Mindscan

34

I stood at the back of the central aisle of the moonbus, and looked at my three hostages—damn, I hated that word!

“Honestly,” I said, “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“But you will if you have to,” said Brian Hades. “That’s what you told Smythe.”

“Smythe won’t let it go that far,” I said. “I know he won’t.”

But Hades shook his head, his white hair glinting in the recessed roof lighting. “He has to let it go that far. Immortex has hundreds of billions invested in this uploading technology—and it’s all predicated on the assumption that the durable copy becomes the real you. We can’t let that … that conceit … be successfully challenged. Not by you here, and not by anyone down there on Earth. Fortunes are at stake. Lives—uploaded lives—are at stake.”

Hades got up out of his chair, but he seemed just to be stretching his long legs. He glanced at Akiko and Chloe, then turned back to me. “Look, there’s no law up here—no police, no governments. So you haven’t committed a crime. And I heard what Smythe said—there are extenuating circumstances. Your surgery—”

“Bet you wish you’d had me killed on the operating table!”

Hades spread his arms. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “You’re not responsible. Just give me the piton gun, and walk away from this. Immortex won’t do anything to you; there’ll be no repercussions. You can end this right now.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’d like to, but I don’t know any other way to get what I want—what I deserve.”

“God, you are so selfish,” said Akiko. “I can’t believe they picked you.”

I felt my eyes narrowing. “Picked me? Picked me for what?”

But Akiko ignored that. “What about us? Look at what you’re doing to us!”

“They’re not going to force a situation in which people might get hurt,” I said.

“No?” said Akiko. “How long do you think they’ll let you hold all of High Eden hostage? How long before the other residents start to panic? They have to put an end to this.”

“It’s going to be fine,” I said. “I promise.”

Now Chloe was speaking: “You promise? What the hell is that worth?”

I moved a bit closer to the two women; I so wanted to calm them, to reassure them.

Suddenly, Hades leapt. It’s a myth that people move in slow motion on the moon: objects fall in slow motion, but if you kick off the floor with all your strength, you’ll go flying like a bat out of Philadelphia. Hades was five meters away, but his leap easily carried him that distance, and when he collided with me, I went flying backwards, ramming against the moonbus’s rear bulkhead.

Suddenly, the two women were in motion, as well. Akiko was out of her chair and also leaping toward us. Chloe grabbed a metal equipment case and came bounding at us, looking as though she intended to brain me with it.

I still had the gun held tightly in my right hand. But Hades had pinned that arm against the bulkhead, keeping me from getting a shot at him or either of the women.

Desperate times call for desperate deeds…

I swiveled my wrist as much as I could and fired a piton. Here, in the cabin, the report of the gun was deafening. Almost instantly, the piton hit its target. I’d wanted to just drill a hole through the outer hull, but I hadn’t been able to aim well. The piton hit a window, going through the vinyl shade in front of it as if it were tissue paper, and breaking the glass beyond. Air started hissing out of the cabin, and a whoop-whoop-whoop alarm began to sound. The shade, with a small hole in it was puckering outward. From the sounds of it, the tempered glass behind it had shattered completely, and the only thing that was keeping the atmosphere from rushing out in a torrent was the little hole in the shade that it had to go through.

We were all looking at the vinyl shade now, watching it bow outward more and more. Any moment now, it would be torn loose by the rush of escaping atmosphere, exposing the whole empty window pane; when that happened, the cabin would lose all its air in a matter of seconds.

Hades looked totally furious, and his pony tail was whipping out horizontally behind his head in the breeze. He still wanted to keep me pinned, but he knew if he didn’t do something soon, we’d all die. With a frustrated shout of “Damn it!” he let go of me and called to the women, “Hurry! Find stuff to cover the window with!”

The vinyl shade was visibly tearing at its edges, and air was pouring out even more rapidly. Chloe, momentarily hesitating between beating me to death with the metal box she was holding and saving herself, dropped the box, which obligingly fell in slo-mo before clanking against the floor and bouncing up half a meter, then falling again. She moved over to the nearest chair, and tried pulling up the seat cushion—but, of course, moonbuses never flew over water; their cushions weren’t removable flotation devices.

Akiko, meanwhile, had gone for the first-aid kit, hanging on the wall next to the entrance to the cockpit. She scrambled to get it open, and found a package of gauze. It was doubtless less solid than she’d have liked, but she rammed some of it into the hole in the vinyl shield.

But, although the roar of escaping air diminished somewhat, that didn’t do anything for the fact that the vinyl was still tearing loose at its edges. I thought about getting everybody to cram into the cockpit; the door to it looked air-tight. Indeed, Hades had already gone in there. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to lock the door shut behind him, saving himself while leaving us to suffocate. But he emerged a moment later—with a large, laminated moon map! He rushed to the window, and—just as the vinyl blind blew out—spread out the map, and held it as tightly as he could against the curving bulkhead. It was being sucked up against the wall, but the fit wasn’t exact; air kept hissing out.

Akiko found adhesive tape in the first-aid kit, and started sealing the edges around the map. Meanwhile, I got all the tubes of suit-repair goop, and tossed them to Chloe, who started squirting that around the map’s edges, too. Hades still had his arms spread out, holding the map.

The videophone was signaling an incoming call. God knows how long it had been doing that; until the roar of escaping atmosphere abated, we couldn’t have heard it. Keeping the piton gun leveled at Hades’s back, I moved over and accepted the call. “Sullivan.”

“Mr. Sullivan, my God, is everyone all right?” It was Smythe’s voice, panic edging the cultured tones.

Chloe had almost finished sealing the edges of the map. Hades relaxed his crucifixion pose, and turned around to face me. His gray eyebrows went up as he saw the gun aimed directly at his heart.

“Yes,” I said. “Everything’s fine … for the moment. We, ah, sprung a leak.”

Another voice—one I knew—came on. “Jacob, this Quentin Ashburn. You’re still plugged into High Eden’s life-support system. It’s not designed to rapidly repressurize a moonbus, but your air pressure should return to normal in about an hour, assuming the leak is contained.

I looked past Hades. Chloe had finished, and the map seemed to be holding in place.

“It is,” I said.

I heard Quentin exhaling noisily. “Good.”

Smythe came back on the line. “What in God’s name happened?”

“Your Mr. Hades tried to rush me, and I had to fire my gun.”

There was silence for a time. “Oh,” said Smythe at last. “Is—is Brian all right?”

“Yes, yes, everyone’s fine. But I hope you know now that I do mean business. What the hell’s happening with getting the other me up here?”

“We’re still trying to reach him. He’s not at his home in Toronto.”

“He’s got a cell phone, for Christ’s sake. The number is—” and I recited it.

“We’ll try that,” said Smythe.

“Do that,” I said, rubbing my temples. “The clock is ticking.”