They turned a corner, and a disconcerting groan echoed through the hallways. Her stomach swooped, body lurching as the hab’s spin lost speed in a staccato stutter that settled down after a few agonizing seconds in which she believed they were all about to stop being biology and start becoming physics.
“Arden.” She pressed the crackling comm against her ear. “You’re in this bucket. We need a stable spin-down. We were damn lucky the spin didn’t stop when the whole thing kicked, but I’ve got a bad feeling it’s going to spin itself to shreds, or stop hard.”
“Say again?” Their voice was a crackling wire.
“Fuck,” she said, then shouted into the comm, “Spin. Down.”
“Understood.”
Sanda paused at a juncture and turned to face her bedraggled pack of scientists, all hunched together and dripping blood across the station that had been their home.
“Listen up,” she shouted. “I’m spinning this station down before it does so on its own. If you’ve got internal injuries, I’m sorry, zero-g is going to suck. Turn your mag boots on and tough it out. We’ll get through.”
Dal, the chatty scientist who’d been so quick to defend the importance of their work on the station, put a hand up. “Sarai can’t manage with the boots,” he said, and jabbed his free thumb at the woman he was holding up by the shoulders.
Sarai lolled against him, eyes glassy, a steady stream of red making its way down her leg from somewhere about her torso to puddle in the aforementioned mag boots. There was no way she could coordinate herself enough to work the boots. Hell, they were probably too heavy for her to lift.
Sanda suppressed a grimace. She may not have had major training, but she’d been a sergeant long enough to know you didn’t let bad news show on your face. Not when there was hope, however slim.
“Can you carry her?”
Dal’s forehead crumpled with distress, his cheeks already red from exertion. “I—”
“I’ve got her.” Novak shouldered his way through the others and, gently, took Sarai’s weight from Dal. At first, Dal tried to hand her over in the way most civs did—wedding-carry style—but Novak shook his head and shifted her weight so he could drape her across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
He met Sanda’s gaze. Something about him wasn’t right. How calm he’d been during the inspection, and then walking into the hall immediately after a shower of gunfire. Holding a high-end blaster like he knew how to use it.
Chest muscles like that didn’t come from getting an engineering degree. They could—anyone could visit a gym, after all—but Novak’s specialty led to work done on station, not in the gravity well of a planet. Even on the nicest habs, heavy weights were hard to find. Cardio and basic resistance was pretty much all you got in space.
She checked out his thighs, wondering how they’d gotten so sturdy, then found herself checking him out in general and shook her head to clear it. This guy was an anomaly, and that was as suspicious as unrefrigerated pudding, but he was willing to help.
“Don’t drop her,” she snapped, annoyed with herself, and turned back to the split hall. Arden pushed through a map of the station to her wristpad, and it lit up to show her the way.
“That guy don’t fit,” Nox whispered.
“Hard for him to get in the way with a body in his arms.”
“Sure about that?”
“Not in the slightest. Shit goes down, shoot him first.”
A deep, teeth-rattling vibration went through the station. Sanda put a fist up, calling a halt, and braced one hand against the wall, swallowing against the sloshing, sickening sensation of the station burning inertia.
“You’ve had your station blown up,” she said to the scientists who were retching and weeping behind her. “This is nothing. Just a little slowdown. It’ll pass.” She kept on talking, because it was either that or join in with the barfing. “This is normal. It’s expected. Just physics, and you all are the masters of physics. Dios, you’ve written dissertations more painful than this.”
Dal laughed wryly at that, scraping his lab coat sleeve across his lips. Novak clutched Sarai to him, eyes squeezed shut, looking green around the gills but otherwise holding on. Liao and the others leaned on each other, against their own knees, on the wall.
All the fluids in her stupid meatbag body did one last final loop-de-loop and Sanda squeezed her eyes shut, flexing her thigh muscles, begging the stars and all her ancestors to keep her from passing out.
Weight lifted.
She opened her eyes. The station kept on groaning, metal popping and creaking and filing complaints left and right, but the hab was spun down, thank the void. They wouldn’t go splat from sudden deceleration.
“Thank you, Arden,” she said into the comm. A screech of static answered.
“Elevator ahead,” Nox said.
Sure enough, once her vision stopped swimming, she saw it too: a large, rectangular door framed in black-and-yellow hash marks, letting everyone know that the place this elevator was headed might have hard vacuum on the other side. Sanda licked her lips.
“Arden said we’d have atmo,” she said.
“Warning lights aren’t on,” Nox said, and shrugged. “Seal must be good on the other side.”
“Warning lights aren’t guaranteed to work right now.” Sanda double-checked her wristpad. Yes, this was where Arden had planned for them to go. There was a closet panel next to the lift, where helmets would be stored.
She, Nox, and Knuth were wearing jumpsuits that fit the couplings of the helmets. The scientists weren’t. Sanda holstered her blaster and made for the closet.
“I’ll go check the air conditions. Nox, stay with them. Keep them calm.”
“Not my specialty.”
“Learn.”
She swung the panel open and selected one of five helmets.
