The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order (81 page)

The
bulk of the rifles made Sib awkward. He missed his hold and carried past the
lift. Floundering, he tried to recover, but his momentum took him down the
passage. The suit’s humidity indicators climbed as he sweated and gasped.

Davies
caught him. He gave Sib a look like one of Angus’ glares, angry or
contemptuous, and steered him back to the lift.

“Thanks,”
Sib murmured, nearly panting.

Covering
Nick with his handgun, Davies guided Sib into the car and keyed the door shut.

Nick’s
snort seemed to fill the inside of Sib’s helmet with scorn. “I told you to pay
attention. This is getting ridiculous. If you navigate out there as well as you
do in here, you’d better cut my arms free and give me that rifle right now. You
might not get another chance.”

“Stop
it, Nick,” Davies snapped. “If he weren’t going with you, we wouldn’t let you
do this at all. You would still be tied up, and whatever happens to
Soar
would
happen without you.”

Nick
gave a short laugh like a burst of static, but he didn’t retort.

As the
lift slid upward, Davies activated the intercom. “We’re at the airlock,” he
reported. No doubt Angus already knew this: he could see it on his maintenance
status readouts. Apparently Davies kept talking to control his own tension. “I’ll
wait in the lift until they’re off the ship. And I’m keeping the gun. If Nick
tries anything in the lock, I might be able to stop him.”

Again
Nick laughed roughly.

“Sib?”
Morn put in unexpectedly. “Can you hear me?” Her voice sounded anxious through
the speakers; too personal to be meant for him.

“Yes,
Morn.”

He
might have been choking. The pressure in his suit still felt high. He resisted
an impulse to lower it further.

“Sib,”
Morn replied as if she were in a hurry; as if she, too, feared freezing. “I
just wanted to say thank you. I don’t know why you think you’re not brave. You
help me when I need it. It’s never easy — it wouldn’t be easy if you were crazy
with courage. But you do it anyway.”

Spare
me, Sib thought. Misery kept him mute.

“As far
as I’m concerned,” Morn finished, “that’s better than being brave.”

“Please,”
Nick put in cheerfully. “Let’s not get all mushy here. This is supposed to be
fun.”

Davies
snarled a low curse, but Nick ignored him.

“Two
minutes,” Angus announced. “Get in the airlock. We’re coming up on that
asteroid. If you miss it, I’ll have to double back.”

“Right.”
Davies thumbed the intercom and began entering codes to open the doors between
the lift and the airlock. While the doors slid aside, he turned to Sib.

He
showed Sib his scalpel, then tucked it into a utility pouch on the belt of Sib’s
suit. “In case you don’t feel like lasering that tape off his arms,” he
explained.

Once
again Sib nodded invisibly inside his helmet.

“Come
on,” Nick commanded. Bumping a shoulder against the wall of the car for thrust,
he pushed himself through the doors.

In
spite of himself, Sib hesitated. He knew too well what he was getting into.
This was his last chance to change his mind: right here, before the airlock
sealed and started decompression. He could free Nick’s arms, hand Nick the
rifle; he could stay with Davies while Nick carried his lifelong hatred of
Sorus Chatelaine to its logical conclusion.

He
could avoid the cold dark and the memory of his own raw screams. Leave someone
else to strike out at the Amnion for the harm they’d done to Ciro and Morn and
his whole family.

You do
it anyway. That’s better than being brave.

Certainly
it was better than begging for mercy and being refused over and over again
while the people he loved died or worse because he couldn’t defend them.

“Say
good-bye to Mikka and Ciro for me,” he told Davies. “I’m glad I knew them.”

Davies
didn’t say, You’ll see them again. We’ll get you back. Maybe he didn’t believe
it.

Swallowing
terror, Sib coasted into the airlock.

Angus’
voice spattered in his ears. “Do it now.”

At once
Davies turned to the control panel. Servos pulled the doors shut with a solid,
interlocking thunk; sealed Sib alone with Nick. A moment later the EVA suits
distended as pumps sucked air out of the lock.

