Fist closed his eyes, his face unreadable. But the ’bed’s monitoring equipment reported a transient spike in his pulse rate. His reaction had not been artifice.
“I would rest a while,” Fist said imperiously, turning his head away. “Leave me.”
Marchey stared down at the old man, trying to understand what had just happened. Fist ignored him, his face inscrutable.
After a couple minutes he rechecked the ’bed’s settings, then reset the sleepfield on delay, allowing the old man to remain awake for another twenty minutes before it came back on.
He paused in the clinic’s doorway, gazing thoughtfully back at his passenger. The mention of Botha Station had hit a nerve, that was fairly certain. Giving Fist time to dwell on the matter might prove useful. And in case his suspicion was correct—
“We reach Botha Station in four and a half days, old man.” He left without waiting for a reaction, closing the door behind him.
“Then we have…” Fist whispered, something like a smile creeping out onto his shriveled face, “a deadline…”
—
Marchey had killed a couple hours at a compad, finding out what he could about Botha Station. It had been fairly educational, but put him no closer to understanding Fist’s reaction.
Botha Station was a regional control, secondary processing, and staging area owned by OmniMat, the second largest space-based mining and materials megacorp. Only AllMine was larger. Those two, plus United Resources, made up the Big Three—or the Unholy Trinity, as they were more often called. The next largest mining and materials combine after United Resources was not very large at all; anything even remotely capable of competing with the Trinity had been either gobbled up or driven out of business decades ago.
Botha was heliostationary, maintaining a position on the sunny side of Jupiter between the orbits of Himalia and Callisto, some 9 million kilometers out from Jupiter’s surface. Ugly little Ananke was over a third of the way around Jupiter’s vast bulk from Botha. While that was one hell of a distance to travel—some 18 million kilometers—it wasn’t really all that long a trip. Some of his house calls took over three weeks to complete.
The volume of space encompassed by Jupiter’s moons was huge, but it was a cozy neighborhood when compared with the Belt, which has a circumference roughly four times the distance between Earth and Jupiter. Although he couldn’t say so for certain, Marchey was pretty sure he had made at least one, maybe two trips completely around the Belt.
His review of the facts and figures about Jovian space were more than a little disconcerting, and he had come to the conclusion that he ought to get some sort of medal for utter and unalloyed obliviousness. He’d traveled hundreds of millions of kilometers and been to almost every part of inhabited space, and yet didn’t really have the faintest idea of where he’d been or how far he’d gone.
Studying the data on his pad, he’d been amazed by how heavily settled the Jovian system had become. Not so many years ago it had been the frontier. Only scientists and a few brave and crazy wilders had been willing to venture even farther than this, to Ixion Station—and beyond—in hopes of making their names and fortunes from Saturn’s lunar real estate.
Now, every moon was either settled or being exploited. There were habs everywhere. In near Leda a shipping tycoon named King—everyone called him Crazy Eddie—had set up an odd combination hab/hotel/pleasure dome that he’d built and brought all the way out from the Belt. In fact, a woman who’d accidentally fallen into Fist’s web while searching for an aunt a few years back had suggested asking King for aid. Jon Halen had contacted him just two days ago, and King had promised supplies on the next available transport.
AllMine and OmniMat were the big sticks in Jovian space. They had moved in and glommed onto what others had found or begun, just as they had done in the Belt, and before that on Mars. It was nearing the point where anyone who wanted to remain independent would have to move outward, toward Saturn. Already Ixion had become more of a way station than the end of the line it had been when he’d visited Ella there.
Somehow all of these changes had slipped past him, even though he had been sent to several stations and settlements over the last few years. One operating room looks pretty much like another—especially if you don’t give a flying fuck where you are. His ship was fully automated, following instructions from elsewhere. Ail he had to do was get aboard and it did the rest. More often than not he hadn’t even bothered to find out where he was bound next.
Looking back, he had to admit that he had been pretty well automated himself. Dr. Georgory Marchey, Robot Surgeon. Keep him well lubricated and he’ll give you years of trouble-free service.
