“Come along now, sir,” the serjeant said to Matthias Rems. It pushed away from the compartment bulkhead with its stocky legs, the pair of them heading for one of the hatchways.
“Don’t ever trust reporters, Jay,” Kelly said. “We’re not nice people. Worse than the possessed really; they only steal bodies, we steal your whole life and make a profit out of it.”
“You don’t,” Jay said, shoving the full child-force of trusting worship behind the words. A belief which was a sheer impossibility for any adult to live up to.
Kelly kissed her forehead, emotions in a muddle. Kids today, so knowing, which only makes them even more vulnerable. She gently pushed Jay towards one of the pediatric nurses, and left them discussing what the little girl had eaten last, and when.
“Kelly, thank Christ!”
The familiar voice made her twitch, a movement which in free fall was like a ripple running from toe to crown. She held on to a grab hoop to steady herself.
Feetfirst, Garfield Lunde slid down into her vision field. Her direct boss, and the man who had authorized her assignment. A big gamble, as he told her at the time, this kind of fieldwork is hardly your forte. Putting her deeper in his debt; everything he did for his workforce was a favour, an against-the-rules kindness. He owed his position entirely to his mastery of office politics; sensevise talent and investigative ability never entered into it.
“Hello, Garfield,” she said in a dull tone.
“You made it back. Great hairstyle, too.”
Kelly had almost forgotten her hair, cut to a fine fuzz to fit her armour suit’s skull helmet. Style, dress sense, cosmetic membranes: concepts which seemed to have dissolved clean out of her universe. “Well done, Garfield; I can see why your observational ability pushed you right the way up the seniority league.”
He wagged a finger, almost catching his ponytail which was snaking around his neck. “Tough lady, at last. Looks like you lost your cherry on this assignment; touched a few corpses, wondered if you should have helped instead of recorded. Don’t feel bad, it happens to us all.”
“Sure.”
“Is anyone else coming back, any other starships?”
“If they’re not here by now, they won’t be coming.”
“Christ, this is getting better by the second. We’ve got us a total exclusive. Did you get down to the planet?”
“Yes.”
“And is it possessed?”
“Yes.”
“Magnificent!” He glanced contentedly around the reception chamber, watching children and Edenists in free-fall flight, their movements reminiscent of geriatric ballerinas. “Hey, where are the mercs you went with?”
“They didn’t make it, Garfield. They sacrificed themselves so the Lady Mac ’s spaceplane could lift the children off.”
“Oh, my God. Wow! Sacrificed themselves for kids?”
“Yes. We were outgunned, but they stood their ground. All of them. I never expected . . .”
“Stunning. You got it, didn’t you? For Christ’s sake, Kelly, tell me you recorded it. The big fight, the last noble stand.”
“I recorded it. What I could. When I wasn’t so scared I couldn’t think straight.”
“Yes! I knew I made the right decision sending you. This is it, babe. Just watch our audience points go galactic. We’re going to put Time Universe and the others out of business. Do you realize what you’ve done here? Shit, Kelly, you’ll probably wind up as my boss, after this. Wonderful!”
Very calmly, Kelly let Ariadne’s free-fall unarmed combat program shift into primary mode. Her sense of balance was immediately magnified, making her aware of every slight movement her body made in the minute air currents churning through the chamber. Her spacial orientation underwent a similar augmentation; distances and relative positions were obvious.
“Wonderful?” she hissed.
Garfield grinned proudly. “You bet.”
Kelly launched herself at him, rotating around her centre of gravity as she did so. Her feet came around, seeking out his head, legs kicking straight.
Two of the serjeants had to pull her off. Luckily the pediatric team had some medical nanonic packages with them; they were able to save Garfield’s eye; it would take a week before his broken nose knitted back into its proper shape, though.
All the passenger refugees had left Lady Mac . Overstressed environmental systems were calming. The docking bay’s umbilicals sent a cool wind washing through the bridge, taking with it the air of the voyage; ugly air with its smell of human bodies, humidity, and heavy carbon dioxide. To Joshua’s mind even the fans behind the grilles weren’t whining so much. Perhaps it was his imagination.
Now there was only the crew left to soak up the luxuriously plentiful oxygen. The crew minus one. There hadn’t been much time for Joshua to dwell on Warlow during the flight. Racing between jump coordinates, worrying about the energy patterning nodes holding out, the leakages, the damaged systems, children he had suddenly become responsible for, the desperate need to succeed.
Well, now he’d won, beaten the odds the universe had thrown at him. And it made him feel good, even though there was no happiness to accompany it. Self-satisfaction was a curious state, in this case roughly equivalent to fatigue-induced nirvana, he thought.
Ashly Hanson came up through the decking hatch and took a swift glance around the lethargic forms still encased by their acceleration couch webbing. “Flight’s over, you know,” he said.
“Yeah.” Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer. Harlequin schematics of the starship’s principal systems vanished from his mind, and the webbing peeled back.
“I think the cleaning up can wait until tomorrow,” Dahybi said.
“Message received,” Joshua said. “Shore leave is now granted, and compulsory.”
Sarha glided over from her couch and gave Joshua a tiny kiss. “You were magnificent. After all this is over, we’re going back to Aethra so we can tell him we escaped and got the children off.”
“If he’s there.”
“He’s there. You know he is.”
“She’s right, Joshua,” Melvyn Ducharme said as he cancelled the neurographic visualization of Lady Mac ’s power circuits. “He’s there. And even if the transfer didn’t work, his soul is going to be watching us right now.”
“Jesus.” Joshua shivered. “I don’t even want to think about that.”
“We don’t have a lot of choice in the subject anymore.”
“But not today,” Ashly put in heavily. He held out an arm to Sarha. “Come along, we’ll leave these morbids to moan among themselves. I don’t know about you, but I’m having one very stiff drink in Harkey’s first, then it’s bed for a week.”
“Sounds good.” She twisted her feet off the stikpad by Joshua’s couch and followed the old time-hopper pilot through the hatch.
A vaguely nonplussed expression appeared on Joshua’s face as they left together. None of your business, he told himself. Besides, there was Kelly to consider, though she’d been almost unrecognizable since returning from Lalonde. And then there was Louise. Ione, too.
“I think I’ll skip the drink and go straight to bed,” he announced to the other two.
They went out of the bridge hatch one at a time. It was only when they got to the airlock that they encountered the service company’s systems specialist coming the other way. She wanted the captain’s authority to begin assessing the ship so she could assemble a maintenance schedule. Joshua stayed behind to discuss priorities, datavising over the files on systems which had taken punishment above Lalonde.
There was nobody about when he finally left the starship. The circus in the reception chamber had ended. The reporters had packed up. There wasn’t even a serjeant left to check him over for possession. Sloppy, he thought, not like Tranquillity at all.