Cheris didn’t waste time on profanities. She fired low, this time blowing out Jedao’s knees. One bullet per knee, which meant five bullets fired, and she only had one left in the clip before she needed to reload.
Even then Jedao wasn’t done. He’d secured the other man’s sidearm. (Why didn’t he have one of his own?) His arm moved. Despite the glassiness of his eyes, and the fact that he couldn’t possibly have survived the head shot—it knew that much about gunshot wounds—he was still tracking, and he fired.
Jedao pitched to the floor with a horrible thud. The bullet went wide, passing over Cheris’s shoulder. Even so, it missed her head by mere centimeters.
The carpet—such beautiful carpet, Hemiola thought absurdly—was streaked dark with blood. And the blood wasn’t the red it had come to expect either from the gorier dramas or the knifeplay that Jedao-past and the hexarch had engaged in.
“Get me to the extraction point,” Cheris said. “Buy me time. I’m counting on you.”
Hemiola had expected alarms to go off once shots were fired in Jedao’s quarters. Instead, it detected a faint hiss as some gas was injected into the air. It logged into Jedao’s terminal and scrabbled through the grid for an explanation.
“Top-level override,” it told Cheris as it frantically calculated an escape route for her.
“That’ll be Kujen,” she said. “Route, now.”
Hemiola opened a tightbeam channel to her augment and sent her its best guess. At this point there was no point denying themselves this avenue of communication, since they’d already given their presence away. It would have to hope that their communications weren’t intercepted and, worse, decrypted in the time it took Cheris to get away. “I’ll cover for you here. Go!”
Cheris whirled and sprinted away. Although she immediately angled herself away from Jedao’s field of fire, Jedao had now dragged himself up on his elbows. Hemiola barreled forward to block him and was rewarded by a direct shot to its carapace.
Hemiola was, while not a military servitor, solidly constructed. The bullet ricocheted and embedded itself in a table. It didn’t slow, but accelerated into Jedao’s gun hand. It connected; heard the crunch of breaking bone.
At this point, Hemiola’s focus on Jedao betrayed it. The unnamed dark-skinned man swiped at it. Hemiola turned turtle, flipped itself right-side-up and snaked out of the way.
The man hastened to Jedao’s side. “Jedao!” he cried, except the word came out slurred. Hemiola braced itself, then took the precaution of launching itself straight at the man’s head. It almost missed because he slumped unconscious just as it got there.
The gas was still being pumped into the air. Hemiola asked Cheris about her status even as it frantically put in requests to the grid to make sure that she wouldn’t get cut off. It became aware that a higher-level user was moving through the system and withdrew abruptly.
Hemiola had bought Cheris all the time it could to escape. Now it was trapped on the Revenant, and it had no idea how to complete the mission when this other Jedao manifestly refused to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WHEN JEDAO RECOVERED consciousness, he had a monstrous headache. Considering that the last thing he remembered was being shot in the head and both knees by a stranger in a Kel infantry suit, it seemed unfair to complain. “Dhanneth?” he asked.
Jedao was having difficulty getting his eyes to focus. “Dhanneth?” he asked again. He tested one knee and almost bit his tongue at the surge of pain.
Dhanneth had collapsed not far from him, it turned out. An enormous bruise covered the right side of his face. Jedao was overcome by a wave of nausea. “Dhanneth, no,” he croaked. Despite the agony in his knees and the pounding headache, he dragged himself over to Dhanneth and checked his pulse. Luckily Dhanneth was still alive, slow pulse, breathing shallowly, although his skin was clammy.
“General Jedao to Hexarch Kujen,” he said to the grid. “There was a break-in and assassination attempt in my office”—he checked his augment, which only made the headache worse—“forty-seven minutes ago. What the fuck is going on?”
The grid informed him that the entire moth was on security lockdown and that the hexarch was not taking messages while he dealt with the matter.
For a brief singing moment, Jedao dared to hope that the unknown assassin had managed to off Kujen before getting the hell away. Too bad she hadn’t shared the secret. And besides, he wasn’t going to believe in Kujen’s death until—well, that was the problem. He wasn’t sure anything could convince him that Kujen was gone forever, considering the man’s particular form of immortality.
So much for Kujen, then. Jedao pulled back Dhanneth’s eyelid and was greeted by a pupil so dilated that it swallowed the iris. Jedao didn’t know much first aid, but that couldn’t be a good sign.
“I need Medical,” Jedao said. “I’m fine”—he figured they’d forgive him the white lie—“but Major Dhanneth is down.”
The grid repeated its message about the security lockdown. Which, apparently, included Medical.
Jedao contemplated his options. He knew from experience that he couldn’t lift Dhanneth outright, given how much larger the man was. (Dhanneth had found Jedao’s dismay at discovering this very amusing, one of the few times Jedao had seen him laugh.) If he were in better condition, he could carry Dhanneth over his shoulders, but he was honestly not convinced that his knees wouldn’t give out.
Would it make more sense to drag Dhanneth all the way to Medical, assuming he could get there without triggering some security protocol and getting them both killed, or make his way there alone, on the grounds that that would be faster, to fetch help?
I can’t leave you here like this, Jedao thought. He gritted his teeth, apologized silently to Dhanneth for the indignity of what was to transpire, and began dragging him out the door in the direction of Medical. Even if his augment was being uncommunicative about the moth’s current layout, the othersense gave him a reasonable idea of where to go.
At first he made slow progress, partly because of the pain, partly because of intermittent dizziness. And then he came across the first victims.
There was no other word for it. A knot of two Kel and a Nirai had fallen not far from the first lift he needed to take. Same symptoms as Dhanneth: slow pulse, shallow breathing, clammy skin, dilated pupils. Jedao was more worried than ever. Had his attacker infected the command moth with some sort of disease or toxin? And if so, why wasn’t he affected?
Breathe in. Breathe out. You can’t afford to panic. He noted the location and names of the fallen soldiers and engineer, then continued dragging Dhanneth. Then it occurred to him to ask the Revenant, Do you have any idea what just happened?
There was a hull breach, it said. They’re long gone now, whoever they were.
You didn’t think to tell me?
A pause, not exactly friendly. Do you tell me whenever you clip your fingernails? I don’t have... nerves in that part of the hull as you understand it. They breached the superstructure grafted on by the Nirai engineers, not living tissue.
Fair point. Do you have any idea what’s going on? Jedao concentrated on the othersense and was even more disturbed. None of the human-sized masses were moving. He had the awful feeling that Dhanneth and the three crew he had come across weren’t the only ones afflicted by the disease-toxin-whatever.