"She's pretty good. For a woman. Nailed me when I was moving in for a mate."
BenRabi shook his head. "Are you for real?"
He could picture it. An overconfident Mouse suggesting a game to kill time, getting too deep into alternate moves to react quickly. Stupid, but in character. "How many times have I told you it was going to get you into trouble someday?"
"God damn, Moyshe, don't mother me. Not now. Do something about the arm, eh? Nobody around here is interested. I could lose it. And these clowns don't do regeneration surgery."
"Amy? Where's Amy Coleridge?" benRabi asked. He found her. "You seen Mouse? He needs a doctor bad."
"I saw him come in. There's one on the way. The woman?"
"Yeah." What was Marya doing now?
This was the price of not having let Mouse have his way on The Broken Wings. On his hands was the blood of a friend; in his mind a nagging gunmetal smile. Whatever feeling he might have had for her, or she for him, they were of enemy tribes. That was the overriding rule. In the end, neither could give quarter.
"I'll take care of it, Mouse," he whispered to his friend. "You keep Amy busy." He rose. "Keep an eye on him, will you, love? I'll be back in a couple minutes."
She asked no questions, probably assuming he was off to the toilet.
From the tool crib he drew an old Takadi Model VI laser cutting torch. It was a light-duty one-handed tool meant for sheet metal trimming. The crib attendant asked no questions.
He slipped out of D.C. and into an empty office nearby. It took just minutes to make the modifications he had been taught in a Bureau school. He created an unwieldy lasegun. Then he stole a scooter and took off.
He had tried to think like the woman while modifying the torch. He presumed that she would not know the attacks were shark and not her own people's. She would do something to neutralize the ship without damaging it. Her specialty dealt with atmosphere...
She would head for Central Blowers. She could take out Operations if she could cut its oxygen supply.
He hurtled through passageways, impatiently trying to remember the way to the blower rooms. Fate seemed determined to stall him. Damage compelled long detours. He had to wait on emergency traffic. People kept stopping him to tell him to get a suit on. The scooter, low on power, slowed to a crawl. He had to walk a kilometer before he found another unattended.
But he eventually reached his destination and instantly knew that he had guessed right. Dead men guarded the closed blower room door from within. Their weapons, if they had been armed, were gone. Moyshe glanced at the thing in his hand. Would it work?
The blower room was vast. It served only Danion's core, but still was a wild jungle of massed machinery and ducting. A lot of air needed moving and scrubbing...
She was in there somewhere, trying to kill them.
Half an hour departed with antelope fleetness. He wandered among the brobdingnagian machines and found nothing. Danion kept shivering but the battle had become so old that it no longer caught his attention. An overpowering fatalism had set in now, a feeling that he was completely powerless in the greater situation.
But, damn! it was a long skirmish.
Weariness preoccupied him. He had been through twenty hard, emotionally draining hours.
He finally located the huge ring of consoles from which Danion's core oxygen levels and humidities were controlled.
He crawled, he climbed, he attained himself a perch on a high catwalk from which most of the controls were visible. He saw only empty seats where a dozen technicians should have been stationed. Corpses lolled lifelessly in two more. A body lay like a broken doll on the aluminum grate decking.
She had been here. What was she doing now?
The question answered itself. She appeared as if spontaneously generated, moving among the boards, selecting cutoffs.
BenRabi aimed his makeshift weapons.
"Marya... Maria... " Her names ripped themselves from him against his will. She had been closer to him, in some hidden part of him, than he had realized.
Her head jerked up, turning, startled. Her eyes were narrow and searching. That mocking smile exploded across her face. "Moyshe. What are you doing here?" She hunted him with jerkily moving eyes, her hand hovering near a holstered, captured weapon. She was afraid. And she wanted to shoot.
"You're trying to kill us," he croaked.
What a stupid thing to say. Of course she was. Why was he waiting? Pull the trigger, pull the trigger, he screamed at himself.
He had done it a million times in imagination. All those images of the gun... Go! Go!
He couldn't. It was real this time. It was not some insane, inexplicable daydream oozing from the nether pits of his mind. Had the gun thing ever had anything to do with real weapons?
She stepped over a dead Seiner. "Moyshe, how can you say that? Not you. You'd be repatriated."
Repatriated to Hell, maybe. Her lie was a kilometer tall. After The Broken Wings and von Drachau's raid? She was going to have his guts on her breakfast toast if he did not do something.
She crossed his aim repeatedly, but he just could not end it. It had seemed so easy when he had been angry. It was easy for Mouse... wasn't it? Sweat beaded on his forehead as he tried to force his trigger.
His aim fell.
The movement gave him away. Her smile gave way to clashing-sabers laughter. Her weapon leapt into her hand. Her hand rose.
He reacted. Her shot reddened metal where he had crouched. But he was moving, across an open space. His finger was frozen no more, though he fired wild, scoring a section of console. He dove into the shelter of a huge machine. Disinterested, it went on grumbling to itself. Like a lot of people, it would do nothing till it was hurt, and then it would just sit there and scream.
Her shouts mocked him. He did not catch her words, but they did not matter. She was taunting him, trying to get him to give himself away again. Beams licked here and there, probing his cover, making metal run like tongues of candlewax.
He was scared. He had swum too deep this time. He had taken the dive he had feared since his assignment to Beckhart.
In an instant of insane gallows humor he told himself that death would certainly end his psychological woes.
But both he and the woman were too confident of his inability, his uncertainty, his lack of commitment. Something within him cracked. Something hatched from an egg of darkness lying in his deeps. He suddenly knew that there was something he could believe in, something worth fighting for. It had been trying to break through from the beginning.
He grinned, then laughed at the ludicrous irony of life. His Grail. He had found it here on the marches of Hell, as he was about to die. This ship, these Seiner people...
In marveling stupidity, he stepped into the open. The woman was so startled she hesitated. He did not. He shot first. His hand was steady, his aim flawless. Just as they had taught him.
The madness of the moment faded. He felt as empty as he had on the day he had entered the Blake City spaceport. Had he found anything after all? Or had his gun-need just thrown up a light-show of justification?
He was standing over her when Kindervoort's people arrived. He did not know how long he had been there. The battle had died away while he waited. And he had reversed all the switches she had thrown, though he did not remember doing so. Operations was getting its desperately needed oxygen.
He was crying when they found him. He had wondered about that for a long time. Mouse sometimes shed tears afterward, as if the new corpse were that of a favorite brother. He supposed Mouse spent his stored emotion then, while it was safe, while no one could grab a handle on his soul.
Someone pried the torch from his bent rod fingers.
"Moyshe?" Amy asked. "Are you all right?"