They pondered leaving someone to protect the jet, but didn't; it was far more likely that they'd need the sixth down there than successfully evade an artillery strike. Besides, they'd told the other engineereds where they were going; they could make it to the near side and signal for rescue, even if it would entail a possible secrecy breach. They leapt out of the crater to see a shining selenic hellscape, no Earth in the heavens, nothing but a horrifically bright Sun above (the faceplates darkened almost immediately in response) and many more craters below, steep, jagged walls at the far horizon. The skin temperature of their suits rose slightly in the overhead sunlight, a single square on their backs glowing bright red to radiate it away, the dark, dusty basalt beneath their feet more than a hundred degrees Celsius.
And normals had once dreamed of living on the surface of this place? The twins expressed the opinion that they had to be out of their fucking minds and got universal agreement. You either got underground to mine titanium and enjoy low gravity, or you got the fuck out.
They watched all possible angles as they moved, running and jumping erratically and looking backwards frequently, eyes watching all sides and particularly the massive rock formation towering high, high above, some pulverized rocks from the earlier attack still slowly tumbling down. Ten kilometers wasn't far at all, not in power armor and making enormous leaps, hurtling themselves almost at random to avoid things they'd never see coming. Paul's earlier elation returned as he soared in the airlessness, in a way he'd only dreamed of before. The Moon was no fit place to live. It was, however, a fit place to play.
It came as no surprise that the entrance was covered in rubble, one particularly large chunk of boulder blocking their path. Paul, laughing, picked the multi-ton wall of rock up and deftly tossed it aside. The fist-sized rock they had used on the entrance was going more than four hundred thousand meters per second when it hit, more or less annihilating the outer doors, but leaving the airlock itself mostly intact and revealing a second set of thick blast doors.
There was a brief discussion: they could try to rewire it open, they could try to force it open, or they could do the smart thing and blow it off its hinges from a safe distance. They chose the latter, turning metal and regolith to white-hot ooze, and suddenly the entire door flew off, flipping end-over-end, a wave of visible air smashing it out as the group dodged, a loud whoosh audible before the silence returned. The heavy door careened into a crater and bounced before settling to a stop, the air from the hole petering out. Sarah used her corner-mirror to check inside, saw nothing but blackness, and the twins cut loose with full-strength blasts before stepping in, the faceplates quickly shifting from dimness to vision enhancement. Infrared would have been nice, but they would be making too much of that to see anything useful.
The corridor was fifteen meters high by fifteen meters wide, extending a hundred meters before ending in a glowing half-melted wall of steel-braced regolith. Far, far too large. This was the Moon, oxygen was at a premium here even if they did have a way of getting it out of the rock. There were only a couple dozen rogues up here, unless they'd been breeding which was highly unlikely. Why the fuck had they built so damn big?
For one thing, it played havoc with the engineereds' strategy. There could be railguns, or anything else, in walls, floors, and even the ceiling. The only rational option was to destroy everywhere they could possibly be as they came in, a scorched-earth plan to annihilate any traps smaller than a deep-buried, extremely large IED. Fortunately the enemy hadn't mirrored the surfaces; that would have made things difficult indeed, as they only had so many solid projectiles to fire. There were two more smaller doors they also destroyed, revealing one large storage closet full of spacesuits, and another full of miscellaneous supplies.
They could only fuse so much deuterium before the residual heat started to build, and they'd cooked so many of the walls, the whole place was starting to heat up and more squares on their backs were glowing, making them look like walking checkerboards. "Atmosphere would be nice, think we can get it?" Howard asked, watching the temperature of the radiators ever-so-slowly drop. Less sharp shadows were good, cooling was better, and actually being able to hear sounds was the icing on the cake.
It didn't seem possible, given what they needed to do. Actually trying to open one of the great doors in such a way that it could be closed again was suicide. Duct tape and something thin and tough would be the way to do it, but they hadn't brought any duct tape ('Note to self, always bring duct tape') and they didn't trust anything the enemy would keep in storage. Ruby pondered melting regolith to seal a smaller hole up, but she didn't know this stuff well enough to even make a good attempt. Maybe if the air cooled it as it escaped, no, it'd just blow it away, but if she..