Angel’s accusations kept coming back to haunt him. At each recurrence he would tell himself that caring where he went wouldn’t have made any difference. It would be like caring that every year you got a little older. It happened. Dwelling on it changed nothing.
So here he was, in the middle of the evening of his first day back on the circuit. He’d done his homework on Botha Station. He’d played cat and mouse with Fist, and still had his whiskers and tail intact.
Unsurprisingly enough, there was a drink in his hand.
That was another of the day’s great accomplishments. Admitting to himself that he couldn’t face the silence and the solitude without it. Knowing full well how easy it would be to let himself resubmerge into the sodden life he’d led before, he’d devised a strictly controlled regimen of alcohol intake. Prescribing enough to pacify, but not enough to pickle. He hoped the little rules and schedules would give him something else to occupy his mind.
At least it had blunted the feeling of being caged by the steel box of the ship, and stopped his restless pacing. Although he had his doubts that the dosage was high enough, he’d kept himself from upping it. At least so far.
He sat at the galley table, rolling his glass between his silver hands and trying to concentrate on the medical journal he’d called up on the pad propped before him. But instead of staying on a new mutagenic strain of parasite fond of vacationing in the islets of Langerhans, his mind kept drifting back to the cold, dimly lit tunnels of Ananke.
“Screw this,” he mumbled after reading the same sentence for the tenth time. He snapped off the pad in disgust and sat back, trying to put a name on the way he felt in hopes that would help him get a grip on it.
He felt… almost, well…
…homesick.
He scowled and gulped at his drink. What an utterly ridiculous notion!
It was just that he was having a hard time readjusting to life on the circuit. To the solitude. To semisobriety.
Still, he kept wondering how Jon was doing. And what about Salli and Ivor and Indira and Ray and Danny and Mardi and Elias and Laura and all the other people he’d met and treated? How were they getting along?
Then there was the sharp point on this pyramid of curiosity, the ten-million-credit question.
Was Angel all right?
He told himself that he kept wondering—all right, dammit, admit it, worrying—about her only because what Fist had said was stuck in his brain like a splinter, causing a festering doubt that infected all his thoughts.
You have doomed her.
Each time that sinister echo sounded again he reminded himself that this was the old psychopath’s genius. Fist wielded abnegation with the skill and precision of a surgeon. Just as he himself could put his prosthetics aside and reach inside a patient’s skull to smooth away an aneurysm or erase a tumor, Fist could just as easily reach inside a person’s head and twist their brain’s contents, warping pleasure into pain, hope into despair, and all certainty into a sucking quicksand of doubt.
He’s lying. Making it up. That was easy enough to say, but not to really believe. Marchey knew it wasn’t that simple.
The old monster was a consummate liar, but he could be just as easily telling the truth if he thought that would best serve his ends. He could be stitching the true and the false so seaml
essly together that there was no way to tell where one ended and the other began, turning what he created into a straitjacket, a prison uniform, a jester’s motley, a shroud.
Only one thing was certain. Fist had wanted him to worry.
The old bastard had succeeded. In spades.
Marchey stared into his glass. Was there any reason he shouldn’t call Ananke to see how his former patients were doing? If something was wrong with Angel, they’d tell him. Even if it was something Fist wanted him to do, what harm could there be in it?
The only way to find out was the hard way.
He put his glass down and headed for the commboard. Less than a minute later he was apprehensively waiting to hear the sound of a familiar voice.
—
Angel trudged back to her cubby. The normally graceful swing and flow of her movements had been reduced to the ponderous plodding of some clumsy machine by nearly thirty straight hours of physical labor. Her last and only break had been her disastrous farewell to Marchey.
Her green eye was glazed with exhaustion. It kept drooping shut on her. Not that she could see straight when it was open.
Her angel eye had no lid to sag. It faithfully reported her slow, lurching progress through the tunnels. Messages scrolled along the top of the lens’s view, firing back along her nano-encrusted optic nerve and into her fatigue-muddied mind.
