Deadman Switch (46 page)

“I know,” I nodded. “But it's a job you never should have taken … because you're doing it for the wrong reasons.”

He snorted: derision, with a shading of nervousness beneath. “I thought you religious types believed that dying for your friends is the highest form of martyrdom,” he said sardonically.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “And so did your parents. But
you
don't. Not really.”

His face tightened. “My parents have nothing to do with it—”

“They have everything to do with it,” I snapped. Two minutes to go … and it would take one of those minutes for the drug in my hypo to kill me. “You were raised in a religious household,” I told him. “Don't try to deny it—the signs are all there. In the process you absorbed a lot of your parents' principles … but it's all just going through the motions. You don't really believe in God, or even in a set of absolute standards that your actions will be measured against. You risk your life for Lord Kelsey-Ramos and others because your parents taught you it was noble to do so; that's the
only
reason you came aboard this tug with a hypo in your pocket.” I locked eyes with him. “You're living a lie, Mikha. I can't let you die one, too.”

His face might have been carved from stone. “My past is none of your business,” he bit out; and for an instant I could see an echo of Aikman in his eyes. “And neither is why I do what I do.”

I looked at his face, read the determination there. A minute and a half to go … and I had run out of time. “In that case,” I sighed—

And without warning I grabbed at the safety cap of my hypo, twisting it off.
To your hands I commit my spirit …
Locating the vein in my wrist, I jabbed.

I should have known it wouldn't work. The hypo wasn't even within five centimeters of the vein when the slapshot pellets slammed into my hand, sending the instrument spinning across the tug and leaving my fingers numb and tingling. “Mikha!—no!”

“Sorry, Gilead,” he said, his voice trembling but with that same iron firmness beneath it. “Right reasons or wrong, it's still
my
job … and I'm going to do it.” Visibly setting his teeth, he released his grip on the needler and reached for his own hypo's safety cap.

I don't know why I jumped at him. It was a futile gesture—even if I could possibly have covered the distance between us in time, I knew full well there was no way I could overpower him. But the frustration flooding my soul would simply not allow me to stand passively by without one last attempt.

Or so I thought … but even as I flew through the air toward him—as he hesitated, then paused to raise a hand against my attack—a small fact that my back-brain had perhaps already noticed burst abruptly into conscious awareness. “Mikha—stop—” I all but screamed—

And broke off as the deck slammed up into my face and chest.

For a long moment I just lay there, temporarily paralyzed from the shock and from having had the wind knocked out of me. The butt of Kutzko's needler lay within my view, as did his still untriggered hypo. Above me, I could hear the sounds of skin against cloth as Kutzko fought to regain his equilibrium in the suddenly returned gravity; the sounds of his breathing, and of his whispered curses.

From Adams, still in the helm chair, there was nothing. No gasping; no movement.

No breathing.

Slowly, carefully, I got my hands under me and pushed myself up off the deck. Another pair of hands slid under my armpits, helping me the rest of the way to my feet. “Adams,” Kutzko said, his voice a mixture of shock and horror.

I nodded, my head aching furiously from the fall. “I know. He'd stopped gasping—I didn't even notice when.” Steeling myself, I turned to look.

He was dead, of course. The empty look on his face—the slackness of his muscles and eyes—it brought me back with a rush to the
Bellwether
and the man whose death I'd witnessed there. More than once I'd noted the way Adams and Zagorin had seemed to take on alien characteristics when in contact with the thunderheads; now, for the first time, I could see how those characteristics remained when everything that was human was gone. It was eerie and abhorrent, and it made me want to be sick.

And to cry.

Beside me, Kutzko took a shuddering breath. “How about you? You okay?”

“I think so. You?”

“Yeah,” he said, a quiet bitterness in his voice. His willingness to die, preempted … and once again the professional shield was forced to contemplate the limits of his power. “What now?—we go home?”

