A/N: Sorry for the delay, but this one turned out to be a monster. Thank you for the comments; thanks, too, to those who've added this stuff to their favorites lists. Things are going to get big, weird, and unhappy now, folks. Hope you're enjoying the trip!
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It was known, morbidly, as "the coffin." The WorSpAd EVA rescue-and-recovery capsule was basically an obelisk-shaped eight-foot-long space suit. No arms, no legs, a single view-slit at roughly face level. Insulated; pressure-activated heating cells buried within a thick soft lining of therma-foam. Room, at a squeeze, for two. The goal was to get the victim inside as quickly as possible, seal, and pressurize. The Icarus was equipped with one coffin, kept in aft storage with the ship's main complement of EVA suits.
Kaneda and Mace guided the capsule, tethered, between them, on the long climb to the wreckage of the crew quarters. Whitby, towing a bag of tools and cutting gear, rounded out the rescue party. The three of them were the crew's best at suit-work; moreover, Whitby, a seasoned wreck diver in the oceans and seas back home, knew her way around tight spaces, jagged edges.
Which sum of experience didn't make the ascent less vertiginous, chafing, or sweaty. They might have gone the whole way on thrusters, but maneuvering with bulky equipment while moving ever closer to the shield's outer edge was already a risk. One misfire— left for right, right for left— and you'd be off, very briefly and very fatally, to the realm of flame and ash. The image of an old-fashioned Hell stuck in Whitby's mind. Midway, clambering beam to beam, maneuvering the equipment bag from near-snag to near-snag, micro-steering with her suit thrusters, she said:
"God, it's getting hot. Sure you checked the A/C on this suit, Mace?"
Mace grunted as, in unspoken unison, he and Kaneda nudged the coffin clear of a hangup on the gridwork. Your suit, your maintenance, Whitby. You don't like it, pop your helmet and get yourself some fresh air.
Quiet, you two, Kaneda panted. He paused, leaned back, looking up at the wreckage. Whitby looked, too. It was all wrong, she thought. The burst cubist tumble of cabins, the black gashes in the twisted metal. Like looking at a shipwreck from beneath.
Eighteen minutes later, they'd arrived. They tied off the coffin and the equipment bag, tethered themselves to girders at the back of the shield, assessed the scene.
No obvious damage to the shield, Kaneda said. That's good.
Mace was peering into the space between the wreckage and the overhang of the shield. Damn, that's a tight fit.
Kaneda joined him. You could have asked Trey to come in your place.
Mace snorted. He's nearly as bad in a suit as Capa.
Unprofessional, Mace, Kaneda said. Good thing they can't hear you on the flight deck.
You can always put me on report— Mace replied. A second's silence on the feed, and then he added, dryly: — Captain.
Whitby let them snipe. She was studying the wreckage, mapping it in her mind as she would a ship at the bottom of a sunless sea. Gauging tight spots, possible dead ends, potential escape routes.
The corridor that had connected the cabins and the Icarus had unspooled like a shredded cardboard tube. At least three of the cabins themselves had been ripped wide open. At least two were missing completely. Two more looked to be breached. No bodies or body parts immediately apparent: Whitby was grateful for that. The cabin nearest the edge of the shield looked to be intact, but the door side was facing into the back of the parabola. If they wanted access, they'd have to cut their way in, and then they'd have to work fast: what air might be remaining within would vent very quickly once they'd pierced the hull.
Kaneda chalked on the cabin's hull side a square large enough to accommodate the bulky shoulders of a suit. Mace, prep the capsule. Whitby, you're going in. Break out the torches.
The arms of the EVA suits contained feeder lines for a variety of equipment. From the equipment bag, Whitby passed cutting torches to Mace and Kaneda, coupled her own torch to her wrist, checked the lights for her oxygen and fuel lines. All green: no leaks. Still, before she fired up, she took a deep, careful breath. Nothing but the flat odor of sweat and canned oh-two. No sweetness. The fuel smelled, some people said, like sugar cookies. Lighting a torch in the presence of a leak could lead to a backspark inside your suit: the mixture of fuel and oxygen would ignite, and you'd be burned alive.
You good, Whitby? Mace asked.
"Good as gold."
Let's cut, Kaneda said.
They each picked a chalked line, started to cut. Sparks popped along the lines as the torches penetrated the hull.
There's air in there, Mace said. Get ready, Whitby.
Whitby shut off her torch, unclipped it from her suit, tethered it to the equipment bag. Mace and Kaneda torched the fourth line, quickly, together, and then Mace braced his back against a girder and kicked in the cut segment of hull.
An outrush of debris. Whitby boosted herself through the hole. The light from her helmet revealed tendrils of smoke coiling like snakes in zero g. Two bodies, upper left. Tangled. Blankets, shredded gray chunks of insulation—
A man and a woman, frozen as if in freefall. They were suspended above her, floating on their backs just shy of what had once been the cabin's left-side wall, their bodies imparted motion by the movement of Whitby's light. No time to assess their condition. She grabbed the woman's arm, pulled.
"Kirbuk"— she said.
One body through the hole, into the rescue capsule.
"— and— ah, Christ— it's Pinbacker."
The ah, Christ, the reason: Mace saw a second later, as Whitby passed the second body through. Pinbacker was burned almost beyond recognition. Oxygen fire, coolant fire, electrical fire: he'd gotten himself in the path of an inferno when the accident happened. Mace and Kaneda shoved him into the coffin with Kirbuk, sealed it, activated the pressurization and the heating cells.