“Don’t
look so pitiful,” Nick gibed. He couldn’t see Sib’s face, any more than Sib
could see his: he was talking to be heard on the bridge. “This is going to be
the goddamn highlight of your life. From here on all you have to do is cover my
back. They’ll think you’re a fucking hero, even if the only thing you really do
is fill your suit with shit.”

“God
damn it, Nick —” Morn began. And Davies barked, “Back off, you bastard! If he
doesn’t cut your arms loose, you’re still helpless.”

But Sib
didn’t care what Nick said. All that mattered now was the outer seal of the
airlock — the last thin doors between him and black space. They eased aside
when all the air was gone, opening
Trumpet
to the deadly, imponderable
rush of the swarm.

He saw
midnight outside. Unseen shapes and ineffable seething crowded the dark. A
momentary glare of static limned the rock Angus had chosen with strange fire.
Then the light vanished, making the darkness deeper.

“Let’s
go
,”
Nick breathed urgently.

Awkward
because of the guns he carried, Sib turned on his suit’s headlamps. Around one
gloved fist he wrapped the end of the line which Davies had attached to Nick’s
bonds.

“OK,”
he croaked out.

At once
Nick cocked his hips, fired his jets.

Gusts
of gas and the line of tape pulled Sib like cargo from the airlock into the
absolute cold of the asteroid swarm.

 _

 _

He could scarcely remember
what happened next. The racket of his pulse and the labour of his breathing
must have deafened his brain; fear must have blinded it. Momentary fragments
came back to him — drifting in the bottomless dark, pressure on the line he
gripped for his life, Nick’s harsh voice — and then faded again; he couldn’t
retain them. Nothing stayed in his head except the echo of old screams until
after he’d spent half an hour clinging to the rock at Nick’s side, anchored by
compression pitons while he watched the elaborate aftermath of the Lab’s
destruction flare and blaze like a distant light show.

Nick
must have pulled him to the asteroid: he couldn’t have managed that on his own.
I kept on screaming until I lost my voice
. Apparently he’d cut Nick’s
bonds, surrendered one of the guns: Nick’s arms cradled the laser rifle in
front of him, and the tape was gone.
I thought as long as I could hear
myself I wouldn’t go insane
. Probably someone — Nick or a voice from
Trumpet
— had told him there were pitons in his utility pouch.
Afraid I might be
turned into an Amnioni just by watching it done to my family
. Otherwise how
would he have known?

None
of it had to happen
.

On the
other hand, he didn’t need anyone to explain the light. He seemed to understand
it by direct intuition, as if the raw glare and glow of coruscation from deep
within the swarm found echoes among his recollections of dismay. He’d been
Captain’s
Fancy
’s data first: he had at least a theoretical understanding of
super-light proton cannon. And he could easily imagine what kind of nuclear
furnace had powered Deaner Beckmann’s domain. The forces devouring the Lab
wouldn’t burn themselves out until every attainable particle of matter had been
cracked open and consumed. Fed with static generated by the complex boil of the
swarm, those forces crackled in the pit of the dark like lightning and St. Elmo’s
fire gone mad. Blast after blast, light etched the asteroids in the distance
until they seemed to writhe, hurt like living tissue by the fury they absorbed.
And after each blast, lingering pressure in his optic nerves left him utterly
blind.

I
saw everything. If they were just being killed, I would have gone back inside
and tried to fight for them. But I saw them injected.

Recollection
froze him like the total cold of the void.

Trumpet
was long gone. Her voices in his helmet had broken up and then
faded some time ago; he wasn’t sure when.

But
Soar
was coming. If she survived the havoc she’d made of Deaner Beckmann’s
installation —

“Jesus,”
Nick breathed as if he were proud of himself. “Isn’t that something? I’ve never
seen anything like it.

