by Timothy Zahn
“Why in front of them?” Kutzko asked. “Why can’t we sit off to the side where we won’t have to worry about them slamming into us?”
My stomach knotted; sternly, I willed it to relax. “Because that would generate too many complicated Doppler effects,” I explained with the casual sincerity I’d learned so well how to wrap my lies in. “From here in front, there’s just one constant effect for them to unscramble. Or there will be, anyway,” I amended, “once I get this thing working.”
“Let me help,” Kutzko offered, stepping forward. The step became a lazy arc as the circuit breakers again snapped and the Mjollnir drive kicked off. He cursed under his breath, flailing for something to grab onto. “Can we at least turn off that blazing pseudograv?” he growled. “This flip-flop stuff is going to get one of us a broken neck.”
“No!” I snapped as Adams’s hand moved to obey. “I want it left on.”
“Why?” Kutzko frowned.
I bit down hard on my lip, searching furiously for a reason he couldn’t argue with … and finding one. “Because the story that we spun for Lieutenant Grashchik wasn’t just froth, that’s why,” I told him. “We don’t know how the thunderhead control would be affected by zero-gee, and I’d rather fight some extra nausea than risk losing position. Speaking of which, thunderhead, where are we?”
“Approximately two … minutes in front of the … Invaders,” he whispered.
I’d asked for three or four. So much for pinpoint accuracy. “Okay,” I said. “Don’t forget to keep watching that light.”
“I will. Are you ready for our … assistance yet?”
I hissed between my teeth. “Not even close. Hang on—let me figure out how to do this …”
In my peripheral vision I saw Kutzko raise an astonished eyebrow. “Are you telling me you spent four days on the Bellwether learning how to run that thing and still haven’t got it down?”
“Look, just shut up and let me work, all right?” I snarled at him. “I know what I’m doing—it’s just going to take a little time.”
Kutzko glanced at Adams, back at me. Still more or less willing to trust me; but that trust was eroding fast. “You know, if it’s going to take this long,” he pointed out, “we could skip this three-minute stuff and pull back a decent distance—say, an hour or so—and do it there. I’d hate to have the thunderhead miss his cue before you even get that blazing thing working.”
“It’s not going to take that long,” I shot back, tension adding more snap to my voice than was probably called for. Without knowing it, Kutzko was skating perilously close to the truth, and the last thing I could afford was for the thunderheads to catch on to what I was really up to. “It’ll take just another minute to get this going, okay?”
“Fine,” Kutzko said, his patience starting to go the way of his trust. “I just hope it won’t take you this blazing long to find the right frequency to send on. Or to figure out what you’re going to say to them.”
“I hopefully won’t have to find a specific frequency,” I growled. “This is a multispectrum transmitter—that’s one of the reasons the adjustments are so tricky. And as for what I’m going to say, I’m going to transmit a simple greeting from the Patri and then repeat it in the language the thunderheads will give us. Then we’ll pull back and wait for a reply. You happy now?”
His reply was cut off by the sudden return of gravity. “Right,” Kutzko nodded, his voice hard. “Just another minute, huh?”
Deliberately, I turned my back on him. “Sorry, thunderhead, but I guess we’ll have to do this again. Same thing, all right?”
“Very … well,” he sighed. His voice—
I spun around, muscles tensing. A single glance was all it took to confirm what my ears had already told me: Adams was starting to lose it. We would have to get off the aliens’ course right away, give him time to recover. “Thunderhead—”
But it was too late. The circuit breakers snapped and gravity vanished … and Adams gasped for breath.
Kutzko shot past me toward Adams, braking himself with a hand on the helm chair as the other hand snatched the oxygen inhaler from its grip and jammed it against Adams’s face. “How far?” he snapped. “Come on, Adams—how far are we ahead of them?”
“Th—three mi … min … utes,” Adams panted.
Kutzko looked over the helm chair at me … and for the first time since I’d known him, there was genuine fear in his eyes. Fear … and resignation. “Three minutes,” he murmured. “Three minutes … and we’re all dead.”
