Nick stretched his arms, twisted his back until his spine cracked. “That’s better,” he announced. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Without transition he looked like his old self—confident, cunning, and unbeatable. All sign of the tic which had once distorted his insouciance was gone. He cocked an eyebrow at Sib’s gun, bent his mouth in mock chagrin, then chuckled to himself and turned to open the suit locker.
“Which one did I wear last time?” he asked rhetorically. “Oh, here it is.”
Whistling tunelessly through his teeth, he pulled an EVA suit from its hangers and began climbing into it.
He checked the suit’s indicators and seals casually, as if he already knew that nothing could go wrong. The helmet went over his head and locked into place. He snapped the faceplate shut; his features slowly vanished as he tuned the plate’s reflective surface. With a hiss, air processing inflated the suit.
“Are you ready?” Sib asked, although he wasn’t sure that Nick could hear him.
But Nick had activated his suit’s transceivers. His external speaker crackled. “Do it,” he instructed. “I want to get this part over with.”
He put his arms behind him, making it easy for Sib and Davies to bind him.
His confidence scared Sib almost as badly as what they were planning to do. But Sib had made this decision himself: he needed to go through with it. If he didn’t, the pain of being refused mercy again would be more than he could bear.
He tossed his roll of tape to Davies and kept his gun aimed at Nick while Davies strapped Nick’s arms.
Then it was his turn. He didn’t hesitate: he’d been hesitant all his life, and it only made matters worse. There was a price to pay for being spared. Always. Inevitably. He gave his handgun to Davies, picked out an EVA suit, and settled into it.
The sensation of the waldo harness around his hips reminded him that he hadn’t been able to control his maneuvering jets on Thanatos Minor. Maybe they would be easier to use in zero g. Or maybe he would misfire them; send himself tumbling away from the ship and Nick, out of reach, beyond hope—
If that happened, he would have to beg Trumpet to save him.
He trusted Morn and Davies. He trusted Mikka and Vector. Nevertheless he already knew the answer.
Spare me.
No.
“Give me a line of tape,” he told Davies, “so I can hold on to him. I’m no good with these jets. If we’re separated, I might not be able to get back to him.”
Davies nodded: he’d seen Sib’s difficulties on Thanatos Minor. While Sib finished checking his suit and sealing himself into his helmet, Davies attached ten meters of tape to Nick’s wrists and folded it over its adhesive to form a rope.
His suit’s air processor built pressure in Sib’s lungs. The indicators inside his helmet told him that the suit’s atmosphere was identical to Trumpet’s. Still he felt that he couldn’t breathe. With the controls on his chestplate, he reduced the volume of air, increased the proportion of oxygen. Gradually some of his claustrophobia eased.
He’d forgotten to toggle his transceivers. Davies moved his mouth soundlessly for a moment, then reached out to key a frequency on Sib’s chestplate. At once the internal speaker came to life.
“Pay attention, Sib,” Nick said. “If you can’t hear me, we might as well stay here. We’ll be useless.”
At the same time Sib heard Davies say, “I’ll give Angus your frequency. We’ll hear you as long as you’re in range. Which won’t be more than a few minutes under these conditions. But if you need help during that time, we can probably do something.”
Sib nodded dumbly, then realized that Davies couldn’t see his face. Swallowing against the dryness in his throat, he replied, “All right.”
Davies moved to the nearest intercom to talk to Angus. He kept the gun pointed at Nick’s head.
Because he’d left himself no choice, Sib drifted past them toward the weapons locker.
Angus coded the locker open as Sib reached it. Determined not to hesitate, not to freeze—not to let the vast cold outside the ship consume him—Sib selected a laser rifle the size of a portable missile launcher for Nick, picked a smaller rifle for himself. Without waiting for Nick’s approval, he closed the locker.
“Fine,” Nick pronounced as soon as he saw Sib’s choices. “If I can’t cut into Sorus with that, I’m wasting my time. That matter cannon Angus lugs around doesn’t hold enough charge.”
