His reply was cut off by the sudden return of gravity. "Right," Kutzko nodded, his voice hard. "Just another minute, huh?"
Deliberately, I turned my back on him. "Sorry, thunderhead, but I guess we'll have to do this again. Same thing, all right?"
"Very... well," he sighed. His voice—
I spun around, muscles tensing. A single glance was all it took to confirm what my ears had already told me: Adams was starting to lose it. We would have to get off the aliens' course right away, give him time to recover. "Thunderhead—"
But it was too late. The circuit breakers snapped and gravity vanished... and Adams gasped for breath.
Kutzko shot past me toward Adams, braking himself with a hand on the helm chair as the other hand snatched the oxygen inhaler from its grip and jammed it against Adams's face. "How far?" he snapped. "Come on, Adams—how for are we ahead of them?"
"Th—three mi... min... utes," Adams panted.
Kutzko looked over the helm chair at me... and for the first time since I'd known him, there was genuine fear in his eyes. Fear... and resignation. "Three minutes," he murmured. "Three minutes... and we're all dead."
Chapter 37
So it had come: the moment I'd hoped and prayed could be avoided. If it is possible, let this cup pass me by... "Check the course reading," I told Kutzko, my heart pounding in my ears as I fought against the sudden nausea of fear. "Make sure we really are in the aliens' path."
He twisted his head around, eyes searching out the proper readout... and with his attention away from me I moved quietly toward him, fingers dipping into my side pocket. The hypo I'd stolen from the lab on Spall was there, hard and cold and lethal. "Help me get Shepherd Adams out of the helm chair," I said to Kutzko, pulling the hypo out and palming it in my right hand.
I don't know why I expected to get away with it. In a single smooth motion Kutzko turned back toward me, his left hand taking over the grip on Adams's oxygen inhaler as his right drew his needler from its holster. "Don't try it, Gilead," he said quietly. "Slapshot clip—I can knock that hypo out of your hand without even drawing blood."
I took a deep breath. "It has to be done, Mikha."
"I know." Releasing the needler, he left it floating before him in midair as he reached into his own pocket. "But you're not going to do it," he said, holding up a hypo of his own. "I am."
I clenched my teeth, frustration and anger and despair welling up within me. Another moment I'd seen coming, as far back as Kutzko's last-minute insistence on coming along. I could have confronted him then, or any time since. But I'd put it off, irrationally hoping it wouldn't have to be dealt with... and now, with less than three minutes remaining to us, I had lost forever the opportunity of doing this gently.
Now, in my last moments of life, I was going to have to hurt him. "This isn't for you to do, Mikha," I told him.
"Since when?" he countered. Retrieving the needler, he holstered it again. "I'm the professional shield, remember? It's my job to risk death for other people."
"I know," I nodded. "But it's a job you never should have taken... because you're doing it for the wrong reasons."
He snorted: derision, with a shading of nervousness beneath. "I thought you religious types believed that dying for your friends is the highest form of martyrdom," he said sardonically.
"Yes, I do," I said. "And so did your parents. But you don't. Not really."
His face tightened. "My parents have nothing to do with it—"
"They have everything to do with it," I snapped. Two minutes to go... and it would take one of those minutes for the drug in my hypo to kill me. "You were raised in a religious household," I told him. "Don't try to deny it—the signs are all there. In the process you absorbed a lot of your parents' principles... but it's all just going through the motions. You don't really believe in God, or even in a set of absolute standards that your actions will be measured against. You risk your life for Lord Kelsey-Ramos and others because your parents taught you it was noble to do so; that's the only reason you came aboard this tug with a hypo in your pocket." I locked eyes with him. "You're living a lie, Mikha. I can't let you die one, too."
His face might have been carved from stone. "My past is none of your business," he bit out; and for an instant I could see an echo of Aikman in his eyes. "And neither is why I do what I do."
I looked at his face, read the determination there. A minute and a half to go... and I had run out of time. "In that case," I sighed—
And without warning I grabbed at the safety cap of my hypo, twisting it off. To your hands I commit my spirit... Locating the vein in my wrist, I jabbed.
I should have known it wouldn't work. The hypo wasn't even within five centimeters of the vein when the slapshot pellets slammed into my hand, sending the instrument spinning across the tug and leaving my fingers numb and tingling. "Mikha!—no!"
"Sorry, Gilead," he said, his voice trembling but with that same iron firmness beneath it. "Right reasons or wrong, it's still my job... and I'm going to do it." Visibly setting his teeth, he released his grip on the needler and reached for his own hypo's safety cap.
I don't know why I jumped at him. It was a futile gesture—even if I could possibly have covered the distance between us in time, I knew full well there was no way I could overpower him. But the frustration flooding my soul would simply not allow me to stand passively by without one last attempt.
Or so I thought... but even as I flew through the air toward him—as he hesitated, then paused to raise a hand against my attack—a small fact that my back-brain had perhaps already noticed burst abruptly into conscious awareness. "Mikha—stop—" I all but screamed—
And broke off as the deck slammed up into my face and chest.
For a long moment I just lay there, temporarily paralyzed from the shock and from having had the wind knocked out of me. The butt of Kutzko's needler lay within my view, as did his still untriggered hypo. Above me, I could hear the sounds of skin against cloth as Kutzko fought to regain his equilibrium in the suddenly returned gravity; the sounds of his breathing, and of his whispered curses.
From Adams, still in the helm chair, there was nothing. No gasping; no movement.
No breathing.
Slowly, carefully, I got my hands under me and pushed myself up off the deck. Another pair of hands slid under my armpits, helping me the rest of the way to my feet. "Adams," Kutzko said, his voice a mixture of shock and horror.
I nodded, my head aching furiously from the fall. "I know. He'd stopped gasping—I didn't even notice when." Steeling myself, I turned to look.
He was dead, of course. The empty look on his face—the slackness of his muscles and eyes—it brought me back with a rush to the Bellwether and the man whose death I'd witnessed there. More than once I'd noted the way Adams and Zagorin had seemed to take on alien characteristics when in contact with the thunderheads; now, for the first time, I could see how those characteristics remained when everything that was human was gone. It was eerie and abhorrent, and it made me want to be sick.
And to cry.
Beside me, Kutzko took a shuddering breath. "How about you? You okay?"
"I think so. You?"
"Yeah," he said, a quiet bitterness in his voice. His willingness to die, preempted... and once again the professional shield was forced to contemplate the limits of his power. "What now?—we go home?"