Up Against It - M. J. Locke [174]
A ball of light expanded outward from Mills, throwing bits of him everywhere. The blast’s shock wave pushed Xuan into the piping, where his feet got tangled. Painfully, he disentangled himself from the pipes and climbed down to stand swaying on Ouroboros’s metallic surface.
He surveyed the mess strewn about the landscape—and all over himself. The remains of the mobster Mills. That ends that problem, Xuan thought. Horror and disgust overcame him, and he doubled over, retching.
* * *
Mitch hailed Sean in his quarters, interrupting Sean’s briefing with Sergeant Maez-Gibson. “I’ve picked up something again.”
“Put it through.” The image—a brief increase in brightness—appeared in his waveface. Sean and Sergeant Maez-Gibson re-ran and studied the wavery image several times. A signal?
“Another explosion, I think,” the sergeant said. She pulled up her waveface and studied something. She said, “But not as big as the first two.”
Sean burst out, “What the ever-loving fuck is going on down there?” then called Mitch. “Soonest ETA?”
“If you two would buckle in and let me pull some gees, I can have us there in another four minutes.”
* * *
Geoff returned to consciousness on a wave of pain that seared all the way up his left side, from back of knee to armpit. He could not move his left arm, though it hung before him. The outer surface of his pressure suit was translucent in patches, and beneath he saw tubes and faint movement, but could not make any sense of it. He thought it was insects crawling on him, but that didn’t make any sense.
He flinched from the sunlight that burned through his cracked visor. He saw ground passing below. Then sun again, then dark space. He didn’t know where he was or what was happening, only wished the pain would stop.
He eventually remembered what he had done. He’d sent out the distress bots. There was one now, passing him in a lower orbit. He’d sent the shuttle off into the wild black yonder. Then there had been an explosion at the planet eater. Joey Spud would be pissed.
He must be in orbit around Ouroboros. Why wasn’t he dead yet? His suit’s integrity had been breached. But the emergency repair systems must have activated. That was what he was seeing in his suit. Good bugs, he thought. They were healing the gaps. Then tubes started growing across his visor, and he watched blankly—unsure if they were real—as they spread across his sight. The pain was breathtaking. Beyond, like a clock ticking, the sun, ground, and black sky rolled by. He felt sure he must die soon. He began to pray for it.
After a while he realized Amaya was next to him on her rocketbike, and she was talking to him. He assumed she was a hallucination.
“Geoff, can you hear me?”
“Hear you,” he croaked.
“You stupid ASS!” she yelled. She vanished, then reappeared in the periphery of his vision. “Macho prick! I could throttle you. We’re a team! Why did you go off by yourself? What are Kam and me? Wall decorations? Serves you right if you did go off and get yourself killed. Fucking imaichi. You’re worse than Ian.”
Now, that’s harsh, he thought.
Her visor light was on as she passed him again. He glimpsed her face. She flung further invectives as she struggled to adjust her orbit to match his. I’m sorry, he wanted to say. I’ll be fine.
She was messing with a harvester net. The swearing convinced Geoff it was really her. (He had to believe he wouldn’t hallucinate an Amaya-style chewing-out. But maybe he would.) She said something about get ready and a tether, but Geoff couldn’t focus. A sharp tug and a pull caught him up in fresh waves of intense pain. She reeled him in over the bike seat and lashed him down, and he passed out again.
* * *
Jane and Vivian exited the hospital. Cold stung their faces. People huddled in the meshworks, still asleep, and the echoing clanks of machines moving city supplies and equipment Jane recognized as the early-morning routines of cluster maintenance. But the smell of unprocessed