Armor

I

There was nothing more on the coil.

Holly kept checking, running it through as Lya and I sat there on our couches, stunned and staring. But it was no good. It was over and nothing could change it. Nothing could change the fact of it or the aura of obscenity it created.

Kent had killed Felix. Kent!

After all he had been through and all he had had to become and become again, after all the bravery and… talent… and… After being the toughest man alive…

Kent, everybody’s hero, had killed him.

Holly gave up after a while and sat back down. The medicos came in and fussed with us. We took it without speaking, without thinking. They pronounced us emotionally and physically exhausted. They said we must get to bed at once.

And we did. Still without speaking, without saying goodbye or good night, we went. Lya, I remember, was weeping softly, almost silently. I could not. It wasn’t sadness, I felt. Not exactly. Not remorse. It was disgust.

I stumbled back to my room, still dazed. Fucking Kent!

That one fact managed to say more about the whole filthy mess, the whole filthy war, than anything else. To me, it was the war.

I found my suite empty. I slid out of my clothes and stood there, wondering what to do. Then I saw the bed and remembered. I sat down on it. The mirror was across from me and I stared at myself without recognition or purpose.

Fucking Kent…

I slept.

And then I was waking, badly and slowly and still dulled. I looked up to find Cortez shaking me awake.

“Leave me the hell alone,” I growled and turned over.

He shook me again. I spun around, lashed upward and snatched him by the collar of his Crew jumpsuit and gripped hard. His eyes bugged.

“It’s Wice,” he hissed. “Wice sent me.”

I stared. “You? You’re in on this, too?”

He nodded quickly. Like a squirrel. I sighed and dropped my hand. “Tell him later,” I said tiredly. Then I noticed the clock. It didn’t seem right. “What time is it?”

“Almost morning,” said the squirrel. “And…”

“And what!”

“And the City is burning.”

II

Project Security was on full alert. No one was allowed to leave or enter. All this from the squirrel.

“What’re you gonna do?” he asked as we strode down a corridor.

I stopped, eyed him with disgust. “Go away.”

He went. I made sure he wasn’t following, though I couldn’t imagine him having the nerve to try. Then I made for my exit. I went through the place, down more corridors, down a lift, and into the lab area without seeing a soul. I found the hatch next to the circuits I had rigged earlier. I could betray Holly twice from the same spot.

Though I wasn’t thinking of it as that. I wasn’t thinking of it at all, or of anything else, as I popped the hatch and slid out into the darkness. Just get across the river without being blazed in the back. I keyed the hatch to re-open.

The bridges were out, of course. The Security there was deep and alert. But they didn’t see me slip around the corner of the dome and into the river. And if they heard my splashing, they weren’t certain enough of its meaning to fire. I crossed without trouble; the water was warm.

The City was not burning. Too much plassteel and hull for a conventional fire. But the dark shadow of looming smoke meant that everything else was probably gone. I couldn’t see much else. The approach I was forced to take led me through undergrowth and tall trees that blocked the outline of the Maze. It also blocked my view of the stars, any sort of trail, and tiny little bushes about ankle high that repeatedly jammed their nettles into my boots. I found a clearing by tripping and falling forward into it. God, but I hated the outdoors.

I was just rising to my knees when he appeared. He was tall as me, heavily armed, and wearing full open-air battle armor. A commando.

“Cale?” he whispered in my direction, then reached for his pistol before I could mumble the lie.

I kicked him in the face twice, in the forehead and right cheek. He dropped like a rock. I stood over him, gasping and waiting unnecessarily for his response. If I hadn’t seen that armor….

I knelt beside him and looted. He had all the goodies. Grenades, a comvid, blaze charges. It was Fleet stuff. It was Borglyn’s stuff.

Today was the day, it seemed.

I took the pistol and a single charge. I clipped the comvid to the loop at my waist. On impulse, I reached over and drained the power from the armor. Then I threw the rest of the extra charges into the trees. It was as good as tying him up—that stuff was heavy.

I never considered wearing it myself. Never.

No one else popped up in the long half-hour it took me to make my way to the edge of the city. And after awhile I had managed a fairly decent rate of progress. More importantly, I felt sure I could retrace my steps.

The main square was apparently deserted. I hated the idea of strolling across so open an area but the Maze was made of less forgiving terrain than the woods and I knew only the one way to get to Wice. I took a deep breath rich with smoke and trotted across to the other side. Nothing happened.

Minutes later I had climbed the passage and the building at the end. The guard that loomed at me from the shadows acted like he was expecting me. He led me through the lair without speaking until we stood before Wice’s broad door. He knocked in an obvious pattern and waited. The door opened.

“Crow,” he said shortly.

The stooge at the door peered at me, nodded me through, closed the door behind me.

There were five of them in Wice’s office. Or six, counting the poor fool lying moaning and bleeding on the floor. All but the fool turned toward me as I entered.

Wice nodded. “ ’Bout time,” he growled. “Again,” he said to one of the others standing over the fool.

The man, huge and heavily muscled, was taking off a shirt soaked with sweat. “Okay,” he said resignedly, dropping the shirt on the back of a chair. Then he leaned over and slammed his fist into the fool’s kidneys. The fool warped like a beached fish and screamed.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded, striding forward.

The man without the shirt stood up quickly, warily on guard. I ignored him for Wice.

“If you ever showed up when you’re goddamned supposed to, you’d know!” Wice snapped back angrily. “Borglyn’s gonna….”

“Wice!” I interrupted impatiently.

He stopped, looking at me, really looking at me for the first time. He sighed. “Where’ve you been, Jack?” he asked with evident hurt in his voice.

Incredible. Between us lay a man waiting to be tortured some more. But all Wice could do was pout. I remembered what he’d told me about being at my piracy trial, the pride he felt at being there. He gaped like a disillusioned child.

“Later,” I said shortly with a brusque wave. I sank into the easy chair. “Tell me.”

“Well, for one thing, today is the day we….”

“I figured that. What’s this?” I pointed to the man on the floor.

Wice shrugged. “Some pilgrim came in a coupla weeks hack with a whole carton of rifles. The locals got ’em.”

“How?”

He looked at the floor. “He gave ’em the rifles.”

“To stop you?”

“Yeah.”

“These people don’t like you, Wice,” I said on impulse.

It struck home. “I don’t give a shit,” he snarled unconvincingly.

I stared. A child. He was a child. He motioned the puncher forward. “Again, Lopes.”

“Wait a second,” I said to Lopes, then turning to Wice before he could protest, “Who is this guy anyway? The one with the guns?”

Wice shook his head. “No. But he knows where they are. He knows all of it, where the leaders are and everything. And he’s gonna tell it all.”

I stood up, forcing my muscles to laxness. “Wice,” I began calmly, “this is only going to make it worse. They’ll never accept you after….”

“They’ll accept Borglyn.”

“But Borglyn…”I began and stopped, suddenly, seeing it all at last. “Borglyn was never just coming for fuel. He’s coming to stay, isn’t he? He’s coming to take over.”

Wice’s mouth was open. “You didn’t know? You really didn’t know?”

I didn’t answer. I was too busy wondering if I had known all along. It wasn’t a Fleet planet, after all. It was Lewis’s planet. Borglyn needn’t fear the might of avenging starships. He could roll over the drunk—in his sleep—and he would own it all. Maybe he wouldn’t even bother with Lewis. Or maybe Lewis wouldn’t care. Maybe both.

It was the tension in the room that brought me back to them. They were all standing very, very still and watching me. I think they knew before I did.

Certainly Wice did. “Jack?” he said quietly. His voice was almost pleading.

I met his gaze, still not decided. Hell—still not truly conscious of the decision before me. I never was. But I reached for the blazer just the same.

I lived because I was fast and because Wice maybe hesitated an instant and because two of them didn’t really believe I would do it until I had and because the two who did reach and fire were the kind of men who enjoyed watching torture and had waited to be fodder all their lives. I lived because they died, because I killed each and every one.

The fool on the floor had a name—Northrup. He knew a lot about the place. When he was able to move, he showed me Wice’s secret exit onto the rooftops. He was very agile, darting from one oddly leveled crag to the next. He was also very happy. And talkative.

Just wait ’til he got me back to the others, was the gist of it. And how delighted they would all be when they found out I was on their side. Just knowing they’d be fighting alongside the great Jack Crow would be a big help.

