Rock Killer (37 page)

“
In sha’allah
,” the president said. If God is willing.

The general’s replacement was already in Tyre. Zuabi would never again see the site of Alexander the Great’s victory over Darius.

***

McConnell was concentrating on the window, still pounding on its edge with the table. The table was scratched and dented and the wood was splitting but McConnell kept hammering with the incredibly expensive furnishing. F
or the money paid to lift the wood from Earth to make that table, one probably could feed and clothe a family for a year
, Charlie thought.

She also realized Rodriguez was not going to rescue her; she’d have to save herself. On the dresser was an ovoid glass objet d’art of glass about the size of a cantaloupe. Charlie dragged herself to the dresser and used it to pull herself up. She hefted the egg, heavy even on the Moon–and therefore very massive–and, using the long dresser for support, shuffled up behind McConnell.

A shrill whistle indicated he was making progress separating the window from the frame. Charlie raised her make-shift weapon above his head and let it drop, putting all her strength into speeding its descent.

McConnell saw her reflection in the Crysteel and turned, but too late. The spheroid’s momentum smashed it through the bubble helmet and into McConnell’s skull that cracked with the sound of a twig being snapped.

Charlie lost control and the egg dropped, making a red stain on the carpet. McConnell slumped slowly to the floor. Blood pumped out of the gash on his skull.

Charlie let herself fall to the carpet and crawled to the wheelchair. She righted it with some effort and painfully climbed in.

She drove it to the closet with the emergency suits on the other side of the large bed. She pulled one on, continuing to ignore the torturous pain in her back that was trying to conquer her brain in a physiological war of attrition. Her defenses against it were being slowly ground down.

***

“If we put a tourniquet on it before moving the beam,” Alex suggested.

“No,” Dr. Jubair said. “She’d bleed to death long before we get her out of vacuum because of the pressure gradient.”

Alex watched the three miners work. Once, in Boulder, he was taken to a trauma center because of a rock climbing accident. He had been conscious enough to admire the skill, speed, and efficiency of those that worked on him. Tsuji and her helpers reminded him of those doctors as they worked their way quickly but carefully to the injured woman. She was, mercifully, unconscious.

Thorne and his two helpers returned from searching the cavernous chamber. “There’s three more bodies in various locations. We got their ID’s. That accounts for all but two.”

“Before she passed out,” Perez stated, “she said that there were two working on the base of the mass driver when the missile hit.”

“We’ll have the
Kyushu
use its radar to look for their bodies,” Alex said. “Good job, Thorne. I don’t think I need you here. You can go.”

“Listen,” Thorne said. “I read a book once. It was about space combat. The book’s almost a hundred years old but I remember that to deal with trauma the suits would close off an injury and breach with a thing that would snap closed like a, a...“ he made a circular opening and closing motion with his fingers.

“An iris?” the doctor asked.

“Yes,” Thorne exclaimed. “It would close off the wound, stopping the depressurization of the suit. It also amputated the limb but it saved the life.”

“Yes?” Alex prodded.

“I was wondering,” Throne continued, “if we cut a piece of plate steel and sharpened one end. Then if we shove it into her leg just above the beam and seal the whole thing with DC foam we could save her. Her leg’s gone anyway.”

“Doctor?” Alex asked.

“It might work. If the bone is intact we’ll never get a plate through it, though. But if the bone is shattered, and I think it is, it could work. The steel would have to be sterilized.”

“I don’t think so,” Alex said. “What’s going to survive this vacuum?

“Tsuji, you been listening?”

“Yes, I’ll get right on it.”

“No,” Thorne said. “I’ve used a laser. I’ll cut the metal so they can keep working. You other two,” he said to his security personnel, “Go on and get off this rock.”

They nodded and wished Thorne and Perez luck.

“Good,” Alex said. “Perez, how’s her air?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Okay,” he said and switched frequencies. “Banda, Chun. How’s it going?”

“Slow but steady,” the deep voice came back. “Another 15 or so minutes and we’ll be done.”

“How’s the air?”

“Getting worse.”

“Listen, in about ten minutes we may need to get this injury across that rope immediately. Be prepared to clear the corridor to the airlock.” They were evacuating through an airlock at the end of a tunnel drilled radially from the central tunnel. Under acceleration the tunnel would have been level.

“Yes, sir.”

The room lit up with sparks as Thorne started cutting metal with a miner’s lasers. The flickering light made the rock interior of the asteroid, filled with metal smashed into bizarre and grotesque shapes, look like a scene from hell.

***

Moeller used her authority to enter the room next to McConnell’s and get to the computer. The guest was perturbed but Moeller said she could complain to NESA authorities and that seemed to make her happy.

Moeller accessed the NESA Security net using her ID in the slot and thumb on the plate.

“Damn,” she said as Rodriguez watched over her shoulder.

“What?”

“It’s got a leak. It’s slow but eventually the room will be uninhabitable.”

“What about the door?” Rodriguez demanded.

Moeller shook her head. “It won’t open now for my access code.”

“Then for whose?”

“A Level One executive. The head of NESA Lunar Security, Mr. Takayanagi, could do it.”

“Then get him to open it.”

“Wait a moment. I have to locate him first.”

***

Thorne returned with a crudely cut circle of metal. One side was somewhat beveled to a sharp edge. Tsuji took it and worked her laser against the sharp edge.

“That should be sharp enough to cut through her suit,” she said.

She handed it to the doctor who looked at it disparagingly.

“I said I could handle a laser; I didn’t say I was good at it,” Thorne remarked.

“You’ll have to put it in,” Jubair said.

“What?” Thorne exclaimed.

“I must keep a tourniquet around her leg to slow the bleeding. You must put the plate in and do it in one clean stroke. Tsuji reports she can move the beam any time now. We are ready.”

