He knew what he should do. Get to your feet, go out and meet them. Let them shoot you. Finish it, once and for all.
But something within him held him fast. A mocking voice in his head laughed bitterly. For all your talk of death, you cling to your miserable life. You know you deserve to die, but you’re not willing to face it. Not again. Once was enough for you. Beneath all the fury and violence is the ultimate cowardice.
I killed myself once, he said to the voice. I tried to atone. They wouldn’t let me die. They wouldn’t let me pay for my crimes. They want men like me. They need killers in their employ.
Unbidden, a quatrain of Khayyam came to his mind:
Human death and fate, he repeated silently. I could have killed them. That woman who questioned me. The stupid oafs on the bridge. I could have killed them all. Maybe I did kill one or two of them. But I tried not to. Despite it all, despite the rage of the monster inside, I kept myself from deliberately killing them.
That’s something, he told himself. Not enough to save your own pitiful life, but at least I tried to stay my hand from murder.
Slowly he clambered to his feet and, for the first time, took a good look at his surroundings. Power generator, he saw. It feeds off the hot plasma ejected from the fusion reactor. He smiled to himself. Even in a blood-red rage your rational mind led you here, where the crew will be afraid of firing lasers at you for fear of damaging their power equipment.
He saw that he was in a narrow aisle between man-tall bulkheads that housed machinery. They’d have to come at you one at a time, he said to himself. I could slaughter them like Samson against the Philistines. I wouldn’t even need the jawbone of an ass.
Turning, he saw that this narrow aisle widened into, a small chamber fitted with a diagnostics console. They could come at me from both sides, front and back. Unless they have to come through this aisle to get to the console station.
He heard footsteps approaching. They were trying to be stealthy, tiptoeing, but the scuff of boots on the deck plates was easy enough to hear, even over the steady hum of the generator.
He retreated with soft, lithe steps to the diagnostics chamber. There was a hatch at its far end. They’ll be able to come at me from both directions. It’s too roomy in here, he decided. Better to fight in the narrow aisle.
Why fight at all? he asked himself. Why not just surrender to them? Would they accept that? Or will they be so frightened of me that they’ll try to kill me straight off? It would be easier for them in the diagnostics chamber. But why should I make it easy for them? Or for myself?
“Dorn!”
Elverda’s voice. High, quavering with tension.
“Dorn, come out. Show yourself. They won’t harm you. I have the captain’s word.”
He grunted. The captain’s word. He’s under orders to kill us both, Harbin replied silently to the old woman.
“Dorn, come out. It will be all right, I promise you.”
She treats me as if I’m a child. Her little boy. Harbin thought back to his own mother, raped and crucified by the soldiers sent to cleanse his village.
They’ll kill us both, he thought. They’ll kill you, Elverda. They’ve got to.
Unless I can prevent it, he told himself.
That was a new thought. Can I prevent them from killing her? Can I save her life? Could saving her one life possibly balance the scales for all the lives I’ve snuffed out?
Could she be the path to my atonement, my final peace?
“Dorn!” she called again.
“I’m here,” he called back. “I’m coming out.”
CONFRONTATIONS
Koop was leading a squad of four crew members, two of them women, down the passageway that led to the power generator bay. The ship’s surveillance cameras showed Harbin huddled behind the generator itself, sitting on the deck plates with his knees pulled up in front of his face. He was unarmed, but Koop had seen what the freak could do with his bare hands.
Elverda Apacheta had insisted on coming with them. Now she stood beside Koop, calling out to Harbin. She called him Dorn.
He stopped his little team at the hatch that led into the generator bay. It was open. “Okay,” he told them, “we wait here until the captain signals.”
Yuan was leading the rest of the crew members who were able to walk, a total of five men and women, around the long way through the ship’s wheel to come up behind the generator bay. His plan was to trap Harbin between the two squads.
“I’ll go in and talk to him,” Elverda said.
Koop shook his beefy head. “Orders are to wait here. I don’t want you in the line of fire when the shooting starts.”
“I can make him come out without shooting,” she insisted.
“No,” said Koop. “You stay here with us.”
She tried to stare him down, but Koop grasped her bony wrist in his massive paw and said gently, “I don’t want you to get hurt. Stay here. Please.”
Elverda almost smiled. Instead she turned and shouted through the open hatch, “Dorn, come out. Show yourself. They won’t harm you. I have the captain’s word.”
No response. I can’t blame him, Elverda said to herself. He knows they want to kill him. Kill us both.
Koop checked the charge on his laser pistol. He had seen the carnage Harbin had unleashed on the bridge, watched the security camera’s playback of the mayhem. Gonzolez hit him square in the chest with a laser shot and all it did was burn a hole in his shirt.
“If we have to shoot,” he muttered to his crew, “go for his face, or his human arm. The metal half of him splashes laser beams like a stream of water.”
“You’ll kill him!” Elverda hissed.
“If I have to,” said Koop, as the others checked their pistols. He wished he had a more powerful weapon: a high-velocity rifle, maybe, or an armor-piercing missile.
Elverda cupped her hands to her mouth and called again, “Dorn!”
From somewhere in the generator bay he called back, “I’m here. I’m coming out.”
Koop’s team stiffened and gripped their guns tighter.
Yuan had led his team halfway around
Tamara Vishinsky had stayed on the bridge, at Yuan’s orders. Ostensibly, she had the ship’s con. In reality, Yuan didn’t want her anywhere near the renegade.
