“Answer me, dammit!”
He had the fat, greedy mouth of a libertine, and his thick lips were pressed together petulantly as he glared at Marchey, waiting for him to respond.
Marchey ignored him, checking the room over carefully. There was a full communit at his bedside, probably linked to the pad. Good. The door he had just come through was the only one in or out. He locked it so they wouldn’t be disturbed.
Reconnaissance done, he faced Valdemar, his face stonily impassive. “I am Dr. Georgory Marchey.” He held up his silver hands so there would be no mistaking what kind of doctor he was. “I’m here to treat you.”
“It’s about time you got here,” Valdemar sniffed, slumping back onto the pillows. “I feel terrible! You should have been here weeks ago! I’m not some damn welf; I run the whole fucking medicine show around here! I deserve better treatment than this!”
Marchey stared down at the flabby little man on the big soft bed, and although he felt nothing kinder than loathing, he smiled.
“Well, I’m here.” His smile subtly altered, an odd glint kindling in his gray eyes. “It has taken me a long time to get to where I am now. Let’s find out if it was worth the trip.”
—
Angel could feel it.
Something was about to happen. The very air seemed charged with a gathering electricity. She had never experienced anything like terrestrial weather, but she had heard and finally understood what people meant by the calm before the storm.
Would they rush her? Would the airlock doors open on a dozen weapons all firing on her at once?
There were a dozen possibilities. She needed to be ready for each and every one of them, but really all she could do was wait, her silver-sheathed body so tense it was a wonder it didn’t ring like a tuning fork with every apprehensive thump of her heart.
She watched the airlock’s double doors, her attention so tightly focused on the vertical seam between them that when the explosion came, she kept staring at the still-intact steel panels, thinking that they had tried to blow the doors and failed.
That thought had scarcely been formed when it was blown away by the terrible, blood-freezing dragon’s roar that was the sound of every spacers’ deepest, darkest nightmare.
The deadly shrieking howl of pressure breach.
Adrenaline-fueled fear burst inside her like a bomb, kicking her exosystems into overdrive. Her head snapped around, homing in on the sound, and she saw the gaping, life-eating, meter-wide hole blown in the wall twenty meters away.
It’s a diversion! The warning flashed in her mind like a starburst, but breach drill was one of the first things learned by every child born in the fragile steel-and-stone shells that kept the implacable enemy vacuum at bay. Her response was as deeply wired into her nerves as the monkey reflex of grabbing at anything within reach when falling.
Instinct had her already racing toward the rack of emergency patches against the far wall, leaning into the gale and legs pumping under her like pistons.
Dust, gravel, and other debris filled the escaping air, stinging her face and pinging off her exo. A plastic packing crate came flying at her out of nowhere. She barely had time to fling up her arm to protect her face. The impact staggered her, whirling flinders snatched out of the air around her and sucked toward the hole. Her momentum and the magnetic soles of her exo were all that kept her from falling and being taken as well. She had to keep her vulnerable organic eye squeezed shut against the scouring whirlwind. Only the indifferent glass lens of her angel eye let her see to reach the rack.
Let her see that the rack was nearly empty. The few remaining ceramyl-backed foamstone patches were far too small to cover the rent.
But the thick meter-and-a-half-square foamstone panel forming one end of the rack was large enough to do the job. She grabbed hold of it, set her feet and heaved, wrenching it from its moorings. Then she got herself turned around and headed toward the hole.
The hurricane-force outrush of air tried to rip the panel from her grasp, and when it couldn’t, snatched her off her feet and took them both.
Angel had only a fractured second in which to realize that if the unreinforced panel hit the wall at the speed they were travelling, it would shatter into a thousand useless pieces. Jaw clamped tight on the air the dropping pressure was trying to steal from her aching lungs, she twisted desperately, turning, trying to get her arms and legs braced before—
Less than a tenth of a second later the panel slammed into the wall, smashing Angel’s body between it and the unyielding stone around the hole it was supposed to cover.
—
“I can’t move,” Valdemar complained pettishly. A pale blue derm was plastered to his neck. Muscle relaxant.
“That’s to make things easier,” Marchey explained as he rolled a table over beside the bed. He didn’t say easier for what. Valdemar would find out soon enough.
“They put me out last time. Aren’t you going to?”
Marchey showed him his teeth. “I think we’ll get better results if we do this while you’re wide-awake.”
“I suppose you know what you’re doing.” Valdemar sniffed.
Some dark bastard cousin of laughter welled up inside of him. “I’ve never been more on top of things in my whole life.”
He laid his forearms on the table, palms up. He’d gotten a lot of practice slipping in and out of the light working trance he needed, and more quickly shucking off his prosthetics back on Ananke. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let go.
Their weight fell away. He opened his eyes, feeling like he had just taken off swaddling gloves. Now his hands felt impossibly supple and exquisitely sensitive, ready to operate.
Even though it had been done without fanfare, removing his prosthetics had made an impression on his patient. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Valdemar’s eyes widen as he straightened up, watched him lick his thick lips nervously. It made him smile.
“This won’t hurt, will it?” Valdemar whined in a small voice.
