“I know.”
“But now she’s gone, I don’t feel much like hanging around.”
Richard looked up at Salah. In the face of so much grief, he simply did not know what to say.
Salah crouched down. “You should not give up,” he told his old friend. “I, too, had a child once, remember. And he was taken from me.”
Again, that long, rumbling breath. “Have you had one happy day since then, Salah?”
Salah’s silence was answer enough.
Martyr started to cough. Richard held him until the fit was over. “That’ll just about finish me, I think,” whispered the American like a ghost.
“Wait for Robin,” pleaded Richard. “It’ll break her heart if you don’t say good-bye.”
“I’ll try to hang on for Robin,” said Martyr. “But she’d better not take long.”
But Robin never came. She was tending the other wounded, Fatima among them, with Asha on Prometheus. Instead, an explosion of gasping and splashing suddenly came upward through the night.
And a voice, loud and triumphant: “What a hull, Chris, what a hull. Damn near impossible to break. Enough air still trapped in it to last for a perishing week. We designed it and we built her. Me and old Sam Hood.”