Nick had begun murmuring over and over again, “Anytime now,” repeating himself as if he were unaware that Sib could hear him. “Anytime now. Count the minutes, bitch. You don’t have many left.”
Sib didn’t listen. In this place—small as an atom himself within the jostling confusion of the swarm—he could believe that the moral order of his life might be overturned.
He caught his first glimpse of the ship because she seemed to emerge straight from the heart of the Lab’s diminished deflagration; created by violence and ravage. Backlit with fire, she loomed out of the dark like a black behemoth, dwarfing Sib and Nick and the asteroid to which they clung; dwarfing every chunk of rock in the vicinity.
“There!” Nick announced in a husky whisper, as if his voice was stuck in his throat, trapped by passions he couldn’t swallow.
Her lights were on, searching the vacuum around her: no sane captain navigated an asteroid swarm without using video to complement scan, in case some freak emission echo or sensor glitch masked an obstacle. In a few moments Sib saw her outlines clearly. Roughly ovoid, studded with antennae, receptors, dishes, and gun ports, and sliding forward without a sound, as if she floated on oil, she soon seemed to fill the visual window of his faceplate, even though she was still two or three k away.
Her lights showed the scars of old battles, the marks of fresh damage. One dent licked along her prow; another left an impression like a crater amidships. And farther back her hull had been holed: torn metal opened on darkness inside her. A cargo bay, Sib guessed.
That was the way in. If the interior bulkheads could be cut, one or two laser rifles might actually do the ship some harm. Not enough to stop her; but maybe enough to slow her down—weaken her.
He’d stopped sweating. His suit indicators warned that he was in danger of dehydration.
Keep out of my fucking way.
He still didn’t have an answer. He’d spent years obeying—and fearing—Nick.
Nick crouched against his pitons. His helmet cocked back and forth as he studied Soar, measured her progress, then checked his rifle to confirm that it was fully charged.
“Cut me, will you?” he muttered. “Come on, bitch. Just a little closer. Come find out what that costs.”
He didn’t speak to Sib again. As far as Sib could tell, Nick had forgotten that he existed.
“It’s time to pay.”
The ship was less than a kilometer away when Nick released his pitons, launched himself with a kick toward her looming bulk. He didn’t use his jets; didn’t need them. Instead he coasted like a stone for the huge ship.
Sib watched with his heart full of old cries. Despite the warmth of his suit, he could feel black cold soaking into him.
Stay right where you fucking are. Let Soar go on past. Stay alive alone in the dark. Hope that the resources of his suit held out until Trumpet could come back for him; that Trumpet survived long enough, or cared enough, to come back for him.
Or go. Defy Nick one last time; stop begging to be spared. Try to strike some kind of blow for all the people he loved.
You do it anyway. Maybe that was true. Maybe Morn had made it true by saying it aloud.
If he let Nick spare him, he would have to pay for it.
Nick sailed away. Every few seconds Soar’s lights touched him, gleaming along his suit like a hint of stars. He’d aimed himself well ahead of the ship: his trajectory looked like it would intersect hers in another moment or two.
Sib didn’t wait for mercy. He said no himself.
Jamming his feet under him, he thrust off from the asteroid.
He didn’t breathe. He wasn’t sure there was still air in his suit. He couldn’t tell whether he’d jumped straight or hard enough to reach the ship. He concentrated on Nick as if he thought that Nick could somehow draw him where he needed to go.
Adrift like a mote in the rush of the swarm, he sailed toward the huge ship.
Now he saw that Nick wasn’t heading for the breached cargo bay in Soar’s flank. Instead he aimed at her prow. As fatal as spikes, her forward guns jutted from their ports—sleek laser tubes, massive matter cannon shafts, complex proton emitters.
Somehow Sib had contrived to jump in the right direction. Several heartbeats ahead of him, Nick reached the hull, caught a handgrip. Sib would touch the ship himself no more than five meters away from Nick.
