“But you don’t handle everything. Morn and I carried you this far on our fucking backs! Didn’t you actually read that playback? Shit, you know she has gap-sickness. I told you that myself! Hard g triggers it. She goes crazy for self destruct. But she saved us in the swarm. I set off the grenade. That was all I could do. She ran helm. In the fucking g of a fucking black hole! She figured out that pain blocks her craziness. So she kept herself sane and saved us by letting g shatter her arm.
“Don’t tell me not to worry about it,” he snarled savagely. “You didn’t come here to finish Fasner, or snatch his data. You came here to get yourself killed. So you won’t have to go on trial for your crimes.”
For a long moment Warden stared back at Angus’ indignation. He didn’t contradict anything Angus said. Instead his organic eye softened slowly, and some of the resolve which closed his face relaxed. He seemed to respond to accusations when nothing else could touch him.
At last he sighed. “I passed sentence on myself a long time ago. I don’t see any reason to commute it now.” Then his voice sharpened. “But I passed sentence on Holt, too. Whatever happens, I want that one carried out.”
Through his teeth, he demanded, “Don’t just kill him, Angus. Tear his goddamn heart out.”
Without transition Angus’ anger seemed to release him; set him free. Dios had finally shown him something he could understand. Tear his heart out—That wasn’t a cop talking: it was a man full of pain who wanted revenge.
A man like Angus himself.
He took a deep breath, let it out with the last of his doubts. “That’s better.” He gave Dios a bloodthirsty grin. “Now we can go to work.”
He didn’t make any promises. He’d spent them all on Morn. But he had no intention of disappointing the UMCP director. He unslung one of his guns and growled cheerfully, “Don’t just stand there. Open the door.”
In an instant Warden resumed his determination. Holding his rifle ready, he keyed the outer doors of the airlock.
Together Angus Thermopyle and Warden Dios left the ship to topple Holt Fasner’s empire.
At first they were lucky. The hub was full of people, all desperately hunting for some craft to take them off station; but none of them were HS guards. There weren’t more than five guns in the whole mob. And everyone recognized UMCP Di rector Warden Dios. Faced With the almost tangible blaze of his authority—and with a pair of charged impact rifles—the crowd gave way; let Angus and Warden through to the lifts.
That was fortunate. So much trapped panic could have overwhelmed the two men. Any number of civilians would have died; but eventually Angus and the director would have fallen.
They were also fortunate that the station’s maintenance and support systems still had power. The lifts worked: light and air-processing held steady: most of the status monitors and intercoms remained active. Apparently Min Donner’s barrage had crippled the generators which supplied HO’s guns, shields, and thrust, but hadn’t cut deeply enough to kill the platform.
However, the lift carried Angus and Warden down quickly into the grasp of the station’s rotational g. That slowed them: instead of floating, they had to carry their own weight. And when they reached the level where Dios had decided they would separate, they found themselves in a pitched battle as soon as the lift opened. Someone in the hub must have called to warn Home Security.
From the cover of the doors Angus laid down fire with both rifles, strafing a swath across the corridor. When he’d cleared enough space, Warden tossed out a brace of concussion grenades. At least twenty guards lay dead, dying, or stunned by the time Holt’s enemies left the lift. They had to pick their way through the carnage as if they were on a battlefield.
“Damn,” Warden panted. “I hope there isn’t much more of this. I don’t like killing people.”
Angus laughed shortly. “I do.” He didn’t give a shit how many of Fasner’s guards he took down.
“Well, don’t stop now.” Dios glanced at the corridor markers to confirm his location, then headed away at a run, holding his rifle in front of his thick chest like an ED officer, trained for combat.
Angus let him go. From now on the director was on his own. Angus’ nerves burned with fear and eagerness; endorphins and zone implant emissions. His instincts fed on the smell of blood, the urgency of death. HS didn’t scare him as much as the Amnion did: he knew he was faster, stronger, more accurate. But the guards could still kill him. Guns equalized the contest.
