Stars whirl about to my left and right. Something inside my skin tries to push its way out. Across and down lies the gateway. I must pass this corridor of blackness and go beyond the gate. Maybe this is the final trip through. I feel all cold and bursting. Fly. Fly.
Virgil kicked off into the void below him. Empty lungs struggled for breath. Sweat boiled from his skin, chilling blood that threatened to boil in his veins.
Drowning. Lights flashing before my eyes. Death Angel, must you put me through all this to make you smile beside Nightsheet? Reach, reach.
His left hand seized a jagged piece of metal sticking out from the side of the passage. Fingers refused to tighten and his wrist slid along the serrated steel. Blood squirted outward in a stream of spheres that instantly exploded, sizzling like water thrown into hot grease. He slid until the wrist wedged between the twisted strut and the bulkhead, pinioning him in the airless pit. Blackness swam before him. Blood evaporated and crystallized across his face in bright crimson, freeze-dried flecks. The pressure seal stood open less than a meter away.
No! It won’t end this way. With a powerful tug, he wrenched his hand from its trap-tearing the flesh and muscle down to tendon and bone-and pulled toward the door. He contorted into the illuminated chamber.
Consciousness faded from him in a growingly familiar manner. So cold. Nightsheet has sucked me dry. I am an empty shell of nothingness. The walls twist and bend toward me. Death Angel, I wanted your wings to wrap me for too long. Now I look for you, but you’re not here.
He saw a figure he had never seen before.
Who are you? I can break your cipher, but I can’t see your face. Get out of my death! What? Not through with me? Who are you to want me to die again and again and again?
“No!” He screamed and struggled, but something pricked his arm and he collapsed slowly to the sheets.
The next time he wakened, it was as if from a slumber. Reaching up to brush the hair from his eyes, he hit his forehead with a bandaged stump. He tried again with the same result. Focusing on the amputation, he looked at it from all sides.
I flex my fingers but don’t see them move. I don’t see them at all. I rotate my hand but it’s not there to turn. Once I saw my hand. Hand saw. Master Snoop needed a hand repairing Ben. Death Angel became a handmaiden. He lowered his arm to the sheets.
“I need a hand job!” he shouted.
“What is your name?”
“I’m VirgilVirgilVirgilVirgilVirgilVirg-”
“Virgil-you cut your hand severely when you crossed the gap. By the time I could get a robot to you, you had lost two liters of blood, your core body temperature had dropped to fifteen, your blood pressure to zero, your heart had stopped beating-”
“All right!” Virgil lay back and stared at the bulkhead above him.
“You were dead for almost eight minutes.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“I’m glad you recovered. I am currently giving one-half gravity thrust for you during your recovery. We are still twelve light days from Epsilon Indi. The system comprises five planets, two suitable for life, seventeen moons, and a number of comets and asteroids.
“You may be interested that we received a message from the other ship during its last attack. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes.” He touched the stump of his left hand with his fingers. A spot of blood encircled the bandage near the injection port.
An image appeared on one of the wallscrims. At first, the picture displayed a mere jumble of light and computer coded indices. Once the information had been correlated, the scene snapped into view.
Virgil stared at a tortured face. Hell looks at me, hate in his
eyes. A wild mane of ashen hair explodes out from his head, wrapping under and merging into his matted beard. His cipher breaks easily.
“I have come!” he cried, like some howling wolf. “I have come to destroy the destroyer!” Virgil heard the sound of laser fire. The man on the screen wiped spit from his beard with a grime crusted sleeve and continued to speak.
“Dirty death, Wanderer. Dirty death for straying!”
“You’re not translating this, are you Ben?”
“No. He is speaking twenty-second century Americ. I am not Ben.”
The man played with battle controls, his eyes darting around in a fevered glaze. The control room he sat in held a dozen other chairs. In most of them were strapped corpses, mummified and dry. Their hollow eyes watched blinking lights without seeing. Their fingers rested on chair arms discolored by their death.
“I am the avenging angel of death come to take you for all you’ve done!”
No. You’re not Death Angel. You’re a trick. Sent by Master Snoop to confuse me, to make me hate Death Angel. Virgil gazed more intently at the image.
“Can you give him a shave and haircut?” he asked.
“Explain.”
Virgil leaned forward, his gold-hued eyebrows narrowing under a meditative frown. “Edit the image. Interpolate his face.”
“Not accurately. His hair is too thick for its surface to give any clue to what lies beneath.”
Virgil raised his left hand to stroke his chin. The bandaged stump rubbed against his jawline. “All right then,” he said. “Can you compare his eyes with those of faces in your memory?”
“Yes.”
Virgil’s voice was steady, but hesitant. “Is it Brennen?”
“It is Dante Houdini Brennen.”
The other madman continued his rant. “Wanderer, we tried to follow. All dead, all dead. All danced down the dark cavern. Then up from death I rose to avenge. If you don’t die for your murders now, I meet you. Meet you at Tau Ceti, June Twenty-Two Twenty-Three. Give you plenty, plenty of time. Complete your death tour-I’ll be following. Every time I die, I grow stronger. Death, Wanderer, I am Death-” The image ended suddenly.
“We transferred just then.”
“He’s out of his mind. Mad Wizard!” The computer made no reply, so Virgil asked, “Was there anything else?”
“No.”
“What year is it now?”
“Approximately the summer of Twenty-One Fifty-Two. Mid-July.”
Forty-four years. All I knew, old and gone, except this madman. “And I can only return after completing the tour?”
“No.”
“What?”
“After sustaining severe damage to my neural net, I was recircuited and the tour program adherence command was defeated.”
Virgil rolled over and stared at the speaker grill behind him. “Then calculate a course back. What’re you waiting for?”
“I think we should wait until you have your hand back.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the lower level of the medical bay is the cloning unit. It is currently growing a cell sample, trimming away unnecessary portions, and your left hand-a new one-will be ready in about three months. I have it under intensive forced generation, since we don’t care about the brain or any other organs.”
“I don’t have three months, I don’t care about my hand. I want-want-” Death Angel must be old and dead, taken by Nightsheet for services rendered. Time. Press a button and it’s gone, eaten up. I don’t have time. Time on my hands. Hand.
He touched his lower lip with his right hand and bent it inward so that it rubbed against his teeth. He slid the fold of skin back and forth several times, thinking, then let go of it to speak.
“You’re saying there’s no limit on my individual transfers now?”
“None.”
“Can the cloning unit be disconnected from the medical bay and the computer?”
“It has emergency modular functioning; it can be.”
“Can it be fitted into a lifeboat and set adrift?”
“Yes.”
He sat up in the bed, fighting the forces that doubled his vision. “Then let’s put it in, transfer out a distance of six light weeks and transfer back.”
Silent for a moment, the computer replied, “Acceptable. When you have recovered.”