Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [123]
CORDUROY had thoughtfully left a subprogramme that displayed the estimated time to self-destruct and the amount of time remaining in which the base personnel could achieve safe distance before the end. The AI put a flashing red skull in the comer of the screen for extra emphasis.
The base director untangled herself from her Number Two Husband and found herself with five minutes to evacuate a base a kilometre across at its widest point.
At 02:24:44 the last shuttle disengaged from The Butterfly's Wing docking torus and accelerated at full bum away from the base. It joined an expanding ring of twenty-two other small craft, all sacrificing their fuel safety margins to get as far away as possible before the reactor blew.
Lodged in its rented RAM, CORDUROY had already filed a suit against Harare Power Systems who owned The Butterfly's Wing for breach of contract. After a second's delay it filed for reckless endangerment as well. It didn't expect either case to reach court but it would discourage HPS from trying to pin the blame on it.
By 02:27:00 the base director received a confirmation of the crew roster. Of the 287 personnel on board The Butterfly's Wing, 286 were accounted for. The only person missing was the chief scientific officer.
Her hair was cornrowed tight on to her skull so as to fit into the suit's skullcap. She'd put the hostile-environment suit on at the last minute. The power-assisted gloves made her fingers clumsy but that didn't matter, she was running this show through a direct neural link. She had even snapped the helmet visor down and switched to internal life support. It was an absurd act; if something went wrong the suit wasn't going to be any protection at all.
The call came at 02:27:34, She'd been expecting it. 'Hello, Ming,' said Kadiatu. 'Everybody get off all right?' Ming, she noticed, was wearing a bathrobe. There were a lot of tense faces in the background. Ming hadn't looked that angry for three years.
'What the fuck are you doing?'
'You know that little problem we had? Meeting the energy requirements for the first two nanoseconds of the jump? I said we could use a contained nuclear explosion and you said we'd never get power baffles that could handle it. Well, I solved the baffle problem. What do you think?'
'I think you're out of your tiny mind.'
'No, but I have drunk half a bottle of sake.'
'You're pissed?'
'You don't expect me to do something like this sober, do you?'
'We could have used a nuclear device in deep space,' said Ming tightly. 'You didn't have to blow up the base.'
'Yes, I did,' said Kadiatu. 'I had to destroy my work. The human race isn't ready for time travel yet.'
'Never mind the human race. What about you?'
'Either I'm ready,' said Kadiatu, 'or I'm plasma.'
'It's pointless anyway. We downloaded your notes, that's the essential bit. We can replicate the experiment any time we like.'
Kadiatu had to laugh, she couldn't help it. 'What you've got, Ming, is the complete works of William Shakespeare, two Kafka novels and a bootleg copy of Thatcher: The wilderness years.'
Ming closed her eyes and said something long and complicated in Cantonese. When she opened her eyes again they were filled with a strange recognition.
'Bugger,' she said and terminated the communications link.
The countdown read sixty seconds.
Inside the suit it was terribly quiet. Kadiatu thought it strange that she couldn't hear her own breathing.
The prototype didn't have a name. It was fashioned out of a modified cargo shuttle, its guts ripped out and replaced by the baffle field managers that would soak up the energy. It hung suspended in