Flesh and Silver

5. Intervention

“Well, Doc, we’ve got us some visitors.”

Jon Halen was wearing the same flowered shirt he’d worn the day before, only now it was wrinkled and rumpled, probably from being slept in. There was at least two days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks and chin, and deep bags under his bloodshot brown eyes.

“I told ’em to piss off,” he went on. “They didn’t have no by-your-leave to land, but they ignored me. They overrode the outer landin’ shaft doors somehow and they’re cornin’ on in like they own the place.” He made a face. “Rude bastids.”

Marchey marvelled at how calm Jon sounded. He wanted to curse and pound on something at the unfairness of it all, but somehow kept his voice even. “Damn. All I needed was another half hour.”

At this point he was running on fumes. Sleep had been out of the question as the deadline approached, and he’d spent hour after hour going over what information he had, searching for whatever leverage he could find. Now that the moment of truth was nearly upon him he felt unreadier than ever.

“We’ll try to buy it for you.” Jon grinned. “Hope our credit’s still good. You really think this patient of yours—”

“Preston Valdemar.” The name of the physician in charge at Botha’s Medical Section was Dr. Raphael Moro. He had given Marchey Valdemar’s name, but refused to disclose his condition or anything else about him. Was that out of simple pique because he’d called the man in the middle of the night and awakened him? Or was it on MedArm’s orders?

“Right, I remember his name from the Helping Hands file. Let’s hope he has the mojo to call ’em off. How’re you gonna convince him?”

Now there was a part of his plan he hadn’t let himself examine too closely. “Any way I can.” He took a deep breath, let it out. “Just get me that half hour and keep them from getting a foothold.”

I will.

Angel made herself tear her gaze away from Marchey’s face on the screen and turned back toward her locker. Inside it was the most certain way of keeping that promise.

The most certain and the most dangerous.

She wanted to pray for guidance, but her new self had not yet decided if she believed in God or not— largely because her old self had been so sure of it.

It was strength she wanted to pray for, because in her weakness she found herself seriously contemplating a course of action which could all too easily end up welding the silver skin of Scylla forever around her. Because now that the moment she had been waiting for was nearly upon her she felt small and afraid, completely unequal to the task she had set for herself.

There seemed to be only one way to banish the fear. A way that would at the same time make her more than equal to the threat posed by the intruders. All she had to do was reach out and take it.

Scylla’s silver bracers hung there before her on their charging hooks in the locker. They seemed to gleam with promises of power and completion. They could make everything all right.

She snatched one off its hook with a sudden, convulsive movement and clamped it against her arm.

It responded instantly, powering up the moment its receptors touched the scarred bare skin on the back of her left hand. The status display popped up in the left periphery of her angel eye as the biometal artifact wrapped itself around her forearm like a living thing. Words and numbers flickered, changing as the weapons systems built into the bracer locked themselves into the exo’s circuits and her own nervous system.

A Scylla-thrill of coiled power radiated up her arm from the bracer, sweeping away her fear and doubt before it. With it surged the heady remembrance of power. With just a thought she could release a howling burst of energy capable of punching through the hardened steel of a ship’s hull like so much foil. Even without her other bracer, nothing made of blood and bone could stand against her. The intruders were doomed if she went to them like this, with Scylla’s armaments to back her up.

If she went to them as Scylla.

The shadow self of Scylla was the returning memory of strength and certainty and purity of purpose. Of fearlessness.

Life as Angel had been nothing but a morass of doubt and confusion and longing. Angel was a creature of weakness and helplessness and futility, her lot fear and pain and failure.

Angel had vowed not to hurt anyone ever again, never suspecting the dire circumstances she would face.

Scylla would cut the invaders down like wheat before a scythe. Nothing could stand in her way.

Nothing.

Least of all that fragile construct named Angel. The person she was now. The one he wanted her to be.

“No,” she whispered, giving the mental command while she was still able. The bracer went back to standby and reluctantly released itself to dangle from her arm like some war god’s notion of a charm bracelet. She peeled it off and put it back on its hook.

There was a long, white, hooded robe in her locker, one her old Master had made her wear sometimes. She chose that over Scylla’s most dangerous aspects, shrugging into it and knotting the belt tightly. Then she closed the door to her locker, leaving sure victory behind as she turned on her heel and began her journey toward the landing bay.

More than the fatigue earned by the last few days made her walk slowly. But Angel held her head high, knowing that she had just won the first very important skirmish of the battle to come.

Marchey’s ship had approached Botha Station like a steel bee homing in on the center of a gargantuan chrome poppy, bathed in the light reflected from the vast spreading petals of silvery superfilm reflectors arrayed around the complex. Beyond it, Jupiter’s Cyclopean bulk blotted out the stars with a seething chaos of color endlessly swirled by a madman’s brush; its staggering size dwarfing the imagination. Earth herself could disappear inside old Jove like a pea in a bucket, and its untrammeled breadth never completely fit inside the human head. Jupiter was always far vaster than you remembered, even if you had just seen it less than an hour before.

Botha’s artificially maintained heliostationary orbit kept it always in sight of the bright nailhead of the distant Sun. That took energy to burn. Its existence made a loud, all-but-impossible-to-ignore statement about the wealth and power the company had at its command.

The station was OmniMat’s center of Jupiter operations, a sprawling complex of docking trees, free-fall manufactories and materials dumps, transfer site for the refined raw materials extracted and excreted by the huge autofactories gnawing at the moons in toward the planet’s surface. Reaching out from its center like ten-kilometer-long stamens were the magnetic catapults used to launch ships and fling containers of the more durable goods sunward.

Botha was a place of endless day and ceaseless activity. The autopilot in Marchey’s ship had locked into local traffic control and begun picking its way through busy swarms of workpods and past ponderous container tugs a while earlier. Jon called back just as Marchey’s ship was sliding into its assigned berth at one end of the main residential cylinder of the sprawling complex.

Marchey had already changed into soft gray trousers and a pristine white tunic, and was just putting the bent silver pin in its place over his heart when Jon came back on-line.

“We got trouble, Doc,” he said without preamble.

“Tell me.” The pin in place, he picked up his coffee. He wasn’t thirsty, but he needed something to do with his hands, and thanks to his prosthetics he would have splintered his teeth trying to bite his nails.

“I think I’d best show you.”

Jon’s feed blipped into a small inset at the upper left corner of the screen. The rest of it changed to a view of Ananke’s loading bay as seen from high above. Marchey assumed that the feed came from one of the spyeyes Fist had put in every corner of his empire.

“They came into the same dock you used,” Jon explained over the muted grumble of sound coming from the bay. “No big surprise there ’cause we only got the one workin’. But they overrode the locktube somehow, jammin’ their lock right up against ours, bustin’ the outer doors.”

Another inset appeared, the view from the pickup outside the lock skewed off at an angle, but showing a section of matte black hull up tight against the stone wall. There was nothing to keep them from leaving their ship and coming through the inner airlock doors.

Nothing but the small, white-clad figure standing in the middle of the wide ramp before the inner doors and barring the way.

“Angel,” Marchey said, feeling his insides go cold as methane snow.

“Mebbe not.”

“Then who?” he demanded, the moment he said it knowing what Jon’s answer would be, and his foreboding warping into dread.

“Scylla.” Jon made a helpless gesture. “Angel’s not a fighter, but she sure as shootin’ is. Hell, none of us are fighters, you know that. Since the greatest danger seemed to come from lettin’ them split us up, we planned to all get in front of the lock, sit down and link arms—try to use passive resistance. Just as we were getting’ ready to put ourselves in place she showed up, pushin’ right through, ignorin’ everybody ’cept to tell ’em to get back. She planted herself there, and an’t moved a muscle since.”

The pickup zoomed in closer, but revealed little more. The robe she wore concealed her exo, its hem brushing the floor to hide even her feet. Her head was bowed as if in prayer, the robe’s hood shrouding her head and face. Her arms were crossed before her chest, her hands hidden by the robe’s sleeves.

