The Dark Imbalance (37 page)

Roche studied the tracking screen. According to the display, Alta was on the move again. She was heading for the airlock that Haid suspected she would go for, but Roche wasn’t going to be able to beat her there.

She considered calling Haid, but then thought better of it. Hopefully he would see what was going on. He was making good time toward his airlock; even if they didn’t make it in time, there was a chance he would be able to intercept Alta out on the hull.

Fifty minutes,
Roche thought to herself. In half an hour, the entire ship would be gone. Unless they could find a way off the ship, or someone to rescue them, they would die with it.

Part of her didn’t mind that at all. The Crescend himself had stated it quite bluntly the last time they spoke:
Your role is played out.
As long as she took Alta Ansourian with her, she might be happy with that....

The woman was also making good time, unfortunately. Hoping to distract her, Roche activated the open channel connecting the suits.

“Alta? Can you hear me?”

“I hear you.” The reply was immediate. “And I can see you, too, Roche! But you can’t stop me! You’re too late! There’s no turning back now.”

The woman’s voice was feverish, breathless. There was a raw edge to it. Roche couldn’t tell if it was fear or determination— or perhaps both.

“What have you done to the engines, Alta?”

“The matter/antimatter mix is in disequilibrium,” the woman replied. “The mix will become more and more unstable until it spirals out of control, and then the ship will blow. Trust me—you can’t stop it; there isn’t enough time.”

“But there is enough time to get away?”

“You can get out of the ship, Roche, but you’ll never escape!” The mockery in her voice angered Roche, and the image of Maii’s helpless form with its outstretched arm returned.

“
Why
did you kill them, Alta?”

“To stop them from interfering, of course.”

“But Maii was just a
child.
She never did you any harm!”

There was a pause before Alta spoke again, and when she did her voice was steeped in uncertainty.

“Those were my orders,” she said. “I couldn’t disobey.”

“
Whose
orders, Alta?” Roche pressed, anger giving way to curiosity. “Why are you doing this?”

More assured now, Alta replied: “Because if it hadn’t been for you, he wouldn’t be dead now!”

“Who? Your
father
?”

“You killed him, Roche!” The hatred in her voice was intense and frightening. “You took him away from me!”

“What are you talking about! You
saw
Jans kill your father! You were there—”

“Lies that you planted!” Alta’s voice was raised to a shout now. “But I know the truth! He showed me. He showed me your
lies.
Justice will prevail!”

The edge to her words unsettled Roche. There was a sense of desperation to them that suggested Alta was beyond reasoning with. She believed what she was saying; she was convinced Roche was responsible for her father’s death. Why, though, Roche didn’t know. Maybe it was simply because she was the nearest available target for reprisal...

Alta was much closer now. The air in the warren became thick with smoke as Roche neared the airlock. She passed emergency doors that had failed to shut. Some hung loose, half open, as though they had changed their mind in the act of closing. Without Kajic to run the ship, even the most basic systems were gradually running down. The rumble of complaining engines became steadily louder as she ran.

“Who showed you, Alta?” said Roche.

The woman said nothing.

“Alta?”

A loud explosion knocked Roche off her feet and sent air whipping along the corridor.

“The airlock,” she gasped in the sudden hurricane, thinking:
We’re open to vacuum
!

She scrambled to her feet, hurried along the corridor and around a corner to find the source of the hurricane: a blackened breach where the outer door of an emergency airlock opened onto space. The inner door hung invitingly open. Roche approached it cautiously, wary of a trap.

Then, she glimpsed a movement: a suit much like hers had just stepped out onto the hull.

Roche didn’t hesitate. Using every joule at her suit’s disposal, she jumped through the gap and after the fleeing woman. Even if Alta was armed, Roche could take a direct hit or two before her suit failed. And if she could catch her and somehow overpower her before she jumped ship....

Upon exiting the hatch, Alta dropped and rolled, bringing her rifle up to cover anyone following her. Roche burst out of the airlock, only a thin veil of artificial gravity preventing her from rebounding off into space. Alta’s first shot missed. Her second caught Roche full on the chest as she threw herself forward. The recoil of the shot knocked her to one side with her ears ringing, but she didn’t hesitate. She surged forward again.

