Amy swore and tried to take aim a second time, and Saul noticed how the trigger mechanism was roomy enough for a spacesuit-gloved finger to fit around it.
Mitchell leaned over Lester’s prone form to snatch the weapon away from her, moving once again with that shocking fluid velocity.
Saul then remembered what Donohue had said. He’s not even human.
He grabbed hold of Mitchell from the side, only for the man to swing Amy’s rifle around like a club, slamming the stock into Saul’s ribs and sending him stumbling backwards. By the time Saul had struggled half upright again, Mitchell was swinging the rifle back and forth between him and Amy. The lander felt more intensely cramped and claustrophobic than ever.
‘I don’t want either of you getting in the way,’ Mitchell shouted. ‘Amy, I—’
The interior of the lander was so tiny that, when Mitchell glanced towards Amy, it was easy for Saul to reach out with one gloved fist and knock the rifle barrel upward, so that it smacked into a control panel mounted on the ceiling. Saul pushed his advantage by grabbing hold of the barrel, struggling desperately to pull it from Mitchell’s grasp. Mitchell was sweating inside his suit, with an expression suggesting he was in considerable discomfort. As his eyes became unfocused, Saul felt the man’s grip on the weapon begin to loosen.
‘Now you listen, you piece of shit,’ Saul barked, ‘you’re going to—’
A sound like a hammer blow filled the tiny cabin, and a nearly irresistible force almost lifted Saul into the air.
He slammed shoulder-first into one of the forward control panels, hard enough to leave him feeling dazed. He caught a glimpse of lunar regolith, down between the lander’s legs, then realized the forward hatch had somehow been blown, the air inside the craft explosively decompressing. Mitchell pushed Amy out of the way and literally dived head-first through the narrow hatch, before landing between the lander’s legs, in a great cloud of dust.
‘Don’t move,’ he heard Amy warning him over the A/V. ‘Your helmet’s cracked. I need to resecure that hatch before we can do anything else.’
‘What the hell just happened?’
Amy reached down for a handle attached to one side of the hatch. ‘Give me a hand here,’ she ordered.
Saul took hold of the handle on the opposite side, and held it in place, following her clipped directions as she reset the locking mechanism. He had to lean over Lester to do s and noticed his unmoving eyes staring off through one of the lander’s triangular windows.
‘I don’t know how he figured out how to do that,’ Amy muttered tightly, ‘but he triggered the emergency release.’
Saul remembered studying Mitchell when he had assumed he might be asleep, and seeing the man’s eyes dart back and forth under their lids, no doubt planning and preparing, while searching out flaws in the lander’s UP-linked control systems.
‘I think I might know,’ he admitted.
Once Amy had finished resecuring the hatch, she reached out and flipped a couple of switches on a control panel, then did the same with a virtual panel floating to one side. A distant hiss quickly built to a roar as the cabin filled up with air once more, from an emergency tank.
‘How he did it doesn’t matter right now,’ said Amy. ‘Well, that’s us repressurized. Now we’ve got to help Lester.’
‘Amy . . .’
She ignored him, pulling open a steel cabinet and withdrawing a large white plastic box. ‘Medical kit,’ she explained. ‘We’ll need to dress that wound.’
Saul gazed down at Lester’s slumped form, with a feeling of hopelessness, as Amy hurriedly pulled off her helmet and dropped it to one side.
Saul pulled off his own damaged helmet too, then helped her remove Lester’s. Tears trickled down her cheeks, as she murmured Lester’s name over and over again, like a litany. Lester’s head rolled to one side, his jaw slack and his eyes vacant.
‘Amy, please, listen to me.’
She began weeping in earnest. ‘We can get him to a hospital in Copernicus,’ she insisted. ‘Someone might still be there, someone who can . . .’
Saul stared down at Lester’s lifeless features. ‘It’s too late for that.’
Amy sniffed and reached up to pinch away the tears gathering around her eyes. She stood up abruptly, the medical kit slipping from her grasp. ‘I don’t understand . . . why did he do this? He tried to kill you, too.’
‘I don’t know,’ Saul replied, reaching out with two gloved fingers to close Lester’s eyes.
Amy kneeled on her seat, her face twisted in anguish, as she stared down at her husband. ‘Listen to me, Saul,’ she said eventually, her voice hoarse. ‘There are some auxiliary suits.’
‘There are?’ Saul felt a sudden stab of hope.
Amy nodded listlessly and touched one gloved hand to Lester’s cheek. ‘ou can get yourself another helmet belonging to one of them.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath, and then stood up as straight as possible. Her eyes, blazing with anger, met Saul’s. ‘I want you to kill him, do you hear me?’
‘Amy . . .’
‘No, dammit, I want him dead.’
Saul tried to think of something to say. ‘I need to find out why he did this, and if I kill him, I can’t do that.’
Her gloved fists clenched themselves by her sides. She might be an old woman now, but Saul suddenly saw just how very formidable she must have been in her youth.
‘Then make damn sure he never gets as far as the colonies,’ she hissed in a half-whisper.
The spare suits were located in a locker hidden beneath a floor panel at the rear. Amy helped him pull out a new helmet.
‘Now listen up,’ she said. ‘We’ve landed a couple of klicks south-east of the Lunar Array. Any normal day, we’d wind up in jail for flying anywhere near this close to it.’ She retrieved the rifle from where she’d propped it against a bulkhead. ‘Here, you’re going to need this thing when you go after Mitchell.’
Saul searched her eyes as he took it from her. ‘Why in God’s name would you need something like this on board a tourist craft?’ he asked. ‘You could have blown a hole in the lander and killed all of us, not just Mitchell.’
‘It’s an insurance policy.’
‘Insurance against what?’
An uncomfortable look crossed her face. ‘Against getting caught.’
‘You were smuggling, is that it?’
‘Not necessarily in this bird. In the VASIMRs, mostly. Things got tight a few years back, and we were on the verge of going under. This way, we can slip all kinds of stuff past customs and fly it straight back home without going anywhere near Florida. People, sometimes, too.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess telling you this doesn’t matter now.’
‘So what were you planning on doing, if you got caught? Have a shoot-out with the ASI?’
Amy made a sound of irritation. ‘Officials we can pay off, but we had competitors – sometimes very vicious ones. We thought they might plant someone on board, a ringer of some kind, so . . .’ She gestured at the rifle. ‘You should realize that thing’s designed to work in a vacuum.’
Saul nodded. He rather suspected that the rifle, when disassembled, might look, to the casual eye, like nothing more than random components of normal onboard equipment.
She squinted at him. ‘You’d figured this out already, hadn’t you?’
‘I had a feeling, yes.’ He lifted up the helmet and paused before sliding it on. ‘You’d better put on your own helmet, if we’re going.’
She laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’d only slow you down.’
‘You need to get to the city, Amy. Your friends will be waiting for you.’
She nodded slowly, with a look of desperate sadness in her eyes that Saul recognized. It was the same way he himself had looked on the day the Galileo wormhole had collapsed.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I need to stay here with Lester. Just for a little while longer.’