This is not the kind of man he should have been.
These are not the kind of things he would have done.
This is what they made him.
What they left him.
When his foot came at me again I was able to reach out with both hands and grab it, heel and toe. The impact hurt my hands as much as I care for any part of me to be hurt, but threw him off balance and left him teetering with a look that was like a gene splice between dismay and amazement.
I twisted his foot.
He hit the ground hard. I grabbed for him, but he speed-crawled out of reach.
This time the race between which one of us got up first was a slow and agonizing one. I could not quite manage to stand up straight. He did, but could barely breathe, choking from the blood bubbling at the ruins of his nose. We stared at each other from two meters apart, wary, gasping, knowing that another round was inevitable but not yet in any shape to start.
There was an odd species of amazement in his eyes. “I’ve…been stupid.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t see what was in front of me. Didn’t see what I should have known.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I didn’t have the breath to waste on it. “What are you going to do?”
He gasped another four or five or six times before spitting blood and then, oddly enough, smiling through bloody teeth. “I don’t…need to do anything, Counselor. It would have been nice to live through this and get out of here with some evidence to show the uncompromised members of the Inner Family at an inquest, but I always knew that death was the most likely outcome. As it happens… I’ve established influence over key people in both command and intelligence, and they’re all under orders not to interfere with our situation unless they receive a shutdown signal from me. If they don’t get that within less time than you want to know, they’ll assume the situation an impasse and blow up the carriage, assuring the Inner Family th-that it was the only way to stop terrorists trying to smuggle a dangerous bioweapon into the ecosphere.” It was getting more and more difficult for him to speak as he discussed defying or planning the death of Bettelhines. “Everybody on Xana will be sad that three B-B-Bettelhines and their guests died, b-but the Inner Family and the c-c-corporation are both strong enough to survive it. It will have to be. The only other choice is letting J-J-Jason and J-Jelaine keep on doing what they’ve been doing, and I can’t allow that.”
I held out my hands, in a hopeless attempt to placate him. “It’s not the only choice.”
“I know. You think you can bring me back to Ph-Philip, or to J-J-J-Juh-Jason and J-Juh-Juh-Juh-Jelaine. You th-think my internal g-g-governors won’t allow me to r-r-res…to r-resist their strongest d-direct orders long enough to let the inevitable happen. And you’re right about that, even if the clock is ticking faster than you think. So I have to take the choice out of my own hands. I have to s-shhh-shut myself down, so the forces out there can do what they need to do, to save the F-F-F-FFF-Fuh-Family from the traitors among them.”
His eyes flashed with sudden white light.
I screamed and launched myself at him, but he was already falling, his limbs turned boneless beneath him as he performed a little half-spin and tumbled to the deck. The most I accomplished when I rushed to him was prevent him from smashing his head open on impact. When I turned him over his eyes were like marbles, his mind lost in whatever fractal image the teem emitters had used to overload him.
I hoped the image was fucking unpleasant, whatever it was. But this was my own fault for hesitating. I’d held back, thinking the object under his jacket was another Claw of God, and not just a trigger for the teemers under his eyelids. He’d survive if the rest of us survived, but now he wouldn’t be able to answer questions for days. By then, the destruction he’d arranged for us would have come and gone, and we’d be atoms and other debris tumbling through space.
What had he said?
“‘Within less time than you want to know.’”
Time enough to free everybody else, and begin another round of debates over our next move? Or less? Minutes? Seconds? Was somebody’s finger already pulling a trigger?
To hell with that.
I hate vacuum. I hate heights. I hate free-fall. I hate space-suits.
I’d completed a grand total of three orbital EVAs in my entire life, and then only as part of safety drills required to maintain my Dip Corps certification. They’re not memories that keep me warm. People tell me that the trainer who tested me on those occasions still dines out about the comical, quivering wreck I’d been. I could counter that I wasn’t quite enough of a quivering wreck to accept the specific kind of comfort he wanted to offer, but that’s just a footnote. The stories aren’t exaggerated. I had indeed been hopeless.
The Bettelhine gear I’d seen Arturo Mendez wear was a different configuration than Dip Corps standard, giving me a few bad moments as I found I couldn’t do whatever I needed to do in order to make the collar seal engage. On my fourth try it clicked, and the permaplastic knit. Good thing, too, because it demonstrated that I’d also failed to engage the most important of the connections at my wrists and ankles and gave me the clue I needed to start all over again and give myself a proper seal so I might be able to survive.
I still wasn’t sure I’d done it right, and tried to tell myself that it would be best to go back and fetch one of the others, somebody who knew how to do this. But then I’d have to ask them to take the measures I was afraid I’d have to take, and I couldn’t ask that of anybody, especially since it would have probably ended up being a Porrinyard taking that final step instead of me.
I might have fucked up a good thing with them. I wasn’t sure. But if I had I did not have the right to ask either one of them to die for me.
I got everything I needed, entered the air lock, cycled to vacuum, and stood there expecting to die as I waited for the exterior door to open. The instant it did I regretted being where I was. The interior of the Royal Carriage might have been equipped with its own specific gravity, but that turned off inside the air lock the instant the chamber was exposed to vacuum. It was a spontaneous change, announcing itself as a sudden lurch in my belly just as sudden vertigo as my inner ear switched its sense of up and down to undecided.
I hated this. I hated this. I hated this.
Inching along the handholds that lined the air lock interior, I pulled myself out the hatchway and groped around until I found the access ladder leading up to the elevator roof. I didn’t need my legs to climb, of course. They trailed behind me like useless growths, every random twitch encouraging the tendency to swing outward and leave me hanging at a right angle to the elevator’s hull. Mendez had made this look easy; I was a clumsy amateur and my various attempts at overcompensation kept me slamming against the hull or hanging perpendicular again. If all the armed forces arrayed around us were monitoring my progress, they had to be laughing their asses off.
Midgard, the continent that housed Anchor Point, was a brilliant green landscape shining up at me, the cable itself receding into invisibility long before it plunged into a canopy of clouds. I didn’t want to know how many thousands of kilometers still separated me from the atmosphere, let alone the ground I’d never reach even if my body drifted long enough to begin reentry. So naturally I dwelled on it and found part of my mind doing the math. My breath, inside the echo-chamber helmet, began to take on the sound of panting.
I didn’t climb all the way to the roof, just far enough to twist the air lock and twist the exterior toggle forcing the hatch to slide shut. It might save the others a few seconds, if they had to evacuate.