Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

to Ship Three. Out here there
was a lot of traffic, but it was more or less orderly, everyone
heading out the way he was. He pushed the car up to its
safety-regulated maximum speed. Even so, he was continually
overtaken. Anxiety tore at his stomach.
    The Forest, with the placid profiles of the Ancestors glimmering
in Sol’s low light, looked unchanged from when he had last seen it,
only days ago, on his way to meet Lora. He felt an unreasonable
resentment that he had suddenly lost so much time, that his careful
plan for an extended farewell to Lora had been torn up. He wondered
where she was now. Perhaps he could call her.
    Thirteen minutes. No time, no time.
    The traffic ahead was slowing. The vehicles at the back of the
queue weaved, trying to find gaps, and bunched into a solid pack.
    Rusel punched his control panel and brought up a Virtual overhead
image. Ahead of the tangle of vehicles, a ditch had been cut roughly
across the road. People swarmed, hundreds of them. Roadblock.
    Eleven minutes. For a moment his brain seemed as frozen as Port
Sol ice; frantic, bewildered, filled with guilt, he couldn’t
think.
    Then a heavy-duty long-distance truck broke out of the pack behind
him. Veering off the road to the left, it began to smash its way
through the Forest. The elegant eightfold forms of the Ancestors were
nothing but ice sculptures, and they shattered before the truck’s
momentum. It was ugly, and Rusel knew that each impact wiped out a
life that might have lasted centuries more. But the truck was
clearing a path.
    Rusel hauled at his controls, and dragged his car off the road.
Only a few vehicles were ahead of him in the truck’s destructive
wake. The truck was moving fast, and he was able to push his speed
higher.
    They were already approaching the roadblock, he saw. A few suit
lights moved off the road and into the Forest, to stand in the path
of the lead truck; the blockers must be enraged to see their targets
evade them so easily. Rusel kept his speed high. Only a few more
seconds and he would be past the worst.
    But there was a figure standing directly in front of him, helmet
lamp bright, dressed in an electric-blue skinsuit, arms raised. As
the car’s sensors picked up the figure, its safety routines cut in,
and he felt it hesitate. He slammed his palm to the control panel,
overriding the safeties. Nine minutes.
    He closed his eyes as the car hit the protester.
    He remembered the blue skinsuit. He had just mown down the man
from the airlock, who had been so desperate to save his family. He
had no right to criticise the courage or the morals or the loyalty of
others, he saw.
    We are all just animals, fighting to survive. My berth on Ship
Three doesn’t make me any better. He hadn’t even had the guts to
watch.
    Eight minutes. He disabled the safety governors and let the car
race down the empty road, its speed ever increasing.
     
    He had to pass through another block before he reached Ship Three
- but this one was manned by Enforcers. They were in an orderly line
across the road, dressed in their bright yellow skinsuit uniforms.
Evidently they had pulled back to tight perimeters around the five
Ships. At least they were still loyal.
    The queuing was agonising. With only five minutes before Andres’s
deadline, an Enforcer pressed a nozzle to the car’s window, flashed
laser light into Rusel’s face, and waved him through.
    Ship Three was directly ahead of him. It was a drum, a squat
cylinder about a kilometre across and half as tall. It sat at the
bottom of its own crater, for Port Sol ice had been gouged out and
plastered roughly over the surface of its hull. It looked less like a
ship than a building, he thought, a building coated by thick ice, as
if long abandoned. But it was indeed a starship, a ship designed for
a journey of not less than centuries, and fountains of crystals
already sparkled around its base in neat parabolic arcs: steam from
the Ship’s rockets, freezing immediately to ice. People milled at its
base, running clumsily in the low gravity, and scurried up ramps that
tongued down from its hull to the ground.
    Rusel abandoned the car, tumbled out onto the ice and ran towards
the nearest ramp. There was another stomach-churning wait as an
Enforcer in glowing yellow checked each identity. At last, after
another dazzling flash of laser light in his eyes, he was
through.
    He hurried into an airlock. As it cycled it struck him that as he
boarded this Ship, he was never going to leave