One detail registered in Mace's mind before he and Kaneda closed the capsule: the light on Pinbacker's biostats tag glowing blue. He, not Gavrila Kirbuk, was their survivor.
#####
Confirmed, inside, an hour later: Kirbuk was dead. And Pinbacker was dying. Searle informed them bluntly of that fact when the greater part of the remaining crew had gathered in Medical. The captain had third-degree burns over more than seventy percent of his body. What was worse was that he wasn't comatose. Impossible, but true. He'd screamed out a lungful of air when they unsealed the rescue capsule, and he'd continued to scream until Searle injected him with enough sedative and painkiller to floor at least three men Pinbacker's size. Now he was twitching in a chemical slumber while Searle did his best to dress his burns.
At the rear of Medical, outside the tiny room that housed the ship's mortuary freezers, Gavrila Kirbuk was lying on a steel examination table. She was dressed as she normally dressed for bed, in loose lounging pants and a worn black sweatshirt. Her face was very pale, suspensively still, as if she were neither dead nor, more poetically, sleeping, but anticipating something that required her to close her eyes. A splash of water, maybe, or the pouring-on of plaster-of-Paris for a life-mask. Her feet were bare. Mace thought she looked cold. The idea seemed to prick the backs of his eyes. He reached out and brushed the knuckles of his right hand against Kirbuk's cheek. Her skin felt like clay.
Whitby was standing with him, silently. She couldn't bear to be in the room, Mace knew, with Pinbacker suffering as he was; she couldn't bring herself to leave. If Mace had been able to move, he might have touched her. If he weren't so certain that if she started to cry he would cry, too, he might have held her. Too much death for two days. Too fucking much. As it was, he and Whitby were still standing like sentries when Cassie and Capa entered Medical and approached Kirbuk's body.
"No. Oh, no," Capa whispered. Mace saw his eyes fill with tears, saw Cassie squeeze his hand.
"Yeah. Too bad, isn't it?" Mace's voice was low and harsh. He took his eyes from Kirbuk's bluish-white face, fixed them hard on Capa. "Now you've gotta play God all by yourself, don't you?"
"Mace—" Cassie looked at him as sharply as her delicate face would allow, shook her head at him. He met her eyes for just a second, then looked away, turned, and walked out of Medical. Whitby followed him as far as the door, and then Mace heard Searle call her name. Mace didn't look back. He kept walking until he reached the staging area outside the aft airlock. There, mechanically, he finished checking and re-airing his EVA suit. Whitby's, too.
#####
He shouldn't have been lucid, let alone conscious, but he was. Whitby, on Searle's request, remained by Pinbacker's side after all the rest of the crew had left Medical. Barring walked out with Trey, her hand on his shoulder for guidance. Cassie left with Capa, who seemed stunned to the point of incorporeality by the physical fact of Kirbuk's death. After sixteen months sharing ship-space with the boy, Whitby had come to know that he related to his emotions like a body with a mismatched shadow: when the two parts aligned, when he actually felt something, the effect could be practically overwhelming, or, as now, even devastating.
Emotionally, at the moment, Whitby was herself ready to crumble. When Pinbacker looked up at her and said, "Why did you rescue me?", she nearly burst into tears.
"We couldn't leave you out there."
A moment of clarity, granted him by the pain meds. It would last for possibly three minutes. "Did you ever love me, Loinnir?" Pinbacker asked softly.
She couldn't look at him, and she couldn't look away. She bit the inside of her mouth to draw her focus from the sobs bunching in her throat. "I still do, Dan."
"Knife. Not a scalpel. A scalpel might break."
"What—?"
"Are you wearing your boot knife, love?"
"Yes."
He looked in her eyes. His were pleading yet gentle in the raw horror of his face. "Under my jaw," he said. "Both arteries. Cut them."
"I can't do that."
"Please, Loinnir. I'm a waste of oxygen. Searle is burning through the mission supply of meds to keep me—"
"No."
He gazed up at her, and she could see him beginning to lose himself. When he spoke again, it was with more effort. "I did something out there—" He frowned. Frustration as the pain began to slip past the drugs. Frustration, and a terrible fear. His voice dissipated to a dry whisper. "I realized something. The mission is changing—"
He was on the cusp of not knowing her. Whitby no longer tried to hold back her tears. "I don't understand, Dan."
"You will." He focused on her as long as he could. Then his back arched against the cot and he drew a breath that was half a scream. "Oh, God. God—"
#####
Whitby couldn't retreat to the cabin she had shared with Cassie. Said cabin was shredded like a rotted cardboard box across the upper edge of the solar shield. Their belongings, like those of everyone else aboard the Icarus, were gone. Whitby would receive her share of clothing and toiletries when the surviving members of the crew tallied and allotted the goods remaining in ship's stores, but nothing would replace the picture of Whitby's older brother, Richie, and his wife, Mary, standing on the bleak, beloved beach outside Mulvern, the wind tangling Richie's wild pepper-and-salt hair, a dark-eyed devil's grin on his face, his arm around Mary's shoulders and their big white house perched on the dune-grass bluff behind them. A photo taken by Richie's wayward younger sister before she went wayward all the way to the bloody sun. The knife with which Pinbacker had asked her to kill him was a going-away present from Richard Whitby to his wreck-diver sibling: a CRKT Sting, its sheath chafing Whitby's ankle beneath the shank of her right boot. An irritant, but one to which she was sentimentally connected and the utility of which she understood. By comparison, what drove her to the engine room now bordered on unbearable.
