They fluttered to the ground at Marchey’s feet. His face a blank slate, he bent, picked them up. Straightened up and began skimming through the pages.
He was soon a lot closer to understanding Moro’s fury. He looked up at the other doctor. “Valdemar is a Maxx addict.”
“He calls it his ‘little vice’,” Moro sneered. “One week’s dosage costs the system more than all the pharmaceuticals and supplies I’d use for six whole months back on Carme. But it doesn’t cost him a single frigging credit. It’s his ‘medicine.’”
Marchey sighed. Maxx was the street name for a synthesized combination of several naturally occurring neuronal proteins. Even doctors called it that. Its clinical uses included the treatment of spinal cord and other major nerve-bundle injuries, Third Form Autism, certain types of paralysis, Laskout’s Anesthesia, persistent coma, and a handful of related conditions. It stimulated and amplified neurotransmission and acted as a sense enhancer.
The drug’s high cost came from the difficulty of its synthesis and terribly short shelf life. But it was potent stuff. In most cases one or two small doses did the trick. A protracted course of treatment almost never ran for more than a dozen doses administered over a twelve-week period.
Even in relatively high clinical dosages the user’s body was able to deal with it, and its metabolized byproducts. Taking it over a long period of time was another matter. Elimination was outpaced by intake. Wastes accumulated, eventually leading to liver and kidney damage. The brain’s normal chemical balance went from subtly altered to completely and increasingly out of whack, resulting in paranoia, extreme mood swings, synesthesia, and a progressive deadening of the senses that the abuser would of course try to combat with increased dosages of the problem’s cause.
Maxx was a prestige party drug for the rich, or rare champagne treat for the street-level abuser. Full-scale addicts were extremely rare; it took a combination of deep pockets and reliable black-market connections to maintain the habit.
That, or a direct legal pipeline into the supply.
“I’m sure you know that the best way to treat his condition,” Moro growled, “is to take him off the damned stuff and help his system purge naturally.” His tone turned caustic, and he glared at Marchey, eyes narrowing to slits behind his glasses. “Come to find out there is another way. A service one of your kind provided about eighteen months ago.”
Marchey stared down at the flimsies, reading a notation that might as well have been an indictment. “Clean him out. Repair all the damage. Let him start all over again.”
There it was before him, more proof of what they had become. His fellow Bergmann Surgeon Andre Fescu had done just that. But he couldn’t blame Andre. He knew it could have just as easily been himself. He wouldn’t have asked any questions, and not just because nobody would have answered them anyway. He would have done the job and been on his way. In the unlikely event that he’d stopped to wonder why he was treating a Maxx addict, he probably would have chalked it up to cleaning up after a botched treatment.
He looked up at Moro again, all too easily able to understand the man’s anger and frustration. He felt it himself, and it frightened him. This was something else to eat away at the dispassion he so desperately needed.
“I’ve seen enough,” he said, standing up and doing his best to keep his face a mask of indifference. “I think it’s time to see my patient.”
[The door to the ship is opening, Doc! Angel just took a step closer to our airlock doors!]
Moro stared at him as if he were some sort of human tumor. “You’re still going to go through with it?”
Marchey shrugged. “We all do what we have to.”
Moro dropped back into his chair. He jerked his bearded chin to one side. “Back out the way you came in, turn right. Follow the red line to Room PI.” His mouth twisted. “I hope you understand that I don’t care to assist in this travesty.”
Marchey headed toward the door. “I work alone, anyway.”
A scowling nod. “I don’t doubt it. Good-bye, then. I don’t believe we have anything else to talk about.”
“No, I don’t suppose we do.” As unfair as Moro’s attitude was, it suggested that if given all the facts he might be a potential ally. But there was no time to spare, and Marchey didn’t dare risk compromising his chances to get to Valdemar.
The door slid open before him. He could feel Moro glowering at his back as he stepped through.
Just after it slid shut behind him and he started following the red line beneath his feet, Jon began cursing in his ear because all hell had broken loose.
—
Angel had taken one small step forward, but no more. Old reflexes told her to take the offense, but she caught herself, remembering that the task she had set for herself was one of defense. Standing her ground, not trying to gain it.
So she waited for the man who had just come through the inner-lock doors to come to her, keeping her head bowed and her eyes downcast. Her angel eye gave her above normal peripheral vision, allowing her to look him over surreptitiously.
He was tall and rawboned, his loose black jacket and trousers unable to completely disguise his muscle-bound body. As he strolled toward her she noted the arrogant self-assurance in his rolling stride, the tough-guy swagger. His big hands hung at his sides, loose and empty.
He had curly red hair close-shaved around his ears, and a dozen bangles hanging from his lobes. There was a friendly grin plastered on his ruddy face, but his eyes were hooded with lazy insolence.
“You the welcomin’ committee, darlin’?” he drawled, offering one big square hand. His knobby knuckles were heavily scarred, suggesting that he had caused more injuries than he had ever dressed.
Angel ignored it. “No,” she said quietly. “You are not welcome here.”
His hand dropped, thick fingers working as if to stay limber. “Aw, don’t be like that, sweetie! We’s just good samarians, come to help get you poor folks fixed up.”
