Deadman Switch

Chapter 37

So it had come: the moment I'd hoped and prayed could be avoided. If it is possible, let this cup pass me by... "Check the course reading," I told Kutzko, my heart pounding in my ears as I fought against the sudden nausea of fear. "Make sure we really are in the aliens' path."

He twisted his head around, eyes searching out the proper readout... and with his attention away from me I moved quietly toward him, fingers dipping into my side pocket. The hypo I'd stolen from the lab on Spall was there, hard and cold and lethal. "Help me get Shepherd Adams out of the helm chair," I said to Kutzko, pulling the hypo out and palming it in my right hand.

I don't know why I expected to get away with it. In a single smooth motion Kutzko turned back toward me, his left hand taking over the grip on Adams's oxygen inhaler as his right drew his needler from its holster. "Don't try it, Gilead," he said quietly. "Slapshot clip—I can knock that hypo out of your hand without even drawing blood."

I took a deep breath. "It has to be done, Mikha."

"I know." Releasing the needler, he left it floating before him in midair as he reached into his own pocket. "But you're not going to do it," he said, holding up a hypo of his own. "I am."

I clenched my teeth, frustration and anger and despair welling up within me. Another moment I'd seen coming, as far back as Kutzko's last-minute insistence on coming along. I could have confronted him then, or any time since. But I'd put it off, irrationally hoping it wouldn't have to be dealt with... and now, with less than three minutes remaining to us, I had lost forever the opportunity of doing this gently.

Now, in my last moments of life, I was going to have to hurt him. "This isn't for you to do, Mikha," I told him.

"Since when?" he countered. Retrieving the needler, he holstered it again. "I'm the professional shield, remember? It's my job to risk death for other people."

"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.