This Day All Gods Die (85 page)

The vibration of fear in his voice sawed against his impulse to resist. But it wasn't the hypo that scared him.

"Do it," Davies demanded in panic.

Hesitantly Vector removed one of his gloves and tucked it into his belt. His hand seemed to drift away from him of its own accord, extending itself to the nearest Amnioni.

Davies had promised himself that he would wait until after he'd been given the injection—

until after the Amnion re-

laxed because they felt sure of him. Angus needed the time.

But the danger had suddenly become too great. As his designated victimizer approached him, he threw out all his plans.

He opened his bare hand, slipped one handle of his monofilament line between his fingers.

Too soon, too soon, he flung himself into motion.

While the Amnioni reached its hypo toward him, he whipped out the line so that its weighted end lashed it around the creature's wrist. Then he leaped at the alien, planted his boots in the center of its chest, and heaved on the line with all his might.

His elevated endocrine system supplied more force than his muscles naturally possessed. And the polysilicate chips crusting the line were as sharp as scalpels. The line tore through tissue and bone; rip-cut the Amnioni's hand off.

From the rent stump a geyser of greenish blood sprayed the air, formed a weightless fountain across the acrid light; so much blood a man could have drowned in it. It splashed heavily onto the front of his EVA suit, half blinded his faceplate.

The Amnioni gave out a hoarse wail like a klaxon of pain.

Shrill as anguish, the sound rang in his helmet. Nevertheless the creature grappled for him with other arms; struggled to capture him while its life gushed out of it.

For an instant he ignored the clutch; fought it only enough to turn in the air and slash a kick at the severed hand—

at the

hypo. His boot shattered the hypo, added drugs or mutagens to the spume of blood.

Vector hadn't moved. He stood as if he were frozen in shock.

At once Davies turned again, into the Amnioni's grasp.

Two arms caught him, three, wrapped around him, hugged him close. He used the creature's pressure as well as his own to pull his line toward the creature's head; loop it around the creature's neck.

But he had no leverage now. Human muscle couldn't match Amnion. The arms closed on him; began to crush him.

The alien should have been growing weaker by the second, yet it remained powerful enough to break his bones.

He heard a distant crumpling noise—

a muffled explosion;

the kind of sound that should have been followed by decompression alerts. But if Calm Horizons cried a warning he couldn't hear it; or didn't understand it.

The alien arms squeezed harder.

Without transition Warden appeared at the Amnioni's back. Strong as stones, his hands gripped the creature's head.

His fingers gouged more pain into its eyes.

Its wailing scaled higher. Its embrace loosened.

Davies couldn't break free, but he could shift backward.

Jamming his free hand to the keypad on his chest, he activated his suit jets.

A waldo harness around his hips controlled the jets.

When he jammed his pelvis to the side, a burst of pressure snatched him out of the Amnioni's arms.

His line cut through the creature's neck until it snagged on bone. The handle and his fist were slick with blood: the power of the jets jerked the weapon from his grip. Then his jets carried him away.

Twisting his hips, he shot toward the forest of gantries. As he soared, he slapped at his faceplate, trying to clear off some of the blood.

Vector still hadn't moved. Damn it, he was paralyzed by his fear of fighting. At the last moment he'd decided to let his life end without a struggle—

No, Davies was wrong. Vector had moved. He must have.

The Amnioni assigned to him drifted limp in front of him now, its arms slack, its hypo gone. Its instruments winked uselessly. Deep in one eye it wore a long sliver of plastic sharpened like a dirk.

Yes. Two down.

Slowly, methodically, Vector pulled his glove back onto his exposed hand like a man who could afford to take his time because his job was done.

Alien voices shouted incomprehensible commands or warnings.

Davies' jets made him faster than any unassisted Amnioni. He ducked past a cable in his way, caught hold of the first gantry arm he reached, and swung around it in time to see Vestabule intercept Warden Dios.

Warden must have kicked himself away from the deck after Davies. He may have tried to hook a ride on Davies' jets and missed. Coasting weightless, he couldn't deflect his trajectory when Vestabule came after him.