“Major,” Novak called out.
She hesitated. “What is it?”
“Take that guy”—he pointed his chin at Nox—“in case there’s more fleet down there.”
Leaving all eight scientists with only Knuth to watch their backs. Fat chance, especially considering Novak, of all people, had made the suggestion.
“I got it,” she said dryly before yanking the helmet on. It sealed to her jumpsuit collar immediately, then flashed up a warning that it wasn’t connected to anything. “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered and grabbed one of the lifepacks from the closet. Her major’s coat would get in the way, so she stripped it off—sorry, Anford—and hooked into the pack, plugging the helmet in. Everything went green in the HUD, including the comm line. Perfect.
She grabbed another helmet and tossed it, tumbling end over end, to Nox, who snatched it out of the air and cranked it on his own head. He flipped the visor up so that the no-lifepack warning would go away.
“Can you hear me?” she asked over comm.
“Loud and clear.”
“Finally, something fucking works.” She slapped the button for the elevator and the doors slid open. No alarm bells yet, that was all she could ask for. “Watch the kittens. Shoot anything that swipes at them.”
“Affirmative.”
She grinned as she stepped into the elevator, selecting the button for the level below. “Sometimes you sound like a fleetie.”
“Rude,” he said.
The doors swished shut, and the elevator rumbled into life, dragging her down. All according to plan, except… Novak had been staring at her far too intensely in the seconds before those doors closed. The elevator’s display ticked, counting down the meters to the next level. She pulled her blaster back out and checked the charge.
CHAPTER 32
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
NEVER TRUST A DISEMBODIED VOICE
Sanda had her blaster up and pointed at the door when the elevator came to a stop, doors sliding open in a shuddering, jerking motion that made her think the shaft had been damaged during the onslaught.
Light the color of watered-down blood filled the ro
om beyond. She hesitated in the open maw of the elevator, not liking the lay of the land before her. The room on this level was cavernous, more in line with the usual construction of inhabited stations but, for that, suspicious. The transition from tight tunnels to wide-open spaces made her skin itch. Anything could be out there, waiting in the dark.
“Atmo?” Nox asked.
She stepped out, mag boots clanging over a metal walkway. The helmet’s HUD cycled the local conditions. No gravity, but the O2 was acceptable and the space was pressurized.
“Habitable,” she said, “but I don’t see a shuttle.”
“I’ll start sending them down.”
“Hold until confirmed clear.”
A pause. “If you think there’s resistance, I’m coming down.”
“Sit on your gun, Nox. Let me get eyes on this damned shuttle.”
“Aye, sir.”
She could practically hear the sarcastic salute that came with that, but Nox wasn’t her problem right now, clearing this room was. From the deck of the Thorn, she recalled that the sixth hab ring was substantially smaller than the seventh. If the whole station was collapsed down, each subsequent hab ring would fit perfectly inside the next.
She crept forward, using the light of her blaster to paint the wall nearest the elevator door. A nondescript panel was the only break in the wall, about a hundred meters in the direction that would be anti-spin, if things were working as they should.
Her steps echoed loud enough for her to pick them up through the insulation of her helmet, a clanging noise that went on and on, indicating this room may be larger, and emptier, than she thought. The blaster could illuminate only a narrow cone of light, everything else fell away into the murky darkness mingled with red emergency lights. Her only consolation was that if anyone had been waiting to ambush her, they would have done it by now. She wasn’t exactly in stealth mode.
She reached the panel and flipped it open, glaring at the wide variety of buttons and switches that, at the present, held no meaning to her. Maybe she should have brought Novak down with her. He was an engineer. And then she could have kept an eye on him.
“Try the blue one,” a scrambled voice, digitized but high and lilting, entered her helmet.
Sanda whipped around, lighting up a fan all around her with the light from the blaster. More perforated metal flooring, ramps, crates, and ladders. But no one, not so far as she could see.
“Arden?” she asked the helmet, feeling stupid. Maybe they’d patched their way into the helmet network on Janus. In less than a minute. Without knowing she put the helmet on. And made their voice higher. Yeah, it was a shitty idea even to her.
“Who is this? Rainier?” she hissed.
“Got someone down there?” Nox asked.
“Clear this channel,” Sanda said.
“Uh—”
With an expert flick of her eyes, Sanda kicked Nox out of her helmet comm.
A soft giggle, limned in static. “He’s going to think you’ve lost your mind.”
“Jules? If that’s you—”
“Not Jules.”
She suspected she was speaking with Rainier, but the voice was too grainy with static for her to be certain. “If you’re Janus personnel and need help evacuating, come to the sixth level.”
“Personnel isn’t exactly right. Don’t worry about me, Major dear, your guess was right the first time, but it seems like you need help, doesn’t it? Try the blue one.”
An icy feeling crawled across Sanda’s skin, one she recognized all too well. The feeling of being watched, from all angles. She clenched her jaw, resisting an urge to tell Rainier to go fuck herself with her own space station.
“Rainier, I want to talk. Where are you? I can get you and Jules off this station if you give me a little direction here.”
