Everything went dark.
The bright tip and the short cutting rod of the laser was clear even through Titus’s suitvisor, and so was the dim form of Inea staggering off balance right across its beam.
Titus grabbed her arm, dancing onto the leading edge of flowing rock, and yanked her out of danger. But that sent him stumbling forward, pivoting in freefall. Suddenly, he realized that Newton’s laws, the coldest of equations, had now condemned him to death. The laser, its butt caught in the moving rocks, would pierce his left eye.
A large, heavy vacuum suit slammed into him. Abbot. Spinning sideways, he landed on his back and bounced. In mid-flight, pain such as he’d never imagined could be endured lanced through him. Paralyzed, he couldn’t even scream when a light that had been inside him, disregarded since he’d first crawled from his grave, winked out.
He rolled and turned to find Abbot sprawled, half buried in debris, the back of his helmet severed from the back of his suit, leaking infrared colors like drops of blood. Two polished ends of vertebrae were exposed, the froth of boiling blood hardly obscuring the fact that Abbot had gone to his final death, a fact that lived in ashen darkness within Titus where no other could see. Mixed with that gasping agony was the throb of another mortal wound. And H’lim, too.
Movement of the rocks had almost stopped.
Inea pulled herself out from under a ceiling panel, and shoved aside a piece of the roof camera turret. Bits of shattered sunlight pierced the rents in the rubble over them, though without atmospheric scattering, they didn’t illuminate much. One of them outlined Abbot’s hand, clutching half a transmitter. Inea waded over to Abbot, knelt, and eased his body into her lap. Short little coughs that might have been astonished sobs came over the suitphones to Titus as he got his knees under him and began to crawl toward them.
“Ti-Titus, did you hear what he said? Did you hear?”
“No.” He pulled up and examined the wound. The spinal cord was severed. Fatally.
“He said-he said, ”You’re still of my blood.“ I was wrong. He loved you. He was crazy, warped, horrible, but he had enough good in him to love you. I’m glad you didn’t let me kill him.” And then she cried.
“You can’t cry in a spacesuit. It’s too hard to wipe your nose.”
“Titus! How-”
“When we have time, we’ll both cry. But for the moment, we’ve got to-”
“H’lim! My God! We’ve got to go get him-” She tried to struggle free of the corpse.
“Inea.”
She stopped.
Titus swallowed hard. “He’s dead. Not dormant. Dead.”
“But how could you-”
“I know. A father knows. When there can be a revival, there’s still a-connection. It’s gone.”
He put a hand on her elbow, remembering all the times he’d helped other fathers rush to the aid of suddenly dormant children. There was no trace of that feeling in him. My first son is dead. “H’lim blew up the convoy when it came close-”
“But why?”
“To keep those four men from getting to us, to keep the convoy from blowing up the Collector and putting the station at the mercy of the blockaders, and probably to distract Abbot as best he could without Influence to help me.”
“What do you mean without Influence?”
“He was so hurt from the sun, so exhausted from battling Abbot, he couldn’t even divert the blockaders.”
“He’s dead,” she whispered.
He stared at her, savoring the feel of her with all his senses. Her acceptance of the loss somehow let him accept it, too. And I’ll never know what kind of science uses a math too difficult for computers.
“Yes, Inea, he’s dead. Permanently, this time. Now come on. We’ve got to see if any of those men survived. There must be first aid supplies in this mess somewhere. And then we have to dispose of Abbot’s body, make ourselves a sledge of some kind to carry extra air, and trek back to the station-unless we can fix the radio and signal for help. But meanwhile we have to concoct a plausible story we can both stick to, and see about disarming any compulsions Abbot left you. And we have to do all of those things before we both break down and cry, or run out of oxygen.”
Titus laid Abbot’s head down on the rocks and shards of console and promised he’d make his father proud, always, even when he disagreed with him.
Chapter twenty-four
Two days later, exhausted and depleted, Titus and Inea passed the last of the painted smiles, the one at the Project Station border, and saluted it as they had all the others that marked the road home.
They were hauling the sledge they had fashioned from wall panels and wiring in order to carry the two injured blockaders they’d found among the wreckage H’lim had made of the caravan. One of them, they were pretty sure, was dead, but the other might still have a chance.
Leaning into the harness they used to pull the thing, they trudged back onto station territory, heads bowed, eyes to the ground. There were still three spare oxygen bottles next to the two lashed-down spacesuits.
Inea staggered with exhaustion, and Titus said, “Don’t stop. We may never get started again, and we might not be noticed for days.” Their suitphones wouldn’t necessarily be heard this far away.
“Don’t worry about me,” rasped Inea. “I could go another day or two. But you must be starving.”
“Not-”
“Titus!” The bull roar had an Israeli accent and a joy Titus had heard only when a program ran on the first try.
“Inea!” came another voice. “Shimon, call the ambulance!”
Two suits were sprinting toward them out of the setting sun. Titus could barely force his eyes toward the glare, but made out one form with a portable flood, and another with the whip antenna of a powerful transmitter waving over his helmet. Inea called, “Shimon! Ernie! Ernie Natches!” Her pull on the sledge increased and Titus staggered, trying to keep up with her. But when they were closer, he was certain their rescuers were indeed his own lab’s Israeli genius and Inea’s electronics mentor.
Twice during their trek, they had seen flyers overhead, but had not known if they were friend or enemy, and so they’d hidden instead of signaling. Now, in a confused babble of questions, answers, and intensive debriefing that lasted through the four hours it took Biomed to clear them through into Carol Colby’s office, they found out why they had seen no identifying markings.
Security had found Mirelle’s body a few hours after H’lim and Titus had left, and Colby got that news through to Earth. Public opinion of the alien in W. S. controlled territory had instantly turned about. A monster that could masquerade as a friend was worse than an overtly monstrous monster.
World Sovereignties had immediately capitulated with regard to the alien. Earth would no longer seek contact with anything from “out there.”
As predicted, all the secessionist support had faded immediately when that proclamation was made. Rhetoric shifted to being ready in case the galaxy ever discovered Earth, and that meant a united Earth.
With the war over and World Sovereignties once again in control, secessionist insignia had already been eradicated, the bombers reconverted to freighters.
As Colby ushered Titus and Inea into her office and installed them in two comfortable chairs before her desk, she said, “I’m sorry to tell you the man you brought in, the one who they thought would survive, died a few minutes ago. He never regained consciousness.”
Titus swallowed hard. At least there’s no chance now that our story will be contradicted. Then he was instantly ashamed of the thought, and aching with new grieving. All that dying, and only we survived.
Inea buried her face in her hands. No amount of cold water had been able to subdue the puffiness from her long delayed cry._
“It’s no reflection on you,” Colby hastened to add as she seated herself and tilted her screen so she could read it and see them at the same time. “You’re still counted heroes. Ah! Here it comes! Biomed has issued you clean bill of health. No trace left of the hypnotic coercion that monster inflicted on you.”