“The term is Samaritans,” she corrected politely. “We are not deceived. We know why you are here, and how you intend to ‘fix us up.’ Go back to your ship and return to your masters. We will have nothing to do with you.”
There were more teeth in his grin now, and he stared down at her with amused contempt. “Now that’s not particular friendly, darlin’.” His voice dropped an octave, turned wheedling. “I think mebbe you better give this a good rethink and start bein’ nice to us.” He chuckled. “Else we jus’ might not be so nice ourselfs.”
“Go away. Now,” she whispered hoarsely, hope that he would be reasonable deserting her completely. She clenched her hands tight inside her sleeves, trying to keep a grip herself. “Please. I am warning you.”
“Warnin’ me? Haw! What’re you gonna do if I don’t, sweetmeat? Stamp your little foot?” He guffawed, stepping closer. “We’s here to stay, meatpie. I think you oughta be more friendly.” The mercy’s grin twisted into a leer. “Fact is, I like little grubber crackies like you to be especial friendly, if you know what I mean.”
He put his rough scarred brawler’s hand under her chin to tip her face up so he could see it. “Le’s find out if you’s a bagger or what.”
Angel could have resisted, but she knew the time had come to risk her newfound self by showing him something of the hated face of Scylla. She prayed that would be enough.
Her face tilted up toward him, rising like a pale moon from behind the snowy hill of her hood.
The mercy’s leer faltered when her steel-and-glass angel eye fixed on him like a gunsight. Deep inside her the unquiet angel stirred, drawn by the first faint scent of fear.
“What the fuck—” he began, beetling brow furrowing in surprise and confusion.
Angel smiled at him then. But not with the closed-mouth smile she had practiced so hard to perfect. Her cheeks tightened as her lips pulled back. She remembered how to do it, the Scylla-smile was a memory woven into her nerves with titanium wires, and as she showed it she felt the
hated other trying to climb back into place behind it.
The red-haired mercy took one bulge-eyed, disbelieving look at the mouthful of sharklike teeth she showed him, each and every one tipped with livid red as if still bloody from a meal of raw meat before he yelped and snatched his hand back as if afraid she would bite it off.
Shocked eyes fixed on her smile, and cocky self-assurance gone, he fell back a step.
Angel pressed her advantage. “Don’t you want to be friendly?” she asked sweetly, closing the distance between them and grinning up at him. Inside she exulted. Scylla was still under control and the invader was on the run!
The mercy retreated another step, then turned and headed back toward the airlock. Not running, but not dawdling either. A jubilant cry went up from the people filling the back part of the bay, and they started toward her.
Angel heard them. She turned to tell them to stay back.
She never got a chance.
The moment her back was turned the mercy spun back toward her, producing a matte black hand weapon with a fist-sized bore from inside his jacket, levelling it in her direction and firing.
No sound or light came from the weapon, but there was no mistaking that he had fired. The gun was a perennial favorite of mercys for closeup work, fondly called a meatblower or a roaster. It fired a tightly focused blast of mixed radiation that created such instantaneous and intense localized heat in its target that it explosively vaporized flesh, the very cells detonating like millions of little bombs as the water in them was turned into steam in a microsecond.
The burst caught Angel in the small of the back. The shot was intended to blow her in half.
Her robe went up like paper in a blast furnace, instantly swallowing her up in a ball of orange-red flame. The Kindred’s forward rush collapsed like a wave against an invisible breakwater, those on the leading edge stumbling and falling. The jubilant roar changed to screams of terror and horror.
The smug grin was back on the mercy’s face as he waited for Angel to fall. But it froze, then peeled off completely when instead she slowly turned back to face him, burning scraps of cloth creating a fiery, smoky halo around her.
The gleaming silver skin and strutwork the robe had hidden was exposed now, golden in the dying flames. The mercy’s face went chalk white as he recognized the combat exo for what it was. He stumbled backwards, his shocked gaze welded to the fixed grin on the face of his intended victim, the weapon in his hand forgotten.
Angel stared back at him with a blank, unwavering expressionlessness that was far more frightening than any scowl or snarl could have been, a machine-cold indifference to everything but what was centered in her crosshairs.
Her still exterior gave no hint of her inner turmoil. The urge to strike back crackled through her a hundred times hotter and more consuming than the fire that had scorched her face. Stoking the rising inner flames was Scylla.
Images filled her head: She could—
—cross the space between them before he could so much as lift a single foot, take his head off with a single careless backhand, and have ample time to study the look of surprise on his face as it hit the ground.
—drive her bladed hand into his chest, rip his heart out, and show him its final bloody beat.
—pull him apart the way a child strips the petals from a daisy.
Scylla showed her all the wonders she could perform, promising that she would at last have an outlet for all the hurt and anger and frustration. That to take this man down would be right and feel so good…
Angel shuddered, blinking back the visions and somehow keeping the angel subsumed. Swallowing hard, she found her voice.
“Please leave! Please!” she wailed, unable to keep the naked entreaty from her voice. The mercy turned and ran.