I was silent, letting him think what he wanted. As far as I was concerned, I had done too much fighting already. Too damn much. The idea of switching sides, of taking sides as if there was doubt… No. It was over. I could give them some help though and I intended to. With a little advice: Run.

Run away, far away, and hide. Run now, right now. Don’t think about it or consider or ponder or make any more speeches—move! Run!

Because Borglyn could not lose.

III

Eyes was beautiful in the starlight. It emphasized the richness of her hair, the soft delicacy of her skin, the Eyes, themselves.

She seemed determined to have all that and all else she possessed carved up.

“We have guns,” she insisted for the thousandth time.

I sighed, dropped my cigarette and stepped on it. I glanced at the open hatch behind her, filled with dim light and the energetic sounds of the others arguing over whether or not I should be trusted at this late date. There was repeated mention of The Plan uttered with tones of faith better suited to a suicide pact. Which was what it would be. I wondered what they would think if they knew I couldn’t care less.

I glanced back at Eyes. I did care about her, maybe. But dumb is dumb.

“You have guns,” I conceded at last. “But they have blazers. Also concussion grenades and mortars and open-air armor. Have you ever seen what can be done with that? They can peel this building apart.”

“Buildings don’t shoot back.”

I blinked. From one bizarre to the next. From one child to another. Madness!

“Neither do dead people!” I barked angrily.

She stared, looked away. Her foot tapped impatiently. This was all decided for her long ago.

“Look. You gather up all your little guns and put them in a pile. Then you all line up behind them out of reach and wait for Borglyn to come. Then you smile at him. Then you give him the keys to the City.”

“Then what?” she asked sarcastically.

“Then he won’t kill you.”

She opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted by a particularly loud burst of arguing. She gestured toward the noise with a toss of her head.

“They don’t trust you,” she said.

“Fine.”

She frowned. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, come on, Jack,” she said with a conspiratorial smile. She squatted down in front of me. She put a feathery hand on my knee. “I know you’re not as cold and hard as you make yourself out to be.”

I stared at her. This was not happening.

“You haven’t fooled me with this bit of yours—you never have.”

“I haven’t…” I echoed dully.

“Not a bit. I know you, Jack. I know that you care.”

“Of course I do. That’s why I’m trying to get you to….”

“No, no. You care, Jack. You care about justice and you care about right and wrong and you care about this thing turning out the way you know it should.”

She really believed it. I could see that. I thought I saw something else, too. She believed they would win, of course. Because they were in the Right, by God! But she believed in more than that. She believed we would all live to see it. Casualties, of course. Strangers, mostly. Or the enemy. But, basically, all—and I meant all—would be well.

She believed it would be easy.

She was dead.

I took her hand from my knee and kissed it softly. “Good-bye,” I said, with as little emphasis as I could manage. Then I stood up and headed back the way I had come across the rooftops.

She raised up slowly, watching me go. I could feel it building behind my back.

“Damn you,” she blurted it out at last. “You’re going to be that way to the very end, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “I’ve seen ‘very ends’ before.”

The explosion of gunfire seemed to come from everywhere at once—the street below, the inside of the building, the surrounding rooftops. The answering blazers were silent but just as obvious in the eerie blue glows their arcing beams made on the plassteel walls across the way.

I had dropped to the deck with the first sound. So, thank God, had Eyes. The blaze aimed at her cut a neat hole in the top of the doorway instead of her nose. Two beams arced at me a second later, passing far too close overhead. I crawled over to a space underneath the protection of the meter-higher roof adjoining. More beams struck, from new and different angles, pressing my nose into the damp rooftop. Damn! They seemed to be everywhere.

The gunfire had cut the argument short inside. I heard boots stomping and the clicking of rifle business. I turned to the open doorway.

“Stay in!” I yelled to them.

No such luck. The idiots weren’t convinced until their first three crusaders had been sliced apart. Eyes screamed as a headless torso plopped to the roof beside her. I thought she was a little late. Somebody offed the interior light, also a little late.

But still a good idea. I crawled rapidly through the darkness toward the entrance and cover. I found the way blocked. It was inconceivable, but the crusaders were using the cover of darkness to get out and fight.

I couldn’t believe it. “You fools! You wanna die? We’re pinned!”

They didn’t even bother to acknowledge me. They simply crawled past, took up the first hint of cover in their way, and opened fire in every direction. Worse still was their reaction to the murderous crossfire that responded.

“There they are!” shouted a half dozen voices at the appearance of the various beams. Then half a dozen or more rose to charge each position, firing from the hip. Some of them actually yelled battle cries as they charged.

Some of them actually lived, too. But not many. It didn’t matter. The doorway was positively choked with more storming out to take their places. Not once did they consider retreating. Not when twenty or more had died, not when the number of beams suddenly, inexplicably, doubled, not when the counter-charge was launched from all sides but one.

That one safe direction was for me. The building was at the very edge of the Maze proper. There was nothing between it and the woods but a handful of one- and two-story shacks. I figured the fall was worth it. The trouble was that I wouldn’t actually be able to see where I would be landing. I could possibly fall the entire three stories.

No choice. I edged out onto the overhanging lip and paused for one last glimpse back.

It was horrible. The beams were coming from two dozen different directions at once. The crossfire was a solid mesh of maiming burning slicing…

Damn them! I thought. “Damn you!” I shouted.

Then I rolled over and dropped. I bounced on something three or four meters below but it was slanted and I fell some more, bouncing some more, badly and out of control and then I hit something very hard, hard enough to go out before the pain had a chance.

IV

I had many dreams, none remembered except the last, the nightmare. Borglyn was the source of it. His deep powerful voice was the instrument of his fear. I dreamed he was using it to describe in detail what would happen when the blazer he held to my temple was keyed. His voice rang with implacable superiority and with reasoned understanding of my fear and helplessness. He was almost sorry, he seemed to be implying, that he was going to kill me anyway.

It was horrible.

Then the pain woke me up and I found out most of it was true.

It was still dark, though without stars. Perhaps two hours had passed. No more. I was lying—I was crumpled, against a rusted sheet metal smokestack at the bottom of an even more rusted slanted rooftop. Almost everything hurt, but my head was throbbing with a ferocity all its own. I groaned and felt around to my crown for the lump I knew must be there, found it, groaned again. I tried pulling myself to my knees.

Borglyn spoke again, from millimeters away.

I started, thrusting blindly away from the sound and trying to turn and face it at the same time. I fell again, hard. My chin snapped against the sheet metal with a rumbling thud, I groaned once more, wincing with the pain. I opened my eyes reluctantly, more to stabilize a wave of dizziness than to see.

But I saw. Borglyn was there, on the vidcom screen. I blinked, blinked again. It was the smallest I had ever seen him. It didn’t help. Another voice, emitted from the grille. Staring at Borglyn, and still groggy, I paid no attention to what it was saying. Then I recognized the voice as Holly’s.

I sat up painfully and grabbed the unit soaking up every word. I didn’t understand all the references. Much had apparently occurred in the time I was out, however. That was clear enough. For one thing, Borglyn’s force was already on the planet, camped across the river from the Dome. For another, they were unopposed.

I glanced behind me at the kaleidoscopic jury-rigging of the walls of the Maze rising above my perch. There was no sign of movement anywhere along their length. No gunfire sounded. Either they had finally taken my advice and run away, or Borglyn had already gotten them.

Borglyn began to speak again. All the reasonableness from the dream was there. His tone was respectful, unhurried, and, still, implacably superior.

“I won’t argue with you, Dr. Ware,” he said with a patient and patronizing smile. “You and I both know your defense screens are gone. I suspect you even know how.”

“I’ve a pretty good idea,” from off screen, his voice a subtle mixture of bitterness and sorrow.

I felt like he had punched me in the stomach. I grabbed up the unit and fiddled with the dials. It was suddenly very important that I see his face.

“Yes,” agreed Borglyn with a neutral nod of his huge head. “At any rate, you’re helpless. And, as far as I can tell, alone.”

I gave up the fiddling. Alone? No wonder he sent no image.

“But in a fort,” Holly was pointing out.

Borglyn sighed. “True, Dr. Ware. Project Domes are forts. But without screens, medieval ones. You have no chance.”

“We’ll see,” said Holly.

Borglyn sighed again. So did I. What the hell was going on? What could Holly be thinking of?

