Judgment at Proteus (59 page)

Someday, I really should stop delivering challenges like that.

“I hope,” McMicking called over his shoulder, “that the Spiders have one hell of an ace up their sleeves.”

“Me, too,” I said grimly, my heart sinking as I did a quick reassessment of the situation. The drudges, I’d already noted, were about a hundred meters away. Losutu and Hardin had covered over half that distance, and even though they were slower than McMicking and me they would make it to the access hatchway well before either what was left of the line of walkers or the new wave of Shonkla-raa. The timing for McMicking and me was a little iffier, but unless the Shonkla-raa were significantly faster than the standard Filly—which they very well could be—we ought to make it all right.

Which still left the question of what we were going to do once we got there.

We’d covered about half the distance, and Losutu and Hardin had reached the drudges and were slowing to a somewhat uncertain stop, when the wind in my face suddenly disappeared.

I frowned as I realized the strangeness of that. The wind was caused by me running through the air. I was still running. How could the wind stop?

I was still trying to figure it out when the wind started up again.

Only now it was blowing against the
back
of my head. As if I’d unknowingly started running backward, or as if the station air itself was on the move.

And with a horrified jolt, I understood.

Shifting my attention from the drudges and hatchway, I peered down the long axis of the station. In the distance, nearly masked by the Coreline’s own coruscating multicolored light show, I could see the faint ring of flashing red warning lights around the far end of the station.

The Spiders had opened the atmosphere barrier.

“McMicking!” I called.

“I know,” he called back. “Save your breath for running.”

I grimaced as the wind at my back began to intensify. Save my breath for running, and for survival.

I don’t know when the Shonkla-raa figured it out. Probably not long after I did. Possibly even before. But as the wind started to edge toward gale strength I heard the command tone filling the station becoming fainter. Not just from the rapidly thinning atmosphere, but also because the Shonkla-raa also recognized their need to conserve air and were alternating the command tone between them, each Filly whistling for only a few seconds at a time before passing it on to the next.

Losutu and Hardin were still standing by the open hatchway as McMicking and I ran up to them. “The air!” Losutu barked frantically, the words almost inaudible in the turbulent wind blowing against him. He jabbed a finger at the end of the station.

“We know,” McMicking shouted back. “Get into the airlock—now.”

“There are air tanks down there,” I added.

It took another half second for that to penetrate. Then Losutu’s face brightened with sudden hope, and he grabbed Hardin’s arm and jumped them both through the hatchway.

“Hang on,” I called as McMicking started to follow, my eyes on the frozen drudges looming over us. Up close, they looked even more precariously balanced than they had from a distance, leaning over the airlock hatchway as if they’d been turned to statues just as they were about to fall in.…

On impulse, I jumped up beneath one, grabbing one of the inward-leaning legs at the top of my arc. A second later, I landed with a thud beside a startled Losutu as the drudge crashed down across the hatchway above me, its tangled legs neatly blocking half of the airlock opening.

McMicking was nothing if not a fast learner. I’d barely recovered my balance when he landed a couple of meters away from me, bringing the other drudge down across the rest of the gap. “We need to tether them!” he called.

“First things first,” I said, looking around the airlock. My vision was dancing with flickering white spots, a telltale sign that I was within a few seconds of blacking out from oxygen deprivation. I spotted a row of oxygen tanks along one wall and hurried over to the first one in line.

The valve was screwed on tight, and for a moment I thought I was going to die right there with my hand still on the valve. But then it came free, and a flood of cold, dry, delicious air blew across my face.

“Over here,” I called to the others, taking a few more deep breaths and then moving to the next tank in line and opening it. “I don’t see any masks—you’ll have to just stick your faces into the flow.”

“And go easy,” McMicking warned as he maneuvered Hardin and Losutu into the twin streams I’d set up. “We don’t know how much we’ve got, or how long we’ll need it. Compton?”

“Right.” I took a couple more breaths, then crossed to where McMicking was unhooking a coil of safety line from one of the other walls. I took one end and jumped up to thread it over two of the drudge’s legs.

