Muddy shrieked again, and leaped from his own couch to throw himself atop Bruno’s body. “No! Declarant, Lordship, you mustn’t consider it! To lose Tamra and you, how unthinkable. No! I won’t allow it!”
“Ah, damn it,” Bruno said, struggling under Muddy’s weight. “Get off me. Get off. I’ll do as I please, damn you!”
“You will not,” Muddy snarled. His breath was hot on Bruno’s cheek; the bristles of his beard dug into Bruno’s flesh like needles. “The Queendom still rots with collapsium, its sun is in imminent danger of swallowing a hypermass, and I have suffered a blow far worse than any torment of Marlon’s. We all have. God, I’m able to empathize. I’m able to feel the pain of all the worlds’ billions, because my own pain is finally too huge to contain.
“Will you not avenge her, Bruno? Will you not fight for her Queendom’s safety, as she’d command you to if she were here? Have we traded places, you and I? Because / would save her worlds if I could. If I could.”
“Let me up.”
“Listen carefully, damn you: I’m weak and damaged and years behind your knowledge of collapsium. I will save the Queendom, but I’ve only yourself to use as my instrument. There is no other r-recourse. Let you up? By God, you’ll get up. Now!”
His weight lifted off Bruno, but suddenly his hands were there, grabbing the ruff of Bruno’s shirt, hauling him up by it.
“Say it,” Muddy instructed, thrusting his face once more into Bruno’s own. “Say you will live.”
“Let go.”
Bruno tried to shake off Muddy’s grasp and saw the wince of agony there on his brother’s face, his own face. Muddy’s weakened body struggled against pain and fatigue and despair, but his grip was surprisingly strong, the conviction behind it being much greater than Bruno’s own. It was that more than anything—that wobbly but determined strength in the face of total calamity—that altered the trajectory of Bruno’s heart.
“All right, damn it. I’ll live,” he agreed, his voice heavy with despair. To be bested by this most pathetic of creatures, to find that he himself was the lesser man after all.
But with nothing left to live for, he could at least, indeed, spend his life in the act of vengeance. He could, at least, do his level best to crush Marlon’s face between angry fists, to put an end to these evil plans, to sweep up every last bit of stray collapsium before irreversible havoc could be wreaked on the Queendom and its people.
‘’Or die trying,“ Muddy added with a sudden, strangled laugh. He released Bruno’s shirt ruff and stepped away, and suddenly tears were rolling down his face. His strength— limited, as he’d so often said—was finally expended, and he staggered and slumped against his acceleration couch.
Not limply, though—the ertial space around them seemed to discourage that. Instead, he bounced away and collapsed in a heap beside the supine Hugo, who mewled in delight. Hello, friend!
“Attention,” the voice of Sabadell-Andorra said. “I am receiving a radio transmission, analog voice.”
Dear God, Bruno thought, was there no rest? Would there be no rest for him, ever? “Play it,” he said, raising the back of his couch to a working position. The whole ship smelled of sweat and scorched cloth, and his own sun-fried hair. He looked around, thinking: so crowded in here. What are we doing?
“De Towaji?” a crackling voice asked from the ether. It was Marlon Sykes’ voice, unmistakable after all these years. “Bruno de Towaji, is that you?”
Bruno sighed, too tired for the moment to feel a proper sense of hatred. “Reply: Yes, Marlon, you pathetic bastard. I’m here.”
“I hoped you’d come,” Marlon said, after only a few seconds’ delay. He must be somewhere close by. Bruno scanned the trajectory display but saw no trace of a base or spaceship or other structure there, just another loose end of Ring Collapsiter swimming into view.
“End reply,” he said. “Ship, can you localize the source of that transmission?”
“Negative, sir. Range is indeterminate, and the signal appears to be coming from a broad region, fully half the sky.”
Bruno frowned. “Which half?”
“Opposite the sun.”
“Hmm. And it all arrives at the same time? It’s a clean signal?”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“How unique. It’s as if it were coming from an enormous shell antenna, symmetric about our position. But that’s unlikely, isn’t it? He’s got some trick he’s employing.”
Marlon’s voice came again. “Bruno, are you still there?”
“Reply: I’m here. You say you hoped I’d come?”
Again, the delay. Then Sykes said, “I did, really. You’re my hero, sir. Didn’t your tattooed friend tell you?” The odd thing was, Marlon didn’t sound snotty or sarcastic or evil with that remark. He sounded like plain old Marlon Sykes, meaning every word he was saying.
“Declarant Sykes,” Cheng Shiao said urgently, leaning over the radio console in an ill-considered lurch. “I must insist that you surrender yourself immediately. You’ve broken the law, sir.”
Sykes laughed at that, and suddenly he did sound evil. “Who’ve you got down there with you, Bruno? Some policeman? No one fit to judge MS, certainly. We make our own laws, we Declarant-Philanders. Even physical laws can be ruled in our favor, if we prepare the proper defense.”
Bruno sighed, weary of all this. “What is it you want, Marlon?”
“To business, eh? No time to catch up on the personal side? All right, then; be that way. I’ve contacted you to ask you to join me. Not quite as a full partner—I’m really not prepared to share the conceptual credit—but I could certainly use your help in the detail work. Frankly, I could use your company, too, if you’re willing to lend it.”
Bruno was aghast. “Marlon, are you insane? Well, clearly you are, but are you stupid as well? Tamra is dead. You killed her, you… you… fiend!” There didn’t seem any better word for it. Words had simply failed him.
“Fiend?” Marlon sounded genuinely hurt. “I’m as much a victim as you, sir. Remember, I loved her first. I didn’t kill her—why would I do that? She killed herself. Ask your little friends there.”
Killed herself? Killed herself?
“It’s true,” Vivian said hollowly. She’d stripped out of her quilted bodysuit and now wore only a kind of slip or under-dress that served to emphasize her all-but-grown-up figure. But her face—her grown-up face—was heartbreakingly sad. “We’d gotten the fax working again, intermittently, but it kept malfunctioning and going offline—none of us knew enough about it to say why. We had only two reflective blankets at that time, and there just wasn’t enough room for everyone underneath them. We tried taking turns that first day, but it was clear that that was just going to slowly kill us all.
“So we tried drawing straws, but Her Majesty somehow rigged the draw. She lost five times in a row. We didn’t let it stand, of course, though she kept insisting it was her duty, that ‘not one more citizen’ would die in her stead. But what was our duty, if not to protect her? Then Cheng Peterson died—we found him with his skin burned black and his tongue all puffed out—and she just… walked out into the sunlight and cut her throat. I don’t know where she got the knife; I never saw it before. We tried to save her. We tried, but you can’t fix a carotid artery under those conditions; you just can’t. So she… died. And the next day—