He led her wordlessly back through the lab, into his apartment—their apartment, now, at least for a time. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Do you want some breakfast? Maybe some music—?”
She nodded, opening her mouth to speak; turned, startled, as the apartment door suddenly opened.
Reede froze; went weak with relief as he saw Niburu come through it, followed by Ananke. He stared at them, suddenly feeling the way a man who had been lost at sea would feel, sighting land. “What took you so long to get here?” he snapped, frowning.
Niburu shook his head. His mouth formed a quirky, uncertain smile. “You forgot to leave a forwarding address, boss.” He shrugged. “So, you missed us?”
It was Reede’s turn to look at him oddly. “Missed you?” he repeated. Something like a laugh caught in his throat; something like a piece of glass, so that for a moment he could not speak. “Yeah,” he muttered, finally. “I can’t figure out how to use the fucking kitchen system.”
Niburu’s smile stabilized. “Right, boss,” he said, with an expression that looked strangely like contentment. “TerFauw sent us back. He said … said you needed us.” He glanced abruptly at Reede’s bandaged hands; Reede saw the discomfort in his eyes as he looked up again. Reede turned away from it, keeping his rictus hold on Ariele.
“We brought somebody with us,” Niburu said, suddenly uneasy again. He gestured toward the open doorway behind him. A third man entered the room. Reede stopped in disbelief.
“Da—!” Ariele cried, starting forward.
“Shh.” Reede caught her arm, pulling her up short; his eyes warned Dawn treader to stay where he was. “What’s he doing here?” He asked the obvious question, letting Niburu and the others read the one he could not speak aloud in the burning-glass of his stare.
Niburu hesitated, knowing as well as he did that the walls had eyes and ears. “He… has important data for you. About the mers—”
“Oh?” Reede glanced at Dawntreader, trying to keep his response neutral. Dawntreader was staring at Ariele; Ariele was trembling in his grip. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep either one of them silent with nothing but willpower. “Let me have a look at what you brought. In there—” He jerked his head toward the waiting lab; led them through its doorway and sealed the door behind them with a brusque command.
He let go of Ariele. “All right. Now we can talk.” Niburu shot him a surprised glance; he nodded. “I control the systems here,” he said, with bitter satisfaction. It was the one place where he was given free access to enough sophisticated hardware and software that he actually had the power to manipulate his environment.
Ariele ran to Dawntreader. He met her halfway, held her in his arms; and if he wasn’t really her father, Reede couldn’t tell the difference in that moment. “You’re all right,” Dawntreader kept repeating, mindlessly, while she murmured, “You came for me…” over and over.
“No she’s not,” Reede snapped. “You’re too late. She’s taken the water of death.”
Dawntreader looked up, and a knowledge of horror that he should not have possessed was suddenly in his eyes. He looked back at Ariele, at Reede again. “Then maybe I came here to kill you, instead of save you—”
“Kill me?” Reede sneered, waving his bandaged hands. “I’m already dead. Save me? Don’t be an ass. If you try to take either of us away from here, you’ll only kill us both. You might as well pick up a gun and do it cleanly. Or else give up now, and admit you’ve walked empty-handed into hell, and you’ll never get out alive. Become a brand for the Source. Then we can all be one big happy family—” His hand slammed down painfully on the counter surface beside him.
Dawntreader winced. He tore his gaze from Ariele’s pale, despairing face to look at Reede again. Slowly his gaze cooled. “All right,” he murmured. “I was prepared for this… . You’ll have to forgive me if it’s still hard to take. But hear me out before you tell me I’m an ass. I know about the water of death, and everything else … so do Moon and Gundhalinu, by now. Gundhalinu can recreate the drug for you, he can protect you, and he’ll be willing to do it, if only for Ariele’s sake.” He glanced at her again, missing Reede’s sudden ironic smile. “I’m taking my daughter out of here. Will you come with us?”
Reede remembered Gundhalinu’s desperate attempt to haul his unwilling cooperation into the Golden Mean’s net. He thought about being Gundhalinu’s drug-dependent lackey, instead of the Source’s. He thought about the mers. He frowned, refusing to listen with more than half an ear; refusing to hope. “You’re missing the point. We’d still be dead before we even got back to Tiamat. It takes too long—”
“Do you have a sample of the drug we can take with us?”
“Yes.” Reede shrugged. “So what?”
“Then we can keep you both suspended in stasis until we have a safe supply.”
“How the fuck are you going to do that?” Reede felt his anger rise as Dawntreader kept attacking his defenses.
“We came down in an LB from the ship, boss,” Niburu said. “We can use the emergency pods to put you in stass.”
Reede turned to look at him. “Gods …” he murmured. The emergency units for injured passengers on a ship’s lifeboats had a limited suspension cycle, but it might be enough.
“You don’t have to be there at all, until Gundhalinu has what you need, once we get out of here,” Dawntreader said. “That’s fucking brilliant,” Reede muttered, with a grudging shake of his head.
“Niburu thought of the lifeboats,” Dawntreader said.
Reede glanced back at Niburu, who shrugged selfconsciously. It struck him then what Niburu and Ananke had risked, were risking, even to have smuggled Dawntreader in here. He realized at last that they had not done it for Ariele’s sake, or out of loyalty to the Hegemony, or simply because Dawntreader had asked them to. And that left only one reason, that he could think of. “You must all be crazy,” he said thickly.
Niburu burst into unexpected laughter. “A man doesn’t have to be crazy to work for you; but it helps,” he said. “What do you say, boss? Will you do it? We could get free of this place, forever—”
“Gundhalinu will help us if we can just get back to Tiamat,” Dawntreader repeated. He looked at Reede expectantly, with Ariele at his side.
“You really intend to do this, don’t you? You’ve got it all worked out.” Reede looked at them, his mouth twisting. “Except for how we’re going to cover that first few hundred meters through the citadel’s security to get ourselves out of here.” He watched the rest of them look at each other. “That’s what I thought,” he said sourly. And then he smiled. “All right,” he murmured. “That’s the kind of odds I like—suicidal.” They all looked at him, now, their expressions turning even grimmer.
“And I have something I’ve been working on for a long time, a little private exercise. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to try it out.” He turned away, striding back to the closest terminal. He sat down, stripping the bandage material from his hands with his teeth. He murmured a sequence of keycodes as his fingers passed over the touchboard. The sensation of the tingling board against the barely healed skin of his hands was exquisitely intense, like his mood was suddenly, as the buried datafile emerged from his secret storage and appeared before him in all its virulent perfection. “Go,” he whispered to it, “and destroy.” He spread his fingers and flattened his branded palm across the touchboard. The image vanished again, leaving the screen empty.