Lord Kelsey-Ramos pursed his lips, followed Grashchik off the tug without comment. "Now—you, Benedar," Kutzko gestured to me. "There's a satchel just inside the lock. Get it—and don't forget that I'll be covering you."
He winked reassuringly as I moved toward the lock. An unnecessary gesture; I already knew the threat had been solely for Grashchik's benefit.
Another unnecessary gesture, as it turned out. Grashchik was nowhere in sight as I collected the massive satchel and carefully maneuvered it through the zero-gee onto the tug. "He's gone forward," I told Kutzko as I pushed the satchel over into a corner and eased it toward the deck. "Probably calling in the alert. Get going—we'll seal the lock from here."
"Don't bother," he said calmly, swinging the lock closed.
I stared at him, feeling a horrible tingle run through me. How had I failed to notice—? "Kutzko, get out of here," I snapped.
"Get the engines fired up," he said, ignoring the order. "I trust you remember how?"
"Mikha—"
"And you'd better get busy—like you said, Grashchik's up there calling for help. Be a waste of a good hijacking if they get us while we're sitting here arguing."
I glared at him; but it was a useless gesture. If he was determined to come along, there was nothing I could do to stop him. And we both knew it.
Tight-lipped, I went over to the board, where Adams had already seated himself in the helm chair. By the time I had the power indicators reading operational, he was ready.
"Thunderhead?" I called. "Are you there?"
For what seemed like a small eternity there was no reply. Heart pounding in my ears, I watched Adams's slack face, thoughts of treachery and betrayal spinning through my mind—
"I am here," Adams whispered.
I swallowed, the worst of the tension draining from my muscles. "We're ready to go. Do you know exactly where the Invaders are at the moment?"
"I do. But where is the zombi... for me to use?"
There was a totally uncaring attitude toward human life hidden beneath the words. "There will be no zombi," I gritted. "Shepherd Adams—the man you're speaking through—will act as your hands."
For a long moment Adams just stared at me, an alien yet unmistakably surprised look on his face. Apparently that implication of their Seeker contacts hadn't yet occurred to the thunderheads, either. "I don't know if it will... be possible to—"
"So try it," Kutzko broke in brusquely, nodding toward the displays. "We've got company coming."
Adams's face twisted, his hands reaching tentatively for the black Deadman Switch. I held my breath... and abruptly fell a few centimeters to the deck below me as the Mjollnir drive came on and the pseudograv began to function.
I exhaled raggedly, swaying a bit as my circulatory system adjusted to weight again. A moment, and my vision cleared... and I turned to find Kutzko looking at me. "Well," I said to him. "It worked."
He nodded, a quiet grimness to his sense. "So far, anyway," he agreed. "Now what?"
"We see how long he can handle it," I said evenly. "If he can get us all the way to the alien fleet in one jump, fine. If not... we see how long he needs to rest between contacts."
"And once we're there?" Kutzko persisted. "You can't have him fading in and out on you while you're trying to hold a conversation with the Invaders."
"Let's just see what happens, all right?" I snapped, my mouth dry. Beneath his casual words I knew what it was he was offering.
For a moment Kutzko studied me. Then he nodded, once, and turned back to the satchel in the corner. "Sure," he said over his shoulder. "There's no rush. Come on—give me a hand and we'll get this comm gear of yours set up."
I stared at his back, my muscles trembling with anger and dread. No, there was no rush; and if we were lucky, there might be no need to go through with it at all.
But I could tell Kutzko didn't believe that. And down deep, neither did I.
Chapter 36
We were forty-five minutes out from Solitaire, three-quarters of the way to the alien fleet, when our luck ran out.
There was no warning at all that I could see—nothing in Adams's face or body language that preceded it. One minute he was sitting at the Deadman Switch, glazed eyes staring tautly into space; the next minute, there was the crack of circuit breakers, gravity abruptly vanished, and Adams was gasping frantically for breath.
We reached him at the same time, Kutzko jamming the oxygen inhaler we'd brought over his nose and mouth as I searched his face for other symptoms.
It didn't look good.
"I'm all... all right," Adams managed after a couple of tense minutes under pure oxygen. "Just let... me catch my... breath, okay?"
Kutzko turned to me. "How is he?"
I took a careful breath of my own. "Not in any immediate danger, I don't think," I said. Before Aaron Balaam darMaupine and the paranoia that had followed in his wake, Watchers had sometimes been employed by hospitals as complements to the standard medical sensors. Fleetingly, I wished some of that specialized training had been available to me. "Heartbeat's stabilizing, and blood pressure seems all right. Brain functions..." I peered into Adams's eyes. "Pupils are responding normally, and... I don't see any evidence of pain."
"Nothing hurts," Adams confirmed, still somewhat short of breath. "Just give me a few... more minutes to rest."
I looked up to find Kutzko's eyes on me... and I knew what he was thinking. "We can do the rest of the trip in shorter stages," I told him firmly. "We're only fifteen minutes or so from the alien fleet—we can let him rest up and then go on."
"What about your talk with the Invaders?" he countered. "You going to confine that to fifteen-minute chunks, too?"
"If need be, yes," I said, keeping my voice steady. The lie was an unnecessary caution, perhaps, with the thunderheads presumably no longer listening in... but with so much hanging in the balance, I preferred unnecessary caution to unnecessary chances.
How easily I'd learned, and learned to rationalize, the art of lying. There are ways that some think straight, but they lead in the end to death... "Besides," I added to Kutzko, hurrying to get my mind off that thought, "any talking I do with the aliens will necessarily be chopped into short segments. They'll be shooting past us at twelve percent lightspeed, remember?"
He grimaced, but for the moment at least he seemed willing to trust me. "All right," he said at last. "We'll give him some time—maybe give him another shot of Dr. Eisenstadt's fancy mixture. See how quickly he recovers."
I glanced at Adams; but if he'd heard the unspoken and if not in Kutzko's tone, he gave no indication of it. "Agreed," I nodded, my stomach tightening. And if not... then either Kutzko or I wouldn't be returning to Solitaire.
—
We waited a little more than an hour... an hour that will forever remain etched on my memory.
Not for anything in particular that happened. On the contrary, the most dominant feature of that time was its extreme boredom. Wrapped in our own individual thoughts and fears about what lay ahead, none of us really felt like talking; and with our equipment already set up there was absolutely nothing for any of us to do. I don't know how many times I floated past the board, studying the never-changing indicators, or how many minutes I spent at the viewport, looking out at the stars and straining my eyes to try and follow the contours of our tethered rocheoid in their dim light.
But what I did mainly was fight against terror.
Not fear. Fear I'd expected, and had been more or less prepared for. But as the minutes ticked by, and I ran out of other things with which to occupy my mind, I began to focus more and more on the image of the alien ships rushing inexorably down on us. It did no good to remind myself that they were two years away at their normal-space speed—my gut instincts had already latched firmly onto the fact that, as far as we were concerned, they were a bare fifteen minutes away. It was a totally irrational terror, but reminding myself of that did nothing except make me too ashamed of myself to try and talk it out with the others. More than once I told myself that the thunderheads might be behind at least some of the emotion, amplifying my feelings as they had back in the Pravilo cell on Solitaire. But this time, even that knowledge didn't help.