“She may have slowed them down a mite,” Halen continued. “Nothin’s happened in the time it took me to get back here from the bay, but—”

“But sooner or later they’re going to try to come out,” Marchey finished with leaden certainty. He glanced at the stacks, seeing that he would be locked in and cleared to debark in about two minutes. His gaze was drawn back to the small white figure standing guard before the lock’s double doors.

Somehow he knew he was seeing Angel, not Scylla. Scylla would never hide her exo, for instance. Nor would she have waited passively, she would have gone in after them. But it wasn’t really a matter of Angel being there and Scylla being off somewhere safely out of the way, like Luna or Limbo or Los Angeles, was it?

She’s in here with me. That’s what Angel had told him. Like a violent genie in a fragile bottle. Rub it the wrong way and out she would burst in all her awful glory.

Angel was in way over her head. No matter how good her intentions, if the situation turned ugly, it could all too easily crack the fragile shell she had built around the creature Fist had made of her and cause her to revert to Scylla.

If that happened, the threat would probably be neutralized. He knew that the combination of Scylla’s fierce persona and that combat exo probably made her a match for the half dozen or so mercys who would be on the ship. There would be no hesitation, no quarter given. She’d chew them up, spit them out, and grind their remains into the ground.

Chewing up and spitting out what was left of Angel in the process. There was no way she could escape what she had been twice.

“Damn,” he muttered, cursing the situation, cursing himself for accusing her of being afraid to shed her exo and truly be Angel. He had a sinking feeling that she was trying to prove him wrong by a test of fire, willingly stepping into the sort of inferno where her darkling sister self could take control.

There was a drawer under the commboard. He pawed frantically through it, searching for a remote. When he found one he held it up for Jon to see. “I’ll wear this so I can stay in touch. Scare one up and send it down to her…”

Hesitation overcame him as he tried to think of too many things all at once. He took a deep shuddering breath and started again.

“Have one of the children take it down to her if you can. That will seem less threatening to the people on the ship, and she might be more likely to take it.”

Jon nodded. “Hang on.” He looked away, speaking in a hushed, urgent voice to someone offcam, listening for a few moments, then nodding curtly. He faced Marchey again.

“We’re working on it. Marcy is here with me, and she’s talking to the ship. They’re acting all innocentlike, saying they only want to come out and help.”

“Stall as long as you can,” Marchey implored him, slipping the remote into his ear, his body heat turning it on. He tapped it with one silver finger. “Keep me advised.”

[You got it, Doc.] Jon’s voice whispered over the remote as well as over the monitor. He cocked his head a moment, listening to Marcy. “Danny’s on his way down with the remote. You think talking to her will help?”

“Probably not,” Marchey snapped. Going on the evidence, he would only make matters worse.

The chime signalling that his ship’s airlock had cycled through sounded. Time to go.

He grimaced. “Sorry about that, Jon,” he added more gently, taking a last longing look at Angel and hoping he would get a chance to tell her he was sorry for the way he had treated her. She appeared so small, so helpless. In so many ways she was little more than a child. Innocent and vulnerable. Trusting. Could she possibly understand just how big a risk she was taking?

Yes, she probably did. Maybe because she had never learned how to lie to herself the way he had.

“Doc?”

Marchey tore his gaze away to look at Halen’s face in the inset. “Yeah?” There seemed to be something stuck in his throat, thickening his voice to a rusty croak.

Jon held up his misshapen hand as if in benediction. “If anyone can make somethin’ out of this mess, it’s you. We trust you, brother. Don’t let yourself forget that.”

Marchey wondered where Halen’s confidence came from. He could use a dose.

“I hope you’re right,” He sighed wearily. “But did you ever think that maybe none of this would’ve happened if I stayed there with you?” If I hadn’t been too willing to run back to my safe old life. If I hadn’t convinced myself that I had fulfilled all my responsibilities toward you. If, if, if—

“Could be,” Jon replied imperturbably. Then he smiled, his face that of a man whose faith remained bouyant and unshakable. “God works in mysterious ways, my friend. Did you ever stop to think that maybe you had to leave here to find out what you needed to know, and get where you needed to be, so you could do what had to be done to stop it?”

Marchey could only hope he was right. And that if there truly was a god, he she or it was on their side.

The name of the physician in charge of the patient Marchey had come to see was Dr. Raphael Moro. Early forties. Born on Earth. Educated on Mars. Excellent credentials.

Marchey knocked at Moro’s office door, hoping he didn’t have to chase the man down, or wait for him to turn up before he could see the patient. Gilt lettering on the door said that Moro was director of the whole Medical Section on Botha. That wasn’t encouraging. Too many administrators believed that the delay and inconvenience they caused others was the best measure of their own power and importance. Giving a Bergmann Surgeon an especially hard time was strictly mandatory.

The door swung open a few moments later. The sheer size of the man filling the opening made Marchey blink and take half a step backward.

Moro was huge, and built like a bear. Round-shouldered and slightly stooped, but still standing well over two meters tall. His skin had the coppery sheen of Polynesian bloodlines, set off by the rumpled white scrubs he wore. His stiff black hair stood straight up atop his head, and his wispy black beard had a stripe of pure white running through it.

He stared silently at Marchey, brown eyes magnified by archaic corrective lenses, the pinched look of distaste on his moon face saying that he disapproved of him on sight. Ignoring Marchey’s greeting and profferred hand, Moro brusquely turned and walked away, leaving it up to Marchey to follow. A half-meter-long, tightly braided black queue draped down Moro’s slablike back, swinging with every step.

“Sit,” he said, pointing at a chair facing his desk as he passed it.

Marchey didn’t particularly care for being ordered around like an orderly called onto the carpet for some screwup, but did as he was told. He watched Moro lumber around the side of the desk and lower his bulk into his high-backed leatherite chair, then just sit there glowering at him.

Even though he could almost feel every precious second ticking by, raising the level of his impatience and anxiety like sand piling higher in the bottom of an hourglass, he dared not let it show. He had to proceed as if this were just another job.

He folded his silver hands on his lap to keep them still. His prosthetics had been left uncovered on purpose. The sight of them made most doctors—surgeons, especially—uncomfortable. Offering to shake hands usually guaranteed a minimum of delay in being taken to the patient.

“I can’t say that I’m particularly pleased by having you brought in on this case, Dr. Marchey,” Moro rumbled at last, his tone gruff and putting sarcastic emphasis on Doctor. That was nothing new. Sarcasm, truculence, and even outright contemptuous loathing—Marchey had heard it all before.

“You’re not?” he replied neutrally.

[Danny’s in the bay now.] Jon whispered in his ear over the remote a second later.

Moro put his hands flat on his desk. They were massive, with thick blunt fingers, more like the hands of a stonecutter than a surgeon. “No, I’m not. But I was overruled. MedArm insisted on bringing in one of your kind.”

“My kind,” Marchey echoed tonelessly. Hostility was nothing new. It looked like Moro intended to articulate his. He didn’t care how vicious the attack was, as long as it was short. Time was running out.

“Your kind. The kind that provide special treatment for the high-and-mighty.”

He watched Moro’s mouth tighten, as if he were about to spit, turning that statement over in his mind. Moro knew how they were being used. Khan had as much as said the same thing. Was it general knowledge, or simply rumor and innuendo that had attached itself to them?

“I refused to give you the patient’s condition when you called because I wanted to see your face. I wanted to see if you showed the slightest frigging sign of a conscience when I told you what you’ve come to do.”

“Well,” Marchey said mildly, “why don’t you tell me what it is? That way we can both find out what we want to know.”

“Your patient is Preston Valdemar.”

“So you told me.”

Moro’s eyes widened behind the thick lenses. “The name means nothing to you?”

“No,” he lied. “Should it?”

“Damn right it should,” Moro growled. “Valdemar used to be Belt Operations Director for OmniMat. But he ‘retired’ to become MedArm’s new Outer Zone Manager a few years back. As you know, the Outer Zone starts with Mars and her moons and comes on out here.”

