Kit closed her eyes, then very slowly elevated her pistol’s muzzle straight toward the ceiling. Then she tilted her head back and opened her mouth like a sword swallower.
I knew for that instant that she had made her decision, and that it was none of the above. She was going to turn her pistol’s muzzle against the roof of her mouth and blow her own brains against the wall behind her, rather than make an impossible choice.
I leapt at her, hand outstretched. “No!”
My leap bought a millisecond’s distraction from the Yavi.
Kit seized the opportunity. She dove to her left and snapped off a shot at him.
But my movement didn’t buy her enough time.
The Yavi’s needler hissed; its blue flash lit the room.
Kit spun to the floor, and her pistol skittered away, barrel smoking.
She lay on the tiles, eyes bulging, gasping, as her left arm flailed blindly and spastically.
I sprang to her, cradled her in my arms, and sucked in a breath so hard that I heard myself shriek.
I had dug bullets out of her before, sewn knife wounds, set broken bones. But this?
Kit’s dive had kept the needler from tearing her heart out. But her right shoulder was gone. Not the bone and sinew. The shoulder’s ball joint was visible, and bone white and slippery red with blood from the clavicle almost to her elbow. The muscle, the blood vessels, all nature’s wondrous little intricacies, were shredded beyond recognition. Blood pulsed and spurted.
I forced myself to breathe.
She was gasping, swallowing air. Her airway was clear. Next.
Stop the bleeding. Where? Where was the bleeding? What was the mnemonic for the axillary artery? “Screw The Lawyers Save A Patient.” The branch nearest the heart was “Screw.” Superior thoracic. The biggest vessel. Calm. Start with that.
I probed bloody tissue with trembling fingers, over and over.
“Fuck!” There was no more superior thoracic, just its pulsing shreds.
The bleeding was everywhere. There was no hole in the dike to stick a finger in, no reason to follow the mnemonic toward “Save A Patient.” The Yavi made needlers to kill human beings with a single shot, and needlers did that supremely well.
I looked up at the Yavi.
He had moved over to the bench near the door, and now sat with his helmet in his lap. He was dabbing blood from a graze wound on his cheek, where Kit’s shot had almost found its mark. He dabbed with a steri that he had removed from his open first aid pack with one hand while he kept his needler trained on me with the other.
I cradled Kit with one arm while she teetered in shock on the edge of consciousness. Already her blood pooled slick on the floor beneath her.
I pointed at his first-aid pack with one hand. “Please. Your smother pack.”
He made a thin smile while he dabbed his blood. He didn’t answer.
I said, “I’ll tell you anything. I’ll do anything. The pack. She’s bleeding to death.”
“Tempting. Save her, then interrogate you both before we try you for war crimes.”
I felt Kit’s free hand claw my shirt, looked down. Her eyes were wide and she managed an infinitesimal head shake. “No interrogation. Never again . . . bleed out first.”
I turned back to the Yavi, but he was glancing at my mother. She was focused on my father, pressing so hard on a pressure point, trying to contain his bleeding, that her forearms trembled.
I asked the Yavi, “Who the hell are you? Did we do something to you?”
“Not to me, directly. Remember Tressel? I’m Max Polian. You two murdered my son, Ruberd.”
“Ruberd? Tressel? Hell, you’re a soldier. If your son was a soldier you know how it works.”
Polian. Hadn’t there been a Major Polian on Tressel? Intel weenie. And this guy. His uniform markings were pin-ons, but they were a Director General’s rank insignia. And Polian, Orion’s control officer. No time to sort it now.
Director General Polian sighed an old man sigh. “I know how this works. I am going to sit here and watch you while you watch your assassin partner die. Then I will shoot you, too, and watch you bleed to death. Then your mother over there will tell us how to build starships. I suppose it would be more valuable, strictly from an intelligence standpoint, to keep you two alive for interrogation. And more humane to show you compassion and mercy. Just like you showed compassion and mercy to Ruberd.”
I eyed Kit’s gun.
