She wasn’t there. The living-room was empty. I had a sudden wild hope that she had done what she wasn’t supposed to do—gone roaming.
Joe Munroe didn’t waste time. He slammed the door shut, took one quick look at the room’s simple layout, and swung me around to face him. “All right. Where’s the stuff?”
“There isn’t any.” My voice cracked in mid-phrase when I saw his glaring eyes. But before that I must have glanced over to the door of the bedroom, because he grunted and gave me a backhand swat across the side of the head. It was hard enough to send me face-first into the metal frame of a swivel chair.
“There better had be. Or you’ll breathe vacuum.” He went to the inner door and yanked it open.
I could hardly bear to watch. Even if Mel crouched down by the bunks there was no way to hide from a searcher for more than a few seconds.
She didn’t even try. Whatever Joe Munroe was expecting, it wasn’t what he got. Mel must have realized there was big trouble on the way when she heard his voice. She came diving out of the door as it opened, and her head rammed Munroe square in the belly. He gave a whoosh and doubled over. Mel followed it up with both fists swung hard into his face.
She was doing a hell of a lot better than I had, but it wasn’t enough. Munroe was three times her mass, as tough as all the spacers seemed to be, and used to both free-fall and rough-housing.
As her fists came away from his face he grabbed her wrists, crushing both of them in his left hand. She gasped in pain, raised her legs, and bent her back. Then she used the extra leverage of his grip to straighten and kick him in the belly. He didn’t make a sound—maybe he had no air left in him—but he let go of her wrists. As she tried to pull away his right hand snapped forward to fix on her shoulder, turning her so she could not kick again.
Mel twisted. Cloth ripped. She broke free, leaving part of her shirt in Joe Munroe’s paw. The force of her movement carried her back against the wall.
There was a long, still moment. Mel was panting. Munroe was doubled over in the middle of the room, hands across his belly. I crouched useless by the door, just as I had been since they began to fight. After a moment Munroe grunted, straightened, and glared across at Mel.
He seemed ready to come at her again when his face changed. I could see why. With a shirt on and her cropped hair, Mel might pass for a boy. But with arms, shoulder, and one budding breast laid bare, deception was impossible.
“Well, now,” Joe Munroe said in a stupefied voice. He was staring at Mel’s pink nipple, oblivious to everything else. “Well, now. Here’s a surprise. Black Paddy was right after all.”
He was easing forward toward Mel, wary of any sign of attack from her. Mel didn’t try to fight. I couldn’t see his expression, but she crouched with her back to the wall and crossed her arms over her body. Munroe reached out, snagged the top of her pants with two thick fingers, and ripped them down. He reached out to grab Mel.
And I, finally, was able to move. I reached into my pocket and dragged out Walter Hamilton’s gun. My fingers trembled as I brought my other hand across and thumbed away the safety guard.
I could not shoot—not with Joe Munroe and Mel right in line with each other. I pushed myself off to one side and braced against the door. She was out of the line of fire and I had a clear view of his left side and chest.
And then, I guess—though I don’t remember doing it—I fired.
I had the gun on single clip. A stream of eight pellets released one after another but so closely spaced that they sounded like one shot, hit Munroe. They expanded on impact and left coin-sized round holes in his shoulder, arm, and back.
The momentum pushed him back. He turned around and stared at me, a strange expression of surprise in his eyes. I thought for a moment that he was going to come at me, because he didn’t crumple or drop. Then I realized that he wouldn’t, not in free-fall. And a moment later I knew that Joe Munroe was dead or dying. He was drifting gaping-mouthed off the floor while drops of his blood floated around the cabin, marking whatever they touched.
That was when I ruined the free-fall record of which I had been so proud. With Mel looking on wide-eyed and panting, and Joe Munroe’s body no more than a few feet away, I curled up in midair. I closed my eyes. And I vomited every scrap of food that lay within my uneasy stomach.
Chapter 24
“Call me in an emergency,” Doctor Eileen had said.
This was an emergency if anything ever could be. I sent a Priority Service message to the cleaning system and hit the line to Level One. She was, thank Heaven, in her quarters.
“It’s me,” I blurted out when she answered. “I’ve killed Joseph Munroe.” Compared with that, nothing else was important.
“Jay?” Eileen Xavier’s voice was sharp. “No good going into hysterics. Calm down.”
“I can’t. Can you come?”
“I’m on my way. Right now.”
The line went dead. I wondered if Danny Shaker, busy with the drive unit at the other end of the ship, was monitoring calls from me to Doctor Eileen. It didn’t much matter, because there was no way to keep from him what had happened. I might claim self-defense, but Joe Munroe hadn’t been attacking me when I shot him. And I couldn’t say I had been defending Mel, because if I did the crew would learn that I had been hiding her.
Considering her narrow escape, the latest arrival on the Cuchulain was far calmer than me. Mel had put her torn clothing back into place as best she could, and now she was studying the little cleaning machines as they flew about the cabin, pursuing and absorbing horrible globs of blood and vomit.
“How do they know?” she said. “I mean, how do they know to clean up the mess, but they don’t clean up him?” She pointed to Joe Munroe’s body.
I stared at her in disbelief. Mel must have understood what Joe Munroe planned to do to her, and my performance before I shot him can’t have given her much confidence that I’d have been any help at all. But she showed no signs of fear—and not even of disgust.
“Same way they don’t try to clean us up,” I said. It was good to think about something abstract. “Template matching. Shape recognition programs. Thermal signatures. They have programs for those.”
“But how about when the body cools off? How long before they’d know he was really just dead meat?”
I was rescued from Mel’s morbid line of thought by the arrival of Doctor Eileen. She glanced at me, gave Mel one startled stare, and hurried over to Joseph Munroe. Her examination of him didn’t take more than five seconds.
She swore, and said, “Long gone,” and then to me, “You did this?”
I nodded.
“Well, you’d better have an explanation, or you’ll face murder charges. Most of these shots are in his back.”
I gestured to Mel. “He was going to—to—” My voice cracked. “He was going to rape her.”
Eileen Xavier turned her attention to Mel. “That’s the next item on the agenda. Where the devil did you spring from, girl?”
Mel had her clothes back to normal, but there was no scrap of doubt in Doctor Eileen’s voice. The odd thing was, I couldn’t see how I had ever mistaken Mel for a boy. It wasn’t just her growing hair. She was as clearly a girl as Duncan West or Pat O’Rourke were men.
Mel said nothing, and she looked at me for guidance. She had heard a lot about Eileen Xavier, in long evening talks about the very different lives that the two of us had led on Erin and on Paddy’s Fortune. But it’s not the same, hearing about someone and meeting them in person.