Only Superhuman (43 page)

Bast drowned her out with a yowl as she kicked off another bin and back toward Emry, claws splayed and eyes gleaming with bloodlust. Emry pushed off to duck between the Symplegadean bins, but pulled herself short, for they were now only a third of a meter apart. She dodged right, but it was a dead end, another large bin in the way, and Bast was too close, grinning at her miscalculation. All Emry could do was brace herself against the bin for Bast’s impact. The she-cat hit hard, pinning her to the side, and Bast dug her claws into its polymer shell as her jaws went for Emry’s throat once again. Emry got her left arm under Bast’s chin, but she was weakened and Bast was determined. Those fangs snapped closer, closer.…

And then Emry’s right hand snaked around, grabbed Bast’s tail, and yanked it sideways between the two large bins just before they collided.

Bast’s shriek almost deafened Emry, and made the cat lover in her feel guilty. It still echoed through the warehouse as Emry broke free and gave Bast one good sock to the jaw to put her down for the count. Kwan’s guards drew their guns and opened fire as Emry kicked off toward him. She caught herself on a cable, ducked behind a crate. “Stop shooting, you idiots!” Hanuman cried before she could. He clearly understood the risk as well. In this enclosed space, the overpressure of an explosion would kill them all even if the shrapnel and heat didn’t. And it would probably blow open the hull like a balloon.

“You’re lying,” Psyche said to Emry, though she sounded confused. “Hanuman wouldn’t do that to me. You must have … Hanuman, let me take her! I can pull it from her!”

“No, she’s too dangerous! We have to get to the bunker now! Trust me, Psyche!”

“I…” Psyche floundered.
She should be able to tell,
Emry thought. Perhaps she couldn’t read Kwan’s simian microexpressions, but she should have questioned his changing story, should have known to be wary of his plans for her.
But that’s just it, isn’t it? Psyche’s so used to being the puppet master … she can’t recognize when she’s the one being played.

“Psyche!” The call came from elsewhere in the cargo bay … and it changed the whole situation. For it was in the unmistakable voice of Eliot Thorne.

Emry looked up to see Psyche whirling, her face bursting into joy.
“Daddy!”
He was closing in on them, pushing his way through the clashing debris with no evident concern for the danger, as though his determination alone would clear a path. So far, it seemed to be working. Thorne was clearly struggling, badly hurt and rasping wet breaths, but he was a juggernaut, refusing to slow down.

Hanuman ordered his guards to hold Psyche, but she broke free without a thought, her eyes fixed solely on her father and brimming with tears as she kicked off their bodies to send herself toward him. But Thorne’s eyes were locked on Hanuman.
“Kwan!”
he rasped with fury.

“Oh, bother,” Kwan sighed. “I’ve changed my mind,” he told the jackal guard as he gathered up the lady lemur and backed into the exit corridor. “Shoot all you want. Do pardon the cliché,” he called to Emry and Thorne, “but if I can’t have her, well…”

Hanuman waved a jaunty farewell through the closing door as the guard began opening fire, his shockdarts striking Psyche, her convulsions tangling her in the cables. Stray shots hit the tumbling crates and containers around her, discharging fierce electricity, setting some of the small containers on fire.
“No!!!”
Emry cried.

They had seconds to live now. Emry saw one chance. Just beyond and ahead of Thorne was a burst-open crate lined with shock-absorbing foam for fragile cargo. With its contents nearly spilled out, it was big enough to hold a few people.

But there was no way of getting to Psyche in time.

Hating herself for the choice, she grabbed Bast and kicked off the biggest crate behind her with all her might. The two of them barreled into Thorne’s side and Emry grabbed hold as they veered onto a new vector, away from Psyche. Thorne screamed and struggled, trying to break free and get to his daughter. Emry held him firmly as they struck the open lid of the crate and rolled in. Emry looked back for Psyche, hoping she was following.

Just in time to see the blinding flash.

The shock wave slammed the lid shut, saving their lives. Even through the protective foam, the noise and heat of the explosion tore through her body and mind as the crate tumbled and shrapnel bombarded it, tossing her mercilessly against the others. The afterimage of the explosion burned across her retinas.

