Something made Alfred look up.
He never knew what that something was, or why. Perhaps it was only instinct, because it couldn't have been anything he'd heard. At Mach six it was upon them long before the sound of its passage, but one glance told him what it was.
He threw himself back from this position, grabbing for Allison, dragging her down into the bottom of the ravine, and flung his body across hers as the universe came apart.
* * *
Tobin Manischewitz never had time to realize what was happening.
His calculations had never factored in the possibility of an all up assault shuttle. The use of transatmospheric military craft in civilian airspace at speeds in excess of Mach two wasn't simply frowned upon; it was profoundly illegal. Assault shuttles didn't have the strident transponders of civilian emergency vehicles to warn other traffic to scatter out of their flight paths. They didn't have the ability to override air car flight computers to clear them out of the way, either. And they certainly didn't have authority to rip across civilian flight corridors in the middle of the day at better than six thousand kilometers per hour. Any hotshot military pilot foolish enough to try something like that was looking at a court-martial and serious prison time, not just demotion, reprimands, or fines.
Manischewitz knew all of that. So did the BSC. The problem was that the BSC didn't care.
* * *
The assault shuttle came shrieking in far ahead of its earthshaking sonic boom, and its targeting systems had hacked a direct feed from one of the Beowulf System Defense Force's tactical satellites. The SDF almost certainly would have given it to them anyway, but there'd been no time to go through channels, and the BSC always had been an . . . unconventional organization.
Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou occupied the gunner's station, and his dark brown eyes were chipped agate. He'd watched the vicious firefight through the satellite while the shuttle howled off the ground, accelerating so rapidly its nose and leading wing edges glowed white with heat while its crew rode the grav plates against the G forces which should have crushed them back into their flight couches. Nobody could possibly have reached his sister more rapidly than they could, but her location was over five hundred kilometers from from Camp Oswald Avery. That was seven minutes' flight—not even an assault shuttle could accelerate instantly to Mach six in atmosphere—and the satellite looking down on the location fix from the still transmitting com had frozen his heart within him. He had no idea who was with her, but the satellite's exquisitely sensitive sensors had shown him only two people in that ravine with ten closing in on them, and seven minutes was an eternity in combat.
But somehow Allison and whoever was with her had managed to hang on. Not only to hang on, but to take steady toll of their enemies. And now, as the shuttle hurtled towards them like Juggernaut, he squeezed the trigger on the gunner's joystick.
Two pods blasted from the shuttle's weapons bay on meticulously plotted flight paths. They accelerated away at a rate which dwarfed even the shuttle's shrieking engines, and then they blew apart . . . directly above the men closing in on that ravine. Four thousand powered flechettes blasted straight down from each of them in precisely targeted oval patterns, each a hundred meters long and forty meters across, whose inner perimeters came within twenty-five meters of both sides of the ravine. Solid clouds of dust and semi-vaporized soil exploded upward from the beaten zone, and as the assault shuttle flashed overhead, banking hard to kill velocity and reverse course, there was no living thing beneath that rising pall of death.
* * *
Allison Chou opened her eyes to a pastel ceiling and sunlight. Her gaze took in the bedside readouts, recognized the familiar aura of a hospital, and it was so quiet she could hear the soft, quiet beep of the heart monitor.
She lay very still for a moment, holding her breath, then exhaled in a deep, cleansing sigh of relief as she realized she didn't hurt anywhere. She closed her eyes again, lips trembling in gratitude, and then, to her own surprise, she smiled.
Your priorities need work, she told herself. Not hurting is wonderful, but you might want to reflect on the fact that you're still alive, too.
A throat cleared itself, and her eyes popped open again, her head turning to the left on the pillow. Matching eyes looked back at her, and she watched them blink, saw the tears in them, and reached for her brother's hand.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was huskier than usual, her throat sore and raspy, and she shivered as she remembered the screams which had made it that way. Jacques must have seen the shadow in her eyes, for his hand tightened on hers as he leaned forward to kiss her forehead.
“Hi, yourself,” he said, and the huskiness in his voice had nothing to do with screams. He sat back a bit, lifting the back of her hand to touch his cheek, and shook his head. “Had me worried there, Alley.”
