Marchey stared down at him in disgust, knowing it was time to finish this atrocity up and get the hell out of there before he lost it.
Suddenly a harsh crackle of static lanced into his ear from the remote, loud enough to make him jerk his head to one side. A moment afterward he heard an agonized whisper.
[Hurry… I can’t do any more.]
His heart stopped mid-beat. Angel!
[They blew a hole in the friggin’ wall!] Jon broke in, his normal unflappable calm reduced to wreckage. [Angel patched it, it was unbelievable what she did, and now she’s blockin’ the airlock doors! I’m tryin’ to get help to her and more air into the bay—]
Then distant and muffled, made metallic by the remote’s attempt to compensate, [Go get another charge! We’ll blow the fuckin’ door to hell and the bitch with it!] The slow rasping wheeze of Angel’s breathing sawed his heart into quivering pieces. The doctor in him heard lung damage.
The man who had been cheated and frustrated and used tightened an invisible hand inside the user he had in his grasp. Valdemar made a strangled sound and went rigid, heels drumming against the mattress.
Marchey withdrew his other hand, reached for the pad. It floated through the air, coming to hang before Valdemar’s pale and uncomprehending face.
“Call them off!” he hissed. “Now!”
Valdemar stared past the pad and up at his tormentor in bewildered terror. “I don’t—”
“Call off your mercys,” he roared, fighting the urge to grind the pad into the man’s face. “Or I swear to God I’ll take you apart one fucking piece at a time. From the inside.” It was all he could do to keep from demonstrating.
“L-line reopen, n-no picture,” Valdemar stammered.
The pad chimed, and after a moment’s silence a woman’s voice issued from it. “Sturges here, Mr. Valdemar.”
“C-call back the troops! L-leave Ananke at once!”
“Are you all right, sir?” Sturges asked with obvious suspicion. “You sound funny.”
Valdemar’s eyes rolled up toward Marchey, and he saw the price of failure carved into his stony face.
Angel was still breathing. If that sound stopped—
“Never mind that,” Valdemar puffed, trying to sound commanding but failing miserably. “Just do as I say!”
“But sir, we’ve almost—”
“Do as I tell you to you stupid slot!” Valdemar shrieked. “Or I’ll have the fucking lot of you brain-burned and sold for testmeat on Armageddon!”
“Yes, sir,” Sturges answered stiffly. “I’m recalling the team now.” There were several endless seconds of anxious silence. Both Marchey and Valdemar held their breaths.
Sturges came back on-line. “They’re coming back to the ship. Do you want us to return to Botha, sir?”
Valdemar looked to Marchey for instruction. He nodded and mouthed the word hurry. “Yes! And hurry!”
Marchey simply closed his spectral hand inside the pad, invisible fingers turning the circuits to useless junk. He let it fall. It bounced off Valdemar’s chest and clattered to the floor.
The pitch of Angel’s breathing suddenly changed. She froze, fear rising thick and acrid as vomit up against his teeth.
[Come back,] she whispered inside his head. A pause, panting for breath. [Pl—please give me… another chance…]
“Angel! I’m here!” he shouted, straining to hear an answer, trying to reach her across the gulf of time and distance and misunderstanding that lay between them. But there was no response, only a hopeless silence that seemed far vaster and emptier than the airless void that separated him from her.
[Hang on, Doc, we’re getting back into the bay now,] Jon bawled in his ear, his voice like a lifeline to where his heart had gone. [The bad guys are liftin’ off! Mardi and Elias are runnin’ over to Angel. We got two vac-crews, one to sealfoam the patch, the other to seal up the airlock door…]
Marchey stood there, blind to the world, seeing it in his mind, seeing Angel’s face, hoping and praying and promising—
[She’s ALIVE!] Jon crowed. [She’s out cold and hurt pretty bad, and I don’t know how the hell we’re gonna cut her loose, but they’ve got a breather mask on her, and she’s alive!]
Marchey’s legs threatened to go out from under him as relief swept through him. A sound that was half laugh and half sob escaped him. “I’m coming back,” he told Jon. “Take good care of her until I get there!”
[Count on it! And thanks!]
Marchey closed his eyes for a moment, setting tears running down his cheeks. When he opened them again, his gaze turned back toward his patient. Valdemar paled and began to sob when Marchey’s attention fell back on him like a lead weight.
“Someone who means a lot to me almost died because of you,” he said quietly. The anger was still there inside him. The loathing. He had right here in his hands one of the ones who had turned his life into a living nightmare, and seen to it he had no way out. Who had nearly destroyed the things he loved, just when he had finally begun to understand that he did love them. Who had corrupted all he held holy for power and profit.
