This Day All Gods Die (11 page)

Davies reacted as if she were taunting him.

"God damn it!" he raged. "What the fuck is wrong with Ciro? What was he doing! Didn't you tell him he's been cured? Didn't you at least try to convince him he doesn't have to take orders from goddamn Sorus Chatelaine?"

Ciro did it? Sabotaged the drives? Well, damn. That sounded like something Angus might have done himself.

"Of course we told him," Mikka replied wearily. "Of course we tried to convince him. Vector showed him the tests, for God's sake. The hurt's just too deep, that's all. We can't reach the place where she damaged him. I can't." She may have shrugged. "There isn't anything worse than what she did to him."

A paroxysm of fury took hold of Davies. "I don't care!''

he yelled. "I'm not interested in excuses! We've got to do better than this! I would be a fucking Amnioni myself right now if Morn hadn't found a way to do better. She was alone on Captain's Fancy, Nick had her locked in her cabin! She still saved me.

"Don't tell me how bad Ciro's been hurt! Tell me—

"

Angus heard a sound like a blow. Davies stopped suddenly, as if he'd been struck. As if he'd struck himself—

"What is it?" Mikka breathed tensely.

Without transition Davies' voice changed. It became at once lighter and sharper. More like Morn's? His intensity gave him focus; seemed to give him authority.

"Vector," he commanded, "let's turn him over."

"What?" Vector asked uncomprehendingly.

In silence Angus echoed, What?

"Turn him over," Davies insisted. "Put him on his stomach."

Hands jerked along Angus' sides. He couldn't tell how many there were. After a moment the restraints fell away, releasing him into zero g.

"Mikka," Davies went on at once, "set the systems to open up his back."

"Why?" she demanded. Vector may have been swayed by Davies' passion; but she was tougher.

Don't ask stupid questions! Angus shouted uselessly. Just do it!

"So we can pull his datacore," Davies retorted. "He said the stasis commands are hardwired. Taking out the chip freezes the whole system. Maybe if we unplug his datacore and then put it back, the computer will reset itself."

Aping Mikka, he growled, "What the hell do you think we have to lose?"

Shit! Abrupt amazement shot through Angus' trapped mind. It might work. It might—

This time he hadn't been ordered into paralysis. His programming had imposed it on him because he'd gone down one of its logic trees too far to recover. Under the circumstances, anything which forced or enabled his computer to re-evaluate his condition might set him loose.

He landed on his face, felt the restraints close again.

"No good," Mikka reported. "The computer wants a code. Sickbay won't do it without the right code."

Davies didn't hesitate. "Then get me a first-aid kit. I'll cut him open myself." Muttering, he added, "It's not like I haven't done this before."

Only a few seconds passed before Angus felt a sharp line run along the skin between his shoulder blades. It should have hurt; but he was too far removed from it for pain. It might as well have belonged to some other reality.

All this was familiar. Alone with Warden Dios, he'd sprawled under the light like a sacrifice while the UMCP director had worked on his back: cut him open; swabbed away the blood; unplugged his old datacore; set a new one into the socket. Dios hadn't stopped talking the whole time.

If Min knew why I'm doing this, she'd turn against me herself.

We call the process "welding.' When a man or woman is made a cyborg voluntarily, that's "wedding." "Welding" is involuntary.

In essence, you're no longer a human being. You're a machina infernalis—

an infernal device. We've deprived you of choice—

and responsibility.

Davies swore steadily under his breath while he did the same things for different reasons. Back then Angus had been able to recognize the change when his datacore was taken out: he'd felt a void as deep as the gap between the stars crouching just beyond the window which linked him to his computer; poised to consume him—

But now he recognized only the tug

which plucked at his back when Davies pulled the chip. Nothing shifted.

He already belonged to the void. Its power over him could not be made worse.

Yet he knew that wasn't true. Trapped and suffocating in the crib in his EVA suit, he'd launched a singularity grenade against Free Lunch. And then he'd fired his portable matter cannon; fired it accurately despite the chaos of the swarm and the instability of cold ignition. He'd created that singularity by his own skill and cunning, no matter who hurt him, or why.

