And I’d never reacted so quickly.
Even so, it took us nearly thirty desperate loops, sudden changes in direction, and zigzags around asteroids to lose sight of them, also losing several square feet of our ship’s outer shielding in our insane final maneuver: squeezing between a par of planetoids, each of them more than a hundred million tons of rock.
That was the worst moment. Really ugly. Like slipping between Scylla and Charybdis. A rock and a hard place. The maneuver had to be precise to the nanosecond. If we’d bumped into them a fraction of a second sooner, they would have caught our flying junkster between them and ground our hull like the molars of some immense monster—but then I wouldn’t be telling this story now. And if I had hesitated a millisecond longer to attempt the passage, the pirate ship’s artillery would have reduced us to ashes.
But things worked out like it was the best of all possible worlds. We left the wolf, with its fangs that snarled and its claws that snatched, behind us. Our tortured engines returned to cruising speed. I slowly peeled my hands from the controls. I looked at them: steady as ever. And I thanked the designers of our android bodies for neglecting to give us involuntary muscle spasms, endocrine glands, and sweat. If I had been human, I would have been buzzing with adrenaline, trembling like a leaf, and drenched through like a diving champion’s towel. Like Vasily.
“Well, that was a close call,” I said, patting his shoulder to calm him and enjoying the elemental pleasure of hearing my own voice. “Who could have imagined they’d have a Chimera hidden in there? Good thing their aim was off and luck was on our side. Makrow must not have been having one of his best days—” Then I saw something in El Afortunado’s palm that made me stop short.
The anti-Psi collar. The collar no living being could possibly remove once it had been snapped around his neck.
Okay, so Vasily had done it anyway. A good thing, too.
Now I understood what those flying ants were doing there (indeed, by now they were all gone), and most of all, what was behind our miraculous escape. Psi powers at play once more. Gaussical versus Gaussical. My friend hadn’t done anything wrong. How could I have thought otherwise? Analyzed objectively: without his ability to manipulate probabilities, a Chimera taking on a shuttle is a fight between a shark and a sardine. A canned sardine. All the odds were against our survival.
“How…?” I was about to ask him, pointing toward the collar, but he interrupted me.
“Old pickpocket’s trick. For all the good it did us. We’re still screwed. That Makrow is a lot more powerful than me; I know that now for sure.” He pointed at an insistently blinking light on the control panel. “Or he’s had more time to practice, especially over the past few days. We got away, but not undamaged.” He unfastened the belts on his safety harness and floated across the cabin to the pressure suit closet. Of course: the first system to fail is always the artificial gravity. He gave a long sigh. “If there’s one thing I learned when I got caught, it’s that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but most of the time you win and lose, both at once. Like now. I hope for our sake that whoever owned these suits kept the breathing devices in better shape than my Romani friends—because I think we’re going to spend a long, long time stuffed into them.”
“Alright, but if they were going to hit us, did it have to be right in our main power generator? Let’s see, we have to cut the power cycles or we’ll explode.” Talking to myself, another custom that I’ve noticed helps calm the humans at tense moments. I started punching the switches again, turning off the reactor and jettisoning the energy crystals in an attempt to get the damn red radioactive leak indicator light to turn off. At last I managed it—but the cabin lights abruptly went dim, and I cursed again.
Of course the primary electrical system would also have to be disconnected now, too. Luckily, my eyes work in much dimmer light than a human’s. The emergency circuit lights gave off a faint yellowish glow under which Vasily’s face took on a sickly hue.
“Oof, that was close. How come it hasn’t exploded already?” I breathed easier once the alarming red light disappeared from the control panel and a bit of power returned. Not all of it, though. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that trying to restart the main engine would leave us completely in the dark. “Well, good thing you noticed in time. We’re stuck here, but the life-support system will hold up. All we have to do now is send out a Mayday and they’ll find us—sooner or later. That is, if those guys ever turn off their interference curtain.”
“They won’t. But that isn’t why I don’t think you should try the radio again.” Vasily was already putting on his space suit, an older model but supersophisticated compared with what the Old Man’s people were using on the Estrella Rom. “It doesn’t matter if the support system holds up. We gotta get out of here. With all the energy you jettisoned just now, the Chimera’s detectors will find us in no time if they’re looking for us, and I guarantee you they are. So after letting them triangulate us with their radio direction finder, you might not even have time to get your suit on—especially if you keep moving so slow.” With a snort, he grabbed another suit from the storage space and with a push floated it my way through the darkened cabin. “Come on, Raymond, we don’t have time to waste. We’d better be well clear of this shuttle when that warship gets here or shrapnel from the explosion could get us. I know it would take the worst kind of bad luck, but when Gaussicals are involved you never know.”
I stared at him. Had he really forgotten that I’m not human? “Thanks for your concern, but I don’t need a suit, Vasily.” I took off my own safety harness. “Did you forget that pozzies don’t breathe?”
“Forget? No way, Dick Tracy,” he taunted me as he finished adjusting his suit and locking his helmet on. “How could I? Woulda been real nice for me not to need to breathe either right now. Thing is, we don’t know how many days we’ll have to float around in this dull asteroid soup before we get picked up, and I’m not planning to go crazy talking to myself the whole time. Big defect in the hyperrealistic android design: you don’t have a radio system built into your structure, do you?”
I nodded, understanding at last what he was getting at: maybe I don’t need air to exist (“live” wouldn’t be quite the right word), but without a hermetically sealed space suit my compressor couldn’t supply me with air to talk with, and we wouldn’t be able to exchange ideas and keep a grasp on sanity.
In silence I took off my fedora, carefully folded it, placed it in an inner pocket of my trench coat, and started climbing into the old pressure suit. I wondered how Vasily planned to hold a conversation without breaking radio silence. I decided it wouldn’t be long before I found out.
Eight
“Hey Raymond, you asleep?”
“What a question, Vasily—you know I’m not.”
“You should try it sometime. Zoning out might do you some good. Tell me something, pozzie: they say the aliens copied you guys’ personalities from real humans that got executed. Remember anything about what you were before? Cop or robber? You know I’m joking, but don’t you miss having dreams?”