He took an instant to compare Warden’s directions, the corridor markers, and his computer’s structural schematic of the station. Then he, too, broke into a run, moving with a cyborg’s speed to find—the idea still amazed him—Holt Fasner’s mother.
Clearly HS hadn’t had time to coordinate more than one defensive stand. He encountered isolated guards; small knots of terrified civilians; techs still trying to do their jobs. Efficient as a microprocessor, he shot everyone who carried a weapon; left the rest alone. He probably should have tried to kill them all so that they couldn’t muster HS behind him. But he’d lost his taste for cold murder. Another change he didn’t recognize.
She might not tell me where he is. But I’m sure she’ll tell you.
That didn’t make any sense.
A sequence of corridors and lifts led him into one of the more heavily shielded sectors of the platform. Markers matched Dios’ directions.
Who the hell was this woman? Fasner’s real mother? Bullshit. He was supposed to be a hundred fifty years old.
Fire dogged him in rapid bursts. He ducked and dodged; ran; flung bloodshed past his shoulders with machine precision.
You’ll figure it out when you see her.
He ran hard; but despite his speed his zone implants kept his pulse firm, charged his blood with oxygen. Past the acrid reek of impact fire, he began to smell the disinfectants of a sterile med-sector.
Warden’s directions fit the markers. That door.
Unguarded. Abandoned. The whole sector echoed with emptiness. If Fasner’s mother was there, he didn’t care enough about her to take her with him.
Unless he’d already evacuated her—
Angus hooked his rifles over his shoulders to free his arms. Trusting the lasers built into his hands, he moved carefully to the door; tested it.
Locked.
The mechanism was more elaborate—more secure—than he expected it to be. Nobody but a cyborg would ever walk in here without the right codes and clearances.
His EM vision read the circuits. A touch of laser surgery released the lock.
As the door slid aside, he sprang at an angle through the entrance, then crouched down against the marginal protection of the wall, making himself a smaller target while he scanned the room.
Shit! For a heartbeat or two, an emission shout from the far wall nearly blinded him. Voices babbled against each other, dozens of them punctuated by music and sound effects, men and women all talking as if the others weren’t there. He searched wildly; saw—
—video screens. Jesus, video screens! Twenty or more, the damn wall was full of them. All on: all projecting muted seriousness and urgency into the darkened room. In fact, they gave the only illumination. Someone had switched the room’s lights off.
Most of the screens showed newsdogs in full spate, pretending they understood events which had left them behind hours ago. A few channels still carried ordinary programs, however, as if they were too important to be interrupted by the mere threat of war and mass slaughter. Entertainment carried more weight than the fate of the planet. Angus spotted at least one sweaty romance and two canned sports broadcasts among the newsdogs.
Slowly he rose out of his crouch. None of this made any sense. If Fasner’s mother lived here, the room had been designed for a madwoman.
A moment passed before he realized he could hear one voice which lacked the transmission quality of the video channels. With an effort, he looked away from the screens to finish scanning the room.
At once he saw
her. The screens shone full on her mummified face; reflected from her staring eyes. The phosphor glow emphasized her apparent lifelessness: she looked like an effigy of death carved in old flesh. But she wasn’t dead. Her eyelids blinked sporadically. At intervals she tried to swallow some of the saliva leaking from the corners of her mouth.
She lived because machines refused to let her die. IVs festooned her arms: some tapped directly into her neck. A device that did her breathing for her enclosed her chest; circulated her blood. Below the equipment her legs protruded along her medical crib like rolls of antique hardcopy.
So swiftly that he hardly noticed what he did, Angus moved to leave the room. But at the door he caught himself; stopped on the edge of fleeing for his life. Shit, the crib! An autonomic terror had taken hold of him before he could control it. She was in the crib. If his computer hadn’t helped him, he wouldn’t have been able to control it now.
There was nothing to be afraid of. He told himself that harshly while panic roared in his ears, throbbed in his temples. She was in the crib. He wasn’t. He wasn’t. Morn and Warden had set him free. He didn’t need to be scared. Instead of feeling all this terror, he ought to gloat over her, glad to see someone else in that position for a change.
