H’lim was right! She can defend herself!

“Inea, remember when I was mad at H’lim for what he told you to do to me, and he told us what you could do because of it?” If only Abbot doesn’t catch on!

“Yeah,” she gasped, against Abbot’s control.

“Now!” shouted Titus. Simultaneously, he yanked the transmitter away from the connections and threw all his might into raising Influence. Then he hurled the transmitter directly at Abbot.

Deep within himself, a blast furnace of power reopened. But this time, it was white hot and focused to a narrow pencil of intent. He used what Abbot had taught him when they had to Influence each other against Biomed’s hypnosis check, and cut through Abbot’s defenses, inducing Abbot’s reflex move to bring the weapon around to ward off the flying object. Now!

The laser came up and flared. Two pieces of transmitter flew onwards, struck Abbot, and bounced to the floor.

With an inarticulate howl he discarded the laser, not caring that its activated tip ate a hole in the stone floor. He sank to his knees over the twin pieces of his last hope.

Inea, released from thrall, picked up the laser, moving at Abbot’s exposed back with deadly intent. Titus flung himself across the space and pinned her arm up. “No!” he said aloud, with no Influence behind it. “He’s neutralized. Kill him in cold blood, and you’re no better than he is.”

He couldn’t see her face, but he felt the muscles in her arm tremble with the smoldering need to slice into Abbot. Urgently, Titus demanded, “Would the priest who charged the crucifix approve of killing for revenge?”

She made a sound that was part sob, part laugh, and part shiver of terror. “I charged the crucifix, praying while he had you.” She let him pluck the cutter out of her grip.

Awe struck, he flung it haphazardly aside, not noting where it landed. It had been different. Very different. “Come on, we have to help H’lim. He can’t handle those four without Influence, and he’s going to-”

Deep inside him there was a tearing, rending pain as if someone had ripped his heart out by the roots. H’lim!

The ground danced.

Titus staggered, hanging onto Inea, who didn’t have the mass to hold him upright. They parted. Abbot struggled to his feet. Then a fluid wave of loose rock pushed into the hut, shoving everything before it. The roof majestically folded downwards. The floor jerked sideways.

One of the screens, detached and seemingly floating on nothing, showed the two crawlers sliding down toward the shed amidst a rock avalanche. Then it went dark.

Everything went dark.

The bright tip and the short cutting rod of the laser was clear even through Titus’s suitvisor, and so was the dim form of Inea staggering off balance right across its beam.

Titus grabbed her arm, dancing onto the leading edge of flowing rock, and yanked her out of danger. But that sent him stumbling forward, pivoting in freefall. Suddenly, he realized that Newton’s laws, the coldest of equations, had now condemned him to death. The laser, its butt caught in the moving rocks, would pierce his left eye.

A large, heavy vacuum suit slammed into him. Abbot. Spinning sideways, he landed on his back and bounced. In mid-flight, pain such as he’d never imagined could be endured lanced through him. Paralyzed, he couldn’t even scream when a light that had been inside him, disregarded since he’d first crawled from his grave, winked out.

He rolled and turned to find Abbot sprawled, half buried in debris, the back of his helmet severed from the back of his suit, leaking infrared colors like drops of blood. Two polished ends of vertebrae were exposed, the froth of boiling blood hardly obscuring the fact that Abbot had gone to his final death, a fact that lived in ashen darkness within Titus where no other could see. Mixed with that gasping agony was the throb of another mortal wound. And H’lim, too.

Movement of the rocks had almost stopped.

Inea pulled herself out from under a ceiling panel, and shoved aside a piece of the roof camera turret. Bits of shattered sunlight pierced the rents in the rubble over them, though without atmospheric scattering, they didn’t illuminate much. One of them outlined Abbot’s hand, clutching half a transmitter. Inea waded over to Abbot, knelt, and eased his body into her lap. Short little coughs that might have been astonished sobs came over the suitphones to Titus as he got his knees under him and began to crawl toward them.

“Ti-Titus, did you hear what he said? Did you hear?”

“No.” He pulled up and examined the wound. The spinal cord was severed. Fatally.

“He said-he said, ”You’re still of my blood.“ I was wrong. He loved you. He was crazy, warped, horrible, but he had enough good in him to love you. I’m glad you didn’t let me kill him.” And then she cried.

“You can’t cry in a spacesuit. It’s too hard to wipe your nose.”

“Titus! How-”

“When we have time, we’ll both cry. But for the moment, we’ve got to-”

“H’lim! My God! We’ve got to go get him-” She tried to struggle free of the corpse.

“Inea.”

She stopped.

Titus swallowed hard. “He’s dead. Not dormant. Dead.”

“But how could you-”

“I know. A father knows. When there can be a revival, there’s still a-connection. It’s gone.”

He put a hand on her elbow, remembering all the times he’d helped other fathers rush to the aid of suddenly dormant children. There was no trace of that feeling in him. My first son is dead. “H’lim blew up the convoy when it came close-”

“But why?”

“To keep those four men from getting to us, to keep the convoy from blowing up the Collector and putting the station at the mercy of the blockaders, and probably to distract Abbot as best he could without Influence to help me.”

“What do you mean without Influence?”

“He was so hurt from the sun, so exhausted from battling Abbot, he couldn’t even divert the blockaders.”

“He’s dead,” she whispered.

He stared at her, savoring the feel of her with all his senses. Her acceptance of the loss somehow let him accept it, too. And I’ll never know what kind of science uses a math too difficult for computers.

“Yes, Inea, he’s dead. Permanently, this time. Now come on. We’ve got to see if any of those men survived. There must be first aid supplies in this mess somewhere. And then we have to dispose of Abbot’s body, make ourselves a sledge of some kind to carry extra air, and trek back to the station-unless we can fix the radio and signal for help. But meanwhile we have to concoct a plausible story we can both stick to, and see about disarming any compulsions Abbot left you. And we have to do all of those things before we both break down and cry, or run out of oxygen.”

Titus laid Abbot’s head down on the rocks and shards of console and promised he’d make his father proud, always, even when he disagreed with him.