Daniel Pinbacker. She'd known the warmth of his body, his textures and touch, his taste, his scent. She sat now with her back to the hard bulkhead beside the huge gears of the ship's differential and breathed the steely funk of hydraulic fluid and grease, trying to flush from her nostrils the odor, metallic-sweet and horrible, of his burned flesh.
She had her knees pulled up, her head in her hands. She heard Mace say: "Loinnir—?"
"Would you fuck off, Stephen? Please."
"You're in the engine room. I work here."
"Work somewhere else—"
She meant to say more; her voice trailed off. She felt utterly blank. Mace sat down beside her, close enough so that their shoulders touched. He didn't put his arm around her.
"He knows he's dying," she said.
Mace said, tightly, "Hard for him not to."
"I'm going to die, too."
"Did he tell you that?"
"No."
"Then that's the first stupid thing I've ever heard you say."
She didn't reply. He was being brutal but honest; she couldn't fault him for it. Nor did she prompt him for the followup— "I won't let you die, Loinnir." In turn, out of respect, Mace didn't look to see her crying. She pressed her shoulder more tightly to his, and he stayed there beside her. That was all.
#####
An hour or so later, the new captain of the Icarus was feeling too much stillness aboard ship. He finished re-airing and stowing his suit, didn't see Mace or Whitby as he passed through Engineering. The flight deck was empty: Trey wasn't at navs; the ship was flying on auto-pilot.
Voices from the mess. Kaneda entered quietly and stood, he thought, unnoticed just inside the door. They were all there, save for Pinbacker, the people who were now Kaneda's crew, standing or seated around the room's largest table.
Searle was on his feet, leaning against the table with his weight on the hand of his good arm. He was addressing all of them, though he was focusing on Mace. "I can't do that," he was saying. "Without— my God— without at least consulting Earth, I can't euthanize someone."
"I'll do it, then." Whitby was standing across from Searle, to Mace's left. "He's already asked me to—"
"No." Mace's tone was uncharacteristically protective. "You don't want to live with a memory like that, Loinnir."
"So what do we do?" Trey asked. "Take a vote? Draw straws?"
"This is sick," Cassie said. "I won't be a part of it."
She was seated at the table; Capa stood behind her chair, his hand resting on her shoulder. "We don't vote on something like this," he said.
Mace nodded. "For once, I'm siding with Brainiac. This is a command decision—" — with a hard and sudden look at Kaneda— "— sir."
Kaneda looked back at him coldly. "Make him as comfortable as you can," he told Searle, and walked out.
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Ten minutes later, Kaneda was in the alcove off Comms that acted as the CO's office, paging through screen after screen of stats, solar data, readouts from Icarus' internal and external sensors, seeing less than he should and wishing more than he ought that he was still first officer. Searle appeared in his peripherals, rapped at the wall.
"A word, sir?"
"Of course." Kaneda gestured at the chair opposite his, across the alcove's small desk.
Searle flinched as he sat down.
"How's your arm, Tom?"
A tight smile. "It hurts."
"Can't you give yourself something for it?"
"I need to stay focused. And Pinbacker needs the strong stuff more than I do."
He said the man's name. Not "the captain." Kaneda minimized his current windowful of data but didn't look up from the screen of his monitor. "What did you want to discuss?"
"I didn't know if I should tell the others." Searle's voice dropped. He propped his good elbow on the desktop, leaned closer. "I examined Kirbuk—"
"And?"
"Petechiae in both eyes."
"A symptom of vacuum asphyxiation."
"That wasn't all. Her hyoid bone is fractured. There are finger-shaped bruises on her throat." He waited until Kaneda met his eyes. "He strangled her, Akira."
For a second, shock rendered Kaneda mute. "He must have been mad with pain," he said, finally. "Blind. Panicked."
"Or he wanted her air."
"He wouldn't do that. He would never have placed his needs over those of—"
Captain Kaneda?
Cassie's voice.
"Yes, Cassidy?"
Would you join us on the flight deck, sir? We're about to alter course for final approach.
"I'm on my way."
He stood as Searle did. The doctor looked at him questioningly.
"Don't tell the others," Kaneda said.
#####
On the flight deck, Cassie was in the pilot's seat; Kaneda was her acting co-pilot. Trey was at navs, Capa was watching the readouts from the payload, and Sullivan was monitoring life support. Barring was sitting, largely sightless, at comms.
In the ship's main corridor, Mace was positioned aft of the patched sector in the hull; six meters farther along, facing back his way, Whitby was standing ahead of it.
Cassie spoke over their comm links. New coordinates locked. Changing course now.
For a moment, nothing changed. And then: a groaning in the metal of the infrastructure, a long, deep, grinding shriek. A sound unnatural even by man-made standards. Mace saw the corridor shift before his eyes, he felt the deck twist beneath the soles of his boots, and he shouted, even before Icarus could sound the alarm for imminent structural failure, "Throttle back, Cassie! Power down! Power down—!"