And twitched my arm violently away as a Filly hand darted through one of the gaps and tried to grab me.

I dropped back to the floor, crouching down as a second hand jabbed toward me. Across the airlock, I saw that McMicking had the other end of the coil looped around the other drudge’s legs and was tying it to a large lock ring fastened to the wall.

Or rather, trying to tie it. His hands, I noticed suddenly, were fumbling uncertainly with the line.

There was a blast of air in my ear, and I turned to see Losutu coming toward me, one of the oxygen tanks in his arms with the nozzle pointed toward me. I took two quick breaths and jerked my thumb toward McMicking. Losutu nodded and headed toward the other, and I bent to the task of fastening my end of the line to another of the lock rings. I finished it and turned around.

And stiffened. McMicking was lying on the floor, unmoving, the oxygen tank near him but spraying its air uselessly in the wrong direction. Losutu was hanging just beneath the drudge, fighting weakly against the Filly hand that had reached through another of the gaps and was holding him by his neck.

Two seconds later, I was at McMicking’s side, crouching low in case there were more Shonkla-raa out there still conscious enough to go fishing for Humans. I rolled the oxygen tank over, positioning it so that it was spraying its air supply toward McMicking. Standing up again, I pulled the squeeze bottle of chili sauce from my pocket, aimed as best I could, and sent a stream of the fiery liquid squarely into the Shonkla-raa’s face.

There would probably have been a bellow of pain if the other had had enough air to bellow with. The hand around Losutu’s throat slackened, but before I could pull it free it tightened up again.

Grimacing, I gave the Shonkla-raa’s face another squirt of sauce. This time, the hand didn’t even twitch.

There was another stream of air at the back of my head. I turned to find Hardin coming up behind me, the other oxygen tank hissing toward me.

And as I inhaled the splotchy white spots out of my vision, he slapped the grip of a long, narrow-bladed screwdriver into my hand.

I turned, and with a silent snarl I jabbed the tip of the screwdriver with all my strength into the back of the Shonkla-raa’s wrist. With a violent spasm, the hand finally opened, dropping Losutu to the floor.

I tried to catch him. But the lack of air had dulled my speed and strength, and the best I could do was partially break his fall. He landed heavily beside the tank that was slowly reviving McMicking. I motioned Hardin to get down beside him, then finished tying off the tether line.

Not that the Shonkla-raa were likely to be coming in after us. Not now. The Shonkla-raa I’d stabbed was lying across the drudge’s legs, his bloodied arm still hanging limply through the opening. He was dead, or close enough. So presumably were the rest of his colleagues.

So was Losutu.

We were huddled together on the floor, one of us dead, the rest of us barely alive, pressed close around the second to last of the airlock’s oxygen tanks, when the Spiders finally came for us.

TWENTY-NINE

“I understand,” Morse said quietly from beside me, “that the whole thing’s being filed under the heading of a tragic accident.”

I nodded silently as I gazed across the station at the rows of bodies, and the grim-faced soldiers and medics from the transfer station carrying the stretchers to the shuttle hatchways.

Two hundred and fifty-six dead. Five survivors, aside from McMicking, Hardin, and me, all of them in critical condition. The Quadrail schedule crashed, with ever-growing disruptive ripples flowing out across the galaxy in both transportation and the critical area of interstellar messages and communication.

An accident.

“What about the passengers on the train?” I asked. “Are they saying anything?”

“Nothing of interest,” Morse said. “Bayta was able to get all the display windows opaqued before anyone saw anything.”

I nodded. “Small favors.”

He nodded back. “Bloody small.”

For another minute we stood in silence, watching the grisly cleanup duty. The Shonkla-raa bodies, not surprisingly, had all been spirited away by the Spiders before emergency teams had even been called. Under other circumstances, I reflected, such subterfuge would have been futile, given how many witnesses had seen them.

In this case, most of those witnesses were already dead, and the rest of us weren’t talking.

“Is Bayta still with Losutu?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Morse said. “The others are down the hall, keeping Hardin company while the Cohn aerator cleans out his lungs. Looks like most of the damage is repairable.”

