Том Светерлич - The Gone World

She’d seen videos of firefights between patrol officers and armed men, people who’d been pulled over on routine traffic stops for minor infractions, who’d gotten it into their heads that someone had to die. Moss had always marveled at the simple brutality of the exchange of fire, two men separated by a short distance—how straightforward it all was, no acrobatics or sharpshooting, just two men walking toward each other, firing rounds until one person lost the strength to stand. She heard movement and raised her gun. She recognized the second gunman, so much younger than when she’d seen his suicide in the mirrored room. Fleece was a young man here, nothing like the obese corpse hanged from the tree of bones, though behind the thick lenses of his glasses she saw his eyes and remembered that this man had recently lost his mind on the surface of Esperance. He ran toward her along the ceiling, firing rounds, his face a mask of confusion and rage. Moss felt another sting, this in her left thigh, above her prosthesis, but she gained her balance, expecting more stings across her body, expecting a sensation like being stung to death by a swarm of bees, and fired into the approaching gunman, calmly unloading her weapon into his center mass just as if she were at a range firing at a paper target. Fleece died, but his body kept coming, spinning as blood spun from him. She lowered her shoulder to absorb the blow, but he flew over her, crashing against a bread oven.

“Ow, fuck ,” said Moss. Three rounds , she thought— I took at least three rounds . She had heard stories of people taking thirty rounds or more, so pumped up with adrenaline that they continued to resist arrest long after they should have died. But one bullet can kill you , she knew. One bullet is enough.

“Okay,” she said, struggling. “Nicole, okay. We need Remarque,” but the pain intensified. The bullet wound to her thigh bled heavily, blood spilling out over her prosthesis and rising around her. “We need to find her.”

“I have to stanch your bleeding,” said Nicole, applying pressure to Moss’s thigh, but blood still pulsed from the wound. Nicole found a thin dish towel in the galley, looped it around Moss’s thigh as a tourniquet. Blinding pain. Moss screamed as Nicole tightened the knot.

“We have to go,” said Nicole. “Shannon, they’ll have heard—”

“No, we need Remarque,” Moss growled.

She pounded on the locked wardroom door, a larger door than the iron portals throughout the rest of the ship, meant for ease of access for the dinner service. She slapped at the closed door, leaving handprints of blood.

“Shannon Moss, NCIS! Come out, we’ve got to hurry! Remarque? I need you for the B-L— Ah, fuck . I’m NCIS. Come out—”

Nicole pounded at the door with her. “It’s Nicole Onyongo! Come out! Hurry! It’s Onyongo—”

The wardroom door opened. Moss had seen a photograph of Remarque, in the Libra crew list, but even so she was much younger than Moss had imagined. Remarque was only a few years older than Moss, her hair a whitish silver color, cut in a boy’s style with swept bangs. In her cotton slacks and U.S. Naval Academy sweatshirt, Remarque looked more like a woman’s soccer captain than a professional soldier. Lean, athletic, her jaw squared. She came from the wardroom with her hands raised, projecting calm rather than surrender. Chloe Krauss followed, the ship’s weapons officer, her hands also raised, a taller woman than Remarque, her crimson hair cut high and tight. Without weapons they had retreated to the wardroom, where they locked themselves in. Eventually, Moss knew, Chloe Krauss would have been shot in the ensuing firefight and Remarque would have been subdued, taken to the crew’s mess, where Hyldekrugger would have slit her throat in front of his men, then passed around her ruined body.

“You’re hurt,” said Remarque. “We can help you. Krauss has training.”

“We don’t have time,” said Moss. “These men, they all fought against you because you wanted to destroy Libra…”

“How did you get here?” asked Remarque. “You aren’t my crew.”

“You have to finish what you started,” said Moss, her breath rattling, the taste of blood in her mouth. “Cascade failure, the B-L—”

“Who are you?” asked Remarque. “How do you know all this?”

“Do you know what a thin space is?” asked Moss. “A space-time knot?”

Remarque’s left eye narrowed, a rakish expression of calculation. Her jaw tensed. “All right. Let’s get to the engine room,” she said. “The B-L was damaged in the initial fighting, but I need to spark a cascade failure for it to develop into a singularity.”

“Hyldekrugger’s in the crew’s mess,” said Nicole. “He’ll be coming.”

Krauss snatched Cobb’s rifle, the M16, loaded a new magazine.

“We can make it to the engine room through the Quad-lander stowage compartment,” said Nicole. “That’s the way we came.”

“There’s a quicker way,” said Krauss. “We can drop through into the gunnery, a straight shot to the engine room.”

“I can’t,” said Moss. She was losing blood, felt cold. A forest in winter, an eternal forest. The tourniquet had already come loose, and blood stained the air around her. “I can’t move anymore.”

Nicole held her. “Let’s go, let’s follow them.”

Krauss led them belowdecks, into one of the thruster houses. She unlocked a portal door and dropped even farther down to one of the cavernous gunneries, the munitions storage. They passed the starboard laser generator, a gray box with a lens. Moss smelled fire as they neared the stern. There’d been fire when she was locked in the brig, she remembered. How long before the inferno would bring down the ship? We could run out of time , she thought. We’d run out of time, and I’d never know it. If the B-L drive misfired, the crew of Libra would reset like chess pieces for a new match.

“Up,” said Krauss.

An iron ladder led to the engineering department, the passageway to the engine room. Moss floated ahead of Nicole, Remarque bringing up the rear, closing the iron door behind them. As they entered the engineering department, however, a voice called out to them.

“Drop your guns! Remarque, give this up! Drop your fucking gun, Krauss!”

Patrick Mursult barred the portal to the engine room, M16 in firing position. He braced himself to counter the recoil of his rifle fire, three magazines floating within arm’s reach for reload. Devastation crashed through Moss: she had saved Remarque only to lead her into this different death. He could kill them all in a rapid spray just by easing back his finger.

“Patrick,” said Nicole. “Please.”

“I can’t let you in here,” said Mursult. His eyes were cold when he spoke to Nicole, and Moss realized that the burgeoning emotions that would one day lead to their affair were dead to him in this moment of decision. He’d kill her, thought Moss, as easily as he’d kill any of them.

“Drop the gun, Krauss,” said Remarque, and Krauss let her rifle float aside. “We’ll talk about this,” she said. “You think you’re doing the right thing—”

“Karl’s coming,” said Mursult, “and he’ll kill you. He wants to be the one. He wants to cut your fucking head off with his ax.”

“Mursult,” said Moss. “Damaris, she—” But her words failed. She was light-headed, so much of her blood lost.

“Who is that?” asked Mursult, his cold eye finding Moss. “She shouldn’t be here.”

Moss tried to speak, choked on blood. She took a deep, wet breath. “I come from another time,” she said. “I’ve seen how this all plays out. You have a wife, named Damaris. You have a daughter, she’s five years old. You’ll have another, a son not yet born, and another daughter. This doesn’t end well, what you’re doing. They all die… because of this. They always die…”