Marchey had also gotten a lot of practice at another skill since leaving Ananke. It was time to see if he was really the apt pupil Fist kept saying he was.
“Only if I don’t want it to,” he answered as he turned to face Valdemar, his smile widening. The flat silver biometal plates capping his stumps had the same cold gleam as his eyes.
“All right, you miserable little pile of shit,” he rumbled, slowly reaching for his patient, the points where his hands should have been coming closer and closer. “Let’s find out just what you’re made of.”
Valdemar tried to cringe away, but he might as well have tried to levitate. Thanks to the derm on his neck his body only trembled like a worm nailed to a board. Panic rising, he tried to reach for the call button, but his hands and arms never even twitched.
Totally helpless, all he could do was stare at the terrifying expression on Marchey’s face, gurgling with terror and humiliation as his bladder let go.
—
Angel was in Hell.
Escaping air roared and squalled around her, cold, so cold, and the implacable void at her back tried to suck her through the hole and swallow her completely. She couldn’t breathe. Jagged rock chips, scouring sand, and bullet-fast bits of debris exploded against her exo and lashed the exposed skin of her face.
She teetered over the immense pool of blackness that filled the back of her skull, welling up from where her head had bounced off unyielding stone. If not for the thin layer of biometal covering her where hair should have been, her skull would have split like a melon. She couldn’t tell if the unending howl she heard was inside or outside her head. She could barely see; she had to keep her human eye closed tight or she would lose it, and the other one kept phasing in and out.
The foamstone panel was still in one piece, only because she had put her body between it and the wall to cushion its impact. The impact had been tremendous; people had felt it in the soles of their feet all over Ananke. If it hadn’t been for her e
xo, every bone in her body would have been broken.
Now the relentless air pressure was turning the panel and the wall into the two jaws of a vise trying to squeeze the life out of her.
Blind, deafened, and dizzy, still one thought clanged endlessly through her reeling mind: This is a diversion! It felt like an eternity had turned since the explosion, but the passionless timesense built into her exo’s circuits told her that less than twenty seconds had elapsed.
She still had a chance to stop them. If she could get free before she was mashed flat or eaten by vacuum. Or simply passed out, letting the other dangers get her.
Angel tightened her grip on the panel and strained against it, the cords standing out in her neck. A cry broke through her clenched teeth when it looked like not even her exo gave her the strength to force it back.
Still she refused to give up. She kept pushing, throwing every iota of energy she could summon into her trembling arms, the strain making the suffocating blackness rise higher and higher. The panel groaned and thrummed, nearly stressed to the breaking point.
Just as her exhausted body was about to fail her, the panel moved, forced back to arm’s length and tipping so that one side ground against the wall.
That gave her better leverage. Bracing it up with her trembling arms, she wriggled toward the widest part of the gap, moving like some small creature trying to crawl out from under a stony crushing foot. When she had gotten as far to one side as she could, she gave one final desperate heave, rolling and twisting as she did so.
The patch slammed home with an echoing boom, cracking down the middle but not breaking. The seal wasn’t perfect; air still whistled around the edges, sucking airborne bits of debris in to wedge in the narrow cracks, but the cyclone was over.
The force of her push sent her crashing to the cold stone floor. She landed on her side, desperately gasping for breath in the too-thin, dust-filled air. Her lungs were on fire, every ragged breath stoking the flames higher.
She could have lain there forever. Her limbs felt like they weighed a ton apiece. Her head swam, and even thinking about moving seemed impossible.
Instead she heaved herself to her feet wearily, blood seeping from her ears and nose, trickling from her mouth. Operating on blind instinct alone she got herself oriented and staggered drunkenly toward the airlock.
The outer doors were just beginning to slide back when she got to within two meters of them, coming within blurry sight of five heavily armed mercys in goggles and breather masks, the red-haired man she had driven off earlier in the lead. It was obvious from the shocked expressions on their faces that they hadn’t expected to find her waiting for them.
Angel was at the end of her strength and endurance. She didn’t so much charge the invaders as start toppling in their direction and somehow manage to keep her feet under her.
The looks of slack-jawed, bug-eyed disbelief that appeared on their faces squeezed a hysterical laugh out of her. It was funny. Scylla was nowhere to be found inside her now, and she didn’t have the strength left to fight them even if she wanted to. The worst she could do was collapse on top of them.
The mercys did not know that. Seeing a battered and bloody-faced silver-skinned wild woman laughing like a berserker as she lurched toward them drove them back to the big airlock’s ruined outer doors.
Angel saw one last chance to slow them down. Her laughter turning to a racking coughing that put fresh blood on her lips, she staggered the last two steps to the airlock’s inner doors. Then she flung her arms wide, extruded her talons, and grunting with effort, drove her barbed hands into the steel panels, sinking them in almost to her wrists. Gathering the tattered shreds of her failing strength, she heaved at the door panels to pull them shut.
Had she been fresh and rested, she could have easily overcome the mechanism that powered the lock doors. In her present condition she was barely able slowly to wrench them shut to the tormented shriek of stripping gears and steel grating against stone. The panels began to twist and buckle around her silver hands. Her grip was too close to their edges, but she dared not try for a fresh hold.