“They’re ready, Angus,” Davies told the intercom. “We’re going to the lift now.”
Ready? Sib thought. Ready? He wasn’t sure the word made sense. Had he ever been ready for anything?
But Nick was ready. Even though his arms were taped behind him, he seemed primed for action. He kicked himself in the direction of the lift before Davies finished talking to Angus.
Sib followed as if he were being tugged along by Nick’s eagerness.
The lift was waiting. By the time Sib and then Davies reached it, Nick had already entered the car.
The bulk of the rifles made Sib awkward. He missed his hold and carried past the lift. Floundering, he tried to recover, but his momentum took him down the passage. The suit’s humidity indicators climbed as he sweated and gasped.
Davies caught him. He gave Sib a look like one of Angus’ glares, angry or contemptuous, and steered him back to the lift.
“Thanks,” Sib murmured, nearly panting.
Covering Nick with his handgun, Davies guided Sib into the car and keyed the door shut.
Nick’s snort seemed to fill the inside of Sib’s helmet with scorn. “I told you to pay attention. This is getting ridiculous. If you navigate out there as well as you do in here, you’d better cut my arms free and give me that rifle right now. You might not get another chance.”
“Stop it, Nick,” Davies snapped. “If he weren’t going with you, we wouldn’t let you do this at all. You would still be tied up, and whatever happens to Soar would happen without you.”
Nick gave a short laugh like a burst of static, but he didn’t retort.
As the lift slid upward, Davies activated the intercom. “We’re at the airlock,” he reported. No doubt Angus already knew this: he could see it on his maintenance status readouts. Apparently Davies kept talking to control his own tension. “I’ll wait in the lift until they’re off the ship. And I’m keeping the gun. If Nick tries anything in the lock, I might be able to stop him.”
Again Nick laughed roughly.
“Sib?” Morn put in unexpectedly. “Can you hear me?” Her voice sounded anxious through the speakers; too personal to be meant for him.
“Yes, Morn.”
He might have been choking. The pressure in his suit still felt high. He resisted an impulse to lower it further.
“Sib,” Morn replied as if she were in a hurry; as if she, too, feared freezing. “I just wanted to say thank you. I don’t know why you think you’re not brave. You help me when I need it. It’s never easy—it wouldn’t be easy if you were crazy with courage. But you do it anyway.”
Spare me, Sib thought. Misery kept him mute.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Morn finished, “that’s better than being brave.”
“Please,” Nick put in cheerfully. “Let’s not get all mushy here. This is supposed to be fun.”
Davies snarled a low curse, but Nick ignored him.
“Two minutes,” Angus announced. “Get in the airlock. We’re coming up on that asteroid. If you miss it, I’ll have to double back.”
“Right.” Davies thumbed the intercom and began entering codes to open the doors between the lift and the airlock. While the doors slid aside, he turned to Sib.
He showed Sib his scalpel, then tucked it into a utility pouch on the belt of Sib’s suit. “In case you don’t feel like lasering that tape off his arms,” he explained.
Once again Sib nodded invisibly inside his helmet.
“Come on,” Nick commanded. Bumping a shoulder against the wall of the car for thrust,
he pushed himself through the doors.
In spite of himself, Sib hesitated. He knew too well what he was getting into. This was his last chance to change his mind: right here, before the airlock sealed and started decompression. He could free Nick’s arms, hand Nick the rifle; he could stay with Davies while Nick carried his lifelong hatred of Sorus Chatelaine to its logical conclusion.
He could avoid the cold dark and the memory of his own raw screams. Leave someone else to strike out at the Amnion for the harm they’d done to Ciro and Morn and his whole family.
You do it anyway. That’s better than being brave.
Certainly it was better than begging for mercy and being refused over and over again while the people he loved died or worse because he couldn’t defend them.
“Say good-bye to Mikka and Ciro for me,” he told Davies. “I’m glad I knew them.”
Davies didn’t say, You’ll see them again. We’ll get you back. Maybe he didn’t believe it.
Swallowing terror, Sib coasted into the airlock.
