next?'
'I'll find a way to contact the shuttle. Then I can get home.'
McCowan cackled, shaking his head. 'I can see, even better than you can, how you're thinking. You're like an open book, you know that? With all those things you won't even tell yourself laid bare.'
'Okay, then, just tell me whatever it is you're trying to say, then let me find Draeger.' Kendrick bunched his hands into fists in frustration. Whatever McCowan now told him, in whatever cybernetic realm he currently inhabited, it still felt to him like they were wasting valuable time.
'You're going to try and destroy the Archimedes,' McCowan stated flatly. 'You can't even admit to yourself that you never intended anything else.'
'That's ridiculous.'
'All these years, you've let your hatred for Draeger carry you along. Now here you are, with the chance to destroy the focus of everything he's been working towards. Are you telling me that if you now had such a chance to hurt him, you wouldn't take it?'
'This is me you're talking about!' Kendrick shouted. 'I'm not a murderer like he is! This is bullshit!'
'But do you really understand what's happening here? You've doubted everything you've seen all along, regardless of how many others shared those same experiences. But now you think that you have the opportunity to destroy everything dear to the man you hold responsible for the death of your family. It's not like I blame you for that, but that doesn't mean what you're intending to do is right.'
Kendrick ran towards him. McCowan stood only a few metres away but somehow that tiny distance became an uncrossable chasm. Kendrick threw himself towards McCowan but landed in exactly the same spot where he'd already been standing. He shrieked with pure rage and began beating at the ground with his fists.
'Ken, stop that.'
'Let me go!' Kendrick tore at the stony soil beneath his fingers till shards of pain ran up his wrists. But it still wasn't enough, and he drove his fists harder into the earth, to feel the spike of shock and pain that he knew he should be sensing, to see if he could somehow pry himself away from this hallucinatory place and back to the station, back to Draeger.
'People who've suffered unjustly don't automatically go out into the world to do good deeds,' McCowan continued. 'They go and do to others what was done unto them, and the whole shitty carnival rolls back to the beginning and starts again. Yes, the worst thing you could do to Draeger is to destroy the Archimedes even before it goes through the wormhole, even with all these people on board, even with me here. But I'm asking you to just think, Ken.'
You're already dead, Kendrick thought silently. You died a long time ago.
'The station will enter the wormhole in only a few more minutes,' McCowan continued. Now Kendrick tore at his own eyes, feeling blood trickle down his wrists. It wasn't real, none of this was real, so what did it matter? 'There won't be any technology for Los Muertos to steal, or anyone else either. Stopping Draeger is one thing, but what then?'
'If you thought I was so dangerous, then why did you bring me all the way to the Archimedes?' Kendrick shouted back.
'Unfortunately,' said McCowan, from a thousand miles away, 'I did not anticipate that someone would also bring a truckload of nuclear fucking bombs on board.'
Kendrick began to smash his head against a rock, cool icebergs of agony crashing behind his eyes with each impact. There was a hard, unpleasant numbness behind his teeth. But what did it matter? What did it matter? What-?
– cheek pressed against the wall next to the airlock, and he was back, he was back. He tore himself away, pain still coursing through him.
It faded after a moment, like suddenly waking after re-experiencing a terrible accident in a dream. Like so much else, a lie, an illusion.
Breathless, his skin smooth and hard, eyes semi-opaque under their nictitating membranes, Kendrick stepped through the door. He pulled it closed behind him and ran the depressurization routine. There was no air to suck out, but still the outer airlock door wasn't going to open until the routine had run its course.
Then he pushed the outer airlock door open and stared off into empty space with naked eyes. He was now at the far end of the station, looking out across the exterior of the chamber's cap. The Earth slid past his view as the station spun on its axis.
Kendrick could see rails on which small platforms were mounted and rungs radiating out from the centre of the endcap. Also at the centre of the endcap was a raised area bristling with communications equipment. The airlock doorway in which he stood was positioned roughly equidistant between the endcap's centre and its rim. The station's spin made the endcap appear to his senses like a vertical cliff. He stepped quickly back from the lip of the airlock, feeling the sudden onset of nausea.
A terrible cold had begun to creep over him and he wondered just how much his body would be able to take of what he was about to put it through. Even though he knew he was running out of time, this gave him more than a moment's hesitation.
Kendrick reached for a handhold positioned just outside the airlock door and pulled himself further out onto the Archimedes' hull. Then he gazed upwards towards the comms array at the centre of the endcap. In the distance he saw a figure in a spacesuit.
It had to be Draeger.
Kendrick gripped on to the rungs and pulled himself slowly upwards, working against the station's spin. He imagined himself as a machine, an automaton incapable of feeling fear or any other emotion. All he had to do was hang on to those rungs and not let go.
All the while a painful numbness gnawed at the edge of his thoughts. There were limits to how long he could survive like this. He kept on climbing, concentrating solely on the rhythmic flexing of his muscles, ignoring the gathering pain as he pushed himself on. Chunks of metal and concrete became visible around him in the inky blackness, some of them spinning wildly. Pieces of the shattered hull, he presumed.
He glanced towards the comms array and saw that Draeger had almost reached it. Kendrick yelled soundlessly, his lungs empty and useless, then pulled himself along faster. Draeger appeared as yet unaware that he was being pursued.
When a shadow passed over Kendrick he almost lost his grip. He managed to hold on and stared up at the underbelly of a shuttle with unfamiliar markings. The craft moved on, disappearing from sight beyond the curved rim of the endcap as it performed a docking manoeuvre.
He'd been right. A man as cunning as Max Draeger would never have come all this way without a carefully planned strategy of escape.
Draeger finally turned his way, perhaps catching sight of the shuttle as it passed overhead. His face was invisible behind the faceplate of his helmet, but it was clear he could see Kendrick.
Now Kendrick knew that he'd become everything Sieracki had intended for him to be: a man-machine built for killing. He felt a distant, almost inhuman sense of satisfaction as he clambered rapidly up towards the spacesuited figure ahead of him.
On the side of the communications tower Draeger had opened a panel behind which lay a display screen showing status lights. As Kendrick rushed towards him, he tried to scramble out of the way and, in doing so, something slipped from his gloved hand. Draeger reached out for it frantically.
Kendrick caught it easily with his uninjured hand and realized that it was a datachip. He could guess only too well what information was contained in it. Though his numb fingers held it clumsily, he continued squeezing it until the brittle plastic snapped and disintegrated.
Now Draeger was trying to get away from him. As he turned for a handhold, Kendrick let the fragments of the crushed datachip spin away. Then he reached out for his adversary.
When Draeger kicked out frantically with one boot Kendrick lost his grip for a moment before grabbing the other's leg and hauling himself on top of him. Draeger struggled and twisted beneath him, letting go of the rungs. He floated away for a moment before returning to hit the surface of the station with a thump after his safety cord