“Very well, Dr.,” said Borglyn with a trace of impatience. “We will see. Or you will. Observe.”

The image on the screen shifted. We were looking down over Borglyn’s shoulder. Before him were arranged the numerous keys and screens of the Coyote’s command console. Borglyn was still inside his ship, still in orbit overhead.

He turned toward the monitor and smiled a cold smile. “I trust you can pick up my screens on your own,” he said, sweeping a hand along the console. “Let me identify them.” He tapped a screen on the top row. “That is the planet, Sanction. This next one is the Dome from one thousand kilometers overhead.” He dropped down a row. “The monitors relaying these images are at my commandos’ camp—less than half a kilometer from where you are now.” He worked a key. A screen showed a pan of the camp itself, an area newly blasted free of vegetation stretching at least one hundred meters from treeline to riverbank.

Every step had firepower.

“Those are the two hundred commandos that will come from you,” Borglyn continued, pointing from screen to screen. “They are as well-armed as Fleet can manage. Those on the right are wearing open-air battle armor. There are thirty of them—each and every one an expert.”

I doubted that, but was damned if I knew what difference it made.

“Those large instruments in the rear, Doctor, are medium-range mortars. They are out of line-of-sight of your tactical blazer cannon and will, in fact, obliterate them when I give the order. You already know something of the one on the left.” He leaned forward and worked a key. The screen above it swelled as the monitor zoomed forward. “That is the hole it has already blown in your… your fort.”

I was squinting at a tiny screen showing an even tinier image and still the hole was clear. It was that big.

God, Holly, get out of there!

The tour ended with Borglyn’s terrifyingly off-handed inventory of his other miscellaneous killing tools. He listed the concussion grenades and the fully charged blaze rifles. But more than what he said, was the way he said it, as if they were just insignificant toys when he knew damn well they were a hell of a lot more.

And he knew Holly knew.

It was chilling.

“Still with me, Dr. Ware?” inquired Borglyn pleasantly.

“Yes,” Holly replied shortly. Was that fear? Certainly respect.

But it sounded too much to me like fatalism.

Borglyn’s smile dropped instantly. His manner became threatening. “And have you indeed seen?” he demanded, biting out each word.

Holly was too smart to answer that one. Or too scared.

Borglyn went on. “Well, I hope you do.” He shrugged slightly; he appeared to be making an effort at maintaining his reasoned calm. But as he began to speak once more, it gradually slipped away to something ominous. Something ugly—

“I have been frank with you. Let me be more so. I want that Cangren Cell—you know that. I want it intact and working—you know that, too. But consider this: We are desperate people, Doctor. We have no fuel left for faster-than-light. Your refusal to cooperate means we must stay and fight you for whatever is left. And we will. One way or another, Sir, I will have you out of that Dome. Even if I have to land this ship myself and blast the can, the dome, the hillside behind it, and you, Doctor, to glass!”

Borglyn paused once more. He was breathing heavily with barely contained fury. His deep blue eyes, always incongruously troubling, shone with a depth of damn near tangible menace.

And one more time it reminded me of something I always seemed to forget when he wasn’t around: he scared me. Not panic. Not quaking. But fear, yes. I genuinely feared the man, more than any other I had known.

I thought of Holly, in there alone and seeing it.

Or maybe he didn’t see it. Maybe he didn’t know enough to realize how utterly lethal Borglyn was. Holly was still in there, after all.

Borglyn was calm again when next he spoke. “You have half an hour, Dr. Ware. Use it to…” His lips curled a cold smile. “…to assess. Then the real world will hit.”

“I’ll watch for it,” blurted Holly suddenly. But it wasn’t even faintly convincing. I felt that pain in my stomach once more.

Borglyn’s voice went dead hard. “Then watch me kill you!” he roared and leaned up to key off the monitor. He stopped his hand. The cold smile returned. “No. You like to see, don’t you?” he snarled. Then he keyed the sound off with a click and spun angrily away.

Damn.

V

I had to get him out.

And I had to go in there with him to do it. Holly knew what I had done. I doubted he would talk to me at all if he had any choice. I had decided not to give him one.

I stood up, ignoring my wobbly gait, and fell-jumped off the roof onto the soft ground below. I picked myself up about halfway, then had to sit down again. Vertigo. I had to blink my eyes several times before they would focus right. Damn! I didn’t have time for a concussion.

I stood up slowly the second time and stayed up. I scanned the dark outlines of the trees before me. I could almost feel the commandos wandering through them. Too much weaponry and not enough targets. It would have to be the bridge route. Borglyn was sure to have them guarded, but anything was better than crowded woods.

I started off at an easy trot down along the outer perimeter of the Maze toward the river. The jumbled stacks of hovels looming over me were still silent and still. The City looked empty. Or beaten. Or both. Eerie. Where were the crusaders?

I had to slow down to a walk for a while to give my head a fighting chance. Fat lot of good to Holly if I conked again.

Damn Holly, I thought suddenly. What the hell was he doing?

He had a plan, of course. A Plan. There had to be one. Something suitable for a spindly over-romantic would-be hero to pull out at the last second, no doubt. Something the Evil villain would never suspect.

Or probably, in the case of Borglyn, notice. I had to get in there.

I tried trotting again. It worked after a fashion. Faster, anyway.

So. I had to get in there and make Holly see me, make him tell me the grand scheme, make him see it wouldn’t work, plus make him leave with me—all in half an hour.

I tripped on something and slid down on my butt. It hurt like hell. I reached back around and pulled out the culprit. I had landed on the comvid.

I was rearing back to throw it against the side of a shack when it spoke to me in Lya’s voice.

“…oh please, Darling,” she was saying, “it can’t do anybody any good if you get killed.”

She sounded awful. Her voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper. Despair and worry and fear, and exhaustion from them all, trembled within it. Then the screen flickered to life with her face and I saw it was even worse than it sounded.

I hit a key. “Lya? This is Jack.”

She perked up. “Jack? Jack, where are you?”

“Outside the City.”

Her eyes got wide. “The City? But… Oh, Jack. You’ve got to help Holly. He’s in the Dome all alone and he won’t come out and they’re going to blow it up in just a few minutes. And he won’t answer me.”

“I’m going there now. Is he really in there alone?”

“Yes,” she sobbed. “He’s locked himself in and, Jack, the defense screens are down. He’ll be killed.”

I waited for her sobs to pass. “What happened? How did all this happen?”

She gathered herself together with effort, brushing back the tears and her hair and sitting up straight. Then she told me.

Most of it I knew, who Borglyn was and the like. And what he wanted. Other parts I had assumed. The ultimatum, the landing of the troops, the guarantees of safety for cooperative types. No one had believed Borglyn when he had first claimed to have “arranged” to sabotage the screens. The boards showed green.

Then had come the blast to match the hole Borglyn had already shown me. Shortly afterward, Holly had ordered everyone out. It wasn’t until all were gathered in the valley at the Crew Quarters, that Lya had noticed he was missing.

“I called him at the Dome. And he said he wasn’t coming and that he wouldn’t let anyone else in and… and he hasn’t spoken to me since. Jack, you’ve got to do something.”

“I will. But why, Lya? Why did he stay? Did he tell you?”

She frowned and shook her head. “Just that he couldn’t give in to that man, to Borglyn. Not after what happened to the Cityfolk.”

I sighed. “What happened?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you that. I was so worried about… Well, they had guns, Jack! I don’t know where they got them. And they attacked Borglyn’s people.”

“And got killed?”

“No! Well, yes, some of them. I guess a lot of them. God, Jack, those monsters have everything!”

“I know. What about the City?”

“Oh, well they all ran back there to hide. But Borglyn called them and told them to bring him all their guns.”

“Did they?”

“Some did, I think. But most of them didn’t. Then Borglyn said he was going to teach them a lesson and he started bombing them or… whatever he did to us.”

“Mortars.”

“Yes, mortars, He shot them all over the City. Said he was teaching them a lesson.”

I frowned, looked up at the looming slums. Still ugly, but standing.

“Anyway,” she went on. “Then they all came out with the guns and they took them, Borglyn’s people did. But when they got back to the City, he started the mortars again.”

“After they’d given in?”

She nodded. “He said the lesson wasn’t over.”

I looked again at the stacks. It didn’t make sense. Then I reached the end of the perimeter and made the turn inward toward the main square.

