The Rings of Tautee Read Free Page B

containment cracked and let in the cold of deep space.
    For days after her home planet broke apart, killing over a billion, she didn't much care if she lived or died. All she kept seeing was the blue-green meadow surrounding her parents" home, the stream with the silver fish, and her old pet Sandpine. They were now all gone, destroyed by something she had headed.
    Destroyed by her "project."
    ""I don't know that for sure," she said aloud.
    Folle had said that to her fifty times as he tried to help her regain some strength. We don't know for sure, he had said. We can't know.
    He had meant that they couldn't know because the equipment couldn't tell them. But she knew the real truth behind Folle's statement.
    They couldn't know because not knowing kept them sane.
    If she knew for certain that the Kanst Energy Experiment was responsible for the breakup of the Tautee system, she'd never be able to take another breath. She and her fellow workers would be the 20 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE greatest mass murderers of all time. She would have killed all her people.
    Her mind couldn't embrace that idea.
    Refused it outright.
    Even though she knew that everyone was dead, she could still see her parents" faces when she closed her eyes. It seemed no different from living the rest of her days in this destroyed facility, far from home.
    Except that her heart ached. Literally ached, as if someone had stabbed her there.
    She took a deep breath and glanced around at the empty room and the debris just now settling back toward the floor in the weak gravity.
    Folle had been gone a long time. He had tried to take her out of this room, this place where she watched her entire race die, but she had refused to leave. For the past two days, he had brought her food and news of the two hundred people in the nearby command center.
    He had told her of the blocked corridors and twisting steel beams. He had said that the others had hope of survival. And he had asked why she hadn't.
    He knew the answer. He was as good a scientist as she was. The bit of moon that held them together wouldn't remain in one piece forever. If it didn't shake itself apart, it would hit other space debris and shatter.
    There were a thousand other possibilities. Every scenario she ran ended with their deaths.
    The main door clanged. She took a deep breath 21 Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch of the dusty air, trying to brace herself for Folle's energy. He was trying to keep her alive. He was trying to keep all of them alive, for what she didn't know.
    They had no right to live.
    Even if they hadn't caused the destruction.
    Everyone else was dead. They had no right to survive.
    She turned to watch him. He was still a beautiful man, thinner than he had ever been, but beautiful.
    He jumped offthe top step, and half-floated toward her.
    He grabbed her shoulder to stop his momentum, then held the chair as he braced himself against the desk beside her.
    "I have a crew patching leaks in the A Section," he said.
    She shrugged. "Busy work. We both know it won't last long."
    "Long enough to be rescued," he said.
    He had never said that word before. She bit back a sarcastic comment[*thorngg'How could anyone save you? We killed everyone in the universe[*thorngg'and instead asked, as reasonably as she could, "Do you really believe that some of the big ships from Tautee orbital labs survived?"
    He nodded, glancing around at the empty, blank screens and the destroyed control panels. "We just need to let them know we're still down here."
    Maybe if she talked to him, she could get him to abandon this new delusion. She stared at the hole in the screen before her, the one made by the floating computer. But what was the point of 22 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE destroying his illusions now? So that he could die as miserably as she would?
    "Prescott?" he asked softly.
    She turned her gaze to him, smiled at him, and ran her knuckles along the soft skin of his face.
    One of them deserved to hope. If he kept busy,