WE by WE (mobi)

Author:WE (mobi)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: RHCB
Published: 2011-10-27T22:57:25.589000+00:00

XII

He had tried to kill the child.

The thought stopped him in the middle of a coding sequence. He looked at the walls of his chamber. His fingers hovered but did not touch his keys.

The wall-display showed the hard blue sky and the pale grasses of the Hunter’s savannah. He had chosen it after returning here from the crew meeting. He had chosen it because he too was hunting.

He was recoding the lost groups from the last set of tail data for transmission by laser. He had not found any suitable translation program in the station’s resources and he had not sent for one from Earth because he did not want to risk alerting the others to what he was doing. Therefore he had to recode the radio signals for the laser by hand – keystroke after keystroke, tap, tap, tap, pausing every now and then to check for the errors that seemed to creep in, however careful he was.

It was tedious. It was mind-numbing. Even after his mind had learned the routines and had passed the task on to those areas of the brain that would run them automatically, it was taking more than an hour to code a second’s worth of transmission. But time was one of the few resources he had. And as he worked, his thoughts drifted, like an unpiloted vessel through space, until they struck something.

He had tried to kill the child.

He had a child of his own, on Earth.

The grasses waved silently. In the mid-distance the squat, misshapen trees shimmered in the imagined heat. He could not feel it. His senses were like his conscience. They noted that things existed but they could not persuade him that they were real.

No! He had not wanted to kill the child. What he had wanted was that May should not have the child. That their plan should be upset. That their lie should be exposed. He had assumed that the child would die anyway. Why? May was ready to risk her life. Everyone else would let her do so. Even Earth had offered its distant congratulations as she steered for her passage with death.

He had barely left his room since the meeting. He had not eaten at all that evening, or this morning either. He was lonely and bewildered, and consumed with a fear that he knew nothing at all. This sense of not knowing was terrible. He did not know who was interfering with the signals, or why. He did not know if May would live, or if her child would live, or how long any of them would live out here.

A hunter must be alone. To want anything else was weakness.

He had opened the microphone channel to the common room, on low volume, so that he would be warned of anyone approaching his door. So when May spoke out there, suddenly and in distress, he heard her.

‘Why did he say that?’ she cried. ‘Why?’

A lower voice answered her. To his surprise Paul realized that it was not Lewis but Vandamme.

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