Dusk (58 page)

The leader had somehow retrieved his knife and the
other man brandished his pistol like a cudgel, and they both
advanced on Cyrus from either flank. The burning on both sides of
his body, despite the chill in the jetway, made clear what would
happen if he spent any more time in this jetway. He was sure he had
been stabbed, and even if he made it out of this passage, he might
not make it back planetside. But he was damned if he was going to
lay down arms here for these Fringe monkeys. Cyrus grit his teeth,
and as he heard the crescendo of the Spellcaster, and he felt the
vibrations in his hand, he turned his back to the two advancing men
and told Jang to open the airlock.

Jang and Six could not believe the macabre
scene playing before them on the holomonitor. Cyrus’s instincts in
zero-G were good, but they were no match for these trained men with
mag-clamps. He fought valiantly, never failing to catch his
opponents off-guard, but they had hurt Cyrus almost as much as he
had hurt them, and now, there were two of them left, and three more
about to break through the bulkhead. And it didn’t help that
Cyrus’s blood was trailing around the hall like Uni Day streamers.
Worse yet, Cyrus was on the wrong side of the jetway.

When Cyrus had sent the order to open the
airlock, Jang didn’t know what to think. There was no way Cyrus
could get to the door in time enough to stop the Echelon, and even
if he could, if they set that laser-bit on the airlock door, they
could forget about using the Paracelsus as anything except a
glorified mausoleum.

But as much as he feared the outcome, Jang
gave the command to open the door anyway, and when he did, he was
even more shocked when he realized what was coming. “On my mark,
fire the boosters,” Jang said to Six calmly, an awkward delivery
given his facial expression.

With his back to the men advancing on him,
Cyrus raised the automatic pistol in his right hand and the
Spellcaster in his left. Then, he tucked his knees to his chest and
fired the Spellcaster against the bulkhead.

The loud clap should have been deafening, but
he heard the airlock open as he flew straight back like he was
launched from a slug cannon. Cyrus smashed into the leader,
knocking him backward and spinning him off his mag-clamps. Cyrus’s
right elbow collided with the mask of the other soldier as he
passed, and then his right hand was firing wildly, sending bullets
tearing through the thick gas in the jetway. Several of the rounds
hit the bulkhead, sparking and igniting the noxious air in the
jetway as the flash from the muzzle simultaneously ignited the air
around him.

“Now!” Jang yelled as he himself pressed the
button to close the airlock. In the time it took for the word to
travel from his mouth to Six’s ear, they watched on the holomonitor
as Cyrus flew through the threshold of the ship with a ball of
flame washing mercilessly from the conflagrated jetway after him.
And then it billowed around him, filling the airlock chamber.

Jang fought back the swelling behind his eyes as he
watched the flames engulf Cyrus. The airlock door slammed shut, the
Paracelsus tore away from its mooring, and the J.L. Orbital spun
away from them into a deeper orbit, emptying the bodies from the
jetway into atmosphere too thin for them to survive. Watching all
this in the holographic imager, Jang barely noticed the flames in
the holomonitor twisting and spinning in a turbulent but awkward
swirl as they funneled into the gun between Cyrus’s hands.

When Six got to him, Cyrus was still
shivering on the floor in a swelling pool of his own blood. Both
hands were locked around the Spellcaster and covered in a sheath of
ice crystals. The gun was also covered in flakes of ice and was
still whining its aria. Six checked Cyrus frantically. The ends of
his hair were singed, and the tips of his beard hairs had been
grayed, but there were no signs of burns. “Are you okay?” Six asked
without subvocalizing. There was no sound at first, and it worried
him, but then there was a slight crackle over the whining of the
Spellcaster as Cyrus’s thumb stood erect from the encasement of
ice.

“I’m full of joy,” came over the network in Cyrus’s
voice, obviously manufactured by the computer, “but I’ll be better
if you get my black and green ass home.”