“Good to hear,” I said. I didn’t have any particular affection for the man, but we’d lost enough people for one day.

“Yes,” Morse said. He hesitated. “McMicking is also telling him everything about the Shonkla-raa.”

I grimaced. But there was no way we were going to hide this one under the rug. Not from Hardin. “I trust he made it clear that Hardin needs to keep all this secret?”

“Very clear,” Morse said. “Under pain of death, actually.”

“Which probably doesn’t mean much to Hardin.”

“Coming from McMicking?” Morse smiled tightly. “More than you might think.” He nodded toward the medical center. “Go on over, if you’d like. I can handle any last-minute questions Colonel Savali might have.”

“Thanks,” I said. I took a deep breath, wincing at the brief stab of pain in my lungs and ribs, and headed toward the medical center.

Sam and Carl, naturally, were right behind me.

In any normal disaster of this magnitude, a medical facility this size would have been swamped. Here, with barely enough survivors to fill a vacationers’ travel van, the place was eerily empty.

Losutu’s body had been put on the bed in one of the treatment rooms, laid out almost as if he was lying in state. Seated in a chair beside him, gazing expressionlessly into space, was Bayta.

Pulling another chair over, I sat down beside her, trying to ignore the two defenders as they tapped off into the corner behind us. “Hi,” I said quietly.

She didn’t answer. I reached over and took her hand. It was cold, and felt as lifeless as the body in front of us. I thought of telling her it was okay, or that we’d won, or any of a hundred different and stupid platitudes.

Instead, I just held her hand and kept quiet.

I don’t know how long we sat there. Probably no more than five minutes. Finally, she stirred. “Two hundred and fifty-six innocent people,” she said quietly. “I killed them, Frank. I opened the atmosphere barriers, and I killed them.”

“You had no other choice,” I reminded her gently.

“Didn’t I?” she asked. “I keep thinking there must have been something else I could have done.”

“Every soldier who’s ever been in combat has had those doubts,” I told her. “Once it’s all over, when you’re out of the heat of battle and the need for split-second decisions, you always think back and wonder what you could have done differently. Sometimes those thoughts are legitimate, and you realize too late that doing something else would have changed the outcome. But usually they’re not.”

I nodded toward the wall and the station beyond it. “For whatever it’s worth, I’ve been out of the heat of battle for over four hours now, and I still can’t see anything else you could have done. Nothing that wouldn’t have gotten all of us killed and still not saved any of the lives that were lost. I can’t think of anything McMicking, Morse, or I could have done, either.”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t worry about the cost? That the cost was inevitable?”

“The cost was determined by the Shonkla-raa, not you,” I said firmly. “It was defined the minute they chose this time and place for their attack. It’s like the terror wars—an enemy who uses innocent civilians as shields has already decreed that some of those civilians will be killed. If you’re going to fight someone like that, you either have to accept that there’s going to be heavy collateral damage, or you have to capitulate. Those are your only choices.”

She sighed. “It was still my idea. My plan. I can’t just brush all those deaths aside.”

“I wouldn’t want you to,” I said. “They were people, and they deserve our honor and respect. Part of that respect is to minimize such deaths wherever you can. The other part is to make sure they died for a reason, that their lives were given so that others might live. In this case, those others are going to number in the billions.”

“Will they?” Bayta asked, the last word almost a sob. “We haven’t stopped them, Frank. Not today, not any other time we’ve tried. They just keep coming and coming. Sooner or later, they’re going to win.”

“No, they aren’t,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “Because—”

I broke off. There were footsteps coming toward our door. Shifting my hand to a different pocket, I got a grip on the
kwi
.

The door opened, and McMicking and Hardin walked in. “Yes, they’re here,” McMicking called to someone still out in the hallway.

“Hail the conquering hero,” Hardin said with only a hint of sarcasm. His eyes flicked to the two defenders, then came back to me. “How are you holding up?”

“A little lung and ear damage,” I said as Rebekah and Terese walked in and joined the party. “Nothing a layered QuixHeal regimen won’t solve. You?”