He hadn’t. Though Moro didn’t know it, he had just given Marchey the information he needed to understand how MedArm had managed to get away with some of the things it had done.

MedArm’s control of off-Earth Health Care was total and nearly autonomous. Sometime in the past it had apparently split into what were in effect two separate MedArms. One to cover the cylties, the Venus stations, and the teeming tunnels of old Luna herself. The other, its evil twin, to cover the vast, more newly inhabited and less densely populated spaces of Mars and its moons, the Belt, and Jupiter’s moons. Since the Bergmann Institute was on Deimos, it was under the Outer Zone’s control.

It was a case of one hand not knowing what the other one was doing, and the body they belonged to— the UN Space Regulatory Agency—knowing even less. UNSRA’s administrative base was, after all, on Luna. Inside the Inner Zone and far removed from the Outer. He had to wonder when this split had happened, and at whose behest.

Neither the “silver lining” or “Indian blanket” file had mentioned it. As for Valedemar, his name had been cited once, but not his position. See file it had said after his name. No doubt there was another locked file that held the missing pieces and would hyperlink the other two together. One Fist had held back, helpful son of a bitch that he was.

Why hadn’t Sal told him about this split?

Ah, but maybe he had. I just let it go in one ear and out the other. Having your head stuffed up your ass creates a fairly serious hearing impairment, to say nothing of how it affects cognitive function.

The important thing was that if Valdemar ran the Outer Zone, then he was even more powerful than Marchey had first thought. This new information only made him all the more impatient to get to him. His feigned indifference even harder to maintain as he sat there waiting for Moro to finish venting his spleen.

“MedArm Outer Zone has been goddamn busy,” Moro went on, making it sound like he held Marchey personally responsible. “You know how the system is supposed to run. Doctors are free to work where they want, even outside the system in private practice if they follow the regs. Inside the system we’re subsidized, with incentives for working in depressed areas. Supposedly the only interference with our autonomy is that sometimes new system-educated doctors are assigned short residencies in places with inadequate medical care.”

Some doctors are free to practice where they want, Marchey amended silently. He kept his mouth shut, though. Moro’s face was darkening, and he could almost smell the man’s anger. Moro had an axe to grind, and Marchey was about to see its edge.

“I’m AAA certified,” Moro said with a scowl. “I assume you know what that means.”

“I do.” AAA certification meant that he was qualified to practice all forms of medicine—surgery, obstetry, genetry, euthanasia, nanotony, and all the rest—rating in the top 5 percent of the profession in terms of skill and training. His own battered pride made him add, “I’m AAAB certified myself.”

Only triple A’s had been admitted to the Bergmann Program, which was the origin of that final—sometimes seemingly terminal—B.

“Good for you. What do you know about Carme, then?”

Marchey shrugged. “Outer Jovian moon. Mostly independents and wilders.”

Moro nodded. “That’s where I used to practice. The conditions were miserable. My whole infirmary wasn’t much bigger than this office. ‘Pay what you can, if you can,’ is the motto for strict adherents to the Healer’s Oath, right? I had my own ore accounts ’cause that was what I got paid with more often than not. Everything I made went toward keeping my practice afloat.” Moro’s blocky hands tightened into knuckly fists atop his desk. “I loved that cold, ugly damned place. Those people meant a lot to me, and by Christ I meant a lot to them! But MedArm ordered me to come here, replacing me with some quack with a half dozen malps hanging over his head. When I tried to refuse, they threatened to punch my ticket to practice. So I came here and tried to appeal, getting about as far as I would trying to shovel vacuum. Valdemar laid it out for me. I was here to stay as long as he did, like it or not. Would you like to hear why?”

[Angel won’t take the remote.] Jon whispered in his ear while he waited. Moro was going to tell him whether he wanted to hear or not. But he did, he needed every handle on Valdemar he could get.

“Because I was, and I quote, ‘Too good a doctor to be wasted on that grubber garbage!’ ” Moro roared, thrusting himself to his feet, his big fists braced on the desk as if preparing to vault over it so he could beat the living hell out of Marchey.

He thrust out his jaw. “So here I sit on my ass in this fancy office like some high-class whore! This place is lousy with corporate high rollers. Sometimes I get to treat what he calls the ‘little people,’ ordinary workers and their families.” His expression turned bitter, his voice dropping to a growl. “Otherwise, I do a lot of cosmetic surgery. Rejuves. Coddle ’xecs without the brains to eat right or exercise. Lots of heart and liver work, lots of substance abuse.”

Marchey couldn’t see why Moro was blaming him for all this, unless he simply had to blame somebody. He watched the big man bend over to yank open a desk drawer. “All that’s just bones I’m thrown to keep me out of trouble. What I really am is Valdemar’s personal physician. Here are his records.” He flung a sheaf of hard-copy flimsies at Marchey as if challenging him to a duel.

They fluttered to the ground at Marchey’s feet. His face a blank slate, he bent, picked them up. Straightened up and began skimming through the pages.

He was soon a lot closer to understanding Moro’s fury. He looked up at the other doctor. “Valdemar is a Maxx addict.”

“He calls it his ‘little vice’,” Moro sneered. “One week’s dosage costs the system more than all the pharmaceuticals and supplies I’d use for six whole months back on Carme. But it doesn’t cost him a single frigging credit. It’s his ‘medicine.’ ”

Marchey sighed. Maxx was the street name for a synthesized combination of several naturally occurring neuronal proteins. Even doctors called it that. Its clinical uses included the treatment of spinal cord and other major nerve-bundle injuries, Third Form Autism, certain types of paralysis, Laskout’s Anesthesia, persistent coma, and a handful of related conditions. It stimulated and amplified neurotransmission and acted as a sense enhancer.

The drug’s high cost came from the difficulty of its synthesis and terribly short shelf life. But it was potent stuff. In most cases one or two small doses did the trick. A protracted course of treatment almost never ran for more than a dozen doses administered over a twelve-week period.

Even in relatively high clinical dosages the user’s body was able to deal with it, and its metabolized byproducts. Taking it over a long period of time was another matter. Elimination was outpaced by intake. Wastes accumulated, eventually leading to liver and kidney damage. The brain’s normal chemical balance went from subtly altered to completely and increasingly out of whack, resulting in paranoia, extreme mood swings, synesthesia, and a progressive deadening of the senses that the abuser would of course try to combat with increased dosages of the problem’s cause.

Maxx was a prestige party drug for the rich, or rare champagne treat for the street-level abuser. Full-scale addicts were extremely rare; it took a combination of deep pockets and reliable black-market connections to maintain the habit.

That, or a direct legal pipeline into the supply.

“I’m sure you know that the best way to treat his condition,” Moro growled, “is to take him off the damned stuff and help his system purge naturally.” His tone turned caustic, and he glared at Marchey, eyes narrowing to slits behind his glasses. “Come to find out there is another way. A service one of your kind provided about eighteen months ago.”

Marchey stared down at the flimsies, reading a notation that might as well have been an indictment. “Clean him out. Repair all the damage. Let him start all over again.”

There it was before him, more proof of what they had become. His fellow Bergmann Surgeon Andre Fescu had done just that. But he couldn’t blame Andre. He knew it could have just as easily been himself. He wouldn’t have asked any questions, and not just because nobody would have answered them anyway. He would have done the job and been on his way. In the unlikely event that he’d stopped to wonder why he was treating a Maxx addict, he probably would have chalked it up to cleaning up after a botched treatment.

He looked up at Moro again, all too easily able to understand the man’s anger and frustration. He felt it himself, and it frightened him. This was something else to eat away at the dispassion he so desperately needed.

“I’ve seen enough,” he said, standing up and doing his best to keep his face a mask of indifference. “I think it’s time to see my patient.”

[The door to the ship is opening, Doc! Angel just took a step closer to our airlock doors!]

Moro stared at him as if he were some sort of human tumor. “You’re still going to go through with it?”

Marchey shrugged. “We all do what we have to.”

Moro dropped back into his chair. He jerked his bearded chin to one side. “Back out the way you came in, turn right. Follow the red line to Room PI.” His mouth twisted. “I hope you understand that I don’t care to assist in this travesty.”