“Goddamn!”

“What, Jack?”

I explained to her that I had just found the lesson.

There was no main square. The land was there. Even some of the puddle. But what made it a square, the buildings which surrounded and enclosed it, were gone. Gone. So was most of the far side of the Maze. A square kilometer at least. The only section still intact was the perimeter I had been following. And nothing, nothing at all, was moving. No one.

“Did he kill everybody?” I muttered.

“Jack?” called Lya.

I ignored her, still staring. Then I laughed.

“Jack?” she called again. “Are you laughing?”

“No,” I lied, though I soon stopped. It wasn’t funny, but… I had slept through it. It was too terrifying to be anything but funny. Damn, I thought next, I must have been in a coma. I felt the back of my head again. The lump felt bigger to my trembling fingers.

“Of course!” I cried, seeing what must have happened. “Holly decided to defend the Dome after this.”

She nodded glumly. “That’s right. Jack, can you… is there anything you can do?”

“I have a way to get in,” I assured her. If Holly hadn’t closed it, I amended to myself.

I started my trotting again. The small bridge across the creek-sewer was just ahead and intact.

“You’ve got to get in and stop him. You’ve got to make him listen.”

“I’ll try,” I puffed, tromping loudly across the small span and on to the river.

“You’ve got to. He won’t listen to me or anyone else from the Project. Lewis was the only one he talked to, and that was hours ago.”

I snorted. “Lewis! Great!”

“Oh, no. Lewis is very concerned.”

I had to stop. I leaned over and braced my hands on my legs. “I’m sure,” I managed to reply.

“He is, Jack. You don’t know. He’s very worried. He said he’d rather give the planet away then have Holly Killed.”

“Then why doesn’t he?”

“He tried. Borglyn wants the Dome. But Lewis did say he could have it—he didn’t care.”

I smiled. Now that I could buy.

I looked at the sky. Dawn was coming fast. How many minutes left? I forced myself to stumble ahead, clutching my stomach tightly with a forearm to keep it where it should be. I stopped when I heard the river. I lifted the Comvid and whispered into it. “I’m turning you off, Lya.”

“What’s the matter?” she all but shrieked.

I slammed the volume control. “I’m at the river. Guards will hear you. I’ll talk to you again when I get across.”

She probably said okay. I keyed off and dropped the unit to the ground. Then I crept slowly forward until I could just make out the outlines of the bridge. I didn’t bother to locate the guards I knew must be there. Instead I cut off at a diagonal to the riverbank. The water was still warm. It seemed to clear my head.

Less than a minute later, I was sliding the hatch open.

It was very dark inside, much darker than the false dawn outside. I felt my way along slowly, my arms stretched out in front like a sleepwalker, until I found a wall to follow. I had gone maybe ten meters when lights, blaring and blinding, flashed into life overhead. I groaned, covered my eyes with my hands.

“What do you want?” said a stern voice from close by, Holly’s.

I moved my hands and squinted enough to see the blazer pointing my way.

“Holly,” I said as calmly as I could.

“What do you want, Jack?” he repeated.

“I want to know what you’re doing in here.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

He stared awhile, determined to be firm and hard and angry. But he hated it and had to fight himself to do it.

He took a deep breath. “Get out,” he said harshly, waving the barrel back toward the hatch.

“No.”

His eyes widened. “I’ll shoot you.”

“Okay.”

A beat. Another. The gun slumped with his arms. Tears pooled in his eyes.

“Jack, how could you?”

My own eyes began to sting. “I don’t know,” I said at last. And I didn’t.

He looked at the floor. His chest shook. I thought I would die.

Something. Not “sorry.” Not enough. Something….

“Holly, one thing.” He looked up at me as though he expected more bad news. I swallowed. “Holly, it was before. I couldn’t have afterwards.”

He understood at once. “Before?” he echoed uncertainly.

I nodded. He made a half smile. He waved me down the corridor. I followed behind him, wondering if from now on the rest of our lives would be divided the same way—before and after Felix.

VI

Holly had no plan. He did have an arrangement of sorts. He started my tour with the Master Ground Control room, the safest room in the Dome, located in its exact center. Holly had managed to get some of each essential packed into this tiny chamber surrounded by consoles and screens.

He had blazer rifles, of course. Two new cases were stacked in one corner between equally new cases of blaze-bombs on the left and concussion grenades on the right. Against one wall he had a long hospital table and lamp, complete with all the medikits and medipacks on a shelf above. Cases of food were littered everywhere, enough for a couple of months at least.

I found his confidence alarming.

Other nooks had other things, books, changes of clothing, every coil from both his and Lya’s files.

“You’ve got everything in here but the suit,” I commented.

He blushed. “The wheelchair wouldn’t fit through the doorway.”

I grinned. “You mean you actually tried it?”

“Sort of. Caught myself trying to jam it through without remembering going to get it. Unconscious, I guess. Or driven mad from the pressure.”

I laughed. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t want it lost either.” Holly smiled his gratitude. “Where is it?”

He led us out of the control room into a large rectangular room easily as big as my suite. It had an extremely high ceiling with beams running out of the wall behind us, down the length of the ceiling, and into the next wall. There were more supplies stacked about. More weapons, more food, more medical things. Against one corner was a desk, Holly’s desk. In the far corner, sitting in the powered wheelchair, was the suit. It looked like an alert pupil, head up, back straight, arms folded in its lap.

I shuddered. “Every time I see it again….”

Holly smiled. “Yeah. Not like before though, you know?”

I nodded. I knew. We had always thought of the suit as Felix’s killer.

“It wasn’t a murderer after all,” I mused.

Holly became thoughtful. “Wasn’t it, though? I mean, what if Felix were still alive? Knowing what we do, knowing what it would do to him to wear it again, wouldn’t we think of it as a murderer once more?”

I saw what he meant. “It is a murderer. Even Felix’s murderer, given another shot. But it didn’t do it!”

“You know, it feels benevolent. But only because it’s powerless and we don’t fear it. A killer with only one victim.”

“And he got away,” I finished.

“I don’t know why we ever feared it so?”

I smiled sadly. “Probably the same reason he did. It worked too goddamn well.”

Holly looked at me. “Or he worked it too well.”

“Yeah. That, too.” I pointed at the ceiling. “Where are we, exactly? I don’t think I’ve ever been in here.”

“This is the Complex central core. It bisects the width of the rectangle.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly.

He laughed. “This structure is a rectangle. Those eaves that jut out at the four corners are attachments.”

“Those big curved wings are just plugged on?”

“Yes. And they’re very unstable. Which is good for me.”

“Why is it good to be in an unstable building?”

“I’m not. I’m set up here in the core. It’s entirely separate from the rest of the surrounding rooms. It’s built that way for… well, for situations like this one. Or in case of earthquakes. The core shields the Cangren Cell.”

“All right, but why is it good to have everything else shaky?”

“Because they can’t attack me from the long ends without creating a barrier of rubble six stories heavy. They have to come right down this line.” He pointed along the overhead beams. “And they have to come from only one direction, the riverfront.”

“Because of the hillside in back?”

“Right. And when they try to come through here, they’ll find three walls in their way. Come on.”

We went into the next room, even larger than the last. At the far end, it grew alcoves from each side, making a “T”. Along the wall of the “T” were several consoles.

“That’s the outer wall,” explained Holly. “Those are stations for the blazer cannon. Now, back the other way.”

We retreated into the second room. Holly closed and sealed the door behind us and pointed to a small console on the wall.

“If they should manage to penetrate the outer wall into the room we just left….”

“Which they damn sure will,” I pointed out.

“Well… if they do, I can come in here and hit these keys and seal off so thoroughly that that other room’s ceiling could collapse and I wouldn’t feel it.”

“And then they’d have to start all over again?”

“Right”

“Minus the cannon.”

“True. But their field of attack would be severely limited. They would be crowding into my killing area.”

“You planning to open the door and shoot?”

He blushed. “There are other things. That room, both of these rooms and the control room alcove, are mined like crazy.”

“They’re in big trouble, all right.”

He frowned. “I know they’ll probably get through anyway….”

“Surely get through anyway,” I corrected.

He frowned again. “What else can I do?”

“Are you kidding? Almost anything. Run away, for a start.”

“I can’t do that,” he replied miserably.

I examined his face. “Holly, you’re not scared enough.”

