Anticopernicus Read Online Free PDF Page A

harness, scrabbling to regain full consciousness, she knew what had happened. A micrometeorite—dust, rock, ice, at these velocities it hardly mattered what—had struck.
    Ange hauled herself through and made her way up the main corridor. The whole ship was shuddering: like a house during an earthquake, or a fat man shaking with fear. If Ange hung in space she was still, but as soon as she reached out and touched the fabric of the craft the vibration communicated itself to her, and her very teeth zizzed in her jaw. The corridor was a chimney, a borehole. It was the inside of a riflebarrel. The corridor flexed and groaned.
    She silenced the alarm’s barbaric yawp. Then she checked the schematics.
    The bulkheads had all sealed automatically. She worked as quickly as she could checking compartment after compartment and opening these. Each time she passed through a door she shut it behind her. Where there was one micrometeorite there were likely to be more. But she had to get to Ostriker.
    She located the forward position where the pinhead meteor had hit. The ship schematic showed that it had come on a freak trajectory, from the side, avoiding the mass of bulked shielding the nose of the craft. Its speed had been its own, then; and not a function of the ship’s own velocity, although it had been going plenty fast enough to enter through the forward 2 hull plate and exit through the forward 7 hull plate. Ange checked the room beyond, found it stable at two thirds pressure, and overrode the bulkhead lock.
    Inside was a mess. The air sucked gently in through the hatch Ange had just opened, blowing past her and swirling into the cabin, stirring a particulate soup of red blood droplets and blobs. Ostriker was by the left wall, her arm through a strap, unconscious. From the doorway Ange dialled up a filter scrub of the room’s air, and some of the fog of blood began to draw away. Ostriker’s right foot was missing, and blood was pulsing and glooping. Dark red strings of blood.
    There was a bright yellow patch on the wall away to the right, and another similarly coloured blob on the wall near to where Ostriker dangled. Presumably she had had enough presence of mind to fix the leak before passing out. Presumably, too, the micrometeorite had passed not only through the wall of this room but also through her foot, turning it into blood and atoms.
    Ange spent a moment checking the trajectory of the item. Ostriker had plugged both the holes in this room. The adjacent space (on the far side of the wall, and sealed away by the corridor bulkhead) must be vacuum now.
    The cabin was full of blood droplets. Circulating the air to clean these was taking a long time, or perhaps the filter was getting clogged. Ange took off her shirt and wrapped it around the lower part of her face as a makeshift mask. Then she launched into the space, unhooked the unconscious Ostriker’s arm from the strap, and pulled her free out into the corridor. She sealed the room behind her. She transferred her shirt to Ostriker’s stump, wrapping it into a clumsy bandage. Then it was slow progress back down the corridor, opening and closing bulkheads one by one, until they were at the medical room.
    She strapped Ostriker onto the medibench and uploaded some data on tackling amputation wounds. The first thing she did was to sprayject analgesics into the patient’s leg. This action seemed superfluous given Ostriker’s lack of consciousness, but (Ange reasoned) she might suddenly come-to at any time. She rubbed her hands thoroughly with antiseptic wash. Then she slapped two plasma bags onto Ostriker’s belly, under her shirt, and unpeeled the sodden makeshift shirt-bandage from her right leg. The raw stump was not pretty to look at. She was no wimp, but Ange’s stomach still shimmered with revulsion as she picked pieces of stray bone and gelid, stringy flesh from the sound site. Ange slathered the whole stump with the mud-like nano gunk, hooked a bag of medimesh about