Deadman Switch

Chapter 36

We were forty-five minutes out from Solitaire, three-quarters of the way to the alien fleet, when our luck ran out.

There was no warning at all that I could see—nothing in Adams's face or body language that preceded it. One minute he was sitting at the Deadman Switch, glazed eyes staring tautly into space; the next minute, there was the crack of circuit breakers, gravity abruptly vanished, and Adams was gasping frantically for breath.

We reached him at the same time, Kutzko jamming the oxygen inhaler we'd brought over his nose and mouth as I searched his face for other symptoms.

It didn't look good.

"I'm all... all right," Adams managed after a couple of tense minutes under pure oxygen. "Just let... me catch my... breath, okay?"

Kutzko turned to me. "How is he?"

I took a careful breath of my own. "Not in any immediate danger, I don't think," I said. Before Aaron Balaam darMaupine and the paranoia that had followed in his wake, Watchers had sometimes been employed by hospitals as complements to the standard medical sensors. Fleetingly, I wished some of that specialized training had been available to me. "Heartbeat's stabilizing, and blood pressure seems all right. Brain functions..." I peered into Adams's eyes. "Pupils are responding normally, and... I don't see any evidence of pain."

"Nothing hurts," Adams confirmed, still somewhat short of breath. "Just give me a few... more minutes to rest."

I looked up to find Kutzko's eyes on me... and I knew what he was thinking. "We can do the rest of the trip in shorter stages," I told him firmly. "We're only fifteen minutes or so from the alien fleet—we can let him rest up and then go on."

"What about your talk with the Invaders?" he countered. "You going to confine that to fifteen-minute chunks, too?"

"If need be, yes," I said, keeping my voice steady. The lie was an unnecessary caution, perhaps, with the thunderheads presumably no longer listening in... but with so much hanging in the balance, I preferred unnecessary caution to unnecessary chances.

How easily I'd learned, and learned to rationalize, the art of lying. There are ways that some think straight, but they lead in the end to death... "Besides," I added to Kutzko, hurrying to get my mind off that thought, "any talking I do with the aliens will necessarily be chopped into short segments. They'll be shooting past us at twelve percent lightspeed, remember?"

He grimaced, but for the moment at least he seemed willing to trust me. "All right," he said at last. "We'll give him some time—maybe give him another shot of Dr. Eisenstadt's fancy mixture. See how quickly he recovers."

I glanced at Adams; but if he'd heard the unspoken and if not in Kutzko's tone, he gave no indication of it. "Agreed," I nodded, my stomach tightening. And if not... then either Kutzko or I wouldn't be returning to Solitaire.

—

We waited a little more than an hour... an hour that will forever remain etched on my memory.

Not for anything in particular that happened. On the contrary, the most dominant feature of that time was its extreme boredom. Wrapped in our own individual thoughts and fears about what lay ahead, none of us really felt like talking; and with our equipment already set up there was absolutely nothing for any of us to do. I don't know how many times I floated past the board, studying the never-changing indicators, or how many minutes I spent at the viewport, looking out at the stars and straining my eyes to try and follow the contours of our tethered rocheoid in their dim light.

But what I did mainly was fight against terror.

Not fear. Fear I'd expected, and had been more or less prepared for. But as the minutes ticked by, and I ran out of other things with which to occupy my mind, I began to focus more and more on the image of the alien ships rushing inexorably down on us. It did no good to remind myself that they were two years away at their normal-space speed—my gut instincts had already latched firmly onto the fact that, as far as we were concerned, they were a bare fifteen minutes away. It was a totally irrational terror, but reminding myself of that did nothing except make me too ashamed of myself to try and talk it out with the others. More than once I told myself that the thunderheads might be behind at least some of the emotion, amplifying my feelings as they had back in the Pravilo cell on Solitaire. But this time, even that knowledge didn't help.

And so, for an hour, I suffered; alone, bored, terrified, and ashamed. It was like a foretaste of hell... and as close as I ever again want to be.

Which probably also explains why, when Adams finally decided he was ready, I immediately agreed to let him do so. I've often wondered whether things would have worked out differently if I'd been more cautious.

—

"You will reach the Inva... ders in three minutes," the thunderhead whispered through Adams's lips. "What are your instructions?"

My throat was dry enough to hurt. Against all odds—against all opposition—we'd made it. Now it was in my hands alone. "Stop us here," I ordered, "as close to being in the path of the lead ship as possible. If you can control our position that accurately, that is."

"I can," the thunderhead hissed, and I got the distinct impression I'd just stepped on his pride. I'd rather thought he would take it that way; hopefully, that would translate into the pinpoint accuracy I needed. Holding my breath, I watched as Adams's hands moved to make a slight correction in the course; then, with a crack of circuit breakers, gravity vanished and the stars once again appeared in the viewport.

We were there.

"All right," I said, fighting to keep my voice from trembling. "Now. Pay attention to this, thunderhead, because this part is crucial." I pulled myself over to Adams and indicated an instrument Kutzko and I had wired into the main board. "This device is measuring the magnetic field strength outside the tug," I explained. "Magnetic fields are what the Invaders are using to scoop hydrogen into their ships' engines, and fields of that strength can be dangerous to our species. You understand?"

"Yes," he whispered.

"Good. Now, this has been set to give you a short—a very short—warning before the strength gets to dangerous levels. When the red light here goes on—" I touched the test button to demonstrate—"you must immediately take us back into Mjollnir space. Understand?—immediately."

"I understand," the thunderhead said.