Alta kicked back to avoid the charge and scrambled to her feet, her gun coming up again. The third shot took Roche in the shoulder, spinning her around. Alarms in her suit flashed red, and the acrid smell of smoke burned at her nostrils.

“
Die!
” The voice came over the open line as Alta swung the rifle’s sight up to her eye, training it on Roche.

Roche knew she had only one more chance. Ignoring the pain in her hip, she dropped to a crouch, forcing Alta to readjust her aim; then, taking advantage of the split second she had gained, she hurled herself forward—

She heard Alta’s gasp at the same instant the energy bolt grazed her helmet. Unable to stop herself, Roche lunged awkwardly forward, colliding with Haid as he took Alta from behind, swinging her around and down onto the hull. The impact cost him his grip on the woman.

As both he and Roche tumbled backward, Roche saw Alta regain her footing and collect the rifle that Haid had knocked from her hands.

“Quickly!” Roche called.

They were barely on their feet when the rifle discharged. She felt the edge of the energy bolt that took Haid in the back, forcing him forward into Roche and sending them sprawling across the hull again.

Haid came to a halt, totally inert, a meter or so away from where Roche had fallen, a massive smoking scar stretching across his suit’s backplate.

“Ameidio!” She heard the panic in her voice. The lack of response from the ex-mercenary filled her with dread. The bolt had taken out the suit’s servomotor control; she wasn’t even sure whether his immobility resulted from death or a simple inability to move.

She looked over to Alta again, saw the woman lifting the rifle once more to aim at her.

“I’m going to kill you, Roche.” There was no longer any hysteria in Alta’s voice, just a quiet determination.

Roche wanted to feel angry, but everything seemed to have been knocked out of her. All she could feel as she sat there, her friend lying prostrate on the hull before her, was a terrible exhaustion. All the fight went out of her; only acceptance remained as she stared down the barrel of Alta’s rifle, and waited....

A single rifle shot flickered through the vacuum, taking Alta at the weakest point of her suit between chest and neck plates. The woman jerked upright and staggered backward, trying to stanch the flow of air out the broken seal. Roche caught a glimpse of her terrified expression before the water vapor sucked out of her lungs plastered ice across the inside of her faceplate. She kicked spasmodically, staggering backward.

Roche heard the woman’s cries over the suit’s intercom,
“
Master
!” The words were carried on molecules of freezing air. “I have failed you!”

Roche turned to look at the figure who had fired, just in time to see him fire again at Alta Ansourian. The woman’s suit stiffened, then went limp. It fell to the hull with a thud.

The sudden silence in Roche’s helmet was broken only by the sounds of her own breathing.

* * *

It was a few moments before Cane spoke. He seemed to be waiting to make sure Alta wasn’t going to get up again.

“Morgan?”

She watched him striding over to where she still sat; then his hands were taking hers and helping her to her feet.

“Morgan?” he repeated. “Are you all right?”

“I thought...” she began, before realizing she didn’t know
what
she had thought. She hadn’t believed he was dead, but she had been so taken up with pursuing Alta that she hadn’t stopped to consider just what
had
happened to him.

“The explosion threw me through the blast doors before they could close,” he explained quickly. “I realized it must have been Alta and so went after her.”

“But the suit,” said Roche. “It didn’t register on the tracking display.”

“I disabled the beacon,” he said. “It was the only way I could get the advantage of surprise over her.”

Roche was still very much shaken by everything that had happened, but she saw a flaw in Cane’s explanation. “That would have taken time. How—?”

“Time is something we
don’t
have right now, Morgan. Look.”

He pointed above her. Only then did Roche look up and see the Hum ship. All spines and strange glassy towers, it looked like a nightmarish sea anemone magnified a thousand times. It was enormous, ominous. Behind it, a faint glow marked where the ring surrounding Sol System’s primary obscured the stars. Strange, pale sheets of lightning flickered in slow motion through the glow, lending the ship a surreal backdrop.

