As the moon’s surface rushed up to meet me, I closed my eyes. Seconds later, I felt the jolt as the suit did its work. The thrust countered my acceleration and burned off speed, and all I could feel was the pressure of the suit against my body as inertia and gravity fought against it. Then something strange happened, and I felt the pressure give way, replaced with a drop in my stomach.
I opened my eyes to see a warning flashing across my visor.
FUEL DEPLETED.
Of course it was. I checked my readouts, hoping the thrust I’d managed had been enough, but the numbers were grim. By the time I hit, I would be moving at a relative speed of forty meters per second.
This was it, the end of my story.
I remembered something I once read then. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Tycho Barrett would die, but others would carry on. I’d join all the people I’d lost, and Section 9 would continue the fight without me.
As I plummeted down toward the icy surface, I felt peace in the knowledge that I had done all that was possible.
10
I opened my eyes again and found Raven looking down at me.
I looked back up at her beaming face, into those bright brown eyes, and her smile felt like home.
Raven clapped her hands together excitedly. “Oh, Tycho, you’re back!”
I tried to say, “I guess I am,” but my throat was dry and I couldn’t make a sound.
“Hold on,” she told me. “I’ll get you some water.”
She disappeared for a moment, and I heard the sound of running water. I blinked at the unfamiliar ceiling and tried to get my bearings. The room spun with every movement of my head. Raven came back and offered me a glass of water. She helped me sit up to take a sip. It felt awkward to move, but I was still too groggy to understand why. I tried to keep my eyes open, but it was hard.
Raven placed the glass on a small tray and sat down next to me. Next to the bed. Was I in a hospital?
“You can close your eyes, it’s okay. There’s no need to fight your own body. Not after what you’ve been through.”
I tried to force some words out again, and this time I succeeded. “l’m alive?”
She gave me a look. “I don’t know how I should take that, Tycho. Which version of the afterlife do you think you’re in?”
I couldn’t fight it anymore, so I let my head fall back onto the pillow.
“That’s better,” she went on. “You just go back to sleep, and I’ll tell you what’s going on when you wake up.”
“No…”
“No, you don’t want to go back to sleep, or no you don’t want me to tell you what’s going on?”
“Tell me…now.”
“That’s awfully demanding, tough guy. It wasn’t hard to find you. Your drop suit left one hell of a mark on the landscape.”
“What happened to the ship?”
“The Havisham is resting beneath the ice in Europa’s ocean. What happened to put it there?”
“Grenade,” I answered.
“Holy shit. That lady threw a grenade inside the ship?”
“No.”
There was a long pause, which might well have been awkward if I hadn’t been too exhausted to think about it. Then Raven finally spoke up.
“You threw a grenade inside the ship?”
I nodded my head, which sent pain stabbing through both shoulders. I winced, and Raven put her hand on my forehead. “Probably better to lie still, at least for now. Okay?” I didn’t ask her to clarify. I was just too tired, and my whole body felt totally wrong.
“Tycho, throwing a grenade inside a yacht like that is the most mental thing I’ve ever heard of. Didn’t you realize it would crash the ship?”
“She was going to get away.”
Another long pause.
“There’s probably no right way to say this, so I’ll just say it. I’m sorry if this is hard for you, truly, but… Tycho, I’m going to need you to open your eyes for a minute.”
Something about the way she said that made me open them immediately, but I didn’t see what she was talking about at first. The world was blurry, like I was underwater.
“What is it, Raven?” She looked down, and I followed her eyes.
I blinked, trying to get what I was looking at to make more sense than it did. It looked like I was wearing part of a nanosuit, starting at my shoulders and running down the length of my arms. I held my hands up in front of me. Wet fluid seeped from the seams and formed hexagonal rivulets across the black graphene. I blinked again and saw curled skeletal metal fingers wrapped in synthetic muscle.
Prosthetics. Just like Capanelli.
“Raven—”
“I know, Tycho.”
She took my hand, and I was surprised to find that I could still feel the warmth of her touch. It felt different, though. Distant. Like it was happening to someone else.
“You almost died. You were dead for a while. The fall took your arms and legs, but—”
I closed my eyes again and tried to make sense of my new reality. Four limbs gone. I was just a torso and a head, with four awkward tools bolted on to me. Raven took my chin and turned my head to look in her eyes.
“I know this is hard,” she continued, “but this is exactly what Andrea lives with every day. If she can do it, Tycho Barrett can do it.”
I knew she was right. With an augmented body, I could live just as well as anyone else. I could even become better at some things over time, because prosthetic limbs were stronger and faster. It’s a strange experience, processing two contradictory sets of emotions at the same time. I would never have wanted something like this to happen to me, but I could accept what it would mean for my future.
Raven was sitting patiently beside me and holding my hand. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know how to answer that. This is a big change.”
“I know. But you’re back at Section 9 Headquarters now, and I can’t think of a better place for you to be. You’ll learn to use your augments in no time.”
The Earth Headquarters was a place I hadn’t frequented since my training period was over. Section 9 usually worked out of a network of safehouses, both on Earth and off-world. The Headquarters in Bruges was used mainly for administrative and training purposes. If I’d been brought back here for the surgery, that implied they had needed access to the best available equipment just to save my life.
“How long has it been?”
“Six days. There’s been a lot of debate about whether you should get a new nickname or not, but when everyone hears that you threw the grenade yourself, I think that will clinch it.”
“How do you figure?”
“Panic is a perfectly good nickname for a man who crashes a functioning spaceship into Europa rather than flying it to safety. Don’t you think?”
Although she was teasing me, I had the impression she was actually impressed. I didn’t imagine too many old spies had a story about the time they rode a civilian ship plummeting into the nearest moon.
“Panic it is, then.” I swallowed, still trying to get my head around what had just happened. I hadn’t even tried to walk yet on these artificial legs. I had no idea how.