a look of unmitigated panic on her face.
“Where’s Lenny?” Neil called to her.
“They got him, Uncle Neil! They’re in the house! They came through the dining room window!”
“But Lenny has the detonator. Did you get it from him?”
“I couldn’t, Uncle Neil. He’s dead. I saw it.”
Neil turned to Glenda. “I’ve got to get that detonator. Take the kids to the cave.”
“Neil, if they’re in the house—”
“I’ve got to get it. If they get their hands on all our supplies…”
He ran up the stairs, passing Hanna on the way.
Hanna joined Glenda and the other kids behind the tennis courts. She glanced at Ashley. “She’s dead?”
Her voice was without inflection, as if she were too shocked to react.
No one answered.
“Everyone up to the cave,” said Glenda.
Everybody knew the way, having gone to the cave—the single most interesting landform anywhere around Marblehill—many times before. Melissa led the way. Then it was Morgan, Jake, and Hanna.
Then Fernandes with Ashley over his shoulder. Ashley’s head and arms flopped back and forth against his back. Hanna began to wheeze mildly as she climbed the hill, but was otherwise in much better shape than she had been while traveling to Marblehill. Tears came to Glenda’s eyes as she stared at Ashley.
How could things have gone so bad so quickly? She reached out and touched Ashley’s head. Pulling her hand away, she saw blood. Glenda thought of Louise. And she spoke to Louise under her breath, telling Louise that she was sorry, that she should have tried harder, but that there was nothing she could do now. Louise’s baby, her niece, was dead.
Glenda glanced back at the house and saw Neil disappear through the third-floor door at the top of the fire escape. The VMs came down. Five of them splashed into the pool, and their combined vibrations forced every last ounce of water into the sky, so that for several seconds it rained pool water, and the smell of chlorine filled the air. A couple of VMs fell into the middle of the tennis courts, cracks instantly appeared all over the ground, and three of the high fenceposts sagged toward the middle of the court.
The last VM hit the slope behind the tennis courts, and shook loose a lot of the dead bushes, which then slid to the lawn in a mini avalanche.
Just as the path drew even with the roof of the house, Glenda saw Neil emerge from the third-floor fire exit carrying a large knapsack looped around one shoulder. She heard his footsteps resounding tinnily on the risers of the fire escape as he double-timed it to the ground. At the same time, she saw a half dozen Tarsalans coming around the west side of the house, all of them armed with Earth-made weapons, one of them running so fast he slipped on the pool water and fell on his hip. The others took aim at Neil and fired. Neil went down, but got on all fours and crawled toward the path leading to the cave. Coming on the heels of Ashley’s death, Neil’s wounding made her feel as if all that was good and decent in the universe had suddenly disappeared, and in fact had never been there in the first place. But it also filled her with the raw determination not to fail Louise again.
“Hold it… hold it! Take positions. Neil’s been hit. Let’s cover him.”
Melissa, especially, followed this order instantly, as if the inadvertent boot camp at Marblehill had trained her well. She fired a withering hail of stinging Montclair ordnance into the advancing Tarsalans and killed all but one of them. The last one fled west and took cover behind the house. Morgan was already running down the hill, screaming for her daddy. Neil was up on his feet, but staggering badly as he climbed the path.
“Jake, go with Morgan. Help your uncle Neil. We’ll cover you from here.”
Jake went.
No more Tarsalans came, and they helped Neil up the hill without further mishap.
A perch in front of the cave overlooked the house from a little less than a quarter mile away. Fernandes finally put Ashley down. The girls, including Hanna, fussed over her, and they all cried to varying degrees.
But the men, including Jake, were peering through their night-vision goggles at Marblehill, and Neil now had the detonater in his hand, his hand poised on the plunger. They were all waiting, the three of them, silently poised there, caught in one of those odd, still moments that sometimes happen in the middle of the most dire combat. Glenda peered past them through her own night-vision goggles. Dozens of Tarsalans entered the house. Neil’s elbow flexed…flexed…and it all came down to the timing…. Neil, Fernandes, and Jake balanced there, as if they were team members engaged in a sporting event, waiting to place the puck in the net, or the ball through the hoop…waited…waited until at last Neil shoved the plunger down with a viciousness that seemed to be a summation of all the anger he felt over losing his wife and daughter.
The house went up.
Two seconds later, Neil sat down quickly, weakened by his own blood loss.
37
Gerry gripped the fifth and final singularity drive, conscious that if Mitch hadn’t overdosed himself with barbiturates, his life support would have given out seventeen minutes ago. Gerry had a line around his waist, and this line, attached to Drive Five, slowly settled in a deep arc toward the surface of the asteroid, its fall slow in the weak gravity, as if it settled through molasses. Ian maneuvered around behind, gripping him, fearful of falling off the asteroid. Gerry’s fingers felt stiff from holding the drive so tightly. He was sweating inside his suit, and his smell was ripe because the Tarsalan virus had sabotaged his personal hygiene unit and all his intragenic filters were off- line.
He heard Ian’s stertorous breathing through his suit radio. The sun was to his rear, and Gerry’s shadow was like a piece of black felt on top of the drive.
He glanced toward Ian and saw his old friend latch his safety belt to one of the drive’s maneuvering rings. “How do your crampons feel?”
“Still holding.” Ian sighed. “This is taking so long.”
“Last one.”
“I keep thinking of Mitch, drifting away.”
“We stay professional, like he says.”
“We’ve been going for eighteen hours. We’re punch-drunk tired. We’re going to start making mistakes soon.”
“Last one. Go ahead.”
“I wish we could fight this damn virus.”
“It would be like two men trying to dike a flooding Mississippi.”
Ian withdrew the pneumatic drill from his pack, like pulling a huge white arrow from a giant quiver, brought it down, maneuvered carefully, then glanced at Gerry. Gerry reached over and grabbed onto his arm. Once Ian was convinced Gerry was holding him tightly, he muttered under his breath, “Three, two, one,” and fired the T-bolt through the brace. Both of them tensed up. Gerry watched his monitor as his crampon psi increased tenfold, and was glad that his feet felt as if they were stuck in deep mud. The last one. Ian started to laugh, first a few short guffaws, then a long run of ha-ha-has, as if they had just deviously outsmarted the virus. No sooner had he finished laughing than the right guidelight mounted at the side of his helmet blinked out. They both froze. They braced themselves. Little things were going wrong all the time now. As though everything was going through a quick aging process. Gerry’s left guidelight blinked out, and the little red warning signal on his inside visor screen, retinally focused so that he could see it easily, told him that the virus was now checkmating his means of illumination.
“I don’t get how this virus works,” said Ian.
“And look, it’s nearly night.”
The terminator came at them like a quick and relentless black tide, spilling over the uneven surface like ink. He couldn’t help thinking of the rising tide of barbiturates in Mitch’s bloodstream. Funny the way it worked, but the second the terminator touched them, their remaining guidelights went out, as if the leading edge formed an invisible circuit. The darkness was so complete that he felt as though he was in a coffin. The stink of his own fear came to him like the sharp zest of a lemon. The red light blinked again, and in this darkness he was too afraid to move—