Marchey headed toward the door. “I work alone, anyway.”

A scowling nod. “I don’t doubt it. Good-bye, then. I don’t believe we have anything else to talk about.”

“No, I don’t suppose we do.” As unfair as Moro’s attitude was, it suggested that if given all the facts he might be a potential ally. But there was no time to spare, and Marchey didn’t dare risk compromising his chances to get to Valdemar.

The door slid open before him. He could feel Moro glowering at his back as he stepped through.

Just after it slid shut behind him and he started following the red line beneath his feet, Jon began cursing in his ear because all hell had broken loose.

Angel had taken one small step forward, but no more. Old reflexes told her to take the offense, but she caught herself, remembering that the task she had set for herself was one of defense. Standing her ground, not trying to gain it.

So she waited for the man who had just come through the inner-lock doors to come to her, keeping her head bowed and her eyes downcast. Her angel eye gave her above normal peripheral vision, allowing her to look him over surreptitiously.

He was tall and rawboned, his loose black jacket and trousers unable to completely disguise his muscle-bound body. As he strolled toward her she noted the arrogant self-assurance in his rolling stride, the tough-guy swagger. His big hands hung at his sides, loose and empty.

He had curly red hair close-shaved around his ears, and a dozen bangles hanging from his lobes. There was a friendly grin plastered on his ruddy face, but his eyes were hooded with lazy insolence.

“You the welcomin’ committee, darlin’?” he drawled, offering one big square hand. His knobby knuckles were heavily scarred, suggesting that he had caused more injuries than he had ever dressed.

Angel ignored it. “No,” she said quietly. “You are not welcome here.”

His hand dropped, thick fingers working as if to stay limber. “Aw, don’t be like that, sweetie! We’s just good samarians, come to help get you poor folks fixed up.”

“The term is Samaritans,” she corrected politely. “We are not deceived. We know why you are here, and how you intend to ‘fix us up.’ Go back to your ship and return to your masters. We will have nothing to do with you.”

There were more teeth in his grin now, and he stared down at her with amused contempt. “Now that’s not particular friendly, darlin’.” His voice dropped an octave, turned wheedling. “I think mebbe you better give this a good rethink and start bein’ nice to us.” He chuckled. “Else we jus’ might not be so nice ourselfs.”

“Go away. Now,” she whispered hoarsely, hope that he would be reasonable deserting her completely. She clenched her hands tight inside her sleeves, trying to keep a grip herself. “Please. I am warning you.”

“Warnin’ me? Haw! What’re you gonna do if I don’t, sweetmeat? Stamp your little foot?” He guffawed, stepping closer. “We’s here to stay, meatpie. I think you oughta be more friendly.” The mercy’s grin twisted into a leer. “Fact is, I like little grubber crackies like you to be especial friendly, if you know what I mean.”

He put his rough scarred brawler’s hand under her chin to tip her face up so he could see it. “Le’s find out if you’s a bagger or what.”

Angel could have resisted, but she knew the time had come to risk her newfound self by showing him something of the hated face of Scylla. She prayed that would be enough.

Her face tilted up toward him, rising like a pale moon from behind the snowy hill of her hood.

The mercy’s leer faltered when her steel-and-glass angel eye fixed on him like a gunsight. Deep inside her the unquiet angel stirred, drawn by the first faint scent of fear.

“What the fuck—” he began, beetling brow furrowing in surprise and confusion.

Angel smiled at him then. But not with the closed-mouth smile she had practiced so hard to perfect. Her cheeks tightened as her lips pulled back. She remembered how to do it, the Scylla-smile was a memory woven into her nerves with titanium wires, and as she showed it she felt the hated other trying to climb back into place behind it.

The red-haired mercy took one bulge-eyed, disbelieving look at the mouthful of sharklike teeth she showed him, each and every one tipped with livid red as if still bloody from a meal of raw meat before he yelped and snatched his hand back as if afraid she would bite it off.

Shocked eyes fixed on her smile, and cocky self-assurance gone, he fell back a step.

Angel pressed her advantage. “Don’t you want to be friendly?” she asked sweetly, closing the distance between them and grinning up at him. Inside she exulted. Scylla was still under control and the invader was on the run!

The mercy retreated another step, then turned and headed back toward the airlock. Not running, but not dawdling either. A jubilant cry went up from the people filling the back part of the bay, and they started toward her.

Angel heard them. She turned to tell them to stay back.

She never got a chance.

The moment her back was turned the mercy spun back toward her, producing a matte black hand weapon with a fist-sized bore from inside his jacket, levelling it in her direction and firing.

No sound or light came from the weapon, but there was no mistaking that he had fired. The gun was a perennial favorite of mercys for close-up work, fondly called a meatblower or a roaster. It fired a tightly focused blast of mixed radiation that created such instantaneous and intense localized heat in its target that it explosively vaporized flesh, the very cells detonating like millions of little bombs as the water in them was turned into steam in a microsecond.

The burst caught Angel in the small of the back. The shot was intended to blow her in half.

Her robe went up like paper in a blast furnace, instantly swallowing her up in a ball of orange-red flame. The Kindred’s forward rush collapsed like a wave against an invisible breakwater, those on the leading edge stumbling and falling. The jubilant roar changed to screams of terror and horror.

The smug grin was back on the mercy’s face as he waited for Angel to fall. But it froze, then peeled off completely when instead she slowly turned back to face him, burning scraps of cloth creating a fiery, smoky halo around her.

The gleaming silver skin and strutwork the robe had hidden was exposed now, golden in the dying flames. The mercy’s face went chalk white as he recognized the combat exo for what it was. He stumbled backwards, his shocked gaze welded to the fixed grin on the face of his intended victim, the weapon in his hand forgotten.

Angel stared back at him with a blank, unwavering expressionlessness that was far more frightening than any scowl or snarl could have been, a machine-cold indifference to everything but what was centered in her crosshairs.

Her still exterior gave no hint of her inner turmoil. The urge to strike back crackled through her a hundred times hotter and more consuming than the fire that had scorched her face. Stoking the rising inner flames was Scylla.

Images filled her head: She could—

—cross the space between them before he could so much as lift a single foot, take his head off with a single careless backhand, and have ample time to study the look of surprise on his face as it hit the ground.

—drive her bladed hand into his chest, rip his heart out, and show him its final bloody beat.

—pull him apart the way a child strips the petals from a daisy.

Scylla showed her all the wonders she could perform, promising that she would at last have an outlet for all the hurt and anger and frustration. That to take this man down would be right and feel so good…

Angel shuddered, blinking back the visions and somehow keeping the angel subsumed. Swallowing hard, she found her voice.

“Please leave! Please!” she wailed, unable to keep the naked entreaty from her voice. The mercy turned and ran.

She watched him disappear through the airlock door, hoping with every fiber of her being that it was truly the beginning of the invaders’ retreat.

Marchey stood just outside sensor range of the door to Valdemar’s room, his head cocked to one side as he listened to Jon telling him what had just happened in the bay.

“Get everybody to hell out of there,” was the only advice he could offer.

[What about Angel?] Jon demanded.

“What about her?” he hissed through clenched teeth, that question tolling over and over in his head.

He rubbed his forehead, trying to think. “Sorry. You say she’s got them stood off for the moment?”

[Yeah, but I doubt it can last. Their sort won’t give up this easily.]

He was afraid Jon was probably right on both counts. This had been no more than a skirmish. A testing of their defenses. Now that they knew they were up against someone in a combat exo the gloves would come off.

“She hasn’t done anything overtly hostile?”

[Not yet.]

He couldn’t even begin to guess which would be worse for her: getting badly hurt or even killed as Angel or reverting to Scylla. He hoped to hell he could fix it so he didn’t have to find out.

“Okay, I’ve got to go now,” he began. The sooner he got to Valdemar the better everyone’s chances.

[Just a second, Doc—] Jon put in. Several seconds passed.

