“Here's a better plan,” Crater said. “Hand over that bag to them, they'll leave, and we save the Cycler.”
Maria looked at Crater in disbelief. “We are under attack by demons. Don't you understand what that means? They will not leave until they kill us all!”
Ensign Klibanoff interrupted. “They're coming out.”
Crater peered around the toolbot and saw four creatures in red armor floating out of a warpod hatch. They were carrying short axes and grappling hooks. “What are the axes for?” he asked.
“It's their signature weapon,” Klibanoff replied. “Demons hack their enemies to death.”
“You see, Crater?” Maria said. “You might not think the contents of this bag are worth anything, but somebody does.”
Crater had to admit somebody did, indeed, especially since they'd sent up a warpod filled with genetically tweaked ax murderers. “Take the bag, get inside the airlock,” he told her. “Ensign Klibanoff and I will hold these fellows off.”
When Maria hesitated, Crater said, “Look, if that bag is important to you, it's important to me. Now go.”
She nodded gratefully, then headed for the hatch.
A grappling hook came flying in, catching on the toolbot. Klibanoff detached it and threw it off, the demon on the line helplessly drifting away. But three demons were already across and making their way toward the toolbot.
Klibanoff handed his two detpaks to Crater. “Get on the warpod. I'll hold them off.”
Crater wanted to argue, to tell the brave ensign that they'd fight them off together, but he knew better. Klibanoff had no chance, but maybe if Crater was fast enough and lucky enough, he might be able to get aboard the warpod hull. He clipped the two detpaks to his belt with the two he already had, and using the toolbot rail, pulled himself around the core to emerge beneath the warpod.
A demon was waiting for him. It swung its ax, Crater dodged, then both he and the demon floated off into spaceâ their only connection the tether attached to the creature's grappling hook. Crater desperately pulled on the demon's arm, trying to make it drop its ax. The demon retaliated by trying to tear Crater's helmet off. They tumbled and gyrated around the tether as they fought.
The demon was astonishingly strong, and Crater knew it was only a matter of time before he going to be worn down. That was when, out of the corner of his eye, Crater saw the gillie crawl onto the base of the demon's helmet. It disappeared, then reappeared inside the helmet. The demon became aware of it and began to scream, a scream that ended instantly when its helmet faceplate suddenly popped open. The gillie crawled out of the helmet and into its holster while Crater fought the gorge in his throat. Death in a vacuum was ugly.
Crater took the tether off the demon, hooked it to his belt, and after the gillie crawled back on his shoulder, pushed the creature away and pulled himself along the tether back to the core. There were no demons where he landed. He worked his way around to the Cycler entry hatch where the warpod was docked. He stuck two detpaks on the warpod near the hatch and set them to explode in three minutes, then crossed over to the warpod and placed two more near its engine nacelles, programming them to go off in five. He then headed back across to the Cycler to see if Ensign Klibanoff was still alive.
To his surprise, he was. Somehow he'd fought off the demons, but now a dozen more had appeared. They were howling a silent scream of rage and waving their axes as they came aboard. “This is it,” Crater muttered, preparing himself for the final onslaught.
Toolbot can fight
, the gillie said.
“Can you control it?” Crater asked, with sudden hope.
Yes
, it said.
“Good old gillie!”
The gillie crawled down his arm and onto the squat machine, signaled a hatch to open, then disappeared inside. Lights glowed on the toolbot's control panel and it began to move along its rail, turning at the switch that took it toward the demons. The toolbot's arms came out and flicked the demons away, cutting their tethers and sending them spinning into space.
“Crater, we're going to win!”
It was Maria. She was back, armed with her rifle. She used it to pot away at the demons. “Don't worry, the bag is safe,” she said, but Crater didn't care about the bag and what was inside it. He was just relieved to see her alive and well.
Eight more demons came out of the warpod, two of them heading for the detpaks Crater had stuck near the entry hatch.
Maria shot one of them. The other one threw its ax at her. It flew end over end and struck her helmet. Her rifle went spinning away and she fell back.
Crater launched himself at the red-suited creature. He fell onto it and used the elk sticker on his tool belt to cut the demon's tether, then pushed it away. A quick look showed there were at least a dozen demons helplessly floating in space, flailing their arms as if trying to swim back to safety.
Thirty seconds
, the gillie said, signaling Crater from the toolbot.
Thirty seconds before the first detpak exploded, Crater shouted to Maria and Klibanoff. “The first detpaks are about to blow. Get some cover.”
Crater saw another demon had discovered the two detpaks he'd placed near the warpod engine covers. He went hand over hand across the warpod hull to stop it from pulling them loose. Before he got there, the first two detpaks exploded, severing the warpod from the Cycler. Crater knocked the demon off the warpod and cut its tether. The warpod began to drift away from the Cycler while the two remaining detpaks, not five feet away from Crater, were counting down to explode.
Jump
, the gillie said.
Now
.
Crater threw himself off the warpod toward the Cycler and saw immediately he had misjudged it. When the two detpaks went off, he was sailing past the Cycler. That was when a metallic arm reached up and grabbed him by his boot. The gillie through the toolbot pulled Crater in while the remnants of the shattered warpod tumbled away, except for one piece: a ragged chunk of hull, which harmlessly ricocheted off the Cycler.
Crater hugged the toolbot. He knew it was ridiculous, but since the gillie wasn't likely to appreciate a hug, it was all he could think to do. Then a demon that had been hiding rose up with his great ax. He swiped at Crater, missed, then swung again. That was when Ensign Klibanoff appeared and finished the demon, using the creature's own ax to do the job.
The battle was over and Crater took a deep breath. “We did it,” he said. “We beat them.”
When Ensign Klibanoff didn't say anything, Craterâ sensing something terribleâasked, “We won, right?”
