Funny— not too long ago, he had stood on Dis, facing just such an empty sunless sky. Then, Michael had made sure he was tethered at all times; the prospect of drifting off into endless space had terrified him.
There was not a whisper of that old terror now as he stepped off the cycler into the void.
The cycler shot up past him, a moving graffiti-scrawled wall visible only by faint starlight. Michael got the light-enhancers in his helmet working, and turned away from the now-bright starship.
The stars were sharp points; as the cycler passed, the exhaust from its engines was blinding. He jetted away from twin columns of light that speared into the night. As he turned again he saw the oval glow of an aurora crowning Apophis.
He knew in general where he was going, so began jetting toward the ruins of the Banshee. Barendts wasn't visible yet; he might never be unless Michael got a lucky glimpse of his reaction pistol firing. Uncomfortably, that suggested that Michael might miss him and go to the wrong interceptor.
He couldn't afford to think about that. Michael recited a mantra to calm himself as he flew through the darkness. All was silent, and he had no sense of motion at all. Only the faint whirring of his suit's systems, and his own breathing, told Michael that he was still real, a physical man and not a spirit drifting in the void.
Part of him was bracing for an onslaught of despair from the kami of Dis. Surely they were still there? But no, they had gone silent. Michael realized this with a kind of shock— when had that happened? When had his constant companions, who had dragged him down all these months, evaporated?
It must have been his decision to rejoin the rebels— to take back Kimpurusha, or die trying. Was that it? He tried to remember his days on Oculus… but no, they had been there then.
Perhaps it was the battle that had just passed. The immediacy of it, the adrenaline. Wasn't this his natural environment now? The battlefield?
Michael frowned, and shook his head. He was no soldier. He might make a credible spy, but he'd had no stomach for hurting anyone, even the marines who had tried to kill him today. Barendts, a trained fighter, had carried most of the attack that got them out of Crisler's clutches.
Far ahead of him a tiny star flared to life, then died. That must be Barendts. Michael lined himself up and made the difficult course correction that would take him that way.
They were approaching the construction shack now. In enhanced light, he could see the white spindle-shapes of the interceptors. Barendts was making for the one on the right. Good.
If both Crisler and the rebels had the secret of the Chicxulub ships, at least there would be a level playing field. Maybe the ships would clash among themselves, ignoring the humans until there was a victor in space. Maybe they could spare lives, not take them that way.
Sadly, though, the halo worlds would lose either way. Without more Jentry's Envys, they were doomed to increasing isolation and irrelevance. Rue's civilization, which he had been born into and still loved, would come to an end.
Barendts was a faintly visible star-shape struggling with a cylindrical white seed at the airlock of the interceptor. The marine hadn't spotted Michael yet.
He knew he shouldn't have left Rue and the others helpless in the balloon-hab. He cast about for something to take his mind off of that in these last minutes of free fall. Fear… Yes! He still couldn't remember when the kami of Dis had left him. He tried to focus on that. It hadn't been in battle, he knew that now. Before that, then… and he had it.
When Irina Case told him that his kami might be the means for reviving the spiritual life of New Armstrong, something had changed in Michael. He'd had no time to think about it then; he'd been arrested immediately afterward, but his kami were powerful and despite what he'd said to Irina, he now believed that he had not simply found them, but had created them; they were not real entities with lives of their own, they were his Art. With them, he had somehow strengthened Rue through her grief. Maybe his kami really could heal a whole world.
And then, as the interceptor fell into the fiery maw of Colossus, he'd had a momentary flash when he thought he understood Rue's Supreme Meme. Somehow, in that moment of insight, the dark whispering voices of Dis had departed for good.
This realization was so astonishing that he almost missed the interceptor. He made a frantic last blast with the pistol, and was actually able to touch the magnetic soles of his boots to the hull of the interceptor and grab the back end of the seed, before Barendts noticed him.
The marine whirled, laser raised.
"It's just me," said Michael. "Brilliant move, skiving off with this thing."
"Bequith!" Barendts laughed shakily. "Quick, let's get it inside. I think I know enough to pilot one of these through the drop; say, how'd you like a holiday on Kimpurusha?" He holstered the laser again.
Michael felt his heart leap at the name of his homeworld. "Kimpurusha? Is that where you're taking it?"
Barendts laughed again. "You never knew, did you? — That's where I was trained. Years after your people tried their insurrection— but they still knew you. I knew who you were when you first came on board the Spirit of Luna!"
"How?" Had rebel cells continued to exist on Kimpurusha after Michael's own uprising failed? No, that wasn't possible; they would have tried to contact him, surely.
"We had the same mentor," said Barendts. "You remember Errend, don't you?"
Michael's stomach turned over.
"He sure remembered you. You were… how did he put it? One of the pawns he had to sacrifice to convince the R.E. that Kimpurusha had gone quiet. But he always hoped you'd kept your allegiance and that we might activate you again. A farsighted man, Errend."
"Indeed." Michael looked over the seed to where Barendts was trying to wedge his end into the airlock. "Need a hand there?"
"Sure, buddy." Michael went around the seed and crouched by the open airlock next to Barendts.
"Why don't you just grab it there, and—"
In one motion Michael unholstered Barendts' laser, and kicked the marine off the interceptor.
"What the hell are you doing!" Barendts tumbled over twice before he got his reaction pistol in hand and steadied himself. "This is our only chance now, don't you get it? If Crisler gets away with the other seed, he'll be able to build a weapon we can't stop! Hell, one that even he can't stop! He'll win the war, Mike. Kimpurusha will have fallen for all time, and it'll be your fault!"
Michael regarded him calmly over the edge of the airlock. "What war is it that you're talking about?" He had to laugh at his own thick-headedness during the past months. "I know all about that war, I just spent the last five years of my life uncovering its victims with Professor Herat.
"Out there in High Space, the war is of all against all, and it goes on forever. No one needs anyone else if they can simply pull up roots and move a few light-years to get away— which works great until you run up against someone who's there already. That's the great lesson of the Chicxulub, isn't it? No matter how big the galaxy, its resources are finite— but with FTL, mobility isn't. Barendts, the result is always— always— the disintegration of the species into thousands of subspecies that war among themselves and with their neighbors. Permanent war. In all the lifetime of the galaxy there's only been two exceptions: the Lasa and the Chicxulub. The Lasa opted out of FTL travel completely; they discovered an environment that encouraged cooperation rather than competition: the halo worlds. No halo world can stand on its own. They need one another, and war between them isn't possible because of the barrier of light-speed."