by Dan Simmons
This seemed to befuddle the fat man, and he stayed in his place as I crossed the now-silent mess hall, opened the door, and stepped out onto the catwalk.
There was nowhere to go. To my right, the two Pax troopers with flechette guns had snapped to attention at the railing. On my left, the thin lieutenant I’d bumped into earlier was hurrying down the walkway with the two civilians and what looked to be a pudgy Pax captain in tow.
“Damn,” I said aloud. Subvocalizing, I said, “Kiddo, I’m in trouble here. They may have me. I’ll leave the external mike open so you can hear. Head straight for the portal. Don’t answer!” The last thing I needed during this conversation was a tiny voice chirping out of my hearplug.
“Hey!” I said, stepping forward toward the captain and raising my hands as if I was going to shake his. “You’re just the man I was looking for.”
“That’s him,” cried one of the two fishermen. “He didn’t come in with us or the Otter group. It’s one of them cross-damned poachers you been tellin’ us about!”
“Cuff him,” said the captain to the lieutenant, and before I could do anything clever, the troopers had grabbed me from behind and the thin officer had slapped handcuffs on me. They were the old-fashioned metal kind, but they worked quite well—locking my wrists in front of me and all but cutting off circulation.
I realized at that instant that I would never make it as a spy. Everything about my foray to the platform had been a disaster. The Pax troops were being sloppy—they were still crowding against me when they should have kept their distance and held their weapons on me while they searched me, and then cuffed me when I was disarmed—but the search would come in a few seconds.
I decided not to give them those few seconds. Bringing my cuffed hands up quickly, I grabbed the chubby little captain by the front of his shirt and threw him back into the two civilians. There was a moment of shouting and pushing during which I turned quickly, kicked the first gun-carrying trooper in the balls as hard as I could, and grabbed the second one by the weapon still slung over his shoulder. The trooper shouted and seized the weapon with both hands just as I grabbed the sling and pulled it down and to the right with all of my strength. The trooper went with the weapon, hit the wall with his bare head, and sat down very quickly. The first trooper, the one I’d kicked and who was still kneeling and holding his groin with one hand, reached up with his free hand and ripped my sweater all the way down the front, tearing my night goggles off my neck as he did so. I kicked him in the throat and he went all the way down.
The lieutenant had removed his flechette pistol by this time, realized that he could not shoot me without killing the two troopers behind me, and struck me on the head with the butt of the thing.
Flechette pistols are not that heavy or substantial. This one made me see sparks behind my eyes for a moment and opened my scalp. It also made me angry.
I turned around and hit the lieutenant in the face with my fist. He pivoted back over the waist-high railing, arms flailing, and kept on going. Everyone froze for a second as the man screamed all the way down to the water, twenty-five meters below.
I should say that everyone but I froze, for even while the lieutenant’s boot soles were still visible going over the railing, I had turned, leaped over the trooper on the floor, slammed open the screen door, and run into the mess hall. Men were milling around, most of them making toward the door and windows on this side to see what the commotion was, but they made way for me as I dodged through them like a deep brooder on a forty-three-man squamish team herding the goat in for the goal.
Behind me, I heard the door slamming open again and the captain or one of the troopers shouting, “Down! Out of the way! Look out!”
I could feel my shoulder blades hunching again at the thought of those thousands of flechette darts flying my way, but I did not slow as I leaped to a tabletop, covered my face with my still-handcuffed wrists, and hit the window flying, my right shoulder taking the brunt of the impact.
Even while leaping, it crossed my mind that all it would take was for the window to be Perspex or smart glass and my misadventure would end in perfect farce—me bouncing back into the mess hall to be shot or captured at the troopers’ leisure. It would make sense for a platform way out here to use unbreakable material instead of glass. But it had felt like glass when I had set my fingers against it a few minutes earlier.
It was glass.