“Ha!” he cried, a wry sad smile curling on his lips. He leaned against a wall and slid down it to the floor. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. I didn’t know you could get this scared!”

“All right! Let’s get moving.”

“I can’t!”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because this is the only chance of stopping him.”

I blinked, stared, sat down abruptly in front of him. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Why else?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Principle of some sort. Desire for hero role. Or martyr’s.”

“No. This is just the best way.”

“This is no way.”

Holly leaned his head back and stared into space. “He must have killed a thousand people in the City this morning.”

“They’re dead. Gone.”

“But others live here. And more are coming.”

“And?”

“He’ll have to be brutal, won’t he? After what he did?”

“After the mortars, yes. He’ll have to maintain. Fear over the hate.”

“So it will get worse and worse and on and on. I’ve got to stop him.”

“Holly, do you really think you can?”

“If I can’t stop him, at least I can drain his arsenal. I can make him use up irreplaceable munitions. There will be a chance that someone will be able to overthrow him.” He brought his head back to level and met my gaze. “You know, Jack? You’re the only one who came.”

“You locked everybody out, didn’t you?”

“I had to be secure. I asked for volunteers first.”

“I hadn’t heard that part.”

He blinked. “You mean that’s not why you’re here?”

“Not at all. Borglyn’s won. I came to get you.”

“Oh. Well, I won’t go.”

“You can’t, I know.”

“But there just isn’t anyone else!” He stared at the floor between his boots. “I wish there was. Anything, just…” Three tears plopped loudly onto the polished floor. He sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m just so scared.”

“Me, too.”

He looked at me with such innocence and said. “Well, Jack, you ought to get started. It’s going to start any minute.”

I lit a cigarette instead of answering. I puffed and thought. Now what? He had a damn good point about the time. And he had a damn good point about what Borglyn would become. Dammit! I hadn’t expected this. He didn’t want to be a martyr. He had no interest in being a hero. He would have given up his role in a second, if… If there had been anyone else. But there wasn’t. Only him. He was the only one who could make a difference. Not that he would. He wouldn’t. He would die. But he was the only one who could, who might. He had to.

“I guess I’ll stay,” I said without thinking.

He looked surprised. I bet I did, too. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I won’t leave without you.”

“I could use your help.”

“You sure could. You wouldn’t have a chance alone.”

“And with you?” he asked, smiling.

I shook my head. “Dead as dirt.”

An overhead thunderclap, the first mortar, signaled the beginning. Holly leaped to his feet and ran to the door and unsealed it. “You know how to work a blazer cannon?”

“More or less,” I answered without conviction.

There were six along the wall running across the top of the “T.” Holly grabbed the third from the left. I took the fourth. I peered suspiciously at the console. A monitor, on the barrel most likely. I keyed the screen. It glowed brightly, receded, then coalesced on the river below. I grabbed the triggers and fired a burst at the water. It worked.

It worked on water. It worked on trees and on sky. But not on mortars. Borglyn had told the truth. There wasn’t a target in sight. Damn!

Meanwhile, mortar shells were ripping the hell out of everything. Great holes appeared out of the smoke along the riverbank. The holes began working their way up the slope to us. Closer and closer, seemingly more and more powerful. Distant concussions echoed from direct hits on the Complex.

Then they hit our wall, about five meters to Holly’s right. The floor warped Violently with the shock wave, tossing Holly up and back into the center of the floor. He bounced like a dead man. I rushed to him to see if he was as bad as he should be. He just rubbed his head and smiled. He was getting up to reman his cannon station when it just blew off the wall, console and all. We ducked no more than half a second after it had hurtled high over our heads.

It got worse. Four blasts slammed against the outer wall within three seconds. The warping floor bounced us like babies about the room. Chunks of masonry crashed to the floor from high above. The sound of it was… Godlike.

It stopped suddenly, all at once. We got to our feet. Holly rushed to a panel on the wall and read some dials.

“Uh-oh,” he said quietly. And was silent.

“Don’t do that!”

“Huh? Oh, I think we have a lacing split here.”

“That’s bad?”

“The lacing is behind two half-meter layers of reinforced plastiform.”

“What’s behind the lacing?”

He made a face. “Mqstly paint.”

“Holy shit!” I cried, grabbing him and dragging him back from the front.

“It won’t collapse, Jack.”

“It will when the grenades hit it.”

“What grenades?”

“They stopped the mortar barrage for something!”

“Shouldn’t we be shooting ’em as they run up to throw?”

“To do that, we would have to approach the guns. The guns are on the….”

Wham! Two, three, four-five-six. Pause. Three more almost at once.

On the floor from the first one. Holding my ears. Opening my eyes reluctantly, sure of seeing blood.

Smoke and dust were filling the room—thick and black and brown and gray, but I saw through it for just an instant, just long enough to recognize the river through a two-meter-high, meter-wide, gash.

They had pierced the first wall.

On impulse, I grabbed a concussion grenade from one of the scattered cases. I threw it, without looking, out through the smoke. Screams followed its detonation. I grabbed up three more and threw them, too.

Now was the time to go to the cannon. “Wait here,” I said to Holly who lay sprawled and choking dust.

“No. No, I’m fine,” he lied and thumped awkwardly head-first into a cannon station.

My cannon had been where the gash was. I stepped one over and keyed it up. I had a target for maybe a second and a half. Once he may have been where my beam struck.

“Dammit! barked Holly. He took his eyes off of his screen and frowned in my direction. “You know, I’d like to shoot back at least once. But unless it’s a tree, there’s never any damn target.”

Bingo! “Shoot ’em.”

“Huh?”

“The trees?”

“Why?”

“They burn?”

“So?”

“They burn down.”

We made a forest fire. It was quite an impressive blaze in no time at all. The far side of the river disappeared behind the wall of smoke. I decided to take a small chance. I stepped through the gash and looked around.

Chunks of plastiform were scattered all over the slope to the water. Much of it was from our wall, but the vast majority of the debris had been blasted from the walls on either side of the core. But no breaches, as Holly had promised. Instead of standing still for the punctures, and making an entrance, the other walls simply collapsed atop one another. One spot, repeatedly targeted, had a massive cone of masonry that seemed to have been torn through a good five meters. But the pile was right where the wall had been and just as obstructive.

I took another quick chance. I trotted around to the ground underneath an eave. Bootprints covered the entire area. This is where they stood when they threw the grenades and made the gash. I stood in one of the spots and pressed myself against the wall. Out of range.

After forty-five minutes of waiting for something to scare us, we decided to get a bite to eat. I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since… I wasn’t sure. Not today or yesterday or….

Damn. Felix had been just yesterday. Damn.

Borglyn’s programming was fun for a while. Mutineers and deserters weren’t much at fire-fighting. They were damn good at trenches, though. They had two of them dug deep enough for the mortars long before the fire went out.

“Pretty far back, though,” observed Holly.

He was right. Too far back to melt the barrels, anyway. Cannon are not made for distance. Then I saw what Holly meant. I didn’t know much about artillery, but Borglyn had called them medium-range mortars. They were a kilometer away.

The question was answered as we watched. The crews began firing at us. We rushed to the outer room, ready to seal it off if need be. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t even dangerous. I sat in the gash, enjoying fresh air and a smoke and admired the splashes for half an hour. Not that they didn’t have the range. They did. At least two shells whistled over the Dome. But no accuracy.

When the shakes came, an hour into the respite, I went to the head and sat them out. When I returned, I pretended not to see Holly having an even worse time. I could do that, had been doing it for him since it had begun. It was really getting to him. Too smart not to appreciate what could happen, he was also too sensitive to ignore it. A nice man.

An hour later, the fire was finally going out. I figured we had another hour yet to come. It was an exhausted, ragtag crowd across the river.

“You think it will matter to them?” wondered Holly aloud.

He was leaning against the wall as before, his head back and staring.

“Who?”

“The people who are left after.”

“Under Borglyn?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Depends on how well we do. On how much we make them work for it. There’re only two of us, after all. Far as they might know, only you. If we make them treat us like an army, it’ll be remembered.”

“Do you think we can?”

“No.”

“Why not? We’ve done pretty well.”

“But we’re out of trees.”

He laughed shortly. “I would like this to count,” he said wistfully.

“Well,” I said encouragingly, “it would help if we could make them flatten the hillside. Or better still, land the Coyote.”