Vestabule's legs were stronger: his leap lifted him faster than Warden could move. At the last instant Warden scissored a kick at Vestabule's head; but Vestabule slapped Warden's boot aside, clamped a fist onto his thigh. Climbing Warden hand-over-hand, Vestabule struck him a sweeping blow which snapped his head back; may have cracked his spine. He slumped in Vestabule's grasp, his head lolling.

Jets at full power, Davies dove at Vestabule before he realized that the two remaining Amnion, the guards, were clos-ing on him.

By pure chance his maneuver surprised them. He flashed through their arms; drove past them toward Vestabule. Inertia carried them onto the gantry.

With almost human vehemence, Vestabule threw Warden's inert form at the nearest bulkhead. Then he wrenched himself around in midair to face Davies.

Davies' hands had already found his belt-pouch: his fingers snatched out his whetted plastic shard. As Vestabule grabbed for him, he hammered his weapon at Vestabule's face.

His strike had all the force of his jets and his arm behind it. Vestabule stopped it with the only defense available: he put his hand in the way. Davies plunged his dagger into the Amnioni's palm and then ripped it away again as he roared past.

More blood. Shit, the atmosphere was already full of blood—

He slewed his hips to turn; launched himself in a desperate effort to catch Warden before Warden struck the bulkhead.

He saw at once that he was too late. Vestabule had hurled Warden too hard for Davies to overtake him. But Vector had no one to fight: he could react more quickly. Rising unexpectedly from the deck, he drifted along the bulkhead in time to interpose himself between Warden and the rough metal.

Warden's momentum slammed both of them into the wall. But Vector's body cushioned the impact. Cradling Warden in his arms, he rebounded slowly toward a nearby gantry.

A hand closed on Davies' ankle. One of the guards had sprung back from a gantry-limb at an angle that intersected Davies' trajectory. Before the guard could improve its hold, he slashed at the hand with his blade, jerked his ankle free, and wheeled off in an uncontrolled tumble of evasive jet blasts.

A voice he seemed to recognize screamed in his ears. It might have been his.

"Angus, God damn you! Get in here!"

The next instant an explosion like a massive fist of thunder staggered the entire hold. God, it must have staggered the whole ship! Cables lurched drunkenly: gantry-arms bobbed and swayed. One of the structures bowed as if it were about to topple—

but of course it had nowhere to go in zero g.

The explosion echoed inside Davies' helmet; clanged pain into his ears. A moment passed before he realized that he could hear the unmistakable sizzling hull-roar of matter cannon fire.

At the same time Calm Horizons' drives came to life, yowling for power until the bulkheads seemed to shriek in distress.

The last battle was under way.

That explosion may have been the destruction of the proton cannon. Davies prayed it was as he flipped himself around a gantry to scan the hold.

Vestabule and the two guards had apparently decided to ignore Vector and Warden. They all fought their own inertia and weightlessness in order to converge on Davies—

the-prize

for which Calm Horizons and everyone aboard was willing to die.

From an entryway opposite Davies' position, four more Amnion appeared. Summoned to Vestabule's aid—

They wore

jet-pods on their hips: they carried guns. Clustered for assault, they left the deck and sailed in his direction.

Seven Amnion. Four with guns. And he was effectively alone. No sign of Angus. Warden was unconscious—

or dead.

Vector had already done more than he would have believed possible.

At the start of Davies' life, Morn had told him, As far as I'm concerned, you're the second most important thing in the galaxy. You're my son. But the first, the most important thing is to not betray my humanity. She'd faced worse than this in the name of that conviction. And she'd found an answer that was better than gap-sickness and suicide; better than surrender.

Calm Horizons was already as good as dead.

His elevated metabolism gave him all the strength he needed; all the courage—

Cocking his hips, he blasted into motion. A mad howl overwhelmed his suit's external speaker.

"Come and get me, you bastards!''

His own last battle had also begun.

about was easy. Save the

Governing fucking Council for Earth and Space. What fun.

