Chapter 36

He'd been wrong.

The Ghoul had already holstered the shotgun on his back, despite the half-ruin of the straps where the plasma charge had hit. He turned to meet the hunter in a half-crouch with a knife of his own. The hunter's first desperate slash was deflected easily by the gauntlet on the Ghoul's uninjured left arm. The man shoved him away and stepped back into the hallway, either to maneuver for space or to draw the hunter away from the little one. Air emerged from the cauterized wound in the Ghoul's chest with a sticky bubbling noise. Somehow, he seemed to have lost most of the skin on his face, leaving the muscle and tendon red and raw.

The hunter righted himself easily and followed him out, seeing an opportunity to get out of visual range of the other one's weapon. His attention was concentrated wholly on the Ghoul, so he almost missed B2-09's slow advance from his right side.

Almost. He stepped quickly to the left so that he could see them both.

Behind him, in the room with the pit, there was a clatter and a gasp. He heard it quite clearly. The Ghoul must have heard something as well. The hunter saw his red eyes flicker that way, the first sign of any emotion he had shown.

"I think your friend might have overdosed," said the hunter.

"Go, Charon," said B2-09. The hunter moved further from the door and made an ironic ushering motion. The Ghoul stepped quickly past him, half-turned so that he never exposed his back, and then he was gone.

The hunter faced the gynoid as she walked toward him down the hall. He put up the combat knife. There wasn't much he could do to a B2 unit with it, in any case.

"They'll both die, won't they," she said. It was not a question.

"Yes," said the hunter.

"I don't know what's keeping him going, but it can't last. And Xen won't live without Changeling." The gynoid shivered, arms folded tightly, and stopped moving toward him. "No more stims."

The hunter had never heard those two names, but he guessed that they referred to the girl and the robot. He reached inside his coat slowly and came out with the sonic collar. B2-09 watched him dully. The light in her right eye flickered off. He felt real pity for what it must be like inside her head. The new determinative will must be fighting all the background programs, and she would be unused to and unable to cope with the roar of emotions.

"It hurts, doesn't it," he said. "I'm sorry about that. I don't have a choice."

"I know," said B2-09. "What's your designation?"

"A3-17," said the hunter. He took a couple of slow steps toward her with the collar held down at his side, open and half-hidden by a fold of his coat. B2-09 was looking at his face.

"A3-17," she said slowly. "You know what the mercs did to me, after they caught me?"

"Yes," he said. There was no reason to lie.

"Charon and Xen saved me," said Bell. She raised her hands to her face. Her shoulders jerked once, but there were no tears. A B2 unit would have no way to produce them. A3-17 was capable of tears, but he had never cried that he was able to remember.

"I'm glad," said the hunter, with complete honesty. The hands were awkward, but he was confident that he could reach around them. He took two swift, silent steps and raised the collar, preparing to snap it around her throat.

It hit her open hand instead. Short, strong fingers tightened around the band of steel, and A3-17's frantic tug could not free it. Then she had the front of his shirt with her other hand, dragging him close to her so that she looked up into his face. She was not breathing hard. She had stopped making the attempt to simulate breathing at all.

"They saved me," she said.

The lights in both her eyes flared up suddenly and brightly.

"And you killed them."

The hunter struggled fiercely, both of his hands on the one that held him as she began to lift him off the ground. He knew what was coming next. It was not even a surprise when the collar closed around his neck.

Then it stopped, just short of the catch clicking.

"I wanted you to know I could do it," said B2-09. "But I'm not that cruel. I'm not going to send you back."

She dropped the collar and turned to slam his body into the wall, once, twice, three times. The breath left his lungs with an oof. He jerked a knee up into her belly, with no more effect than if he'd hit a padded wall. The CAU simply ignored it.

"Xen asked me once what it would take to kill an A3," B2-09 said. "I never thought I'd be able to get my hands on you, you see. I didn't reckon on Charon and Xen doing so well." She tore away the front of his shirt as if it were made of paper. "So I've been thinking about it, A3-17. I can't choke you to death. But you need your circulation, don't you? You have to get blood to your organics. And that means you can't live without your heart."

The hunter did not scream as her fingers dug into his chest. It was the greatest act of will he ever accomplished in his short life.

---

Xen lay on her side at the bottom of the pit, gasping for breath. Agony spread from the middle of her chest and out to the ends of her fingers. Runners of fire even fingered up into her jaw. She had fallen the last few feet. She wasn't sure whether she'd hit her head or not. If it hurt, it was so much less than the pain in her chest that she could not detect it.

She turned her head, not for the first time. What was left of Changeling sat on the floor a few feet to her left. Plasma had melted the center of the packbot's teacup chassis to slag. All three arms lay bent awkwardly around the downcurved heat shield. Every trace of heat had faded from the mechanism, giving Xen not the slightest hope.

Dead. My fault.