For so many years the saving of every life had left behind nightmares, and this pathetic creature had used that for his own advantage, for his own greedy purposes.
Nightmares…
It took him only a moment to reduce Valdemar to total unconsciousness, and a few moments more to pull the familiar icy cloak of full trance about himself. Anger faded. Hate dissolved. Everything but cold directed will leached away, leaving only himself, his patient, and the cure.
He wrapped his immaterial hands around Valdemar’s head, fingertips sinking inside the man’s skull. “Remember me,” he rasped, his touch and deep trance guaranteeing that he was heard.
“Resign. Stop turning MedArm into garbage. Give up Maxx or die” He could feel brain activity sputtering and flickering under his fingers, knew that his every word was being incised inside that skull past any erasing.
“If you disobey me, I’ll come back for you. Remember me and what I can do to you. Remember…”
He shifted his grip. A touch here, there, saw to it that Valdemar would not waken for several hours.
Letting go of Valdemar he stood back, shrugging off the trance state, then turning his back on his patient to reattach his silver arms.
He knew he should be ashamed of what he had just done. Maybe he would be. Yet he wouldn’t take it back even if he could.
At that moment all he could think about was getting to his ship and getting his ass back to Ananke as fast as he could, because there was someone there who needed him.
—
Returning to his ship was no problem. It was upon reaching the berth where it was docked that he ran into an unforeseen complication.
His ship’s airlock door gaped wide open.
He stood there staring, knowing damn well that he’d left the craft locked up tight when he left. It was doubtful that old Fist had tried to escape. Not only was he too weak to walk and buried under a sleepfield to boot, he had every reason to want to remain hidden while the ship was on Botha Station.
That left one logical conclusion. Somehow, someone must have suspected Fist’s presence on the ship. There was no way to guess how. The important question was: Had they already spirited him away, or was the kidnapping still in progress?
There was only one way to find out. He continued on inside, moving quietly, cautiously, his home suddenly hostile territory.
The dimly lit main compartment was deserted. He crossed it, soft-soled shoes whispering across the carpeting, straining to hear any telltale sounds over the anxious thudding of his heart. The clinic’s door was open, bright light flooding out. As he drew closer he heard voices. Moving with all the stealth he could muster, he crept to the doorway and peeked inside.
Two men were struggling to pull Fist over the high sides of the unibed. The burly one dressed in the red OmniMat Security uniform had his arms wrapped around Fist’s thin chest. Marchey watched
the old man turn his head and spit in the man’s face.
“‘Old skig spit on me!” he cried, his mouth curled in disgust as he rubbed his cheek against his shoulder.
The other man, dressed in a dark blue ’xec’s tailored onepiece, laughed. “I’ll teach him some manners.”
“Damn well better!”
Onepiece let go of Fist’s feet, stepped around to the side of the bed, then backhanded him hard enough to snap his head back on his scrawny scarred neck. “You behave, grampa.” He grabbed a thin wrist. “Act up again, and I’ll break your goddamned fingers.”
Fist’s head came back up, and he glared at onepiece, those carious yellow eyes blazing with sneering malevolence. His bloodied mouth moved as he whispered something that made the ’xec’s face redden. Fist laughed, a moment later whispering something else that made the ’xec let go and clench his fists. One drew back in threat. Fist laughed again, daring him.
Marchey almost had to laugh himself at the ornery old bastard’s absolute, unbreakable cantankerousness. But he knew he had to do something before the old man goaded them into killing him, thereby taking all of his secrets to the grave.
He scrubbed his mouth, trying to figure out the best way to deal with the situation. No great plan came to mind. He was tired and impatient to be on his way, and he’d had a bellyful of deception, intrigue, and taking the subtle approach.
“Screw it,” he muttered softly, squaring his shoulders and striding on into the clinic as if he owned the place.
“Who the plug are you?” onepiece demanded, dropping his clenched hands and stepping back.
“Don’t worry, I’m a doctor,” he told them with a reassuring smile as he sauntered toward the security man at the far end of the unibed. The guard let go of his burden and reached for the holster strapped to his hip.
He never got a chance to touch the weapon inside. Marchey, still beaming happily, stepped in close and put his broad shoulders behind a roundhouse punch that drove his biometal fist into the cleft in the man’s chin like a silver sledgehammer. His blow knocked the guard clear off his feet and into the bulkhead behind him. He slammed up against the padded surface, hung there a second, then crumpled bonelessly to the deck.
Marchey gaped in amazement at the results of the first punch he had ever thrown in his whole life, then spun around to confront the other trespasser, brandishing his fists and ready for round two.
Onepiece took one look and fled.