“It's Maria,” Klibanoff said, and Crater felt his glittering triumph turn into a darkness blacker than the farthest reaches of space.
:::
THIRTY-THREE
D
octor Kelly Arnold was the name of the Cycler's surgeon. She was, according to Captain Fox, a young woman of great competence who'd served his crew and passengers well across a dozen cycles. “Severe trauma,” she apprised Crater, “decompression sickness, frostbite, and skin burns. That's what happens when you're too close to an explosion and your ECP suit is compromised. I'm sorry.”
It hurt Crater to see Maria in such an awful state. He wished more than anything that he could take her place, and his mind kept returning to when he told her to go inside. She had gone but then come back to fight. It was, he supposed, that awful Medaris family pride.
Maria's face was swollen and discolored, and her arms were mottled with frostbite and scabbed with burns. She was reduced to lying in bed with tubes leading in and out of her and an oxygen mask attached to her ravaged face.
“What she needs,” Dr. Arnold said, “is microbe therapy to heal her liver and kidneys, plus DNA therapy to cure her skin lesions. I am not set up for such delicate work in my surgery, nor do I have the necessary equipment to prepare the microbial material.”
Earth was receding, the Cycler gone too far for a scramferry to catch it. It would be another five days before Maria could be transported to the hospital at Armstrong City. “Will she make it, Doctor Arnold?”
Dr. Arnold was, by nature, honest and direct. “Understand,” she said, “there is a great deal of damage inside Maria's body. Her liver is releasing poisons and her kidneys are not properly filtering. She also has a fever that I am having difficulty controlling. On top of that, she is developing pneumonia.
I can take care of some of that with traditional medicine but not all.”
Crater hadn't prepared himself for such bad news. He had, upon reflection, perhaps become used to escaping death and even expected it now that it had happened a number of times. He supposed maybe that was why wars were fought with young men, because as a group they never figured anything bad would happen to them, always the other fellow.
Since the beginning of the trek across the wayback, Crater had never thought anything would happen to Maria because he was ready to lay down his life for her, as was Captain Teller.
Now, Doctor Arnold had slapped him in the face with the truth although he rebelled against it. “She can't die. I told the Colonel I wouldn't let her.”
Dr. Arnold studied him, then said, “Your promise to Colonel Medaris holds no weight with the unfolding of the universe, Mr. Trueblood, nor, for that matter, with Maria's liver function.”
Ensign Klibanoff was with Crater. In an attempt to be kind, he said, “Don't feel so low, Crater. After all, you saved the Cycler and all of us aboard it, except poor CP Strickland.”
Crater slumped into a chair beside Maria's bed and held his head. “You give me too much credit. In a way, this is all my fault.”
Ensign Klibanoff didn't argue, mainly because he suspected Crater was right, although certainly the maimed girl in the bed bore some responsibility as well, not to mention Colonel Medaris and his extended family. To let such a young girl go out across the wayback and then into space for whatever was in that bagâwell, their reputation for ruthlessness was apparently a correct one.
Captain Fox was thinking along the same lines when he called Crater to the bridge. Crater stood with his head bowed while the captain railed against the nations of Earth who, he said, “could not be trusted to keep the peace for more than a day.” He also harangued Crater about Colonel Medaris and the other heel-3 company owners who “consider their own writ as holy as the words in the Bible.”
“And you,” he roared, pointing at Crater, “you come aboard my Cycler, knowing full well you are putting every manjack and womanjill aboard in jeopardy, and for what?”
Captain Fox ordered the duffel bag brought to the bridge.
A crewman opened it to reveal a jumble of bones, including a skull. Crater peered at the yellowing, musty artifacts with the same fascination as the bridge crew.
“Are these bones worth death, misery, and the neardestruction of my ship?” Captain Fox demanded.
“No, sir.”
“Whose bones are they?”
Crater told him and Captain Fox frowned in disbelief.
“How is that possible?”
“It shouldn't be possible,” Crater admitted. “But it is.”
Captain Fox walked to one of the view ports and looked at the receding Earth. “Such evil yet occurs even when the good succeeds,” he muttered, then ordered the bag closed and placed in Crater's cabin. “If there is a curse on those bones, let it descend on you, not my Cycler.” And with that, he made the sign of the ancient cross and ordered Crater off his bridge.
When Crater returned to his cabin, the duffel was resting on the deck. He stared at it, then put the quilt from his bed over it so he wouldn't have to look at again. He was joined soon afterward by Pacoâthe cat had also survived the demons' attackâwho settled on his lap as Crater looked out the cabin view port that was turned toward the cold, unblinking stars of deep space. Paco didn't stick around too long because he had other laps to grace, and Crater, growing restless, asked the gillie about his parents. The gillie complied, using holopix, their birth announcements, photos of them growing up, being married, and working in their laboratory flitting by in the air. “Could you show me their inventions?”
Crater asked.
The gillie showed Crater the charts, graphs, pix, and text of more than a dozen new designs his parents had invented.
One after one, Crater dismissed their designs as elegant but impractical. One design, patent pending, was the manufacturing methodology required to produce what they called “heavy air,” or a mix of oxygen and nitrogen molecules made heavier by the addition of sticky neutrons to provide extra mass.
Heavy air
, their application for the patent claimed,
would revolutionize the colonization of the moon and Mars by covering these airless or near-airless orbs with breathable air of sufficient mass that the new atmosphere would not leak into space
. Crater instantly spotted a couple of problems with heavy air, not the least of which was the creation of the trillions of tons of the stuff needed to cover the surface of the moon and trillions more for Mars. The other flaw, of course, was that people weren't designed to breathe heavy air, nor were plants designed to make use of it. That would require the design of new humans and new plants, and Crater didn't even want to think how much that would cost both in money and souls.