A layer of roar vanished as Cassie cut the main thrusters. A second later, she eased the retros to power, and the groaning died as the ship's motion neutralized. The deck stabilized beneath Mace's feet. He held his breath, listening for the popping of rivets, the cracking of weld, the whistle of air from a hull breach. Twenty feet away, Whitby, one hand pressed gingerly to the patched bulkhead, was doing the same thing.
She looked his way, shook her head. Her expression was grim. "Kaneda—?" Mace said.
Report, Mace.
"Best guess, sir: if we go to full power long enough to change course, the repairs to the hull won't hold."
Thirty minutes later, his guess was gospel. A scan of the hull showed that the damage to the ship ran deeper than they'd thought. If they tried to turn for their final approach to the sun, the Icarus would snap in two.
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"Can we fix it?" Kaneda asked. He and his people were now gathered as a crew on the flight deck. "I need hardly point out that loss of navigational capability at this point would be... problematic."
Trey spoke drolly from the room's upper level: "All in favor of not flying directly into the sun...?" He raised his hand. Several of the others did, too.
Mace looked around at them. "Come on, guys. This was always a possibility."
"Wait, wait: what?" Cassie, standing near the cockpit, stared at him incredulously. "Crashing the ship was always a possibility—?"
"Cassie, you knew that—"
"I know I'm just the pilot; I just drive the bus, but—"
"You knew there was a possibility we wouldn't make it back."
"I guess I missed the memo."
"It might not work anyway." Capa stepped clear of the shadows around the science station, focused his too-clear eyes directly on Mace. "The launch is meant to occur within a given range of angles relative to the surface. There's a target zone."
"I know that."
"So why are you so prepared for us to die? It would be pointless and, worse, likely ineffectual."
"If it were effectual, you'd be all for it, though, wouldn't you—?"
Whitby, standing slightly behind Mace just inside the hatchway, saw the muscles tighten in his shoulders. She'd known her share of dangerous men. She brushed past him, drawing his attention away from Capa, and asked, echoing Kaneda: "So: can we fix it?"
"Shoring beams for the shield," Mace said, "welded and riveted to reinforce the hull. We can cut them to fit."
"With Capa's help, I can work out the engineering angles," Trey offered. "Of course— given the delay, the time deviation— the final course adjustment will be more extreme."
"Then we'll have to make sure the repairs are extra-solid," Kaneda said. "Can you work out the corrections?"
"I think Icarus and I can handle it. We can model any changes before we apply them." Trey added, with a bit less brio: "And, um, anyone who cares to is free to check our math."
"I'll break out my slide rule," Whitby muttered. "Don't trust you or that damn box as far as I can throw the both of you."
"We're looking at at least an eight-hour job, with a full team," Mace said. He turned to Capa. "Can we accommodate the delay in launch?"
"The payload has a half-life of roughly five million years," Capa replied. "It's not like the sell-by date is coming up anytime soon."
Blank looks all around. He blushed, drew into himself. "I—I'm sorry—"
"It's okay." Trey leaned toward him conspiratorially. "We've never heard you make a joke before, that's all."
Tentative smiles, from Cassie, from Whitby and Sullivan.
"Come on, people," Kaneda said. "We have a plan. Let's map out the repairs and suit up."
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The intention was to complete the repairs all at once, without a break. The work crew would take along extra oh-two tanks, to be bundled and tethered in the construction zone. Each tank was good for an hour; each suit held two tanks. In the staging area at the aft airlock, Kaneda reviewed instructions for the inexperienced on how to swap out an empty. Cassie helped Trey and Capa to suit up. Kaneda was going out first, with Sullivan. Whitby would follow with Trey. Mace and Capa would be last.
"Keep in mind," Kaneda said, as he wrestled his way into his suit, "we still don't have comms between the ship and the suits. Suit-to-suit, yes, but they won't be able to hear us inside. Or vice-versa."
"So no emergency assistance from Medical or the flight deck." Cassie spoke to the room at large, then went back to helping Capa clamp himself into his armored golden exo-self. She leaned a little closer than absolutely necessary, rigging his earpiece and mike. "Mind your air," she said, more quietly, just for him. "Stick close to Mace."
"I will. I want to kiss you," he added. Nerves talking: he was surprised when he said it. He was more surprised a second later when Cassie kissed him on the lips.
"Be careful, Robert," she said. She drew back, her eyes never leaving his, and closed his helmet.
Mace and Whitby would be the fastest to suit up, so they suited up last. They stood apart from the others, savoring a few final moments when their limbs weren't golem-thick and clumsy. Whitby caught Mace watching Capa, his expression flat and cold.
"It's not his fault that Kirbuk is dead," she said, softly. "You know that, right?"
"Of course I know that—" He heard his own tone, caught himself.
"Do you want to partner Trey instead?"
"No."
He was certain. He was capable. But he was shaking. Out of sight of the others, Whitby drew his head down to her shoulder.
"I'm just so fucking tired," he whispered.
"I know, Stephen. I know. Me, too." She closed her eyes, rubbed his back. "But we keep it together, yeah?"
"Yeah." He drew away from her. Not out of embarrassment, though, or out of awkwardness: when he squared his shoulders, Whitby saw at least the ghost of his easy, brash confidence. "C'mon, woman, I'll help you with your chest plate."
"You'll keep your hands well away from my chest plate, you great pervert."