When the flatdeck moved up to the front of the
Echelon lev, Toutopolus felt as if the floor had dropped from
beneath him. Milliken had looked dazed, but had snapped to full
awareness as a figure drove a dark object that could only have been
a knife into his gut. He had kicked the man with the knife away
from him, and then there had been a blinding flash. That was when
Toutopolus had shielded his face and jumped through the windshield
of the craft. He had stumbled across what must have been the
console, and across something that felt like a body, and when his
pupils had finally dilated, he found himself next to a man holding
Milliken in a chokehold. The man’s own eyes must have been still
adjusting to the flash, because as Toutopolus raised his own gun to
the man’s head, the man seemed to pay him no mind. The interior of
the ship was dark, and even the flashing orange of the emergency
lighting was flickering to a halt, but Toutopolus could still make
out the shape of the man’s head as he fired. Before he could turn
to fire at the other figures, someone grabbed his gun arm and
twisted it. Toutopolus heard a resounding snap, like someone
throwing a towel against the wall, and as a blistering cold shot
from his elbow to his shoulder, he found himself yanked toward the
gaping hole that had been excised from the side of the fighter by
the Valois. He leaned away from his unseen attacker’s grasp to yank
his arm loose, but the pressure in his arm, as the man countered
and pressed against the inside of his shoulder blade, sent a wave
of pain through his body that weakened every muscle he was aware
of. As Toutopolous’s momentum carried him toward the hole in the
wall, he wondered, even amidst the pain that made consciousness
seem like background noise, what falling from so high would feel
like. Then something stubborn caught under foot, and Toutopolus saw
the stars of the night sky spreading out before him. The Miasmic
air entering through the hole felt much colder than the air he had
left on the flatdeck.

Milliken had found himself on the floor in
the twitching grasp of a body in the last of its death throes. The
back of his own head was covered in muck that he did not want to
contemplate, and something rocklike, probably the knee of a
spasmodic leg, fluttered painfully against the small of his back.
And then, as his vision adjusted to the slowing of the metronomic
orange light, Milliken heard a pop that sounded like someone
opening a champagne bottle in another room.

But there was no other room. And as he saw
Toutopolus’s body, his arm bent in a place it should not have bent,
hurled toward the opening that had been left by the Valois blast,
he pushed himself off the twitching body beneath him and extended
both legs into the outside of the knee of the soldier hurling
Toutopolus toward the hole in the side of the fighter. There was
another snap, like the final snap just before timber collapsed
under its own weight, and the man did just the same as the timber
would have, slowly collapsing on his own knee, which was now folded
in the wrong direction itself. As the man tumbled over, Milliken
found a knife that was beneath him on the floor, and even as the
man hit the floor, Milliken brought it down onto his torso, digging
through Comptex and breastbone alike. A fount of blood issued from
the man’s writhing body and subsided as his lung collapsed.
Milliken stood, snatching the knife from the man’s body, but
Toutopolus, who must have been dizzy and shaken by the damage to
his arm, stumbled out of the hole on his own accord.

Uzziah had managed to keep the craft level
with the front end of the other damaged fighter resting on the back
of it, but the other fighter was losing power rapidly, and Uzziah
could not hold both of them steady for long. Aerik moved quickly
toward the flatdeck as he saw Stavros of Five stumble out of a hole
in the side of the fighter and Paulice of Swords catch him by his
ankle. “Devil’s in the house of the rising sun,” in the voice of
Taewook of Cups filled his earwig, which meant two things; the
Knight of Swords’s computer had secured the codes for the docking
doors that led beneath the pyramid, and that scrambled fighters,
which had made it possible for Taewook to steal the codes, had used
those codes to open the doors and were now speeding toward
them.

And then, as Paulice pulled Stavros’s limp
body back into the craft, one of the figures rose up into a sitting
position from the dark mass of bodies on the floor of the fighter,
and a sparkle of light glimmered across the muzzle of a gun in his
hand—and it was pointed at Paulice.

Aerik instinctively raised his rifle and fired, but
the bullets dissolved on the still functioning astrapi shield of
his own fighter. He screamed both in frustration and in hope that
the sound waves would penetrate the barrier his bullets could
not.

