Prophets

  And she hated him for making her remember that.

  Over the next couple of hours, the PA broadcast updates; no communication from the planet; drive continuing to cool down; other ship’s systems nominal. About three hours into the silent ordeal, Tsoravitch, who’d taken over the role of bridge communications officer, announced, “We have a transmission from the planet. They’re giving us communications and landing protocols.”

  “About time,” Kugara whispered. “We’ve been calling them for three hours.”

  “Maybe they don’t want us here.” Nickolai said.

  “What?”

  “They came out here for a reason. Maybe they don’t welcome visitors from their past.”

  Kugara opened her mouth to say something, but she stopped herself. It was a possibility that should have been patently obvious to any native of the Fifteen Worlds. Dakota certainly wouldn’t welcome an unannounced visitor from anywhere, Grimalkin wasn’t much better.

  We may be lucky no one is shooting at us.

  Twenty minutes later the whole cabin shook.

  “What the hell?” Kugara said, trying to keep her feet as the ship violently vibrated. Emergency klaxons sounded, and the cabin lights began flashing red. That’s the signal for a hull breach!

  Parvi’s voice came over the PA, “Everyone to the nearest lifeboat/cabin now! We’ve had a critical overlo—”

  Her voice was cut short by the sound of a massive explosion that threw Kugara toward the ceiling. As she fell back down, she could feel the weight of her body sucking away, telling her that the gravity manifolds were failing. When she hit the floor again, she bounced lightly off.

  The lights in the cabin died, plunging both of them into complete darkness. The PA no longer spoke, and for a few moments the only sound in the cabin came from the two of them breathing.

  “Were we attacked?” Nickolai whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Kugara answered. She fumbled for a handhold in the dark and found one next to the door. She pulled herself against the wall. Through the wall she could feel vibrations that made her stomach churn. Something overloaded the power plant, she thought. Emergency power should be returning shortly . . .

  As if in response to her thought, a dull red light came on above the doorway. Then it began flashing rhythmically.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered through clenched teeth. She opened the console next to the door and confirmed her fears.

  “What is it?” Nickolai asked.

  “Shut up!” she yelled at him, as if there was anything she could have done at this point. The emergency systems had fully taken over. The cabin was sealed. She tried to get the comm to the rest of the Eclipse responsive, but the cabin’s connection to the rest of the ship was dead.

  The display, unresponsive to her touches as it was, helpfully showed a schematic of the cabin’s systems. Power and life support were now on a fully closed loop, helpfully illustrated by two animated arrows pointing at themselves. Six colored blocks connected the square cabin schematic to the rest of the schematic of Eclipse.

  One of the blocks turned from green to yellow to red. The small block on the screen broke in half. At the same time a pop like a rifle shot resonated through the walls of the cabin.

  “Kugara?” Nickolai asked.

  The first block faded from red to black as the next block broke in half. Another rifle shot shook the walls of the cabin. She shook her head.

  “Kugara?”

  “It’s the escape sequence,” she whispered. Another shot resonated through the skin of the cabin. This time the vibration didn’t fade away completely. Holding on to the wall next to the display, Kugara had the morbid sense of being trapped inside a loose tooth. “This cabin’s about to be blown free from the rest of the ship.” Another rifle shot and the vibrations were noticeably larger in amplitude. “If there’s even still a ship on the other side of this door.”

  She pushed off the wall and grabbed the edge of the cot, the only piece of furniture in the room. She braced her feet on the floor and lifted, folding it into the wall, slamming it shut.

  Another rifle shot; this time the sound of twisting and grinding metal accompanied the amped-up vibrations.

  She pushed off and grabbed the handle of a yellow-and-red outlined panel in the wall. She pulled it open, and a padded bench with crash webbing unfolded. She pulled herself into it and spared a glance at Nickolai, bound to the wall. She muttered, “Shit!” as the last rifle shot echoed through the cabin.

  The shot was followed by a thundering roar, and suddenly they were no longer weightless. Kugara felt herself sinking deep into the padding beneath her as the whole cabin shook. The floor of the cabin was now the wall behind her, and Nickolai was secured sideways on the wall to her left.

  She stared at Nickolai and could see the strain on the sealant tape as his body pulled against it. His head bent toward her and slightly away from the wall, and his lips curled back in a snarl revealing his massive teeth. His head shook with the vibrating cabin. The cabin jerked, and Kugara winced in sympathy as his head slammed back against the wall.

  “Nickolai!” she called out to him, the shaking cabin giving her voice a manic vibrato.

  He grunted something and shook his head. She didn’t know if he was telling her he was okay or that he wasn’t. A shiny thread of saliva and blood trailed from his lips to the wall/floor where Kugara had strapped herself in. The vibration stopped, but the acceleration continued.

  “The engine’s going to burn until the computer thinks we’re clear,” she yelled above the sound of the engine. The acceleration wasn’t painful, two, maybe two and a half gees. But it kept going. And going.

  God, how much delta-V does this lifeboat need?

  She didn’t know the full specs on the Eclipse’s lifeboats, but it was very unlikely that they packed more than a few minutes’ worth of fuel. The job of the disposable engines on these things was to get the lifeboat clear of dangerous debris, and if possible maneuver the boat toward rescue . . .

