She ignored him, pulling open a steel cabinet and withdrawing a large white plastic box. ‘Medical kit,’ she explained. ‘We’ll need to dress that wound.’
Saul gazed down at Lester’s slumped form, with a feeling of hopelessness, as Amy hurriedly pulled off her helmet and dropped it to one side.
Saul pulled off his own damaged helmet too, then helped her remove Lester’s. Tears trickled down her cheeks, as she murmured Lester’s name over and over again, like a litany. Lester’s head rolled to one side, his jaw slack and his eyes vacant.
‘Amy, please, listen to me.’
She began weeping in earnest. ‘We can get him to a hospital in Copernicus,’ she insisted. ‘Someone might still be there, someone who can . . .’
Saul stared down at Lester’s lifeless features. ‘It’s too late for that.’
Amy sniffed and reached up to pinch away the tears gathering around her eyes. She stood up abruptly, the medical kit slipping from her grasp. ‘I don’t understand . . . why did he do this? He tried to kill you, too.’
‘I don’t know,’ Saul replied, reaching out with two gloved fingers to close Lester’s eyes.
Amy kneeled on her seat, her face twisted in anguish, as she stared down at her husband. ‘Listen to me, Saul,’ she said eventually, her voice hoarse. ‘There are some auxiliary suits.’
‘There are?’ Saul felt a sudden stab of hope.
Amy nodded listlessly and touched one gloved hand to Lester’s cheek. ‘ou can get yourself another helmet belonging to one of them.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath, and then stood up as straight as possible. Her eyes, blazing with anger, met Saul’s. ‘I want you to kill him, do you hear me?’
‘Amy . . .’
‘No, dammit, I want him dead.’
Saul tried to think of something to say. ‘I need to find out why he did this, and if I kill him, I can’t do that.’
Her gloved fists clenched themselves by her sides. She might be an old woman now, but Saul suddenly saw just how very formidable she must have been in her youth.
‘Then make damn sure he never gets as far as the colonies,’ she hissed in a half-whisper.
The spare suits were located in a locker hidden beneath a floor panel at the rear. Amy helped him pull out a new helmet.
‘Now listen up,’ she said. ‘We’ve landed a couple of klicks south-east of the Lunar Array. Any normal day, we’d wind up in jail for flying anywhere near this close to it.’ She retrieved the rifle from where she’d propped it against a bulkhead. ‘Here, you’re going to need this thing when you go after Mitchell.’
Saul searched her eyes as he took it from her. ‘Why in God’s name would you need something like this on board a tourist craft?’ he asked. ‘You could have blown a hole in the lander and killed all of us, not just Mitchell.’
‘It’s an insurance policy.’
‘Insurance against what?’
An uncomfortable look crossed her face. ‘Against getting caught.’
‘You were smuggling, is that it?’
‘Not necessarily in this bird. In the VASIMRs, mostly. Things got tight a few years back, and we were on the verge of going under. This way, we can slip all kinds of stuff past customs and fly it straight back home without going anywhere near Florida. People, sometimes, too.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess telling you this doesn’t matter now.’
‘So what were you planning on doing, if you got caught? Have a shoot-out with the ASI?’
Amy made a sound of irritation. ‘Officials we can pay off, but we had competitors – sometimes very vicious ones. We thought they might plant someone on board, a ringer of some kind, so . . .’ She gestured at the rifle. ‘You should realize that thing’s designed to work in a vacuum.’
Saul nodded. He rather suspected that the rifle, when disassembled, might look, to the casual eye, like nothing more than random components of normal onboard equipment.
She squinted at him. ‘You’d figured this out already, hadn’t you?’
‘I had a feeling, yes.’ He lifted up the helmet and paused before sliding it on. ‘You’d better put on your own helmet, if we’re going.’
She laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’d only slow you down.’
‘You need to get to the city, Amy. Your friends will be waiting for you.’
She nodded slowly, with a look of desperate sadness in her eyes that Saul recognized. It was the same way he himself had looked on the day the Galileo wormhole had collapsed.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I need to stay here with Lester. Just for a little while longer.’
‘Amy . . .’
‘No.’ Her expression was stony. ‘Go find him now, before he gets away.’
TWENTY-NINE
Lunar Array, 11 February 2235
Saul pocketed some extra ammunition that Amy gave him, her mouth pursed all the while in a thin line. By the time she had depressurized the lander again, Mitchell had already gained half an hour’s head-start.