"Yes we can," she said, and directed her lasers at a section of regolith near the door, cutting the corner, making a hole small enough for them to duck through. She broke through the other side and the engineereds stood in the path of the escaping gas, letting it drop their temperature as if fanned by a cool breeze, jamming their hands and feet into the ground and walls to avoid getting blown away. "Okay, next door, I want a big piece of metal." The tunnel itself was cooled by the air as it escaped into outer space, so they walked through it cautiously, the others starting to understand her plan.
There was another blast door, right there, sealed tight. Why put it in such a place? It was less than twenty meters away from the one they had cut the corner from, and there wasn't an airlock here. Ruby, having taken point, told everyone else to get back and started to blast the side- immediately the door itself exploded, slamming through the hallway at enormous speed, Ruby dodging back into the hole as metal slammed against metal, another gust of air following in its wake. At least they hadn't been disappointed; there were traps here after all. She started lasering walls and dodged back again, one long, thin projectile slamming into the rock a foot from her arm. Damn this single-file hole, might have been a bad idea..
"Fuck a duck," Luke said, both him and Ruby darting back and forth in the cramped space to administer more hot death to walls and taking another wall-embedded railgun out before it fired. Ceiling and floor, but nothing there.
"That son of a bitch," William said, looking at the hole in the rock. The railgun with its fast, armor-piercing projectiles had worked before, so the rogues kept right on using it.
There were doors roughly five meters apart along the walls, most of them melted, some collapsed. A spacesuited hand came out of one, as if in surrender, and someone started to step out-
"No, it's not-", Ruby shouted, seeing it more clearly, all of them dodging back as she lasered it. The robot exploded into a volley of shredding needles, the engineereds avoiding most, a handful glancing off their armor at angles. More robots came out of more doors, and this time Sarah and her servant found room to throw grenades before ducking back in. Damn, this was just too cramped- they came out slowly, Sarah liquefying everything she suspected, and Ruby went through with her original plan. The section of destroyed door she picked up must have massed two thousand kilograms; the suit let her tote it over her head almost as if it were made of styrofoam, her feet leaving indentations in the rock. She placed the door section over the hole and held it there, melting some of the regolith with her flames ('good thing they're pre-oxidized') for a good if slightly imperfect seal. "Okay, open the next door, get some more gas in here, and I won't have to hold it."
They saw the air first. There was a left turn at the end of the corridor, the door must be leaking there- and now they saw its bulk, the entire door literally turning the corner, reflecting- the twins dodged into a room- "Fuckshit!" Howard exclaimed, jumping back from the room with his brother before a piston slammed down, crushing the ceiling before that entire room exploded, sending shards of rock and a ball of flame into the hall that they leaped away from, undodgable thumb-sized rocks rebounding off their armor. Could they all dodge back into that hole-
And Paul was blasting it with his autocannons, expending ammo with abandon, tearing mirrored steel to shreds, blowing apart the jet motors that were propelling it. Suddenly a huge gust of wind burst through the moving door, sending its pieces flying (more things to dodge, damn..), a wave of air slamming into them and blowing them back, the clanging sound of bouncing steel a surprise to the ears. Ruby's plan had worked; the air pressure had pinned the door piece against the wall, almost completely air-tight, like a vacuum cleaner holding a piece of plastic.
"Hello. Please let me out," they heard on the other side of one of the half-melted doors, in a rogue's voice that they recognized. "Hello. Please let me out." Over and over again, in the exact same tone. They knew quite well what they'd get if they opened that door.
"Well, we've got sound now, are you sure we want it?" William asked his brother, suddenly very glad there were six of them there, wishing they had brought eight or ten.
"Sarah, does this place serve a useful purpose, or is the whole thing a trap?" Howard asked, thoroughly creeped out.
"Little bit of both," Sarah answered, recalling Gritzl's hallways. But those hadn't been anywhere near this bad, and Gritzl hadn't been able to prepare this thoroughly. "Those bedrooms were real bedrooms, but the occupants ran before we got here."
