Bitter Angels (47 page)

“And what’s the difference?” I sneered.

“Terms and conditions,” she answered. “I told you I was tortured? The man who ordered that is still alive, and he’s going to stay that way. In fact, he’s immortal now. He’s living in a comfortable pair of rooms in the middle of his home city, and he’ll live there forever, nice and cozy. He can’t go outside. He can’t talk with another human being face-to-face. He can’t even go comfortably insane. He’s alive and stable, and we’re going to keep him that way. He never gets away from what he’s done, never gets to have a better life or another life. He never meets his Maker or sees his Heaven. He gets to watch while the kingdom he built fades from the historical record and the city he ruined is rebuilt by his enemies and opened up wide, because all the people he tried to lead to his brutal salvation like his enemy’s way better.

“He’s ours. He’s
mine
, in his two-room cell, forever and ever.

“Do you want revenge for you and yours? Help me make the Blood Family live with what they’ve done.”

My hand was shaking, making the fingers drum against my thigh. “It’s not enough.”

“And it’s never going to be,” she agreed. “But you can kill them all and it still won’t be enough. It just gets you the wrong answers and prolongs the horror you’re trying to end.” She took one more step closer. “Have you remembered the hostages, Amerand? Those are Oblivion’s children over there. You make the wrong move here and you’re killing them all.”

“Maybe they’re better off dead.” The words opened a kind of gate inside me, a flood of emotion so close to relief I couldn’t even be afraid of it. I had held that thought in the
depths of me for longer than I knew. The fight for survival exacted too high a toll. We were all better off dead.

“Do you really want to be the one who makes that decision? Do you want to be like the Erasmus family, deciding who gets to count as a human being and who’s just fodder for your disappointment?”

“You don’t understand,” I whispered. “You don’t understand!” I shouted.

“They’ve taken people from me, too. They used them and they murdered them. What else do I have to understand?” She reached out and gripped my hand hard, as if attempting to squeeze her conviction into me. “I am not going to let Erasmus win, Amerand. I will
not
leave this system standing. But I need your help.”

I was trembling. I had come here in the certainty that this was the last thing I would ever do. There was no future for me. There was nothing beyond this chamber. Terese was trying to rewrite the hastily constructed code of my last moments and force a future onto me.

I moved my lips, but there was no sound.
How?

Terese understood me. “You were going to send this thing into the middle of Fortress, right? Crack the city apart? I need you to pick us a new destination.”

My mind sputtered, trying to force itself into some kind of position that could take into account the possibility that I was not going to die. “Where?”

“Oblivion.”

I heard the word, but my mind which had been so sharp up until now could only absorb it slowly. “Oblivion is dead.”

I watched compassion wash over her. I didn’t want it, not then, not ever. I didn’t want anyone to understand what I
felt, or what I was going through. I wanted to hoard all the pain for myself.

“They’ve turned it into a bolt-hole,” she told me. “They’re going to hide there until after you’ve destroyed Fortress and the Pax Solaris has cleaned up. They think we’ll just take away the refugees and abandon the system.” The gleam of discovery lit her eyes. “This place is too far off the beaten path now, and takes too much effort to maintain. No one else would colonize it. The surviving Blood Family can wait until they’re good and forgotten. They’ll have all the time there is.”

Anger, red and alive, burned in me. The gall was incredible. They’d allowed a whole world of people to die, and they were going to plunder the corpse.

I was breathing hard. I was dizzy. My whole mind was turning over, and I didn’t know where to look, what to think. “What do we do?”

“Exactly what they want you to do. You’re going to set this thing off. Only you’re going to miss. Instead of jumping to the inside of Fortress, you’re going to drop us as close as you can to Oblivion.”

I considered this as best I could. I was going to Oblivion in a peeled core. I was going to my dead home. My first reaction was born of my time in the Security. “They’ll shoot us down.”

“It’ll take seven hours for a missile to get there. I checked, as far as I could. My people will be here before then.”

My second reaction came from my pilot’s training. “We could end up inside Oblivion.” And die. I had come expecting to die, so I wasn’t quite sure why I suddenly cared.

“We could,” she admitted. “This is on the face of it radically stupid.”

“Because I want them focused on me. If they get their hands on me, I can make them think I’m just trying to cover my people’s escape.” Her smile was thin and bitter. “They’ll probably think I’m spying, but that’s okay too.”

“What are you really doing?”

“Spying and covering my people’s escape,” she answered so promptly that I knew she was lying.

“And if you die?” I asked.

Her voice was absolutely calm. “Then I die trying.”

Die trying. I was so tired. I didn’t know if I could. I wanted to just die. But maybe I had strength enough left for this. I could have just killed myself after all, as Hamahd had done, as my father was going to do, but I’d wanted to accomplish something first. Taking out Fortress in all its foul glory had been my something.

Perhaps I could change my plans. I had wanted to help the Solarans. I’d wanted to help Terese. Perhaps I could die trying, too. Maybe then it wouldn’t hurt so badly.

“I’ll take you,” I said, and I was able to meet her gaze again, and her gaze was absolutely grim.

“Understand, if you come with me, you will be acting under the laws and constraints of the Solaris Guardians.
All
of them.”