Chapter 37
SO IT HAD COME: the moment I’d hoped and prayed could be avoided. If it is possible, let this cup pass me by … “Check the course reading,” I told Kutzko, my heart pounding in my ears as I fought against the sudden nausea of fear. “Make sure we really are in the aliens’ path.”
He twisted his head around, eyes searching out the proper readout … and with his attention away from me I moved quietly toward him, fingers dipping into my side pocket. The hypo I’d stolen from the lab on Spall was there, hard and cold and lethal. “Help me get Shepherd Adams out of the helm chair,” I said to Kutzko, pulling the hypo out and palming it in my right hand.
I don’t know why I expected to get away with it. In a single smooth motion Kutzko turned back toward me, his left hand taking over the grip on Adams’s oxygen inhaler as his right drew his needler from its holster. “Don’t try it, Gilead,” he said quietly. “Slapshot clip—I can knock that hypo out of your hand without even drawing blood.”
I took a deep breath. “It has to be done, Mikha.”
“I know.” Releasing the needler, he left it floating before him in midair as he reached into his own pocket. “But you’re not going to do it,” he said, holding up a hypo of his own. “I am.”
I clenched my teeth, frustration and anger and despair welling up within me. Another moment I’d seen coming, as far back as Kutzko’s last-minute insistence on coming along. I could have confronted him then, or any time since. But I’d put it off, irrationally hoping it wouldn’t have to be dealt with … and now, with less than three minutes remaining to us, I had lost forever the opportunity of doing this gently.
Now, in my last moments of life, I was going to have to hurt him. “This isn’t for you to do, Mikha,” I told him.
“Since when?” he countered. Retrieving the needler, he holstered it again. “I’m the professional shield, remember? It’s my job to risk death for other people.”
“I know,” I nodded. “But it’s a job you never should have taken … because you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.”
He snorted: derision, with a shading of nervousness beneath. “I thought you religious types believed that dying for your friends is the highest form of martyrdom,” he said sardonically.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “And so did your parents. But you don’t. Not really.”
His face tightened. “My parents have nothing to do with it—”
“They have everything to do with it,” I snapped. Two minutes to go … and it would take one of those minutes for the drug in my hypo to kill me. “You were raised in a religious household,” I told him. “Don’t try to deny it—the signs are all there. In the process you absorbed a lot of your parents’ principles … but it’s all just going through the motions. You don’t really believe in God, or even in a set of absolute standards that your actions will be measured against. You risk your life for Lord Kelsey-Ramos and others because your parents taught you it was noble to do so; that’s the only reason you came aboard this tug with a hypo in your pocket.” I locked eyes with him. “You’re living a lie, Mikha. I can’t let you die one, too.”
His face might have been carved from stone. “My past is none of your business,” he bit out; and for an instant I could see an echo of Aikman in his eyes. “And neither is why I do what I do.”
I looked at his face, read the determination there. A minute and a half to go … and I had run out of time. “In that case,” I sighed—
<
br /> And without warning I grabbed at the safety cap of my hypo, twisting it off. To your hands I commit my spirit … Locating the vein in my wrist, I jabbed.
I should have known it wouldn’t work. The hypo wasn’t even within five centimeters of the vein when the slapshot pellets slammed into my hand, sending the instrument spinning across the tug and leaving my fingers numb and tingling. “Mikha!—no!”
“Sorry, Gilead,” he said, his voice trembling but with that same iron firmness beneath it. “Right reasons or wrong, it’s still my job … and I’m going to do it.” Visibly setting his teeth, he released his grip on the needler and reached for his own hypo’s safety cap.
I don’t know why I jumped at him. It was a futile gesture—even if I could possibly have covered the distance between us in time, I knew full well there was no way I could overpower him. But the frustration flooding my soul would simply not allow me to stand passively by without one last attempt.