Angus’ voice spattered in his ears. “Do it now.”
At once Davies turned to the control panel. Servos pulled the doors shut with a solid, interlocking thunk; sealed Sib alone with Nick. A moment later the EVA suits distended as pumps sucked air out of the lock.
“Don’t look so pitiful,” Nick gibed. He couldn’t see Sib’s face, any more than Sib could see his: he was talking to be heard on the bridge. “This is going to be the goddamn highlight of your life. From here on all you have to do is cover my back. They’ll think you’re a fucking hero, even if the only thing you really do is fill your suit with shit.”
“God damn it, Nick—” Morn began. And Davies barked, “Back off, you bastard! If he doesn’t cut your arms loose, you’re still helpless.”
But Sib didn’t care what Nick said. All that mattered now was the outer seal of the airlock—the last thin doors between him and black space. They eased aside when all the air was gone, opening Trumpet to the deadly, imponderable rush of the swarm.
He saw midnight outside. Unseen shapes and ineffable seething crowded the dark. A momentary glare of static limned the rock Angus had chosen with strange fire. Then the light vanished, making the darkness deeper.
“Let’s go” Nick breathed urgently.
Awkward because of the guns he carried, Sib turned on his suit’s headlamps. Around one gloved fist he wrapped the end of the line which Davies had attached to Nick’s bonds.
“OK,” he croaked out.
At once Nick cocked his hips, fired his jets.
Gusts of gas and the line of tape pulled Sib like cargo from the airlock into the absolute cold of the asteroid swarm.
He could scarcely remember what happened next. Thè racket of his pulse and the labor of his breathing must have deafened his brain; fear must have blinded it. Momentary fragments came back to him—drifting in the bottomless dark, pressure on the line he gripped for his life, Nick’s harsh voice—and then faded again; he couldn’t retain them. Nothing stayed in his head except the echo of old screams until after he’d spent half an hour clinging to the rock at Nick’s side, anchored by compression pitons while he watched the elaborate aftermath of the Lab’s destruction flare and blaze like a distant light show.
Nick must have pulled him to the asteroid: he couldn’t have managed that on his own. I kept on screaming until I lost my voice. Apparently he’d cut Nick’s bonds, surrendered one of the guns: Nick’s arms cradled the laser rifle in front of him, and the tape was gone. I thought as long as I could hear myself I wouldn’t go insane. Probably someone—Nick or a voice from Trumpet—had told him there were pitons in his utility pouch. Afraid I might be turned into an Amnioni just by watching it done to my family. Otherwise how would he have known?
None of it had to happen.
On the other hand, he didn’t need anyone to explain the light. He seemed to understand it by direct intuition, as if the raw glare and glow of coruscation from deep within the swarm found echoes among his recollections of dismay. He’d been Captain’s Fancy’s data first: he had at least a theoretical understanding of super-light proton cannon. And he could easily imagine what kind of nuclear furnace had powered Deaner Beckmann’s domain. The forces devouring the Lab wouldn’t burn themselves out until every attainable particle of matter had been cracked open and consumed. Fed with static generated by the complex boil of the swarm, those forces crackled in the pit of the dark like lightning and St. Elmo’s fire gone mad. Blast after blast, light etched the asteroids in the distance until they seemed to writhe, hurt like living tissue by the fury they absorbed. And after each blast, lingering pressure in his optic nerves left him utterly blind.
I saw everything. If they were just being killed, I would have gone back inside and tried to fight for them. But I saw them injected.
Recollection froze him like the total cold of the void.
Trumpet was long gone. Her voices in his helmet had broken up and then faded some time ago; he wasn’t sure when.
But Soar was coming. If she survived the havoc she’d made of Deaner Beckmann’s installation—
“Jesus,” Nick breathed as if he were proud of himself. “Isn’t that something? I’ve never seen anything like it.
“I’ve been waiting for this all my life. I’m going to light a fire like that in her heart. When she dies, she’ll consider hell an improvement.”