"With crushing ceilings," Howard added. It was obvious who ran the place. Brenk must have his own personal reign of terror up here. Sorry, if you're running a reign of terror anywhere in the Solar System, the Dominator gets to join in too. Them's the rules.
They performed the same ritual as they turned the next corner. The hallway was easily four hundred meters long, and they took time to carve and burn as many walls as they could, fusion fuel less of a concern than a trap they might have missed. Things in the walls, ceiling, and floor satisfyingly melted and exploded, proving the continued worth of their strategy. A surviving railgun on the far end of the hallway went off, but a 6000 m/s projectile from 400 m away was almost leisurely to dodge.
This hallway branched in a four-way junction, continuing for twenty meters on the left and right before ending in doors, the group staying around cover while blasting these walls.
"Straight," William said. His logic was simple: If they found reason to start running out, he wanted to run in a direction that directly led somewhere presumably cleared of traps. Sarah almost suggested that they split up, but knew the idea would get vetoed and probably for good reason. It didn't matter if they were each a walking tank with redundant firepower; you did not split up in a place like this.
They crossed the junction quickly, all of them suspicious that perhaps one of the half-melted doors was itself a projectile and there was nothing behind it but explosives.
When they were halfway down that hall, the shooting started.
So many shots coming so fast, the wide-angle autoshotgun encompassing more and more of the hall, and the spread on that thing- Howard found himself in the firing cone and intuitively dodged to the ground before he realized that he wouldn't drop quite so fast here- and there was a loud, solid CLUNK as one of the flying pellets struck him in the back of the head with enough force to blow open concrete and shatter bone. William blew off the tip of the barrel, but the damn thing was firing at an angle so he had to fire another armor-piercing shell, this time blasting partway through the wall to hopefully take the rest of it out. It stopped firing for now, but- 'Oh shit, Howie-'
And Howard got up, putting an armored hand very gently to the back of his hood-helmet, feeling the centimeter-deep indentation where the pellet had hit him, chuckling. 'Billy was right. The next one got me in the head.' He'd felt the impact like catching a fast rock with a pillow. The armor was designed to bend and not break when struck hard enough. Were he wearing a regular spacesuit, he would surely have had his skull blown in; the grazing hit against the thick steel had simply ricocheted away, failing to penetrate.
"Fuck," Sarah said, pressing herself against the side of the wall. This was an awful place to be, and whatever was shooting at them was obviously built fairly solid. She wanted to get closer and nullify its spread, but that was likely suicide. She wanted to go back but that would more easily put their entire bodies in that guy's firing cone. Maybe if they retreated fast enough and just blasted their way through the regolith, or she could throw a fusion bomb in there-
"Do you hear me, Paul?" an unfamiliar, amplified voice called out, and they took the chance to dart backwards out of the danger zone while this guy talked, blasting plasma and projectiles to cover their retreat. "I think your color suits all of you, but especially you. They might have put you in master's clothes and given you a master's position, but we both know you don't deserve either of those. You'll never be more than just a pretender. Because in the end, your Dominator is nothing but a genetics project, and you're nothing but a servant." Who the hell could that be?
No, it was obvious. There was only one person who would say those things to him. "Damien," he said softly, and instantly Luke was moving, rushing headlong into danger in violation of all the advice he'd given, pushing off a solid section of wall with his hand for more speed. "Luke-", Paul started, but remembered. He'd given Luke explicit orders, once. Now those orders would be carried out or he was going to lose a friend right now.
Luke did what none of them wanted to as the thing started firing at him- he jumped above the waves of pellets, an act which could leave himself vulnerable and airborne for far too long- but he'd jumped hard enough to immediately kick off the ceiling as he glimpsed his enemy, a titanic humanoid mech of mirrored steel. Headless and more than ten meters high, it boasted two enormous gibbon-like arms hanging from the torso, standing up on two squat, long-footed legs, surrounded by advanced batteries bolted to its body in clumps. Multiple hydraulics spoke of redundant systems; this was a machine designed to both sustain and deal damage. Although it had its own attached weapons, a series of larger guns were strewn around it, the right arm having dropped the destroyed autocannon to pick up another, the left bearing a massive automatic grenade launcher that was slowly pointing towards the hallway. Two point-defense turrets on its shoulders started to look up at Luke before he melted them with quick, angled shots.