[Okay. The bay is almost completely evacuated, soon as it is we’ll seal it up. Danny just came back in. He says Angel told him to tell you that she knows you’re trying to fix everything. She says she’ll hold them back until you can get them called off our backs. She says… she says she’ll try to make you proud of her this time.]

Marchey closed his eyes for a moment, daunted by her courage. Her loyalty and trust. He found himself remembering the first and last times he had seen her, and all the mistakes he had made in between.

“Hang on, Angel,” he muttered half under his breath, opening his eyes to stare at the door to Valdemar’s room, less than a dozen steps away. The final barrier to his objective.

“This time I won’t let you down,” he whispered, an apology and a promise all in one.

He started moving. Had there been anyone else in the corridor to see him, the cold, tight-lipped expression on his face might have made them try to stop him.

Not that it would have done them any good.

Angel listened to her message being delivered as she moved closer to the airlock doors. She had refused the remote Danny brought her because her exo already allowed her to monitor the channels they were using. She had not mentioned it because she did not want them to know she was listening, to give them the chance to try to talk her out of the task she had set for herself.

The invaders were going to try to come out again. Soon. Angel wanted to believe otherwise, but knew better. Scylla knew it for certain, and was just waiting for her chance to be reborn like a vengeful phoenix in the heat and flames of battle.

All she could do now was wait.

The bay had been evacuated and sealed up tight. That was good. It was one less thing to worry about.

Marchey would come through. She did not doubt it for one single moment. He had helped deliver the people of Ananke from oppression once before, and he would do it again. Somehow the mantle of guardian angel had been passed on to him.

For all her telling him that he was dead inside, she knew that there was a strength in him, a steadfastness that she had first seen clearly when he stared Scylla straight in the eye—stared his own death straight in the eye—and refused to back down. Not because he did not care if he died, but because when pushed to stand by what he thought was right not even an angel’s rage could move him. There was something deep inside him every bit as durable as his silver hands, just as bright and stainless. He was capable of so much more than he knew.

He would save them all. Only this time, she would be at his side. They would be… together.

[Hang on, Angel,] his voice whispered in her ear.

Her breath caught in her throat. He didn’t know that she could hear him, but that didn’t matter. It was enough that he had said it. And she knew—knew— that he was telling her to hold on to the identity he had given back to her, and not revert to the other.

[This time I won’t let you down.]

Or I you, Angel vowed, placing herself directly in front of the airlock’s double doors. Fatigue and apprehension and the effort it took to keep Scylla subsumed made her head swim.

But she stood tall and proud, a solitary silver sentinel with a gentle smile on her face. Knowing that he cared after all strengthened her, fortified her sense of purpose. She would protect those she had once terrorized. She would make her mother and all the other dead proud of her. She would prove once and for all that she was no longer what she had once been.

She would give Marchey the time he needed, no matter what it cost. This time her life was pledged to something worthy.

She would show her love for him the only way she could, and hope that when this was all over he would realize that she was more than just his ally, and it was more than just help she wanted to give him.

Preston Valdemar was sitting up in bed, dressed in pearly white silk pajamas, hunched over a sleek wood-trimmed pad and speaking into it when Marchey appeared in his doorway. He looked up, eyes narrowing and brow furrowing in suspicion.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, putting the pad on standby and hugging it protectively to his chest.

Marchey didn’t answer. He stood there, taking a good long look at his patient. Sizing him up.

Valdemar appeared to be in his late fifties, the skin of his face blotchy, loose pouches of flesh sagging under his eyes and chin. According to his records, he was in his late sixties. The full range of antigeria techniques had been used on him just over a year before, so he should have looked to be in his late thirties at most. Maxx addiction had undone most of that. His close-set eyes were muddied by it and medication, their whites bloodshot and jaundiced.

There was also an unhealthy saffron cast to his skin. It was unlikely that the bloodcleanser racked in beside his bed was there for show. His liver and kidneys were probably little better than spoiled meat.

“Answer me, dammit!”

He had the fat, greedy mouth of a libertine, and his thick lips were pressed together petulantly as he glared at Marchey, waiting for him to respond.

Marchey ignored him, checking the room over carefully. There was a full communit at his bedside, probably linked to the pad. Good. The door he had just come through was the only one in or out. He locked it so they wouldn’t be disturbed.

Reconnaissance done, he faced Valdemar, his face stonily impassive. “I am Dr. Georgory Marchey.” He held up his silver hands so there would be no mistaking what kind of doctor he was. “I’m here to treat you.”

“It’s about time you got here,” Valdemar sniffed, slumping back onto the pillows. “I feel terrible! You should have been here weeks ago! I’m not some damn welf; I run the whole fucking medicine show around here! I deserve better treatment than this!”

Marchey stared down at the flabby little man on the big soft bed, and although he felt nothing kinder than loathing, he smiled.

“Well, I’m here.” His smile subtly altered, an odd glint kindling in his gray eyes. “It has taken me a long time to get to where I am now. Let’s find out if it was worth the trip.”

Angel could feel it.

Something was about to happen. The very air seemed charged with a gathering electricity. She had never experienced anything like terrestrial weather, but she had heard and finally understood what people meant by the calm before the storm.

Would they rush her? Would the airlock doors open on a dozen weapons all firing on her at once?

There were a dozen possibilities. She needed to be ready for each and every one of them, but really all she could do was wait, her silver-sheathed body so tense it was a wonder it didn’t ring like a tuning fork with every apprehensive thump of her heart.

She watched the airlock’s double doors, her attention so tightly focused on the vertical seam between them that when the explosion came, she kept staring at the still-intact steel panels, thinking that they had tried to blow the doors and failed.

That thought had scarcely been formed when it was blown away by the terrible, blood-freezing dragon’s roar that was the sound of every spacers’ deepest, darkest nightmare.

The deadly shrieking howl of pressure breach.

Adrenaline-fueled fear burst inside her like a bomb, kicking her exosystems into overdrive. Her head snapped around, homing in on the sound, and she saw the gaping, life-eating, meter-wide hole blown in the wall twenty meters away.

It’s a diversion! The warning flashed in her mind like a starburst, but breach drill was one of the first things learned by every child born in the fragile steel-and-stone shells that kept the implacable enemy vacuum at bay. Her response was as deeply wired into her nerves as the monkey reflex of grabbing at anything within reach when falling.

Instinct had her already racing toward the rack of emergency patches against the far wall, leaning into the gale and legs pumping under her like pistons.

Dust, gravel, and other debris filled the escaping air, stinging her face and pinging off her exo. A plastic packing crate came flying at her out of nowhere. She barely had time to fling up her arm to protect her face. The impact staggered her, whirling flinders snatched out of the air around her and sucked toward the hole. Her momentum and the magnetic soles of her exo were all that kept her from falling and being taken as well. She had to keep her vulnerable organic eye squeezed shut against the scouring whirlwind. Only the indifferent glass lens of her angel eye let her see to reach the rack.

Let her see that the rack was nearly empty. The few remaining ceramyl-backed foamstone patches were far too small to cover the rent.

But the thick meter-and-a-half-square foamstone panel forming one end of the rack was large enough to do the job. She grabbed hold of it, set her feet and heaved, wrenching it from its moorings. Then she got herself turned around and headed toward the hole.

The hurricane-force outrush of air tried to rip the panel from her grasp, and when it couldn’t, snatched her off her feet and took them both.

Angel had only a fractured second in which to realize that if the unreinforced panel hit the wall at the speed they were travelling, it would shatter into a thousand useless pieces. Jaw clamped tight on the air the dropping pressure was trying to steal from her aching lungs, she twisted desperately, turning, trying to get her arms and legs braced before—

Less than a tenth of a second later the panel slammed into the wall, smashing Angel’s body between it and the unyielding stone around the hole it was supposed to cover.

“I can’t move,” Valdemar complained pettishly. A pale blue derm was plastered to his neck. Muscle relaxant.

“That’s to make things easier,” Marchey explained as he rolled a table over beside the bed. He didn’t say easier for what. Valdemar would find out soon enough.

