Royd lifted his foremost grapplers and smashed them to the side as he surged forward. Dannel caromed off a bulkhead, leaving a wide wet mark where he struck, and more of his guts came sliding out. Lindran lost control of the knife. Royd accelerated past them, driving up the corridor through the cloud of blood.
“I’ll watch behind,” Melantha said. She turned and put her back to his. Already the two corpses were safely behind them. The knife was floating uselessly in the air. She started to tell Royd that they were all right, when the blade abruptly shifted and came after them, gripped by some invisible force.
“Swerve!” she cried.
The sled shot wildly to one side. The knife missed by a full meter, and glanced ringingly off a bulkhead.
But it did not drop. It came at them again.
The lounge loomed ahead. Dark.
“The door is too narrow,” Royd said. “We will have to abandon—” As he spoke, they hit; he wedged the sled squarely into the doorframe, and the sudden impact jarred them loose.
For a moment Melantha floated clumsily in the corridor, her head whirling, trying to sort up from down. The knife slashed at her, opening her suit and her shoulder clear through to the bone. She felt sharp pain and the warm flush of bleeding. “Damn,” she shrieked. The knife came around again, spraying droplets of blood.
Melantha’s hand darted out and caught it.
She muttered something under her breath and wrenched the blade free of the hand that had been gripping it.
Royd had regained the controls of his sled and seemed intent on some manipulation. Beyond him, in the dimness of the lounge, Melantha glimpsed a dark semi-human form rise into view.
“Royd!” she warned. The thing activated its small laser. The pencil beam caught Royd square in the chest.
He touched his own firing stud. The sled’s heavy-duty laser came alive, a shaft of sudden brilliance. It cindered Christopheris’ weapon and burned off his right arm and part of his chest. The beam hung in the air, throbbing, and smoked against the far bulkhead.
Royd made some adjustments and began cutting a hole. “We’ll be through in five minutes or less,” he said curtly.
“Are you all right?” Melantha asked.
“I’m uninjured,” he replied. “My suit is better armored than yours, and his laser was a low-powered toy.”
Melantha turned her attention back to the corridor.
The linguists were pulling themselves towards her, one on each side of the passage, to come at her from two directions at once. She flexed her muscles. Her shoulder stabbed and screamed. Otherwise she felt strong, almost reckless. “The corpses are coming after us again,” she told Royd. “I’m going to take them.”
“Is that wise?” he asked. “There are two of them.”
“I’m an improved model,” Melantha said, “and they’re dead.” She kicked herself free of the sled and sailed towards Dannel in a high, graceful trajectory. He raised his hands to block her. She slapped them aside, bent one arm back and heard it snap, and drove her knife deep into his throat before she realized what a useless gesture that was. Blood oozed from his neck in a spreading cloud, but he continued to flail at her. His teeth snapped grotesquely.
Melantha withdrew her blade, seized him, and with all her considerable strength threw him bodily down the corridor. He tumbled, spinning wildly, and vanished into the haze of his own blood.
Melantha flew in the opposite direction, revolving lazily.
Lindran’s hands caught her from behind.
Nails scrabbled against her faceplate until they began to bleed, leaving red streaks on the plastic.
Melantha whirled to face her attacker, grabbed a thrashing arm, and flung the woman down the passageway to crash into her struggling companion. The reaction sent her spinning like a top. She spread her arms and stopped herself, dizzy, gulping.
“I’m through,” Royd announced.
Melantha turned to see. A smoking meter-square opening had been cut through one wall of the lounge. Royd killed the laser, gripped both sides of the doorframe, and pushed himself towards it.
A piercing blast of sound drilled through her head. She doubled over in agony. Her tongue flicked out and clicked off the comm; then there was blessed silence.
In the lounge it was raining. Kitchen utensils, glasses and plates, pieces of human bodies all lashed violently across the room, and glanced harmessly off Royd’s armored form. Melantha—eager to follow—drew back helplessly. That rain of death would cut her to pieces in her lighter, thinner vacuum suit. Royd reached the far wall and vanished into the secret control section of the ship. She was alone.
The Nightflyer lurched, and sudden acceleration provided a brief semblance of gravity. Melantha was thrown to one side. Her injured shoulder smashed painfully against the sled.
All up and down the corridor doors were opening.
Dannel and Lindran were moving towards her once again.
The Nightflyer was a distant star sparked by its nuclear engines. Blackness and cold enveloped them, and below was the unending emptiness of the Tempter’s Veil, but Karoly d’Branin did not feel afraid. He felt strangely transformed.
The void was alive with promise.
“They are coming,” he whispered. “Even I, who have no psi at all, even I can feel it. The Crey story must be so, even from light-years off they can be sensed. Marvelous!”
Agatha Marij-Black seemed small and shrunken. “The volcryn,” she muttered. “What good can they do us. I hurt. The ship is gone. D’Branin, my head aches.” She made a small, frightened noise. “Thale said that, just after I injected him, before—before—you know. He said that his head hurt. It aches so terribly.”
“Quiet, Agatha. Do not be afraid. I am here with you. Wait. Think only of what we shall witness, think only of that!”
“I can sense them,” the psipsych said.
D’Branin was eager. “Tell me, then. We have our little sled. We shall go to them. Direct me.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes. Oh, yes.”
Gravity returned; in a flicker, the universe became almost normal.
Melantha fell to the deck, landed easily and rolled, and was on her feet cat-quick.
The objects that had been floating ominously through the open doors along the corridor all came clattering down.
The blood was transformed from a fine mist to a slick covering on the corridor floor.
The two corpses dropped heavily from the air, and lay still.
Royd spoke to her from the communicators built into the walls. “I made it,” he said.
“I noticed,” she replied.
“I’m at the main control console. I have restored the gravity with a manual override, and I’m cutting off as many computer functions as possible. We’re still not safe, though. Mother will try to find a way around me. I’m countermanding her by sheer force, as it were. I cannot afford to overlook anything, and if my attention should lapse, even for a moment… Melantha, was your suit breached?”
“Yes. Cut at the shoulder.”
“Change into another one. Immediately. I think the counterprogramming I’m doing will keep the locks sealed, but I can’t take any chances.”
Melantha was already running down the corridor, towards the cargo hold where the suits and equipment were stored.
“When you have changed,” Royd continued, “dump the corpses into the mass conversion unit. You’ll find the appropriate hatch near the driveroom airlock, just to the left of the lock controls. Convert any other loose objects that are not indispensable as well; scientific instruments, books, tapes, tableware—”
“Knives,” suggested Melantha.