I hit the corrugated steel of the roof and just kept rolling downhill, shards of glass flying around me and crunching beneath me. I’d brought part of the window’s muntin with me—broken wood and glass was stuck in my vest and tattered sweater—but I didn’t slow to disentangle myself. At the end of the roof I had a choice: instinct made me want to keep rolling over the edge, get out of sight before those gunmen opened up behind me, and hope that there was another catwalk below; logic made me want to stop and check it out before rolling over; memory suggested that there were no catwalks along this north edge of the platform.
I compromised by rolling off the edge of the roof but grabbing the overhang as I did so, peering down between my swinging boots as my fingers slipped. There was no deck or platform down there, just twenty meters of air between my boots and the violet waves. The moons were rising and the sea was coming alive with light.
I levered myself up far enough to look back at the window I’d broken through, saw the gunmen milling there, and dropped my head out of sight just as one of them fired. The flechette cloud went slightly high, missing my straining fingers by two or three centimeters, and I flinched as I listened to the angry-bee hum of thousands of steel needles flying past. There was no deck below me, but I could see a pipe running horizontally along the side of the module. It was six or eight centimeters across. There was the narrowest of gaps between the inside of the pipe and the wall of the module, perhaps wide enough for my fingers to find a grip—if the pipe did not break under my weight, if the shock did not dislocate my shoulders, if my handcuffed hands did not fail, if … I did not think: I dropped. My forearms and the steel of my handcuffs slammed into the pipe, almost flipping me backward, but my fingers were ready to grip and they did so, sliding upward along the inside of the pipe but then holding my weight.
The second burst of flechette fire above me blew the roof overhang to shreds and perforated the outer wall in a hundred places. Splinters and steel shards tumbled past in the moonlight as the men shouted and cursed up there. I heard footsteps on the roof.
I was shuffling and swinging to my left as quickly as I could. There was a deck protruding below the corner of the module down there, at least three meters below me and four or five meters to the east. Progress was maddeningly slow. My shoulders were shrieking with discomfort, my fingers were becoming numb from lack of circulation. I could feel glass shards in my hair and scalp, and blood was running into my eyes. The men above me were going to get to the edge of the roof before I could get to a point above the platform.
Suddenly there was cursing and shouting, and a section of the roof caved in where I had been hanging. Evidently their flechette fire had undermined that section of roofing, and now their weight was causing it to collapse. I could hear them shoving back, cursing, and finding alternate routes to the edge.
This delay only gave me an extra eight to ten seconds, but it was enough to allow me to shuffle my hands to the end of the pipe, swing my body once, twice, release on the third swing, and fall heavily to the platform below, rolling up against the east railing hard enough to knock the wind out of me.
I knew that I could not lie there and get my wind back. I moved quickly, rolling toward the darker section of deck under the module. At least two flechette guns fired—one missing and roiling the waters fifteen meters below, the other pounding the end of the deck like a hundred nail guns firing at once. I rolled to my feet and ran, ducking low beams and trying to see through the maze of shadows down there. Footsteps pounded somewhere above me. They had the advantage of knowing the layout of these decks and stai
rways; but only I knew where I was headed.
I was headed to the easternmost and lowest deck, where I had left the mat, but this maintenance deck opened onto a long catwalk that ran north and south. When I had cut far enough under the main platform that I thought I would be even with the east deck, I swung up onto a support beam—it was about six centimeters wide—and, handcuffed arms flailing left and then right for balance, crossed an open section to the next vertical post. I did this again, shifting north and south when the beams ended, but always finding another beam running east.
Trapdoors were flying open and footsteps pounded on the catwalks beneath the main deck, but I reached the eastern deck first. I jumped to it, found the mat where I had lashed it to the post, unrolled it, tapped the flight threads, and was up and flying over the railing just as a trapdoor opened above the long flight of stairs coming down to the deck. I was lying prone on the carpet, trying to make the least silhouette I could against moons or glowing waves, tapping flight threads clumsily because of the handcuffs.