“They put me out last time. Aren’t you going to?”

Marchey showed him his teeth. “I think we’ll get better results if we do this while you’re wide-awake.”

“I suppose you know what you’re doing.” Valdemar sniffed.

Some dark bastard cousin of laughter welled up inside of him. “I’ve never been more on top of things in my whole life.”

He laid his forearms on the table, palms up. He’d gotten a lot of practice slipping in and out of the light working trance he needed, and more quickly shucking off his prosthetics back on Ananke. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let go.

Their weight fell away. He opened his eyes, feeling like he had just taken off swaddling gloves. Now his hands felt impossibly supple and exquisitely sensitive, ready to operate.

Even though it had been done without fanfare, removing his prosthetics had made an impression on his patient. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Valdemar’s eyes widen as he straightened up, watched him lick his thick lips nervously. It made him smile.

“This won’t hurt, will it?” Valdemar whined in a small voice.

Marchey had also gotten a lot of practice at another skill since leaving Ananke. It was time to see if he was really the apt pupil Fist kept saying he was.

“Only if I don’t want it to,” he answered as he turned to face Valdemar, his smile widening. The flat silver biometal plates capping his stumps had the same cold gleam as his eyes.

“All right, you miserable little pile of shit,” he rumbled, slowly reaching for his patient, the points where his hands should have been coming closer and closer. “Let’s find out just what you’re made of.”

Valdemar tried to cringe away, but he might as well have tried to levitate. Thanks to the derm on his neck his body only trembled like a worm nailed to a board. Panic rising, he tried to reach for the call button, but his hands and arms never even twitched.

Totally helpless, all he could do was stare at the terrifying expression on Marchey’s face, gurgling with terror and humiliation as his bladder let go.

Angel was in Hell.

Escaping air roared and squalled around her, cold, so cold, and the implacable void at her back tried to suck her through the hole and swallow her completely. She couldn’t breathe. Jagged rock chips, scouring sand, and bullet-fast bits of debris exploded against her exo and lashed the exposed skin of her face.

She teetered over the immense pool of blackness that filled the back of her skull, welling up from where her head had bounced off unyielding stone. If not for the thin layer of biometal covering her where hair should have been, her skull would have split like a melon. She couldn’t tell if the unending howl she heard was inside or outside her head. She could barely see; she had to keep her human eye closed tight or she would lose it, and the other one kept phasing in and out.

The foamstone panel was still in one piece, only because she had put her body between it and the wall to cushion its impact. The impact had been tremendous; people had felt it in the soles of their feet all over Ananke. If it hadn’t been for her exo, every bone in her body would have been broken.

Now the relentless air pressure was turning the panel and the wall into the two jaws of a vise trying to squeeze the life out of her.

Blind, deafened, and dizzy, still one thought clanged endlessly through her reeling mind: This is a diversion! It felt like an eternity had turned since the explosion, but the passionless timesense built into her exo’s circuits told her that less than twenty seconds had elapsed.

She still had a chance to stop them. If she could get free before she was mashed flat or eaten by vacuum. Or simply passed out, letting the other dangers get her.

Angel tightened her grip on the panel and strained against it, the cords standing out in her neck. A cry broke through her clenched teeth when it looked like not even her exo gave her the strength to force it back.

Still she refused to give up. She kept pushing, throwing every iota of energy she could summon into her trembling arms, the strain making the suffocating blackness rise higher and higher. The panel groaned and thrummed, nearly stressed to the breaking point.

Just as her exhausted body was about to fail her, the panel moved, forced back to arm’s length and tipping so that one side ground against the wall.

That gave her better leverage. Bracing it up with her trembling arms, she wriggled toward the widest part of the gap, moving like some small creature trying to crawl out from under a stony crushing foot. When she had gotten as far to one side as she could, she gave one final desperate heave, rolling and twisting as she did so.

The patch slammed home with an echoing boom, cracking down the middle but not breaking. The seal wasn’t perfect; air still whistled around the edges, sucking airborne bits of debris in to wedge in the narrow cracks, but the cyclone was over.

The force of her push sent her crashing to the cold stone floor. She landed on her side, desperately gasping for breath in the too-thin, dust-filled air. Her lungs were on fire, every ragged breath stoking the flames higher.

She could have lain there forever. Her limbs felt like they weighed a ton apiece. Her head swam, and even thinking about moving seemed impossible.

Instead she heaved herself to her feet wearily, blood seeping from her ears and nose, trickling from her mouth. Operating on blind instinct alone she got herself oriented and staggered drunkenly toward the airlock.

The outer doors were just beginning to slide back when she got to within two meters of them, coming within blurry sight of five heavily armed mercys in goggles and breather masks, the red-haired man she had driven off earlier in the lead. It was obvious from the shocked expressions on their faces that they hadn’t expected to find her waiting for them.

Angel was at the end of her strength and endurance. She didn’t so much charge the invaders as start toppling in their direction and somehow manage to keep her feet under her.

The looks of slack-jawed, bug-eyed disbelief that appeared on their faces squeezed a hysterical laugh out of her. It was funny. Scylla was nowhere to be found inside her now, and she didn’t have the strength left to fight them even if she wanted to. The worst she could do was collapse on top of them.

The mercys did not know that. Seeing a battered and bloody-faced silver-skinned wild woman laughing like a berserker as she lurched toward them drove them back to the big airlock’s ruined outer doors.

Angel saw one last chance to slow them down. Her laughter turning to a racking coughing that put fresh blood on her lips, she staggered the last two steps to the airlock’s inner doors. Then she flung her arms wide, extruded her talons, and grunting with effort, drove her barbed hands into the steel panels, sinking them in almost to her wrists. Gathering the tattered shreds of her failing strength, she heaved at the door panels to pull them shut.

Had she been fresh and rested, she could have easily overcome the mechanism that powered the lock doors. In her present condition she was barely able slowly to wrench them shut to the tormented shriek of stripping gears and steel grating against stone. The panels began to twist and buckle around her silver hands. Her grip was too close to their edges, but she dared not try for a fresh hold.

She heard the enemy shout, saw them start back toward her. That spurred her to one final all-out effort. Her whole existence narrowed down to herself and the doors.

Just—

Their resistance was incredible. Her arms and insides were aflame. Red-and-black motes danced before her eye. She turned her face away as they began firing at her, daring only to use rubber dumdums in the enclosed space.

—close!

In the end her will was greater.

The closing mechanism gave way with a gunshot crack and the doors slammed shut. The warped steel panels would not close all the way, leaving a gap the thickness of her hand between them, but it was the best she could do.

Angel hung there by her wedged hands, panting for breath in the rarefied air and grimly holding on to consciousness. She tried to lock her exo, finding that it refused to move anyway. The inside of her angel eye flashed with warnings and damage reports, pulsing in time with the hammering of her heart.

She heard muffled cursing. Gloved fingers appeared in the gap, trying to pry the doors open again. Her exo had turned into a silver vise, making that impossible. It took her three tries to find the breath to whisper, “Comm active,” and she had to swallow a mixture of blood and dust before she could speak again.

“Hurry,” she gasped. Her throat tightened, and she felt a gathering wetness in her eye; tears stained with blood. “I can’t… do any more.”

As she was licking her bloody lips to speak again, she heard one voice rise above the angry gabble at the other side of the doors. “Go get another charge,” it bellowed. “We’ll blow the fuckin’ door to hell and the bitch with it!”

She rested her head on her arms, closed her eye.

So that would be how it ended. The silent darkness was piled up so high inside her that she would probably never know when it happened. Consciousness had turned to smoke in her hands. It kept trying to slip through her fingers and fade away.

Still she held on. This was her last chance to make things right.

There were so many things she had wanted to tell him. That she had never been truly alive until he had touched her and given a real life to her. That she was sorry for the things she had said, for driving him away. So many things…

Her head lolled to one side, and she found herself fighting a tidal wave of red-edged black. Had she blanked out? She couldn’t be sure. She only knew that the next wave would take her all the way under, and there was no way to stop or evade it.