Morn had set him free to fight for himself.

And then he'd been brought back from the edge of his personal black hole. He wasn't alone here: other people had saved him. They could have left him to die, damn right, that's what he would have done himself, get rid of the butcher the rapist the illegal who looked like a toad and stank like a pig while they had the chance, no one would ever know the difference. Gone and good riddance.

The people around him hadn't done that. They'd retrieved him from the fringes of his doom. And now they were trying to do the same thing again in another way.

Beyond question the power of the void could be made worse. Davies, Vector, and Mikka could fail—

Angus' terror might have eaten him alive if he'd been able to feel its full strength. His body was immune to it, however. Only his mind remained vulnerable.

"How long do we have to wait?" Mikka asked tensely.

"How should I know?" Davies retorted. "I've never done this before. And I sure as hell didn't design this shit."

Sounding unnaturally calm, Vector remarked, "Orn Vorbuld"—

a name Angus didn't know—

"used to say we

have to drain the bad juju out of the chip."

Mikka snorted. "Orn Vorbuld was an asshole."

Was. Dead now, apparently. Another casualty.

Like Angus himself.

Try it, he groaned. Haven't you waited long enough?

Haven't you tortured me enough? Try it, for God's sake!

Save me or let me die—

"Fuck it," Davies muttered through his teeth. "I don't know what we're waiting for. Give me a swab. I can't plug anything in if I can't see the damn socket."

We've committed a crime against your soul.

Angus felt pressure on his back, roughly gentle, mopping blood away. The raw edges of Davies' incision seemed to sting with cold as if they froze in the air of sickbay; as if the deep chill of space leaked in to claim him for the last time.

It's got to stop.

Pressure again: harder; more focused. There, in the center of his back; at the nexus of his being.

Silence.

Mikka murmured, "Is it in all the way?"

"I'm not sure," Davies breathed.

Angus was sure enough for both of them.

Without transition a window opened in the darkness of his head—

a window of relief so intense that he would have sobbed aloud if his zone implants had allowed it.

Before he slipped away into the dark, his chronometer informed him that he'd been in stasis for more than four and a half hours.

gap in Angus' back where

he'd just reinserted the datacore chip into its socket, and waited for his heart to break.

He didn't have any other ideas. If this didn't work, Angus might as well be dead. Sickbay might keep him alive indefinitely; but no one aboard Trumpet would ever reach him again.

It wasn't working. Davies could see that. Held by his restraints, Angus lay like a slab of meat on the surgical table.

Only the autonomic rasp of his breathing indicated that he wasn't a corpse.

Another failure. The last one: the fatal one. He hadn't been good enough to help Angus save the ship. If Morn hadn't risked gap-sickness to aid him, they all would have died. For a while he'd been so caught up in his own exhaustion that he'd let Morn and Angus suffer for long, unnecessary minutes. And after that he'd had to rely on Mikka to run helm, despite her injuries and Ciro's pain, because he hadn't been able to cope by himself.

He didn't know how to repair the drives. He wasn't even smart enough to turn off Trumpet's homing signal.

But there was worse.

He'd failed to understand himself. Hell, he hadn't even tried. He'd refused to look at what lay behind his fury for revenge on Gutbuster. Instead he'd let Nick commit his bizarre suicide. He'd killed Sib Mackern as surely as if he'd pressed the firing stud himself. And he'd taken his roiling terror out on Morn as if it were anger; as if she were inadequate in some way, not good enough for him.

I'm Bryony Hyland's daughter. The one she used to have

—

before you sold your soul for a zone implant.

Now he'd failed to bring Angus back from stasis. Trumpet'5 drives were dead: the gap scout couldn't navigate; couldn't cross the gap in any direction; couldn't even decelerate. All her choices were gone. She was doomed to drift like a coffin consigned to the sea of space until death or the UMCP

intervened.

He wanted his heart to break; wanted something essential inside him to snap. Otherwise he would have to face the consequences of all the things he couldn't do.

He wasn't listening when Vector sighed, "Well, what do you know. Would you look at that?" Nevertheless an unfamiliar congestion in the geneticist's tone made him turn his head.