My instinct was to fly due north, but I realized that this would be a mistake. The flechette guns would be accurate only to sixty or seventy meters out, but someone up there must have a plasma rifle or the equivalent. All the attention was focused on the east end of the platform now. My best chance was to head west or south.
I banked left, swooped beneath the support beams there, and skipped just above the waves, heading west under the protective edge of the platform. Only one deck protruded out this far—the one I’d dropped onto—and I could see that it was empty at the north end. Not just empty, I realized, but shot to bits from the flechette fire and probably too dangerous to stand on. I flew under it and continued west. Boots clattered on the upper catwalks, but anyone catching a glimpse of me would have a hell of a rough time lining up a shot because of the dozens of pylons and cross girders here.
I swooped out from under the platform into the shadow of it—the moons were higher now—and stayed just millimeters above the wave tops, staying low, trying to keep the long ocean swell between me and the western end of the platform. I was fifty or sixty meters out and almost ready to breathe a sigh of relief when I heard the splashing and coughing a few meters to my right, just beyond the next swell.
I knew instantly what it was, who it was—the lieutenant I had slugged and sent sprawling over the railing. My impulse was to keep on flying. The platform behind me was a mass of confusion at this point—men shouting, others shooting off the north side, more men screaming at the east end where I had slipped away—but it seemed that no one had seen me out here. This man had struck me in the head with his flechette pistol and would happily have killed me if his pals hadn’t been in the way. The fact that the current had pulled him out here away from the platform was his bad luck; there was nothing I could do about it.
I can drop him off at the base of the platform—perhaps on one of the support beams. I got away once this way; I can do it again. The man was doing his job. He does not deserve to die for it.
It is fair to say that I hated my conscience at moments like that—not that I had had many moments like that.
I stopped the hawking mat just above the waves. I was still lying on my belly, my head and shoulders hunched low so that the shouting men on the platform would not spot me. Now I leaned out and to the right to see if I could spot the source of the coughing and splashing.
I saw the fish first. They had dorsals like holos I’d seen of Old Earth sharks, or the cannibal saberbacks of Hyperion’s South Sea, but two shining dorsal fins rather than one. I could see the fish clearly in the moonlight: they seemed to glitter a dozen bright colors, from the twin dorsal fins to their long bellies. They were about three meters long, they moved like predators with powerful surges of their tails, and their teeth were very white.
Following one of these killers over the swell toward the coughing sounds, I saw the lieutenant. He was splashing and struggling to keep his head above water, all the while pivoting, trying to keep the multicolored killer fish at bay. One of the twin-dorsaled things would lunge toward him through the violet water, and the lieutenant would kick at it, trying to strike its head or fin with his boot. The fish would snap and then wheel away. Others were circling closer. The Pax officer was obviously exhausted.
“Damn,” I whispered. There was no way I could leave him there.
The first thing I did was tap the code that killed the deflection field—that low-scale containment field designed to keep the wind out at high speeds and the hawking-mat occupants, especially children, from tumbling off at any speed. If I was going to be pulling this waterlogged man aboard, I did not want to have to struggle against the EM field. Then I slid the mat down the long swell toward him, bringing it to a halt right where he had been.
He was no longer there. The man had slipped under. I considered diving for him, then saw the pale forms of his arms struggling just under the waves. The shark-things were circling closer, but not attacking at the moment. Perhaps the shadow of the hawking mat disconcerted them.
I reached down with both manacled hands, found his right wrist, and pulled him up. His weight almost tumbled me off the mat, but I leaned back, found my balance, and tugged him up far enough that I could grab the back of his pants and haul him—dripping, coughing water—onto the hawking mat.