She watched him disappear through the airlock door, hoping with every fiber of her being that it was truly the beginning of the invaders’ retreat.
—
Marchey stood just outside sensor range of the door to Valdemar’s room, his head cocked to one side as he listened to Jon telling him what had just happened in the bay.
“Get everybody to hell out of there,” was the only advice he could offer.
[What about Angel?] Jon demanded.
“What about her?” he hissed through clenched teeth, that question tolling over and over in his head.
He rubbed his forehead, trying to think. “Sorry. You say she’s got them stood off for the moment?”
[Yeah, but I doubt it can last. Their sort won’t give up this easily.]
He was afraid Jon was probably right on both counts. This had been no more than a skirmish. A testing of their defenses. Now that they knew they were up against someone in a combat exo the gloves would come off.
“She hasn’t done anything overtly hostile?”
[Not yet.]
He couldn’t even begin to guess which would be worse for her: getting badly hurt or even killed as Angel or reverting to Scylla. He hoped to hell he could fix it so he didn’t have to find out.
“Okay, I’ve got to go now,” he began. The sooner he got to Valdemar the better everyone’s chances.
[Just a second, Doc—] Jon put in. Several seconds passed.
[Okay. The bay is almost completely evacuated, soon as it is we’ll seal it up. Danny just came back in. He says Angel told him to tell you that she knows you’re trying to fix everything. She says she’ll hold them back until you can get them called off our backs. She says… she says she’ll try to make you proud of her this time.]
Marchey closed his eyes for a moment, daunted by her courage. Her loyalty and trust. He found himself remembering the first and last times he had seen her, and all the mistakes he had made in between.
“Hang on, Angel,” he muttered half under his breath, opening his eyes to stare at the door to Valdemar’s room, less than a dozen steps away. The final barrier to his objective.
“This time I won’t let you down,” he whispered, an apology and a promise all in one.
He started moving. Had there been anyone else in the corridor to see him, the cold, tight-lipped expression on his face might have made them try to stop him.
Not that it would have done them any good.
—
Angel listened to her message being delivered as she moved closer to the airlock doors. She had refused the remote Danny brought her because her exo already allowed her to monitor the channels they were using. She had not mentioned it because she did not want them to know she was listening, to give them the chance to try to talk her out of the task she had set for herself.
The invaders were going to try to come out again. Soon. Angel wanted to believe otherwise, but knew better. Scylla knew it for certain, and was just waiting for her chance to be reborn like a vengeful phoenix in the heat and flames of battle.
All she could do now was wait.
The bay had been evacuated and sealed up tight. That was good. It was one less thing to worry about.
Marchey would come through. She did not doubt it for one single moment. He had helped deliver the people of Ananke from oppression once before, and he would do it again. Somehow the mantle of guardian angel had been passed on to him.
For all her telling him that he was dead inside, she knew that there was a strength in him, a steadfastness that she had first seen clearly when he stared Scylla straight in the eye—stared his own death straight in the eye—and refused to back down. Not because he did not care if he died, but because when pushed to stand by what he thought was right not even an angel’s rage could move him. There was something deep inside him every bit as durable as his silver hands, just as bright and stainless. He was capable of so much more than he knew.
He would save them all. Only this time, she would be at his side. They would be… together.
[Hang on, Angel,] his voice whispered in her ear.
Her breath caught in her throat. He didn’t know that she could hear him, but that didn’t matter. It was enough that h
e had said it. And she knew—knew— that he was telling her to hold on to the identity he had given back to her, and not revert to the other.
[This time I won’t let you down.]
Or I you, Angel vowed, placing herself directly in front of the airlock’s double doors. Fatigue and apprehension and the effort it took to keep Scylla subsumed made her head swim.
But she stood tall and proud, a solitary silver sentinel with a gentle smile on her face. Knowing that he cared after all strengthened her, fortified her sense of purpose. She would protect those she had once terrorized. She would make her mother and all the other dead proud of her. She would prove once and for all that she was no longer what she had once been.
She would give Marchey the time he needed, no matter what it cost. This time her life was pledged to something worthy.
She would show her love for him the only way she could, and hope that when this was all over he would realize that she was more than just his ally, and it was more than just help she wanted to give him.
—
Preston Valdemar was sitting up in bed, dressed in pearly white silk pajamas, hunched over a sleek wood-trimmed pad and speaking into it when Marchey appeared in his doorway. He looked up, eyes narrowing and brow furrowing in suspicion.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, putting the pad on standby and hugging it protectively to his chest.
Marchey didn’t answer. He stood there, taking a good long look at his patient. Sizing him up.
Valdemar appeared to be in his late fifties, the skin of his face blotchy, loose pouches of flesh sagging under his eyes and chin. According to his records, he was in his late sixties. The full range of antigeria techniques had been used on him just over a year before, so he should have looked to be in his late thirties at most. Maxx addiction had undone most of that. His close-set eyes were muddied by it and medication, their whites bloodshot and jaundiced.
There was also an unhealthy saffron cast to his skin. It was unlikely that the bloodcleanser racked in beside his bed was there for show. His liver and kidneys were probably little better than spoiled meat.
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