But there weren’t any handgrips on the surface ahead of him.
Hit; bounce off; drift away—Back out into the swarm. The ship would glide past him, leaving him in the void.
No. His boots could generate a magnetic field. Any decent suit had that capability: it was essential to EVA survival.
He slapped the switch and flipped into a somersault.
When his boots touched metal, they held.
At some point he started breathing again. For what seemed like ages, relief and anoxia left him blind; he couldn’t focus his eyes.
But it was time. Here and now. No more hesitation. No more paralysis. Time to strike his blow.
He blinked his vision clear.
His laser rifle was too small. It would take long minutes to burn into Soar’s outer hull; or damage even one of her guns. But there were other targets—
By the illumination of his headlamps and Soar’s running lights, he scanned the surface of the ship for particle sifters, cameras, receptor dishes; anything vulnerable.
There: a video camera; one of several searching the dark.
He pointed his rifle, clasped the firing stud. First he missed. Then a red slash slagged the camera from its mounts.
A blow. Sib bared his teeth. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Something he’d never done before. If he’d had the chance, he might have yelled aloud until his mute, screaming fear became a howl of defiance.
Nick cut him off.
“I warned you.”
He wheeled; saw Nick in front of him.
“Sorus is mine.” The voice of murder.
Frozen with surprise, he watched as Nick raised his arms and brought his rifle to bear.
In a flash of coherent light, Sib Mackern was spared.
SORUS
Sorus Chatelaine rode the Shockwave out from the Lab’s destruction with Deaner Beckmann’s blood on her hands and more killing on her mind.
The blast of her proton gun and the detonation of the Lab’s generator echoed inside her as if she’d lit an inner chain reaction as hot and consuming as the one she’d left behind. There was no turning back from that slaughter: it could only carry her forward. Her actions were like atoms splitting themselves from violence to more violence.
As the wave front defeated itself against the charged rock of the swarm, Soar slowed her headlong ride and began hunting Trumpet’s emission trail. For that job Sorus trusted her scan first. In any case, there was nothing she could do personally to help the search. Despite her appearance of attention to the ship and the bridge—and to the mutated man beside her—she concentrated on other things.
From violence to violence—
The man she really wanted to kill wasn’t Nick Succorso. He was Milos Taverner. As far as she was concerned, Succorso was trivial. When she’d manipulated and discarded him all those years ago, she truly hadn’t cared whether he lived or died: she didn’t care now. On the other hand, no other action would have given her as much harsh joy as murdering the Amnioni. And not only be cause he was here, watching her, prepared to criticize: not only because whether or not she survived the dissatisfaction of her masters depended on his evaluation of her.
She also wanted to kill him because he’d forced her to destroy the Lab. Even in her nightmares—the only dreams she had—she hadn’t foreseen that kind of slaughter. He’d driven her to kill people she’d known and sometimes respected; illegals like herself.
So much killing. Each new link in the chain reaction twisted her heart. Her life nauseated her. Only the violence itself kept her going—
She didn’t have anything else to hope for.
She was sup
posed to capture Trumpet somehow: she understood that clearly enough. The Amnion would be dissatisfied by any other result. Unfortunately she didn’t believe it would be possible. Despite her gamble with Ciro Vasaczk, she couldn’t imagine anything except death.
If the Amnion were merely dissatisfied, however, they might not withdraw her humanity. She had too many other uses.
Then other outcomes became conceivable.
If she could put off her doom for a while—
“Got it, Captain,” the scan first announced suddenly. “Trumpet’s emission signature. No mistake.”
“Good,” Sorus said crisply, although she hardly noticed what she was doing. “Compare it with the course Retledge gave us—put any discrepancies up on the screen so we can look at them. And route it to helm.
“Helm, it’s time to get serious about catching her.” Orders were unnecessary now. Her people already knew what to do. She spoke primarily to show Taverner that she was carrying out his instructions diligently. “Scan should be able to give you a velocity estimate. We need to go faster. We’ve already closed a lot of the distance. Now we’ll cover the rest.