“Don’t you want to save your friends? I said, try the blue one.”
Sanda closed her eyes and blew out a slow breath, for if she didn’t take the time to do so, she was going to scream her face off.
“I am reasonably certain you ordered the destruction of this station when Jules failed to execute me. Why in the void should I trust you?”
“You can’t. Probably shouldn’t. This station is disposable. You may or may not be. I haven’t decided yet. Your call on the whole living-or-dying situation.”
If it were just her ass on the line, she’d call Rainier’s bluff and wait to see if she could get the woman to show herself, but she had a handful of scientists waiting a level above, and none of them could make it off this dissolving behemoth without help. She clenched the grip of her blaster so hard the weapon shook.
“Tick-tock, Major.”
Sanda turned back to the panel. Running along the right-hand side of the display was a narrow, pulsing button in a soft blue light. She hovered a finger over the button and waited for a sign. Nothing.
“If this is a trick, I’ll make you pay.” She pressed it.
Lights came up across the hab, flicking on one by one, the whole place humming like a waking giant with the thrum of diverted power. This, she realized, was not a priority hab. No one lived here—it stored shuttles and crates. When the emergency systems had kicked on, all the station’s power had been diverted to its essential systems. This wasn’t one of them. Now that the lights were on, she could see a shuttle resting halfway across the main floor from where she stood. In the dark, it would have taken her far too long to find it.
“This isn’t over,” Sanda said into the digital ether.
“Next time, I think I’ll kill you.”
“What—”
“Here he comes.”
A squeal of static filled her helmet and she was forced to switch off that channel, leaving the voice behind. Yellow lights lit up near the elevator, drawing her eye, and the doors slid open—hiccuping in their frames—to reveal Nox, all alone, his rifle out and ready. She lifted a hand to him and switched back to that channel.
“We’re secure,” she said over comm.
“Fuck, I thought you’d been ambushed down here. Who the hell were you talking to?”
“Rainier, I think. She’s more cracked than I thought, but we’ll hash that out later. This place is bleeding power, we gotta get the others out before we lose life support.”
A crackle over the comm. Knuth said, “I hear that right? We’re clear?”
“Yes, bring ’em down.”
“Affirmative.”
Nox swore and ducked out of the elevator, stumbling a little, as the yellow lights flashed and the doors started to shut. He scowled after it, then turned around to take in their surroundings. Crates, ladders, and a single shuttle.
“That’s our ride,” Sanda said, pointing with her blaster’s light at a shuttle resting on a mag pallet about three hundred meters away. Nox groaned, pointing all around with the light on the end of his rifle, even though the room’s lights were up full whack.
“This is a friggin’ warehouse, is there even a hangar door?”
Sanda shifted her light. “I think I see one over there, they had to get the cargo in here somehow, right? If not, I’ll signal Conway to blast us a new hole.”
“They can’t even hear us.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
She had to get these people, her charges, into that shuttle. There were eleven of them altogether, and the shuttle looked maybe, maybe big enough to hold six, but it had to last them only until they could get to the Thorn. Then, with the ships twinned, they’d have air and supplies aplenty.
The elevator slid open, revealing the first batch of stumbling scientists. Three rounds, she told herself, mentally counting them off as they glanced around, wary.
“Nox, take them, get them settled.”
“On it.” He pushed his visor back up. “Come on, clear that fucking elevator, we got more on the way.”
They stumbled out in a hurry, grouping into a tight knot as Nox waved them onward.
“Clear,” Sanda said over comm to Knuth.
“Make it quick, Knuth,” she said tightly.
Nox trotted up to her, a tricky thing to do with mag boots on, and flipped his visor down, switching over to lifepack supply. “Station’s dying,” he said.
“Agreed. We gotta go now. Move it, Knuth.”
“Loading.”
Sanda pursed her lips to keep from swearing. Nox leaned over and nudged her, lightly, pointing up at the ceiling with one gloved finger. She expected cameras, or even more fake fleeties, but he was definitely pointing at a thick collection of tubes and pipes, bundled up tight, pulsing with a strange grey-violet light.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Was hoping you would have an idea.”
“I do not.” She craned her head around and spotted Liao lingering by the shuttle’s airlock. The diligent leader, waiting for her whole crew to make it. That would have to do. Sanda pointed at her, then waved her over. She came, warily, but she came.
Sanda and Nox pushed their visors up.
“What is that?” Sanda asked.
Liao squinted. “I can’t be sure. Coolant, maybe? Or a nanite conduit?”
“Nanite conduit? That’s not exactly standard, Doctor.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. My team wasn’t allowed below the seventh level. We were working on micronization, so that was an educated guess.”
Sanda frowned. Rainier had said that the station was disposable. While it wasn’t possible to take anything she said at face value, maybe what Rainier had been avoiding saying was that she didn’t want the truth of the station’s contents found.
Liao said, “If I could get a sample, then—”
“Excellent idea. You got anything to take a sample with?”
“Without knowing the origin of the matter, I can’t risk contamination—”
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