Her right arm punched out once, twice, three times. The Wolf began to move again. When Reese opened her eyes there was blood and bone spattering the faceplate.
“I’m still heading upship,” Reese said. “I don’t think the Wolf knows where you are.”
Chung didn’t answer. No point, Reese thought, in his sending a radio signal that might give away his position. The Wolf reached the forward control room, then began a systematic search of the ship, moving aft. Reese reported the suit’s movements, hoping to hell he’d get away. The ship was small, and a search wouldn’t take long.
Custom thread, Vickers had told her. Woven into the target-acquisition unit. Berger had done it, she knew, not only wanting to wipe out the station personnel but anyone who knew of Cuervo’s existence. She was riding in an extermination cyberdrone now, trapped inside its obscene, purposeful body. Mandate. Liquid. Consolidation. The code had sent the Wolf on its rampage. The liquidation is mandated. Consolidate knowledge about Cuervo.
Displays flickered on the screen. The thing had scented Chung. Reese could do nothing but tell him it was coming.
Chung was by the aft airlock, halfway into the rad suit he’d need to flee through the airless engine space. His face was fixed in an expression of rage. “Steward!” Reese screamed. The ten-gauge barked twice, and then the Wolf froze. The displays were gone. The Wolf, still with considerable momentum, continued to drift toward the aft bulkhead. It struck and rebounded, moving slowly toward Chung.
Reese tried to move in the suit, but its joints were locked. Her crashing pulse was the loudest sound in the helmet. She licked sweat from her upper lip, felt it running down her brows. Chung’s body slowly collapsed in the insignificant gravity of the asteroid. Drops of blood fell like slow-motion rubies. The gravity wasn’t enough to break the surface tension, and the droplets rested on the deck like ball bearings, rolling in the circulating air…
Reese’s heart stopped as she realized that the sound of the Wolf’s air-circulation system had ceased. She had only the air in the suit, then nothing.
Her mind flailed in panic. Shouting, her cries loud in her ears, she tried to move against the locked joints of the Wolf. The Wolf only drifted slowly to the deck, its limbs immobile.
Like Archangel, she thought. Nothing to look forward to but dying in a suit, in a tunnel, in the smell of your own fear. Just like her officers had always wanted. She tasted bile and fought it down.
I’m using air, she thought, and clamped down, gulping twice, trying to control her jackhammer heart, her panicked breath.
Chung’s furious eyes glared into hers at a distance of about three feet. She could see a reflection of the Wolf in his metal teeth. Reese began to move her arms and legs, testing the tension of the web.
There was a pistol under her left arm. If she could get to it with her right hand, she might be able to shoot her way out of the suit somehow.
Fat chance.
But still it was something to do, anyway. She began to move her right arm against the webbing, pulling it back. Blood rubies danced before her eyes. She managed to get her hand out of the glove, but there was a restraining strap against the back of her elbow that prevented further movement. She pushed forward, keeping her hand out of the glove, then drew back. Worked at it slowly, synchronizing the movement with her breath, exhaling to make herself smaller. Steward, she thought, would have been quoting Zen aphorisms to himself. Hers were more direct. You can get smaller if you want to, she thought, you’ve done it before.
She got free of the elbow strap, drew her arm back, felt her elbow encounter the wall of the suit. She was beginning to pant. The air can’t be gone this quickly, she thought, and tried to control panic as she pulled back on her arm, as pain scraped along her nerves. Sweat was coating her body. She tried to think herself smaller. She could feel warm blood running down her arm. The Wolf was saturated with the scent of fear.
Reese screamed as her arm came free, part agony, part exultation. She reached across her chest, felt the butt of the pistol. It was cold in her hand, almost weightless.
Where to point it? She could try blowing out the faceplate but she’d have the barrel within inches of her face, and the faceplate was damn near impervious anyway. The bullet would probably ricochet right into her head. The Wolf was too well armored.
Chung’s angry glare was making it impossible for her to think. Reese closed her eyes and tried to think of the schematics she’d studied, the location of the variable-lattice thread that contained the suit’s instructions.
Behind her, she thought. Pressed against her lower spine was the logic thread that operated the Wolf’s massive limbs. If she could wreck the thread, the locked limbs might move.
She experimented with the pistol. There wasn’t enough room to completely angle the gun around her body.
Sweat floated in salty globes around her as she thought it through, tried desperately to come up with another course of action. The air grew foul. Reese decided that shooting herself with the pistol would be quicker than dying of asphyxiation.
She tried to crowd as far over to the right as possible, curling the gun against her body, holding it reversed with her thumb on the trigger. The cool muzzle pressed into her side, just below the ribs. Line it up carefully, she thought. You don’t want to have to do this more than once. She tried to remember anatomy and what was likely to get hit. A kidney? Adrenal glands?
Here’s where I really take it up the ass, she thought. She screamed, building rage, and fired…and then screamed again from pain. Sweat bounced against the faceplate, spattering in the fierce momentum of the bullet’s pressure wave.
The Wolf’s limbs unlocked and the cyberdrone sagged to the deck. Reese gave a weak cheer, then shrieked again from the pain.
She had heard it wasn’t supposed to hurt when you got hit, not right away. Another lie, she thought, invented by the officer class.
There was something wrong with the world; with the way it was manifesting itself. She realized she was deaf from the pistol blast.
Reese leaned back, took a deep breath of foul air. Now, she thought, comes the easy part.
REESE MANAGED TO put her right arm back into the sleeve, then use both arms—the armor, thankfully, was near weightless—to get herself out of the suit. She moved to the sick bay and jabbed endorphin-analogue into her thigh, then X-rayed herself on the portable machine. It looked as if she hadn’t hit anything vital, but then she wasn’t practiced at reading X-rays, either. She patched herself up, swallowed antibiotics, and then out of nowhere the pain slammed down, right through the endorphin. Every muscle in her body went into spasm. Reese curled into a ball, her body a flaming agony. She bounced gently off one wall, then another. Fought shuddering waves of nausea. Tears poured from her eyes. It hurt too much to scream.
It went on forever, for days. Loaded on endorphins, she looted the station, moving everything she could into the freighter, then pissed bright blood while howling in agony. Fevers raged in her body. She filled herself with antibiotics and went on working. Things—people, aliens, hallucinations—kept reaching at her, moving just outside her field of vision. Sometimes she could hear them talking to her in some strange, melodic tongue.
She grappled Voidrunner to the freighter’s back, then lifted off Cuervo and triggered the charges. She laughed at the bright blossoms of flame in the locks, the gush of air that turned to white snow in the cold vacuum, and then into a bright rainbow as it was struck by the sun. Reese accelerated toward Earth for as long as she could stand it, then cut the engines.