It lay eight feet from me. I could go for it, and Ruberd’s father would cut me down before I got within four feet of it. Or there was a one in a thousand chance that Polian would sneeze at that instant or something, and I could shoot him dead. I would rob his smother pack off his corpse, and maybe prolong Kit’s life. Like Kit said, sometimes you just have to cross that bridge and let it collapse under you.
What would Ya Ya Cohon say? That one thousand to one against are still better odds than one thousand to zero against.
I measured distances, slid my hand out from under Kit. I didn’t look at Polian, just listened until I heard him sigh, and hoped that in that instant he was also doing the old man stretch.
I sprang for the pistol.
As my fingertips brushed the pistol’s barrel, I saw the blue flash, heard the needler hiss.
And waited to feel the spinning needles rip me open.
Didn’t happen.
FORTY-ONE
Polian had shot Kit again!
Despite the gun now inches from my fingers, panic turned my head. No, Kit lay still and bleeding, but unchanged.
“Gaak.”
I swiveled toward Polian.
The old man rocked back and forth as he sat, one gauntleted hand clawing at his neck ring, the other empty and his needler on the floor. His eyes bulged, and blood foamed and pulsed from an exit wound that gaped in his throat where his Adam’s apple had been.
He managed to point his mailed index finger at Kit and at me, then blood exploded from his throat wound as he tried to scream through a shredded windpipe, and only whistled like a ghost. “You—”
He toppled forward, and before he hit the floor tiles I was on him, tearing at his first-aid pouch for its smother pack.
When Polian fell, I saw his killer standing behind him.
The small man wore modern armor, not old mail like Polian’s, and the needler in his hand, whining as its small single cylinder cycled, was an officer’s sidearm, a Yavi soldier’s weapon, not a cop’s long gun.
As I worked the smother pack free from beneath Polian’s dead body, the other Yavi plucked his own smother pack out, tossed it to my mother and pointed at me as he said to her, “Watch what your son does with his. Do the same to your husband.”
I sat back with the smother pack in hand, tore away the sterile wrap as I stared at our well-informed benefactor. His visor was up, and he was older than Polian, with a broad, gray moustache.
“Who the hell are you?”
I glanced at my mother, who still sat with bloody fingers pressed into my father’s torso. Holding up my pack so she saw it, I grasped the red tape between thumb and forefinger, pulled.
She nodded, eyes wide, and mimicked.
“Gill. My name is Ulys Gill.”
The small Yavi went to my mother, knelt and supported my father’s body so she could work. The flashes on his armor were imprinted, not pinned on. Another Director General? There were only two uniformed service directorates, so the brass was thick in here.
As the pack swelled and heated, I molded it around the butcher’s waste that had been Kit’s beautiful shoulder. The pain stiffened her, her eyes flew open, and I pressed the side of my hand into her mouth when she opened it to scream.
“Bite! Ow.” I nodded. “Good girl. Keep it up. It’s a bitch ‘til the air pockets are pressed out.”
When she finally spit my hand out, she reached with her free hand and clawed weakly at the dressing.
I pulled her fingers away. “Tear that dressing and you will bleed to death.”
Her eyes were closed, and she hissed through clenched teeth, “Deserve to.”
I kissed her forehead while she slapped at my chest, her hand like a dishrag.
“It’s the shock talking. We’ll cross that bridge when it collapses underneath us.”
Gill laid his hand on my shoulder. “Your father’s stable, too. But I need to get you all out of here.”
I stared at this small old man, shook my head. “Why the hell are you doing this?”
He had holstered his needler while he helped my mother. Kit’s pistol lay a foot from my hand. This Gill was not just any Yavi, he was a high-value target. And I was a soldier whose duty was to whack high-value targets. But my father had been a soldier with a duty once, too. And instead of pulling one more trigger, he had trusted somebody he didn’t even know.
I let Kit’s pistol lay.
Gill said, “I want your mother off this planet alive, along with credible witnesses who can assure your leaders that Yavet hasn’t used her to learn how to build starships.”
“Because you think the Trueborns will preemptively nuke Yavet?”