“I can’t do this,” Thorne pleaded.

Alex’s gloved hand touched Thorne’s suited shoulder.

“Perez, how much longer?”

“Three minutes,” Perez replied. He looked at Thorne in a tacit plea.

“You can do it,” Alex said. “Don’t let another one die.”

Thorne took a deep breath. “Okay.”

Thorne put the sharp end against the woman’s thigh just above where the beam pinched the leg down to nothing. Thorne braced himself and Alex put his mass against Thorne’s back while trying to jamb his legs between two metal beams. Alex hoped Thorne wouldn’t move and the plate would.

Jubair used a miner’s rope to tie a tourniquet. He pulled it tighter and tighter; so tight that Alex thought he was going to breach the suit.

“Now,” Jubair said unexpectedly.

Thorne shoved with all his muscles. The plate sliced cleanly into the suit and through the flesh and only hesitated at the bone. Thorne stopped when he felt the metal bump against solid rock behind the leg.

Perez quickly sprayed DC foam around the plate. Some white foam turned gray as it mixed with blood that was slowly boiling out. They waited interminable seconds while the foam hardened.

“She’s out of air,” Perez said. It wouldn’t take her long to expend the oxygen in her suit.”

“Okay,” Jubair said. “Now, Tsuji.”

The three miners pushed their combined masses against the beam. It moved and Perez and Thorne lifted the woman up.

“To the emergency door, fast,” Alex said redundantly. The two security men moved quickly and skillfully. Jubair followed and Alex stayed out of the way. He watched them go in the first emergency door.

Alex let out a long sigh that his helmet mic amplified. “At least there’s one that won’t die,” he breathed.

Tsuji placed a hand on his shoulder. “You saved a lot of lives, Director.”

Alex turned to look at her. “What? Ten people died because—”

She cut him off. “Because some fools decided to use violence to make their idiotic point. You saved 120 lives. And those who died are the responsibility of those that started the violence.”

Alex turned away from the miners. “Let’s go,” he said angrily. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

***

Charlie sealed the helmet. The damn emergency suit for civilians didn’t have a transmitter, just a receiver for getting instructions. It did have a loud speaker on the chest (she’d heard it called a “bitcher” somewhere). At least she could communicate with the chair until the air ran out. O
h, well
, she thought,
I can wait
. She felt blood and perfluorodecalin from the wounds reopened on her back pooling in her boots. She just didn’t know how long she could wait. She used her gloved hand to push the joystick to the side, turning the chair around to face into the room.

McConnell was running toward her with the bloody glass egg in his hands. Fragments of his broken helmet were lodged in his cranium.

Charlie tried to stand to run but managed only to fall out of the chair.

McConnell stood over her and grinned. She saw him say something. He raised the art above his head.

“Chair, voice command mode, forward, fast,” Charlie yelled superfluously as the speaker amplified her voice. The chair slammed into McConnell throwing him off balance in the unfamiliar gravity.

He dropped the egg, grabbed the chair and heaved it away from him. It bounced over the bed and serendipitously landed on its wheels.

Meanwhile Charlie was crawling away from him. He scooped up the sphere and again towered over her prone figure.

Charlie tried to crawl away but it was no use, he’d trapped her in a corner.

Charlie could see the wheelchair between McConnell’s legs. It was near the Crysteel window facing away from it–the window that was already loose.

“Chair, backwards, fast,” Charlie yelled again.

The chair’s back crashed into the window’s bottom edge.

“Chair, forwards, fast, backwards, fast, repeat,” Charlie said.

McConnell smiled at her, ignoring the chair and her commands. He mouthed, exaggeratedly, “Fuck you,” and—

And the chair hit the bottom of the window and the Crysteel plate popped out. There was enough air left in the room that decompression was explosive. McConnell fell back on the floor dropping the egg. It shattered. Everything was dragged to the window. Charlie landed on top of McConnell, who flopped like a landed fish. It was over soon and he was dead.

Charlie rolled off him and looked at his face. It was a portrait of absolute terror, frozen forever like that.

***

Director Chun hung from the rope between the rock and the
Kyushu
. He was just at the airlock in the side of the ship when he paused to look back at SRI-1961. Because he was the last off, his asteroid was now an empty shell falling through space carrying only the three bodies they’d been forced to leave behind. He wondered as to its fate. If its velocity were sufficient it could escape the solar system. Or it might be captured by the sun again and go on in some other orbit as if indifferent to the human conflict and death that had occurred because of it.

“Director Chun,” Takashara’s voice came over Chun’s suit radio. “Are you okay? Do you require assistance?”

“Negative,” Chun replied crisply and he moved clumsily into the airlock. When it had cycled he pulled off his helmet and wiped tears from his eyes.

Takashara floated in front of him. Her hair was constrained in an intricate braid.

“Captain,” Alex said. “You’ve never looked so good to me.”

“Your doctor,” Takashara said, “reports the injured woman will be all right.”

“Well,” Alex qualified, “as all right as one can be after losing a leg.”

***

Charlie was getting tired of waking up in hospitals. The first thing she saw was that damn nursemaid shaking his head.

She half expected him to shake a finger at her.

Rodriguez’s face was the next thing they let her see.

“We got an emergency airlock in to take you out,” he said. “You lost a lot of blood.”

“That’s okay,” Charlie said softly. “Most of it wasn’t real anyway.”

Rodriguez laughed softly. “When you’re released and feel up to it I’d like you to be the Assistant Security Chief here.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I’ve been thinking about getting off the Moon. Maybe I should move into asteroids or go to Jupiter or Ceres.”

“Whatever you like,” Rodriguez said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “maybe I’ll go to Mars. I’ll think about it.”

“You do that,” Rodriguez said. “You could probably get whatever you want from SRI, at least until Chun gets back.”