He raised his gun in a single fluid motion, too fast for Delagarza to react. Sharpe’s back straightened, though she was clearly shaking. She looked Major Strauze square in the eyes.
“—to stop a war,” Strauze said, and pulled the trigger.
Delagarza screamed a single “No!” that was drowned by the sound of the shot. Even though the barrel was silenced, it sounded like an explosion going off next to his hear.
He didn’t see the bullet, but he saw the entrance and exit wounds appear at, seemingly, the same time. Sharpe’s head deformed like a melon smashed against the ground before the light had finished exiting her eyes.
Delagarza didn’t see anything else. He turned, and ran for his life, faster than he’d ever ran in his life, a human-shaped projectile moving away from Strauze. Still, the sound of a body hitting the pavement came clearly to him.
He wanted to scream, but the only sound was a ragged howl. Like a wild animal, he looked around, trying to find anything, anyone that could help him. The streets were deserted. Even the stores had thrown their “closed” signs and lowered their security curtains.
Krieger waited for him a few meters away from the Pakistani food stand. She was grinning at him in that cruel way of hers, the same way she’d done while he slept with her. She aimed a gun at him, and Delagarza stopped, dead in his tracks. He looked back and saw no one. Strauze hadn’t thought him important enough to chase. Hell, he hadn’t considered Delagarza worth the effort of ordering the snipers to open fire.
It was a distressing idea. At least Krieger cared enough about him to meet him face to face.
“You made me look terrible when you survived Taiga Town,” Krieger said. “The clean-up crew had to come out of my own pocket, you know?”
“Krieger—”
The world flashed white for an instant. Numbness spread through Delagarza. Some force pressed against his abdomen, not in a painful way, but hard enough to make breathing hard.
Delagarza found a tiny hole in his reg-suit, about an inch above his navel. He looked at his hands. They were covered in blood which was already browning and crusting against his skin. He opened his mouth to beg for his life.
Krieger shot him another two times.
All force rushed out of Delagarza’s body, like a water balloon with a leak. His knees failed him, and he slid down the wall and to the floor, leaving a red streak as he went. The most he could do was press his hands against the wounds, trying to contain the flood of blood. It didn’t hurt as much as he expected. The wounds became three stinging sensations, not entirely unlike being stuck by a wasp.
“As they say, all is well which works out in the end. Or something like that,” Krieger told him. “Thanks for the assist, Delagarza. Never could’ve done it without your help.”
As pain—real pain—began surge from Delagarza’s stomach, the adrenaline gave him enough strength to ask:
“How?”
Krieger stopped a few steps away from him. The soles of her boots left bloody footprints on her wake. “After you survived Taiga, we kept tabs on you from Outlander. You’d be amazed at what one can see with the password of all security cameras and access to the orbitals around a planet.”
“Oh.”
He never had stood a chance.
Krieger turned his back to him. “Now, be a good boy and wait for the clean-up crew to take you out of the streets. I’ve a celebration party to attend,” she said, and left him there.
DELAGARZA COULD FEEL his heart rate slowing as all pain and fear abandoned his body. Even the blood flow slowed, which was probably a bad omen. He pressed against his wounds harder. Strange. That hadn’t been his conscious decision at all.
Just give up, Delagarza told himself, it’s over. Stop nagging at me and let me bleed out with some dignity.
He closed his eyes and let darkness overtake him.
It’s not over until I say it’s over, himself answered back, now shut up and let me focus. I never quite got the hang of this one.
The reg-suit spat a constant blare of warnings at him. Cold seeped through the suit’s damaged fabric, and power drained out of the battery.
It was a race to see what would kill him first—the cold or the blood-loss. So far, the blood-loss was winning, but the cold wasn’t giving up hope.
Besides the indescribable agony of being shot in the stomach three times, Delagarza felt at peace.
He had done his best. For once in his life, he had done good. Sure, he deeply regretted it and he wished he’d never tried, but he still had done it, and that had to count for something.
I wonder if I’ll see my mother. Maybe there’s an afterlife, after all.
Believe me, if there’s a God, we’re on his naughty list. Now shut up and do as I say. Get Rajpar’s attention. He’s hiding behind his stand. Ask him to let you use his wristband. Yours is compromised, that’s how Strauze kept tabs on you. Call Cooke, or Charleton. Ask them for help. Have them get you to a doctor. On the down-low, though. No hospitals.
Delagarza rolled his eyes. This part of dying sucked. The hallucinations. The talking to himself. Why couldn’t he just dream of his childhood? Whatever. His heartbeat had all but disappeared. It was over.
What did I just tell you? I slowed your heartbeat. You’re not bleeding out yet. Now ask Rajpar for help. Hurry, this meditation is fucking hard to maintain from my own subconscious. And there’s digestive acid soaking my intestines, which doesn’t help at all.
“Dude…” Delagarza muttered. Just. Stop. Let it go. She’s dead. We failed. The EIF is not getting their space princess.
She’s Reiner’s daughter. And I care because she isn’t dead.
Delagarza blinked. He flashed the clean memory of Edith Sharpe as the bullet plastered her brains all over her own clinic’s walls.
That’s not Isabella Reiner.
What? She said…
What she had to say to protect Isabella. She lied. People do that. Get used to it.
This can’t be happening.
Our job isn’t over, Delagarza.
“I am a prim and proper asshole,” Delagarza whispered.
He opened his eyes.
18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CLARKE
The trip to the old fleet’s coordinates lasted four days. Then the Beowulf drifted in deep space, without anyone knowing its location, and with no way to return to civilized space. No one hailed them upon their arrival, and the detection systems were deaf and blind, so if anyone was out there, there was no way to know.
Burying their dead was a grim task. Pascari carted Antonov’s remains, in a plastic bag, next to Julia’s drifting body. Captain Navathe pushed the pilot’s body next to the others. Clarke waited until Navathe and Pascari cleared the airlock and then cycled it. From the inner lock window he saw the bodies float out of the ship and for a second matched its speed, like three birds riding an airplane’s coattails. Slowly, they disappeared from view. They’d end up hitting the energy-density ring, where the forces involved would atomize them and spread their atoms across the universe.
A fitting end for the men and woman who died fighting for the Edge.
Julia had found her peace, but Clarke had lost his.
No, not lost. It had been stolen. And he would’ve given anything to return the favor to that gunship. A new dream was added to his nightmares about Broken Sky. A simple dream, short. He heard again the smug voice of the unknown commander of the gunship who had been replaced by Admiral Ernest U. Wentraub, at times mixing up with Captain Riley Erickson of the Vortex. The gunship commander, face to face with Clarke in dream-space, ordered him to surrender his ship and his crew. Clarke knew Isabella Reiner was a passenger, so he refused. The commander, then, showed him all the hostages he had captured, and that Clarke had condemned to death. Julia, Antonov, and all the sailors of the Applegate, his friends and family who had died during Broken Sky, some of them following Clarke’s orders. In the dream, Clarke saw them transform into corpses, broken and bloodied, while he screamed and the commander laughed.