“How...?”

“It must have slow-jumped,” he said. A rumble came through the
Ana Vereine
’s hull. “Quick, Morgan. Use your thrusters and jump over to D nacelle.” He pointed. “That one.”

She faced him, puzzled.

“Just
do
it,” he insisted.

“I’m not leaving Ameidio.” She nodded toward her friend’s lifeless form. His suit was immobile, but she still didn’t know whether or not he was dead.

“Understood,” he said. “I’ll slave his suit to mine and follow you over. Now go!”

His urgent tone overrode her confusion and she did as he asked, though minus the usual grace with which she might have piloted the suit. Limited by her lack of depth through just one eye, as well as the lack of implants, she took the suit awkwardly up and out of the drive section’s artificial gravity well and to the one enclosing the nacelle Cane had indicated. She resisted the disorienting change in gravity at first, then relaxed and let it hold her.

When she had adjusted, she was standing on a patch of hull apparently slightly above where she had been before. From this new vantage point, she could see a reddish glow clinging to the drive ports, the sole visual sign of the ship’s impending destruction.

She looked around, expecting Cane to be following, but saw him land instead on another nacelle some distance away, Haid’s suit following like a ball on a string.

“Cane?’

“I’m sorry, Morgan.” There was something different in his tone—something of the Cane that had rescued her from the Disciples. “But this is where we part, I’m afraid.”

Roche felt a wave of nausea wash over her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Really, Morgan—think.”

She did, and it hurt. “It was you Alta was talking about,” she said softly.
“
You’re
her master.”

“You sound surprised,” he said.

“No,” she said. She was beyond surprise; she felt utterly dead inside. “Disappointed.”

“I’m only doing as my nature dictates,” he said.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. She was remembering what Haid had said about Alta being unresponsive, and that Cane had spent a lot of time talking to her. That was when it must have happened. With a veil of suspicion still hanging over him, he would not have been able to move as she had. He had bent her will to his; he had made her his puppet.

The silence on the open link between them seemed to hum with repressed energy.

“It was all lies,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Your amnesia, saving me on Sciacca’s World—everything. It was all just lies.”

“Not just lies, Morgan. But lies in a game—a game between the Box and myself, between my kind and the Crescend.”

“What about Inderdeep Jans?’ said Roche. “Why—?”

“All strategic games require sacrifices, Morgan,” he said. “But don’t think I didn’t feel her pain. It touched me deeply, as did the deaths of the five you killed on the
Phlegethon.
For a group mind, the loss of even one component is painful. But you couldn’t appreciate that, could you? Coming as you do from such a hapless and disparate race...”

“A group mind?’

“The
irikeii
glimpsed it in the black speck at the heart of me and Jelena Heidik. You saw it too, when you looked at us through a reave. There’s more to us than meets the mental eye.”

“So you
are
linked?” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “Everything I have seen and experienced was shared with my siblings.”

“Another lie.”

“All of them were necessary,” he said. “It was part of the game.”

Roche felt herself reel. “But why didn’t you just kill me? Why have you kept me alive? Why all of
this
?”

“Because we want you to know the reason for it all.” She could almost feel the coldness in his voice. “We want you to be aware of the consequences of your
decision
.” He emphasized the word deliberately, almost viciously. “We suspected from the beginning that the High Caste would become involved. Coming into contact with the Box when I awoke confirmed it. I watched it as closely as it watched me. I didn’t guess that it was inside you, but I knew you were connected, that you were involved. You were the key, and the Crescend was the lock. When you asked me about killing me, and when you told Trezise that High Humans wouldn’t help, I knew that the lock had been turned.”

She wasn’t entirely following him, but that didn’t seem to matter at this time.

“I let you live,” she said weakly. “I gave your race another chance.”

He raised the assault rifle.

“That was a big mistake, I’m afraid, Morgan,” he said, and fired.

She took a step back by reflex, but the bolt didn’t come anywhere near her. Instead it struck the nacelle’s support girders. She couldn’t believe he had missed; it had to have been deliberate. He was tormenting her, perhaps, before finally killing her.