Mikka caught her breath as she followed Vector's pointing hand.

Davies blinked, but couldn't grasp what he was seeing.

Apparently Vector wanted him to look at one of sickbay's status displays. Which one? What difference did it make?

"Davies Hyland," Vector drawled cheerfully, "my intense young friend, you are a genius. Or, as Angus will no doubt say when he gets the chance, a fucking genius."

"The EEG, Davies," Mikka urged quietly. She might have been on the edge of tears. "Look at his EEG."

Now Davies saw it.

Just moments ago that screen had been effectively blank; filled by the undifferentiated emission of Angus' zone implants. The sensors hadn't been able to penetrate the noise to detect any neural activity. But now a whole series of normal-looking waves and spikes scrolled along the EEG's bandwidths.

"He's asleep," Vector explained before Davies could try to guess what the readings meant. "Not blank. Not in stasis.

Sleeping." He consulted a readout, then went on, "This isn't exactly natural. These lines"—

he indicated a few of the

bandwidths—

"are too regular. His zone implants are doing this to him. He needs time to heal. But he isn't blank" Vector insisted. "His systems are on-line again. He'll probably wake up when his diagnostics say he's ready."

The geneticist grinned at his companions. "Maybe now we have something to hope for."

Without warning a visceral relief gripped Davies so hard that he doubled over as if he were cramping. Mikka croaked his name, but he wasn't able to respond. Pains he couldn't name locked down the muscles in his chest and abdomen, pulling him into a fetal knot. He'd been under too much strain for too long; living on pure adrenaline. Flesh had limits—

even

his enhanced metabolism had limits—

and he'd passed them

long ago. Shocked by the sudden change in the stimulus of his neurotransmitters, his nerves went haywire, misfiring in all directions; clenching him into a ball. Adrift in zero g, he bobbed against the wall and bounced back as if he'd lost all mass; all substance.

"Davies!" Mikka snagged him by the arm, stopped his helpless motion. "What's the matter? What's wrong?"

If he could have opened his throat, he would have called Morn's name. But he couldn't speak; couldn't breathe—

Vector didn't hesitate. "I'll get some cat." At once he started keying commands for the sickbay dispensary.

No! Davies wanted to protest. No drugs, no cat, don't give me anything, that isn't what I need, you don't have to be afraid of me, I'm not like that! Morn was the one who needed cat. To control her gap-sickness. So that she wouldn't try to kill them all.

Closed in pain as if it were a womb, his image of himself shifted.

I'm not her.

Here was the proof. When the universe spoke to Morn—

when hard g pushed her flesh past its limits—

she attempted

self-destruct. Or she hurt herself in some way to deflect the impulse. But he had a completely different reaction. He became a killer of another kind altogether. Driven by his terror of the Amnion, and of their desire to use him against his entire species, he sent other people out to die. He hungered for murder, not suicide. And when his body was overwhelmed, he became a universe not of clarity but of pain: helpless as a convulsing epileptic.

He'd figured out how to bring Angus back from stasis.

And he was not Morn.

That knowledge seemed to reach depths in him which it had never touched before. The hurt which cramped his muscles and sealed his lungs was his, no one else's. It was his inability to distinguish himself from her.

He'd saved Angus.

He didn't want any goddamn cat.

Before Vector could reach him with a hypo, his chest and limbs began to unlock themselves.

"Vector, he's moving," Mikka announced unnecessarily.

Davies drew a long, shuddering breath. Bit by bit he unfolded himself. When he could turn his head, he did his best to nod at Vector and Mikka. "I'm all right." He hardly heard his own voice, but at least he was able to speak. "I don't need cat.

I'm just—

" Words couldn't convey what he wanted to say.

I'm not Morn. That's important. "I just need sleep."

Vector studied him for a moment, glanced down at the hypo in his hands, then referred the question to Mikka.

"Don't look at me," she murmured wanly. With the heel of one hand, she pressed the bandage over her eye and the corner of her forehead tighter. Maybe she thought that would make her injuries hurt less. "We all need sleep. If he says he doesn't want cat, I say send him to bed."