Now the relentless air pressure was turning the panel and the wall into the two jaws of a vise trying to squeeze the life out of her.
Blind, deafened, and dizzy, still one thought clanged endlessly through her reeling mind: This is a diversion! It felt like an eternity had turned since the explosion, but the passionless timesense built into her exo’s circuits told her that less than twenty seconds had elapsed.
She still had a chance to stop them. If she could get free before she was mashed flat or eaten by vacuum. Or simply passed out, letting the other dangers get her.
Angel tightened her grip on the panel and strained against it, the cords standing out in her neck. A cry broke through her clenched teeth when it looked like not even her exo gave her the strength to force it back.
Still she refused to give up. She kept pushing, throwing every iota of energy she could summon into her trembling arms, the strain making the suffocating blackness rise higher and higher. The panel groaned and thrummed, nearly stressed to the breaking point.
Just as her exhausted body was about to fail her, the panel moved, forced back to arm’s length and tipping so that one side ground against the wall.
That gave her better leverage. Bracing it up with her trembling arms, she wriggled toward the widest part of the gap, moving like some small creature trying to crawl out from under a stony crushing foot. When she had gotten as far to one side as she could, she gave one final desperate heave, rolling and twisting as she did so.
The patch slammed home with an echoing boom, cracking down the middle but not breaking. The seal wasn’t perfect; air still whistled around the edges, sucking airborne bits of debris in to wedge in the narrow cracks, but the cyclone was over.
The force of her push sent her crashing to the cold stone floor. She landed on her side, desperately gasping for breath in the too-thin, dust-filled air. Her lungs were on fire, every ragged breath stoking the flames higher.
She could have lain there forever. Her limbs felt like they weighed a ton apiece. Her head swam, and even thinking about moving seemed impossible.
Instead she heaved herself to her feet wearily, blood seeping from her ears and nose, trickling from her mouth. Operating on blind instinct alone she got herself oriented and staggered drunkenly toward the airlock.
The outer doors were just beginning to slide back when she got to within two meters of them, coming within blurry sight of five heavily armed mercys in goggles and breather masks, the red-haired man she had driven off earlier in the lead. It was obvious from the shocked expressions on their faces that they hadn’t expected to find her waiting for them.
Angel was at the end of her strength and endurance. She didn’t so much charge the invaders as start toppling in their direction and somehow manage to keep her feet under her.
The looks of slack-jawed, bug-eyed disbelief that appeared on their faces squeezed a hysterical laugh out of her. It was funny. Scylla was nowhere to be found inside her now, and she didn’t have the strength left to fight them even if she wanted to. The worst she could do was collapse on top of them.
The mercys did not know that. Seeing a battered and bloody-faced silver-skinned wild woman laughing like a berserker as she lurched toward them drove them back to the big airlock’s ruined outer doors.
Angel saw one last chance to slow them down. Her laughter turning to a racking coughing that put fresh blood on her lips, she staggered the last two steps to the airlock’s inner doors. Then she flung her arms wide, extruded her talons, and grunting with effort, drove her barbed hands into the steel panels, sinking them in almost to her wrists. Gathering the tattered shreds of her failing strength, she heaved at the door panels to pull them shut.
Had she been fresh and rested, she could have easily overcome the mechanism that powered the lock doors. In her present condition she was barely able slowly to wrench them shut to the tormented shriek of stripping gears and steel grating against stone. The panels began to twist and buckle around her silver hands. Her grip was too close to their edges, but she dared not try for a fresh hold.
She heard the enemy shout, saw them start back toward her. That spurred her to one final all-out effort. Her whole existence narrowed down to herself and the doors.
Just—
Their resistance was incredible. Her arms and insides were aflame. Red-and-black motes danced before her eye. She turned her face away as they began firing at her, daring only to use rubber dumdums in the enclosed space.
—close!
In the end her will was greater.
The closing mechanism gave way with a gunshot crack and the doors slammed shut. The warped steel panels would not close all the way, leaving a gap the thickness of her hand between them, but it was the best she could do.
Angel hung there by her wedged hands, panting for breath in the rarefied air and grimly holding on to consciousness. She tried to lock her exo, finding that it refused to move anyway. The inside of her angel eye flashed with warnings and damage reports, pulsing in time with the hammering of her heart.
She heard muffled cursing. Gloved fingers appeared in the gap, trying to pry the doors open again. Her exo had turned into a silver vise, making that impossible. It took her three tries to find the breath to whisper, “Comm active,” and she had to swallow a mixture of blood and dust before she could speak again.
“Hurry,” she gasped. Her throat tightened, and she felt a gathering wetness in her eye; tears stained with blood. “I can’t… do any more.”
As she was licking her bloody lips to speak again, she heard one voice rise above the angry gabble at the other side of the doors. “Go get another charge,” it bellowed. “We’ll blow the fuckin’ door to hell and the bitch with it!”
She rested her head on her arms, closed her eye.
So that would be how it ended. The silent darkness was piled up so high inside her that she would probably never know when it happened. Consciousness had turned to smoke in her hands. It kept trying to slip through her fingers and fade away.
Still she held on. This was her last chance to make things right.
There were so many things she had wanted to tell him. That she had never been truly alive until he had touched her and given a real life to her. That she was sorry for the things she had said, for driving him away. So many things…
Her head lolled to one side, and she found herself fighting a tidal wave of red-edged black. Had she blanked out? She couldn’t be sure. She only knew that the next wave would take her all the way under, and there was no way to stop or evade it.
“Come back,” she croaked breathlessly. “Pl—please give me… another chance…”
She wanted to explain what she meant, and hear if he answered, but the silent darkness took her before she had a chance to do either. It crashed over her.
It took her down.
Valdemar’s compad lay on the bedside table, still on standby. Marchey had glanced at it while putting it aside, seeing that it was linked to the bedside comm, and willing to bet that his patient had been talking to the supposed mission of mercy on Ananke when he’d come in.
—so you could do what needed to be done to stop it, Jon had said. Soon now he would see if that was true.
Marchey stared down at Valdemar’s pale, frightened face, trying to keep a handle on his emotions. The light working trance gave him some distance from them, but not much. Rage, hatred, and loathing hammered at his insides, demons shrieking to be let out.
“The Helping Hands Foundation,” he growled softly.
Valdemar blinked in confusion, his eyes flicking to one side to glance guiltily at the compad before coming back to jitter nervously between Marchey’s face and the invisible hands poised just over his chest.