But she was in the crib. His mother had tied his wrists and ankles to the slats. IVs and equipment nailed this woman in place. His mother had twisted his whole life with pain which Holt Fasner’s mother understood absolutely.
He couldn’t feel glad: that malicious pleasure was beyond him. His fear ran too deep. At one time he’d been perfectly capable of selling twenty-eight men and women to the Amnion. For all he knew, he might still be able to do it. But he believed that even in his worst and most brutal rages he could never have done that to another living being.
No, he was wrong: he had done it. Even that last perception of himself was false. Didn’t he think of his welding as a kind of crib? And hadn’t he forced a zone implant into Morn’s head? Imposed his own version of welding on her? Reduced her to a machine?—a thing that lived only to satisfy him?
Now finally he understood that terrible moment aboard Bright Beauty when he’d wept over the damage Starmaster had done to his ship—or over the damage he’d done to Morn. Even then he hadn’t been sure which caused him the most pain. But he knew now.
Murder was a small crime by comparison.
He remained, paralyzed, at the door until he heard the woman mutter insistently, “Is someone there? I thought I was alone.” Repeating herself for the second or third or tenth time.
Still awake: still conscious inside her terrible prison.
As if the situation had suddenly become simple, he left the doorway and crossed the room to stand in front of Holt Fasner’s mother. She was still conscious; still suffered the torment he’d fled all his life. That changed everything. Violent tremors ran through him like spasms of revulsion; but his zone implants concealed them. Nevertheless they couldn’t stifle the grief and rage that congested his face as he looked at her.
“You’re not alone,” he answered her hoarsely. “I’m here.”
As far as he could tell, she didn’t so much as glance at him. Her eyes flicked past him from side to side, hunting her screens for sanity or death.
“Captain Angus Thermopyle.” Her voice was a husky whisper. “Killer. Rapist. Illegal. I recognize you.
“You’re in my way.”
The sound made his scalp crawl; sent skinworms of distress along his spine.
“I know.” He wanted to step aside; wanted to hide his distress in the gloom beyond the screens. Ruled by his computer, his body stayed where it was.
Her toothless gums chewed over his refusal to move for a moment. “In that case,” she breathed thinly, “you must want something. What is it?”
The taste of her helplessness sickened him. He bit down hard so that he wouldn’t gag on it.
“Tell me where Fasner is.”
Her eyes went on searching past him, picking up grains of comprehension from the screens. “What do I get out of it?”
His throat closed. He fought down bile. “What do you want?”
A small gust of mirthless laughter pulled through her. Spit drooled down her chin. “I can’t tell you. I’ve been living this way too long.”
Involuntarily Angus matched her strained whisper. “That’s all right,” he assured her. “I know what you want.”
She might not have heard him. She was silent for a while. Then she remarked obliquely, “Warden is doing better. But it’s still not good enough.”
Angus had no idea how much she knew; what she understood. She was probably crazy. Yet he believed instinctively that she’d grasped everything.
Pressure mounted in him. Clenching his fists, he retorted, “Will it be ‘good enough’ if he brings this station down around your ears?”
The woman’s eyes showed a hint of moisture. Small bits of light and images from the screens reflected in her gaze.
“Only if he does it in time.”
“Then let me help him,” Angus urged quickly. “Tell me where Fasner is.”
She laughed again. “Promise me first.” That may have been as close as she could come to sobbing. “Give me your word of honor. As a gentleman.”
He knew why she hesitated; why she feared him. She knew too much about him—and too little.
He moved closer to her, pushed his face at hers. “I’m not a gentleman,” he rasped grimly. “I don’t know what honor is. I don’t even know your name. But I wouldn’t leave a tucking Amnioni like this.”
That was true now.
“You hate him,” he told her. “Because he did this to you. That’s what keeps you alive. If you don’t help me stop him, he’s probably going to live forever.”