Then the crate hit something and cracked open, and the air was ripped from her lungs as she and the others tumbled free. Her eyes burned, and her bare arms and head tingled and ached fiercely as they swelled from within. They were in vacuum! But not open space—the cargo corridor within the docking module, its walls scarred from the debris that had blown through it like chaff from a cannon. The cargo lock had blown out—no doubt designed as an emergency release valve to protect the hull from rupture. The end wall of the corridor had blown out to vacuum in turn, but a nanotube-cable mesh had caught and held most of the cargo, including their own crate, while allowing the literally explosive decompression of the corridor. Beyond was blinding light from the sun mirror, rippling as stray debris punched through the mirror’s thin film.

Emry, Thorne, and Bast were now drifting back inward through a cloud of debris. Beads of their own blood trailed them like cometary tails. All around them were passages leading to docked ships—plenty of safe havens. If only she could get to one of them and get it open before her body’s oxygen reserves ran out.

But wait … one was opening on its own. A light beckoned.

Zephyr called in her head. Had it not gone straight to her auditory center, she’d never have heard it over the ringing in her ears.

Emry’s swollen fingers clumsily grabbed the arms of Thorne and Bast, both of whom were virtual dead weights. As their course brought them toward a wall, she planted her feet on it, let her knees bend, and pushed off toward the lock, straining against the others’ momentum. She got the aim right, but they were drifting toward it too slowly; she was weakening already. She felt consciousness starting to fade.…

But then she was breathing and aware again. The three of them floated in the lock as it repressurized. Bast remained limp, and Emry could see that she’d lost much of her tail, probably sliced off by the door of the cargo bin.

But that was nothing to what Eliot Thorne had lost. Once he could breathe again, he screamed and wept for a long time. For the first time in over half a century, he was out of control.

*   *   *

Emry had just finished securing Bast in
Zephyr
’s medbed when she heard him undocking. “Zeph? What’s going on?” She looked around to see that Thorne had disappeared.

“Emry, Thorne is in the cockpit. He’s warming up the plasma drive!”

“Oh, Goddess. Stop him!”

“I can’t. He’s overridden my control somehow. I don’t understand it.”

“Oh, shit.” She pushed off toward the cockpit, feeling the maneuvering thrusters firing. “Psyche must’ve gotten the override codes out of me that first night,” she told him as she climbed the ladder toward the top of the ship.

“Override codes?”

“Zephyr—”

“Nobody told me about any override codes.”

“Later, okay?”

“And you’ve known them all along?”

“Can we focus here!” She pulled her dartgun as she neared the cockpit hatch. Thorne hadn’t even bothered to seal it.

Once she got in, she saw why. He had a plasma gun from
Zephyr
’s arsenal trained on the entrance, held firmly in one hand while the other operated the manual controls to turn the ship so its exhaust nozzles would be aimed at Neogaia’s core. Emry had never had to use those controls; they existed only as emergency backups if something happened to the shipmind. But Thorne worked them like an expert. “Come no closer,” he rasped. Aside from one arm, he sat unmoving, a burnished iron statue, a colossus of rage. “Do nothing to interfere and I will leave you free to go when I am done. You and your corps are no longer priorities of mine.”

“You know they’re going to blast us out of space if you don’t power that drive down right now.”

“They lack that option. I have their overrides as well as yours. Psyche…” His voice broke. “She always gave me everything I asked for. She never let me down.”

Emry was ambivalent. This man was a killer, his daughter no less so. She had every reason to hate them. But they had been family to her, not so long ago. And she knew this grief all too well. Tentatively, she reached toward him. “Eliot…”

“Do not try it, Emerald. Do not try to talk me down from this. Hanuman Kwan needs to pay for what he has done. His whole stinking race must pay! Psyche was worth more than all of them put together, and it will take all their lives to repay that debt!”

“You’re going to slice up the whole habitat? What about all the other delegates? What about your allies?”

“I have warned the Vanguardians to evacuate immediately.”

“And what about all the others? The Vestans, the Hygieans, all of them? How many wars are you willing to start to punish one man?”