“Me, too.” Her lips trembled again for just a moment as they shaped a smile, then her eyes narrowed. “It was Manpower, wasn't it?”
“Yes.” Jacques lowered her hand from his cheek, holding it on the edge of her hospital bed in both of his, and cleared his throat.
“Yes,” he repeated, “it was.”
“What did they want?”
“Information. They wanted me to turn over the identities of all of our people working out of the embassies and consulates in Silesia.” Jacques' mouth twisted. “I'm sure they'd have gotten around to asking for more, eventually, but that was ‘all' they asked for the first time around.”
Allison's eyes widened. She'd guessed it had to be something like that, but surely Manpower must have realized Jacques couldn't—wouldn't—have given them that sort of information, no matter what they did to her. It would have destroyed him not to, but he would have known even better than she what Manpower would have done with that information, how many other lives it would have cost. And as she looked into his eyes, she saw the confirmation—saw his own anguished knowledge that he couldn't have done it even to save her.
“It wouldn't have mattered,” she told him now, freeing her hand from his to stroke the side of his face. “It wouldn't have, Jacques.” She shook her head, her eyes dark. “They were going to kill me anyway in the end.”
“I know,” he whispered, closing his eyes and turning his head to press his cheek more firmly against her palm. “I knew it from the beginning. Part of it was who we are, and part of it was to send a message.” He managed a brief, quirky smile. “Apparently they were even more upset with me over something that happened on Old Earth than I thought they were.” He inhaled deeply. “I always knew what I do could splash on the people I care about—even on you, Alley—but I never really believed it. Not until now.”
“That's because what you do is so much worth doing,” she told him. “And while we're kicking ourselves, I probably should've been just a bit more careful myself.”
“Well,” he said grimly, “I think I can assure you that Manpower's never going to come close to you again, Alley.”
There was something hard, frightening, about his eyes, and Allison felt her eyebrows rise in question. He saw it, and laughed harshly.
“We got one of them alive—found him tied up with tape in a utility shed, I believe—and we've . . . spoken to him at some length. And because we have, we know who planned and authorized the entire operation. The person who actually planned it is already dead; some time in the next few T-months, the people—plural—who authorized it will also be dead. In at least two cases, that's going to require an operation on Mesa itself, so we'll probably start there—take out the hardest targets first—and then pick the others off later. But trust me, Alley. Manpower will get our message loud and clear.”
“I don't want anybody to risk—” she began, thinking of the enormous dangers of mounting any sort of operation on Mesa, whose security services were among the most efficient—and brutal—in the explored galaxy. What had happened to her was bad enough already; if men and women of the BSC were killed “avenging her,” it would be even worse.
“It doesn't matter what you want, Alley.” Allison looked into Jacques's eyes and knew that flat, hard voice belonged not to her brother, but to Captain Benton-Ramirez y Chou, Biological Survey Corps. “And this isn't about getting even for what they did to you. Oh, there's some of that involved, don't think for a minute there isn't! But this whole thing started when they tried to assassinate Aurèle Fairmount-Solbakken on Old Earth. Our reaction there was purely defensive, but then they escalated, went after the Corps right here on Beowulf, and did it in a way guaranteed to underscore the fact that they were escalating. We don't like that, and we're going to make it very clear to them that it was a really, really bad idea. The sort of idea that gets the people who approve it dead, no matter how long it takes or how hard they are to reach.”
“You really expect that to stop it?” She sounded skeptical, and she knew it, but he only showed his teeth in a thin, cold smile.
“Manpower isn't the Ballroom, Alley. They're not motivated by belief systems or the need to liberate the victims of genetic slavery. They don't think that way, because they're only in it for the money. They don't give a damn how many people they kill or maim or torture—just like you—in the process, of course, because people aren't human beings to them; they're only things to be used. Only disposable, replaceable, unimportant items on a spreadsheet somewhere. But they think in terms of doing things to other people. They think their wealth and their power and the Mesan security systems protect them from people who might think about doing the same sorts of things to them. We're going to have to hush the whole thing up, of course—if the rest of Beowulf found out about this, they'd probably demand an all out military strike on Mesa, and you can just imagine how the rest of the League would feel about that! But Manpower knows about it, and they'll understand our response just fine. They think of themselves as ‘businessmen,' Alley, and when they discover the cost of ‘doing business' here on Beowulf, or against people like Fairmont-Salbakken or, yes, people like you, they'll decide it's too high.”
