“Don’t try a long shot.” That was Parmikan to Lyle, over the suit radio. “She’s injured. Get in close. Then we finish him and grab her. But don’t kill her — she’s taking us home.”
“I won’t kill her.” That was Lyle, the white plaster on his nose vivid through the suit’s visor. “Not ’til I’m done with the bitch. She’ll wish she was dead before that.”
They were coming after us, knowing that we had no place to hide. It was our misfortune to find ourselves, weaponless and pursued, in the emptiest quarter of known space. Nowhere to run to, and soon we would be out of air.
McAndrew was retreating anyway, dragging me along with him, but not in a simple, straight-line run. We were zigzagging up and across and sideways, rolling all over the sky; which made good sense if you were trying to evade being shot, and no sense at all when your enemy had just declared that he would not shoot until he got close.
Then we stopped dead. Mac glanced all around him, sighting for Parmikan and Lyle, the two mass detectors just where we had left them, and the shape of the Hoatzin, further off. He lifted us a few meters upward, and halted again.
“Here we are, then,” he muttered. “And here we stay.”
Lyle and Parmikan hadn’t moved while Mac and I had been corkscrewing our way around in space. Now they started towards us. Soon I could see their faces, white in the reflected glow of the visors’ built-in instruments.
Still McAndrew didn’t move. The feeling of distance and unreality that had swamped me the moment I was shot started to fade. At last I was scared. But when I started my propulsion system, ready to take off again away from the advancing men, Mac held out his hand to stop me.
“No, Jeanie. Hold by, and don’t move.”
They were closing on us. Parmikan was two or three meters in the lead. Lyle still held the gun, but he had learned his lesson. He would not fire again until he was at point-blank range, too close to be thrown off in his aim by the effects of free-fall rotation.
“Mac!” We couldn’t stand still and be slaughtered like sheep. I swung to argue with him, and saw the expression on his face. He was agonized and biting his lower lip. “Mac, come on. We can’t just give in.”
But he was shaking his head at me. “I’m sorry, Jeanie,” he said. “This isn’t me. I can’t go through with it. No matter what happens next, I have to give them a chance.” And he lifted his arm towards Lyle and Parmikan. “Don’t come any closer. Stay right there. You are in terrible danger.”
That stopped them — for a second or two. They stared all around, and saw nothing. Lyle snorted through his broken nose, while Parmikan laughed aloud for the first time since I had met him.
“Don’t try that on us, McAndrew,” he said. “We weren’t born yesterday. If you stand still, I promise you’ll get yours clean and quick.”
He was moving forward again. My suit’s vision enhancement showed the grin on his shapeless mouth. He looked as happy as I had ever seen him. And then the clean white of his suit was broken by a thin black line that ran across Stefan Parmikan from hip to hip, about two inches below his navel.
He stared down at himself as the line widened. He started to scream, and tried to back up.
It was too late. His motion carried him forward. As it did so he shrank, shortening and squeezing in towards his hips. The thin black line became a rolling tunnel of red and purple across his whole body. Twisted internal organs were moving into it from above and below. Then Parmikan had passed all the way through.
The scream ended. A pair of legs, still held together at the top, came floating on towards us. Separate from it moved a torso, cleanly severed. Blood gouted out and froze as a fine icy spray.
Lyle, a few meters behind, had enough time to stop. He paused, still holding the gun.
“Hand that over.” I summoned what little energy I had and spoke over the suit radio before McAndrew had time to react. And then, when Lyle hesitated, I said, “Hand it over right now. Or get just the same as he did.”
He hardly seemed to be listening. His eyes were following the horror of Parmikan’s severed body. But he nodded and released the gun, which floated gently away from him.
It’s a measure of how far gone I was that I actually started out towards it, until McAndrew grabbed me.
“You stay where you are, too,” he said. “And Lyle, don’t move a millimeter until we come around and get you. There’s other gravitational line singularities through this whole volume.”
We began to move again, McAndrew hauling me along like ballast in a strange helical path that wound its way towards Van Lyle. Finally McAndrew was able to reach out and snag the gun.
“All right.” He waved it at Lyle, then towards the Hoatzin. “We’ve got a clear run from here to the ship. You start that way. And remember that I understand freefall ballistics a lot better than you do. I won’t miss.”
The three of us drifted slowly back to the lock, but McAndrew would not let Van Lyle enter. He handed me the gun. “You first, Jeanie. Can you fix the lock so it works?”
“I think so.” I moved inside. “I just have to reset the safety interlocks.”
I made it sound trivial, and it should have been. But I kept half blacking-out before I was done and able at last to refill the interior of the Hoatzin with air.
It seemed forever before the lock cycled again. I wondered and stayed tense. I had the gun. Suppose Lyle had taken advantage of that and overpowered McAndrew?
I dropped those worries when Lyle emerged from the inner lock. His manner and bearing were of a crushed man with no fight left in him. I made him take his suit off, but I kept my own on until McAndrew finally came through the lock.
He didn’t give Lyle a look. He came straight across to me and examined my injured leg.
“I’m sorry, Jeanie,” he said, as he helped me ease out of my suit. “I know I put us in danger, warning them the way I did. If Parmikan had stopped in time we might have been killed. But I couldn’t let them go on moving into that line singularity, without giving them at least a chance to stop. I just couldn’t do that. You’d have done the same thing, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I would.”
Like hell. If it had been up to me, Lyle would be floating around in two halves, the same as Stefan Parmikan. But then, compared with McAndrew I’m a barbaric, vengeful throwback. “Don’t worry about it, Mac. What you did was the right thing.”
I winced, as the suit came free from my calf and caught on crusted blood. “So whose idea was it, Van Lyle?” I said. “Who decided that on this expedition, McAndrew and I wouldn’t be going back?”
He had been sitting slumped over, staring at the floor. He looked up, opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind. He shook his head.
I didn’t blame him. When we arrived home he would be charged and surely convicted; but nothing the system authorities could do to him was half as bad as Anna Lisa Griss’s vengeance if he betrayed her.
McAndrew had gone across to the capsule’s medical center and was returning with two spray syringes. “I’m going to put you under, Jeanie, while I dress your leg,” he said. “You’ll have to wait until we’re home for a full repair. But first, to be safe…”
He went to Van Lyle and pressed the loaded syringe against the back of the stooped man’s neck. Lyle tried to stand up, with a startled expression on his face. It was already too late.
“Better if we keep him under all the way back,” Mac said, as after a few struggling seconds Lyle slid forward and fell face-down on the floor. “That way we don’t have to worry.”
I wasn’t worrying. I was going to be next, and physically I was ready for it. My calf was beginning to throb mercilessly. Still I held up my hand in protest. “Mac, wait a minute. We shouldn’t head back until you’ve finished your experiments. And you’ve hardly started.”