Expendable - James Alan Gardner [129]
Now she plunged toward Jelca, her hands reaching for his throat. The attack was awkward, off-balance; her dizziness showed. Jelca dodged, deflecting her rush to one side. He took one quick glance in the direction of his stunner, but it was too far away. Instead, he turned the other direction: toward the Sperm generator.
“No!” I cried. The maniac intended to turn it on. If it activated now, a Sperm-tail thousands of klicks long would establish itself in a single second—a tail waving out of control, lashing up out of the atmosphere and into space. The generator itself was bolted down securely, but those of us in the room weren’t. All three of us would make a very short cold trip into hard vacuum.
With nothing else close to hand, I whipped off my helmet and heaved it across the room, catching him hard in the back of the head. The blow struck with a resounding crack. He pitched forward, sprawling onto the black coffin of the generator…but his hand was still moving, searching for the activation switch.
“Stop him!” I yelled. “That machine will kill everyone!”
Oar lashed out a foot and kicked Jelca in the side—not a skilled kick, but strong enough to lift him and flip him back half a meter. He dropped onto the coffin again, this time spreadeagled on his back. I couldn’t tell if he’d fallen closer or farther from the generator’s switch; but he was still conscious, still moving, still reaching out to turn on the machine.
With no time to get to my feet, I slithered across the floor, straight toward the stunner. My eyes were on Jelca; his hand fumbled with something on the far side of the generator…probably the switch.
I grabbed the gun and fired fast without aiming—even if I didn’t hit him full on, the edge of the sonic cone might stagger him. But I hadn’t appreciated the power of the amplified pistol. Hypersonics smashed against the glass wall over Jelca’s head and shattered it to crystal rain, exploding it outward in a shower that left a gaping hole in the tower.
Air whistled outside as glass shards pattered onto Jelca’s radiation suit. He could ignore the shards; what he couldn’t ignore was the clumsily wielded axe coming at him.
Oar tried to chop Jelca like she would chop a tree—a hard blow straight down toward his chest. If she had been at full strength, he never would have blocked the blow; but she was weak now and bleary. He caught the axe and stopped it, both arms extended as he seized the axe handle at the base of its head.
For a moment, they both were frozen there: Jelca fending off the axe, Oar trying to force it down onto his sternum. Then Oar whispered, “Fucking Explorer. This is what expendable means.”
She let go of the axe, grabbed his arms, and jumped with him, straight out the hole in the wall.
Part XVIII
EGGS HATCHING
Cleaning Up, Sweeping Away
I walked halfway across the room, intending to look out the window. Then I stopped. There was nothing outside I wanted to see.
Before my eyes took too much damage from the radiation, I picked up the helmet and put it back on. The smell of it sickened me. A lot of things sickened me.
With a few sharp jerks, I yanked out the wires between the Sperm generator and its battery. I wanted to damage the machines more permanently, but didn’t know what would be safe. There were people in this tower; if the generator contained nuclear materials or antimatter, smashing it might set off an explosion.
I didn’t want to hurt anybody, did I?
It was easy to unlock the elevator—Jelca had simply attached an override chip to the control panel. Once I disengaged the chip, I rode to the bottom floor and carefully moved back all the ancestors Jelca had disarranged. It allowed me more time to put off going outside.
I still had to go out eventually.
Jelca was dead, of course—no mere human could survive such a fall.
It didn’t help that he’d been