Malley’s right hand now wore a glove studded with a network of fine wires and metal nodes. He thrust it at Pardell before the latter could avoid him.
Excitement. Desperation.
Freed of the painful blast of sensation the instant contact was broken, Pardell gasped for air. Spots swam in front of his eyes and his heart, not particularly peaceful to start with, hammered with sickening blows. He threw up what little he’d put in his stomach and hoped it landed on Malley’s boots.
Maybe it did, but when Pardell looked up resentfully, he saw Malley busy examining the glove. As though nothing had happened, Pardell told himself, first in outrage, then in stunned disbelief. Nothing.
In fact, rather than any sign of pain, the stationer had that fiercely joyous look on his face—the one he always got when he’d solved some impossible equation or delivered the killing line in a debate.
“It works,” the stationer was saying in a hushed voice. “It works.”
“What do you mean, it works?” Grant demanded. Pardell thanked him silently, too busy rinsing out his mouth with water Aisha passed him, to do the same. “What’s going on here, Malley?” The Earther looked from the stationer to Pardell and back again. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? It can’t be—”
Malley seemed impervious, as if his mental gears were whirring out of control. “This was what she wanted with you, Aaron,” he said triumphantly. “This—!” He waved the ridiculous-looking glove again.
“You’d better start making sense, Malley,” Pardell finally ground out, his stomach still trying to express its displeasure.
Grant held up his hand for silence. His other hand was cupped over the comm in his ear. From the look on his face, the Earther didn’t like what he was hearing, Pardell decided.
The stationer wasn’t paying attention. “I should have seen it, Aaron—” Malley started to explain, only to stop as Grant backed his demand for silence with the weapon now magically out and in his hand.
“Unfortunately, now isn’t the time, gentlemen.”
Chapter 38
NOW wasn’t the time, Gail fumed. Protocol, regulations—when you were already breaking ninety percent of them, what possible difference could one more make? But Tobo could be incredibly stubborn, and he’d insisted on notifying Thromberg Station’s docking controllers of their intention to move the Seeker. Hazard to shipping. Gail tapped her gloved fingers against the porthole. What shipping? In the wake of the Outsiders’ demands, nothing was moving. Nothing dared.
Where was Grant?
It had to be done quickly. Rosalind had notified her supporters, but didn’t claim to control the majority of those who clung to Thromberg’s outer hull. She’d advised speed over caution, to take advantage of confusion and a lack of central authority.
Gail wondered what that said about the ’siders, but agreed. Fast suited her. Any long-range patrol ship from Sol System could outrun the Seeker. Her only hope of evading the righteous interference of Titan U was to put the Seeker off the map. Of course, her only hope of returning home again without being arrested was to succeed. A little something she didn’t plan to share with Tobo, Grant, or the miserable Reinsez until absolutely necessary.
Where was Grant?
There. Pounding feet as the last of their boarding party climbed the shuttle’s ramp, pulling on his suit as he came. Gail made herself relax and nod a greeting, before donning her helmet. Immediately, Grant’s voice echoed around her ears—presumably on a private setting between the two of them. “What the hell’s going on? And what are you doing here?”
Gail wanted to laugh. She’d finally gotten a rise out of the taciturn officer—unfortunately, not at a moment she could enjoy it. “We have an opportunity to retrieve the tapes and other records from the Merry Mate II, Commander Grant,” she informed him, keeping her voice to “briefing” formality. “Given the instability of the situation out here, I deemed it essential to take that opportunity. Rosalind has been very cooperative—but she’ll only work with me.”
Silence. He was probably grinding his teeth, Gail thought cheerfully. She functioned best when things moved like this, when she rode a current of possibilities and had to pick the optimum course by instinct. It had smacked her into a few walls in the past—but, more often than not, it had taken her to success well before anyone else saw it coming.