He spun, coming out of the chair in a blur, and she found herself slammed into the wall, disarmed, his hand around her throat, anchoring himself with a white-knuckled grip on a wall handle. “You dare lecture me on morality! If you hadn’t betrayed us—if you had stayed by her side…”

Emry faced him without fear. “
No,
Eliot! This isn’t on me. Take it out on me, on the Neogaians, on the whole Sol System, and nothing will change. Punish anyone you want, but you’ll still be hiding from your own guilt. It was
you,
Eliot. It was you who turned your own daughter into a weapon. Into a force of such power that people were willing to kill to take her from you. You used her, exploited her, long before Kwan did. You made her a victim of her own power.”

She found herself weeping for her friend, forgiving her. But her voice remained strong and angry. “Tell me, Eliot—was she ever really happy? Did she ever have the chance to be a little girl, instead of a champion in training? Did she ever really have a friend, someone she could let go with and not try to manipulate? Did she even know what that meant?”

“Two minutes to plasma drive activation,” Zephyr announced.

“You designed her to be the instrument of your power,” Emry went on. “She never got the chance to live her own life. She never got to experience anything really true, anything that wasn’t part of your agenda. Nobody ever saw who she really was … and she probably never knew herself. That’s the real crime, Eliot. And it’s all on you.”

His hand fell slowly away from her throat. But she stayed close, held his eyes. “Looking for someone to punish, to blame—someone to hate—that’s just a way to hide from your grief. A way to avoid the pain by pushing it onto someone else. To avoid … admitting that sometimes there’s just nothing we can do.” She lowered her head as Zephyr called out the ninety-second mark. “We never want to admit things are out of our control. So when something terrible happens, we look for someone we can take it out on so we feel like we have some power. But that doesn’t do any good, because it’s not what we want to have power over. The thing we want to change … the loss … that’s impossible to do anything about. So we just end up wasting our power, abusing it to hurt other people.”

“Seventy seconds.”

“And when we do that,” she went on, her eyes rising to his again, “we’re doing an injustice to the people we’re grieving for. Because we’re not … letting ourselves … just
love
them. Just deal with their loss, and face the grief we owe to them. And when we don’t do that … we don’t let them become part of our memory, and let their legacy heal us of our pain … and go on living the way they would’ve wanted.”

“Even if the guilt for their loss rests with us?” His eyes were inscrutable. Emry couldn’t tell if it denoted challenge or acceptance.

“Maybe especially then. Because that’s their legacy too. If we listen to it, it can help us use our power wisely … or know when not to use it. Know when it’s time just to let go, and accept things as they are.”

The cockpit fell silent—until Zephyr called, “Thirty seconds. Mister Thorne, if you’d like some time to think it over, that’s entirely in your hands.”

With an anguished growl, Thorne pushed back over to the controls and jabbed down on them. “Plasma drive powering down,” Zephyr announced after a moment, sounding decidedly relieved. “Thank you. Now if you wouldn’t mind returning control to me…”

“Zephyr.” Emry moved closer to Thorne, stopping just short. She couldn’t bring herself to touch him. “Go home and grieve, Eliot. Don’t look for something to do about it. Don’t take it out on the universe. Just let it happen. Otherwise … trust me … you will never find peace.”

He studied her. “But what of Kwan?”

“He’ll get his karmic reward,” she assured him. “If the Troubleshooters have anything to say about it.”

21

Worth the Trouble

In the wake of the explosion, the Neogaians seemed disinclined to launch further attacks on Thorne or the Troubleshooters. With Psyche gone, there was no longer any point. Besides, their sun mirror and docking facilities needed immediate repair, and even Kwan’s agenda had to take a backseat to that. Kwan had secreted himself in the command bunker, far too well protected for the Troubleshooters to reach, and was no doubt content to hole up there until he was safe. Emry and the others would have to leave him there for now, since they had to supervise the evacuation of the delegates. Emry hoped that, just possibly, his culpability in the cargo bay explosion, and his wanton sacrifice of the hapless guard who set it off, would create enough bad blood that the Neogaians would see fit to extradite him … or exact their own justice. Whatever the case, Kwan’s ability to do harm had been greatly diminished for now. Although he’d done more than enough already.