“Will?” Gill shook his head. “I hope you won’t. But you can. And you might. I’m a soldier. I prepare for what I know my adversary can do, then I have to guess what he might do.” He nodded toward Polian’s body. “I guessed right about Max. That he was prepared to sow the wind even if he reaped the whirlwind. He may not be the only one in our government who thinks that way. So I won’t risk just turning you all in.”
I nodded. “Your rank cut ice with the people out in the cordon. They won’t come in here unless you or Polian tell them to. You each bluffed your way in here alone. But now, if you turn us in, there’s explaining to do. If we ‘escape,’ less. Even a Director General can’t get away with murder. Especially if the victim’s another DG.”
He smiled. “And one suspected of being a scrubbed peep, at that.”
A Yavi officer who was a peep? I looked at his face again, pointed. “Tressel. You were the commanding Officer. You were five feet from me. I could have blown your face off.”
“So I suppose this makes us even. Captain Parker, you and I are a pair of ex-Legion bastardized peeps with many stories to swap. But right now we hold in our hands the fate of the world that gave us life. And also the lives of Colonel Born and General Wander.” He pointed at the countdown timer on Kit’s wrist. “Shall we move our bastard asses before that spaceship of yours blows itself up?”
“I’ve aborted self-destructs before.” I shook my head, “But I can’t fly a Scorpion.” I nodded toward Kit. “She’s the pilot.”
Gill tugged his lip. “We could get you all out however you got in. Criminals find government money spends as well as everyone else’s. Medical attention in the meantime’s a problem. The crooked physicians are incompetent. The competent physicians talk too much.”
I looked at Kit again. She lay in a pool of her blood that was already drying up.
I said to Gill, “No time, anyway. And you say you can’t control what the rest of the government may do with us if we wait.”
I didn’t ask to be in charge of this clusterfuck. It wasn’t my fault. Well, not entirely. But now that I was in charge, nobody, not my mother, not my father, most certainly not Kit, was getting interrogated by the Yavi on my watch. Our way out was to fly to the moonlet Kit had mentioned. There, my mother would be safe from Yavi interrogation, and Kit and my father could get patched up. We had a ship. But we couldn’t fly it.
Gill and I stared at one another.
Two clever scrubbed peeps who had come that close to pushing the doomsday clock hands back an hour. Instead, we sat and watched as Kit’s timer winked down to twenty-one minutes. But we had not one decent idea between us.
My mother touched my arm. “Dear, if it would help, I’ve logged sixteen hundred left-seat hours in Scorpions.”
“Mom?”
She raised her right hand. “Swear to God. If it’s operable, I can burn the paint off that sucker.”
Gill and I looked at the timer, which flicked to nineteen minutes as we watched, then at each other.
He said, “I’ll get my car.”
“Do it. My mother and I will get these two ready to move.”
FORTY-TWO
It took Gill ten minutes to bring his car up.
While he did, I triaged Kit and my father, then shot them both up with syrettes from Gill’s and Polian’s first-aid packs. Both needed transfusions and more. But they were stable enough that if we could get them to Kit’s listening-post moonlet, and if it had a decent infirmary, they each had a chance. Which was better than they had if they stayed here on Yavet.
Gill appeared in the room’s doorway, still blissfully alone. Where does a Director General drive his car? Anywhere he wants to.
He frowned. “Can we move them twenty yards? My car’s too big to get any closer.”
Having now spent time on Earth, I smiled at that.
Actually, there were no “cars” in stack cities, where goods and garbage moved through the utilities and people moved horizontally on jammed sliding pedways, up and down in elevators or updraft tubes. Or just walked or climbed the old-fashioned way. Gill’s “car,” or “slider,” was an underpowered four-place wheeled vehicle that Trueborns would derisively call a “golf cart.”
“Golf,” by the way, involved overlandscaping perfectly good countryside, then contesting upon it a game, played with flails and a small ball, that was so difficult that it was described as a good walk spoilt. The Trueborns fixed that not by taking away the spoilage, but by taking away the walk, replacing it with “golf carts.” As if that wasn’t fix enough, I hear there’s now a full-contact version of golf you can bet on at Funhouse.
