escape
To be entirely fair, he hadn't been in the best of moods to begin with.
Gritting his teeth, Sellers grappled his hands around the edges of the doorframe until his grip was strong enough to pull himself up by, and gauged the distance to the railing through slitted eyes. No more than six feet. He should be able to make it. And if he fell... well, he could always crawl. What he could feel of his lower legs -- which was almost nothing, although it was impossible to tell anymore if that was nerve damage or the nanospray, thank his devil's luck he'd been in what was still ostensibly a hospital -- felt like the insides of his trouser legs were filled with blood, like squelchy open bags of it. His feet inside his shoes were unpleasantly warm and wet.
It was impossible to tell how much longer he'd be able to stave off shock. So far the only things keeping him going past it were anesthetic and sheer force of will, and the latter's adrenaline-fueled capacity to keep him unmuddled by the former. He'd had to crawl up in Labyrinthos, oh yes, hauling himself along on his elbows on the brushed-steel floors and crying like an infant, but only aware that he must get out -- must get out. In the nearest hallway he had been blessed to find a wheelchair, abandoned and only slightly burnt, and he had dragged himself into it in a cacophany of monstrous pain and cold relief. He would never have been able to make it otherwise. At the nurse's station he had filled his lap with enough drugs to keep his legs silent for a year, or forever if he decided to take them all at once. Then he had wheeled himself to the elevator. But of course he'd had to abandon the wheelchair several levels up inside the Song; the only elevator was the stock elevator, for God's sake, and the wheels wouldn't roll on the grated catwalks. And why was this so, and why was the Song's secondary, manual-startup generator nearly at the bottom of the godforsaken contraption? Why, for the same reason that everything had been happening the way it had today, of course: Joachim Mizrahi was a miserable bastard.
He gathered his breath and flung himself through the doorway, hard. It was hard enough; he struck against the railing at his midsection, managing to brace his hands in time not to simply flip headfirst over it like a trick diver, wheezing in his throat as all the air was knocked out of his body. He hung flat and deflated over the rail for a moment, struggling to refill his lungs, and then gasped and pushed himself back up. Almost there now. Almost --
There was someone down there.
He froze in his slump, his head hanging down, trying to convince himself he wasn't seeing what he thought he was seeing, but he was. A child, in fact -- a boy, no more than perhaps eleven or twelve, his perfectly formed and lovely face framed by startlingly white hair. He sprawled on his back on the catwalk one rank down, apparently unconscious, twitching from time to time as though in dreams or a seizure. It was this motion that had first caught Sellers's eye.
He recognized the creature at once. A URTV. Badly damaged, perhaps the last left alive among its comrades. A terrible pity and shame.
He pulled the gun out of his robes and shot it in the head. The range was absurdly short; the catwalks were laddered closely together. He could see perfectly well the red hole the bullet opened in its forehead.
He could see perfectly well when, a moment later, the dented and crumpled bullet pushed slowly back out of the skin, and tumbled down the URTV's head, to first clink against the grating and then tumble through it into space. And when the small red hole it had left behind surged together, liquidly, and closed itself, and a moment later left no sign of where it had been.
Sellers sighed.
"URTV," he called, annoyed to hear the grating harshness of his own voice. "URTV, can you wake up?"
It didn't move. It really was unconscious, he supposed. Maybe even comatose.
"All right," he muttered, and it came out on a sigh as he hauled himself up again on his trembling arms. "No time for you now anyway."
When he came back from the second generator, the URTV was still where he had left it. That was something, at least. He supposed eventually he should move it into the lab, confine it somehow for study, but not now. Right now his plans and schemes extended about as far as getting back to the wheelchair, taking a dangerous number of drugs, and falling unconscious himself until he was safely back in the rather indiscriminate arms of Ormus. But now the bloody nuisance would probably bother him, and keep him up wondering what it was doing down here while he was lying, prone and helpless, up above.
He found himself wondering idly just how many ways it couldn't die.