“My winter quarters,” Marlon apologized, catching Bruno’s look. “It isn’t much, but then it doesn’t really need to be, does it?”
“Your systems are down,” Bruno said.
Marlon’s smile was sheepish. “Well, yes, there is that. Not entirely down, mind you—not yet, anyway. But the most critical systems—the ones on which the Queendom’s fate depends-—are inaccessible. I was hoping perhaps you could help me with that.”
“I?” Bruno asked innocently.
Marlon’s smile vanished. “I don’t know what you’ve done, Bruno, but you’ll kindly undo it. Immediately! The project has reached a critical juncture, and if I’m not at the controls in the next few hours there will ‘t>e no arc defin. The sun will still collapse, mind you, but there’ll be no purpose to it, no benefit to anyone. Senseless death and destruction is something we all wish to avoid, I’d think.”
“Hence your magnanimity,” Bruno said.
“Oh, tch tch, Bruno. After all these years, you still doubt the special bond between us? Come, help me out of this jam. If you reflect a moment, you’ll realize you have no actual choice about it.”
Wobbling against Shiao’s weight, Bruno sighed. “Marlon, can’t you just stop this? I believe you. You’ve discovered the arc de fin, where I have not. Isn’t that enough? History will mark your triumph either way. But if you end this villainy now, if you’re willing to leave bad enough alone, you’ll at least be remembered with some measure of approval. A would-be monster who, in the end, didn’t have the heart for it. The sun, Marlon. Was there ever a more fundamental symbol of nurture, of comfort, of life itself?”
“I expect not,” Marlon agreed, amicably enough. ‘’I’ve come too far, though, Bruno. I wouldn’t stop this if I could, and at this point I don’t see that it’s even possible. Now, that’s an honest response. I could just as easily have agreed to your demand, let you reactivate my systems, and then killed you. That’s what a monster would do. But I have more respect than that.”
“And if / agree to your demand,” Bruno countered, “and your systems are reactivated, you could still kill us both.”
“I could,” Marlon conceded. “But I give you my word that you and all your friends will be stored safely.”
“Safely?” Shiao snorted. “Surely this place… will be among the first destroyed, and there is no Iscog to carry our patterns away from here.”
Marlon shrugged. “Whether this camp will survive I’m not sure—it’ll be on the nightside during the worst conflagrations, vulnerable only to neutrinos passing all the way through the planet. But the question is moot—I have a spaceship to escape in.”
“Ah,” Shiao said. “Of course you do.”
“No insolence, please,” Marlon said wearily. “I’ve already given you your lives, what more do you expect?”
There was no right answer to that question. No answer was attempted.
Finally, Marlon rolled his eyes, sighed heavily, and pointed the gun again at Shiao’s head. It was a strange little thing, four tubes emerging from the rim of a parabolic dish, not parallel but converged on the geometric center of Shiao’s skull. The whole thing was translucent and blue and quite fragile looking, like a funny toy designed to mock the concept of “gun.” But Bruno had never seen anything like it, and that was reason enough to be afraid.
“Fifteen seconds, gentlemen. You’ve presumed on my patience long enough.”
“Give him nothing,” Shiao said calmly.
But Bruno held up a placating hand. “Marlon, please. This isn’t easy for us.”
“The others with you,” Marlon said. “They’ll die as well. Slowly, badly, if I have any say in the matter. Five seconds.”
“I surrender,” Bruno said quickly. “Please, harm none of them.”
Marlon relaxed. “You’re no fool, de Towaji. You understand: Your lives can end along with several billion others, or they can continue while those billions die anyway. Those are the only choices available. The equation is simple.”
“Indeed,” Bruno said, his heart quailing. He still hoped for some miracle, some way to bring this horrific matter to a less-than-horrific conclusion. But to achieve that miracle, even to hope for it, he must live at least a little while longer… “Can you access some sort of intercom or public address system? I’ll need to speak with my friends.”
“That can be arranged,” Marlon said, stepping toward the live wellstone wall in which the doorway had appeared. He looked somewhat less than trusting as he tapped out a series of commands on the wellstone’s surface.
A pickup and wall speaker appeared beside Bruno, at the same level as the speaker beneath his chin.
“Er, hello?” he tried. “Vivian, are you there?”
“Bruno!” Deliah van Skettering’s voice called back immediately. “We were worried; you’ve been gone so long!”
“You may remain worried,” Bruno said. Then, finally, he knew what he must do: He must order Deliah and Vivian and Tusite and Muddy away from this place. Could he not save the Queendom? Was it arrogance to think he ever could? Well, then at least he would save something, and not in the foul clutches of Marlon Sykes. He would order them away, and Marlon, with his systems down, would have no choice but to let them escape. Meanwhile, he would vent his anger on the available targets: Shiao first, naturally, but Shiao had just got done placing his fate in Bruno’s hands. And Shiao’s death, his inevitable death, might conceivably give Bruno enough time to throw himself hands-first at Marlon’s throat—
But Vivian Rajmon’s high, teenaged voice called out before he could quite get the words formed. “Cheng? R.C. Captain Cheng Shiao, are you all right?”
“I’m here, Commandant-Inspector,” Shiao said, suddenly attentive. “I… would have you know that my heart was lost the moment I met you, Commandant-Inspector. It would have been yours, if you’d have had it—yours for a million years. But my life belongs to de Towaji, and to the Queendom. Forgive me.”
And with those words, Bruno’s hoped-for miracle occurred: Shiao’s body, crippled and broken and bloodied though it was, somehow found the strength to leap four meters across the room at Marlon Sykes. Marlon had been suspicious, waiting for trouble of some sort, but Cheng Shiao was a hard man to stop. The gun went off with a little popping sound, but a moment later Shiao swept it from Marlon’s hand, knocking it across the room so that it spun along the floor and came to rest beneath the rumpled cot. He knocked Marlon down as well, in the same clean motion.
“Good night!” Bruno couldn’t help exclaiming.
Then Vivian’s voice came again. “Cheng! Cheng!”
And Muddy’s voice. “What’s happening, sir? Can we help?”
Shiao wrestled Marlon facedown onto the floor, and then from somewhere, some pocket or recess in the tattered space-suit, produced a ball of handcuff putty and slapped it down on the small of Marlon’s back. Rattlesnake-quick, it lashed out to encircle wrists and ankles, leaving Marlon neatly trussed and screaming. “Dealbreakers! Dealbreakers! Rotten, stinking, dishonest…”
But there was no look of triumph or even relief on Shiao’s face. Only pain. He rolled away, falling onto his back, and Bruno could see the wound Marlon’s gun had made in Shiao’s abdominal cavity. Not a bullet hole, or a laser burn, but a void—a six-centimeter absence where armor and flesh should be. Transported? Vanished? The dream of matter, somehow undreamt? It hardly mattered; Shiao would not survive the injury. Already it was filling with blood. Cheng Shiao would be dead in sixty seconds, if that.