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?
And why the hell am I thinking like this?
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.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Good Samaritans
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)
Date: 2526.6.3 (Standard) 750,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534
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.
Gravity’s gone.
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.