Gundhalinu was already reacting, as if a sixth sense from his years as a Blue had told him something he couldn’t have known. He shouted for the troopers loitering outside, lunged backward before Reede’s own momentum could catch up to him. He collided with a table in the crowded space behind him.
Reede’s fist with the calibrator caught him in the side of the face, slamming him back into a pile of equipment. Gundhalinu fell, crashing down in a rain of electronics gear. He lay still; Reede saw blood.
Reede spun back again as Hundet burst into the tent. Hundet took it all in in one glance; the stun rifle he already held in his hands rose to his shoulder.
Reede reached frantically for the knife at his belt. He flung it without even time to aim, trusting blind instinct and his perfect reflexes. The blade caught Hundet in the chest, stopping his forward motion with the shock of the counterblow. He seemed to hang, agonizingly suspended in midair, through an endless moment before his legs gave way and he sprawled facedown on the floor. Reede crossed the lab in less than a heartbeat to the place where Hundet lay in a spreading pool of red. He rolled Hundet with his foot.
Dead. Hundet’s eyes stared up at him in unblinking hatred as he leaned down and jerked his knife from the dead man’s body. He wiped the blade on Hundet’s tunic impassively, and put it back into his belt sheath. He picked up the rifle, checking its charge. He adjusted the setting to maximum; on that setting it would stop a man cold from a considerable distance, and kill him easily at short range. Holding the gun, he went outside.
Trooper Saroon stood in the open space between domes, clutching his rifle indecisively. His face was tense and worried as he watched Niburu and Ananke, who stood looking toward the lab. The expressions on all their faces changed abruptly as Reede came out of the dome, carrying Hundet’s gun.
“Freeze!” Reede said, but he could have saved his breath. Saroon stood frozen already, with the look on his face turning to pathetic betrayal as he grasped what must be happening. He stared at Niburu and Ananke again, in disbelief; his gun wavered.
“Drop it,” Reede said, gesturing with his own weapon. Saroon tossed the rifle away and raised his hands. He kept stealing glances at the tent, hoping against hope that someone else would come out of it. “Niburu,” Reede said, “Ananke. This is it. We’ve got everything we came for, and more. Get inside and get started—I want that stardrive unit in the rover now. We’re leaving, as soon as I take care of details.” He moved a few steps toward Saroon, getting within fatal range, and raised the rifle again. Saroon sat down abruptly in the sand as his knees buckled. Reede adjusted his 81111 downward.
“No, Reede—!”
Reede lowered the rifle, furiously, as he found Niburu squarely in his line of sight. “Goddammit! Get out of the way, you stupid bastard.”
But Niburu stood motionless, placing his body like a shield between the trembling boy and the gun. “You don’t have to do this. What’s the point—?”
“Yes, I do. Get out of the way.” Reede gestured with the gun, feeling his face harden over. “Get out of here if you don’t want to watch. But get the fuck out of my way. Now!”
“No. I won’t let you kill him.” Niburu stood straighter, white-faced and tightlipped. He barely topped the kneeling trooper’s height, but Reede found nothing absurd about his position. Slowly, as if he were hypnotized, Ananke moved forward, ready to add his body to the human shield. Reede’s hands tightened over the gun.
But as he began to raise it again, Ananke glanced away, distracted by some unexpected motion. Reede followed his glance, swore as his eyes caught sight of something—someone, disappearing around the bend of the canyon. Someone running like hell toward Fire Lake.
Reede ran back to the tent. A glance inside told him all he needed to know. The far wall of the dome gaped, letting in daylight. Gundhalinu was gone.
Reede went after him down the canyon, leaving Saroon behind, forgotten. Gundhalinu was the one who mattered, the one he had to stop. Because Gundhalinu was heading for the Lake, and he didn’t know why. The canyon seemed to go on forever, shimmering with heat, until he began to wonder desperately whether the Lake was shifting reality around him, stretching out spacetime so that he would never reach his quarry. He had almost drowned because the Lake protected Gundhalinu; the Lake loved Gundhalinu….
But he burst out of the canyon mouth onto the open shore at last, and Gundhalinu was there, standing silhouetted by the Lake’s hellshine on the barren, tortured stone. Facing the Lake he raised his hand, to throw something—
“Gundhalinu!” Reede raised his rifle even as he shouted the name. He fired.
Gundhalinu staggered as the shock hit him; the impact carried his arm forward. His hand released whatever it had held, as his nervous system went dead and he collapsed on the beach. Reede saw something too small to identify disappear into the shimmering haze.
Reede ran forward, crouched down, rolling Gundhalinu’s helpless body onto its back. Gundhalinu stared up at him, bloody and bruised but completely aware.
“What was it?” Reede said fiercely. “What did you throw into the Lake?”
Gundhalinu didn’t answer; silent whether he liked it or not, because his voluntary responses had been put on hold. He breathed in ragged gasps. He’d taken a bad hit, enough to affect his autonomic nervous system. But Reede saw triumph slowly replace the fury and the betrayal in the other man’s eyes.
Reede kicked him anyway for not answering, out of spite or something darker. Gundhalinu’s face spasmed with pain. Reede straightened up, looking toward the Lake; watching, half-blind, for some clue. And then he saw it—a glitch, a ripple, a shimmering transfiguration in the distortion all around him. He could almost feel it … the vision of his worst fear coming true. And yet something inside him was filled with wonder.
“You did it, didn’t you—?” he said, looking back at Gundhalinu. “That was the virus! You’ve infected the whole fucking Lake with it!” He kneeled down, catching Gundhalinu by the front of his sweat-soaked shirt, and dragged him up to sitting. He held Gundhalinu’s bruised face clamped in his free hand so that they were eye to eye. Gundhalinu met his gaze unflinchingly, and blinked once, slowly, like a nod.
Reede slapped Gundhalinu, hard; feeling the other man’s pain with the same dizzy sense of terror and pleasure that he felt when the pain was his own. “I was going to kill you because I had to, because you knew too much… . But now it’s too late for that. Now I’ll just have to kill you for revenge.” He let Gundhalinu go, letting him fall back onto the mottled surface of the stone. He pushed to his feet.
Picking up the stun rifle, he leveled it at Gundhalinu’s head. Gundhalinu’s face did not change, could not. But in his eyes Reede saw desperation and fear... grief, betrayal, loss. The muzzle of the gun sank slowly as Reede’s hands lowered, suddenly strengthless; as his mind’s eye replayed his waking to a vision of red rock and glaring sky, to Gundhalinu’s face hovering above him and the knowledge that the man he had just been trying to kill had saved him from death by drowning.
His rage and resolve drowned in the clear, sweet river of his memories. He remembered all that they had accomplished together, the uncanny way their minds meshed, the knowledge that he had never worked with anyone before who had … who had … He turned his back on Gundhalinu’s naked vulnerability, stared out at the seething, blinding Lake, the face of Chaos. He listened to it screaming, inside his head. But because of what they had created together, already it was transforming into something new, into Order… .