She heard the enemy shout, saw them start back toward her. That spurred her to one final all-out effort. Her whole existence narrowed down to herself and the doors.
Just—
Their resistance was incredible. Her arms and insides were aflame. Red-and-black motes danced before her eye. She turned her face away as they began firing at her, daring only to use rubber dumdums in the enclosed space.
—close!
In the end her will was greater.
The closing mechanism gave way with a gunshot crack and the doors slammed shut. The warped steel panels would not close all the way, leaving a gap the thickness of her hand between them, but it was the best she could do.
Angel hung there by her wedged hands, panting for breath in the rarefied air and grimly holding on to consciousness. She tried to lock her exo, finding that it refused to move anyway. The inside of her angel eye flashed with warnings and damage reports, pulsing in time with the hammering of her heart.
She heard muffled cursing. Gloved fingers appeared in the gap, trying to pry the doors open again. Her exo had turned into a silver vise, making that impossible. It took her three tries to find the breath to whisper, “Comm active,” and she had to swallow a mixture of blood and dust before she could speak again.
“Hurry,” she gasped. Her throat tightened, and she felt a gathering wetness in her eye; tears stained with blood. “I can’t… do any more.”
As she was licking her bloody lips to speak again, she heard one voice rise above the angry gabble at the other side of the doors. “Go get another charge,” it bellowed. “We’ll blow the fuckin’ door to hell and the bitch with it!”
She rested her head on her arms, closed her eye.
So that would be how it ended. The silent darkness was piled up so high inside her that she would probably never know when it happened. Consciousness had turned to smoke in her hands. It kept trying to slip through her fingers and fade away.
Still she held on. This was her last chance to make things right.
There were so many things she had wanted to tell him. That she had never been truly alive until he had touched her and given a real life to her. That she was sorry for the things she had said, for driving him away. So many things…
Her head lolled to one side, and she found herself fighting a tidal wave of red-edged black. Had she blanked out? She couldn’t be sure. She only knew that the next wave would take her all the way under, and there was no way to stop or evade it.
“Come back,” she croaked breathlessly. “Pl—please give me… another chance…”
She wanted to explain what she meant, and hear if he answered, but the silent darkness took her before she had a chance to do either. It crashed over her.
It took her down.
—
Valdemar’s compad lay on the bedside table, still on standby. Marchey had glanced at it while putting it aside, seeing that it was linked to the bedside comm, and willing to bet that his patient had been talking to the supposed mission of mercy on Ananke when he’d come in.
—so you could do what needed to be done to stop it, Jon had said. Soon now he would see if that was true.
Marchey stared down at Valdemar’s pale, frightened face, trying to keep a handle on his emotions. The light working trance gave him some distance from them, but not much. Rage, hatred, and loathing hammered at his insides, demons shrieking to be let out.
“The Helping Hands Foundation,” he growled softly.
Valdemar blinked in confusion, his eyes flicking to one side to glance guiltily at the compad before coming back to jitter nervously between Marchey’s face and the invisible hands poised just over his chest.
He let Valdemar feel a slight weight and pressure, watched fresh sweat blossom on his ashen forehead and upper lip.
“Wh—what about it?” he panted.
“At this very moment there
is a so-called relief mission trying to steal Ananke from its rightful owners.”
“They’re not stealing,” Valdemar protested.
“What would you call it, then?”
“They’re uh, p-providing a service.”
“For a price.”
“Well, yeah, what’s—”
Marchey cut him off. “With no chance to refuse this service. I’m hearing what is going on even as we speak.” His mouth tightened. “Do you know what it makes me want to do?”
Valdemar shook his head meekly. Marchey’s face filled his field of vision. It was the face of a man so filled with fury and contempt that he looked capable of anything. It came to him that he might just be staring his own death in the face.
Marchey’s eyes narrowed. “It makes me want to give you the same deal. A service for a price.” He sank his immaterial hands into Valdemar’s body.
“Maybe a little heart surgery.” A feather-light touch on a certain bundle of nerves set off a brief flare of pain deep in the man’s chest. Valdemar let out a strangled squeak, eyes bulging and his face going the color of curdled milk.
“A heartless bastard like you could probably use a little work on the old ticker.” Marchey did it again, hard enough to make Valdemar gag and his whole body convulse.
This was wrong, and Marchey knew it. Worse yet, it felt so good. The urge to make Valdemar squirm and beg wanted to pour out his hands like a boiling poison bottled up past containment.
You’re bluffing, he reminded himself desperately. You can’t can’t can’t do him any real harm!
“Please!” Valdemar wailed, his voice shrill with terror. “You can’t hurt me like this! You’re a d-d-doctor!”
Marchey bent lower, putting his face inches from Valdemar’s. “Yes I am. I talked to Dr. Moro. He told me how you said the people he served didn’t deserve a doctor like him.” A mirthless smile screwed itself onto his face. “Maybe I’m the sort of doctor you deserve.”
Valdemar’s mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he’d completed his own humiliation by losing control of his bowels as well as his bladder. He cowered there in stinking misery, utterly powerless to stop Marchey from doing whatever he wanted with him.
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