Three minutes later, we got my father and Kit into the back seats of Gill’s vehicle. We discovered that, although it was designed for four, it held all of five people. As long as one of the five didn’t feel weird riding with a woman on his lap who looked just young enough to be trouble, but was his mother.
Gill’s car resembled a blacked-out egg on tiny wheels, was normally driven not by Gill but by his aide and bore Director General’s tags.
That last proved critical. Few Yavi could afford sliders. Most wouldn’t bother to afford one if they could. The passage crowds, in the passages wide enough for sliders at all, made sliders into egg-shaped black doorstops.
Unless the slider had Director General’s tags. Then if pedestrians or other sliders failed to yield, the DG’s driver shot the miscreant or had him or her questioned. “Getting questioned” involved the good old chain-mail boot kicking that I remembered so nostalgically. So shooting was usually unnecessary.
Ulys Gill was unaccustomed to driving himself, but he knew where the switches for the flashing lights and siren were.
The human seas parted everywhere we went.
With nine minutes to spare, we made a whooping, flashing, suitably theatrical entrance to the chamber at the base of Stack Fourteen, Eastern, Ninety-six Lower. The stack’s main access door had been rolled open, and the chamber bustled with Gill’s uniformed tech nerds.
Then an armored Yavi, needler in one hand, stepped into the path of Gill’s car with his palm upraised. He was a cop, not one of Gill’s nerds.
My heart pounded faster.
Gill may have been a DG, but his passengers were probably just a little too suspicious to pass muster if the cop peeked inside Gill’s vehicle.
I looked over at Gill, then back at our unconscious cargo, and asked Gill, “Now what?”
Gill hopped out of the egg and slammed the door behind himself, and the guard snapped to and saluted. We sat invisible inside Gill’s blacked-out staff car and I listened to my heart pound.
A fat-lipped kid in internal-security uniform peeled off the bustle, ran to Gill and the guard and joined their discussion.
My mother shifted on my lap. “That boy’s hat looks ridiculous.”
I reached round, took Kit’s wrist an
d read the timer. “Four minutes.”
Eventually, the kid in the ridiculous hat, which marked him as a provisional lieutenant, said something to the cop, whom he outranked. Then the provi formed up all the personnel, including the armed guard, then led them away, double time.
As soon as Gill’s techs were all out of sight, Gill waved me forward.
I jumped out of his cart, ran toward him, then the two of us dashed ahead into the stack.
The stack had been shut down, but both the floor grate and wall plates remained too hot to touch with a bare hand.
Kit’s Scorpion floated perhaps fifty feet above our heads in the stack’s dimness.
The clock in my head said we had two minutes before our ride home blew itself to pieces.
A wheeled maintenance scaffold unit sat parked and still folded on the floor grate, directly beneath the Scorpion. A WMS was basically what Trueborns, for whom food still grew on trees, called a “cherry picker.”
Gill and I clambered into the cherry picker’s basket, Gill slammed down a lever on the basket’s frame, and the whining machinery lifted the panting pair of us up toward the Scorpion’s open canopy.
I said, “What lie did you tell the provi and the cop?”
“That she was gonna blow any second. Don’t they say that in your holos?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Sometimes the truth will set you free.”
The elevator platform lurched, stopped. I leaned into the Scorpion’s interior, looked round the cabin.
Finding the countdown timer was easy. First, because it was a beer-can-sized bolt-on mounted in the middle of the center console above the monitors. Second, because its dinner-roll-sized slap button flashed red and read “ABORT?” in black letters, while the remaining seconds showed below, ticking down. Usually, an explosive timer started flashing only when time zero was less than one minute away.
Forty-four seconds.
I swung into the copilot’s seat, and the seat harness buckles clanked as I landed atop them. Then I hammered the abort button with my fist.
The button kept flashing, but the display changed to five flashing green dashes across the red, and above them the words, “ENTER CODE.”
Balance Point Page 26
