Jesus Christ don’t let go of me, O’Donnell begged them silently. He gaped at the emptiness that stretched out forever, the gleaming Earth so far below, the black infinity of space swallowing his tiny frail being. His breath caught in his throat. He could hear his pulse thundering in his ears. He saw himself spinning into the dark yawning void endlessly, spiraling out into nothingness, cast away until the end of time. For the first time he could remember since childhood, Hugh O’Donnell found himself praying.
But Freddy and Lance held him firmly for the several minutes it took to cover the two hundred meters between the raft of modules and the observatory. As they slowed to a stop outside the airlock, Freddy radioed Lance to remain in his MMU while he took O’Donnell inside. Lance acknowledged with a thumbs-up.
Freddy and O’Donnell sealed themselves in the airlock, waited for the pressure to equalize, then opened the inner hatch to enter the observatory itself. Freddy was more familiar with space suits than O’Donnell and removed his helmet quickly. O’Donnell tried to detach his own and spun into a tumble. Freddy eventually pried it off, dislodging O’Donnell’s glasses in the process.
“So this is exile,” said O’Donnell, reattaching his glasses and looking around the cramped quarters. He shuddered slightly, remembering his terror outside. “It’s cold in here.”
“I gonna level with you, man,” said Freddy. “I know you didn’ kill Weiss.”
“Thanks for your confidence, Freddy. Why the hell am I here, then?”
“Commander don’ wan’ you hurtin’ anyone.”
“Like Lance? He attacked me, pal. That kid is nuts.”
“Well, he ain’t gonna attack you no more,” said Freddy. “You an’ me got a big problem, man.”
“You’re half right, anyway.”
“I’m all right. I’m with Welch.”
“You’re what!?”
“With Welch, man. I’m supposed to watch you. Make sure you do your work. Make sure no one fuck around with you. And we both fucked up, man. You because you had that shit stuffed down your throat, me because I didn’ stop it.”
“This is a helluva time to tell me!”
“Orders, man,” said Freddy, unhappily. “They don’ want you to know you got a security man with you. They figure you give us both away if you knew.”
“Shit,” O’Donnell muttered.
“In spades.”
“What exactly happened?”
“Don’ know exactly. I found Weiss outside your lab aroun’ 0115 hours. He already dead and somebody, maybe him, tried to get in your lab by removin’ the hinges. I fix the door and hide Weiss in a canister in the logistics module until I figure out what’s goin’ on. Then I look for you. You trashed in your compartment. I din’ know why, so I fix you in your restraint and hope you wake up. Lance found the body and Tighe called everybody into the rumpus room. When you don’ show, we go look. I found you where I left you, but you still trashed.”
“So why does Dan think I killed Weiss?”
“You the best bet, far as he can see. He knows your lab tampered with and found a button ripped off Weiss’s shirt outside it.”
“That won’t hold up as evidence.”
“We ain’t in court, man.”
“So who do you think did it?”
“Don’ know. Same guy gave stuff to Russell Cramer, prob’ly.”
“How did you know that Cramer had drugs in him?”
Freddy tapped his temple with a finger. “I had a talk with Cramer before they sent him down. He wasn’ much help. I think he got it directly from Roberts. But I don’ know where Roberts got it from.”
“Roberts? That twit?” O’Donnell said. Then he took a breath. “I guess there aren’t too many possibilities.”
“There’s enough. We don’ have much time.”
“Say that again. So someone tried to fuck me up because they know what I’m working on.”
“Maybe. Anything possible with these lulus.”
“Weiss?”
“Nah. Too stupid. An’ we ran a check on him. Somebody use him, if you ask me.”
“What about my lab?”
“Sealed it myself. Copied all your computer files, then crashed the system.” Freddy patted his chest to indicate the disk. “Rest of the stuff a problem. Skillen wants the space. Oyamo wants the data. They all think you working on the toxic-waste superbug. But no one doin’ anything till the shuttle get here.”
“Then what?”
“Don’ know. I gotta have a little talk with Bianco, case things get outta hand later. Meanwhile, I gotta report to Welch. Make sure he can get some friendlies on the shuttle.” Freddy thumbed an encryption chip from his flight suit pocket and pressed it into a slot on the comm console. “This’s the only link I left open, besides Tighe’s down in the command module. You wanna talk to Welch?”
“Nah,” said O’Donnell. “I never liked the bastard.”
While Freddy reported the situation to Welch, Lance remained parked outside the airlock. He was suspended between the dazzling beauty of the Earth and the cold, star-specked darkness of the firmament, but he paid little attention to either view. Freddy seemed to be taking an awfully long time in the observatory. Maybe O’Donnell had tried to overpower him and right now they were banging around inside.
Lance felt a tingle as he remembered his own battle with O’Donnell. The sensation was not unlike what he had felt with Carla Sue, before she proved to be a dishonest, lying, cheating slut. He had not merely punched O’Donnell. He had smote him as if his own hand were the hammer of God.
Lance decided to swing around to one of the observatory windows. His right forefinger accidently touched the MMU’s pitch control, and a jet of cold nitrogen gas sent him into a tumble. Blue-white Earth and deep black space flashed past him like a giant stroboscope, bright-dark, bright-dark, until he nudged a series of opposite thrusts to arrest himself.
Wow, he thought, that was fun. He jetted away from the observatory and tried it again. And again. And again.
3 SEPTEMBER 1998
TRIKON STATION
The bar was empty at that time of the morning except for the two men sitting side by side at the far end, away from the windows. They were a strange pair: a short, round, heavyset bald man who exuded nervous energy and a long, lean, lanky, lantern-jawed guy with his elbows on the bar and his head drooping between his hands.
“I still can’t believe it,” said Ed Yablon. “I mean, I know it’s true—but in my gut I expect to see him come waltzing through that door and pull up a stool beside us.”
“Yeah,” muttered Zeke Tucker.
Yablon picked up his beer and drained it. Smacking the empty glass on the bar’s gleaming surface, he motioned for the bartender to fill it up again.
“I ought to be glad, in a way,” Yablon said. “The sonofabitch was nothing but trouble.”
“Yeah.”
“The biggest pain in the ass I ever had to work with.”
“Yeah.”
“You remember the time he snuck into the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport and… well, hell, Zeke—you were there with him, weren’t you?”
Tucker did not answer. Yablon saw that the photographer was softly, quietly sobbing as if his own father had just died.
After removing his space suit Freddy went directly to the command module to report on the transfer of O’Donnell to the observatory.