When Marchey was still in college he had visited Earth for the first and only time, and in a stone temple in a country named India seen a real live crocodile the monks kept there. It was said to be almost a hundred years old, one of the last natural-born specimens alive. The huge, cold-blooded creature had lain there half-submerged in its pool, regarding the world around it with that same fearless, carnivorous dispassion. Its soulless gaze assayed you as either meat or threat, and if you were lucky, it dismissed you as neither.
Fist turned his head to look up at Marchey, exposing the jagged scars Scylla’s talons had carved into his thin neck. He stared up at him for several long, unpleasant seconds before speaking.
“You’ve taken me… off Ananke.” Fist’s voice was a papery whisper, sibilant and reptilian. The disease in his lungs had gone into full-blown terminal stage. There wasn’t much more than a handful of functioning tissue left. All else was dark carcinomic growth, nightshade blooms spreading in the warm darkness.
“That’s right,” Marchey answered, reminding himself to choose his every word carefully. “You had pretty much worn out your welcome.”
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Fist’s laughter was a bubbling ophidian hiss that raised the hackles at the back of Marchey’s neck.
“I suppose… I did at that.” The ghost of a shrug. “You took me away… so they could not kill… the poor old man… who has done… so much for them?”
Marchey shook his head, almost smiling because he had a chance to score a hit on the old man’s ego. “Not one of them raised so much as a hand against you. I guess you didn’t corrupt them as much as you thought.” Of course keeping him buried under a sleepfield the whole time hadn’t hurt. Fist could drive a saint to homicide.
“Or I taught them… better than they know.” His hand twitched dismissively. “No matter. What of… my Scylla?”
“Her name is Angel,” Marchey returned coldly, the pleasure he’d felt a moment before clabbering at the mention of her name and the memories it conjured. “Scylla was the name of the thing you tried to turn her into. But that didn’t work out so well after all, did it? Remember how she very nearly took your goddamn head off? She’s not Scylla anymore, and she’s not yours.”
Those cruel yellow eyes bored into Marchey’s face, commanding his full attention. “If she is… my toy no longer… she must have… become yours. You subverted her… supplanted me. That makes her… yours.”
Fist’s smile was a horrific thing. Again it reminded Marchey of laughing, scythe-wielding Plague in medieval art. “Isn’t she… a delightful possession?” He licked his thin black lips with a long gray tongue. “Young. Beautiful. Innocent. So eager… to please.”
“She’s nobody’s possession,” Marchey responded heavily. “She’s not a pet or a puppet. She’s her own person now. Nobody owns her—least of all me. Now that you’re no longer pulling her strings she has a chance at a life of her own.”
Fist’s baleful, unblinking stare held all the warmth of a breath of space. Under it confidence withered like an orchid blasted by frost. “You… abandoned her?” he asked, an ominous note of accusation sharpening his tone.
Marchey kept himself from looking away, feeling like he was pinned to a board under a microscope, being examined to see if he was fit for dissection. Besides, he wasn’t sure he could if he wanted to.
“Yes.” He hadn’t really abandoned her, but he knew better than to try to argue the point. In a war of words he’d be the first and only casuality.
“Then you have… doomed her,” Fist pronounced, looking pleased by the prospect.
“I set her free.” He couldn’t keep the defensive note out of his voice. “I gave her a chance to make something of herself.”
“You have… doomed her,” Fist repeated with a steely certainty that made Marchey’s blood turn to neocaine. He told himself that Fist was just trying to bait him. Angel’s life or death had meaning to Fist only as something he could use to his advantage.
Try as he might, Marchey still couldn’t resist the bait. He had to ask Fist what he meant, even though he was almost certainly playing into the old man’s hands.
“Explain what you mean by that.” It came out more of an appeal than the demand he had intended.
Fist ignored his question. He examined what small part of his surroundings were visible from inside the unibed, then turned his attention back to Marchey. “Where are you… taking me?”
Marchey shook his head, unable to let the other matter drop. “First tell me what you meant by saying I’ve doomed Angel.”
The bundle of paper-covered sticks that was Fist’s hand twitched in a gesture that said the matter was of no real consequence. “Nothing.” That rictus sardonicus of a smile again. “If she is… as you said… her own person… then her fate… is of her own making… and no concern… of yours.” He peered at Marchey expectantly. “Is that… not so?”
Marchey opened his mouth to answer, closed it. His crash course in dealing with Fist had taught him that anything he said would only sink him deeper in the morass. So he reluctantly left the matter unresolved and answered Fist’s question.
“We’re headed for a place called Botha Station.”
He saw something flicker across Fist’s masklike face. It was there and gone too quickly to be identified for certain. He didn’t think it had been fear, but it might have been… dismay?
Fist closed his eyes, his face unreadable. But the ’bed’s monitoring equipment reported a transient spike in his pulse rate. His reaction had not been artifice.
“I would rest a while,” Fist said imperiously, turning his head away. “Leave me.”
Marchey stared down at the old man, trying to understand what had just happened. Fist ignored him, his face inscrutable.
After a couple minutes he rechecked the ’bed’s settings, then reset the sleepfield on delay, allowing the old man to remain awake for another twenty minutes before it came back on.
He paused in the clinic’s doorway, gazing thoughtfully back at his passenger. The mention of Botha Station had hit a nerve, that was fairly certain. Giving Fist time to dwell on the matter might prove useful. And in case his suspicion was correct—
“We reach Botha Station in four and a half days, old man.” He left without waiting for a reaction, closing the door behind him.
“Then we have…” Fist whispered, something like a smile creeping out onto his shriveled face, “a deadline…”
Marchey had killed a couple hours at a compad, finding out what he could about Botha Station. It had been fairly educational, but put him no closer to understanding Fist’s reaction.
Botha Station was a regional control, secondary processing, and staging area owned by OmniMat, the second largest space-based mining and materials megacorp. Only AllMine was larger. Those two, plus United Resources, made up the Big Three—or the Unholy Trinity, as they were more often called. The next largest mining and materials combine after United Resources was not very large at all; anything even remotely capable of competing with the Trinity had been either gobbled up or driven out of business decades ago.
Botha was heliostationary, maintaining a position on the sunny side of Jupiter between the orbits of Himalia and Callisto, some 9 million kilometers out from Jupiter’s surface. Ugly little Ananke was over a third of the way around Jupiter’s vast bulk from Botha. While that was one hell of a distance to travel—some 18 million kilometers—it wasn’t really all that long a trip. Some of his house calls took over three weeks to complete.