*** WARNING***XO PHYSICAL SYSTEMS REDLINE***
her second silver self warned in pulsating red letters.
***REST AND NOURISHMENT PARAMETERS EXCEEDED***PARTIAL SYSTEMS OVERRIDE INVOKED***HOST MUST EAT AND REST BEFORE IRREPARABLE DAMAGE OCCURS!***
Angel had no idea what any of that meant. Nor did she care, now that she knew it was not instruction from God. Whatever tatters of concentration she could muster were wrapped around the strange way she felt. She knew she wasn’t moving her legs. She was only thinking about moving them, and her exo was doing the rest, carrying her slack, numb body along inside it. It felt odd, but not unpleasant.
Suddenly she felt something being pushed against her lips. She peered woozily down past her nose, saw her hand forcing a cake of manna into her mouth. She chewed the bland biscuit out of reflex, swallowed the dry crumbs. Her pouch. There had been manna in her pouch. Was that distant gnawing sensation hunger?
Before long her pallet hove into view, doubling and blurring as her organic eye lost focus and track. She couldn’t even remember having passed through the outer door to the chapel.
The next thing she knew she was stretched out on her bed, flat on her back and unable to move.
***HOST FATIGUE LEVEL CRITICAL***
wrote itself inside her angel eye.
***EXTERNAL DANGER LEVEL NULL***FULL OVERRIDE INVOKED***VOLUNTARY SYSTEMS GOING TO ENFORCED REST STATUS***
For the first time in memory her angel eye went dark of its own accord, shutting down so that sensory input from it did not keep her awake. Everything vanished in the darkness that followed. Her pale, haggard face grew lax as she began to sink into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
Moments later she was dragged back toward wakefulness by a loud, insistent buzzing sound. Her angel eye remained stubbornly dark, but she managed to pry the other one back open.
She was still blearily trying to make sense of the sound when it stopped. An instant later the meter-square main screen of her comm lit.
Angel’s breath caught in her throat as Marchey stared out of it at her like a face from a dream. Her heart raced faster and her head swam at the rush of emotions that surged through her. The comm had been left on standby against the one-in-a-million chance that he might try to call her, and against all odds he had!
She tried to get up, desperately wanting to get closer, to touch him if he was real, to answer if he was calling her, but her silver-armored body lay stiff, as if cast from solid metal.
Panic set in. She strained and twisted, trying to flog her body into motion but only able to lift her head slightly off the pillow. Commands to her traitorous limbs were swallowed up by a silent nothingness that furled tighter with every exertion.
***WARNING!!!***
wrote itself in fiery red print inside her still-dark angel eye.
***REST IMPERATIVE***THREAT LEVEL NULL***XO-MEDSYSTEMS INVOKING INVOLUNTARY SEDATION***
Angel’s head fell back, her breath sawing in and out in ragged sobs. Her head spun. Dizziness made everything unreal. She couldn’t think straight, couldn’t tell if she was really awake or trapped in a nightmare, wanting to reach him so badly the need was more than she could contain; but her exo and her weakness defeating her.
The last thing she saw through the tears welling up in her eye was a smile appearing on his face.
She tried to smile back—
4 Consultation
Jon Halen’s lean, dark visage filled Marchey’s screen, lighting up in a toothy grin when he saw him. “Hey there, Doc,” he drawled, “If you’re callin’ bout your bill, the check’s in the mail.”
Marchey had to smile, and not just at that very old, very bad joke. Just seeing Halen again did more to lighten his mood than anything he’d drank lately.
“Glad to hear it. How are things back at the old homestead?”
“Tolerable. I did just get one bit of good news.”
Marchey smirked. “Salli wants to have your children?”
That made Jon snicker. “No, that’s not it. ’Sides, I’ve been too busy humpin’ a keyboard for any of that.”
“Any luck cracking Fist’s accounts?”
