Six seconds.
Wethers succeeded in clipping Paakth-Doy’s temple on his backswing, knocking her back against Jason and Jelaine. He spun on his heels and launched himself at the spiral staircase only ten paces away.
Time accelerated as I put everything I had into speed.
Wethers was not slowed down at the spiral staircase, as I’d hoped; instead he dropped the Khaajiir’s staff down the center of the stairwell and took the stairs four at a time, descending all the way to the galley level in six easy leaps. I reached the top of the stairs just in time to look down and catch a glimpse of him retrieving the staff from where it landed.
He must have wanted it as more than just a cudgel. Now that he knew it contained the Khaajiir’s files, he would see it as the data he’d need to undo everything Jason and Jelaine had done.
I tried to make my own descent as fast and as graceful as his and made it past the lower-suite deck without incident but then, handicapped by the dizziness left over from the blow I’d taken, hit one of the wedge-shaped descenders below that at the wrong angle. I tripped over my own stupid feet and took the rest of the distance at an ungainly head-over-heels tumble that I managed to deflect only when I grabbed for and lost the handrail. I don’t know how I avoided breaking my neck, but I landed with my back on the galley deck and my legs flat against the ascending stairs, the least desirable position for anybody looking up to see Vernon Wethers about to drive a big stick into her neck.
Fuck that. I arched my back, brought my legs up and forward with all the strength in me, and struck some part of the bastard hard enough to knock him back. He hit a bulkhead with a grunted curse. I rolled again, stumbled, and managed to get up facing him just as he backed into the passageway leading to the galley and crew quarters.
The advantage was all his here. The passageway was narrow and there was no way to maneuver around him. He was able to land hits on my chest and my neck as I tried to seize the staff from his hands.
In a few seconds I heard pounding feet behind me, and Paakth-Doy crying, “We’re here, Counselor!”
I found myself forced to back up a step to dodge a jab at my face. “What the hell took you so long?”
“We could only go single file,” Paakth-Doy explained, “and I wasn’t willing to hurl myself down the way you did. I took them only two at a time like a normal person.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered, as another jab struck home.
I heard more pounding feet and the shared voices of Jason and Jelaine. “Vernon! Stop this at once! This is an Inner Family order!”
Wethers didn’t drop the staff, but he did weep, his expression contorting in ways that suggested violent inner forces tearing him apart. “I can’t! Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the Inner Family’s good!”
Still behind me, Jason said, “Vernon. You’ve endangered three members of the family. You’ve killed one personal guest and attacked an honored one. You’ve sabotaged our infrastructure and subverted our military. You’ve interfered with policy decisions well above even your pay grade. The Inner Family is very angry with you. The Inner Family orders you to put that thing down and tell us everything we need to do to restore contact with the outside world.”
Another jab from Wethers. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t. Not if it means letting you destroy everything your great family has ever stood for. Not when it’s my duty to stop you.”
Jelaine, now: “Our family stands for a lot of things, not all of them good. Just look what we’ve done to you, or Colette, or any of those others. You might have had a life once. We took that away.”
Wethers backed up another step. “I have a life. Protecting the corporation.”
“You’re not protecting anything,” Jason said. “Don’t you see, the company can’t go on forever if its only business is poisoning the well it drinks from? Maybe not in your lifetime, or even mine, but someday the human race is going to realize it has cancer and do whatever it needs to do to save itself. We need to be more than the tumor that has to be removed. We need to change, whatever it costs.”
Did Wethers seem to be weakening? “Not the way you’ve done it.”
Now Jelaine, again: “Do you think it’s going to get easier, Vernon? If you think we’ve had to make some moral compromises now, you won’t believe how much this surgery is likely to cost a century or two in the future. By then it may really require the destruction of the Family to save the rest of humanity. Do you really want that on your shoulders? Or do you want to save the Bettelhines while there are still Bettelhines left to save?”
More running footsteps behind me. Philip and Dejah shouting. Wethers glanced over my shoulder, a critical loss of focus that gave me the chance to seize the end of the staff closest to me and drive his end into his chest. Do to him what he’d been doing to me. He tried to wrestle me for control, but I was able to add my weight to his thrust and drive the staff against a wall.
Paakth-Doy seized our end and wrested it from his hands.
Wethers ran.
The skinny little bastard knew how to accelerate from a dead stop. By the time any of us were able to react, he was already five paces ahead and diving into the next compartment.
He slammed the blowout switch on the other side of the hatchway before I was halfway to him. An ear-piercing shriek sliced the air, providing the standard one-second warning of airtight compartments about to shut. A gleaming metal door imprinted with the goddamned useless Bettelhine Family crest emerged from its housing in the wall and began to slide sideways across its track, cutting us off from the figure even now increasing the distance between us.
One second too late and that door would cut me in half, but I didn’t have time to think about it and there were voices behind me screaming go-go-go and then all of a sudden changing that scream to no-no-no when it looked like I wasn’t going to make it. I had to slip through the door sideways, managing to pull my right foot through just before the advancing door would have amputated it. My available view of the compartment behind me was just a sliver by then, and I had less than a heartbeat left to see who I’d left there, but I caught glimpses of Jason, Jelaine, Paakth-Doy, and—a new arrival—Dejah, all arriving at this barrier too late to follow me.
I turned my back on them and ran, past the crew quarters, past two more airtight doors Wethers was either too confident or too much in a hurry to activate, all the way to the spiral staircase descending to the cargo bay. I reached it just in time to see the top of his head disappearing below deck level. I didn’t bother to take the stairs but instead vaulted over the railing at a trajectory that had me landing feet-first on his shoulders. This move sounds a hell of a lot more impressive than it was. Wethers grunted, slammed against the curved rail, and somehow avoided falling. I slid against the central pillar and then tumbled against his legs, sweeping them out from under him and dropping us both onto our sides in a kicking screaming flailing tangle of limbs. I kicked off a higher step and drove my knee into his crotch. He turned his hands into claws and went for my eyes. I found one of his fingers and bit down hard, drawing blood and a scream, prepared to keep grinding until I severed the digit at the bone.
But the major problem with clamping down on somebody’s finger in a free-for-all like this is that while you have their finger, they have your head.
He put all his strength into driving the back of my head into the steps. I gasped, releasing him. He shifted his bloody hands and went for my eyes with his thumbs. I seized his wrists and drove my aching head forward, crushing his nose with my forehead. He recoiled, overbalanced, and tumbled to the base of the stairs.
It would have been so easy to just give up and let unconsciousness take me then.