#####
For the first three hours, everything went relatively well. All six of the spacewalkers guided the ten-meter-long beams from the anaerobic construction hold at the far forward end of the ship; Whitby, Trey, and Sullivan cut the lengths into segments with the chemical torches clipped to their left wrists; Mace, Kaneda, and Capa welded and riveted the pieces in place. Capa managed to stay focused and calm within the confines of his suit until, hanging upside-down at the underside of the hull, he happened to look down into the black emptiness stretching off forever beneath his head. A clear open window in the dust cloud surrounding the ship. And through it he could see—
— far off, far, far off, a star. A billion miles away.
Close enough to touch.
With the blackness crowding in all around him.
He drew a breath, pushed it out. The blackness didn't budge. He breathed harder, staring at that single star—
Something nudged his right arm. He turned clumsily with his thrusters, saw a gold-suited figure hanging upside-down next to him.
Capa? Mace's voice spoke inside his helmet: You okay?
"Y—yeah."
You're doing fine, man. Relax.
Capa nodded shakily, blew out hard. A drop of sweat floated before his eyes like a clear glass bead. "Okay."
Mace rapped on his helmet. Don't go staring at shit. You'll freak yourself out.
He maneuvered away to meet Whitby and Trey, who were approaching with a segment of girder. Capa checked his remaining oxygen and the charge on his rivet gun and followed him.
#####
"My eyes hurt," Barring said. She was on the flight deck with Cassie, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, facing the banks of monitors in the cockpit, the forward windows. Given that ship-to-suit comms were still down, and for all they could see of the work crew through the distance, darkness, and dust— which was to say nearly nothing— she was, despite being some seventy percent blind, practically as cued in as Cassie was to what was going on outside.
"Do you want me to walk you to Medical?" Cassie asked.
"No. Thank you. I can go on my own."
A tip Whitby had imparted en route to the aft airlock with the rest of the work crew. The Hibernian witch had her uses. "Count your steps, Ingrid," she'd said. "Sixty-five short ones from Medical to the flight deck. Another fifty to the aft airlock."
"Is that a hint?" Barring had replied.
She felt Whitby's phantom grip on her shoulder as she pushed back in the co-pilot's seat. A simple response, a squeeze. Bony fingers, strong. Barring would never admit to anyone, especially to Whitby, from this private realm of dark shapes and shadows, with the memory of pain and fear still sharp in her mind, how reassuring that contact had been.
She got up, eased clear of the cockpit. "I'll be right back."
She could feel Cassie watching her. She tried not to resent it. Being solicitous was a central component of their chief pilot's makeup; as even their low-affect backup physicist would be apt to attest, she was the very embodiment of "caring." A veritable trifecta of it: noun, verb, and adjective.
"Call if you need help," Cassie said.
#####
Two cocktails. One for himself, one for Pinbacker.
Just a hint of painkiller, a jolt, an aperitif. His arm was hurting like a bastard. Searle swallowed pills and water, waited, relaxed as the edge, just the edge, of his consciousness softened. He focused. He listened for maybe twenty seconds to Pinbacker's breathing. Listened without looking at the man himself, without consulting the monitors or the holographic rendering of Pinbacker's insides floating in midair beside the captain's cot.
Without looking, he listened to the increase in respiration, the rising strain as Pinbacker forced air in and out of his lungs. The wheeze in his throat as he struggled to breathe. His latest dose of painkiller was giving out. In fifteen minutes, he'd be screaming. He'd been better off where he was, out in the wreckage, in zero g. Alone with his conscience, Searle could admit that. In here, the air burned against Pinbacker's exposed flesh. In here, he was one raw nerve ending.
Searle went to the drugs cabinet, took out three bottles of Lethanol. He unwrapped a syringe, capped it with a needle. He'd wanted to wait until the others were out of the way. This was a decision Kaneda didn't need to make so early in his command; this was something Whitby didn't need to see. By the time the repair crew returned, Daniel Pinbacker would have died. That was all. Searle pierced the rubber cap of the first bottle of painkiller, drew the contents into the syringe. Behind him, Pinbacker groaned. Searle tossed the empty first bottle into the recycler, reached for the second.
"Doctor Searle?"
"Yes—?" Searle placed the syringe, two-thirds full, on the equipment tray to the right of the meds cabinet. He turned. Barring was standing just inside the entrance to Medical, her hand on the doorframe. Uncertainty, a heightened awareness, on her face. Her serge-blue eyes were focused on a point midway into the room.
"Ingrid—? Did you come here by yourself?"
"I'm not an invalid, Searle."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to sound condescending." He approached her. Her eyes tracked his motion without quite finding his face. Searle smiled. "Getting more of your sight back?"
"Yes." She smiled, too, slightly. "But they hurt. My eyes hurt."
"Part of the healing process." He took her by the right arm, guided her closer to the bank of examination lights. "Here: let's have a look."
She stood, coldly patient, while he checked her eyes. Her sclerae were still shot through with red, but her pupils were beginning to respond, and the swelling, both around the sockets and in the eyes themselves, was practically gone. He offered her a pill for her troubles, pressed it into the palm of her right hand. "This might make you a little woozy."
"It's alright, Searle." She waited while he placed a plastic cup of water in her free hand. "It's not like I'm on duty."
Searle watched her drink, took the cup back when she finished. "What do you say to a bit of light therapy?"
"Alright."
She held out her forearm, not her hand, and Searle guided her to the Earth Room.