I blinked tears from my eyes. I had talked Adams into this trip—had talked him, for that matter, into involving himself with the thunderheads in the first place. My project, my ambitions, my errors. His cost. “We stay,” I told Kutzko with a sigh. “Thunderhead, if you can still hear me, please continue with what we've been doing: bring us around to a position three to four minutes further back toward Solitaire.”

There was a moment of hesitation, a noticeably slower reaction to the command than the living Adams/thunderhead combination had displayed. Perhaps it was merely surprise on the thunderhead's part that we were going to keep on with it.

Surprise, or disappointment.

I turned back to Kutzko, to see the question on his face. “We have to keep trying,” I told him. “Otherwise his sacrifice will be for nothing.”

He held my eyes another moment, the question fading into accusation: that if I'd been ready to transmit when we first arrived, that sacrifice might not have been necessary. I braced myself for a fresh argument; but the emotional strain of the past few minutes had left him as weary as it had me, and he merely nodded and turned away. Wiping one last tear from my cheek, I walked back to the transmitter and resumed my tinkering.

The gravity vanished a few seconds later, and I was still making adjustments three and a half minutes after that when the red light flashed on and the thunderhead controlling Adams's body—I couldn't bring myself to think of it as a zombi—took us back onto Mjollnir drive. Across the tug Kutzko watched me, a dull bitterness slowly growing through his sense at my continued failure to finish what he still believed were serious preparations for talking with the aliens. “I think I'll have it in another run,” I announced. “If you'll just take us in one more time, thunderhead—?”

My sentence was cut off by the now-familiar crack of circuit breakers, and we were once again in zero-gee. I licked my lips, started to turn back to my transmitter—

And without any emotional sense whatsoever, Adams's body rose from the helm chair and turned to face me. “You—Benedar,” he whispered.

A shiver of horror went up my back at the sound of that voice. There was nothing even remotely human about it, despite the fact that it came from a human throat. With the passing of Adams's soul all the human elements were gone … and what was left was the closest thing to a pure thunderhead voice we were ever likely to hear. “Yes, thunderhead, what is it?” I managed to say.

The dead eyes gazed emotionlessly into my face. “Betrayer,” the thunderhead whispered. “You will die.”

And, moving awkwardly in the zero-gee, he started toward me.

“D
ON'T FIRE!” I SNAPPED,
holding a warning hand palm-outward toward Kutzko. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him hesitate, his needler still trained on Adams's body, the fingers holding it bone-white at the knuckles. Never in eight years had I seen him as thoroughly rattled as he was now—and I could hardly blame him. “Don't fire,” I repeated, fighting hard to keep down my own horror at the sight. “What are you going to do, kill him?”

His answer was a hiss between clenched teeth.

“I know,” I agreed. “Just stay cool—I'll handle it.”

“Oh, good,” he breathed. “Mind telling me what's going on that you need to handle?”

I cocked an eyebrow at Adams's dead face. “You want to tell him, thunderhead, or should I?”

“You have lied to us,” the alien whisper came again. The body, still slow and clumsy, was nevertheless getting too close for comfort, and I found myself moving backwards in response. “You have betrayed us. You will die.”

“How could I have betrayed you?” I asked. “Haven't I done exactly what I said I'd do?”

The thunderhead ignored the question, as I'd rather expected him to. Logic and prior agreements were clearly not in the forefront of his mind at the moment. “You will die,” he repeated.

I clenched my teeth, fighting to stir up some emotional energy. The battle was over, and I'd won—the thunderheads' fury was all the proof I needed of that—and with the victory all the drive of the past week had drained into deep fatigue. For the moment I honestly didn't care whether the thunderheads killed me or not.

But if I died now, Kutzko would die with me. For his sake, I had to see this through to the very end. “Has what I've accomplished made things any worse for you?” I demanded, forcing myself to look directly at the dead eyes. “Or have you forgotten that your existence as a race is directly dependent on the Invaders' own survival?”

