He let Valdemar feel a slight weight and pressure, watched fresh sweat blossom on his ashen forehead and upper lip.
“Wh—what about it?” he panted.
“At this very moment there is a so-called relief mission trying to steal Ananke from its rightful owners.”
“They’re not stealing,” Valdemar protested.
“What would you call it, then?”
“They’re uh, p-providing a service.”
“For a price.”
“Well, yeah, what’s—”
Marchey cut him off. “With no chance to refuse this service. I’m hearing what is going on even as we speak.” His mouth tightened. “Do you know what it makes me want to do?”
Valdemar shook his head meekly. Marchey’s face filled his field of vision. It was the face of a man so filled with fury and contempt that he looked capable of anything. It came to him that he might just be staring his own death in the face.
Marchey’s eyes narrowed. “It makes me want to give you the same deal. A service for a price.” He sank his immaterial hands into Valdemar’s body.
“Maybe a little heart surgery.” A feather-light touch on a certain bundle of nerves set off a brief flare of pain deep in the man’s chest. Valdemar let out a strangled squeak, eyes bulging and his face going the color of curdled milk.
“A heartless bastard like you could probably use a little work on the old ticker.” Marchey did it again, hard enough to make Valdemar gag and his whole body convulse.
This was wrong, and Marchey knew it. Worse yet, it felt so good. The urge to make Valdemar squirm and beg wanted to pour out his hands like a boiling poison bottled up past containment.
You’re bluffing, he reminded himself desperately. You can’t can’t can’t do him any real harm!
“Please!” Valdemar wailed, his voice shrill with terror. “You can’t hurt me like this! You’re a d-d-doctor!”
Marchey bent lower, putting his face inches from Valdemar’s. “Yes I am. I talked to Dr. Moro. He told me how you said the people he served didn’t deserve a doctor like him.” A mirthless smile screwed itself onto his face. “Maybe I’m the sort of doctor you deserve.”
Valdemar’s mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he’d completed his own humiliation by losing control of his bowels as well as his bladder. He cowered there in stinking misery, utterly powerless to stop Marchey from doing whatever he wanted with him.
Marchey stared down at him in disgust, knowing it was time to finish this atrocity up and get the hell out of there before he lost it.
Suddenly a harsh crackle of static lanced into his ear from the remote, loud enough to make him jerk his head to one side. A moment afterward he heard an agonized whisper.
[Hurry… I can’t do any more.]
His heart stopped mid-beat. Angel!
[They blew a hole in the friggin’ wall!] Jon broke in, his normal unflappable calm reduced to wreckage. [Angel patched it, it was unbelievable what she did, and now she’s blockin’ the airlock doors! I’m tryin’ to get help to her and more air into the bay—]
Then distant and muffled, made metallic by the remote’s attempt to compensate, [Go get another charge! We’ll blow the fuckin’ door to hell and the bitch with it!] The slow rasping wheeze of Angel’s breathing sawed his heart into quivering pieces. The doctor in him heard lung damage.
The man who had been cheated and frustrated and used tightened an invisible hand inside the user he had in his grasp. Valdemar made a strangled sound and went rigid, heels drumming against the mattress.
Marchey withdrew his other hand, reached for the pad. It floated through the air, coming to hang before Valdemar’s pale and uncomprehending face.
“Call them off!” he hissed. “Now!”
Valdemar stared past the pad and up at his tormentor in bewildered terror. “I don’t—”
“Call off your mercys,” he roared, fighting the urge to grind the pad into the man’s face. “Or I swear to God I’ll take you apart one fucking piece at a time. From the inside.” It was all he could do to keep from demonstrating.
“L-line reopen, n-no picture,” Valdemar stammered.
The pad chimed, and after a moment’s silence a woman’s voice issued from it. “Sturges here, Mr. Valdemar.”
“C-call back the troops! L-leave Ananke at once!”
“Are you all right, sir?” Sturges asked with obvious suspicion. “You sound funny.”
Valdemar’s eyes rolled up toward Marchey, and he saw the price of failure carved into his stony face.
Angel was still breathing. If that sound stopped—
“Never mind that,” Valdemar puffed, trying to sound commanding but failing miserably. “Just do as I say!”
“But sir, we’ve almost—”
“Do as I tell you to you stupid slot!” Valdemar shrieked. “Or I’ll have the fucking lot of you brain-burned and sold for testmeat on Armageddon!”
“Yes, sir,” Sturges answered stiffly. “I’m recalling the team now.” There were several endless seconds of anxious silence. Both Marchey and Valdemar held their breaths.
Sturges came back on-line. “They’re coming back to the ship. Do you want us to return to Botha, sir?”
Valdemar looked to Marchey for instruction. He nodded and mouthed the word hurry. “Yes! And hurry!”
Marchey simply closed his spectral hand inside the pad, invisible fingers turning the circuits to useless junk. He let it fall. It bounced off Valdemar’s chest and clattered to the floor.
The pitch of Angel’s breathing suddenly changed. She froze, fear rising thick and acrid as vomit up against his teeth.
[Come back,] she whispered inside his head. A pause, panting for breath. [Pl—please give me… another chance…]
“Angel! I’m here!” he shouted, straining to hear an answer, trying to reach her across the gulf of time and distance and misunderstanding that lay between them. But there was no response, only a hopeless silence that seemed far vaster and emptier than the airless void that separated him from her.
[Hang on, Doc, we’re getting back into the bay now,] Jon bawled in his ear, his voice like a lifeline to where his heart had gone. [The bad guys are liftin’ off! Mardi and Elias are runnin’ over to Angel. We got two vac-crews, one to sealfoam the patch, the other to seal up the airlock door…]
Marchey stood there, blind to the world, seeing it in his mind, seeing Angel’s face, hoping and praying and promising—
[She’s ALIVE!] Jon crowed. [She’s out cold and hurt pretty bad, and I don’t know how the hell we’re gonna cut her loose, but they’ve got a breather mask on her, and she’s alive!]
Marchey’s legs threatened to go out from under him as relief swept through him. A sound that was half laugh and half sob escaped him. “I’m coming back,” he told Jon. “Take good care of her until I get there!”
[Count on it! And thanks!]
Marchey closed his eyes for a moment, setting tears running down his cheeks. When he opened them again, his gaze turned back toward his patient. Valdemar paled and began to sob when Marchey’s attention fell back on him like a lead weight.
“Someone who means a lot to me almost died because of you,” he said quietly. The anger was still there inside him. The loathing. He had right here in his hands one of the ones who had turned his life into a living nightmare, and seen to it he had no way out. Who had nearly destroyed the things he loved, just when he had finally begun to understand that he did love them. Who had corrupted all he held holy for power and profit.