It was with heavy but shaking hands that he brought up the Eighth Array, grabbed the orbital data, recomputed the orbit, and nudged the “tainers back on target, a circle a hundred fifty yards wide not half a mile from the station. It would be a ”hard“ landing, and there would be some loss, especially since the target area could not be cleared of all rocks. But it had been leveled and smoothed at one time, for use as a staging area when the station had been built. Most of the supplies would survive impact.
When Titus emerged, he found Abbot talking to a guard. He cut his conversation off and followed Titus. “You had the Array up, didn’t you? Colby wouldn’t let me in. Titus-”
He didn’t break stride, the stolen board stiff and heavy in his lab coat pocket. “If you want to know what the auditors found, talk to Colby.”
“Titus, you don’t know what you’re doing-”
“-and right now, I’m too tired to learn.” Titus hit the lift call button and was shocked when a door opened before “his nose. He slipped in and hit the door-close before Abbot could follow. He left his father sputtering. I can’t believe I’ve got his transmitter and he never knew! But Titus didn’t even feel a sense of triumph. Abbot had seemed so haggard.
By the time the doors opened again, Titus felt the letdown ot tension. Nothing would happen now for days with the “tainers in freefall orbit.
He returned to his room, weary from the weight of the daylight outside and the cold knowledge that there would be no blood for him after all. Even Inea’s squeal of delight as he showed her his plunder didn’t raise his spirits.
Together, with a kind of solemn ceremony, they broke the board in a dozen pieces and stuffed some of them down the disposal. Titus felt like a traitor not telling her that he had the other transmitter intact, hidden in H’lim’s room.
That night, despite everything Inea could do, not one drop of orl blood would stay down. Covered with cold sweat, Titus curled around his aching middle and huddled in one corner of the bed, struggling to breathe gently enough not to set off the perpetual dry heaves.
I could live. If I develop a string. He’d accepted this job with the knowledge it might become necessary, but the idea had never been real to him before. I’m taking ectoplasm from Inea, and in this condition, I can’t help her replace it. I can’t go on like this.
He hugged himself tighter and tried not to think. In a few moments, he’d get up and rig his wires around the bed so he could sleep. Presently, trickles of a seductive aroma invaded his sinuses. His throat melted open and surrounded the sweetness as if to swallow the nourishment.
No. Inea! Before he could move, she thrust a hard rim against his mouth and tilted it so the blood ran down his throat and he was forced to swallow. Fresh human blood. Her blood, still warm from her body, replete with her life, aching with her love. Shaking with the need for it, he tried to thrust it away, knowing there was no end to what he would do for more.
She pushed the glass back at his mouth, and he saw the tourniquet still around her arm, the clumsy mark where the needle had gone into the vein. “Drink, Titus, or it will go to waste.”
He did. He couldn’t help it. After a bit, he found himself sitting crosslegged, cradling the glass he’d licked clean and inhaling the aroma. It hadn’t been enough. Would any amount be enough? “Abbot put you up to this.”
“No. It was my own idea. H’lim told me it probably wouldn’t be as addictive if I gave it to you in a glass.”
“H’lim said that?” His eyes fixed on the tourniquet and he battled to release it.
“You can have more,” she said, proffering the arm. She registered surprise, and maybe disappointment, when he only removed the tourniquet. “H’lim said maybe human blood would settle your digestion so you could accept some orl blood.”
He coiled the tourniquet expertly around his hand and tied it. “Inea, you shouldn’t have done it. One human can’t support one of us, and I don’t dare start with anyone else.”
“Very soon, H’lim will have his booster ready.”
“If that’s no more successful than the orl blood, it will be worse than useless.”
“The blockade can’t last much longer, then your own supplies will be coming through.”
“You don’t understand. If you think my reaction to the orl blood is bad, wait until you see what the reconstituted blood will do to me after this.” He gestured with the glass. On the other hand, he felt much better.
“H’lim said it wouldn’t be as bad as if taken directly.”
“He doesn’t understand. It’ll be bad enough.”
Finally hurt by his rejection, she pulled away. “If I wanted gloom and doom I’d turn on a newscast.”
“Then why don’t you!” he snapped and instantly regretted it.
She whirled away and poked at the vidcom controls.
He set the glass aside, went up behind her and put his arms around her, pulling her suddenly pliant body against him. “I’m sorry. It helped. Obviously, it helped. H’lim’s right, it does make a difference. The heart’s electrical, you know. The impulses are perceptible in arterial blood. There’s nothing quite like it, and nothing at all like the strength it gives-or the mad desire for more. I love you more than life itself, and I’d have drunk from you until you’d died if you’d forced that on me just then. You hit a reflex, Inea. Now that you know what power you have over me, I hope you’ll exercise it with restraint.”
She kept her eyes on the screen where the reporter was reading lists of battle casualties. “H’lim says the orl have a kind or power over the luren, too, but they’re just animals and doru know how to use it. Titus, I’m not an animal. I won’t hurt you-And I know despite what you think, that you won’t hurt me. You’re afraid you would, but I can’t let that fear kill you-for nothing.”
“I’m a long way from dying of hunger.” The feeding frenzy would come first. No, I can’t chance that. I’ll have to take drastic action long before that. Since bodies would not be shipped back to Earth due to the quarantine, what he was contemplating meant a final death.
She twisted in his arms, locking her fingers behind his neck. “Titus, you didn’t see yourself on that bed a few minutes ago. When I came over there, I thought you had died, that I’d lost you even though we finally defeated Abbot!”
He couldn’t disillusion her about Abbot’s defeat. “I understand why you did what you did, but I don’t want you to do anything like that again. Inea, it could be dangerous for you. And-mutilated corpses are difficult to explain.”
His brutal phrasing finally got through to her, but before she could answer, the ground shook with an ominous rumble that rolled through the complex. The screen sizzled and went dark. The lights flickered, then steadied, and in the distance there was a brief shrieking of a decompression alarm.
She clamped herself to him with a whimper as he reached to shift the screen’s controls. Colby was on an internal channel, and the news was not good. “. land lines that control the Eighth Array have been cut, though the Array itself has not been damaged.”
Colby betrayed none of the hope that the supplies would come in on target, that the decoy would deplete the blockaders’ equipment when it blew up, and that W.S. would come out on top. She’d rather face despair on the station than risk a premature leak to the blockaders.
Courage. Human courage. Watching her, Titus felt his own courage revive and felt the line of kinship with humans that was so meaningful to Resident philosophy. “I think maybe you might be right, Inea, maybe-just maybe-I wouldn’t hurt you. I don’t want to try it, you understand, because it’s too risky, but-” me.