It was enough to sink him back to his knees. Though it wasn’t prayer that kept the preacher there but one gravity boot and abject fear. He was shivering like an injured animal, slipping between panic and his own approaching insanity, reaching for that refuge but never quite making it. LizAlec made damn sure of that. She didn’t take kindly to having been killed and she wanted Brother Michael to know exactly what was happening to him, as it happened.
Every bursting vein, every ruptured internal organ.
LizAlec walked over to the gold eagle-winged lectern and waved her hand across its surface to awaken the keypad. Keys materialized on the surface, or rather the black glass reading surface swirled clear to show keys resting beneath. Brother Michael might claim not to approve of unfettered technology but he’d still bought the best deck Microsoft could supply.
Fingers flicking over the keys, never quite touching, LizAlec recreated the inner grille to the airlock, then closed the recessed door, checking its seal. Not that she needed to, the glass was machined to a four-micron tolerance. Even unbolted, it was designed to seal itself under pressure. And the opening servo couldn’t kick in unless atmospheric pressure inside the lock stood at .52 and rising.
None of which was high on Brother Michael’s worry list. With the door shut, LizAlec pulled herself from his mind, leaving him naked with terror. Now he was on the other side of the glass door, beating at the grille with his fists, his screams of abuse mixed with pleas for his life.
LizAlec shut down her mind and when that didn’t work scrabbled at the keyboard until she found a way to kill the sound. Now he just looked like some character from a tri-D, one where the audio card had crashed.
“You really going to kill him?” It was the first thing Lars had said to her since he arrived with the goat. In fact, LizAlec had got round to wondering if he even recognized her. But of course he did. There weren’t that many fifteen-year-olds aboard The Arc with English, African and Uzbek DNA in them, especially not ones he’d tried to rape.
“No,” said LizAlec, “I’m going to blow him into space.” Like there was a difference...
Lars grunted and when she looked again he’d gone back to rubbing his chin in the fur of the goat’s neck. The sandrat didn’t even look up when she toggled the key to depress the chamber and open the airlock’s space-side door. Brother Michael exploded into the Big Black on a rush of air, his arms and legs flailing like those of a puppet. His heart flared in blind panic, and his mouth opened as its final scream was ripped out of his lungs by the vacuum.
“Welcome to hell,” LizAlec said softly and those were the last words Brother Michael ever heard. Twelve to thirteen seconds is what it usually takes for a vacuum victim to black out. Though small children often only manage five. And there’s a ninety-second window during which it’s theoretically possible to pull someone back into a pressurized environment and revive them, with a medium-to-good chance they’ll recover fully.
But there was no one to pull Brother Michael back — and there was no way LizAlec was going to let him die that quickly.
At plus thirteen seconds he was paralysed, but still conscious: the outward rush of water vapour was already freezing his nose and lips. Traumatic convulsions racked his body at plus-fifteen seconds and then paralysis set in again, seconds later. Inside the soft tissues of Brother Michael’s flesh and inside his veins water vapour began to form, distorting his flesh. LizAlec couldn’t have kept him alive beyond this, not even if she had wanted to. But she was going to keep him conscious until death. And that’s what she did.
A spider’s-silk overskin might have prevented embolism, but Brother Michael didn’t have one, so instead water vapour pooled inside him until his skin distended to bursting. He was panic-stricken, beyond thought. Already his heart rate was in decline. At plus-forty seconds his blood pressure plummeted until pressure in his veins matched that of his arteries. Brother Michael’s heart still tried desperately to beat, but blood could no longer flow.
LizAlec never felt Brother Michael rupture open, because that was the point she let go of his terrified, gibbering mind — and felt it scrabble gratefully out of existence.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Welcome to Insanity
What did LizAlec believe in? She believed in herself: at least, she did now. Believed, too, in the voice, low and hollow in her head. The voice that told LizAlec justice wasn’t always just, but it was dangerously satisfying.
Maybe even addictive.
“Get out of here,” LizAlec told Lars, but he just stared at her.
“Go,” she told the sandrat, her feet locked firmly to the steel floor of the cathedral. She could feel the electricity that worked the soles, sense the field emanating from the bottom of her shoes. Come to that, she could feel fields emanating from the lectern, from the altar lights, even from the black-glass pulpit.
The whole cathedral was a mess of shimmering EMFs that conflicted, overlapped, reacted with each other.
“Get out,” LizAlec insisted. “Seal the safety doors on your spar, tell the others but don’t tell the bodyguards, okay?”
The boy looked blank.
“If you don’t lock the doors,” said LizAlec, “the goat will get hurt...”
She should have realized that that was all it would take. Lars folded the bleating animal tightly in his arms and backed towards the Otis. He had no idea what LizAlec was planning to do, and he cared even less. She was a freak, all strange eyes and cropped hair. The girl’s edges were too sharp, the colours around her flashing bright like the skin of an epileptic chameleon. Every time he looked at LizAlec, her outline had changed.
Lars preferred girls like Sara who kept her aura down to a few simple hues. Lars himself kept his Kirlian aura down to one colour only. He was rather proud of that. “Be safe,” said the door and then Lars was gone, safe inside the pressurized Otis, on his way back to the goat pen. Tomorrow the mammals were going out to The Arc itself. Out to the ring where Sister Aaron was making a world for them full of fields, trees, small streams. Ants cleaned up the leaf litter and worms aerated the soil, all twelve feet of it. The Arc wasn’t Eden, old or new, whatever CySat reported, but it was better than Planetside.
Face it, anything was better than that. Time to go, thought LizAlec.
Not that there was any point staying. The next cargo ship wasn’t due for two months, according to the lectern. Paris could have fallen by then, Lady Clare might be dead, put up against a wall by the Black Hundreds. If that hadn’t happened already. And as for Fixx, God only knew the trouble he’d be in.
LizAlec sucked her teeth, ran one shaking hand through the stubble of her hair and wondered about getting another boyfriend, one who wasn’t so high-maintenance. It hurt her to think that Lady Clare might be right about anything, but she might be right about that.
“Escape pod,” LizAlec demanded.
“Situation normal,” announced the cathedral’s bioAI, speaking through a tiny pair of bioVox speakers inset into the eagle’s wings of the lectern. The voice had that irritating coded-by-number kindergarten tone LizAlec remembered from AIs at her first school.
“There is an escape pod?” LizAlec asked crossly and walked back to the lectern to skim frames of safety data, tilting the eagle’s wings herself rather than waiting for the lectern to work out the best angle. Of course there was a pod: it was the bloody pulpit. LizAlec stared at the glass monstrosity rising like a block of black obsidian. She should have guessed from its size, not to mention the EMF field emanating from it.