Allison looked up at him, tasting the harsh iron in his voice, seeing the flint behind his eyes. Perhaps he was right. She hoped he was, anyway, and she felt a reflection of that same flint, that same iron, deep in her own soul. She'd always hated and despised genetic slavery. Now it was personal. Now she'd experienced at least a taste of what millions upon millions of genetic slaves had endured for centuries, and she understood the truth of their existence in a way no bloodless intellectual analysis could ever have shown her.
Jacques looked back at her for a long, still moment. Then he shook himself and smiled.
“That's enough doom and gloom for a while, Alley! Wait here. I'll be back in a sec.”
“Wait here?” she thought as he climbed out of the chair and disappeared, closing the hospital room door behind him. She looked down at the flimsy hospital gown—some things never seemed to change—and shook her head. Just where does he think I'm going to go? Until they get me some clothes, at least! Besides, he and I both know doctors too well to think anyone's going to release me just because I happen to feel fine. They're going to be running neurological tests and psych evaluations for days before anyone's willing to sign off on—
The door opened again, and her thoughts broke off as a very tall man followed Jacques back into the room. Her eyes widened, and then she realized he'd been on the other side of that door all along. That she'd known he was, even as she spoke to her brother, and that she hadn't realized she knew only because it had been so natural, so inevitable, that he had to be there. She would have recognized his absence instantly; his presence was like the beat of her own heart, so central, so necessary to her own completion, that it called itself to her attention only when it wasn't there.
That's what it was all along, she realized. That . . . incompletion. That sense that things were out of balance somehow. It was because he was too far away. Or maybe because neither of us knew what was going on, what was happening.
A distant part of her brain told her that she still had no idea what was happening, or why, but that didn't matter. It wasn't something which had to be understood; it was simply something which was, and she felt her face blossoming in a huge smile as that awareness flowed through them both.
“I don't believe the two of you have ever been formally introduced,” Jacques said. “Alley, may I present Lieutenant Karl Alfred Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy. Lieutenant Harrington, allow me to present my sister, Allison Carmena Elena Inéz Regina Benton-Ramirez y Chou.”
He smiled devilishly as Allison darted a deadly look in his direction, but the smile softened quickly, and he reached up to lay one hand on the towering Sphinxian's shoulder.
“I don't pretend to understand everything Alfred's told me, Alley. I don't have to. I know what he did. That's more than enough for me, and I also know I'll never be able to repay him for doing it.”
He looked into her eyes for a moment, and then he walked back out of the room, closing the door behind him once more.
“Good morning, Lieutenant Harrington,” she said softly, holding out her hand—and her heart—to him. “Thank you for my life.”
He took her hand in his as if it were the most precious thing in the entire universe and settled into the chair beside the bed. His eyes were dark, examining her face with an almost frightening intensity, as if he had to confirm that she was actually there. That she truly had survived. She shivered as she felt the searing power behind that regard, the need. It was the most powerful emotion she'd ever felt . . . and it was someone else's. Under other circumstances, in another time or another place, or from another person, that . . . hunger for her would have terrified her with the iron tang of its compulsiveness. Its obsessiveness.
But this wasn't another time or another place, and it certainly wasn't another person, and what would have terrified her under those other circumstances had no power to frighten under these, for she felt the same need within herself. She shivered not because it frightened her, but because it had become so central to who and what she was and it had taken her all unaware. It was so warm, so caring, so gentle and yet so ferociously strong. It made her want to laugh, to cry, to fling her arms around him and bury his face in kisses. It sang through her like the note of some enormous crystalline bell fit to set the universe singing, and it was simultaneously the most comforting and the most erotic thing she had ever experienced in her life.
She didn't know how long the two of them simply gazed at each other. It seemed to last forever, and yet it ended far too soon as he drew a deep breath and settled farther back in the chair, still holding her hand.