“Should that be our goal?”

“Hell, no. We’re either doing this to win, with the idea of trying to win, or it’s masturbation.”

“I’d still like to see the Coyote. You think we will?”

I had been pondering that. “We might,” I said carefully. “But I don’t think it will attack us. Nothing eats fuel like a Nova-blaze.”

He nodded. We sat there, watching the smoke rise into the sunshine.

“Hey!” I blurted suddenly. “It’s daytime.”

Holly smiled. “Has been since it started.”

I relaxed. “I suppose so,” I mumbled.

What was I doing? Why was I here? I knew how it was going to end. I knew. But still I went along, on and on as if not really examining the madness would make it safer.

Holly. Sweet Holly. I knew why he was here. He felt he had to be. He felt he was the last hope and therefore responsible to try. I understood that. I understood those reasons. For him.

I did not understand those reasons for me. Yet here I was. Idiot.

There were a lot of things I didn’t understand lately. Like that morning when I had….

“What?” he asked.

“I guess I was mumbling.”

“Tell me,” he said excitedly, sitting up and leaning forward.

I smiled. “It’s not as much fun as that.”

“Is it bad?”

“Mostly.”

“About what you did?”

“No. About something else I did. This morning.”

“What?”

“I killed five people in the City.”

He blinked. “Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what happened.”

So I did. About Wice and about Northrup, the tortured fool. And about Lopes. About the other three.

“The thing of it was, I knew I was going to do it before I felt like doing it. Well, I didn’t want to do it. I had no passion for that fight. But I knew I was going to do it because….”

“Because it was the right thing?”

“Oh, shit. I hope not.”

“Afraid of becoming noble?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.

“That, too. But basically, that’s the worst reason I can think of for killing. That it’s the right thing to do. You kill out of outrage or fury or to keep from dying or something like it, that’s fine. Hell, kill them rather than bother with them—or be bothered by them. But if you’re killing them because it’s the ‘right thing to do,’ it’s only because you’ve done so many wrong things up until then to make that spot. It’s not the right thing to do. It’s the best of the last of your choices.”

“That’s the longest I’ve ever heard you talk at one time.”

“That’s because you never ask me about my hair.”

Later, I asked Holly about the eaves. He said fine. We set the last of the charges as the first bunch appeared from the right. I leaned out the hatch and shot one of them. The others flattened against the wall, out of range. Holly was all for blowing it right then. But I wanted to wait for the left-handers to show up, too.

When the first blaze-bomb rattled at us from the right, I acceded. Holly keyed the charge from the control room so we could see it better. It got everyone of them. But it kept falling and rolling, great chunks cascading over and over. When it had finished, we had a ridge of debris from the Dome to the river. It was five meters high at it’s highest point.

“We’ve cut them off!” announced Holly with a cheer.

“No. They’ll blow it open. But it got their attention.”

We blew the second on the grounds that no one could be that stupid. It made another ridge. All the way to the river. Hot damn.

So ended the second attack.

Things started happening pretty fast after that.

The trouble was, the whole thing had been damn near a blur all along. From the beginning when the squirrel woke me up to Wice to… no more Wice and then no more Crusaders and then no me for a couple of hours. To crazy Borglyn to crazy Holly.

Now crazy me.

They came in the third wave moments later. They came to the ridges we had made by blowing the eaves down the hill. They didn’t blast them, though. They just stood behind them, out of sight and out of range, and threw things at us. They didn’t bother with catapults or launchers. They hauled out the people wearing that open-air armor. Their artificial muscles were plenty. They threw concussion grenades and blaze-bombs, which I had expected. And smoke, which I had not. Idiot.

They had us anyway. We had no place to go. Only one place from which to fight back. The smoke wouldn’t hide us from them. But they could use it. And they did.

“Get ready to blow this first one!” I yelled to Holly as the first half-dozen blasts rocketed masonry along the front wall.

“Can’t we wait?” Holly yelled back gamely, running to another cannon console.

“No!” I screamed back. “No! We can’t stay in this for-wardroom! We’ve gotta go back to…”

“Look! They’re coming up at us!” he said, ignoring my cussing and firing away with the cannon.

But the smoke bombs hit then, cutting off most of our effectiveness. And then the first of the grenades hit, rocking us back and rocking the wall itself. Through the dust and smoke coming in I saw it waffling back and forth on either side of the gash. It was crumbling and warping and shaking….

And then coming at us as something hit it just right and a five-meter-wide section just folded back, just lifted up and folded back from the gash toward us. We were already down, blasted down and bouncing, me screaming for Holly to get back, goddammit, before…

Too late. That section of wall, folding and crumpling and collapsing, disintegrated from the force of another blast and then those pieces blew apart from the force of another and then one of those smaller pieces—a tiny one no larger than me—shot forward across the floor and over him.

“Holly!!”

And I leaped forward to help him, to get him back and get him away from the commandos I knew damn well would be coming up the hill from those ridges through the smoke. More grenades and blaze-bombs and then blazers and then hand-to-hand with that… Damn! With the ones wearing armor!

“Holly!” I screamed again and tried to get through the smoke and the blasts that wouldn’t stop coming, wouldn’t stop shaking me and throwing me about. The chunks of wall were rolling through now, from the gash and the inside of the wall and from the ceiling, falling and smacking horribly close by—

“Holly!” Then there he was beside me, the blood streaming and he lifted his head and gave me sort of a half-smile that he was all right but he damn well wasn’t and I cussed at him or maybe at me and then they hit us face-to-face.

I shot one. Two-four-five. The cases of grenades were there and I grabbed and threw with such urgency and terror that I didn’t bother to key them to blast, just threw them and heard them scream and saw them drop back out of sight. Then I had a second and I used it to key the next batch of three or four. I tossed the rifle to the side and grabbed for Holly. He moaned as I lifted him off the floor but there wasn’t anything I could do about that right then. The people outside hadn’t thought we were still in there that close and they were sure to drop back and throw much, much more.

And then the blasts were there, right there, at the area almost directly in front of the gash. Soon they would be coming all the way through. I tightened my grip on Holly’s shoulder, ignoring his cries, and hauled him back, stumbling, toward the next inner door. We were almost there, almost through it all the way, when two or three or a thousand seemed to hit all at once and the blast threw us forward, punching us limply through the air and the doorway. I heard Holly scream again, knew what must be happening to him, felt the hurtling chunks rake across my back and shoulders. A small something tore across the back of my neck as I lifted up to key the door shut and sealed and safe. The blood, the screams and the pain, the pains….

The door slammed shut, locked, and sealed itself automatically. For the moment, it was over.

Holly screamed as I dragged him the length of the second room to the Control room. The screams were strident and searing and they echoed off the floors and the ceiling and those beams. I ignored them and got him into the Control room and up onto the hospital table and slapped a medigrip on the worst of the spots, his broken-shattered leg where the bone was white and stark. Then I did something to put him out. He went. Then I collapsed.

VII

I was thinking of the funeral.

The funeral. The one with presidents and ministers and secretaries of this or that, representing these or those, all decked out and solemn in black and respect. It was the biggest funeral ever, somebody had said. Everyone who was anyone, everywhere that was anywhere, had somebody, a Somebody, in attendance. Nobody wanted to miss the funeral.

It was Kent’s funeral.

Like most people I had watched it. It had been carried on the Fleet beam, no less, and perhaps had the largest audience for any event in history. Such a man! Such a hero! Everybody’s Hero! I had felt pretty much the same way. I hadn’t known any better.

What a man….

Funny the things you think about when you’re tired and scared and only have a second or two to rest.

Which was all I had. Half stimules and half painers, I had managed to get Holly and me pretty much fixed up. Medigrips and medipacks everywhere over the cuts and contusions and abrasions. There was a disquieting, and possibly crucial, amount of blood over us. But I figured we would live until they killed us.

Lya called. I was too numb to think not to answer.

She hated me, of course. And she blamed me. For Holly still being there, to begin with. Maybe for him ever being there. And I was a liar too, for not calling her back like I had said I would. True, true, all of it true. All of it and more. I smoked and listened in silence, staring not at her but at the view of Borglyn’s console which he had so generously and sadistically continued to provide.

We were really screwed. They had the whole riverfront laid out, staked out. They were ready for us. They were waiting for us. They had us.

Shit.