“If Ciro Vasaczk did what I told him,” she added grimly, “we should get hints from her particle trace before long.”
Unless something went wrong—
She faced Taverner grimly, defying him to challenge her.
Maybe this time, she prayed privately, something will go wrong for you, you inhuman bastard.
An hour or two ago he’d brought a strange box as big as her command board to the bridge. It was covered with controls and readouts which meant nothing to her. Despite its size, he wore it in a harness around his neck so that he could enter commands and see the results easily. Its weight meant nothing in zero g.
He’d told her what it was, although she hadn’t asked: his SCRT; the device—he claimed—which gave him instantaneous contact with Calm Horizons. The time was near when the two vessels would need to work together without delays in communication—and preferably without being overheard.
Maybe he was telling her the truth. Maybe his box worked.
Maybe Calm Horizons was near enough to join the hunt.
In that case, Sorus might be able to carry the logic of violence a step farther.
Where was the UMCP warship she’d last seen stationed near the Com-Mine belt, obviously waiting for Trumpet! Even though she’d found no hint of the cruiser, she felt sure it was somewhere close.
If Taverner was telling the truth, Calm Horizons had already been seduced into committing an act of war. With any luck at all, the big defensive would eventually find herself in a pitched battle with the UMCP warship.
That gave Sorus hope; the only hope she had left. She pictured the defensive and the warship pounding each other to derelicts. She pictured herself shooting Milos Taverner right between the eyes—before he could trigger the mutagen sacs he’d set on the scrubber pads. If necessary, she pictured firing on Calm Horizons herself to make sure the defensive died. Then she pictured her people salvaging what she needed most from Calm Horizons’ drifting carcass: the antidote which kept her human. A supply so large that it would last her as long as she lived.
If all those things happened, she would be free. She and her people—
The chain reaction carried her forward. It was irresistible anyway: she didn’t try to alter or deflect it. Her proton gun had brought down ruin on the Lab like an instant of sunfire. Now she preferred to take her chances; risk her own destruction.
But first she had to stop Trumpet.
That probably wasn’t going to be easy. By reputation, at least, both Nick Succorso and Angus Thermopyle were formidable opponents. In addition Thermopyle was a UMCPDA cyborg, with resources even Taverner didn’t understand. Trumpet had secrets of her own. And Sorus’ gamble with the Vasaczk kid might too easily be caught.
Nevertheless she intended to gain this one more piece of death for her masters. So that she could go beyond it.
A palpable tension afflicted the bridge. Taverner had that effect. Potential disasters charged the air. Her people sweated over their boards; clung to their duties fretfully.
She knew how they felt. Still their tightness worried her. Men and women with their nerves pulled this taut made mistakes—
“Captain!” The communications first’s voice cracked. “I’m getting audio transmission.”
Atoms split along Sorus’ nerves, carrying fear like a nuclear pile. “Out here?” she demanded. “Who’s trying to talk to us out here?”
What the hell is going on?
“Milos—” she began. Is Calm Horizons already here? What’s she doing? But his unreactive face stopped her. He still wore the eyeshades she’d given him to conceal his Amnion features. When she stared at him, a black strip gazed back, as fathomless and unreadable as the gap.
“It’s not aimed at us,” the woman on communications answered quickly. “General broadcast—we just happened to overhear it. I’ve been scanning every frequency we can get, just in case something leaks through that might help us. For a while the reaction behind us fried all the bandwidths. But now we’re past it.”
General broadcast? That made no sense. Who in their right mind would transmit a general broadcast in this asteroid swarm under these conditions, with the Lab’s destruction still flickering and spitting in the background?
“Locate the source,” Sorus ordered.
“Sorry, Captain. I’ve already tried. It was just one short burst. We didn’t have a chance to triangulate. And it wasn’t coded for position, time, anything like that. Just plain voice transmission. I can give you the quadrant, that’s all.”