A yard or so beyond the robot's corpse lay the cargo net. It was half-obscured from Xen's view by the pedestal in the middle of the pit, but she could see that it was tied around its contents so that it formed a neat bundle. She had a very clear view of the single steel probe that lay on the floor beside it.

There was something, something important she should be doing. She could hear voices from above, but there was too much concrete for her to read heat signatures through the walls of the shaft. Bell was speaking, and a man's voice that she had never heard...

Footsteps. Someone was climbing down the ladder. Xen curled up tighter as another paroxysm hit, white spots half-blotting out her vision. The sound of heavy boots went past her with measured tread. As her vision cleared, her eyes traveled up to a pair of big shoulders and a very familiar heat signature. Charon was turned away from her. She couldn't see his face.

Five degrees above normal. Why doesn't he hurry? Is it too late? Something else was wrong. She heard the gurgle and hiss as he breathed, and there was a hot spot in his heat profile on the right side of his chest.

Plasma rifle, she thought, and whimpered through her gritted teeth. No. No. No.

Charon went straight to the bundle and picked up the probe from the floor. Xen watched as he went to tip the dead Changeling onto her side. He sank to one knee – slowly, carefully – and jabbed at the button on the underside of the heat shield.

The dead chassis creaked and hissed. Xen watched as an epi pen spun toward her across the floor. Well, that was no good. Epinephrine was almost certainly what had caused the infarction she was currently having. It wasn't as if Changeling hadn't warned her.

Xen listened to the clink of stimpaks as Charon gathered them up. He straightened up slowly, as if it were difficult, and turned to walk back to her. She had an excellent view of the scorched wound in his chest as he knelt heavily beside her. His leather armor had scorched away first of all, showing the raw muscle around the hole. It was bigger than her fist, black at the rim and red at the center. Tiny red bubbles formed at the edges as he exhaled.

"I'm sorry," Xen said.

Charon rolled her onto her back – not very gently, she almost bit through her own lip – and arranged five stims in one large fist. Xen watched as he poised it above her sternum.

"I'm not," Charon said, and struck.

She was awakened by a voice. The diction was familiar, clipped and clear.

"Well, I suppose that will be all." She heard a gurgling cough, and then another voice said,

"Yeah. I hope Bell gets dat bastard." There was another interval in which the speaker seemed to have trouble breathing. "Ya kept da contrack, anyhow. Looks like d'kid's gonna make it."

Xen opened both sets of lids as she rolled onto her side. Empty stimpaks slid off her chest. Charon sat with his back to the wall of the pit nearby, shoulders heaving with each breath. No air seemed to be escaping from the chest wound now, though it looked exactly the same. His body temperature had fallen to just a hair above normal. His face showed no more expression than usual. The rheumy eyes might be a little more tired than she remembered.

Most alarmingly, he had taken off the shotgun harness. It lay on the ground beside him.

"Charon!" She crossed the few feet between them in an awkward half-crawl. "Where are the rest of the stims?"

Charon let his head fall to one side slightly so that he could look at her.

"I used dem," he said.

"What, all of them?" Xen looked around frantically. There were epi pens scattered around Changeling's chassis. There were also two more stimpaks. Both were broken. Their contents had already pooled and evaporated. "What about the ones you were saving?"

Charon lifted his left shoulder minimally. "Used dem earlier."

"Damn it, Charon." She bit her knuckle. "Heart attack from epinephrine overdose! That should've taken two stimpaks, maximum. Maybe three if there was bad damage to the myocardium. And even then, I'd probably live until we could get more."

"You didn't say dat before," said Charon. He made the gurgling noise again.

"I didn't realize five was all you had." Xen said. She slumped down facing him, leg against his leg. "There's no more air getting out. That means your lung has collapsed. There's air in your chest cavity. Without stims, you're going to die."

"I know," said Charon.

"All of this is my fault. If I hadn't brought us here - "

"He'd'a caught us somewhere else," said Charon. He had never interrupted her before. "Only one way dis could've been avoided."

"You mean if I'd never sent you to help Bell," Xen said.

"Yes." Once again, and despite his injury, she received the impression that he was amused. "Are you sorry about dat?"

Xen looked the dying Ghoul in the eye. "No," she said miserably.

"Glad to hear it," said a voice from above. Xen looked up. Bell was lying flat on the floor, leaning over them. Her hands were dark with gore where they rested on the edge of the pit, and a long drizzle of red ran down the wall from one of them. A light shone brightly in the back of each dark eye.

"Bell! He hit Changeling's emergency button," Xen said. "Then he used all the stims on me."

"Of course he did," said Bell. She smiled slightly. "Glad to see you're both alive. I think I saw a first aid kit on the wall in the office space. Stay with him while I go get it."

"What about the android?" Xen said.

"Forget him," said Bell, and vanished. Xen heard her running away.