For the first time the woman looked straight at him.
“Warden was right,” she breathed. A damp film distorted or purified her vision as she studied him past the confines of her crib. “He staked everything on you. And that Hyland girl. I thought it was a mistake. But I was wrong.”
In a voice he could barely hear, she told him how to find Motherlode’s berth.
Without hesitation he snatched both rifles from his shoulders. No flinch or flicker marred his resolve as he aimed his guns at the machine which breathed for her and smashed it to scrap; blasted her imposed life out of her.
At once her old eyes filled up with rest, then glazed to darkness as her torment finally let her go. But he didn’t stop there. Instead he blazed fire like a saturation barrage around the room, ripping apart the rest of her equipment, pulverizing her video screens, tearing chunks of plaster out of the walls and ceiling. He didn’t release the firing studs of his rifles until he’d reduced the whole place to gloom and debris.
He kept that promise. In some ways he was becoming more like Warden Dios all the time.
Leaving ruin behind him, he burst from the room at a run to keep another.
WARDEN
He didn’t have far to go. A lift or two; a few corridors. One more crime: the most spectacular—but by no means the worst—crime of his compromised life. The place where he and Angus had separated was closer to UMCHO Center than to Norna Fasner’s sickchamber. Angus probably had less time than Warden did. On the other hand, the cyborg was much faster. And he killed more easily.
In spite of everything, Warden Dios still wanted to keep his own body count to a minimum.
UMCHO Center wasn’t the real nexus of Holt’s vast empire. But Red Priority security locks would give Warden access to Holt’s data from any board in the HO network. And Center had resources he needed; resources which would be easier to use there than from some remote console. In addition, he was hoping for help. If he couldn’t persuade or coerce at least one Center tech to assist him, his last crime would be much more difficult to carry out. A lot more people would die—
He ran steadily, but didn’t push himself; tried to balance speed and caution. It would be too pitiful for words if he came all this way only
to let some nameless HS guard kill him prematurely. But he didn’t encounter any guards. The few people he met were unarmed and scared: consumed by the danger; no threat to him. He reached the corridor outside Center without firing at anyone.
The Center doors were guarded, however. He’d been sure they would be. In general Holt didn’t inspire the kind of loyalty that would hold men and women at their posts when he’d obviously abandoned them. The guards were there, not to keep other people out, but to keep the techs in.
Left to themselves, HO’s civilians would have welcomed anyone who suggested rescue or escape. Unfortunately a darker commitment drove Home Security. The guards knew that if they were taken they would be held accountable for any number of Holt’s actions. Their only hope was to believe that the CEO might still find a way to save them.
Warden knew they were mistaken: Holt had no intention of saving any of them. But he was also sure these guards wouldn’t listen to him if he tried to argue the point. Before they spotted him, he flipped a concussion grenade at their feet; ducked around a corner while it went off. Then he hurried to the doors.
As a precaution, he slung the guards’ rifles over his shoulder, shoved their sidearms into his belt. Armed like a guerrilla, he thrust open the doors and strode into HO Center.
The hall itself was hardly distinguishable from any center of operations in human space. Function dictated form. Displays ranked the walls: rows of consoles lined the deck: flat, impersonal lighting washed out shadows and ambiguities. Except for its size, this could have been UMCPHQ Center.
It was built to a larger scale, however. The staggering amount of data processed here dwarfed UMCPHQ’s operations. Holt could have run a planet from this room—if he hadn’t been so busy trying to manipulate all of human space.
But the place was practically empty. As he came through the doors, Warden counted five techs and a guard. That was all, in a room where hundreds of men and women usually worked. If the rest had fled, and a guard was required to keep these five at their consoles—
Warden jumped to the conclusion that the techs weren’t working for HO. They weren’t directing an evacuation, running support systems, allocating resources, restraining panic; weren’t doing any of the jobs a damaged station full of terrified people needed. Otherwise more of the techs would have stayed.
This Day all Gods Die: The Gap into Ruin Page 72