I blinked tears from my eyes. I had talked Adams into this trip—had talked him, for that matter, into involving himself with the thunderheads in the first place. My project, my ambitions, my errors. His cost. "We stay," I told Kutzko with a sigh. "Thunderhead, if you can still hear me, please continue with what we've been doing: bring us around to a position three to four minutes further back toward Solitaire."
There was a moment of hesitation, a noticeably slower reaction to the command than the living Adams/thunderhead combination had displayed. Perhaps it was merely surprise on the thunderhead's part that we were going to keep on with it.
Surprise, or disappointment.
I turned back to Kutzko, to see the question on his face. "We have to keep trying," I told him. "Otherwise his sacrifice will be for nothing."
He held my eyes another moment, the question fading into accusation: that if I'd been ready to transmit when we first arrived, that sacrifice might not have been necessary. I braced myself for a fresh argument; but the emotional strain of the past few minutes had left him as weary as it had me, and he merely nodded and turned away. Wiping one last tear from my cheek, I walked back to the transmitter and resumed my tinkering.
The gravity vanished a few seconds later, and I was still making adjustments three and a half minutes after that when the red light flashed on and the thunderhead controlling Adams's body—I couldn't bring myself to think of it as a zombi—took us back onto Mjollnir drive. Across the tug Kutzko watched me, a dull bitterness slowly growing through his sense at my continued failure to finish what he still believed were serious preparations for talking with the aliens. "I think I'll have it in another run," I announced. "If you'll just take us in one more time, thunderhead—?"
My sentence was cut off by the now-familiar crack of circuit breakers, and we were once again in zero-gee. I licked my lips, started to turn back to my transmitter— And without any emotional sense whatsoever, Adams's body rose from the helm chair and turned to face me. "You—Benedar," he whispered.
A shiver of horror went up my back at the sound of that voice. There was nothing even remotely human about it, despite the fact that it came from a human throat. With the passing of Adams's soul all the human elements were gone... and what was left was the closest thing to a pure thunderhead voice we were ever likely to hear. "Yes, thunderhead, what is it?" I managed to say.
The dead eyes gazed emotionlessly into my face. "Betrayer," the thunderhead whispered. "You will die."
And, moving awkwardly in the zero-gee, he started toward me.
Chapter 38
"Don't fire!" I snapped, holding a warning hand palm-outward toward Kutzko. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him hesitate, his needler still trained on Adams's body, the fingers holding it bone-white at the knuckles. Never in eight years had I seen him as thoroughly rattled as he was now—and I could hardly blame him. "Don't fire," I repeated, fighting hard to keep down my own horror at the sight. "What are you going to do, kill him?"
His answer was a hiss between clenched teeth.
"I know," I agreed. "Just stay cool—I'll handle it."
"Oh, good," he breathed. "Mind telling me what's going on that you need to handle?"
I cocked an eyebrow at Adams's dead face. "You want to tell him, thunderhead, or should I?"
"You have lied to us," the alien whisper came again. The body, still slow and clumsy, was nevertheless getting too close for comfort, and I found myself moving backwards in response. "You have betrayed us. You will die."
"How could I have betrayed you?" I asked. "Haven't I done exactly what I said I'd do?"
The thunderhead ignored the question, as I'd rather expected him to. Logic and prior agreements were clearly not in the forefront of his mind at the moment. "You will die," he repeated.
I clenched my teeth, fighting to stir up some emotional energy. The battle was over, and I'd won—the thunderheads' fury was all the proof I needed of that—and with the victory all the drive of the past week had drained into deep fatigue. For the moment I honestly didn't care whether the thunderheads killed me or not.
But if I died now, Kutzko would die with me. For his sake, I had to see this through to the very end. "Has what I've accomplished made things any worse for you?" I demanded, forcing myself to look directly at the dead eyes. "Or have you forgotten that your existence as a race is directly dependent on the Invaders' own survival?"
"You will die—"
"Enough of that!" I snapped. "Answer my question—or else admit that you never meant to cooperate with me in the first place. That you intended all along to sabotage my efforts."
"There was no sabotage."
"Not yet, no," I growled. "But there would have been, wouldn't there, just as soon as I asked you what I should say to them?"
There was no answer. "Get it moving, Gilead," Kutzko said, his voice tight. "If you don't talk him back to the helm in a couple more minutes we'll be smashed into powder."
"We've got all the time in the world," I told him evenly. "The fleet's not behind us anymore—they're angling away from Solitaire."
He stared at me. "They're what?"
"They've chosen to live," I said, my eyes steady on Adams's face. "The only question now is whether or not the thunderheads will be smart enough to do the same."
The thunderhead hissed. "You bargain for your life?"
"Bargain?" I shook my head. "No. The bargain's already been made and is being carried out. I simply point out that killing us won't gain you anything at all."
"It will gain revenge."
"Revenge for what?" I snarled, suddenly tired of thunderhead singlemindedness. "For the failure of your grand scheme to have us destroy your enemies? It would never have worked—you should have known that years ago. Human beings aren't brainless insects you can manipulate without consequences—we hate and we resent and we fear, and no matter what you did with us, sooner or later we would have wiped Spall clean of you."
I broke off, hearing my voice ringing through the tug and abruptly realizing I'd been shouting. I took a ragged breath, forcing calmness over the frustration and anger and weariness. "You have just two choices left," I said quietly. "You can have us as mediators and, perhaps, as willing allies if you can persuade us that your side is in the right... or you can have us join the Invaders as your enemies. There are no other possibilities."
For a long minute Adams's body floated motionless in the middle of the tug. Totally dead, now, with even its alien life gone from it. "What's happening?" Kutzko asked.
"He's gone to discuss it with the others, I'd guess," I said. I focused on his face... "You've figured it out."
He gave me a lopsided smile; and from his sense I could see that one of my worries, at least, could be laid to rest: that he didn't resent me for having kept him ignorant of my plans. "I may be slow, but I'm not totally stupid," he said wryly. "Cute—and nicely devious, in all directions. I'd have thought that kind of thing beyond your talents."
I grimaced, feeling a curious sadness growing within me. "We all have the potential for deceit," I sighed. "Even Watchers."
He snorted gently. "As Aaron Balaam darMaupine so graphically proved."
Aaron Balaam darMaupine. "It's funny, you know," I said, the words sounding distant in my ears. "Every Watcher for the past twenty years has had to suffer because of darMaupine—the parents' sins bringing punishment indeed on the children and grandchildren. His name's a curse and an insult everywhere in the Patri and colonies—for years I despised the sound of it, and even now I can't hear it without cringing. And yet, it was that name that gave me the key to what we've just done."