Something in Lya’s tone had changed, I realized distantly. I looked up to see the same tears and the same aching pain. But something else had been added. Resignation. Acceptance. Whatever we wanted to do….

Huh?

“…should have realized you would never give into them. And Holly… I guess I knew all along, from that first moment when we got here to the valley and he wasn’t with us. He’s just too good a man.” She paused, whimpered, pulled herself together. She smiled weakly at me. “And you, too, Jack. You’re both too good.”

I stared. Then I mumbled something back about, well, t’weren’t nuthin’. But I was thinking what I had thought long ago—how long ago? A month?—when she had first accepted me along with all the rest of the Jack Crow smoke.

You’re a fool, Lya. Still a fool to trust me.

It made no difference that now, when it wasn’t going to help, when it was far too late for that, that she could trust me. It made no difference that I would never leave him now. It made no difference that I was about to die with him and for him.

She was still a fool. So were we all.

I was about to key off when she said, no, there was someone else who wanted to talk to me.

Karen. Dry-eyed and stone faced and good-bye, Jack.

But too dry-eyed. Too stone-faced. It was on her, too. And because of that, I guess, as much as anything else, it sank upon me at last. It was over, ever, over. We were dead.

“I lo… Good-bye, Jack,” she said and I saw the tears coming at last.

I nodded, feeling my eyes heating up and leaned forward to key off. Her face became alarmed suddenly, and she asked one last thing. She asked me to tell her that I wasn’t doing this for her in any way.

I said I wasn’t. Straight-faced and not lying much. Then I keyed off.

Borglyn began to laugh.

I looked up, startled, then furious. He was back at the console. He had been listening in.

“A peeping torn now?” I asked him. Snarled at him.

He continued to laugh. It was a deep, powerful laugh. Like the rest of him.

It unnerved me. But I lashed out as if it didn’t, about how he might as well listen in to me while he could and then in on others later because he sure as hell wouldn’t have anybody of his own from now on. Not unless you count the daughter of somebody he was beating to death in another room.

“She’ll do it, Borglyn.” I was really rolling now. “She’ll do it to keep Poppa alive but she’ll hate you. She’ll want to throw up when those fat pig hands and that fat pig body…”

He cut me off with his raging. I had hit something.

“Don’t give this to me, Pig. Give it to her. But don’t expect it to keep her from vomiting into those blue eyes. You’re dead and gray and laid open and she’ll see it.”

He was very quiet.

“Is it worth it?” I asked him and smiled ugly through dry caked lips. “Is it worth what you’ve done to be what you’re gonna have to be for the rest of your life?”

He was still quiet. And something else. I remembered the look he had given me that last moment in the ship when he had laughed with such bitterness about Banshee. I had thought Banshee was destroyed and he had laughed in that way that looked like it hurt.

But not now. No help from that now, godammit!

“And don’t start on that damned war, Borglyn! A lot of people came through that war.”

He was excited again. And angry. “You don’t know anything about it, Crow!” he roared. “You… you damned adolescent! You don’t know anything about what it was like, what it meant, how….”

His voice trailed off.

“I know one thing, Borglyn. I know it when I see it. And it’s you.”

His eyes went wide, confused. Vulnerable.

“You’re the damned war, Borglyn. You and your punks are now. You see any other ants around here?”

He was quiet for a beat or two. Then he leaned forward to the monitor and spoke in a dead voice. Bright red dead.

“You’re gone, Crow. Gone. I don’t care if you try to give up now or not. Either way, I’m gonna see you stretched and bleeding.”

And then I was standing up from my stool and yelling at him and shaking my fist at the screen and saying there wasn’t much chance of that when he was in orbit and safe and hiding and… and still running away from the fighting.

Borglyn screaming back that, by God, he oughta come down there and show me just what the hell fighting really was….

And I shouted louder, shouted over his fury and outrage with fury and outrage of my own and more, with the fear the sight of him gave me. “You come down here, Pig, and I’ll cut them off and bounce them on the bridge.”

Goddammit! He was coming right now\ And he yelled at somebody to take her down and then he whirled back to glare at me and together, against each other, we reached up and keyed off.

Men are so cute.

I woke Holly. Borglyn was sure to lighten a bit on the way down. And it was never going to be a case of dueling pistols anyway. I was going to have to get to him on my own. But he would be there! He would be on the planet and in range of some kind of chance, some kind of scheme….

I laughed. The Plan had raised its throbbing head at last.

Holly refused unless he could play too. He looked at me with those bloodshot darting eyes and refused. He was pale and shaking and hurt. But still he wouldn’t.

“You’re gonna have to have some support fire, Jack. You haven’t got a chance without it.”

“Dammit, Holly! I haven’t a chance anyway. Stay out of it. Just show me how to blow what’s left of the outer room and…”I got a bad thought. “What about after that? Will I be able to get the door open once I’ve blown the bastards in front of it?”

He smiled weakly. “The door will spring,” he assured me. “I’ll do it for you.”

I stared at him. “No need. Just tell me how.”

“No.”

Damn! So cute.

It took a lot more painers to get him going again. That and stimules. On second thought, I took a bunch myself. Why hold back now? I loaded up on other things, too. On blaze pistols clipped on everywhere. And a rifle with extra charges and a row or two of concussion grenades. Not enough to get me across the river to the Coyote—there weren’t enough in the universe to do that alone—but maybe enough for my little Plan. Maybe enough to get to one of the commandos wearing that open-air armor. Anybody could wear open-air. It wasn’t like Felix’s specially built black suit. And once I had that on, and with perhaps a break or two…

And then we were at the door, me loaded down with goodies and Holly equally burdened with two blaze-rifles and the medigrips piled around his leg and other places, making him walk bowlegged behind. I didn’t want to waste any time on the off-chance that Borglyn would tell them I was coming out. I didn’t think he would mink of it. But still, I knew the people outside would never expect it.

I stood crouched before the door and nodded to Holly, by the panel. He keyed the blast. It shook the floor and the door. It blew, according to Holly, the outer room, floors and ceiling and gash and commandos down the hill toward or in the river. It was very loud.

“Now spring the door,” I urged him. I didn’t want to wait an instant for them to recover.

Holly nodded. He keyed the switch for “open.” That’s all it took. I snarled at him as I raced forward. He laughed and stumbled along behind.

The Plan was for me to rash out ahead to find cover. Then I would support Holly’s exit against any resistance that might be left from the first blast. Holly could thereafter support my charge down the hill over the ridge.

We never had a prayer.

The blast had done its job well enough. There was no sign of the front chamber except for the huge chunks of masonry scattered about. As I leaped forward to the first boulder-sized one, however, I knew it was over.

They were waiting at the ridge, safe and secure and already firing, already filling the air with the arcing grenades. I spun around to yell at Holly to stop! “Stay where you are! Holly! I’m coming back in….”

But then it was too late. The first blasts hit and we both went down. I saw him slammed against a jagged cornice and lay stunned. I tried crawling toward him but then the air was full of blue beams and dust from the blasts. I felt a surge of heat along my thigh and jerked it out of the open. I couldn’t get across the open space to him. I was cut off. But he was exposed! He was open to their fire and the blasts, without any protection at all but a difficult angle up from the ridge.

The ridges. The other side opened up about then. And then from two sides the air was filled with beams and grenades and dust and slamming rocking noise. I tried crawling back to him, curled up around myself to ward off the dust and rock that rattled against the surrounding rubble. But it was no good. No way to get back without being struck by the flying shards. No way to stay. No way to do anything. So I crawled and stumbled forward and things crashed into me, cutting and tearing and crushing and I yelled to Holly that I was sorry, sorry, so sorry that I wasn’t going to make it to help him, I was dying and sorry and Holly? Can you hear me?

Suddenly moving quickly, sliding roughly across the broken stones. Holly? But Holly was there beside me, sliding along parallel and… What the hell? I strained to lift my head, to see who had us by our collars. But then he no longer did. We were inside the second room once more and he had dropped us flopping on the floor and turned to re-seal the door.

It was Lewis. It was the drunk. He was sober. I remembered the hatch.

He didn’t bother to take us all the way back to the Control-room table. He left us lying where we were and used the medical supplies stacked against the wall.

“Lewis?” asked Holly suddenly.

I turned, surprised and delighted to see he was still alive. “Holly! You made it!”

He grinned, winced from the pain. “Why not? You did,” he asked.