Or so I thought … but even as I flew through the air toward him—as he hesitated, then paused to raise a hand against my attack—a small fact that my back-brain had perhaps already noticed burst abruptly into conscious awareness. “Mikha—stop—” I all but screamed—
And broke off as the deck slammed up into my face and chest.
For a long moment I just lay there, temporarily paralyzed from the shock and from having had the wind knocked out of me. The butt of Kutzko’s needler lay within my view, as did his still untriggered hypo. Above me, I could hear the sounds of skin against cloth as Kutzko fought to regain his equilibrium in the suddenly returned gravity; the sounds of his breathing, and of his whispered curses.
From Adams, still in the helm chair, there was nothing. No gasping; no movement.
No breathing.
Slowly, carefully, I got my hands under me and pushed myself up off the deck. Another pair of hands slid under my armpits, helping me the rest of the way to my feet. “Adams,” Kutzko said, his voice a mixture of shock and horror.
I nodded, my head aching furiously from the fall. “I know. He’d stopped gasping—I didn’t even notice when.” Steeling myself, I turned to look.
He was dead, of course. The empty look on his face—the slackness of his muscles and eyes—it brought me back with a rush to the Bellwether and the man whose death I’d witnessed there. More than once I’d noted the way Adams and Zagorin had seemed to take on alien characteristics when in contact with the thunderheads; now, for the first time, I could see how those characteristics remained when everything that was human was gone. It was eerie and abhorrent, and it made me want to be sick.
And to cry.
Beside me, Kutzko took a shuddering breath. “How about you? You okay?”
“I think so. You?”
“Yeah,” he said, a quiet bitterness in his voice. His willingness to die, preempted … and once again the professional shield was forced to contemplate the limits of his power. “What now?—we go home?”
I blinked tears from my eyes. I had talked Adams into this trip—had talked him, for that matter, into involving himself with the thunderheads in the first place. My project, my ambitions, my errors. His cost. “We stay,” I told Kutzko with a sigh. “Thunderhead, if you can still hear me, please continue with what we’ve been doing: bring us around to a position three to four minutes further back toward Solitaire.”
There was a moment of hesitation, a noticeably slower reaction to the command than the living Adams/thunderhead combination had displayed. Perhaps it was merely surprise on the thunderhead’s part that we were going to keep on with it.
Surprise, or disappointment.
I turned back to Kutzko, to see the question on his face. “We have to keep trying,” I told him. “Otherwise his sacrifice will be for nothing.”
He held my eyes another moment, the question fading into accusation: that if I’d been ready to transmit when we first arrived, that sacrifice might not have been necessary. I braced myself for a fresh argument; but the emotional strain of the past few minutes had left him as weary as it had me, and he merely nodded and turned away. Wiping one last tear from my cheek, I walked back to the transmitter and resumed my tinkering.
The gravity vanished a few seconds later, and I was still making adjustments three and a half minutes after that when the red light flashed on and the thunderhead controlling Adams’s body—I couldn’t bring myself to think of it as a zombi—took us back onto Mjollnir drive. Across the tug Kutzko watched me, a dull bitterness slowly growing through his sense at my continued failure to finish what he still believed were serious preparations for talking with the aliens. “I think I’ll have it in another run,” I announced. “If you’ll just take us in one more time, thunderhead—?”
My sentence was cut off by the now-familiar crack of circuit breakers, and we were once again in zero-gee. I licked my lips, started to turn back to my transmitter—
And without any emotional sense whatsoever, Adams’s body rose from the helm chair and turned to face me. “You—Benedar,” he whispered.
A shiver of horror went up my back at the sound of that voice. There was nothing even remotely human about it, despite the fact that it came from a human throat. With the passing of Adams’s soul all the human elements were gone … and what was left was the closest thing to a pure thunderhead voice we were ever likely to hear. “Yes, thunderhead, what is it?” I managed to say.
The dead eyes gazed emotionlessly into my face. “Betrayer,” the thunderhead whispered. “You will die.”
And, moving awkwardly in the zero-gee, he started toward me.
