Prophets (35 page)

“The lifeboat's going to try and land us,” Kugara said, undoing the straps holding her to the acceleration couch. “So much for Tsoravitch's communications and landing protocols.”

She pulled herself over to the console by the door, hoping to get some feedback on the state of the
Eclipse,
how fast they were going, and the integrity of the lifeboat. The little display wasn't that accommodating, giving her little more than the fact that inside was oxygen, outside was hard vacuum.

Not that she could have done anything if the lifeboat was damaged. The lifeboat was going to burn off its velocity hitting atmosphere until the boat was slowed enough for the drag chutes to deploy. If either the shielding or the chutes had been damaged, their reentry would be painful and short.

She looked up at Nickolai and realized that even if the lifeboat worked perfectly, his ride would still be painful and short. He'd been severely beaten by the two-G escape from the
Eclipse.
If this thing hit atmosphere, it was going to go in ass-first and pull a lot more than two Gs deceleration, and it was going to be a hell of a lot rougher.

“I'm going to have to get you into one of the crash couches.”

Nickolai laughed. “You should leave me here. I'm not going to fit in a human cradle.”

“Maybe if you were bound to the right wall.”

“Leave me here.” Nickolai spat, and an oblong glob of blood and saliva went on a tumbling slow-motion odyssey toward the nominal ceiling.

Kugara pulled herself down to one of the emergency panels under the folded-up cot and ejected the medkit.
Probably going to need this when we land, if we survive.
“Do that, and we reenter the atmosphere, if your skull isn't turned to jelly slamming into the bulkhead, your internal organs are probably going to be perforated on the splinters that used to be the right side of your rib cage.”

“So? I betrayed you all. Why should you care what happens to me?”

“Your damned Angel has too much blood on her hands already to just let someone die out of spite.” She pulled out a cutter from the emergency medkit. It was designed to liberate victims from damaged environment suits or, in a pinch, more substantial wreckage. The shiny fifteen-centimeter crystalline blade was designed to vibrate through most inorganic materials and leave flesh intact.

She pulled herself up in front of the tiger and said, “Don't make me regret this.”

She started with his legs, slicing through the sealant tape. The knife hummed in her hands as she traced the outlines of his thigh and his calf. The tape came free in small segments, which she plucked from the air and pressed to the wall. Fortunately for Nickolai, the sealant tape only bonded to synthetic material, so she didn't pull free patches of fur with the tape. She worked her way up to his waist and for the first time found herself disconcerted by the fact that Nickolai didn't wear any clothing.

His balls are as furry as the rest of him.
She had to snort to keep herself from an uncharacteristic giggle.

“Are you all right?” Nickolai asked. His voice was still slurred from the blood pooling in his mouth.

You're asking me?
“I'm fine.”

She wondered if she should check the oxy levels in the lifeboat. Not that it mattered; either there was enough and the recycler was working or they were screwed.
More things are getting to me than lack of air.

She kept cutting, freeing his torso, pulling long strips off his chest and abdomen, finally his neck. He floated free of the wall, arms bound behind him. She grabbed his shoulder and maneuvered so she was behind him. When she did, he said, “My arm's a construct.”

Oh, shit.
She had completely forgotten about Nickolai's arm. She placed her hand against the tape wrapping his right arm. The tape was a rigid shell in the shape of his arm. It had also changed color. The normal tape was a matte gray color, but it shifted toward green as it bonded to something. Even in the ruddy emergency lighting, she could tell the tape on Nickolai's right arm had shifted all the way to the fluorescent green of a fully bonded seal.

The damn stuff was tougher than most steel alloys. Even if she freed that arm, there was no way he could move it.

She stared at it and said, “I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking.”

Nickolai shook his head and spat some more blood. “It doesn't matter. Just don't use that tool against it.”

“Yes.” The cutting knife would leave flesh intact, but could probably slice Nickolai's cybernetic arm in half. At least it could do a lot more damage than the sealant tape already had. She carefully cut along his left arm, avoiding coming near his right and the hardened tape.

It took a few minutes, but she freed his left arm. He swung both arms in front of him, the right arm immobile in its impromptu cast. She pushed a little away, giving him some room. She had some fear that he might turn on her. He was the reason they were in this situation, by his own admission a traitor.

Though she wondered if that was the right word. Traitor? They both were mercenaries. In the end, their loyalty was to whoever hired them. Nickolai may have broken a BMU contract, but did that carry the weight of that word?

Nickolai pushed against the wall with his left hand and rotated to face her. He extended that hand toward her and asked, “May I have that tool?”

Kugara wondered a moment about the knife's usefulness as a weapon, then berated herself. Nickolai was deadlier unarmed than she would be with most hand-to-hand weapons. If he wanted to attack her, he would have done so already.

She handed him the knife.

Nickolai wrapped his hand around the handle and held up the blade, staring at it. In his grip, the blade seemed tiny, almost a surgical instrument. She watched as his jaw clenched, and his blood-smeared lips pulled back in a silent snarl revealing his huge canines.

He lifted his right arm up, and inserting the blade at a shallow angle, he started to cut. The blade sank deeper under the sealant tape than it should have, and Nickolai winced.

He didn't stop cutting.

He worked the blade down the length of the bindings, from the shoulder, along the bulge of his bicep, across the elbow, down the forearm. Liquid beaded along the cut, spheres of clear fluid more viscous than water floating free of the wound.

Even though it was artificial, the way Nickolai worked was too much like someone skinning themselves alive. She whispered, “Stop,” but he either didn't hear her or he ignored her.