“Will you swear it?” Part of me couldn’t believe she was taking the time to do this. Another part of me understood perfectly.

“I swear on my mother’s life and my father’s. I swear on the memory of Oblivion, I will abide by your commands and follow your orders.”

She nodded. “I accept your oath on behalf of the Solaris
Guardians.” Then, suddenly, like a burst of starlight, a smile spread out across her face. She reached up and touched my cheek as she had once before. “Welcome to the fight, Amerand Jireu.”

Then she stepped back until she moved into the nearest emergency cradle.

I turned to the access panel. I moved two codes. I changed three input parameters. I set the timer.

I slipped into the cradle next to Terese’s. I secured my restraints and my webbing, and I looked across at her. She smiled at me from behind her oxygen mask.

I pulled my mask down. I closed the cap on my cradle.

I watched the access pad flicker over from silver to green to red.

The explosion went off right next to my ears. A world of weight slammed against my chest. I would have screamed, but I had no air in my lungs.

Darkness.

It was real to me, David, I’d said. It was always real.

The explosion tore the world apart.

My eyelids felt heavy as concrete. I forced them open.

I saw nothing.

I tasted blood in the darkness. Panic screamed through my brain. I was in the cell, they were coming for me, there would be more pain, I couldn’t stand any more pain…

I dragged in a breath that tasted of blood and tried to find my right hand. I thought I could feel my fingers, my palm, my wrist. I twisted my wrist, my numbing fingers searching for the release.

My arm fell forward and slapped against something. I hissed as fresh pain tore through my elbow joint. I flexed my index finger and felt the brush of my glove against the
tip. I bent my wrist up and scrabbled against my cuff until I found the switch for my handlight and pressed it. A burst of white blotted out the world and I had to screw my eyes shut until that particular pain faded.

When I was able to open my eyes again, I was staring at a wall of salt-and-pepper stone, coated with a white powder that was all that was left of my cradle cap. I hung tight against the webbing. If it gave way, I would fall, full length against the pulverized silicate and stone.

I knew what it meant, and my breath started coming short and fast. It meant we’d missed. Instead of landing near the surface, we’d jumped inside Oblivion.

With some difficulty, I turned my head, my heart banging against my aching ribs. The sides of the compartment were curved. If I was this close to the stone, how close was Amerand? I gritted my teeth and raised my light, angling it to my right.

Amerand was also still in his straps, but he was wedged firmly between the wall of the compartment and the broken stone.

I took a deep, useless breath and pulled my arm back up, trying not to scream, but I got my oxygen mask off. There was air pressure, or I would have been bleeding out my pores by then. The atmosphere had to be breathable, at least in the short term, because there was no way anything in this shattered eggshell of an engine core was still functioning, including the O2.

“Amerand!” I croaked. “Amerand!”

He blinked, slowly, groggily.

“Amerand, talk to me!”

His tongue pushed itself out of his mouth several times. I couldn’t see any blood, but that meant nothing.

He turned his head back and forth. The mask grated against the stone, and dragged off over his cheek.

“A little more to the left next time,” he whispered.

Relief washed through me. A smile flickered on his face, but rapidly turned into a grimace. “I’m stuck.”

“Yeah. Hold on.”

“Yes.”

After some pained struggling and a lot of cursing, I managed to free my left arm so I could sort of brace myself against the stone underneath me while I undid my webbing. The gravity was light enough that I easily caught myself on both my hands, though the pain in my wrists made me gasp. I pulled my boots free from the ankle braces and let my feet drop.

For a moment, I just stayed there on hands and toes, as if I meant to start doing push-ups, breathing in the gritty, hot, stale air.

“Right,” I whispered. “No time for this.” I lowered myself onto my belly and twisted around. Slowly, I started wriggling toward Amerand.

“You noticed the air, too?” he said.

“I was hoping you hadn’t.” I stripped off a glove and shoved my hand into the narrow crack between his ribs and the webbing.

“I grew up in pressurized tunnels,” he reminded me, and made an effort to suck in his gut. “Believe me, you learn that a smell like this means there’s no new air coming in.”

Stone tore my skin. I prodded cloth and skin and Amerand grunted. “Sorry.”

I edged my hand down. There was enough room to undo his right-hand cuff, but I couldn’t slide my arm between his body and the stone to get to the other.

“How about your left hand?” I asked. “Have you got any room at all?”

“Give me a minute.” He closed his eyes and bared his teeth. I waited, listening to the rustling as his fingers searched and strained. I tried to breathe shallowly. I tried not to think what it meant if we had come to rest in a pocket of stone deep in the core of Oblivion.

“Got it.” Amerand opened his eyes. “I think.”

“We’ll find out in a minute.” I scrunched backward, and he reached out, stretching and wincing and wriggling, until his fingers curled around the ragged stone ledge. One centimeter at a time, he eased himself out until he was crouched on hands and knees beside me.

It was noticeably warmer. Sweat coated my forehead.

“Now what?” he said.

I did not have the strength to sugarcoat the situation. “Now we find out if we’re dead or not.”

If we were only partway buried in stone, we might be able to break out through the damaged hull. If we were deep inside the moon’s core, we had until this little pocket of air ran out.