Chapter 38
“DON’T FIRE!” I SNAPPED, holding a warning hand palm-outward toward Kutzko. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him hesitate, his needler still trained on Adams’s body, the fingers holding it bone-white at the knuckles. Never in eight years had I seen him as thoroughly rattled as he was now—and I could hardly blame him. “Don’t fire,” I repeated, fighting hard to keep down my own horror at the sight. “What are you going to do, kill him?”
His answer was a hiss between clenched teeth.
“I know,” I agreed. “Just stay cool—I’ll handle it.”
“Oh, good,” he breathed. “Mind telling me what’s going on that you need to handle?”
I cocked an eyebrow at Adams’s dead face. “You want to tell him, thunderhead, or should I?”
“You have lied to us,” the alien whisper came again. The body, still slow and clumsy, was nevertheless getting too close for comfort, and I found myself moving backwards in response. “You have betrayed us. You will die.”
“How could I have betrayed you?” I asked. “Haven’t I done exactly what I said I’d do?”
The thunderhead ignored the question, as I’d rather expected him to. Logic and prior agreements were clearly not in the forefront of his mind at the moment. “You will die,” he repeated.
I clenched my teeth, fighting to stir up some emotional energy. The battle was over, and I’d won—the thunderheads’ fury was all the proof I needed of that—and with the victory all the drive of the past week had drained into deep fatigue. For the moment I honestly didn’t care whether the thunderheads killed me or not.
But if I died now, Kutzko would die with me. For his sake, I had to see this through to the very end. “Has what I’ve accomplished made things any worse for you?” I demanded, forcing myself to look directly at the dead eyes. “Or have you forgotten that your existence as a race is directly dependent on the Invaders’ own survival?”
“You will die—”
“Enough of that!” I snapped. “Answer my question—or else admit that you never meant to cooperate with me in the first place. That you intended all along to sabotage my efforts.”
“There was no sabotage.”
“Not yet, no,” I growled. “But there would have been, wouldn’t there, just as soon as I asked you what I should say to them?”
There was no answer. “Get it moving, Gilead,” Kutzko said, his voice tig
ht. “If you don’t talk him back to the helm in a couple more minutes we’ll be smashed into powder.”
“We’ve got all the time in the world,” I told him evenly. “The fleet’s not behind us anymore—they’re angling away from Solitaire.”
He stared at me. “They’re what?”
“They’ve chosen to live,” I said, my eyes steady on Adams’s face. “The only question now is whether or not the thunderheads will be smart enough to do the same.”
The thunderhead hissed. “You bargain for your life?”
“Bargain?” I shook my head. “No. The bargain’s already been made and is being carried out. I simply point out that killing us won’t gain you anything at all.”
“It will gain revenge.”
“Revenge for what?” I snarled, suddenly tired of thunderhead singlemindedness. “For the failure of your grand scheme to have us destroy your enemies? It would never have worked—you should have known that years ago. Human beings aren’t brainless insects you can manipulate without consequences—we hate and we resent and we fear, and no matter what you did with us, sooner or later we would have wiped Spall clean of you.”
I broke off, hearing my voice ringing through the tug and abruptly realizing I’d been shouting. I took a ragged breath, forcing calmness over the frustration and anger and weariness. “You have just two choices left,” I said quietly. “You can have us as mediators and, perhaps, as willing allies if you can persuade us that your side is in the right … or you can have us join the Invaders as your enemies. There are no other possibilities.”
For a long minute Adams’s body floated motionless in the middle of the tug. Totally dead, now, with even its alien life gone from it. “What’s happening?” Kutzko asked.
“He’s gone to discuss it with the others, I’d guess,” I said. I focused on his face … “You’ve figured it out.”
He gave me a lopsided smile; and from his sense I could see that one of my worries, at least, could be laid to rest: that he didn’t resent me for having kept him ignorant of my plans. “I may be slow, but I’m not totally stupid,” he said wryly. “Cute—and nicely devious, in all directions. I’d have thought that kind of thing beyond your talents.”