They didn’t have long to wait, She’d had Tobo relinquish the Seeker’s final holds on the station before letting him notify the station of their flight path. They’d suited up as the ship drifted free and began moving along Thromberg’s axis with only the most delicate of maneuvering thrusters involved. Gail doubted anyone on the ship not watching the view screen or a monitor even realized the Seeker was in motion. It would take a fraction of the time it had taken Pardell to walk the same distance to reach his ship.
He was alive and conscious. Sazaad must have wet himself.
“Stand by.” The announcement came from the shuttle pilot. There was a clang, and Gail kept hold of the nearest strap, anticipating the minor roughness as the shuttle coasted down its ramp and out of Seeker.
Gail checked her gauges, making sure her comm was set to wide open, knowing the others were doing the same. There were eight of them in the shuttle’s freight air lock: herself, Grant, Rosalind Fournier, FD Tech Specialists Bennett, Wigg, Cornell, and Sensun, and Ops Specialist Allyn. Grant had chosen his team; Gail had insisted on meeting them and learning their names before entering the air lock. Allyn didn’t look to have rested—how could he, given the loss of his entire ops group?—but he was the FDs’ surviving expert on null-g operations. The others were new faces to her.
Grant likely considered her both nonessential and too valuable to risk. Gail hadn’t allowed debate. She trusted no one else to recognize what she had to find on the ’sider derelict—what had to be there or she’d lost already. Being wrong about this would mean being wrong about many other things—her entire chain of reasoning would crumble.
More of those details she didn’t plan to share beyond Grant and Tobo.
“In position.” The air lock display winked through its paired sequence of reds, ambers, and greens; Grant and his people slipped open the tops of their holsters, the weapons within secured by both tether and mag clamp. Gail stepped to the back, willing to let the FDs do their job. As long as they didn’t interfere with hers.
The air lock door slid into its holding position along the hull, revealing their destination.
Gail heard someone swear. She echoed the word to herself.
The vid recorded by the ’bot had lied. It hadn’t shown her the reality of Outside.
It was the scale that overwhelmed the senses first. The curve of the station had definition now, its true size plotted against space by rank after rank of toy starships. Gail forced herself to look up and try to find the ’Mate.
Leaving the Seeker a safer distance away, the shuttle floated under the Outsiders’ city, a direction Gail’s mind wanted to register as down, but her ears insisted was up as long as they were within the shuttle’s gravity. The confusion was something she ignored with the ease of practice. After all, she’d spent months in orbit around Titan, watching Saturn loom overhead.
The station had turned this side to its sun, bathing everything in harsh, white light. In contrast, the air lock was suddenly flooded in soft yellow. The null-g warning sounded in their helmets. With the others, Gail reached down and activated the mag on her boots. Small ships—or expensive ones—could afford to run gravity induction systems tagged to their translight drives. Bigger space objects, such as Thromberg herself, relied on their spin to mimic the effect for inhabitants, accepting that only certain levels would have optimum gravity. Among the few early efforts Earth had made on behalf of the overcrowded stations was to provide inducers for those with abundant power sources. On Thromberg, such gifts had opened up the industrial levels to habitation. Outward Five, they’d called it.
Gail doubted those living there were gr
ateful.
She swallowed, adjusting to the familiar sensation of falling in place.
Rosalind’s cultured voice sang out in her ear: “The ’Mate,” she said, pointing one prosthetic hand outward. “Between those two large freighters and what’s left of the Aces Adrift casino. They didn’t build liners to last.” This an aside, as if Rosalind took the failure of such ships personally. If she was like other engineers of Gail’s acquaintance, she probably did.
Gail didn’t bother trying to decipher the ’Mate’s location from the mass of ships leaning this way and that. Others would take her there. She wasn’t even to use her own propulsion system. Allyn would ferry them as a unit, including Rosalind—whose patchwork suit lacked the system anyway. She’d rejected an offer of one of their suits, but accepted replacement power packs. Gail wondered if Rosalind wanted to avoid looking like one of them. Not the most confidence-inspiring notion.