Wary of traps, Luke spun, raking the walls and ceiling with full-strength microwave death, making an enormous wave of plasma as he plummeted to the ground. By the time the computer-assisted targeting of the enemy machine had angled the right arm high enough to aim at him, he'd already slammed into that arm and was grabbing the mirror-steel skin.
An electrical arc immediately went into his hands, down his feet, and into the floor. Damien started to laugh. He'd known that they'd do this if they could. These genetically engineered nonhumans were so fond of getting up close and personal. It was a simple matter for Brenk to install a defense that would cook them the moment they touched him. His laughter subsided as he realized he wasn't the only one laughing. Suddenly there was more electricity- lots more, off the scale- and the right arm's circuit breakers tripped and it went dead to save the rest.
Luke kept right on laughing. Damien's zap was barely a twentieth of the juice he could dish out in this suit, let alone take. He saw the other arm target him with the grenade launcher- far, far too slow, the motors simply unable to move that much metal in time- and Luke pushed off the right arm and dived to the floor, slamming feet-first into the ground next to its right foot. It tried to shock him again as he lifted it off the ground, his own feet dug into the rock by the effort, the mirrored steel creaking and buckling, dozens of megagrams of mass forced into the air as the far smaller, far stronger machine worked its will on the larger. Luke sent the whole thing tilting forward over the long, flat left foot and it crashed to the ground in slow motion face-first, its left arm trying to push it back upright. He climbed onto its back and it tried again with the electrical defense before sputtering out. He found the entry hatch; the handle came off in his hand so he simply summoned the claws and jammed his fingers into the steel, peeling it back like a can of sardines, ultimately breaking the hinges and revealing Damien, lifting the terrified young man out by the neck and showing him to the rest of the engineereds like a trophy.
Paul barely recognized him. A combination of growth, low gravity, and lack of sunlight had not been kind to his body and his complexion over the last decade. Who he had known as an arrogant, vicious asshole had become a gangly, pale, helpless, writhing bundle of sticks, held aloft by someone who was more than his match in every sense.
"No," Luke said, "I'm nothing but a servant."
He held on to Damien's neck, grabbed his left ankle, and discharged. Fast, angry electrons surged through Damien at once, instantly frying his clothes, charring his skin, and stiffening his body. What feces was left in him was propelled out by steam, boiling blood exiting from every normal orifice and a few new ones. Muscle and bone alike burned under the continuous lightning strike. Luke tossed the corpse at the far wall backhand as hard as he could, and it came apart like an overcooked turkey fired from a cannon.
Paul laughed. Sure, he could have told Luke to take him alive, but... why? Dead is dead, wasn't that what he told him? There's no coming back from dead, that which is dead can't hurt you. And this time Paul's former tormentor really was dead, a pile of charred meat and blackened bones up against a wall in a lunar cavern, left to rot far from the rest of humanity.
Sarah worried about a self-destruct device in the thing, and Luke tore it open searching for one before the rest of them could take chances with their lives. They continued down the hallway and reached the corner. "I know you have a habit of blowing apart the walls of every corridor, but please don't do that to this one," an unfamiliar, amplified voice said. Sarah took a quick mirror-stick glimpse around the corner in both directions. Same as every other hallway, with a large set of double doors at the end of the right. These were more ornate, hydraulics and gears visible. To the left was another heavy blast door.
"Then come out," Howard ordered at top volume. Sarah watched the door open, staying behind cover that she could never be sure was cover, Paul watching the same mirror. The apparatus on the doors was both decorative and functional; the gears started turning and the hydraulics pulled the doors back. A man wearing a gold-visored spacesuit walked slowly towards them, arms and hands splayed in surrender.
"There's oxygen, take it off," Paul commanded him. The man dutifully stripped piece by piece, leaving himself clad in only a thin suit with absorbent underwear. An Enforcer or robot that looked and acted exactly like this would be a masterpiece of engineering. "That too." He knew he saw the face before, but it didn't match.. who was this?
