Reconnaissance done, he faced Valdemar, his face stonily impassive. “I am Dr. Georgory Marchey.” He held up his silver hands so there would be no mistaking what kind of doctor he was. “I’m here to treat you.”
“It’s about time you got here,” Valdemar sniffed, slumping back onto the pillows. “I feel terrible! You should have been here weeks ago! I’m not some damn welf; I run the whole fucking medicine show around here! I deserve better treatment than this!”
Marchey stared down at the flabby little man on the big soft bed, and although he felt nothing kinder than loathing, he smiled.
“Well, I’m here.” His smile subtly altered, an odd glint kindling in his gray eyes. “It has taken me a long time to get to where I am now. Let’s find out if it was worth the trip.”
Angel could feel it.
Something was about to happen. The very air seemed charged with a gathering electricity. She had never experienced anything like terrestrial weather, but she had heard and finally understood what people meant by the calm before the storm.
Would they rush her? Would the airlock doors open on a dozen weapons all firing on her at once?
There were a dozen possibilities. She needed to be ready for each and every one of them, but really all she could do was wait, her silver-sheathed body so tense it was a wonder it didn’t ring like a tuning fork with every apprehensive thump of her heart.
She watched the airlock’s double doors, her attention so tightly focused on the vertical seam between them that when the explosion came, she kept staring at the still-intact steel panels, thinking that they had tried to blow the doors and failed.
That thought had scarcely been formed when it was blown away by the terrible, blood-freezing dragon’s roar that was the sound of every spacers’ deepest, darkest nightmare.
The deadly shrieking howl of pressure breach.
Adrenaline-fueled fear burst inside her like a bomb, kicking her exosystems into overdrive. Her head snapped around, homing in on the sound, and she saw the gaping, life-eating, meter-wide hole blown in the wall twenty meters away.
It’s a diversion! The warning flashed in her mind like a starburst, but breach drill was one of the first things learned by every child born in the fragile steel-and-stone shells that kept the implacable enemy vacuum at bay. Her response was as deeply wired into her nerves as the monkey reflex of grabbing at anything within reach when falling.
Instinct had her already racing toward the rack of emergency patches against the far wall, leaning into the gale and legs pumping under her like pistons.
Dust, gravel, and other debris filled the escaping air, stinging her face and pinging off her exo. A plastic packing crate came flying at her out of nowhere. She barely had time to fling up her arm to protect her face. The impact staggered her, whirling flinders snatched out of the air around her and sucked toward the hole. Her momentum and the magnetic soles of her exo were all that kept her from falling and being taken as well. She had to keep her vulnerable organic eye squeezed shut against the scouring whirlwind. Only the indifferent glass lens of her angel eye let her see to reach the rack.
Let her see that the rack was nearly empty. The few remaining ceramyl-backed foamstone patches were far too small to cover the rent.
But the thick meter-and-a-half-square foamstone panel forming one end of the rack was large enough to do the job. She grabbed hold of it, set her feet and heaved, wrenching it from its moorings. Then she got herself turned around and headed toward the hole.
The hurricane-force outrush of air tried to rip the panel from her grasp, and when it couldn’t, snatched her off her feet and took them both.
Angel had only a fractured second in which to realize that if the unreinforced panel hit the wall at the speed they were travelling, it would shatter into a thousand useless pieces. Jaw clamped tight on the air the dropping pressure was trying to steal from her aching lungs, she twisted desperately, turning, trying to get her arms and legs braced before—
Less than a tenth of a second later the panel slammed into the wall, smashing Angel’s body between it and the unyielding stone around the hole it was supposed to cover.
“I can’t move,” Valdemar complained pettishly. A pale blue derm was plastered to his neck. Muscle relaxant.
“That’s to make things easier,” Marchey explained as he rolled a table over beside the bed. He didn’t say easier for what. Valdemar would find out soon enough.
“They put me out last time. Aren’t you going to?”
Marchey showed him his teeth. “I think we’ll get better results if we do this while you’re wide-awake.”
“I suppose you know what you’re doing.” Valdemar sniffed.
Some dark bastard cousin of laughter welled up inside of him. “I’ve never been more on top of things in my whole life.”
He laid his forearms on the table, palms up. He’d gotten a lot of practice slipping in and out of the light working trance he needed, and more quickly shucking off his prosthetics back on Ananke. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let go.
Their weight fell away. He opened his eyes, feeling like he had just taken off swaddling gloves. Now his hands felt impossibly supple and exquisitely sensitive, ready to operate.
Even though it had been done without fanfare, removing his prosthetics had made an impression on his patient. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Valdemar’s eyes widen as he straightened up, watched him lick his thick lips nervously. It made him smile.
“This won’t hurt, will it?” Valdemar whined in a small voice.
Marchey had also gotten a lot of practice at another skill since leaving Ananke. It was time to see if he was really the apt pupil Fist kept saying he was.
“Only if I don’t want it to,” he answered as he turned to face Valdemar, his smile widening. The flat silver biometal plates capping his stumps had the same cold gleam as his eyes.
“All right, you miserable little pile of shit,” he rumbled, slowly reaching for his patient, the points where his hands should have been coming closer and closer. “Let’s find out just what you’re made of.”
Valdemar tried to cringe away, but he might as well have tried to levitate. Thanks to the derm on his neck his body only trembled like a worm nailed to a board. Panic rising, he tried to reach for the call button, but his hands and arms never even twitched.
Totally helpless, all he could do was stare at the terrifying expression on Marchey’s face, gurgling with terror and humiliation as his bladder let go.
Angel was in Hell.
Escaping air roared and squalled around her, cold, so cold, and the implacable void at her back tried to suck her through the hole and swallow her completely. She couldn’t breathe. Jagged rock chips, scouring sand, and bullet-fast bits of debris exploded against her exo and lashed the exposed skin of her face.
She teetered over the immense pool of blackness that filled the back of her skull, welling up from where her head had bounced off unyielding stone. If not for the thin layer of biometal covering her where hair should have been, her skull would have split like a melon. She couldn’t tell if the unending howl she heard was inside or outside her head. She could barely see; she had to keep her human eye closed tight or she would lose it, and the other one kept phasing in and out.
The foamstone panel was still in one piece, only because she had put her body between it and the wall to cushion its impact. The impact had been tremendous; people had felt it in the soles of their feet all over Ananke. If it hadn’t been for her exo, every bone in her body would have been broken.