Then I performed the series of clumsy, amateur shifts necessary to turn myself around so I could hang on the ladder with my back to the carriage and face the constellation of Bettelhine forces surrounding us.
They all had to be watching me. They all had to be wondering what I was doing.
Wethers’s instructions had eliminated any chance of them coming to rescue us.
So I had to go to them.
The only problem with that, aside from the strong possibility that somebody would see fit to blast me out of the sky, was that I had no attitude jets, no means of propulsion, no way of braking or altering my course once I performed this all-or-nothing leap. There might have been something for that purpose aboard the carriage, but I didn’t know where it was kept and would have been useless at operating it anyway. The time constraints reduced me to basics.
So I pressed the soles of my boots against the carriage hull, told myself that I was, by Juje, going to do this in the next five seconds—one, two, three, four, five—somehow found myself still hanging on, called myself a coward, and counted one, two, three, four, five again.
Kick!
I don’t know how quickly I left the carriage behind, but it wasn’t fast. The cruisers and skimmers and fighters and battalions still remained ahead of me, watching my approach with a stolid, uncaring silence. The lights of their occasional course corrections flashed like reflected sunlight on a rippled sea. Three or four of the space-suited figures ahead of me burned brighter and longer, moving to new positions: not to intercept me, I saw, but to stay out of my way. As long as I didn’t fire at them or go for a weapon they’d just let me drift by on a course that would keep me going long after my air ran out.
I flipped the transmit toggle on the suit hytex connection. “Please! This is Counselor Andrea Cort of the Confederate Diplomatic Corps! I am drifting and in desperate need of assistance! Please help me!”
No answer.
Either Wethers had been thorough enough to disable to suit’s communications, or the forces he’d corrupted were sticking by their instructions to stand down.
I tried again. “Please! This is Counselor Andrea Cort! I’m an honored guest of Hans Bettelhine! You are to give me the rank of Inner Family member for as long as I remain within your space! I’m ordering you to rescue me!”
Again, nothing.
I must have been less than thirty meters from the nearest Bettelhine soldiers, all of whom were turning to follow my progress, but otherwise remained impassive and unmoving as I drifted toward the hole in their ranks.
Seconds left before I passed them.
Shit. I’d really hoped I wouldn’t have to do this next part.
I reached for the hook, midway up my right arm, where I’d clipped a certain artifact I’d been carrying since my arrival at Layabout. Disguised as one of the ornaments on my black suit, It was instead one of the many small items of contraband I made a habit of carrying with me whenever away from New London. But it wasn’t exactly high-tech. Had I left this in my suite and been unable to get to it from the cargo bay, the chamber had contained any number of other tools that would have done just as well.
All I really needed in this situation was a sufficiently sharp object.
And I’d already tested this one, a Dip Corps insignia capable of extruding a four-centimeter cutting edge, on one of the spare suits in the cargo bay, so I knew it would work.
I removed it from its hook, popped the blade, and in a single determined jab, punched a hole through my suit.
Actually, it was not just my suit. I got some flesh as well. The air venting through the puncture was not only glistening with clear ice crystals born of my own respiration, but with red ice crystals as well. I yelled as loud as I could, which turned out to be not very loud, and felt something tugging at the air leaving my mouth.
Is this what you want, you bastards? Is it?
The soldiers were turning, but still not coming for me.
I stabbed myself again. This one made me convulse. Something slammed into my back; the figures around me became a blur, but not a blur I could see, because there was something wrong with my eyes and then with my brain and then with the taste of blood in my mouth and then what a goddamn stupid way to die and then something exploding inside my chest and then
19 XANA
Nothing seemed to happen after that, not for a long time; nothing except for me replaying those moments and remembering how and where but not why I’d died.
Even when things started happening, they didn’t amount to much.
I drifted in and out of consciousness for a while.
At one point I found myself floating, fetuslike, in a chamber filled with golden fluid. The walls were both curved and transparent, and the shapes moving in the drier chamber beyond were all distorted funhouse figures, their faces stretched into cylinders with only distant resemblance to the people I had known. One pressed a palm against the wall separating us and mouthed something. I considered reaching out to place my own hand against the other side, but could not seem to translate the impulse into action, and soon lost all interest. After a few seconds I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.
With little transition I found myself in another flotation chamber, in this case the blue nothingness of the AIsource virtual interface. I was annoyed. I didn’t want to be bothered by their shit right now. But the avatar just studied me and spoke a single sentence, one I was in no mood to register, much less heed. It’s not over, Counselor.
In between flashes of being wheeled somewhere on a gurney and lying on a bed with each of my hands being held and massaged by a watchful Porrinyard, I dreamed of my childhood on Bocai. I’d had such dreams before, of course, but most of them, too many of them, had been traumatic flashbacks to the night of the massacre. I was well used to sitting upright in cold sweats, still seeing images of bloodlust and loss. Less often I returned to the moments I remembered now: the idyll before the tragedy, the sunny skies, the laughing faces, the love of both my human and Bocaian families. In this particular flash I must have been about three or four years old. My mother and I were together in a park I remembered well, playing a lazy game with a ball at the end of a string and rules that I made up as I went along. I tripped over something and went down hard, exploding with sobs at the typical childhood inability to absorb the pain and shock adults deal with every day. My mother picked me up and told me it was okay, that I’d be all right, that she’d take care of the owie when we got home. She was bright-eyed and sympathetic, strong and wise—she knew the wound was really nothing, and knew the crisis needed to be felt in order to pass. As the dream, or memory, ended, Bocai’s sun glistened on her dark hair and I reached out, in innocent fascination, to touch it.
The blue room again.
Andrea Cort: You are not yet out of danger.
I thought you said you wouldn’t help me. That it was against your precious rules of engagement.
We’ve helped you more than you can know, Counselor. We are helping you now. The Bettelhines are using their local franchise of our medical enterprise to treat you.
AIsource Medical. This marked another time I owed them. What’s wrong with me?
You were exposed to pure vacuum for just under a minute. There was extensive damage to your lungs, your trachea, your nasal passages, your throat, and your eyes. You also suffered a number of disfiguring burst blood vessels on your chest and shoulders, and a significant cerebral event in your brain. You were, for several subsequent minutes, dead.