And he stood there naked, hands still splayed. "Leave it all behind and come here," Sarah ordered him.
As with Damien, a decade on the Moon had not been kind to his physique. There was no chance of him hiding combustibles in his fat or muscle, as he had Ethiopian levels of both. He walked towards the group and took a sudden step back- the floor was far too hot. "You can put your boots on," Sarah said contemptuously. He did and came back, looking around at the oven the group had turned the hallway into, parts of it still visibly glowing even in the light from the other halls. "Ruby, go check him." He stood there sweating as Sarah's servant inspected his boots, rectum, and body, carefully poking his guts and under his ribs searching for metal or explosives. "Clean," Ruby said, despite the fact that he was very unclean indeed.
"Brenk," William said upon seeing him, contemptuously. Of course, Paul realized- the decade hadn't been any kinder to his face than it had Damien's.
"Will you be magnanimous in victory?" Peter Brenk asked, puppy-dog eyes plaintive. "Spare a defeated dungeon master?"
It was all the twins could do to avoid shattering their faceplates with their palms. "And to think, we already implanted Gary, too.," William muttered as if he really was talking through his hand.
Sarah glanced at them. C'mon, guys, time's still at a premium. "Yes," she answered him, placing the instant-implanter to his forehead. Fifteen seconds, a lot of screaming, and a half-cup of blood later it was done. "You can't lie and you can't withhold information. Anything else that can kill us?" she asked Peter.
"Possibly," he said, still reeling from the sudden transition between extreme pain and relative painlessness. "Did you really bomb everything you could see on the surface?" She nodded. "There's more pitfalls in halls you didn't go down. There's a few false walls you never found out about, too. You take the path you came in and you won't trigger anything. And of course, my room in there? To the gills. You probably guessed, but I really wasn't expecting the armor." Neither were they. Daniel would get major commendations. "There isn't anything dangerous in those clothes and the air tank is just that."
"Where are the rest of you?"
"They're mostly right here. No traps," he answered, knocking shave-and-a-haircut on a section of wall. The regolith slid open, and the faces that stared back at them were wide-eyed and terrified, especially the ones they recognized on sight. The old, old Night Operator. The Bastard, whose son had died a second time, and his Bitches, their lard-bedecked faces almost begging to be gloated upon before killed. Howard's Daddy had hated these people since the then-Inheritor was very young. Their public clones had insulted the new Dominator right before he had killed them.
"Brenk, you traitorous son of a fucking-", Damien's father started, his red face unaffected by his long time spent in this pit, his body run to pure obesity by low gravity and lack of exercise instead of skeletonizing the way his son and Brenk had. The extra weight didn't much affect Howard grabbing him by the neck and slamming him into the wall not quite hard enough to kill him, burning his back against the half-molten rock.
"You," Howard growled. Gladstone, choking out his screams, batted helpless hands against the merciless grip.
"Fuck you, and fuck your worthless son," William snarled, so mad he punched a deep indentation into the wall. The soft organics and porous calcium between his fist and the wall barely cushioned the blow, his arm nearly to the elbow in bloody lard. Howard, chuckling, stepped back and let go of the man, who stayed in place impaled on William's forearm before William tore his arm out sideways, sending fat, muscle, and a great amount of blood spiraling through the air in the low gravity. He only hoped there was no afterlife and no reincarnation for this piece of shit or his progeny, as he didn't want either of them to exist in any form. Let them be permanently deleted from reality.
If the twins killed them all like that, this was going to take too long. "Ruby," Sarah said, gesturing, and her servant immolated their remaining foes all at once in a wave of fusion-accelerated fire, extremely volatile gases becoming heat and carbon dioxide, flesh and organs becoming more of the same, ash, soot, and black skeletons the only remains. Sarah looked at the twins almost apologetically, but one prisoner was more than enough, she didn't want to stay here any longer than was operationally necessary even if they had the trap master, and none of them could blame her. "Any more?"