  Or a habitable planet.

  The acceleration cut out, leaving them both in free fall again. Over the PA system a computer-generated voice said flatly, “Three hours until atmospheric insertion.”

  “Atmospheric insertion?” Nickolai said. His voice was a little bubbly, blood massing at the corner of his mouth.

  “The lifeboat’s going to try and land us,” Kugara said, undoing the straps holding her to the acceleration couch. “So much for Tsoravitch’s communications and landing protocols.”

  She pulled herself over to the console by the door, hoping to get some feedback on the state of the Eclipse, how fast they were going, and the integrity of the lifeboat. The little display wasn’t that accommodating, giving her little more than the fact that inside was oxygen, outside was hard vacuum.

  Not that she could have done anything if the lifeboat was damaged. The lifeboat was going to burn off its velocity hitting atmosphere until the boat was slowed enough for the drag chutes to deploy. If either the shielding or the chutes had been damaged, their reentry would be painful and short.

  She looked up at Nickolai and realized that even if the lifeboat worked perfectly, his ride would still be painful and short. He’d been severely beaten by the two-G escape from the Eclipse. If this thing hit atmosphere, it was going to go in ass-first and pull a lot more than two Gs deceleration, and it was going to be a hell of a lot rougher.

  “I’m going to have to get you into one of the crash couches.”

  Nickolai laughed. “You should leave me here. I’m not going to fit in a human cradle.”

  “Maybe if you were bound to the right wall.”

  “Leave me here.” Nickolai spat, and an oblong glob of blood and saliva went on a tumbling slow-motion odyssey toward the nominal ceiling.

  Kugara pulled herself down to one of the emergency panels under the folded-up cot and ejected the medkit. Probably going to need this when we land, if we survive. “Do that, and we reenter the atmosphere, if
your skull isn’t turned to jelly slamming into the bulkhead, your internal organs are probably going to be perforated on the splinters that used to be the right side of your rib cage.”

  “So? I betrayed you all. Why should you care what happens to me?”

  “Your damned Angel has too much blood on her hands already to just let someone die out of spite.” She pulled out a cutter from the emergency medkit. It was designed to liberate victims from damaged environment suits or, in a pinch, more substantial wreckage. The shiny fifteen-centimeter crystalline blade was designed to vibrate through most inorganic materials and leave flesh intact.

  She pulled herself up in front of the tiger and said, “Don’t make me regret this.”

  She started with his legs, slicing through the sealant tape. The knife hummed in her hands as she traced the outlines of his thigh and his calf. The tape came free in small segments, which she plucked from the air and pressed to the wall. Fortunately for Nickolai, the sealant tape only bonded to synthetic material, so she didn’t pull free patches of fur with the tape. She worked her way up to his waist and for the first time found herself disconcerted by the fact that Nickolai didn’t wear any clothing.

  His balls are as furry as the rest of him. She had to snort to keep herself from an uncharacteristic giggle.

  “Are you all right?” Nickolai asked. His voice was still slurred from the blood pooling in his mouth.

  You’re asking me? “I’m fine.”

  She wondered if she should check the oxy levels in the lifeboat. Not that it mattered; either there was enough and the recycler was working or they were screwed. More things are getting to me than lack of air.

  She kept cutting, freeing his torso, pulling long strips off his chest and abdomen, finally his neck. He floated free of the wall, arms bound behind him. She grabbed his shoulder and maneuvered so she was behind him. When she did, he said, “My arm’s a construct.”

  Oh, shit. She had completely forgotten about Nickolai’s arm. She placed her hand against the tape wrapping his right arm. The tape was a rigid shell in the shape of his arm. It had also changed color. The normal tape was a matte gray color, but it shifted toward green as it bonded to something. Even in the ruddy emergency lighting, she could tell the tape on Nickolai’s right arm had shifted all the way to the fluorescent green of a fully bonded seal.

  The damn stuff was tougher than most steel alloys. Even if she freed that arm, there was no way he could move it.

  She stared at it and said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Nickolai shook his head and spat some more blood. “It doesn’t matter. Just don’t use that tool against it.”

  “Yes.” The cutting knife would leave flesh intact, but could probably slice Nickolai’s cybernetic arm in half. At least it could do a lot more damage than the sealant tape already had. She carefully cut along his left arm, avoiding coming near his right and the hardened tape.

  It took a few minutes, but she freed his left arm. He swung both arms in front of him, the right arm immobile in its impromptu cast. She pushed a little away, giving him some room. She had some fear that he might turn on her. He was the reason they were in this situation, by his own admission a traitor.

  Though she wondered if that was the right word. Traitor? They both were mercenaries. In the end, their loyalty was to whoever hired them. Nickolai may have broken a BMU contract, but did that carry the weight of that word?

  And why the hell am I thinking like this?

  Nickolai pushed against the wall with his left hand and rotated to face her. He extended that hand toward her and asked, “May I have that tool?”

  Kugara wondered a moment about the knife’s usefulness as a weapon, then berated herself. Nickolai was deadlier unarmed than she would be with most hand-to-hand weapons. If he wanted to attack her, he would have done so already.