“You will die—”

“Enough of that!” I snapped. “Answer my question—or else admit that you never meant to cooperate with me in the first place. That you intended all along to sabotage my efforts.”

“There was no sabotage.”

“Not
yet,
no,” I growled. “But there would have been, wouldn't there, just as soon as I asked you what I should say to them?”

There was no answer. “Get it moving, Gilead,” Kutzko said, his voice tight. “If you don't talk him back to the helm in a couple more minutes we'll be smashed into powder.”

“We've got all the time in the world,” I told him evenly. “The fleet's not behind us anymore—they're angling away from Solitaire.”

He stared at me. “They're
what?”

“They've chosen to live,” I said, my eyes steady on Adams's face. “The only question now is whether or not the thunderheads will be smart enough to do the same.”

The thunderhead hissed. “You bargain for your life?”

“Bargain?” I shook my head. “No. The bargain's already been made and is being carried out. I simply point out that killing us won't gain you anything at all.”

“It will gain revenge.”

“Revenge for what?” I snarled, suddenly tired of thunderhead singlemindedness. “For the failure of your grand scheme to have us destroy your enemies? It would never have worked—you should have known that
years
ago. Human beings aren't brainless insects you can manipulate without consequences—we hate and we resent and we fear, and no matter what you did with us, sooner or later we would have wiped Spall clean of you.”

I broke off, hearing my voice ringing through the tug and abruptly realizing I'd been shouting. I took a ragged breath, forcing calmness over the frustration and anger and weariness. “You have just two choices left,” I said quietly. “You can have us as mediators and, perhaps, as willing allies
if you
can persuade us that your side is in the right … or you can have us join the Invaders as your enemies. There are no other possibilities.”

For a long minute Adams's body floated motionless in the middle of the tug. Totally dead, now, with even its alien life gone from it. “What's happening?” Kutzko asked.

“He's gone to discuss it with the others, I'd guess,” I said. I focused on his face … “You've figured it out.”

He gave me a lopsided smile; and from his sense I could see that one of my worries, at least, could be laid to rest: that he didn't resent me for having kept him ignorant of my plans. “I may be slow, but I'm not totally stupid,” he said wryly. “Cute—and nicely devious, in all directions. I'd have thought that kind of thing beyond your talents.”

I grimaced, feeling a curious sadness growing within me. “We all have the potential for deceit,” I sighed. “Even Watchers.”

He snorted gently. “As Aaron Balaam darMaupine so graphically proved.”

Aaron Balaam darMaupine. “It's funny, you know,” I said, the words sounding distant in my ears. “Every Watcher for the past twenty years has had to suffer because of darMaupine—the parents' sins bringing punishment indeed on the children and grandchildren. His name's a curse and an insult everywhere in the Patri and colonies—for years I despised the sound of it, and even now I can't hear it without cringing. And yet, it was that name that gave me the key to what we've just done.”

Kutzko's forehead furrowed. “I don't understand.”

“His humility name. Balaam.” I blinked sudden moisture from my eyes. “You remember the story of Balaam, don't you?”

“Sure—he was a prophet sent by someone to curse the Israelites. The one whose donkey talked to him.”

I nodded. “The one whose donkey revealed what was waiting for him in the road ahead—”

I broke off as Adams's body subtly reanimated. “Well?” I asked the thunderhead. “What have you decided?”

There was no answer; but the dead hands groped for position on the ceiling handholds, turning Adams's body back toward the helm chair. Visibly steeling himself, Kutzko moved to assist … and a couple of minutes later, the stars vanished and gravity returned.

I watched Kutzko lean over Adams's shoulder to study the heading indicators; and even before he spoke, I could tell from his posture what the thunderheads had decided. “We're heading back to Solitaire,” he announced quietly.

I closed my eyes.
God then opened Balaam's eyes and he saw the angel of God standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand; and he bowed his head and threw himself on his face …
“I guess,” I murmured, mostly to myself, “even thunderheads know the angel of death when it stands before them.”