“Allison Carmena Elena Inéz Regina Benton-Ramirez y Chou,” he said in that deep voice that sent little shivers of delight through her bones. “Excuse me, but I sort of thought your name was Allison Chou. It would've simplified things a lot if I'd known you were a Benton-Ramirez y Chou when this whole thing started. I could've called in the whole world to get someone from your family out of trouble! At least I'd've known to call your brother, anyway.”
“Yes, that's my entire name, Karl,” she said in a slightly dangerous tone. “It's also something I've spent most of my life running away from,” she added in a softer voice, admitting something she would have admitted to very few.
“Why?” he asked simply.
“For the same reason they hung all those names on me in the first place. Because I want to be me, not just another Benton-Ramirez y Chou buried under all those tons of family history and tradition. Nobody on Beowulf would dream of forcing me to do anything I didn't want to do . . . and that won't stop them for an instant from doing it anyway. I don't want to be preprogrammed. I want to know—to know, Alfred—that the decisions I make are my decisions. And I don't want to be some kind of . . . of medical royalty. I want to be just Allison.
“I'm not like Jacques. It's never occurred to him for a moment to live up to the expectations people have of our family. Trust me, there are scores of people who were disappointed in him, who looked down their noses at him when he refused to go into medicine and settled for being an obscure, fairly junior military officer—and one who doesn't seem to take his duties all that seriously, for that matter. But that's because they don't really know him. They don't know what he's truly done with his life, what he still plans on doing with it, and having so many people underestimate him and take him lightly is part of what let's him do that so very well. But I don't want that. I want what I'm pretty sure the first Benton, and the first Ramirez, and the first Chou who took up medicine wanted. I just want to be a doctor, Alfred. That's all. Just to be a doctor doing what a doctor does, one patient at a time, because it fills her with joy and she knows it's what she chose to do and not what everyone expected her to do.”
She stopped, suddenly and burningly aware that she had never once expressed that so clearly to anyone.
Including myself, she realized wonderingly. I've never found the words for it before. Maybe because I've never really looked at it that clearly till I had to explain it to him. And I did have to explain it to him, even if I never have to explain it to another human being ever again. I had to tell him.
“I can see that,” he told her, and she realized he truly could. That he did, with a clarity no one else could have matched. He looked at her for another few moments, and then his eyes darkened and he looked away, as if unable to meet her gaze any longer.
“I can see that,” he repeated in a low voice freighted with some emotion she couldn't quite identify, “because I'm running away, too.”
She stared at him, and suddenly she knew with that emotion was. It was shame. And it was worse than that, for it was leavened with horror as well. It was that darkness within him, and it frightened him as dreadfully as the neural whip had terrified her, but—
“You're wrong,” she told him softly. He froze, and she squeezed his hand. “I know what you're afraid of, and you're wrong.”
Stillness hung between them for long, silent seconds. And then, finally, he looked back down at her, and she felt the roiling force of his emotions.
Neither of them, she realized in that moment, would ever be able to lie to the other. Whatever sang and danced between them, there could be no prevarication, no deceit in it. But the fact that they couldn't lie didn't necessarily mean that what they believed was the truth, either, and she felt the power of his rejection. Felt his need to strangle the monster before the monster destroyed him or, far worse, the people he cared about.
“I know what you're afraid of,” she repeated, and squeezed his hand even more tightly, shaking it between them for emphasis. “I know. I don't know how I know, and I don't know why, but I do, and you're wrong.”
“No,” he half-whispered. “You're wrong. You weren't there. You didn't see.”
“I didn't have to be there then,” she said gently. “I was here now. I saw the man who came for me, who saved me, and I know that man better than I've ever known anyone else in my entire life. I know him better than I know myself, because I see and feel him whole and entire. Because—Oh, I don't have the words for it, Alfred, and neither do you, but you know what I mean!”
“Allison—”
His hand tightened on hers, and for the first time she felt its true strength in that viselike pressure. It hurt, but it was a good hurt, and she met his eyes unflinchingly, knowing what he was about to say.
“I got people killed,” he told her, his voice frayed around the edges, his eyes bottomless as interstellar space. “So many people. And I killed so many others myself. It was . . . it was—God, I don't know how to tell anyone what it was like!”