  She handed him the knife.

  Nickolai wrapped his hand around the handle and held up the blade, staring at it. In his grip, the blade seemed tiny, almost a surgical instrument. She watched as his jaw clenched, and his blood-smeared lips pulled back in a silent snarl revealing his huge canines.

  He lifted his right arm up, and inserting the blade at a shallow angle, he started to cut. The blade sank deeper under the sealant tape than it should have, and Nickolai winced.

  He didn’t stop cutting.

  He worked the blade down the length of the bindings, from the shoulder, along the bulge of his bicep, across the elbow, down the forearm. Liquid beaded along the cut, spheres of clear fluid more viscous than water floating free of the wound.

  Even though it was artificial, the way Nickolai worked was too much like someone skinning themselves alive. She whispered, “Stop,” but he either didn’t hear her or he ignored her.

  Under the pseudoflesh of Nickolai’s right arm were muscles and bones and nerves; the bones metallic, the muscles some synthetic polymer, and the nerves filaments of gold or some other nonreactive metal. They weren’t alive, but they mimicked life too well. The polymer muscles glistened wetly under the emergency light, sliding and swelling as he moved his arm.

  When he was done, his right arm was flayed like a holographic medical display. Kugara couldn’t stop staring at it.

  “Why?” she asked him.

  “It was necessary,” Nickolai said.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Nickolai flexed the fingers on his right hand, and she could see the tendons sliding along his wrist. “The neural feedback shut down about halfway in.”

  She opened the medkit and pulled out some heavy-duty bandaging spray.

  “You don’t need to—”

  “Hell I don’t. Even if you don’t feel that, I know that wasn’t designed to be exposed to the air.” She grabbed his right wrist, near the hand where it was still wrapped in fur and something that felt like skin. He allowed her to pull it forward. She sprayed the can onto the faux wound that was Nickolai’s arm. The spray dried white and flexible, giving his arm the character of a well-defined corpse.

  She let his arm go, and he bent it, flexing his hand again. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, right.” She took handfuls of hardened sealant tape still attached to ragged clumps of almost-flesh, and shoved them into a cabinet so the debris wouldn’t bounce around the cabin and kill them during reentry.

  The computer voice spoke. “Two hours until atmospheric insertion.”

  “Now that you’re free,” Kugara told him, “Help me rig an acceleration couch that will fit your oversized body.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Good Samaritans

  Surviving the worst will always complicate the matter.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.

  —FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

  Date: 2526.6.3 (Standard) 750,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Everything had been going as smoothly as could be expected, the bridge crew making periodic announcements over the PA system while Parvi sat at her station obsessively nursing as much efficiency as she could out of the damaged damping coil. Things were going better than she had a right to expect, the engines were already down to 50 percent ahead of her projection.

  Then every meter on the console before her redlined. The power spike was sudden, and she lost all readout from the damping coil at the same time the emergency klaxons announced a hull breach.

  She slammed her hand on the PA broadcast and shouted, “Everyone to the nearest lifeboat/cabin now! We’ve had a critical overload.”

  Before she finished her sentence, the drives blew. She could see the displays go critical in the split second before the explosions. Everything lurched out from underneath her as every display went dead, plunging the bridge into darkness.

  More explosions, and Parvi could feel her ass drifting out of the seat in the darkness.

  Gravity’s gone.

  She grabbed the dead console blindly, trying to keep from drifting away. Hull
breach, lost gravity, how long before we’re breathing vacuum?

  After a moment, emergency lights flickered on around the bridge, bathing them in a red glow. “What the fuck just happened?” Wahid called from the far side of the bridge. Now that there was some light, he kicked off the wall, back toward the console.

  “The drives overloaded,” Parvi said, not quite believing it herself.

  “Did the damping coil cause it?” Mosasa asked.

  Parvi shook her head. “The spike happened before it failed.”

  “Someone tached in,” Tsoravitch whispered.

  “That’s bullshit,” Wahid said, pulling back into his seat. “They’d have to be right on top of us. You heard Bill.”

  Parvi looked down at the pilot’s station, and even under emergency power, all the displays were dead. She tried calling up details on the drives, the maneuvering jets, life support, and structural integrity. She couldn’t get anything except the internal diagnostics of the bridge itself. “I can’t communicate with the ship’s systems. Everything in the pilot’s station is cut off . . .”

  “Wahid?” Mosasa snapped.

  “I can’t raise the bridge’s nav console.”

  “Tsoravitch?”

  “It’s dead. Everything’s dead!” She slammed her fists against the console in front of her. “Nothing.”

  Parvi stared at Tsoravitch and felt the same edge of panic herself.

  “Snap out of it,” Mosasa said. Parvi heard desperation in his voice that went deeper than Tsoravitch’s panic. His voice grew brittle as he yelled at her. “We need the external sensors on-line, and that’s not going to happen with you breaking down!”

  Before Parvi could intervene, Wahid said, “Listen.”

  The bridge fell silent. After a few seconds, a sound resonated through the skin of the Eclipse, a distant hammer blow echoing though the whole vessel. Another few seconds and the sound repeated.