Milliken thought he heard something over the
howling of the wind and sputtering of the damaged craft. He wasn’t
sure, but he flipped the knife in his hand anyway and instinctively
dropped as bullets rang out around the hole in the wall. Milliken
heard Toutopolus groan and saw him fall to the floor of the fighter
just at the edge of his vision. Milliken loosed the knife in his
hand, and it flew with an accuracy that surprised even him. But it
only thudded, handle-first against the soldier’s face. The soldier
fell backward from his sitting position, but caught himself.
Milliken snatched Toutopolus’s gun from the floor, and as the
soldier sat up, he fired, snapping the soldier’s head back
violently as something unseen in the darkness splattered against
the opposite wall.

Milliken stood, tucking the handgun into the belt of
his suit, and he hoisted the moaning Toutopolus onto his shoulder.
Toutopolus was going into shock and would need attention that he
could only get on the other fighter, assuming they could make it
there. Milliken saw Aerik standing at the end of the flatdeck, one
foot on the nose of the wrecked fighter, extending his hand. The
ship shuddered as Milliken shuffled toward the front. It was not as
hard to carry Toutopolus as it would have been on Earth, but moving
through the unstable fighter with a grown man on his shoulder drew
sweat from his brow. As he stepped onto the console, which was now
showering sparks in intermittent bursts, Milliken heard another
indecipherable yell, but this time, his foot slipped, and in the
instinctive struggle to hold Toutopolus and not lose his balance,
he was unable to move.

Toutopolus’s whole body was cold except his
arm, which was now completely consumed by hot, stinging needles and
was dangling helplessly in the air. As he tried to steady himself,
someone yelled, and he looked up. It was hard for him to breathe in
this position. It would not have mattered normally, but in the
thick of the Miasma, the lack of oxygen, in addition to the pain,
distorted the reality around him into an impressionistic blur. As
he raised his head, he saw what must have been one man blurred into
two, rearing his arm back to throw another Squib.

Unsure if the tips of his fingers, even on
his good arm, would even be able to feel the metal of the pistol,
Toutopolus snatched the gun from Milliken’s belt expecting it to
drop to the floor. But his hand obeyed the commands from his brain,
and the gun fired a burst, sending the figure to the floor.

But only one of the double images fell, and
Toutopolus realized, as the adrenalin now rushing through his body
afforded his vision a moment of clarity, that they had not been a
double image at all, and the other, very real image, was training
Milliken’s own assault rifle on them.

Milliken felt his own body shake as Toutopolus had
fired the gun from his belt at something behind them. Aerik
urgently reached out his hand, but then collapsed back onto the
flatdeck as a fan of blood sprayed out of the back of his leg with
the sound of gunfire. Milliken had reached for Aerik’s hand, but
when it fell back through the astrapi shield, Milliken’s own
footing faltered again. But this time, as Toutopolus muttered a
more disturbing “Uhh,” Milliken lunged with the leg he still had
beneath him, and dove through the astrapi toward the flatdeck.

Toutopolus cursed his vision for becoming clear just
long enough for him to have front-row seats at his own death. But
then, suddenly, just as the muzzle aimed at him spat flames, he
found the macabre image receding. And as the darkening fighter
moved outside his vision, he swore he could see the actual bullet
just before it sparked out of existence against the astrapi no more
than two centimeters in front of his left eye. He, Milliken, and
Aerik plummeted to the flatdeck as a barrage of blue sparks
showered around them. And then, as a Cyclopean jolt of pain ripped
through his body when he attempted to steady himself with his
shattered arm, Toutopolus saw a bright flash in his darkening
vision as the Squib exploded, splitting the fighter they had fallen
from in half as it spiraled away into the darkness of the Miasma.
And then his vision faded, and he himself spiraled away, flailing
into his own personal Miasmic gloom.

Six had bandaged Cyrus’s wounds and had
propped him up in one of the passenger seats on the bridge. Cyrus’s
wounds were superficial, and he would be fine so long as he sat
still, which might be a little difficult in the next few minutes,
but Six had made sure he was securely buckled in the five-point
harness on the chair. Cyrus had been groggy, which was probably
less due to loss of blood and more due to the blast shock of being
too close to not one, but two Spellcaster discharges, but he was
not so bleary he couldn’t function. Above all else, he seemed
tired. His body was still adjusting to the Eos, and this was the
longest time he had been out of the sun. Six had set him as close
to the windshield as he could, and perhaps the sunlight would help
him regain his wits.