Halen’s grin slipped. “Naw, I’m ’fraid not. I’ve been spendin’ ev’ry minute I can spare tryin’ to get a handle on his records, but I’m still just sortin’ the locked files from the open stuff. The old bastard had enough data squirreled away to keep me diggin’ for years.”
He scrubbed his stubbly chin with his misshapen hand, peering at Marchey with one eye. “You been, um, talkin’ to him?”
“A little. Sorry, but he hasn’t told me anything.” Nothing I wanted to hear, anyway. Or believe.
Jon shook his head. “Don’t be. I shouldn’ta even asked. Like I said before, don’t go messin’ with him any more’n you absolute have to.”
“You said you have good news,” Marchey prompted.
Halen’s irrepressible grin reappeared. “I surely do! There’s medical people and all those supplies you wrote up on the way. Just got the word that they’re s’posed to arrive sometime late Friday.”
That was about the same time he’d reach Botha Station. Marchey let out a sigh of relief. Now maybe he could stop feeling so guilty about leaving them. “That’s great. I knew MedArm would come through.”
Jon shook his head. “It an’t them personally, it’s some outfit called the Helping Hands Foundation.”
—
Marchey sat there after saying good-bye to Jon, mulling things over.
By all rights he should have been feeling pretty good. Jon had accessed the medical files for him, and he had been pleased to see that not only were Mardi and Elias doing an excellent job of keeping them up-to-date, the people in their care were doing at least as well as could be expected. Jon had offered to get Mardi to report directly—Elias was sleeping—but he didn’t want her to think he was checking up on them.
Medical help was on the way. That should have been a load off his mind. It was, mostly. But he had never heard of this Helping Hands Foundation, and couldn’t help wondering why they were doing what was supposed to be MedArm’s job. Bureaucracy at work, no doubt, some penny-pinching MedArm comptroller using a private group of do-gooders to pare his or her precious budget. Once this outfit arrived he’d have to check with Mardi and Elias to make sure they were doing a good job—and raise holy hell if they weren’t.
Jon hadn’t seen Angel since bumping into her in a corridor the morning Marchey left. He’d looked disappointed when Marchey turned down his offer to track her down for him. It appeared that not even his departure had dampened Jon’s desire to put the two of them toget
her.
He got up from the commboard and drifted back to the galley. He’d refilled his glass with straight scotch and knocked half of it back before he remembered that he was rationing the booze.
“Just celebrating,” he mumbled, scowling into his glass. Everything was turning out the way it was supposed to. Everything was coming up roses.
No news was good news. Angel was probably just fine.
He drained the glass. She was undoubtedly going on with her life, already forgetting about him.
Just like he was forgetting about her.
—
Marchey jerked in surprise and spilled his coffee when his arm chimed that next morning, having forgotten that the day before he’d set it to remind him when Fist’s sleepfield was about to shut down. The unibed had been programmed to give the old man half an hour of wakefuless per day.
He started to get up, then changed his mind and settled back into the galley seat. Let the miserable old bastard stew a few minutes. After swabbing up the mess he’d made he refilled his cup from the dispenser. Took a sip, grimaced.
Brandy flavoring in coffee was not at all the same thing as the real thing. Not even close. He dumped it out.
It was still early in his second day back on the circuit. The two hours he’d been up felt like two days.
The long stretches of monotonous solitude had never grated on his nerves like this before, never made him feel this trapped and jittery.
Of course this was the first time he’d tried to do it this close to sober. He couldn’t recall the countless other times he’d spent days—sometimes even weeks— like a machine on standby clearly enough to say he truly remembered them. They were like the hours spent in sleep. He knew they had passed, but darkly and disconnected from the normal flow of time.
Just three days before there hadn’t been enough hours in the day. Now there were too many days in each hour. The minutes pass slowly when you’re all alone and mostly sober. Any distraction was welcome.
Marchey stood up, bitterly amused by the realization that looking in on Fist was going to be the high point of his day.
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