Then we both laughed.

Lewis did not. He didn’t speak at all, in fact. He tended to us in grim silence, darting back and forth from body to body with grips and packs and an air of urgency. We weren’t much help. Too tired and too hurt and, come to think of it, too amazed at being alive.

When it was over and we were going to live for another short while, he sat us up against the wall and gave us some water. Then he hauled over a chair and sat down and lit a cigarette and looked at us with that same grim expression, of a parent furious with naughty children, and asked: “Why?”

Holly tried to tell him. About Borglyn using mortars on the Cityfolk again and again and about how horrible that was and what it meant. About how Borglyn would be so hated now that he would have to be even more brutal later on and how, no, we didn’t think we could beat him exactly, but slowing him down would surely mean something….

He interrupted once. In a cold tone he nodded at me. “All this for you, too?”

I nodded, feeling strangely embarrassed.

Holly seemed embarrassed, too. He went on, really wanting Lewis to understand.

“It has to be done, Lewis.”

Lewis sighed. “It always does, Holly. That’s no reason to do it.”

“But all those people!”

“What about them?”

Holly frowned, stuck. He turned to me. But I couldn’t think either. He turned back to Lewis.

“Lewis, there just isn’t anyone else? Can’t you see that?”

He stood up, walked a couple of steps. He puffed a puff. He looked down at us. “Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

Holly faced him. “I just didn’t see any way out, Lewis. I still don’t.”

Lewis frowned. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t,” replied Holly in an odd tone.

I looked at him. Tears were starting from his eyes. I shook my head. What the hell was going on?

And then Lewis was there, right in front of us and crouched down and peering at us with eyes I didn’t know he possessed and he said: “You can’t? Neither of you? You don’t see any way out?”

We shook our heads. And then Holly said, in a calm clear voice: “There isn’t one.”

Lewis dropped his face into his hands. He rubbed it hard.

But then, when he lifted it back up, the grimness had gone. It was replaced with… what? Reckless abandon?

He smiled. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

Then he stood up and stripped off his jumpsuit. He was naked underneath. I heard a groan behind me. I looked and saw that Holly was openly crying now. He must have known then.

But I didn’t until Lewis walked naked to the far corner of the room and did something that only one human creature in all the universe could do. He touched his open palm to that of the black suit—and it opened.

Felix.

VIII

It couldn’t be.

“I want to know how come you’re not dead!” I demanded idiotically.

Lewis/Felix laughed. It was that same carefree abandon as before. Then he winked at me. “You got a couple of minutes?” he asked, indicating the door to the outside.

That wasn’t what I meant. I said so. Holly helped. He asked about Kent.

“Kent’s dead,” was the uncarefree reply.

“I know that. He died on Banshee. But what I…”

“He didn’t die on Banshee. He died on the Terra.”

We looked at each other. I went this time. “Lew… Felix? Is it Felix?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

“We thought Kent killed you.”

He frowned. “He saved me. They killed him.”

“Who?”

“Fleet,” he said in a dead voice and knelt down to fiddle with the suit. It had sprung, spread-eagled open, off the wheelchair onto the floor.

In a hurried voice, Holly told him what we meant, why we had thought what we thought. When he got to the part about immersing, Felix cringed.

“You really did that? You went through the whole thing with me?”

Holly said we had. “Except between drops. But everything in the suit.”

Felix shuddered. “Still…” He shuddered again, made an effort to regain his former humor. “I hope you guys had more fun than I did,” he said and laughed.

We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t want to say anything. But we had to know. Holly told him about being there when Kent had struck him and then everything going blank, the Alpha readings dropping out of sight.

Felix smiled. “I can see your problem. But all that happened was that Kent popped my suit when he hit me. I guess he was afraid I would struggle or something. As if it would have made any difference. Damn! but that man was strong.”

We nodded, watching in silence as he continued to both talk and work the suit.

“Then he put me in a ship. It was… He’d stolen it from someone I…”

“From Allie?” Holly prompted.

Felix looked at him, surprised. Then he nodded slowly. “That’s right. You know everything. The whole story.”

I really wanted to disappear. But Holly didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed.

“Everything in the suit,” he said.

Felix nodded back. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and regarded it lovingly. Then he tossed it away.

“Kent put me on the ship and sent me off, still in his armor the whole time. When they tried to find out what was going on, he blocked them.” Felix stared, remembering. His voice was very quiet when next he spoke. “I saw what happened from the port. They cut him in half.” He shrugged, almost violently. “But I was long gone by then. To here.”

“And all this time…?” I wondered aloud.

He smiled. “All this time. Have I got water? I notice I’ve got everything else.”

Holly nodded. “Fully operational.”

I looked at him. “Why?”

He blushed, looked at Felix. “I suppose you think that’s sick.”

Felix grinned, then laughed, then giggled wildly, almost falling over. “Holly? How the hell would I know?”

Then he lay down in the suit. And it closed over him. Then they both stood up.

It was terrifying.

“Is… is it all right?” Holly stuttered.

The black helmet nodded. The amplified voice was harsh and deep. It echoed loudly. “It hurts. I’m out of shape.”

He walked loudly and heavily over to the seal and paused with a huge black finger poised over the panel. “Just key it open?”

Holly nodded.

I tried to pull myself up, slipped back down. “Felix…?”

“What?” boomed back, not unpleasantly.

“Uh… nothing. Later.”

“Later,” he echoed. I couldn’t read it.

He sighed loudly, electronically. “I wish you could smoke in here.” Then he pushed the key and the door opened and he was gone. We heard the blasts begin almost at once. The door, set to close behind him, cut out everything afterward.

“Come on,” shrilled Holly, stumbling across the floor to the Control room. “I want to see.”

I followed. So did I.

It took us a long time to clamber inside and get the panel working. Our own monitors were long evaporated by battle. And Borglyn had cut us off before. So we missed a lot of it. But Holly managed to jump into Borglyn’s signal anyway. We tried several angles, but none of them got what we wanted.

Finally, we managed to get our old perspective, from the monitor over Borglyn’s shoulder. We could see what he could see. It was great.

Felix was incredible.

He was everywhere at once. Borglyn couldn’t keep track of him cleanly from his monitors. There were just scattered images. Bodies flying through the air… blaze-bombs or grenades exploding with no one around… blazers cutting off abruptly, shattered and bent… Felix steaming right at the monitor as he reached the edge of the river and leaped across it, all twenty-something meters of it…

Then the main camp scurrying about and the mortars going off and somebody yelling in a high-pitched strident tone of growing terror that there were no targets, where the hell was he and….

“Omigod! There, there, there!”

Felix was great!

Borglyn, on the other hand, was terrified.

“Lift! Lift, goddammit!” he yelled to one and all and the Coyote began to rise.

One of his henchmen, in the Control room with him, said something about running scared and the sumbitch not being able to hurt a starship anyway.

Borglyn hit him, a loud back-handed smack across the face. “You said he’d never get across the river! Lift!”

But the ship was already rising, a few meters up already and then I heard Holly hiss beside me, “No!” as we both saw the black suit still coming, loping incredibly fast across the ground. And I knew what he meant. I knew what he feared.

And Borglyn knew what to do.

“All tacticals,” he yelled to unseen crew around him. “Discharge them all at once. Now!”

On the screens the wall of fire blocked the sight of everything as it swept down across the camp, boiling the mortars and the commandos and the land and everything else.

Then the view was eclipsed by interference as the Coyote vaulted suddenly upward into Sanction’s sky.

I just sat there.

But Holly evidently could not. He began to furiously work the keys, trying blindly, desperately, to restore our view. He almost got it a couple of times, though not well and not clearly. And our fix on the monitor we wanted was clearly lost. We got random snowy pictures from all over the ship, corridors and bulkheads. No sound. No pattern. And no hope. The ship was pulling out of our range.

But that was the least of it anyway. I reached a hand over and lay it gently on Holly’s. I couldn’t stand to see him torture himself, or me, by trying for….

He went stiff when the screen went sharp and clear.

I looked where he looked.

The image was from the outer portside monitor. It showed the length of the outer hull illuminated against the backdrop of daytime Sanction. And silhouetted against that, right in the center of it….

The black suit had one plassteel hand gripped vise-tight on a warp bleeder conduit. The other was clenched into a black fist that hurtled toward the monitor’s single eye.

And then all was dark.