A Song Called Youth (131 page)

After that . . . 

His pressure suit was ballooned-out in the pressureless void, the arms becoming stiff, almost rigid. It was one of the cheap, old-fashioned kind the Colony got surplus from the Korean moonbase. Would have been nice to have one of the more flexible gas-permeable suits. This one smelled like the inside of a tramp’s shoe, for one thing. The lining fibers were coming loose, prickling him, the rest of the interior feeling faintly vitreous from years of bodies in it. And there was no telling when it might decide it couldn’t maintain airtight integrity any longer. In which case, he’d be dead in seconds.

Russ kept plodding, clinking, on toward the distant abstract tree of Witcher’s antenna. His limbs fighting the restraint of the clumsy pressure suit, his own breathing rasping loud in the helmet. Rattles and tickings came from the clamps for the backpack control box against his chest, the electric cable angling across his rib cage, the communication and ventilation umbilical bumping his hip; the small cutting torch clacking against the zipper of his utility pocket. A crackle came in the headset: Lester’s voice, once, “We can stop if you need to, Russ. It’s . . . ” Something more, fuzzed out by static.

“I ain’t that goddamn old yet.”

“This shit takes getting used to. I’m tired already, and I’m pretty used to it. You sure we can’t take the maneuverers? The guy’s probably bluffing about being able to detect anything flying over the hull.”

“I don’t want to take the chance he’s not bluffing.”

”I’m gonna make my oxymix a little richer, Russ. You might wanna try it. It helps when you get tired.”

“You think I don’t know you’re patronizing me, Lester? I ain’t that goddamn old yet, I’m telling you.” But he reached down and turned the knob on the backpack control, enriched his oxygen flow.

It made him feel a little light-headed; not particularly stronger.

Sweat itched between skin and suit lining. He had to hit the defogger switch on his helmet about every thirty seconds now.

Maybe there was a better way to do this. Maybe Lester was right and the guy had been bluffing. But they were committed now. And if he hadn’t made the right decision, fuck it, the decision couldn’t be unmade.

The chrome tree—though stark and clearly defined against a pocket of starless black—never seemed to get any closer.

Maybe they’d figured the air wrong. People didn’t normally
walk
very far across the outer hull. They used maneuverers or a repair module, usually. The amount of air they’d taken had been a function of guesswork. Maybe they’d run out before they got there. Or before they got back.

Just keep going.

His breath was rasping louder and louder in his ears. Sweat stung his eyes, blurred his vision. His heart pounded. His lungs heaved. This was no time for masculine pride. This was something like crossing a bad stretch of the Sahara on foot. Exhaustion out here could mean death.

He spoke into his headset, “Lester—wait a sec.”

Crackle. “Sure.”

They stopped. Empyrean jewelry wheeled around them. The occluded sun lit the stunted horizon.

Russ’s breathing quieted. The ache in his muscles subsided a little.

“Okay.” They plodded onward.

He wished he could talk to Claire. Damn, what a babe. Tough as nails, but when she wanted to be, pliant as a willow. Be nice to get a report from her, but she was afraid Witcher might have a way to monitor a long-range EVA transmission.

Hell. He had to pee.

The urine transfer collector was cinched onto his dick. It was supposed to work. But if it didn’t work right, he’d have piss floating around in his suit . . . 

Maybe it was nerves, but he couldn’t wait. He pissed. It took an effort of will—bucking a lifetime of inhibition against pissing his pants. That’s what it felt like: infantile self-wetting. Except the collector got most of it.

Only a few drops of golden urine floated past his eyes, wobbling with surface tension.

Distances were playful out here, and suddenly the antenna was there, glazed by starlight so it looked like an ice-bound, leafless tree in the dead of winter. Bigger than he’d thought it was, forty feet high. Must have been a major conspiracy and a lot of payoffs to get it out here, planted right under his nose. But then, there was a lot of EVA work that went on, and the hull wasn’t security-monitored much.

He glanced at his chronograph. About twenty minutes left to deadline. Pretty soon now they’d be breaking through the door of Witcher’s apartment. This had to be done
fast.

He and Lester set to work, one on either side, burning through the ten-inch metal trunk of the “tree.”

The cutting torch, spitting its own oxygen in defiance of the vacuum, eating slowly but steadily through the gray alloy.