#####
Outside, near the new scaffolding of girders caging the bulkhead, Capa found himself floating next to Sullivan, on the far end of a beam. Kaneda and Mace were guiding the opposite end. Sullivan was refueling his welding torch.
Do you smell that—? he asked, absently.
An odd question. Capa, of course, could smell nothing but the salt-metallic tang of sweat and canned air. "No. What—?"
Something sweet. Like vanilla, or—
Whitby barked, suddenly, over the feed: Sully, don't—!
— as Sullivan pressed the power switch for his torch. He screamed.
White-hot light glowed from the viewslot of his helmet. Capa froze, staring.
Inside his suit, Sullivan was on fire.
Mace boosted himself over the far end of the beam, propelled himself their way. Capa, vent his suit—!
Sullivan was thrashing, howling. Capa pawed clumsily at him with his heavily gloved hands, couldn't get a grip on the clamp on the man's helmet— "I can't reach the release—"
Vent his fucking suit—! Mace reached them, shoved Capa aside, shut off the airflow on Sullivan's suit, popped his helmet.
The flames extinguished.
And for a second Capa looked directly into Sullivan's empty black eye sockets. "Jesus— Jesus God—"
A second later, Mace had Sullivan's helmet closed and re-sealed. He switched on the man's air a second after that. He held Sullivan by the bulky shoulders of his suit and methodically checked the biostat lights on his chest plate, peered through the view slit of his helmet, past the smoldering horror that was Sullivan's face, and checked the lights there. Red. Nothing but red. No greens, no yellows.
He's dead, Mace announced.
Whitby and Kaneda and Trey had reached them. "I— I'm sorry," Capa stammered.
Mace turned Sullivan's body to face him. Tell him that.
Mace. Christ— Whitby got between him and Capa. It was Sully's fault. He shouldn't have fired his torch. And five seconds is the outer limit for venting a suit. How many times have you managed it—?
Mace didn't reply.
Do we take him in? Trey asked.
Over the feeds, a moment of labored silence, of shared breathing.
No, Kaneda replied. We tether him; we keep working.
#####
He burned. He was sleeping; then he was falling; then he was on fire.
An electrical spark ignited a mixture of oxygen and coolant in Pinbacker's tumbling cabin. He became his own lightsource when the space around him went black. Smoke, flame, flashes of flailing limbs beyond the privacy glass of his door. The door bursting open. Vacuum beyond. Pulling himself into— or being pulled into— Kirbuk's cabin next door. The door sealing. There was air. Air. His relief was so great that for a second he didn't realize that while the flames were gone from his body, the pain wasn't.
It was still with him now.
#####
Maybe, thought Searle, he'd given himself a touch too much. Pinbacker hadn't had nearly enough. In opposition to the uncertainties of spot-titering, Searle was experiencing withdrawal, too: he hadn't been to the forward lounge in days. The sun he saw in his mind was faded, cracked. An artifact from a provincial church, an icon, a piece among dozens on a museum wall. He needed to feel the light flooding his pupils, tingling on his skin, pressing against the vestigial nerve endings of his pineal gland. In the meantime, while he'd managed to drug himself to the point of indecision, the one-time captain of the Icarus was moaning like an animal.
Searle?
Cassie's voice.
"Yes, Cassie?"
Barring was coming to see you. Did she make it there okay?
"Yes. She's resting in the Earth Room."
That sound—
"It's the captain. I have to go, Cassie—"
Of course—
The feed went quiet. Pinbacker didn't.
Searle shuddered, hunched his shoulders, both good and bad, aching and not, and fought an urge to put his hands over his ears. Short of murder, how do I make it stop—?
"Icarus."
Yes, Doctor Searle?
"Auto-doc programming: medical code override 'Heller.'"
He waited through five seconds of silence. The mainframe was healthy and online; the request was unorthodox. Icarus was locating files in some seldom-visited corner of her vast database, comparing them to standard operating procedure, and, in her artificial wisdom, deciding whether Searle's request required command authorization.
Override 'Heller' accepted. Nonstandard procedures programming loading to auto-doc.
Searle breathed out. "Thank you, Icarus."
Pinbacker's eyes were more green-gold than brown now, the red in his sclerae diluting the contrast in colors. He went silent as Searle approached; he looked up at the doctor with agonized, wordless pleading. "Relax, Dan," Searle told him. "I'm going to help you." He injected Pinbacker with enough Lethanol to keep him quiet. (If it were too much, though, if it killed him— this, thought Searle, from behind the cotton-like scrim of the painkiller he himself had taken— what did it matter, really?) Pinbacker's scorched lids closed over his eyes; his breathing deepened and slowed. Searle ordered up a scan of the man's central nervous system; Icarus, complying, wove in the air before his eyes a three-dimensional latticework of nerves in bright peacock blue. Searle then told her to map and overlay the intersect points between Pinbacker's primary pain receptors and his brain. Simple, really. Maybe too simple. The hot spots— where the captain's body screamed out its agony to his cerebral cortex— appeared, appropriately enough, in red.
"Icarus: virtual-scalpel interface, real-time. Subject: neurological scan, Daniel Pinbacker."
Acknowledged, Doctor Searle.
A stylus in Searle's hand, fetched from the instruments cabinet, a laser-tipped telescoping arm above Pinbacker's head.
"Commence test, Icarus: stylus-to-laser synchronization."
Commencing test, Doctor Searle.