Marchey flung himself after, crashing into the ’xec’s lumbar region. They both went down, Marchey on top.
The ’xec’s head bounced off the deck with a sickening thump that made Marchey wince.
“Bravo… Doctor!” Fist called from inside the unibed. “A remarkable… display… of fisticuffs!”
“Just shut up,” Marchey grumbled, climbing off the ’xec’s back, then rolling him over and peeling back an eyelid. The man was down for the count, but fundamentally undamaged. He crossed the compartment to check on the security guard.
In the process of checking pupil response he found out that he had knocked the man not only cold, but cross-eyed.
—
Forty minutes later he was already undocked and on his way back to Ananke. He had taped up the intruders’ hands and feet, put a sedative derm on each to give him more time to make his escape, then stuffed them into an equipment cabinet in the lockbay.
Fist had suffered only a few minor cuts and bruises from his manhandling. Marchey treated them and put him back under the sleepfield. The old man had kept laughing and calling him by the name Ali, whatever the hell that meant.
Now that the battle of Botha Station was over, he was dead on his feet and more than ready to sleep. But there remained a couple loose ends he wanted to tie up before he let himself collapse. So he drew a cup of coffee with just a hint of brandy in it to offset the caffeine, seated himself at the commboard, and called Dr. Moro.
The bearish, bearded physician came on, his face knotting into a look of tight-lipped distaste. “You again.”
“Valdemar is still an addict,” Marchey informed him without preamble. “His condition remains fundamentally unchanged from when I arrived, though he will probably stay unconscious for at least another six hours.”
Surprise replaced Moro’s disapproval. “Why?”
Marchey told him.
Raphael Moro turned out to be a very good listener. The few questions he asked led Marchey to tell him everything: the Helping Hands visit to Ananke and Valdemar’s place in the scheme; how he had gotten to Ananke and what had happened there; how the Bergmann Surgeons had been co-opted by a tainted MedArm, and how Sal Bophanza had fled the Institute. It took him almost an hour to lay out the whole story. By the time he was done Moro was looking at him in a very different manner.
Marchey slumped there in his chair, feeling drained. His cup was empty and his throat was dry, but he couldn’t summon the energy to get up and go for a refill.
“Well, well, well,” Moro said at last. “That’s quite a story. Going back to one particular, did you know that MedArm sent a flash directive to all personnel? Anyone with information as to the whereabouts of Dr. Salvaz Bophanza is supposed to report it immediately. Both large rewards and severe penalties are mentioned.”
Marchey rubbed his gritty eyes, trying to remember if he had told Moro where Sal and ’Milla were headed. “I should have expected that.” He sighed. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Do about what?” Moro returned blandly, stroking the white streak in his beard. “So, what are you going to do next?”
“Damned if I know.” Marchey let out a mordant chuckle. “I’m almost afraid to find out, considering how I’ve done so far.”
Moro peered at him a long moment, his glasses, making his eyes look huge, then smirked. “Yeah, you’ve frigged up royally.”
He sat back, steepling his thick fingers. “Let’s see. After years of doing the best work you could do under conditions so bad they turned you into a drunk—instead of suiciding, or just plain quitting—you let yourself be kidnapped by an exo’d maniac who thought she was an angel. She took you to Ananke. There you managed to keep your Oath, helped bring down the man who had brainwashed her and turned the moon into his private empire, started her back on the road to humanhood, and incidentally found the cure for one of the things that had been messing up the lives of all the Bergmanns while you were at it.”
Marchey started to interrupt, but Moro held up his hand. “Please, no pleas until all the charges are read. After all that, you followed orders and went back on the circuit after doing three doctors’ worth of work on Ananke. You kept yourself from becoming a drunk again, and figured out the danger they were in by playing head games with a dangerous psychopath who had nearly destroyed you once and was probably working up to another whack at it, saved the moon and the ex-angel
Acknowledgments
This book never would have been written if Dr. Stanley Schidt at Analog had not rescued a story titled “A Touch Beyond” from the slush pile. A few years later he published “Angel,” the second part of the Marchey/Angel saga. When I tried to sell him a third part, he said what this really wanted to be is a novel. But don’t blame him.
A million thanks are due to my wife, Sue-Ryn, for protecting me from the rest of the planet during writing season and gently and patiently dealing with the zombie I become. Thanks are also due to friends and family who encouraged me; to my agent, Joshua Bilmes, for helping sell this story to a good home; and to Laura Anne Gilman and her crew at Penguin Putnam for getting it into print.
copyright
ROC
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First Printing, August 1999
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Copyright © Stephen L. Burns, 1999 All rights reserved
Cover art: Bruce Jensen
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