Time eating steadily away at their margin of error . . . 

“I just don’t like it, is all,” Marion was saying. “It’s fucked, that’s all. It sucks.”

“You’re so articulate, dear. How very charming that is.”

“You’re pissing me off, Dad.”

She’d never spoken to him like that before.

Witcher swallowed the hurt and leaned back against the wall, drawing his feet up onto the bed, knees against his chest. “It’s getting rather close in here.”

A renewed
whi-ii-ine
came from the door, a noise that set his teeth on edge: the moronic techies, boring into his privacy.

“I don’t think we should think about all this now,” Witcher went on. “We’re all rather claustrophobic and under pressure. Marion, why don’t you sit down, hmm?”

She was pacing past Jeanne and Aria, who were sitting on the edge of the bed, at Witcher’s feet. Guns in their hands. Their heads turned to watch her pace, as if they were at a slow-motion tennis match.

“I don’t want to sit down, I’m thinking, I’m deciding, I can’t do it sitting down. I just wish there was more room to walk in here, you can’t go but three steps without fucking having to turn around.” She reached into her pocket and, to his amazement, took out a cigarette, triggered the end with a thumb so it flared alight.

“What are you doing?” he asked in his most emotionless voice. A voice he rarely used with them.

“I’m smoking a fucking cigarette.”

“I don’t allow it and the Colony doesn’t allow it.”

“I don’t care what Mama don’t allow, I’m gonna smoke my cigarette anyhow.”

“What?”

“Forget it.” She stopped pacing with startling abruptness, and turned to squint past a curl of smoke at him. “Dad—you were really gonna let that shit go, the virus, or was that, like, a bluff. Or maybe a fantasy . . . ”

He glared at her. If he pretended it weren’t true, she’d have won a challenge to his authority. He’d have backed down. And his authority must be absolute, because these girls were armed.

He hedged. “Marion, you’re a very lovely girl, and very talented, but it’s a big, complex world—too big and too complex, that’s it’s chief problem—and . . . and it’s just not something you’re going to understand.”

“Is that right.”

Aria stood up, took the cigarette from Marion’s hand, flicked it through the bathroom door into the toilet bowl.

Witcher felt some relief. Aria was still with him, then.

But she kissed Marion on the cheek and said, “It’s just too close to smoke in here, pretty doll. Take a pill and you can have a smoke when we get into the Open.” She sounded too conciliatory . . . 

Aria turned to Witcher. “Answer her question. Is it true or not? About the virus?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I take that to mean it is true.”

Stall them, Witcher thought, glancing at his watch. In a few minutes, Pasolini would be in the Paris sat-receiving station he’d set up. And he could signal her. He wished he’d set up some sort of repeating loop signal.

“The world stinks with suffering,” Witcher said. “I want to free it from suffering, lead the survivors into Utopia. Into the first real possibility of freedom.
But freedom needs room.
”

Not turning around, Jeanne said, “I don’t think freedom needs mass murder . . . 
Merde.
No. I just didn’t know you’d go that far . . . ”

There was a red light blinking on his transmitter console. He was grateful for the interruption. He swung his feet off the bed, moved to the console. Stared. “There’s someone tampering with the antenna.” He hit the transmit button. Another red light. The antenna was too damaged to transmit.

“They’ll go to hell,” he said, “if there is one.”

He tapped the keyboard for antenna adjustment . . . 

It was standing up on not much more than a finger’s width of metal now, holding upright in a way that would have been defiance of gravity—if there had been much gravity . . . 

The torches were whittling at that metal finger from either side.

And then a vibration tickled up through his boots, and the antenna torqued suddenly.

Clop.
Crunch.
Pain in Russ’s chest. His feet kicking nothingness.

Seeing the impossibly right-angled tree receding from him; the stark shadows sucking into it. Lester suddenly looked like a midget—and then a doll. Receding.

“Russ!” Crackle. “Russ! Fuck! Don’t thrash around like that, you’ll use up oxygen! We’ll come and—” Crackle.

The fucker had detected them; had swung the antenna with its angle-adjuster, knocked Russ off his feet. Into space. With enough force to best the small gravitational pull of the Colony 
. . . (Please, God. I know I’ve fucked up in my life.)