I desperately hoped so; Lord Kelsey-Ramos's best estimate was that the red light would give us barely three seconds to get out of the aliens' way. A tape-thin margin for error; though at the speed the fleet was making, I suppose we were lucky to get even that much warning. "Good," I told the thunderhead, trying to sound confident in his abilities. "You watch the light while I get this transmitter ready to go."

I moved to the comm gear we'd set up, watching Adams out of the corner of my eye... and I had no trouble catching the thunderhead's sudden surprise. "You are already pre... pared to signal the In... vaders?" he asked.

"Well, of course I've got to tune this thing first," I said off-handedly. "After that, I'll need you to tell me exactly what to say. You did tell me you could communicate with them, didn't you?"

Some of the thunderhead's nervousness left Adams's body. "Yes," he whispered. "We have promised to give... you whatever aid is... necessary."

I nodded, as if I really believed the face value of the words, and turned to the comm. "Okay, now. Let's see..."

I had asked Lord Kelsey-Ramos for the most sophisticated equipment he could get, and he'd taken me doubly at my word. The comm gear, for all its compact size, was a virtual catalog of dials, setting switches, readouts, and adjustments. I fiddled busily with them, keeping a careful eye on Adams and the red light sitting in front of him. If the warning came and the thunderhead didn't notice—

Abruptly the light flicked on. "Thun—" I started to shout; and then gravity returned and we were once again safe in Mjollnir space.

I took a shuddering breath, fighting to banish the vivid image of flaming death hurtling down on me. "That was very good, thunderhead," I managed. "Well. That came sooner than I expected, somehow. Where are we headed?"

"Outward," Adams whispered. "Beyond the Invaders."

"Come back around, please," I instructed him. "Put us back in front of the lead ship, again three to four minutes ahead of them."

"Why in front of them?" Kutzko asked. "Why can't we sit off to the side where we won't have to worry about them slamming into us?"

My stomach knotted; sternly, I willed it to relax. "Because that would generate too many complicated Doppler effects," I explained with the casual sincerity I'd learned so well how to wrap my lies in. "From here in front, there's just one constant effect for them to unscramble. Or there will be, anyway," I amended, "once I get this thing working."

"Let me help," Kutzko offered, stepping forward. The step became a lazy arc as the circuit breakers again snapped and the Mjollnir drive kicked off. He cursed under his breath, flailing for something to grab onto. "Can we at least turn off that blazing pseudograv?" he growled. "This flip-flop stuff is going to get one of us a broken neck."

"No!" I snapped as Adams's hand moved to obey. "I want it left on."

"Why?" Kutzko frowned.

I bit down hard on my lip, searching furiously for a reason he couldn't argue with... and finding one. "Because the story that we spun for Lieutenant Grashchik wasn't just froth, that's why," I told him. "We don't know how the thunderhead control would be affected by zero-gee, and I'd rather fight some extra nausea than risk losing position. Speaking of which, thunderhead, where are we?"

"Approximately two... minutes in front of the... Invaders," he whispered.

I'd asked for three or four. So much for pinpoint accuracy. "Okay," I said. "Don't forget to keep watching that light."

"I will. Are you ready for our... assistance yet?"

I hissed between my teeth. "Not even close. Hang on—let me figure out how to do this..."

In my peripheral vision I saw Kutzko raise an astonished eyebrow. "Are you telling me you spent four days on the Bellwether learning how to run that thing and still haven't got it down?"

"Look, just shut up and let me work, all right?" I snarled at him. "I know what I'm doing—it's just going to take a little time."

Kutzko glanced at Adams, back at me. Still more or less willing to trust me; but that trust was eroding fast. "You know, if it's going to take this long," he pointed out, "we could skip this three-minute stuff and pull back a decent distance—say, an hour or so—and do it there. I'd hate to have the thunderhead miss his cue before you even get that blazing thing working."

"It's not going to take that long," I shot back, tension adding more snap to my voice than was probably called for. Without knowing it, Kutzko was skating perilously close to the truth, and the last thing I could afford was for the thunderheads to catch on to what I was really up to. "It'll take just another minute to get this going, okay?"

"Fine," Kutzko said, his patience starting to go the way of his trust. "I just hope it won't take you this blazing long to find the right frequency to send on. Or to figure out what you're going to say to them."

"I hopefully won't have to find a specific frequency," I growled. "This is a multispectrum transmitter—that's one of the reasons the adjustments are so tricky. And as for what I'm going to say, I'm going to transmit a simple greeting from the Patri and then repeat it in the language the thunderheads will give us. Then we'll pull back and wait for a reply. You happy now?"

His reply was cut off by the sudden return of gravity. "Right," Kutzko nodded, his voice hard. "Just another minute, huh?"

Deliberately, I turned my back on him. "Sorry, thunderhead, but I guess we'll have to do this again. Same thing, all right?"

"Very... well," he sighed. His voice—

I spun around, muscles tensing. A single glance was all it took to confirm what my ears had already told me: Adams was starting to lose it. We would have to get off the aliens' course right away, give him time to recover. "Thunderhead—"

But it was too late. The circuit breakers snapped and gravity vanished... and Adams gasped for breath.

Kutzko shot past me toward Adams, braking himself with a hand on the helm chair as the other hand snatched the oxygen inhaler from its grip and jammed it against Adams's face. "How far?" he snapped. "Come on, Adams—how for are we ahead of them?"

"Th—three mi... min... utes," Adams panted.

Kutzko looked over the helm chair at me... and for the first time since I'd known him, there was genuine fear in his eyes. Fear... and resignation. "Three minutes," he murmured. "Three minutes... and we're all dead."