“Look,” Chaim said shortly, and she heard an edge of nervous fear in his truculence, “I told you I'm not taking on more partners. Just because you followed us to this claim doesn't mean we're going to cut you in on it.”
“I didn't figure you would.” He brought the thing up in front of him; Mythili recognized it at last as a portable laser cutting torch. Her lungs were suddenly tight and aching.
“Fitch—” Chaim raised his hands, placating, surrendering.
“Don't bother with it, Dartagnan. I saw your testimony against Siamang; I know you'd promise me anything now, and try to turn me in later. I'm not giving you the chance to do that to me.”
“What does that mean?” Chaim said, knowing what it meant.
“It means he's going to kill us, and pirate our claim.” Mythili moved forward a little, painfully aware of the uncertain footing and the pit behind them. “Fitch, listen, listen to what I just said. You don't seem like that kind of man, not a murderer, not a thief. We never did anything to you. You're not that greedy. And you said Chaim's father was your friend—” she was amazed at the quiet reason in her own voice, which was somehow functioning without the control of a conscious mind that had gone white with the fear of death.
Fitch laughed once; there was something in the sound as desperate as their own terror, and as unable to believe that he was actually doing this to them. But he shook his head at her, and the quiet torch in his hands did not waver. “We weren't close. Besides, I think he'd understand. He'd understand that a man who's spent his life in space gets old before his time. And when you're getting too old and your ship is, too; when in all your life you've never made a find that's done more than just keep you alive to go on searching; when you know you're born unlucky, you'll die old and poor and alone … when you know all that, and you see two healthy young kids get handed a ship and go out to make a rich strike—”
“—you go a little crazy,” Chaim finished softly. “No!” Fitch said. “You finally get sane. You realize the truth, that you're the one you have to look out for. I lived inside the rules all my life, and what did it get me? Nothing! Now I make my own rules. Nothing else matters—you don't. Don't waste my time with talk,” as Mythili tried to speak, “just start backing up.” He gestured with the laser.
She glanced over her shoulder. They were less than two meters from the edge of the gaping reactor hole, its lips bearded with overhanging rubble. They would fall into the pit, not a fatal fall, but the rubble coming down on top of them would bury them forever. Her eyes leaped from a piece of twisted metal to a chunk of concrete, searching for a weapon—all the while knowing that there was nothing she could do quickly enough to save herself or Chaim from Fitch's torch.
Chaim moved abruptly beside her, not moving back but toward Fitch, his hands still outstretched. She wondered with sudden disgust whether he was about to beg for his life. But before she could even finish the thought he stumbled, sank to his knees in the broken masonry.
Fitch swore, and the nose of his laser torch dropped slightly, following Chaim down. “Get up.” His attention flickered between them.
Chaim thrashed awkwardly, starting a slow cloud of debris. Mythili wondered at his inability to get his equilibrium back, wondered if he was that frightened. But then in the space of a heartbeat he was up and moving—on a collision course with the weapon in Fitch's grasp. “Mythili, get out!” The shout spilled over into movement, impact, a chaos of input, a crack of lightning. She threw herself backwards as the laser flew off-track, firing, slashing through the space where she had been and dazzling her eyes to tears. She heard more grunts and cries; blinked furiously, trying to force sight back into the dark-bright mottled space inside her head as she groped in the debris for a metal bar. She pulled one free at last, pushing herself upward. The periphery of her wounded vision showed her the two men struggling to keep from being overbalanced in the soft sea of rubble. The intermittent, bloody streak of the laser's beam lashed the darkness. Fitch's knee caught Chaim in the stomach, thrusting him backwards, tearing his hands loose from the torch.
As Fitch recoiled from his own thrust, rising in the air, he brought the torch's beam back into line. Mythili hurled the bar, her body's reaction to the movement distorting her aim. But still the bar struck the torch, knocking it out of Fitch's hands, and sent it spiraling lazily into the air. The red beam roved, pointing like the finger of God, and she realized that the dead-man switch had jammed. “Look out, look out—!” She threw her hands up, pressing her helmet glass … watched helplessly as Fitch tried to maneuver himself out of its path, and failed. Still in mid-fall, with nothing to give his frantically twisting body support for a counter-motion, he cried out as he saw his own weapon turn against him.
The stream of intensified light stroked down across him in an idle caress, laying open his suit, searing the cloth and flesh beneath it; releasing the captive oxygen, the artificial ecosystem that kept him separate from the vacuum outside. She heard his scream start, lost it in the rush of escaping air that saved her from hearing its end.
Chaim pushed off as the falling finger of light reached out for him in turn, rebounded sideways before it found him—kept on tumbling, as the debris shifted under him, spilling him toward the pit.
“Chaim!” She screamed this time, screamed his name as she saw him slide toward the edge. He clambered over the shifting face of the rubble, a grotesque slow-motion pantomime of a man trying to walk on water. A chunk of cement struck him in the chest, canceling his frantic upward momentum, throwing him back.
She bounded forward as she saw him fall, doubled her own momentum as she landed at the shifting lip of the pit and plunged recklessly out and down. She matched Chaim's free fall, catching frantically at his leg as she dropped past him. Her body wrenched, and together they went on falling through the crest of the avalanching metal and concrete, to a collision with the bottom of the pit. Her feet struck cement with an impact that ground her teeth, and bones grated on cartilege.
“Move! Move—” She didn't need Chaim's garbled shout of warning to go on collapsing over her feet, to push herself off again across the floor of the pit in a blind leap. He followed her through it, and together they came up against the far wall in another jarring impact, as behind them the falling rubble made inexorable silent thunder. She settled at the wall's foot, sank down in pain and exhaustion, not letting herself turn back to watch.
“Thank you,” Chaim said thickly, crouching strengthless beside her. “Thank God you didn't run.” He laughed, with shaken irony.
She looked up at him, and suddenly her own body was trembling uncontrollably. “You fool! You damned fool! What did you do that for? You threw yourself right at him, it's a miracle he didn't fry you! What the hell were you trying to prove?”
More laughter seeped into her helmet, thin and gray; she listened in disbelief. “I can't do anything that suits you.” He pushed himself up, rested a hand on her shoulder. “I guess I was trying to prove that—that what happened on Planet Two would never happen again.”
She drew him toward her, felt their bodies touch, suit to suit. Their faces met, glass to glass, in silence.
They buried Fitch in the abandoned city below the factory: the only inhabitant in a City of the Dead. She listened with uncertain emotion as Chaim spoke a benediction, calling Fitch a symbol of all Heaven's humanity and the thing that had killed him a symbol of how it had destroyed itself—not through technology, but through misguided greed.
And then with the ship's salvaging equipment, they cut loose the waldoes of the ruined factory and lifted them away. Clutching the prize in spidery arms, the Mother began a homeward course, tracking back through lifeless wastes toward the Demarchy's still-beating heart. Chaim did not try to force the closeness between them, although she felt his longing, and she was grateful. She felt no need either to pull away or to draw close before she was ready, and yet her gratitude at his understanding drew her closer in spite of herself. And while the journey outward had seemed endless in its solitude, their shared return slipped by her like a soft afternoon, as the past fell further and further behind.