Under the pseudoflesh of Nickolai's right arm were muscles and bones and nerves; the bones metallic, the muscles some synthetic polymer, and the nerves filaments of gold or some other nonreactive metal. They weren't alive, but they mimicked life too well. The polymer muscles glistened wetly under the emergency light, sliding and swelling as he moved his arm.

When he was done, his right arm was flayed like a holographic medical display. Kugara couldn't stop staring at it.

“Why?” she asked him.

“It was necessary,” Nickolai said.

“Does it hurt?”

Nickolai flexed the fingers on his right hand, and she could see the tendons sliding along his wrist. “The neural feedback shut down about halfway in.”

She opened the medkit and pulled out some heavy-duty bandaging spray.

“You don't need to—”

“Hell I don't. Even if you don't feel that, I know that wasn't designed to be exposed to the air.” She grabbed his right wrist, near the hand where it was still wrapped in fur and something that felt like skin. He allowed her to pull it forward. She sprayed the can onto the faux wound that was Nickolai's arm. The spray dried white and flexible, giving his arm the character of a well-defined corpse.

She let his arm go, and he bent it, flexing his hand again. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, right.” She took handfuls of hardened sealant tape still attached to ragged clumps of almost-flesh, and shoved them into a cabinet so the debris wouldn't bounce around the cabin and kill them during reentry.

The computer voice spoke. “Two hours until atmospheric insertion.”

“Now that you're free,” Kugara told him, “Help me rig an acceleration couch that will fit your oversized body.”

Surviving the worst will always complicate the matter.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.

—FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

Everything had been going as smoothly as could be expected, the bridge crew making periodic announcements over the PA system while Parvi sat at her station obsessively nursing as much efficiency as she could out of the damaged damping coil. Things were going better than she had a right to expect, the engines were already down to 50 percent ahead of her projection.

Then every meter on the console before her redlined. The power spike was sudden, and she lost all readout from the damping coil at the same time the emergency klaxons announced a hull breach.

She slammed her hand on the PA broadcast and shouted, “Everyone to the nearest lifeboat/cabin now! We've had a critical overload.”

Before she finished her sentence, the drives blew. She could see the displays go critical in the split second before the explosions. Everything lurched out from underneath her as every display went dead, plunging the bridge into darkness.

More explosions, and Parvi could feel her ass drifting out of the seat in the darkness.

She grabbed the dead console blindly, trying to keep from drifting away.
Hull breach, lost gravity, how long before we're breathing vacuum?

After a moment, emergency lights flickered on around the bridge, bathing them in a red glow. “What the fuck just happened?” Wahid called from the far side of the bridge. Now that there was some light, he kicked off the wall, back toward the console.

“The drives overloaded,” Parvi said, not quite believing it herself.

“Did the damping coil cause it?” Mosasa asked.

Parvi shook her head. “The spike happened before it failed.”

“Someone tached in,” Tsoravitch whispered.

“That's bullshit,” Wahid said, pulling back into his seat. “They'd have to be right on top of us. You heard Bill.”

Parvi looked down at the pilot's station, and even under emergency power, all the displays were dead. She tried calling up details on the drives, the maneuvering jets, life support, and structural integrity. She couldn't get anything except the internal diagnostics of the bridge itself. “I can't communicate with the ship's systems. Everything in the pilot's station is cut off . . .”

“Wahid?” Mosasa snapped.

“I can't raise the bridge's nav console.”

“Tsoravitch?”

“It's dead.
Everything's dead!
” She slammed her fists against the console in front of her.
“Nothing.”

Parvi stared at Tsoravitch and felt the same edge of panic herself.

“Snap out of it,” Mosasa said. Parvi heard desperation in his voice that went deeper than Tsoravitch's panic. His voice grew brittle as he yelled at her. “We need the external sensors on-line, and that's not going to happen with you breaking down!”

Before Parvi could intervene, Wahid said, “Listen.”

The bridge fell silent. After a few seconds, a sound resonated through the skin of the
Eclipse
, a distant hammer blow echoing though the whole vessel. Another few seconds and the sound repeated.

It took a moment for Parvi to realize what was happening.

“The lifeboats,” Parvi said to Wahid.

“What?”

“The drive failure caused enough damage to trigger the emergency systems to abandon ship.” Another distant hammer blow. “The
Eclipse
is launching the lifeboats. Everyone locked in the cabins is being evacuated.”

That meant everyone except Bill and the people on the bridge.

Tsoravitch sucked in a ragged breath and asked. “What could make that happen?”

“A catastrophic failure,” Mosasa said quietly. “Complete loss of shipwide life support, imminent structural failure, fire, explosion—”

Another hammer blow, and a slight lurch felt through the floor.

Mosasa pushed away from the bridge console and pulled himself toward the wall. Once there, he began pulling open access panels.

“What are you doing?” Tsoravitch asked.

“A failure in the data lines to the main console,” Mosasa said, “We shouldn't have lost the feed from the rest of the
Eclipse
.”

“Tsoravitch,” he shouted, “get over here. I'm going to need your help.”

Another hammer blow, and another lurch.

Parvi could picture the lifeboats bursting from the skin of the
Eclipse
, like parasitic larvae burrowing out of the flesh of their host.

Tsoravitch pulled herself over to Mosasa, and the two of them began digging into the guts of the bridge's data network.

Wahid turned to look at Parvi. “Think our boss saw this one coming in his AI crystal ball?”

Parvi shook her head as another hammer blow echoed through the bridge. This one seemed farther away, and the lurch that followed weaker. “No,” she told him. “I don't think he had any idea.”