Nick was crazy: Sib knew that. No matter how totally they took Sorus Chatelaine by surprise, one or even two laser rifles simply could not do a ship Soar’s size all the damage Nick hungered for. Nevertheless Sib didn’t argue. He no longer cared what Nick said. Deep inside himself, he concentrated on holding his thoughts and memories and actions together so that finally—for perhaps the first time—he could choose what happened to him.
His life had come to this. There was nothing else left.
After watching the Lab’s lambent, unsteady ruin for a few more minutes, Sib asked, “When will we feel the shock wave?”
“We won’t.” Nick was sure. Over the years he’d claimed any number of times that he could do algorithms in his head. “Captain Thermo-pile was right about that. There’s too much rock in the way—too much inertia. It’ll absorb the actual concussion. We can relax, enjoy the show.” He might have been talking about some naive bit of theater.
“What about Soar?” Sib pursued. “She must have been sitting right on top of that blast. What did it do to her?”
Nick turned toward Sib. His headlamps shed smears of refraction down Sib’s polarized faceplate.
“Sib Mackern,” he snorted, “you never fail to amaze me. You are so fucking slow. Don’t you get it? Has this whole sequence of events”—he sneered the words—“gone over your head?
“She didn’t need to use a super-light proton beam. She could have hit Beckmann with matter cannon and not made it so absolutely fucking obvious who was doing it. But then his power plant wouldn’t have blown.
“She used her damn proton gun because she wanted that explosion. She wanted the shock wave.
“Sure, it’s going to scrub out our particle trace. It’ll erase every decipherable emission in the whole sector.” His voice was heavy with contempt for his companion. “But she doesn’t need to track us. She knows our course. All she has to do is clean the garbage out of the way and come after us.
“That’s what this blast is for. If she burns just right, she can ride the wave front—let it clear the way and carry her along at maybe five or six times Trumpet’s velocity. Of course, she’ll have to brake as the front dissipates, do her own work after that. But in the meantime she’ll cover a lot of distance.”
As if Sorus Chatelaine’s ingenuity pleased him, he finished, “She probably gained two hours in the first ten seconds after she fired that damn cannon.”
Oh, God, Sib panted to himself. New fears crawled around his abdomen. “You mean—”
“That’s right,” Nick jeered. “She’s going to get here long before you figure ou
t how to be as brave as that shit-crazy bitch”—he didn’t need to say Morn’s name—“thinks you are.”
Light throbbed and glowered in the heart of the swarm. Secondary discharges traced jagged lines from rim to rim of Sib’s vision, defining impossible horizons. The aftermath of the Lab’s destruction appeared to be generating its own coriolus forces, mounting in savagery instead of diminishing—
Soar might come into range at any time.
“In that case,” Sib said thinly, “you’d better tell me what we’re going to do.”
The sudden vehemence of Nick’s reaction nearly pulled him free of his anchor. “You aren’t going to do anything,” he rasped inside Sib’s helmet. “You’re a self-righteous, mutineering asshole, and I’m sick to death of you. I’m sick of you and Vector and Mikka and all you bastards who think you have a right to do anything except take orders. I will fry you before I let you interfere with me.
“Are you listening to me? You can hang on to that little squirt gun. If you want, you can stick it in your mouth and suck on it. But Sorus Chatelaine is mine. You are going to stay right where you fucking are and keep out of my fucking way.”
Sib’s rifle pointed at Nick’s chest. He didn’t want to be killed here, now, while unresolved fears filled his head, and he could still hear himself screaming. The idea that Nick intended to spare him closed around his heart like the cold of space.
Nick didn’t want him to do anything. He could wait where he was while Soar passed by. Stay alive: stay out of Sorus Chatelaine’s hands. If Trumpet came back for him, he would know mercy at last.
It might happen. If he let it.
Half an hour passed. More? Less? He didn’t know. Gradually he concluded that the Lab’s death storm was lessening. Light still streaked like cries through the chaos of rock, but by degrees it lost its garish intensity. The Lab was gone, burned down to its atoms and discharged into the void. The illumination would die when it exhausted its final fuel.