Seeing that he wouldn’t win the race to the glass, Daeman grabbed a girder protruding fifteen feet from below the marked panel and arrested his movement. Caliban landed on the ledge, arms out, blocking the approach to the white square. Daeman saw that there was no way that he could get around or past those wide arms, those raking claws. He suddenly felt the pain from his torn and punctured arm hitting his mind and torso like an electric shock, then felt the growing numbness there as warning of the weakness and shock that must soon follow.
Caliban threw his head back, roared again, showed his teeth, and chanted—“What I hate, He consecrates—what I ate, He celebrates! No mate for thee—more meat for me!” Caliban was ready to spring after Daeman as soon as the human turned to flee.
Seeing the raw scars on Caliban’s chest, Daeman found himself smiling grimly. Savi hurt him with her shot. She didn’t die without a fight.
Neither will I.
Instead of turning to flee, Daeman pulled himself horizontal on the girder, squatted, gathered his remaining energy in his legs, put his head down, and launched himself straight at Caliban’s chest.
It took Daeman two or three seconds to cross the space between them, but for an instant the monster seemed too surprised to react. Food was not supposed to act in this impertinent manner—prey was not supposed to charge. Then the creature realized that his dinner was coming to him—wearing the thermskin he desired—and Caliban showed all of his teeth in a smile that became a snarl. The beast threw his arms and legs around the incoming human in a grip that Daeman knew the monster would not release until the man was dead and half-eaten.
They went through the membrane together, Daeman feeling the sensation of tearing through a curtain of sticky gauze, Caliban bellowing into thin air one second and into cold silence the next. Together, they tumbled into outer space, Daeman hugging Caliban as fiercely as the monster was clutching Daeman, the human’s left hand pressed up against the monster’s underjaw, trying to keep those teeth away for the eight or ten seconds he thought he needed.
The thermskin suit reacted immediately to vacuum—tightening fiercely into Daeman’s flesh, constricting until it acted as a pressure suit, sealing off even molecular gaps that would bleed air or blood or heat into space. The osmosis mask inflated the clear visor and switched the movement and purification of the man’s recycled breath to 100 percent. Cooling tubules in the thermskin let Daeman’s natural sweat flow quickly through channels, cooling his sunward side even as body heat was transferred to the part of his body in minus-two-hundred-degree shadow. All this happened in a fraction of a second and Daeman did not even notice. He was too busy thrusting Caliban’s jaw and muzzle upward, keeping those teeth away from his throat and shoulder.
Caliban was too strong. He shook his head, freed it from Daeman’s weakening pressure, and then threw open his mouth to bellow before ripping the man’s throat out.
Air rushed out of Caliban’s chest and mouth like water from a punctured gourd. Saliva froze even as it spewed into space. Caliban clapped his long-fingered hands over his ears, but not in time—blood globules spewed into space as the creature’s eardrums exploded. The blobs of blood began to boil in vacuum and, barely more than a second later, the blood in Caliban’s veins began to boil as well.
Caliban’s eyes started to swell and more blood spurted from his tear ducts. His muzzle moved up and down as his mouth worked like a fish’s, wheezing silently in vacuum, gasping for air, but no air came. The surface of Caliban’s bulging eyes began to freeze over and cloud white.
Daeman had wrenched himself free, tumbled across the outside terrace—almost floated helplessly off into space, but caught the metal-mesh railing—then hauled himself hand over hand to where the familiar sonie was tethered to the metal surface. He didn’t want to run. He didn’t want to turn his back on Caliban. He wanted to stay and kill the thrashing monster with his gloved hands.
But one of those hands wasn’t working now—his torn right arm now hung useless as he kicked the final ten feet to the low vehicle. Harman. Hannah.
A human would be dead by now, unprotected in space—knowing so little about anything, Daeman instinctively knew that—but Caliban was not human. Spewing blood and frozen air like some horrible comet boiling away its own surface as it approached the sun, Caliban tumbled, flailed, found purchase on the gridded metal of the terrace, and kicked his way back through the semipermeable wall, back into air and relative warmth.
Daeman was too busy to watch. Pulling himself down prone into the driver’s cushions, he turned his gaze to the metal shelf where the virtual control panel should be. It was off.
How do I activate it? What do I do if I can? How did Savi start it up?
Daeman’s mind was blank. His vision narrowed as black dots danced in his field of view. He was hyperventilating and close to passing out as he worked frantically to recall the image of Savi flying the sonie, activating the controls. He couldn’t remember.
Calm down. Easy. Easy. It was his voice, but not his—an older voice, steady, amused. Take it easy.
He did, forcing first his breathing back to a sane rate, then willing his heartbeat to slow, then focusing his vision and his mind.
Didn’t she use some voice command? That wouldn’t work here in space. No air, no sound—Savi had told them that. Or perhaps Harman had. Daeman was learning from everyone these days. How then? He forced himself to relax a step further, and then closed his eyes and tried to recall the image of Savi flying them all away from the iceberg that first night flight.
She passed one hand under this low cowl, near the handgrip, to activate things.
Daeman moved his left hand. A virtual control panel flashed into existence. Able to use only his left hand, closing his eyes when he had to remember more clearly, Daeman moved his fingers through control sequences on the multicolored virtual panel. The forcefield flicked on and pressed him down against the cushions. A second later, a roar startled Daeman into looking up, but it was only air flooding into the secured space, just as he’d commanded with his fingers. With the air, came a voice, “Manual or autopilot mode?”
Daeman tugged his osmosis mask up a bit, almost wept as he breathed in the first sweet air he’d tasted in a month, and said, “Manual.”
The control grip flicked into place, surrounded by a virtual aura. The stick felt solid in Daeman’s left hand.
Forgetting the tie-downs until he saw the elastic bands rip free and fly into space, Daeman lifted the sonie ten feet above the metal terrace, twitched the stick, fed power to the rear thrusters, went off course, quickly realigned before smashing into metal instead of window, and hit the semipermeable square doing thirty or forty miles per hour.
Caliban was waiting on the ledge inside. The monster leaped for Daeman’s head and his trajectory was perfect, but the forcefield was on. Caliban bounced off and tumbled into the empty air at the center of the tower.
Daeman made a wide turn, getting used to the steering, twisted the control stick to add more power. The sonie was doing sixty or seventy miles per hour when Caliban looked up, the beast’s bleeding eyes went wide, and the bow of the sonie plowed into the monster’s midsection, sending him flying across the open tower space and crashing into girders and glass on the far side.
Daeman would have loved to stay and play—the want of it ached more in him that the screaming pain from his right arm—but his friends were dying below. He banked the sonie and dived straight down toward the city floor more than ninety stories below.