“Come back,” she croaked breathlessly. “Pl—please give me… another chance…”

She wanted to explain what she meant, and hear if he answered, but the silent darkness took her before she had a chance to do either. It crashed over her.

It took her down.

Valdemar’s compad lay on the bedside table, still on standby. Marchey had glanced at it while putting it aside, seeing that it was linked to the bedside comm, and willing to bet that his patient had been talking to the supposed mission of mercy on Ananke when he’d come in.

—so you could do what needed to be done to stop it, Jon had said. Soon now he would see if that was true.

Marchey stared down at Valdemar’s pale, frightened face, trying to keep a handle on his emotions. The light working trance gave him some distance from them, but not much. Rage, hatred, and loathing hammered at his insides, demons shrieking to be let out.

“The Helping Hands Foundation,” he growled softly.

Valdemar blinked in confusion, his eyes flicking to one side to glance guiltily at the compad before coming back to jitter nervously between Marchey’s face and the invisible hands poised just over his chest.

He let Valdemar feel a slight weight and pressure, watched fresh sweat blossom on his ashen forehead and upper lip.

“Wh—what about it?” he panted.

“At this very moment there is a so-called relief mission trying to steal Ananke from its rightful owners.”

“They’re not stealing,” Valdemar protested.

“What would you call it, then?”

“They’re uh, p-providing a service.”

“For a price.”

“Well, yeah, what’s—”

Marchey cut him off. “With no chance to refuse this service. I’m hearing what is going on even as we speak.” His mouth tightened. “Do you know what it makes me want to do?”

Valdemar shook his head meekly. Marchey’s face filled his field of vision. It was the face of a man so filled with fury and contempt that he looked capable of anything. It came to him that he might just be staring his own death in the face.

Marchey’s eyes narrowed. “It makes me want to give you the same deal. A service for a price.” He sank his immaterial hands into Valdemar’s body.

“Maybe a little heart surgery.” A feather-light touch on a certain bundle of nerves set off a brief flare of pain deep in the man’s chest. Valdemar let out a strangled squeak, eyes bulging and his face going the color of curdled milk.

“A heartless bastard like you could probably use a little work on the old ticker.” Marchey did it again, hard enough to make Valdemar gag and his whole body convulse.

This was wrong, and Marchey knew it. Worse yet, it felt so good. The urge to make Valdemar squirm and beg wanted to pour out his hands like a boiling poison bottled up past containment.

You’re bluffing, he reminded himself desperately. You can’t can’t can’t do him any real harm!

“Please!” Valdemar wailed, his voice shrill with terror. “You can’t hurt me like this! You’re a d-d-doctor!”

Marchey bent lower, putting his face inches from Valdemar’s. “Yes I am. I talked to Dr. Moro. He told me how you said the people he served didn’t deserve a doctor like him.” A mirthless smile screwed itself onto his face. “Maybe I’m the sort of doctor you deserve.”

Valdemar’s mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he’d completed his own humiliation by losing control of his bowels as well as his bladder. He cowered there in stinking misery, utterly powerless to stop Marchey from doing whatever he wanted with him.

Marchey stared down at him in disgust, knowing it was time to finish this atrocity up and get the hell out of there before he lost it.

Suddenly a harsh crackle of static lanced into his ear from the remote, loud enough to make him jerk his head to one side. A moment afterward he heard an agonized whisper.

[Hurry… I can’t do any more.]

His heart stopped mid-beat. Angel!

[They blew a hole in the friggin’ wall!] Jon broke in, his normal unflappable calm reduced to wreckage. [Angel patched it, it was unbelievable what she did, and now she’s blockin’ the airlock doors! I’m tryin’ to get help to her and more air into the bay—]

Then distant and muffled, made metallic by the remote’s attempt to compensate, [Go get another charge! We’ll blow the fuckin’ door to hell and the bitch with it!] The slow rasping wheeze of Angel’s breathing sawed his heart into quivering pieces. The doctor in him heard lung damage.

The man who had been cheated and frustrated and used tightened an invisible hand inside the user he had in his grasp. Valdemar made a strangled sound and went rigid, heels drumming against the mattress.

Marchey withdrew his other hand, reached for the pad. It floated through the air, coming to hang before Valdemar’s pale and uncomprehending face.

“Call them off!” he hissed. “Now!”

Valdemar stared past the pad and up at his tormentor in bewildered terror. “I don’t—”

“Call off your mercys,” he roared, fighting the urge to grind the pad into the man’s face. “Or I swear to God I’ll take you apart one fucking piece at a time. From the inside.” It was all he could do to keep from demonstrating.

“L-line reopen, n-no picture,” Valdemar stammered.

The pad chimed, and after a moment’s silence a woman’s voice issued from it. “Sturges here, Mr. Valdemar.”

“C-call back the troops! L-leave Ananke at once!”

“Are you all right, sir?” Sturges asked with obvious suspicion. “You sound funny.”

Valdemar’s eyes rolled up toward Marchey, and he saw the price of failure carved into his stony face.

Angel was still breathing. If that sound stopped—

“Never mind that,” Valdemar puffed, trying to sound commanding but failing miserably. “Just do as I say!”

“But sir, we’ve almost—”

“Do as I tell you to you stupid slot!” Valdemar shrieked. “Or I’ll have the fucking lot of you brain-burned and sold for testmeat on Armageddon!”

“Yes, sir,” Sturges answered stiffly. “I’m recalling the team now.” There were several endless seconds of anxious silence. Both Marchey and Valdemar held their breaths.

Sturges came back on-line. “They’re coming back to the ship. Do you want us to return to Botha, sir?”

Valdemar looked to Marchey for instruction. He nodded and mouthed the word hurry. “Yes! And hurry!”

Marchey simply closed his spectral hand inside the pad, invisible fingers turning the circuits to useless junk. He let it fall. It bounced off Valdemar’s chest and clattered to the floor.

The pitch of Angel’s breathing suddenly changed. She froze, fear rising thick and acrid as vomit up against his teeth.

[Come back,] she whispered inside his head. A pause, panting for breath. [Pl—please give me… another chance…]

“Angel! I’m here!” he shouted, straining to hear an answer, trying to reach her across the gulf of time and distance and misunderstanding that lay between them. But there was no response, only a hopeless silence that seemed far vaster and emptier than the airless void that separated him from her.

[Hang on, Doc, we’re getting back into the bay now,] Jon bawled in his ear, his voice like a lifeline to where his heart had gone. [The bad guys are liftin’ off! Mardi and Elias are runnin’ over to Angel. We got two vac-crews, one to sealfoam the patch, the other to seal up the airlock door…]

Marchey stood there, blind to the world, seeing it in his mind, seeing Angel’s face, hoping and praying and promising—

[She’s ALIVE!] Jon crowed. [She’s out cold and hurt pretty bad, and I don’t know how the hell we’re gonna cut her loose, but they’ve got a breather mask on her, and she’s alive!]

Marchey’s legs threatened to go out from under him as relief swept through him. A sound that was half laugh and half sob escaped him. “I’m coming back,” he told Jon. “Take good care of her until I get there!”

[Count on it! And thanks!]

Marchey closed his eyes for a moment, setting tears running down his cheeks. When he opened them again, his gaze turned back toward his patient. Valdemar paled and began to sob when Marchey’s attention fell back on him like a lead weight.

“Someone who means a lot to me almost died because of you,” he said quietly. The anger was still there inside him. The loathing. He had right here in his hands one of the ones who had turned his life into a living nightmare, and seen to it he had no way out. Who had nearly destroyed the things he loved, just when he had finally begun to understand that he did love them. Who had corrupted all he held holy for power and profit.

For so many years the saving of every life had left behind nightmares, and this pathetic creature had used that for his own advantage, for his own greedy purposes.

Nightmares…

It took him only a moment to reduce Valdemar to total unconsciousness, and a few moments more to pull the familiar icy cloak of full trance about himself. Anger faded. Hate dissolved. Everything but cold directed will leached away, leaving only himself, his patient, and the cure.