There was a short discussion about the cables draped like strands of seaweed, or fragments of net, between the ships. Allyn believed they wouldn’t be a problem. Gail remembered watching Pardell slide along his cable and hunted for suited figures.
None in sight. That didn’t mean there weren’t dozens of ’siders lurking in the black shadows of their ships, or waiting inside air lock doors. For the first time, Gail appreciated how impossible a conflict it must have been. How could the stationers have imagined they could dislodge these people? It wasn’t a question of having the high ground—it was having the technology and knowledge to survive with no ground at all.
She was startled from her thoughts by hands at her waist. Someone—Grant—was fastening lines to her belt. “Release your boots,” rang in her ears. Rather than get out of her way, he bent and did that service for her. Before Gail could protest being treated like luggage, she was pulled from the air lock with the rest of them.
They weren’t dropping like rocks, she reminded herself, keeping her eyes open with an effort. Allyn was in the lead, having provided the initial push to get them out of the air lock and moving away from the shuttle. They were beads along a string attached to him; Gail found herself next-to-last. Doubtless, Tobo was watching them on the Seeker’s vids as well as the shuttle’s.
She counted out the seconds. Five, and past the outermost cable. It glinted dangerously, like a trap set to capture animals much larger than they.
Six, and Allyn had reversed, using his movement away from the rapidly approaching ship hulls to slow them down. It was a fine balance, to dump velocity without dragging them outward. As she twisted helplessly on the string, Gail decided it was far too late to suggest they might have tried practicing this maneuver first. Besides, she assured herself, she was probably the only one here who hadn’t tried rocketing down into a maze of decayed starships.
For a maze it was. The Aces Adrift was the only landmark Gail could keep in view, her gaudy exterior still attention-catching even here, decades after her former life transporting gamblers. How she came to be limpeted to Thromberg had to be a story in itself, one Gail doubted she’d ever hear. The ending was written in jagged cracks along every seam that made the Aces more like a child’s sculpture of a broken egg rather than the proud starship she had once been. Had she shattered when her crew tried to follow the other ships into the station? Or was it, as Rosalind implied, simply that they didn’t build longevity into things meant to amuse?
Nine, Gail counted to herself. They’d slowed—enough that Gail started to concede their landing might not involve a helmet-smashing thud or a rebound into nothing. They were between hulls now. Two of the FDs had disconnected from the string and were under their own propulsion. Gail could see them touch down and quickly lock their boots to the station plate, then move aside with weapons out.
Somehow, they only looked like targets themselves.
Then, Gail found herself drifting shoulder-first against Thromberg’s comforting bulk. She cautiously but quickly released the fastening on her belt, to avoid being dragged into any of the others. Like them, her body began to slowly rise again until she switched on her mags. Her feet, as if they were hands, grabbed the surface and held.
They were encompassed by irregular shadows and irrational tubing. No wonder the cables were used to move any distance. Down at the surface, there was barely room to walk between the writhing mass of wiring and conduits, let alone to navigate the heaved and buckled plates they punctured. From the look of it, Gail suspected the ’siders simply made a new connection whenever an older one failed.
Considering what many of these connections carried to their ships, Gail sincerely hoped none would fail while she stood within reach.
“Follow me.” Rosalind’s voice was emotionless, as if she could care less about the reaction of Earthers to the reality of Outside. And why should she? Gail asked herself, walking with the others toward the smallest of three ships nearby. Earthers had known. The station knew. It hadn’t made a difference before—why would it now?
The chair appalled Gail beyond all reason. She’d been expecting the interior of the Merry Mate II to be like her owner’s suit: patched and repaired until nothing original showed, but with the integrity of her function intact.
The chair proved otherwise. Rosalind had claimed it, as the only thing to sit on within the ’Mate’s bridge. It had been handmade from scraps of plastic and fabrics, a giant bag without back or armrests, but with a broad lumpy seat that could fit three. Or one curled up to sleep. She pictured Aaron Pardell here, surrounded by dark monitors and scavenged panels. Did he pretend his ship could still fly? Was he, like Rosalind, consumed with a spacer’s hopes—or was he of a newer generation, focused on surviving here?