Lester was getting smaller and smaller. The sun was rising like the blazing furnace of Death as he angled out into space. Into the restless nothing.

His heart was like an amateur drummer playing an inconsistent drumroll.
(Look, God, I’ll try to be a better person. I’ll marry Claire. I’ll get closer to Jesus. Please.)

Seeing the edges of the Colony, the whole place shrinking to fit into his field of vision.

He said it aloud, a hoarse whisper. “Please . . . ”

Claire’s office. Claire and Stoner. The smell of fear.

Claire said, “Witcher didn’t transmit. The antenna has to be down by now. I’m gonna call Russ.”

“Maybe you should wait,” Stoner said. “We can’t be sure—”

“I can’t wait.” She patched into the EV radio. “Russ? I mean, uh, Admin One to EVA Two and Three.”

Static like spittle spraying. “
Claire?
” Lester’s voice.

“Is the antenna down?”

“Yeah, but—Claire, get an RM out now, track Russ. Witcher knocked him into freefall. He’s floating free . . . ”

Claire’s eyes blurred. She hit a switch, a siren hooted throughout the Colony. She hit a button and spoke to Airlock Supervisor Six: “EVA 2 is adrift, repeat, adrift, you should be able to get a fix from his transmitter . . . ”

“We’re not getting anything. Where is he?”

“Russ?” She waited. “Russ? Are you reading me. Russ, it’s Claire . . . ” She changed bands. “Oh, shit. Lester? They’re not picking up a signal from him, and he isn’t answering me.”

“The damn antenna hit him in the control box. Busted it—”
Crackle.
“I can’t even see him anymore. Man, I feel helpless. Get somebody out here!”

She spoke to Airlock Six. “Fix on EVA One, spiral outward from there and do a search. Get everything you’ve got out there. Is there a shuttle in the vicinity?”

“No.”

“Do your best.”

A buzz from another fone. “Claire? We’re through the lock in the door . . . ”

What did she do now? If she didn’t supervise the taking of Witcher’s quarters, people would probably get killed in the confusion. If she didn’t supervise the search for Russ, they might lose him. Someone had to be there to push them into doing everything fast.

“Stoner—can you handle the Witcher thing?”

“I can try. It’s not my expertise. You’re the one with the combat experience.”

“Shit!” They’d do all right on their own, looking for Russ.

She yelled at the fone. “Leave Witcher alone till I get there!”

She ducked through the door, ran down the corridor.

She wanted to be outside, herself, in an RM, looking for Russ. She wanted to scream.

Now she knew why her father had gone off the deep end.

One minute of air left. Spinning around some axis he’d never known he had before. There was the Colony. A bar of light. Now it was gone. There it was. Now it was gone.

Thirty seconds of air left.

No one coming. His transmitter was broken.

You want to choke to death in the suit, Russ?

He said, “Okay, Lord Jesus, if that’s the way you want it. Take me, please, warts and all. I’m sorry for anything I did that I shouldn’t have done. I love you. I love Claire.”

He opened his visor.

“They’re gonna rush the door,” Marion said. A little sweat ran from her palm, running down the gun-grip.

She stood rigidly in front of the door. Aria and Jeanne beside her. Three guns, three women, focused on the door.

“Maybe we block it off some way,” Jeanne said.

“Nothing here to move big enough for that,” Marion said. “Bed’s built into the floor.”

“When they come through,” Witcher said, deciding it right then, “shoot to wound one, kill the others. Then we’ll pull the wounded one in for a hostage. They’ll have to make arrangements with me.”

Marion said, in a voice that, somehow, he knew was meant for the other women, “Don’t do
anything.
”

The door was kicked,
clang,
and swung inward.

Marion moved at the same time in a blur, to one side of the door, using the gun like an aikido staff, the speed of a scorpion’s stinger, hitting the Colony Security heavy in the side of the head. The guy went right down, out cold. She kicked the next one in the gut. He folded up, fell back.

She pushed the unconscious one out. A hostage set free after only one second of captivity.

She kicked the door shut.

Witcher was standing ramrod straight, back against the wall. Staring at Marion in hurt disbelief. “I told you to shoot!”

“Not taking your orders anymore, Dad.”

“You low-class little bitch. You whining little punk cunt.” He turned, reached under his pillow, drew out his little explosive-bullet pistol.