P ART IV: Z ERO M OMENT
fingertips over the last bit of rubber, fixing it to the epoxy. It sealed the Lady Grey’s fate... and, he had already realized, his own. How long left? Maybe a minute. He’d worked so fast that he hadn’t noticed just how the whole process of death was really overrated before. No epiphanies, no great moments of bright gleaming light, no saintly voices beckoning him. His penlight had slipped from his fingers, had followed the large light down into the depths, and left him in the dark. Scotty felt kind of disappointed — woulda been nice to go out in a blaze of glory. Struggling vainly with the water, he was fairly sure he’d never see the surface. It was cold, he was tired and his ship was safe. What else was there? Everyone always says that there’s a limit to what a human being can take before they give up, and giving up seemed like the best option of all. Go ahead and breathe in; it won’t hurt for long. The worst of the agony from running out of air had long since passed, so what little pain there was left was meaningless. Then it’d be over. No more fighting. No more reason to fight. If Scotty was hanging from a cliff, it would be by his fingertips, slipping. No one could save him, and he couldn’t save himself. There was nothing left to fight for. The universe would just continue on, and he couldn’t do one damned thing about it. No rhyme, no reason, no moral, no nothing. Ten seconds? Maybe less. Then it’d be over, and he’d be dead. Just that quick. “No.” It wasn’t self-preservation, sacrifice, duty or honor, either; it was courage in its purest form — in and of itself. It would never be praised, understood or even seen. It just was. He raged suddenly in the battle, thoughtless, fighting all the harder simply because there was nothing else to do. It was a war without morals or any of the civilized virtues society could bestow; illogical, hopeless, primal defiance. Blatant refusal to go quietly. On an equally primitive level, wordless... 279