One thing Grant’s people could tell her after scouting through the ’Mate: Aaron Pardell had lived here alone.
“Ah.” Rosalind made a noncommittal sound. There were a pair of consoles with still-flickering lights: internal systems. She sat before one of those, cross-legged on the chair despite her suit. Grant’s people were quietly and carefully checking the rest. Gail thought this very wise. They could end their mission just as easily by assuming a dark panel was a safely dead one. On a larger scale, the ’Mate’s translight drive and initiation matrix was intact, if out of fuel. Rosalind made no effort to conceal the information that this was one of the ships her people had rigged to use against Thromberg. Could still use, if she chose. So they were standing inside a bomb. It didn’t seem to make much difference.
They’d taken off their helmets. Grant’s people excelled at deadpan, professional faces, but there’d been a few wrinkled noses. Gail had trouble not sneezing. The chill, thin air was breathable, if you spent most of your time in a poorly ventilated machine shop. She occasionally caught a whiff of mold, as though something was growing behind the metal bulkheads. It could have been the damp rags hanging on lines in the main corridor.
Gail stood beside the console, watching Rosalind use her more dexterous left hand on the controls, and tried to ignore the chair. “Are you in?” she asked impatiently, when the ’sider paused.
“I need only enter Raner’s codes to access the ’Mate’s data records,” Rosalind replied, her eyes lifting to meet and hold Gail’s. “Which I will do, once you tell me what you really want, Dr. Smith. And don’t tell me it’s anything to do with young Aaron’s health—because I doubt you’d go to even half this trouble for one man, no matter how unusual.”
The trouble with extortion, Gail reminded herself, was how easily it became predictable. She had expected something from Rosalind. Hoping it would be complete cooperation would have been naïve.
“I don’t deny I’m here for more,” Gail admitted without hesitation. “I need to find a planet. Specifically, the planet where Aaron Raner found this ship and the ‘unusual’ child inside it.”
Rosalind’s look sharpened, if that were possible. “This would be where you plan to take your ship and find the Quill,” she stated, raising one brow sardonically. “What’s wrong with all the other so-called contaminat
ed worlds? Why this one?”
Gail felt Grant’s attention but didn’t acknowledge it. Once they left Thromberg, she didn’t care who knew. It wouldn’t matter. “Because I have evidence this may be the first world contaminated by the Quill. And because I believe your unusual young man is the only person to have been on such a world and survived.”
Chapter 39
MALLEY stretched until his heels reached the end of the cot. He drew up his knees with a muttered complaint.
Even Earther beds were too short.
A minor inconvenience, taken in perspective. Aaron was alive. They were both better fed and clothed than either could remember. And they had these nice, private rooms.
With locks.
The cot creaked as Malley shifted his bulk around. The room wasn’t quite dark—he shouldn’t stumble into any of its fixtures if he got up to try pacing again—but it was too small for more than four strides in any one direction.
Hardly satisfying.
Neither was not knowing what had set Grant off and landed them in the next-best thing to cells. Had it been the incoming message in the commander’s comm—something requiring his presence and so this rather drastic means of keeping things stable until he returned?
Malley could understand that.
Or had Gail Smith left orders to keep Aaron in the dark about her research and what it meant to him?
Not while he was around.
What he wanted most was to talk to Aaron about what had happened with the Earther glove. More precisely, what hadn’t happened. Malley flexed the fingers of his right hand, still amazed there’d been no detectable sensation when he’d touched Aaron. His friend had definitely been affected—and furious. But Grant hadn’t given him time to explain or apologize. Over Aisha’s vehement protests, the FDs had rushed them both out through the doorway leading to the rest of the science sphere, hurrying them each into what appeared to be quarters. Already occupied quarters.
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