“I’ve
been waiting for this all my life. I’m going to light a fire like that in her
heart. When she dies, she’ll consider hell an improvement. “

Nick
was crazy: Sib knew that. No matter how totally they took Sorus Chatelaine by
surprise, one or even two laser rifles simply could not do a ship
Soar’s
size all the damage Nick hungered for. Nevertheless Sib didn’t argue. He no
longer cared what Nick said. Deep inside himself, he concentrated on holding
his thoughts and memories and actions together so that finally — for perhaps
the first time — he could choose what happened to him.

His
life had come to this. There was nothing else left.

After
watching the Lab’s lambent, unsteady ruin for a few more minutes, Sib asked, “When
will we feel the shock wave?”

“We won’t.”
Nick was sure. Over the years he’d claimed any number of times that he could do
algorithms in his head. “Captain Thermo-pile was right about that. There’s too
much rock in the way — too much inertia. It’ll absorb the actual concussion. We
can relax, enjoy the show.” He might have been talking about some naive bit of
theatre.

“What
about
Soar
?” Sib pursued. “She must have been sitting right on top of
that blast. What did it do to her?”

Nick
turned toward Sib. His headlamps shed smears of refraction down Sib’s polarised
faceplate.

“Sib
Mackern,” he snorted, “you never fail to amaze me. You are so fucking
slow
.
Don’t you get it? Has this whole sequence of events” — he sneered the words — “gone
over your head?

“She
didn’t need to use a super-light proton beam. She could have hit Beckmann with
matter cannon and not made it so absolutely fucking obvious who was doing it.
But then his power plant wouldn’t have blown.

“She
used her damn proton gun because she wanted that explosion. She wanted the
shock wave.

“Sure,
it’s going to scrub out our particle trace. It’ll erase every decipherable
emission in the whole sector.” His voice was heavy with contempt for his
companion. “But she doesn’t need to track us. She knows our course. All she has
to do is clean the garbage out of the way and come after us.

“That’s
what this blast is for. If she burns just right, she can ride the wave front —
let it clear the way and carry her along at maybe five or six times
Trumpet’s
velocity. Of course, she’ll have to brake as the front dissipates, do her own
work after that. But in the meantime she’ll cover a lot of distance.”

As if
Sorus Chatelaine’s ingenuity pleased him, he finished, “She probably gained two
hours in the first ten seconds after she fired that damn cannon.”

Oh,
God, Sib panted to himself. New fears crawled around his abdomen. “You mean —”

“That’s
right,” Nick jeered. “She’s going to get here long before you figure out how to
be as brave as that shit-crazy bitch” — he didn’t need to say Morn’s name — “thinks
you are.”

Light
throbbed and glowered in the heart of the swarm. Secondary discharges traced
jagged lines from rim to rim of Sib’s vision, defining impossible horizons. The
aftermath of the Lab’s destruction appeared to be generating its own coriolus
forces, mounting in savagery instead of diminishing —

Soar
might come into range at any time.

“In
that case,” Sib said thinly, “you’d better tell me what we’re going to do.”

The
sudden vehemence of Nick’s reaction nearly pulled him free of his anchor. “
You
aren’t going to do
anything
,” he rasped inside Sib’s helmet. “You’re
a self-righteous, mutineering asshole, and I’m sick to death of you. I’m sick
of you and Vector and Mikka and all you bastards who think you have a right to
do anything except take orders. I will
fry
you before I let you
interfere with me.

“Are
you listening to me? You can hang on to that little squirt gun. If you want,
you can stick it in your mouth and suck on it. But Sorus Chatelaine is
mine
.
You are going to stay right where you fucking are and keep out of my fucking
way.”

Sib’s
rifle pointed at Nick’s chest. He didn’t want to be killed here, now, while unresolved
fears filled his head, and he could still hear himself screaming. The idea that
Nick intended to spare him closed around his heart like the cold of space.

Nick
didn’t want him to do anything. He could wait where he was while
Soar
passed
by. Stay alive: stay out of Sorus Chatelaine’s hands. If
Trumpet
came
back for him, he would know mercy at last.