What I hadn’t expected was a projectile weapon, held in Van Lyle’s hand and pointed right at my belly-button. I rammed my left fist down on the lock control, as the thought flashed through my head that there should have been a more thorough luggage inspection when we boarded the Hoatzin.
I moved as fast as I could, but they had been ready and waiting. I was too slow. Lyle pressed the trigger.
As he did so two things happened. Parmikan smacked at Lyle’s hand and screamed, “Don’t kill her! We need her to get us back.” That saved me, spoiling Lyle’s aim. In the same moment the outer lock door, its final safety trigger broken by the force of my fist, blew outward in a rush of air.
I flew out with it, knowing that my last-ditch plan to fight back had failed. I was hit. And my secret weapon was useless, because Lyle and Parmikan were already wearing suits.
I felt the fainting weakness that comes with a sudden drop of blood pressure. Then my suit resealed, and a few seconds later McAndrew was grabbing at me to halt my spin. He had followed me as I emerged in that crystal cloud of cooling air.
I felt pain for the first time, and looked down. Half the calf of my left leg was missing. The automatic tourniquet had cut in and tightened below the knee. The flow of blood from the wound had already stopped. I would live — if we somehow survived the next few minutes.
Which didn’t seem likely. Lyle and Parmikan had emerged from the lock, and Lyle still had his gun. He raised it. And shot me again.
Or he would have done, had he been the least bit familiar with freefall kinematics and momentum conservation. Instead the recoil of his gun sent him rolling into a backward somersault, while the bolt itself flew who knows where.
Before Lyle could sort himself out and fire again, McAndrew was dragging me away, using his suit propulsion system at maximum setting to carry both of us along. One nice thing about Mac, he didn’t need much data to form a conclusion.
“Don’t try a long shot.” That was Parmikan to Lyle, over the suit radio. “She’s injured. Get in close. Then we finish him and grab her. But don’t kill her — she’s taking us home.”
“I won’t kill her.” That was Lyle, the white plaster on his nose vivid through the suit’s visor. “Not ’til I’m done with the bitch. She’ll wish she was dead before that.”
They were coming after us, knowing that we had no place to hide. It was our misfortune to find ourselves, weaponless and pursued, in the emptiest quarter of known space. Nowhere to run to, and soon we would be out of air.
McAndrew was retreating anyway, dragging me along with him, but not in a simple, straight-line run. We were zigzagging up and across and sideways, rolling all over the sky; which made good sense if you were trying to evade being shot, and no sense at all when your enemy had just declared that he would not shoot until he got close.
Then we stopped dead. Mac glanced all around him, sighting for Parmikan and Lyle, the two mass detectors just where we had left them, and the shape of the Hoatzin, further off. He lifted us a few meters upward, and halted again.
“Here we are, then,” he muttered. “And here we stay.”
Lyle and Parmikan hadn’t moved while Mac and I had been corkscrewing our way around in space. Now they started towards us. Soon I could see their faces, white in the reflected glow of the visors’ built-in instruments.
Still McAndrew didn’t move. The feeling of distance and unreality that had swamped me the moment I was shot started to fade. At last I was scared. But when I started my propulsion system, ready to take off again away from the advancing men, Mac held out his hand to stop me.
“No, Jeanie. Hold by, and don’t move.”
They were closing on us. Parmikan was two or three meters in the lead. Lyle still held the gun, but he had learned his lesson. He would not fire again until he was at point-blank range, too close to be thrown off in his aim by the effects of free-fall rotation.
“Mac!” We couldn’t stand still and be slaughtered like sheep. I swung to argue with him, and saw the expression on his face. He was agonized and biting his lower lip. “Mac, come on. We can’t just give in.”
But he was shaking his head at me. “I’m sorry, Jeanie,” he said. “This isn’t me. I can’t go through with it. No matter what happens next, I have to give them a chance.” And he lifted his arm towards Lyle and Parmikan. “Don’t come any closer. Stay right there. You are in terrible danger.”
That stopped them — for a second or two. They stared all around, and saw nothing. Lyle snorted through his broken nose, while Parmikan laughed aloud for the first time since I had met him.
“Don’t try that on us, McAndrew,” he said. “We weren’t born yesterday. If you stand still, I promise you’ll get yours clean and quick.”
He was moving forward again. My suit’s vision enhancement showed the grin on his shapeless mouth. He looked as happy as I had ever seen him. And then the clean white of his suit was broken by a thin black line that ran across Stefan Parmikan from hip to hip, about two inches below his navel.
He stared down at himself as the line widened. He started to scream, and tried to back up.
It was too late. His motion carried him forward. As it did so he shrank, shortening and squeezing in towards his hips. The thin black line became a rolling tunnel of red and purple across his whole body. Twisted internal organs were moving into it from above and below. Then Parmikan had passed all the way through.
The scream ended. A pair of legs, still held together at the top, came floating on towards us. Separate from it moved a torso, cleanly severed. Blood gouted out and froze as a fine icy spray.
Lyle, a few meters behind, had enough time to stop. He paused, still holding the gun.
“Hand that over.” I summoned what little energy I had and spoke over the suit radio before McAndrew had time to react. And then, when Lyle hesitated, I said, “Hand it over right now. Or get just the same as he did.”
He hardly seemed to be listening. His eyes were following the horror of Parmikan’s severed body. But he nodded and released the gun, which floated gently away from him.
It’s a measure of how far gone I was that I actually started out towards it, until McAndrew grabbed me.
“You stay where you are, too,” he said. “And Lyle, don’t move a millimeter until we come around and get you. There’s other gravitational line singularities through this whole volume.”
We began to move again, McAndrew hauling me along like ballast in a strange helical path that wound its way towards Van Lyle. Finally McAndrew was able to reach out and snag the gun.
“All right.” He waved it at Lyle, then towards the Hoatzin. “We’ve got a clear run from here to the ship. You start that way. And remember that I understand freefall ballistics a lot better than you do. I won’t miss.”
The three of us drifted slowly back to the lock, but McAndrew would not let Van Lyle enter. He handed me the gun. “You first, Jeanie. Can you fix the lock so it works?”
“I think so.” I moved inside. “I just have to reset the safety interlocks.”
I made it sound trivial, and it should have been. But I kept half blacking-out before I was done and able at last to refill the interior of the Hoatzin with air.
It seemed forever before the lock cycled again. I wondered and stayed tense. I had the gun. Suppose Lyle had taken advantage of that and overpowered McAndrew?
I dropped those worries when Lyle emerged from the inner lock. His manner and bearing were of a crushed man with no fight left in him. I made him take his suit off, but I kept my own on until McAndrew finally came through the lock.
He didn’t give Lyle a look. He came straight across to me and examined my injured leg.