On Io, the deadline for the evacuation had come, and passed.
From the vantage of a windowed observation gallery in the medical complex, Surgeon-Commander Lorna Tem watched the shuttles lift from their launch pads. Each was a rising spark, balanced on the clean line of an asymptotic drive flame, slowly at first, then with mounting speed, climbing towards the defence screen wrapped around Io. Even that screen was itself now beginning to be pulled back. It had become a hindrance to the evacuation effort—and besides, what became of the surface of Io was irrelevant now. The Machines could bombard the crust into a sea of lava, and the engine inside the moon would continue to function.
Tem had been promised a seat on one of those departing ships, but even if that option still remained—not all the shuttles had yet lifted—she was now set in her mind, resigned to her fate. The remaining staff, all of whom had volunteered to stay, were now with the conscious patients, doing their best to comfort them. None of these cases was well enough to endure the stress of an emergency shuttle launch, even had there been room for them all. The medical staff had decided that unless the patients requested it, there would be no euthanasia, no deactivation of life-support systems—not until they were already feeling the fires of hell as Io began its death plunge into the clouds of Jupiter.
And when that time was upon them, Tem had decided, she would willingly submit to the same fate, with the rest of her staff who chose it.
Now, not for the first time in recent hours, a deep seismic throb passed through the structure of the complex, up through the floor and into her bones. Tem, standing by her window, had to struggle to keep her balance—it felt as if the floor was tilting. This was the thing inside Io, stirring into life. They were bringing it online for longer and longer intervals, and the strength of its effect was building. Then the throb died away. She had no doubt that it would return, longer and stronger each time—and Io’s orbital trajectory was already being deflected.
It was an extraordinary situation, she thought. When she had first made the journey from home on a laputa inside Saturn to the Life Sciences Institute on Mimas, the arc that had brought her to the highest echelons of the interplanetary medical community, she had never once thought her career would conclude with her riding a moon to its death . . .
She thought of Falcon. Wondered if he still lived.
There had been no word from him since he had passed beneath the Machines’ radio-scattering layer. She had done her best for him, no question of that. Prepared him for the rigours of the expedition—and then tried to give him a clue as to how the Springer-Soames were trying to use him.
She had no great sympathy for the Machines, but by the same token she harboured no great enmity towards them either. What she detested was war, regardless of the justification. And were the Machines really so alien? As a child on the Hindenburg she had seen humanity in Howard Falcon when his mechanical eyes met hers, a fleeting contact that had changed her life. If people were wrong about Falcon, then were they wrong about the Machines? The Machines were, after all, a human creation.
Well, it was moot now. Nothing had come of Falcon’s expedition—no good or bad outcome, merely silence. And this war might still be fought to its terrible finish. At least, if the Machines were not already disabled, they might be able to fight back, but either way the moon itself seemed doomed. Farewell, little Io, Tem thought. When Galileo first found you, you lit up our imaginations—and you served us well for centuries. But ultimately you’re no more valuable to us than we are to each other, when it comes to war.
Expendable . . .
That was when a panel in the wall chimed.
“Surgeon-Commander Tem to her office. Case note query received. Please attend.”
Tem frowned. A case note—now? Seriously? Delivered to a doomed medic, on a moon that was about to be destroyed? But the bureaucracy of an interplanetary health support organisation had priorities even beyond the war between human and Machine.
Again the peremptory command. “Surgeon-Commander Tem to her office. Case note query from Surgeon-Adjutant Purvis on Ganymede. Please attend . . .”
Purvis. Suddenly, with that name, everything changed. Of course, Purvis. His timing could hardly have been worse . . . Or, depending on your point of view, better.
Grinning, she made her way from the observation deck to her office.