He wrapped his immaterial hands around Valdemar’s head, fingertips sinking inside the man’s skull. “Remember me,” he rasped, his touch and deep trance guaranteeing that he was heard.

“Resign. Stop turning MedArm into garbage. Give up Maxx or die.” He could feel brain activity sputtering and flickering under his fingers, knew that his every word was being incised inside that skull past any erasing.

“If you disobey me, I’ll come back for you. Remember me and what I can do to you. Remember…”

He shifted his grip. A touch here, there, saw to it that Valdemar would not waken for several hours.

Letting go of Valdemar he stood back, shrugging off the trance state, then turning his back on his patient to reattach his silver arms.

He knew he should be ashamed of what he had just done. Maybe he would be. Yet he wouldn’t take it back even if he could.

At that moment all he could think about was getting to his ship and getting his ass back to Ananke as fast as he could, because there was someone there who needed him.

Returning to his ship was no problem. It was upon reaching the berth where it was docked that he ran into an unforeseen complication.

His ship’s airlock door gaped wide open.

He stood there staring, knowing damn well that he’d left the craft locked up tight when he left. It was doubtful that old Fist had tried to escape. Not only was he too weak to walk and buried under a sleepfield to boot, he had every reason to want to remain hidden while the ship was on Botha Station.

That left one logical conclusion. Somehow, someone must have suspected Fist’s presence on the ship. There was no way to guess how. The important question was: Had they already spirited him away, or was the kidnapping still in progress?

There was only one way to find out. He continued on inside, moving quietly, cautiously, his home suddenly hostile territory.

The dimly lit main compartment was deserted. He crossed it, soft-soled shoes whispering across the carpeting, straining to hear any telltale sounds over the anxious thudding of his heart. The clinic’s door was open, bright light flooding out. As he drew closer he heard voices. Moving with all the stealth he could muster, he crept to the doorway and peeked inside.

Two men were struggling to pull Fist over the high sides of the unibed. The burly one dressed in the red OmniMat Security uniform had his arms wrapped around Fist’s thin chest. Marchey watched the old man turn his head and spit in the man’s face.

“‘Old skig spit on me!” he cried, his mouth curled in disgust as he rubbed his cheek against his shoulder.

The other man, dressed in a dark blue ’xec’s tailored onepiece, laughed. “I’ll teach him some manners.”

“Damn well better!”

Onepiece let go of Fist’s feet, stepped around to the side of the bed, then backhanded him hard enough to snap his head back on his scrawny scarred neck. “You behave, grampa.” He grabbed a thin wrist. “Act up again, and I’ll break your goddamned fingers.”

Fist’s head came back up, and he glared at onepiece, those carious yellow eyes blazing with sneering malevolence. His bloodied mouth moved as he whispered something that made the ’xec’s face redden. Fist laughed, a moment later whispering something else that made the ’xec let go and clench his fists. One drew back in threat. Fist laughed again, daring him.

Marchey almost had to laugh himself at the ornery old bastard’s absolute, unbreakable cantankerousness. But he knew he had to do something before the old man goaded them into killing him, thereby taking all of his secrets to the grave.

He scrubbed his mouth, trying to figure out the best way to deal with the situation. No great plan came to mind. He was tired and impatient to be on his way, and he’d had a bellyful of deception, intrigue, and taking the subtle approach.

“Screw it,” he muttered softly, squaring his shoulders and striding on into the clinic as if he owned the place.

“Who the plug are you?” onepiece demanded, dropping his clenched hands and stepping back.

“Don’t worry, I’m a doctor,” he told them with a reassuring smile as he sauntered toward the security man at the far end of the unibed. The guard let go of his burden and reached for the holster strapped to his hip.

He never got a chance to touch the weapon inside. Marchey, still beaming happily, stepped in close and put his broad shoulders behind a roundhouse punch that drove his biometal fist into the cleft in the man’s chin like a silver sledgehammer. His blow knocked the guard clear off his feet and into the bulkhead behind him. He slammed up against the padded surface, hung there a second, then crumpled bonelessly to the deck.

Marchey gaped in amazement at the results of the first punch he had ever thrown in his whole life, then spun around to confront the other trespasser, brandishing his fists and ready for round two.

Onepiece took one look and fled.

Marchey flung himself after, crashing into the ’xec’s lumbar region. They both went down, Marchey on top.

The ’xec’s head bounced off the deck with a sickening thump that made Marchey wince.

“Bravo… Doctor!” Fist called from inside the unibed. “A remarkable… display… of fisticuffs!”

“Just shut up,” Marchey grumbled, climbing off the ’xec’s back, then rolling him over and peeling back an eyelid. The man was down for the count, but fundamentally undamaged. He crossed the compartment to check on the security guard.

In the process of checking pupil response he found out that he had knocked the man not only cold, but cross-eyed.

Forty minutes later he was already undocked and on his way back to Ananke. He had taped up the intruders’ hands and feet, put a sedative derm on each to give him more time to make his escape, then stuffed them into an equipment cabinet in the lockbay.

Fist had suffered only a few minor cuts and bruises from his manhandling. Marchey treated them and put him back under the sleepfield. The old man had kept laughing and calling him by the name Ali, whatever the hell that meant.

Now that the battle of Botha Station was over, he was dead on his feet and more than ready to sleep. But there remained a couple loose ends he wanted to tie up before he let himself collapse. So he drew a cup of coffee with just a hint of brandy in it to offset the caffeine, seated himself at the commboard, and called Dr. Moro.

The bearish, bearded physician came on, his face knotting into a look of tight-lipped distaste. “You again.”

“Valdemar is still an addict,” Marchey informed him without preamble. “His condition remains fundamentally unchanged from when I arrived, though he will probably stay unconscious for at least another six hours.”

Surprise replaced Moro’s disapproval. “Why?”

Marchey told him.

Raphael Moro turned out to be a very good listener. The few questions he asked led Marchey to tell him everything: the Helping Hands visit to Ananke and Valdemar’s place in the scheme; how he had gotten to Ananke and what had happened there; how the Bergmann Surgeons had been co-opted by a tainted MedArm, and how Sal Bophanza had fled the Institute. It took him almost an hour to lay out the whole story. By the time he was done Moro was looking at him in a very different manner.

Marchey slumped there in his chair, feeling drained. His cup was empty and his throat was dry, but he couldn’t summon the energy to get up and go for a refill.

“Well, well, well,” Moro said at last. “That’s quite a story. Going back to one particular, did you know that MedArm sent a flash directive to all personnel? Anyone with information as to the whereabouts of Dr. Salvaz Bophanza is supposed to report it immediately. Both large rewards and severe penalties are mentioned.”

Marchey rubbed his gritty eyes, trying to remember if he had told Moro where Sal and ’Milla were headed. “I should have expected that.” He sighed. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Do about what?” Moro returned blandly, stroking the white streak in his beard. “So, what are you going to do next?”

“Damned if I know.” Marchey let out a mordant chuckle. “I’m almost afraid to find out, considering how I’ve done so far.”

Moro peered at him a long moment, his glasses, making his eyes look huge, then smirked. “Yeah, you’ve frigged up royally.”

He sat back, steepling his thick fingers. “Let’s see. After years of doing the best work you could do under conditions so bad they turned you into a drunk—instead of suiciding, or just plain quitting—you let yourself be kidnapped by an exo’d maniac who thought she was an angel. She took you to Ananke. There you managed to keep your Oath, helped bring down the man who had brainwashed her and turned the moon into his private empire, started her back on the road to humanhood, and incidentally found the cure for one of the things that had been messing up the lives of all the Bergmanns while you were at it.”

Marchey started to interrupt, but Moro held up his hand. “Please, no pleas until all the charges are read. After all that, you followed orders and went back on the circuit after doing three doctors’ worth of work on Ananke. You kept yourself from becoming a drunk again, and figured out the danger they were in by playing head games with a dangerous psychopath who had nearly destroyed you once and was probably working up to another whack at it, saved the moon and the ex-angel.