"There's three who left, probably for the emergency shelter, but that wasn't well-protected. I tried to tell them- they're dead men walking," Brenk said, a nasal whine creeping into his voice. He strongly suspected that so was he. He made a mental note to do his very best to avoid pissing the twins or any other engineered off for the foreseeable future, hoping that they would fundamentally accept his surrender.
"Ruby. Dead men not walking," Sarah said, and her servant was gone in a few jumps of fire.
"Get your clothes back on," Howard ordered Brenk, glancing at Sarah and moving his head: We're done here? She nodded. The rogues were confirmed dead, they had a prisoner, this whole place was a deathtrap. Time to get the fuck out.
Brenk complied immediately, still talking. "The only thing left for you to worry about is the nuclear pile," he said, gesturing to the doors on the other side of the corridor. "I'm no nuke engineer, but they shouldn't be able to make that go critical if everything was done to spec, but- well- you know them," he said, as if he wasn't one of them to begin with and as if he wouldn't have overseen every last one of the traps. "Can you imagine that some of them wanted it with a hydrogen center? When we told them it wouldn't work the way they thought it would, a few actually asked to spare uranium for a bomb. As if we could. Or if I'd want to."
"No plans on going out in a blaze of glory?" Paul asked, helping him with the spacesuit.
He scoffed at the idea. What good was an epic self-destruct device if he wouldn't survive to watch it work? "None. If I had a getaway plan I'd've used that, but where would I go and how would I get there? 'Twas bad enough just getting here in the first place," he said as he finished putting his gloves and helmet on.
"All right," William said. "We're getting out of here," both twins finished. There was an argument for dealing with the nuclear reactor now, but fuck it- Sarah was right, they were here to kick ass, not tempt fate.
"Talk and move," Howard said, the question burning. "Why, Brenk?"
He'd expected the question and gave his rehearsed (actually rehearsed- he'd practiced in front of a mirror) answer, every word true. "Because I could. The world has no meaning except what we give it, and we're only here once. I wanted to make things more exciting, to alter the world from its course, to end the monotony of Dominator rule. So when they came to me and said that they had a plan to implant the Dominator, of course I went along with it. I did have my own plans, but I never hated you the way the rest of them did. You were always just my chosen opponents in the game I decided to play." He found the neologism the best way to phrase it: "Duumvirate, I did it for the lulz." They digested what he said. Just that, then. Not the deep perversions of the foul, nor the searing hate of the power-mad, nor the quasi-religious insanity of the self-centered authoritarian, nor the desperate flailing of someone fearing that the world will be pulled out from under him, nor even a personal grudge. An intentional choice, made early on for no other reason than to influence the course of events. Brenk had led Montgomery and the rest of the rogues to believe that he was just in it for the power, which wasn't quite wrong and wasn't quite right.
Brenk was jogging too slow. William picked him up and started running, the rest following. "We were engineered, Brenk," William said softly as the armor propelled him. "You had no idea what that meant at the time, the world we'd build, the things we'd create. You could have had it all, you could have built thousands of your dungeons for us to play in, but you chose the side of idiocy, ignorance, and fear. It's we who influence the course of events. Not you."
"We," Brenk said, shaking his head as he watched his final line of defense pass by. "Us. That wasn't supposed to happen. Ending up opposing your whole kind was probably my biggest mistake, but that's not the biggest.. flaw.. in this game of ours." He took a deep breath, as if trying to find a way to explain the ineffable, without saying something that he thought would get him killed outright. "There's not.. supposed.. to be two of you. It shouldn't have happened that way! And I couldn't fix it. No matter how I tried, I couldn't make it so there was just one of you. It wasn't.. fair." Ah. He was crazy, then. Just not in the way they had thought. He hung his head in abject defeat. The twins were inclined to show mercy, perhaps let him live for a while after the End of Secrecy and have him build something that was actually fun, his creative insanity treated as a rare resource before he died of old age, the weird crap (like the repetitious robot still begging to be let out) used in an entertaining spooky-house environment instead of actually trying to kill engineereds.