The lieutenant was pale and cold, shaking all over, but after an initial bout of retching up seawater, he seemed to be breathing all right. I was glad for that: I was not sure my generosity would go so far as administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Making sure that he was sprawled on the mat far enough that one of the passing dorsal-fish wouldn’t leap up and take his legs off, I turned my attention back to the controls. I set a course back to the platform, rising slightly as we went. Fumbling in my vest, I found the com unit and keyed in the code needed to detonate the plastique I had planted on the skimmer and thopter decks. We would approach the platform from the south, where I could make sure those decks were clear of people: I would then transmit the detonate code with a simple push of the button and, in the ensuing confusion, swing back around and come in from the west, dropping the lieutenant off at the first dry place I could find under there.
I turned to see if the man was still breathing and had an instant’s glimpse of the Pax officer on one knee, something gleaming in his hand …
… he stabbed me in the heart.
Or it would have been directly through my heart, if I had not twisted in the split second it took for the knife to cut through my vest, sweater, and flesh. As it was, the short blade ripped into my side and grated against a rib. I did not feel pain at the moment so much as a shock—a literal electric shock. I gasped and grabbed for his wrist. The blade came in fast, higher this time, and my hands—slippery with seawater and my own blood, slipped back along his wrist. The best I could do was pull downward, using the band of metal connecting the manacles on my wrists to pull his arm down as he stabbed me again, a downward thrust this time that would have come in over the same rib and punctured my heart had it not been for my pull on his arm slowing the movement and the com unit in my vest pocket deflecting the blade. Even so, I felt the blade rip at the flesh of my side again and I staggered back, trying to get my footing on the rising hawking mat.
I was dimly aware of the explosions at my back: the knife blade must have struck the transmit button. I did not turn to look as I found my balance, feet apart. The mat continued to rise—we were eight or ten meters above the ocean now and still climbing.
The lieutenant had also leaped to his feet, falling into the natural crouch of a born knife fighter. I have always hated edged weapons. I have skinned animals and gutted innumerable fish. Even when I was in the Guard, I could not understand how humans could do that to humans at close range. I had a knife on my belt somewhere, but I knew that I was no match for this man. My only hope was to get the automatic out of its holster, but it was a difficult movement—the pistol was on my left hip, turned backward so that I could draw acr
oss my body, but now I had to use both hands, fumble aside the hanging vest, pull up the flap over the weapon, pull it out, aim it …
He slashed across my body, left to right. I jumped back to the very front of the hawking mat, but too late—the sharp little blade cut through flesh and muscle along the back of my right arm as I was reaching across my body for the pistol. I felt the pain of this cut and cried out. The lieutenant smiled, his teeth slick with seawater. Still crouching, knowing that I had nowhere to go, he took a half step forward and swung the knife upward in an eviscerating arc that had to end in my belly.
I had been turning to my right when he slashed me before, now I kept the motion going and pushed off from the climbing hawking mat in a clean dive, my manacled hands directly in front of me as I broke the water ten meters below. The ocean was salty and dark. I had not taken much of a breath before hitting the water, and for a terrible moment I literally did not know which way was up. Then I saw the glow of the three moons and kicked in that direction. My head cleared the surface in time to see the lieutenant still standing aboard the rising mat, now thirty meters closer to the platform and perhaps twenty-five meters high and rising. He was crouched and looking in my direction as if waiting for me to return so that he could finish the fight.
I would not be returning, but I did want to finish the fight. Fumbling underwater for the automatic, I unsnapped the holster, pulled the heavy weapon out, and tried to float on my back so that I could aim the damned thing. My target was climbing and disappearing, but he was still silhouetted against the impossible moon as I thumbed back the hammer and steadied my arms.
The lieutenant had just given up on me and turned toward the commotion on the platform when the men there fired. They beat me to it by a second or two. I doubt if I would have hit him at that distance. There was no way they could have missed.
At least three flechette clusters struck him at once, knocking him back off the hawking mat like a load of laundry someone had tossed through the air. I literally saw moonlight through his riddled body as it tumbled down to the wave tops. A second later one of the colored shark-things bruised past me, actually bashing my shoulder aside in its eagerness to get to the mass of bleeding bait that had been the Pax lieutenant.