Several different jamming fields cloaked him until he reached the super-light proton cannon. And hull-sealant hardened almost instantly. A database told him more than he wanted to know about it. In 1.7 seconds it stiffened enough to stand against decompression: in 4.2 it became so hard that it could face limited amounts of impact fire and matter cannon as if it were steel. Proton fire would tear it apart, of course—

but he

only needed five seconds to fill the emitter with so much sealant that the gun would probably shatter itself at the same time.

Call it twelve seconds altogether, and the Amnion lost most of their hostages. The fucking Members were safe.

The rest of what he had to do would be a hell of a lot harder.

If he had any sense—

if he were still the man he remem-

bered being—

he would head back to Trumpet; take his ship away from Mikka. When the fighting started, he could protect himself with the gap scout's dispersion field until he got a chance to burn for open space and the gap.

But he didn't do that. He hardly considered it. Instead he launched himself with all his reinforced strength toward the docking port where Punisher's command module rested against Calm Horizons' side.

He'd become someone he didn't know at all.

He'd offered to sabotage the proton cannon in order to placate Morn; so that she would agree to the rest of his scheme. But his promise to her wasn't the only reason he'd actually done it. He needed the diversion. His plans to rescue Dios, Davies, and Vector—

and to destroy Calm Horizons—

were desperately precarious. Any one of a thousand things could go wrong. So he was forced to hope that Vestabule would realize he'd been betrayed and try to destroy Suka Bator. When the proton cannon shattered, it might do enough damage to distract the Amnion.

As he sailed toward the docking port, he blocked his terror of EVA and his fear of death by correlating databases on matter cannon, EVA suits, and his own welding. He remembered vividly the terrible blast of pain which had nearly finished him back in Deaner Beckmann's asteroid swarm, when the quantum discontinuities of Trumpet's battle with Soar—

and the effects of Trumpet's dispersion field—

had hit his EM

prosthesis like a sledgehammer. Now everything depended on the enhanced vision Lebwohl's medtechs had given him. If any of these damn ships or stations opened fire for any reason, or if Calm Horizons tried to use her proton cannon unexpectedly, he might find his head burned open by distortion on bandwidths hot enough to slag the neurons of his brain. Killed by his own augmentation—

He absolutely could not afford to be blinded. Not now: not while he was still so far from the docking port, and Davies and Vector were fighting for their lives, and Ciro wasn't even close to being in position. If he reached the port without the full, effective use of his prosthesis, he might as well unseal his helmet and let the cold dark have him. Everything would be lost.

So he followed trails of numbers across the gathered knowledge Dios had made available to him; adjusted the polarization of his faceplate to compensate. Then he checked the numbers again. Through his datalink he did what he could to ready his zone implants for a catastrophe.

As he'd feared, there was no setting which might ward off the EM side effects of a super-light proton explosion.

God, this fucking warship was big! He'd crossed less than half the distance, and he was already close to contact with the hull, drawn off his trajectory by Calm Horizons' mass. In another few seconds he would be forced to touch down so that he could kick himself into flight again. Or else he would have to activate the magnetism of his boots and try running.

Either way, he would lose time.

He looked up at Trumpet through a smear of sweat; cursed viciously when he saw that Ciro hadn't moved. The damn lunatic lay where Angus had left him, even though he should have been halfway to his position by now. If he didn't carry out his part of the plan on schedule, Trumpet and the command module were almost certainly doomed, along with everyone aboard—

Mikka and the fat man, not to mention

Angus himself, Davies and Vector, Warden Dios.

Angus understood that Ciro had no intention of surviving.

But he'd believed, trusted, that the demented kid didn't want to waste his own death.

He keyed his helmet pickup; filled his lungs to howl at Mikka's paralyzed brother.

Before he could start, distant space erupted with fire.

Wrenching himself around, he turned in time to see lasers and matter cannon strike out from a station orbiting beyond UMCPHQ. In the first instant of the attack, he didn't know which astonished him more: the assault itself, defying Min Donner's explicit orders; or the target of the barrage.