“That’s enough,” he said. His voice rasped as he spoke, grating against itself with gravity and dehydration. The chillers of his biosuit were audible from where I lay, doing their best to siphon off his excess heat. Even so, I could see a bead of sweat tracing down his brow. And…what was that I thought I saw, reflected in the shine of his cheek? He turned his head before I could tell, but it almost looked like…

My mind raced. Where had he come from? What was he doing here? How had he entered without me knowing? Why was he holding me at gunpoint, and why the hell was Ramsay just standing there? A quick look at Ramsay’s holo answered at least one of those; he’d arrived while I’d been in the mantle, too engrossed, it seemed, to hear the whoosh of the entryway.

And a quick look at mine went a long way towards answering another. It showed everything. Ram and my time in the inky, developing the thing in queue, our plan to use the baubles to do the disperse, even my trip through the mantle only a minute or two before. Everything we had been through since we’d split up into pairs, spelled out fine detail, using only the plainest of prose so even a simpleton like Banks could understand.

Everything except the why.

“Can’t let you do that,” he grated. The finger on his trigger twitched. He was close, I could tell. The set of his frame, the fear in his eyes, the couchant way he held himself…even without a screen to show us, it was clear that he was close. Just itching for a reason, for any halfway-baked excuse to take out some of his frustrations on the man who’d brought him into this. Any excuse to do something, anything, even if it made no sense.

He hadn’t been this way with her. Then he’d been a hired gun: alert, but relaxed, sure of his ability to handle any curves she’d throw at him, and only vaguely interested in the outcome. Here he was a nervous wreck, the fate of the world weighing heavy on his sterine shoulders. He swallowed, and seemed to almost choke on the act. Like he’d tried to swallow a mouthful of sand. “I can’t let you launch another cyber.”

“It…it’s not what you think,” I started to protest. How much did he know? I asked myself. Had he poked his head into the inky and seen what was left of Miller? Did he know what we were up against, the twists and turns this thing could take? “The Haggarty virus, the reason we’re here…it’s more than what it seems. But Ram and I found the fix. We just need to queue it up, and…

His finger tightened on the trigger, and re-trained the muzzle on where he thought my heart would be. “What we need is to complete the mission,” he said. “Last I checked that doesn’t include playing roulette with a cyber that could end the world.”

“The mission is to stop this thing!” I screamed. Spittle sprayed against my plate, obscuring portions of my view. “And you’re allowing it to spread! I’ll have you thrown in hock for this! Both of you! I’ll have them take back both your marks and I’ll…I’ll have you culled!” That got his attention. His trigger finger seemed to slacken, and his rifle wavered just a bit. “You don’t think I can? I can. If we make it out of this, I’ll have you both before the diamondhead within a week, and we’ll see who…”

POW!

A sharp report from Bank’s muzzle, coupled with the metallic ting! of steel piling into steel. The pane behind the access panel vortexed as the bullet hit it, forming a funnel that I couldn’t tell if it ended in a hole or with a ball of metal. The echo of it rang in my ears, even through the bio-suit. It had entered only inches from my head.

“Next one doesn’t miss,” Banks warned.

I shook. Words shriveled on my tongue. My mouth hung open, slack and empty, jaw twitching helplessly as it tried to form the explanation, that one magic string of words that could disarm the situation, but for long seconds nothing came. Then, in a crash of unearned comprehension, I realized I didn’t have to. I couldn’t say why, or how, or even how knew I could, but all at once my choice was clear.

I thought of that scene we’d viewed in the inky, when Ram and I were standing next to Miller’s liquefying form, and, with all the effort of my will, forced myself to play it back.