“What are you talking about?” asked Captain Hetnys. “Station, don’t do any such thing.” Basnaaid gasped as Captain Hetnys gripped her tighter, shook her just a bit to emphasize the threat.
Stupid Captain Hetnys. “Captain, are you really going to make Station choose between Basnaaid and the residents of the Undergarden? Is it possible you don’t understand the consequences of that?” Tisarwat’s fish-witted had been about right. “Let me guess, you intended to kill me, imprison my soldiers, destroy Mercy of Kalr, and claim to the governor that I’d been a traitor all along.” The water bubbled again—twice, in quick succession, larger bubbles than before. Captain Hetnys might not have yet realized that she’d lost, but when she did, she would likely take the most desperate action available. Time to end this. “Basnaaid,” I said. She was staring ahead, blank, terrified. “As the poet said: Like ice. Like stone.” The same poem she had quoted, that had brought me here. I had understood her message. I could only hope that now she would understand mine. Whatever you do, don’t move a muscle. My finger tightened on the trigger.
I should have been paying more attention to Lieutenant Tisarwat. Tisarwat had been watching Captain Hetnys, and the ancillary at the head of the bridge. Had been moving slowly, carefully closer to the island, by millimeters, with neither myself nor Captain Hetnys nor, apparently, Sword of Atagaris noticing. And when I had spoken to Basnaaid, Tisarwat had clearly understood my intention, knowing as she did that my gun would defeat Captain Hetnys’s armor. But she also understood that Sword of Atagaris might still pose a danger to Citizen Basnaaid. The instant before I fired, Tisarwat dropped her own armor and charged, shouting, at the Sword of Atagaris ancillary.
Bo Nine, it turned out, had been crouching behind the rail at the top of the rocky ledge. Seeing her lieutenant behave so suicidally, Bo Nine cried out, raised her own gun, but could do nothing.
Captain Hetnys heard Bo Nine cry out. Looked up to see her standing on the ledge, gun raised. And the captain flinched, and ducked low, just as I fired.
The Presger gun, it turned out, was waterproof, and of course my aim was good. But the shot went over Captain Hetnys, over Basnaaid. Traveled on, to hit the barrier between us and hard vacuum.
The dome over the Gardens was built to withstand impacts. Had Bo Nine fired, or Sword of Atagaris, it would not have even been scratched. But the bullets in the Presger gun would burn through anything in the universe for 1.11 meters. The barrier wasn’t even half a meter thick.
Instantly, alarms sounded. Every entrance to the Gardens slammed shut. We were all now trapped, while the atmosphere blew out of the bullet hole in the dome. At least it would take a while to empty such a large space, and now Security was certainly paying attention to us. But the water flowing out of the lake meant that there was no real barrier between the Gardens (with their hull breach) and the Undergarden. It was entirely possible that the section doors there (the ones that worked, at any rate, all of which were on level one, immediately below us) would close, trapping residents who hadn’t managed to get out. And if the lake collapsed, those residents would drown.
It was Station’s problem. I waded toward the island. Bo Nine ran down the path to the water. Sword of Atagaris had pinned Tisarwat easily, was raising its weapon to fire at Basnaaid, who had wrenched free of Captain Hetnys’s grip and scrambled away toward the bridge. I shot Sword of Atagaris in the wrist, forcing it to drop its gun.
Sword of Atagaris realized, then, that I posed an immediate danger to its captain. Ancillary-quick, it rushed me, thinking, no doubt, that I was only human and it would be able to easily take the gun from me, even injured as it was. It barreled into me, jarring my shoulder. I saw black for an instant, but did not let go of the gun.
At that moment, Station solved the problem of water pouring into the Undergarden by turning off the gravity.
Up and down disappeared. Sword of Atagaris clung to me, still trying to pry the gun out of my hand. The ancillary’s impact had pushed us away from the ground, and we spun, grappling, moving toward the waterfall. The water was not falling, now, but accumulating at the dome-edge of the rocks in a growing, wobbling mass as it was pumped out of the lake.
In the background, behind the pain of my shoulder and my effort to keep hold of the gun, I heard Station saying something about the self-repair function of the dome not working properly, and that it would take an hour to assemble a repair crew and shuttle them to the spot to patch it.
An hour was too long. All of us here would either drown, unable, without gravity, to escape the wobbling, growing globs of water the waterfall pump kept sending out, or asphyxiate well before the dome could be repressurized. I had failed to save Basnaaid. Had betrayed and killed her sister, and now, coming here to try, in the smallest, most inadequate way, to make that up, I had caused her death. I didn’t see her. Didn’t see much, beyond the pain of my injured shoulder, and Sword of Atagaris, and the black and silver flash of water as we drew closer to it.
I was going to die here. Mercy of Kalr, and Seivarden and Ekalu and Medic and all the crew, were gone. I was sure of it. Ship would never leave me unanswered, not by its own choice.
And just as I had that thought, the starless, not-even-nothing black of a gate opened just outside the dome, and Mercy of Kalr appeared, far, far too close to be even remotely a good idea, and I heard Seivarden’s voice in my ear telling me she looked forward to being reprimanded as soon as I was safe. “Sword of Atagaris seems to have gated off somewhere,” she continued, cheerily. “I do hope it doesn’t come out right where we just were. I may have accidentally dropped half our inventory of mines just before we left.”
I was fairly sure I was more starved for oxygen than I realized, and hallucinating, up until half a dozen safely tethered Amaats took hold of the Sword of Atagaris ancillary, and pulled us both through the hole they’d cut in the dome, and into one of Mercy of Kalr’s shuttles.
Once we were all on the safe side of the shuttle airlock, I made sure that Basnaaid was uninjured and strapped into a seat, and set an Amaat to fuss over her. Tisarwat, similarly, but retching from stress and from the microgravity, Bo Nine holding a bag for her, ready with correctives for her lieutenant’s bloody nose and broken ribs. Captain Hetnys and the Sword of Atagaris ancillary I saw bound securely. Only then did I let Medic pull off my jacket and my shirt, push my shoulder bones back into place with the help of one of Seivarden’s Amaats, and immobilize my shoulder with a corrective.
I had not realized, until that pain went away, how hard I’d been gritting my teeth. How tense every other muscle in my body had been, and how badly that had made my leg ache as a consequence. Mercy of Kalr had said nothing directly to me, but it didn’t need to—it showed me flashes of sight and feeling from my Kalrs, assisting the final stages of the evacuation of the Undergarden (Uran assisting as well, apparently now an old hand with microgravity after the trip here), from Seivarden’s Amaats, from Seivarden herself. Medic’s outwardly dour concern. Tisarwat’s pain and shame and self-hatred. One-armed, I pulled myself past her, where Bo Nine was applying correctives to her injuries. Did not trust myself to stop and speak.