“Reese.”
He turned, saw Blok standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” Blok said, his nervousness driving his voice even lower than its normal Slavic pitch.
“I’m going up to the cave, Blok.” He wasn’t sure why the words came out. It seemed to him he might just as easily have said nothing at all.
“I can’t let you do that,” Blok said. Reese looked up again, and this time Blok was holding a 7mm Luger.
“So,” Reese said.“It’s Russia again. I thought you were beyond that. I thought you were part of the colony now.”
“Don’t patronize me, Reese.What do you know about loyalties? Who do you have to be loyal to? Your fellow astronauts? Your family?”
Reese flinched, his guilt at abandoning Jenny to her husband fresh in his mind again. He could have tried harder to get through to her, maybe won her away, and saved her life.
Stop it, he told himself.There’s no point in torturing yourself. It’s too late for any of that.
“You can’t even understand how I think,” Blok went on.“You can’t understand what rodina means to a Russian.You don’t even have the word in your language, just ghosts of it.‘Homeland.’What does that mean? You can’t even translate the idea.”
“This isn’t to do with you,”Reese said.“It doesn’t have anything to do with Russia or the US or Frontera or anything else.This is just for me.”
“That’s naive, Reese.You know better.There is no such thing as a non-political act. Everything is political.And I cannot let you leave. Nobody leaves until this whole thing is sorted out.”
Reese stood up.“You can’t use the gun in here,Blok.It’s too dangerous.”
Blok steadied his right hand with his left.“Then don’t force me.”
Reese took a step toward him, but Blok stood his ground.
“Put it away,” Reese said.“Please.This is something I have to do.”
They were less than six feet apart. Reese stared at the distorted proportions of the Luger, the swollen barrel, the arms stretching away forever behind it. It seemed to Reese that Blok would probably use the gun. It was like poker, he thought.There were times you paid to see the hole card, even when you already knew what it was going to be. Because, he thought, there were just certain hands you had to pay for.
He took another step and Blok fired.
For a second, Reese could not connect the loud, sharp snap of the pistol with the shove that rocked him back on his feet, with the point of heat in his left shoulder that was at the same time numbingly cold.Then his forebrain put it into one-syllable words for him: I’ve been shot.
Before Blok could fire again, Reese stepped in and put his own, larger hands around the gun. His left arm was nearly useless, but with the strength of his right he began to crush Blok’s fingers, pushing the barrel of the gun up and back, until Blok whimpered and tried to let go, and Reese pushed the gun back hard, catching Blok across the bridge of his nose and down one cheek with the barrel.
Blok slipped to his knees and Reese pulled the gun away with his left hand, the fingers stiff and desensitized, swinging his right fist around, trying for the jaw but bouncing painfully off the cheekbone instead. He stood back, breathing hard, and watched Blok sway for a second, then topple slowly forward onto his face.
The bullet had torn through the trapezius muscle of Reese’s shoulder and dimpled the durofoam behind him, lodging in the structural plastic of the wall without cracking it.A good thing, he thought, I was there to slow it down.
There was a good deal of blood. He touched the hole in his shoulder and had to steady himself against the doorframe, leaving a trail on the enameled metal. He found a first aid kit and sprayed both sides of the wound with K platelets, feeling the skin prickle and tighten as the tangle of fibrin formed quickly into a scab.
He had to put the Luger down to get into the gloves of the suit; when he was finished, he fitted the gun back into the limp fingers, not knowing what else to do with it.A sizzling ache spread through the muscles of his back, making his throat tighten and his eyes water.The
first aid kit contained a vial of Butorphanol, but Reese closed the cover before the temptation got the better of him. He was not going to stagger through this in an analgesic haze.
He had to start moving. He cycled through the lock and walked toward the setting sun, watching the south wind pump billows of dust into the twilight.The kids’ cave had been the first permanent outpost on Mars; his feet knew the way, even if shock had left him a little faint and clumsy. He crawled into the airlock and lay still as the atmosphere blew in around him, reality flickering on and off as he fought to get his breath.
“He’s hurt,” somebody said, and the helmet came off his head. Somebody else handed him a dish of beet sugar and a glass of water, and he lapped up the sugar with his tongue, the taste of it alternating between nauseating sweetness and the bitterness of sand.
“How bad is it?”Verb asked, squatting in front of him.
He blinked. He sat propped against one wall, looking out on a room of endless darkness, punctuated by cones of intense white light. Under two of the cones he could see children typing rapidly into crts; under a third, a Rhesus monkey ate popcorn out of a wastebasket.Verb’s slightly pop-eyed stare was centered on the blood at the edge of his neck.
“Not...serious,” he said.“Just let me get my wind back, I’ll be okay.” He saw the gun still clinging to his useless left hand and shook it loose, pushing it away from him across the floor.
“You’re bleeding,”Verb said.“You don’t look good.”
“It’s superficial,” Reese said.“I sprayed it, it’s okay. Really.”
“Don’t fool around with me,”Verb said.“Okay? Because this is important to me, too. I can’t have you dying on me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Okay, then. Because it looks good. It looks really good.” Her face shone with a thin film of sweat, and her body gave off a sharp odor of excitement.“Crunch, do the lights, okay?” One by one the spots blinked off, and Reese felt his pulse skittering away from the totality of the darkness, the darkness like a sensory dep tank, like blindness, like death.
“Crunch has got a program,”Verb said.“You run that map you gave us through a hologram projector, and set it for a very small scale...”
Pinpoints of light appeared in the darkness, not giving off enough illumination to locate the walls or floor, instead creating the illusion of stars in infinite space.And then, gradually, they began to move.A trinary system spun past his face, and below his legs he could see the dense exploding gas at the heart of the galaxy. In the distance floated the purple smears of the great nebulas, and beyond them tiny quasars spat high-intensity radiation out through the tornadoes at their poles.All of them visible at once, crammed together, blazing with life.
Reese felt the hard, hot kernel of despair that had brought him this far begin to melt, to transform itself back into its original components of wonder, awe, and burning ambition.
“You’ll go through in your suit,”Verb said.“We’ve got a parachute and some survival gear just in case, including some food and water and extra air.There’s a transmitter that will let us know if you made it. Eventually, that is.About twelve years from now, for the round trip.”
“Okay,” Reese said.
“We’re shooting for a kilometer above what we think is the surface of an Earth-size planet.We could screw up and put you underground, in which case you explode, or we may put you so far out you’ll burn up on the way down.There may not be any air for the chute to grab. It could be a gas planet, in which case none of this matters anyway. Okay?”