Sorus chewed her lower lip for a moment. “All right,” she replied. “Let’s hear it.”
“Aye, Captain.” Communications tapped keys, reversed her log to the data she wanted, then activated the speakers.
At once the bridge fell silent. No one breathed or moved.
“Cut me, will you?” a man’s voice said out of the dark. “Come on, bitch.”
His tone had a curious hollow resonance which made it sound constricted in some way. Yet it was almost unnaturally clear—distance and static should have affected it more.
“Just a little closer. Come find out what that costs.”
The voice nagged at her memory. She nearly recognized it—“It’s time to pay.”
“Captain Chatelaine,” Milos Taverner put in as if even he finally felt something which might have been surprise, “that is Captain Succorso.”
She knew he was right as soon as he spoke. Nick Succorso. Somewhere nearby—too near. Come on, bitch. Setting a trap, calling her into it.
Why did he sound so hollow, constricted?
Just a little closer.
She should have known the answer; should have recognized it, too; but she didn’t have time.
“Scan, damn it!” she barked urgently. “What’s out there? What’re we getting into?”
“Nothing, Captain,” the woman on scan protested. “Nothing except rock. I’ve got Trumpet’s trail, but she’s still ahead of us, we haven’t caught up with her without knowing it. And I can’t see anything else. We’re the only ship here.”
Sorus didn’t hesitate. “Targ, stand by. Helm, evasive action on my order. Taverner, you’d better anchor yourself somewhere. We’re going to start kicking around pretty hard.”
Taverner stepped in front of her console and clamped himself there with one hand. The other remained on the controls of his SCRT.
“There’s nothing out there,” scan insisted, staring wide-eyed at her displays.
It’s time to pay.
“Tighten your video sweep,” Sorus commanded harshly. “Get me visual all around the ship.”
With her thumb she set off alert klaxons throughout Soar.
“Ready, helm?”
Before helm could respond, scan gasped, “Shit! Captain, we just lost one of the cameras!”
Sorus let herself shout. “Get me visual! Damn it, I
want to see what’s out there!”
At the same instant the woman on communications hissed, “Captain!” and keyed the speakers again.
Hollow and deadly, like a voice from the grave, Succorso said, “I warned you. Sorus is mine.”
Christ!
This time communications had no difficulty fixing the source. “God!” she cried, involuntarily frantic. “He’s right on top of us!”
Scan was focused too far away, that was the problem—looking for objects that were too big. Right on top of us. That odd, constricted resonance in his voice: Sorus had almost recognized it. Of course. She should have understood immediately.
But how could she or anyone have guessed that Succorso was crazy enough to do something like this?
“Captain,” scan shouted at her, “we’re hit! Laser fire!”
“Confirm that,” the man on data barked from his readouts. “We’re under attack. We’ve got damage.”
What damage? Where were they hit?
One thing at a time.
Sorus drove her voice through the fear and consternation of her people. “Where’s visual?”
“Coming, Captain!” scan croaked.
An instant later the main screen split into images as three of Soar’s external cameras swiveled toward the point of attack. From conflicting perspectives—shock, nausea, rage—Sorus saw figures in EVA suits.
Just two of them: two lone human shapes in the vast swarm, assaulting her ship as if they thought they could beat her on their own. And one was already out of action; unquestionably dead: drifting away from the hull with a weightless fountain of blood where his faceplate should have been.
Soar was being attacked by one man. One lunatic who’d just lost or killed his only companion.
But he knew what he was doing.
Clamped magnetically to the metal, he stood facing the super-light proton port. In his arms he held a laser rifle; a big one. Etched garish and fatal out of the dark by searchlights, he fired and fired into the base of the cannon.
“What the fuck’s he doing?” helm asked as if he couldn’t trust his eyes; couldn’t understand what he saw.
Targ knew the answer. “Captain,” he announced in shock, “I’ve lost the proton cannon. It’s dead. Completely.”