Sarin went down, sprawling. Her head welled blood. A handful of her dark hair was still wadded up in her attacker’s fist.
“Sandra?” I said, incredulous.
Sandra stood there, a naked beauty dipped in black paint. The microbial creatures covering her had all dried up and turned crusty by now. In spots, they were flaking away.
“Have you gone nuts?” I asked.
She stared at me in a fury. “I heard it all,” she said. “Every word you whispered to her.”
“But how…”
“I heard you kiss her. I heard your heart accelerate. Hers too-”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my hands coming up in a calming gesture. “I’m so glad you are awake and alive.”
“Really?”
“Yes! Yes, really. This didn’t mean anything,” I said, gesturing down to poor Sarin. I knelt and checked her pulse, which was still strong. She’d awaken shortly with a headache and a burning spot on her scalp that was missing a lot of hair. “Jasmine didn’t deserve that. She was just scared.”
“I told you once I’d kill if you fooled around.”
“You can’t go around smashing fellow officers.”
“You can’t go around making out with them.”
I shook my head. “It was one kiss at a weak moment. I apologize.”
Sandra still stood over Major Sarin, watching us both intensely. I nudged Jasmine, but she wasn’t going anywhere. I felt the back of her head. “I think you fractured her skull.”
“Get away from her,” Sandra said dangerously.
I looked up at her with narrowed eyes. This was not quite the Sandra I knew. She sounded-a bit crazy. I decided it was time to redirect her anger. “Are you pissed?” I asked.
“Totally,” she said.
“How’s this: we’ll turn Sarin over to the medics, and we’ll turn some of that attitude against the Macros.”
“Together?” she asked.
Each word she spoke, I now realized, seemed to be forced from her lips, almost as if she had a bout of stuttering she was holding back.
“Yeah,” I said, standing slowly. “Let’s do this together Sandy.” I invoked a pet name I only used for her in private moments.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “Not today.”
I nodded. We walked out of the restroom and I sent help inside for Major Sarin. I was nonplussed to see Carlson responding to my call. He had survived? Great news, there.
Carlson gaped at Sandra as he went by. She was still naked, painted black and staring at everyone with wide, crazy eyes. She didn’t seem to care about her appearance at all. The rest of the guys in the brick had their mouths hanging open. Sandra took no notice of them.
“Let’s spray that gunk off and get you into a vacc suit,” I said.
She let me help her, but her muscles were tense and quivering the entire time. She almost never blinked her eyes. I had a thought as I adjusted her suit and doubtfully gave her a weapon. She was reminding me of every marine I’d seen recovering from the nanite injections. She had that look of new strength, almost as if she’d been born into a new body she didn’t quite know how to control yet.
“I don’t want a gun,” she said, handing back the light hand-beamer I’d given her.
“What then?” I asked.
She took my knife off my belt and held it with fingers that gave tiny tremors. I could see her shaking, even through her gloves. I wanted to order her to take a break, to sleep off whatever was going on in her head, but something in her eyes was electric, like a twisting live cable that snapped and sparked. She was holding herself back, I realized.
What the hell had Marvin, Ning and those microbes done to her? I figured they had probably all perished on Jolly Rodger, and I’d most likely never learn the truth.
37
My marines and I crawled over the hull like angry ants, but the ship was like a sealed mason jar-there just wasn’t any way in. We avoided the underside of the ship and thus were nowhere near the deadly belly-turret. Every hatch we could find was slagged shut from the inside.
Kwon showed up eventually and we tried a group burn-through, concentrating our beamers on a single spot to make it white hot. I had no doubt we could have done it with a beam tank, but blasting our way into the hull wasn’t working, at least not quickly enough. Sandra stood nearby, silent and staring.
“This is not happening, Colonel,” Kwon told me.
“Yeah,” I said. “We need something heavier.”
“Colonel?” a voice called into my helmet. It was Gorski, who was my sole man on ops right now. I’d given him Sarin’s job until she recovered.
“Go ahead, Gorski.”
“We’re about to go through the ring,” he said.
“Not much we can do about that, is there?”
“No sir,” he said, and signed off.
I looked up worriedly. I didn’t see the ring, but that wasn’t a surprise. We were going so fast, the cruiser would just sail up to the ring and through it before our eyes had time to register it. Still, I was worried. It seemed so odd, the way these Macros ignored us. They didn’t even answer our radio signals. We were less than nothing to them. We were fleas on a dead dog.
“Let’s pull back a bit onto the top of the cruiser’s hull,” I said. I led the way, and my marines followed. “I don’t really like the idea of going through a ring while standing out on top of this ship. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Our boys did it before,” Kwon said. “They all were sucked out into space from the ring in the Worm mound.”
“Yeah,” I said. “About that, the Worms had a direct conduit the last time we saw them, directly from the ring inside their giant mound out into space in another star system. A pretty nice way to launch ships. Just imagine, you build them on the ground, put them on rails and roll them out into space. Not having to lift anything up into orbit is a big savings of effort. Better yet, your construction people could build the ship under normal planetary conditions, not out in space in vacc suits, fighting with low-gravity.”
Kwon shook his head in his helmet. “If you say so, sir. I think having a hole on the surface of your world would be a big problem. Wouldn’t it suck all your air out into space?”
I chuckled. We’d reached the aft region of the ship by now, where our few bricks were clamped on. “There was some kind of control possible. When the Macros screwed me last time into going down there and connecting up that ring to turn it on, I learned it is possible to alter the behavior of the rings. The Macros did it that time. If you could choose when your ring was active, you could send through your ships whenever you wanted.”
Kwon didn’t say anything more. I thought he might be disturbed at the idea of playing with such forces. Maybe he thought I was getting one of my bright ideas and would try to set a ring like that up on Earth. I wasn’t that crazy…was I? I had to admit that maybe, just maybe, I was.
I was walking along the hull of the cruiser with Sandra following me. She had that knife still-and she made me oddly nervous with it. Her mannerisms weren’t the same as they’d been before she’d been in the coma.
“Sandra?” I said. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
“Try me.”
“I’m thinking about cutting people up.”
I blinked. She was right. I hadn’t wanted to know. I told myself she’d always been a hothead. She’d be all right if I just gave her some time to calm down. Maybe this was all a result of her brain injury. The microbes had