Sarah's servant, however, was not so inclined. Even years later, even with low gravity altering her real target's stride, even with him in a panicked lope in a now-antiquated spacesuit hoping to reach the jet and somehow take it over to save himself from certain doom, she knew his gait and his mannerisms. There was no question. With no sound to warn them, none of the three turned around as she blasted towards them; the other two never knew what hit them, their heads flattened together into brain pancakes with bone-and-helmet flakes. She tapped Gritzl on the shoulder, smiling.
She would cherish the look on his face for the rest of her life.
"Awwww. You think you're a big boy, don't you?" she said, touching helmets to transfer sound. She hadn't turned off the communicator and the others wondered what was going on. "Big boy wants to dress up like a spaceman. Sorry, but you're just a little boy and shouldn't be wearing those grown-up clothes." She tore it from him, yanking off the helmet and ripping the suit, boots, and gloves right off his body, leaving him exposed to vacuum and direct sunlight. A gush of quickly-freezing air rushed out of his nose and he gasped helplessly, slowly falling to the searing-hot dust, squinting in reflex as his eyes started to freeze, his sweat instantly evaporating to a thin icy film, his right eardrum rupturing with a spray of purple, freezing blood. The others had figured it out and the riotous laughter of Luke drowned out their chuckles. "Looks like baby needs his ba-ba," she said, opening the valve on his air tank and shoving it in his mouth, his stiff hands clasping it, desperately and hopelessly trying to get any of the air down his throat before it escaped. He floundered with it for fifteen seconds before shock and asphyxiation finally rendered him unconscious. Ruby stomped on his head and wiped it off on his body.
"If you're done, get the jet next to the entrance," Sarah ordered her, and in moments she reached it and did just that, the rest immediately climbing in with Brenk and a couple of extra air tanks for him in tow.
They came back much slower than they had gone out, at a leisurely one gravity, interrogating Brenk thoroughly to make sure he really was the last. There was only one real question remaining, and William asked it with a smile on his face: "So, Brenk, we got a little message in a bottle telling us where to look. Who do you think betrayed you?"
The blood had been draining into his head from a gravity he was not used to, and outrage caused it to flood his face. "I don't know!" Who could have possibly...
"Were there any threats, serious arguments, or organizational changes recently?" Howard asked.
"No, none of note, and Ivan Petrovich autoeuthanized three days ago, but it couldn't have been him. For him, everything, and I mean everything, was about his progeny. He was terrified of his lineage being supplanted by yours. That's why he joined in the first place. He was a very old man, he had no duplicate, his kids were all he had."
"Really?" William asked, smiling. "Then let's take a look at his family tree when we get back to Earth."
Brenk looked offended. "When his grand-daughter married last year he swore he'd do anything to save her and her kids from you, and I know he was not lying."
The twins looked at each other, faces wide in smiles, tears in their eyes from the hilarity. He didn't know.. he really didn't know... they started laughing, then Paul, then Sarah, then Luke and Ruby, and the whole jet fairly shook with echoed, amplified laughter.
"Okay, okay, stop, stop," Howard said, quieting his friends and himself down. "Peter, are you aware that Northberg Medical openly and willingly provides neonatal genetic services to any Illuminatus who wishes them?"
"No, there's no way that she'd..," Brenk started.
"That she'd what, Brenk? That she'd turn her own kid into a genetically superior being instead of leaving it a normal? That she and her husband would go 'Yeah, let's not leave our kid well behind the curve'? That she'd be as devoted to her family as her grandfather, a man who she thought was dead years ago?" William asked rhetorically.
"There is a way, and she did," the implants made him say despite himself.
"And I bet you were all making mouth noises about attacking Northberg again," Howard said. Brenk started to sob into his arms, tears collecting at the bowl of his helmet. Ivan was determined to protect his genetic line, even if altered. How could he have missed it? How could he have been so stupid? "Oh, you weren't all wrong. You knew his motivations perfectly. You just forgot to check what the circumstances were." And then there was more laughter, slow and chuckling, and Brenk withdrew into himself for the hours it took to return to the planet.
They made their re-entry over Antarctica (thruster-braking, not aerobraking) to avoid secrecy concerns on deceleration. They wouldn't need to worry about those much longer, either.