Searle shifted his hand to the right, to the left, up and down, through the holographic representation of Pinbacker's nervous system. The telescoping arm moved as the stylus did.
"Icarus: magnify scan."
The threadlike nerves before Searle's eyes grew to the thickness of rose stems.
"And again, please, Icarus."
A thicket now, a thorn bush in brilliant blue. Searle placed the tip of the stylus at the edge of the virtual first of Pinbacker's primary pain receptors, hanging in the air in front of him like a splatter of blood, and depressed a button on the stylus's side. Above Pinbacker's head, the metal arm replicated the motion of the stylus; the arm's tip glowed red.
And, deep inside the captain's skull, the subcutaneous laser began to cut.
#####
Pinbacker flatlined seconds after Searle severed his last pain receptor.
All for the best, Searle thought, as he terminated the auto-doc program, closed down the holographic projection, put away the stylus. The man suffered enough. Had he survived the procedure, he would have lived the last three days of his life comfortably free of sensation, that was all. Therein lay the enforced obscurity of the Heller programming, the need for the override: to end Pinbacker's pain, Searle had damaged beyond repair the man's interface with physical sensation. The captain of the Icarus would have been paralyzed. He would never have felt anything ever again.
Searle was feeling too much. Regret, yes. A degree of grief, even: their captain had been a decent and brave man, he and Searle had been shipmates for nearly two years, and the tragedy and strain of the last two days had been close to overwhelming. But, more immediately, Searle was feeling what Pinbacker, had he lived, couldn't: the dull but insistent ache of his broken arm.
He took from the meds cabinet a white pill, swallowed it. Not to be confused with the pill he'd given Barring, no: what he took would focus on the pain, on further defanging the bite of his fracture's grating edges. Barring's pill, very likely, had gone straight for her consciousness. Which was fine: her healing body needed the sleep. Searle re-capped the pill bottle, shut the bottle behind the glass doors of the meds cabinet, and turned to go to the Earth Room.
He stopped, shocked. His heart thumped up against the base of his throat.
Pinbacker was sitting up on his cot.
Rigor mortis could do that, Searle reminded himself. Corpses laid out flat on their backs had, on occasion, been known to bend at the waist: with the body no longer producing adenosine triphosphate, the muscles, including those in the abdomen and back, continued to contract, pulling the torso upright. Only the phenomenon normally took hours—
Pinbacker turned to him and asked: "What have you done to me, Tom?"
Searle stood mutely looking at the readouts on the biostats monitor. Seeing the alpine march of Pinbacker's heartbeat across the screen. Wondering which pill he had in fact taken, or how many pills in total.
"Captain—" He had to fight not to stammer. "How do you feel?"
It was a stupid question. A God-damned incompetent's question. Pinbacker's burned lips twisted into a smile.
"That's the thing, Tom: I don't feel anything at all."
"You shouldn't be able to move."
He didn't mean to say it out loud. It was as if the meds spoke for him. That one white pill.
"Really—?" Pinbacker replied. Searle stared in disbelief as the man swung his legs off the cot. Casually, Pinbacker pulled the IV needles from his forearms. He watched blood trickle across the raw flesh of his wrists and drip onto the floor. He held one of the needles carefully between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and studied its gleaming bloodstained length. "Might I have a glass of water?"
"Of course."
They were both in shock. Searle told himself that as he half-filled a plastic cup with water at the tap to the right of the equipment cabinet. He was also suddenly, acutely aware that, save for a blind woman who was likely drugged unconscious in the next room, he and Pinbacker were alone in Medical.
As if he could hear Searle's thoughts, Pinbacker asked: "How many of the crew survived?"
"Nine."
Searle handed him the water. Pinbacker watched his own fingers curl around the cup.
"And how many are on board now?"
He drank while he waited for Searle to reply. Searle said nothing.
"Ah," Pinbacker murmured. He looked thoughtfully at the cup. "You see, I can remember being able to feel. I remember feeling. The sensations are still there."
"Like a phantom limb..."
"A phantom limb: yes. Like my body is one big phantom limb."
"You should lie back down, Dan. You need to rest."
"I'll rest later. I need to show you something," Pinbacker said. "There's something you need to understand—"
The frame of the cot creaked as he stood up. Searle felt as if he were trying to wake from a nightmare. That was it: he'd accidentally taken the same medicine he'd given Barring. He hadn't slept much in the last few days, and he was asleep and dreaming now. He was high on painkiller, talking to a dead man. If only the throbbing in his arm weren't so insistent. If only he couldn't feel the deck unsteady beneath his feet, the sweat beading and clammy on his forehead. "What's that, Dan?"
"It would be easier for me to show you. Come with me, Tom."
Something in Pinbacker's tone— so easy and calm, so reasonable— was, drug-dream or no, frightening him. Searle edged toward the tray on which lay the hypo two-thirds full of Lethanol.
He spoke as he moved, kept his voice even. "You need to stay here, Dan. You're weak—"
"I'm strong. Stronger than you think."
Searle looked toward the tray, fumbling. When he turned back, hypo in hand, Pinbacker was right there. He shook his head. "No, Tom."
He held a scalpel. He gripped Searle by the wrist of the hand that held the hypo and jammed the blade of the scalpel into Searle's throat.
#####
Barring was seated on the floor of the Earth Room half asleep— "woozy" having been something of an understatement on Searle's part— when the light program suddenly terminated. Darkness like crude oil flooded her eyes.