He was trembling, and she laid her left hand atop the one which was crushing her right as she saw the ghosts in his eyes and felt what he was feeling as he faced them.
“I had to do it,” he said. “I had to. If I hadn't, even more people would've died, and not just on Clematis. I didn't have a choice, and I knew it, and it was what I was trained to do. But I did it so well. I was like . . . like a machine, Allison. It was all ice and focus and purpose and I'd never been so alive in my life. And it was even worse than that. It was a need . . . a hunger. I knew exactly what I was doing every moment, and I never hesitated, never flinched, never once stopped to think about all the lives I was taking. At the end I was covered, literally covered with blood, and I probably shot at least a dozen people who were only trying to surrender before I could make myself stop.”
His soul was in his eyes, strangled by the ghosts of his dead, and she recognized the anguish in it. She understood it, and she felt the tears in her own eyes.
“I don't know what happened on Clematis,” she said quietly. “I never even heard of it before. But I know what's inside you, Alfred. That's why you asked for a transfer to the Navy and medical school, isn't it?”
“I'm too good at killing people,” he said very, very softly. “Too good at it. And if I let the monster out again, what will it do? What if I become the monster? What if that becomes who and what I am? I don't want to live with that. I won't live with that. And that's why I ran away from the Marines, why I'm hiding as a doctor instead of what I really am.”
“What you are is a doctor.” Her soft voice was as unyielding as battle steel. “You may be running from what happened on this Clematis, but what you're running to is what you were always meant to be. It's not just guilt, not just trying to find some safe way to sublimate your ‘monster' and expiate your responsibility for all the people who died. Tell me you don't take joy in it! Tell me you don't know deep at the core of you that this is what you want more than any other possible life's work. Tell me that, Alfred, because you may be able to lie to yourself, but you can't lie to me.”
His lips trembled, and she shook her head.
“Jacques is a historian,” she told him. “More than a historian—at least half our family think he's some kind of nut. He belongs to something called the Society for Creative Anachronisms, and he's got an entire library stuffed with old books and stories that go clear back to pre-space Old Earth. He used to read to me for hours when I was a child, and one of those stories was about a girl who agreed to become a monster's prisoner to save her father. Only the monster wasn't a monster—not really. But he was under a curse, and he couldn't stop being one, couldn't transform himself back into the human being he was meant to be. Not until she realized the truth. That broke the spell, and I thought it was a wonderful story when I was a little girl, but I realize now that it went even deeper than that. He had to believe he was no longer a monster, no longer ‘the beast' he'd allowed himself to become. He needed to care more about her than about anything else in the world and let go of the things that had twisted his outside appearance to match the torment inside him. And when she saw beneath that appearance, she allowed him to see it as well.”
She shook her head, her eyes brimming with tears, and lifted his suddenly lax hand in both of hers. She cradled it against her tear-slick cheek and smiled at him.
“That's us, Alfred. It's us! Me, running away from home because I need to be myself, and you, terrified of your ‘monster,' afraid you're becoming the beast. But you're not. Maybe the beast is inside there, but it isn't you. You control it, and it was the beast that let you save my life. And you didn't come for me because you wanted an excuse to kill other people. You came for me because what you are is a good, caring, decent, gentle man. I know that—I see that—and you know I do. You know it, Alfred, and you've been alone with the beast too long. Trust me. Oh, trust me, my love.”
* * *
Alfred Harrington gazed into those shining, tear-filled eyes, feeling her total certitude, her absolute belief, and something crumbled inside him as she called him “my love.” Something he'd clung to for so long simply turned to smoke in his hands as he realized she was right. She was right. The monster—the beast—was part of him, but so was she, and he could turn away from the exaltation of the Angel of Death and find the monster's silver bullet in her. Not as some sort of talisman, some kind of magic charm, but as the one person in the entire universe who truly knew him for who and what he was . . . and was not.
He reached out a left hand which had never shaken even once in combat on Clematis or here on Beowulf, and its fingers trembled as he touched her face with feather gentleness and leaned towards her.
“I do, Alley,” he whispered. “I do.”
And their lips met at last.