From beyond the wall of the Earth Room came a choking, a gurgling. A clatter of metal on the hard deck. A thud.
"Doctor Searle—?"
Barring got up, and a wave of dizziness rose up to meet her. She had to wait, wait longer, before she could move without tipping. And then she one-quarter saw, three-quarters sensed—
A shadow, very near. The smell of burned flesh filled her nostrils.
Mere inches from her right ear, Captain Pinbacker's voice whispered: "Are you an angel?"
Barring, terrified, whispered back: "Yes."
"Then you know where I'm taking him."
The shadow left her. From Medical came the sound of a body being dragged away, a grunting, a groan of shock or pain, the hiss of clothing against the deck. Heavy footsteps, growing distant. Barring waited, frozen in half-drugged fear, until the footsteps and the dragging sound were gone. Then she felt her way to the entrance to Medical. The toe of her right boot caught the edge of a fallen steel tray, sent it slithering away across the deck. Near the door, she slipped on something slick, almost fell. Her flailing right hand found the doorframe; there, she felt something sticky and warm.
Blood. She couldn't see it, didn't dare to taste or smell it, and she knew what it was. Tears filled her useless eyes. She stepped out into the corridor on shaking legs.
And there she realized she'd lost the count.
She was too frightened, too numbed with meds, and she couldn't remember what Whitby had told her: the number of steps that would take her to the flight deck.
#####
Pinbacker moved quickly, with an easy, unfeeling strength. He told Searle, as he dragged the dying man toward the payload, "I want you to know what it feels like. I want you to understand why it has to end."
No time at all, beyond the constraints of sensation, to walk the spindle-length of corridor, to cross young Doctor Capa's cathedral, to navigate the gantries and hallway leading to the forefront of the payload. He propelled Searle those final steps into the lounge, released him. Searle stumbled to his knees, folded forward, gasping, gagging on blood. Pinbacker continued to the window, tipped his forehead to the water-smooth glass, the coolness he couldn't feel. "Now, we have to ask ourselves, Tom, we have to ask: has Akira altered the overrides—?" He spoke as much to Searle as to the sun, the behemoth majesty seething nearly wall-wide before him, the blinding light filtered to ancient gold and arterial red through the computer-controlled tinting.
Behind him, Searle found breath enough to say—
#####
— Cassie—?
Searle's voice, over the feed from the comm tags. A cracked and choked whisper. Cassie started, sat up straighter in the pilot's seat.
"Searle—?" It sounded almost as if the interior feeds were failing again. "Is something wrong?"
#####
Pinbacker turned away from the sun. "Icarus?"
Yes, Captain Pinbacker?
He left Searle where he was, left the lounge. Just outside the door, he stopped.
#####
— it's Pinbacker, Searle gasped. Cassie, he—
#####
"Window filter, forward lounge," Pinbacker said. "Full sunlight, Icarus, if you please."
#####
On the flight deck—
— a scream. A most horrible scream. It crescendoed abruptly to a roar, died in a burst of static. Cassie sat bolt upright, her heart suddenly pounding.
"Doctor Searle?"
No reply from the feed. She went to the entrance to the flight deck, looked out into the corridor.
Cassie. A different whisper from the feed. Help me.
Barring. Cassie left the flight deck, ran for Medical. Barring was standing, her shoulder pressed to the bulkhead, not far from the entrance. She was feeling her way along the corridor.
"Ingrid—?"
Barring's expression was a mix of relief and terror. She reached blindly in the direction of Cassie's voice; Cassie caught her right hand.
Recoiled.
Barring's fingers were covered in blood.
A dark figure, tall, male, was approaching, at a distance, from the direction of the payload. "Searle—?" Cassie called.
"No, Cassie, no. It's not Searle—" Barring spoke desperately. "It's Pinbacker. He—"
Cassie frowned. "It can't be—"
The figure was moving toward them with purpose. In the dimness of the corridor, Cassie still couldn't see its face.
"Cassie—" Barring pulled at her. "Cassie, please—"
Too much shadow, still, but her instincts told Cassie what her eyes couldn't or wouldn't: something was wrong, very wrong, with the man coming their way. She took Barring by the wrist. "Ingrid, run—!"
#####
She and Barring ran for the flight deck, got inside. Cassie closed and locked the hatch.
Waited. Staring at the smoke-gray alloy of the door, her heart thudding against her sternum.
"Cassie."
A man's voice. Pinbacker's voice. Not over her comm feed. Inches away, on the other side of the hatch.
"Cassie, open the door, please."
Beside her, Barring was biting her lip, stifling a sob.
"No, sir," Cassie replied. She was shaking. "Respectfully— Captain, you're not well—"
A pause. Silence.
Something struck a ringing blow against far side of the hatch. Cassie jumped; Barring cried out.
"Lieutenant Cassidy," said Pinbacker, "I'm ordering you to open this door—"
Another thunderous blow to the door. Almost as if someone were hitting it with a four-foot engine wrench. Cassie could swear she saw the hatch shift on its hinges, dent slightly inward.
"Cassie." Pinbacker's voice was quiet now, reasonable, practically gentle. "I would like for you and Barring to join Doctor Searle in the forward lounge. I need you to understand something."
Cassie asked, as evenly as she could: "Understand what, sir?"
"Why it has to end. Why it all has to end."
#####
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