“I need food,” Li said into the suddenly silent cabin, and pushed off toward the galley.
The galley racks yielded nothing but a small sack of algae-colored imitation kasha and a thoroughly squashed packet of reconstituted vegetables. The kasha tasted like mold, and the vegetables looked worse, but they were food. Li fought the urge to skip dinner, telling herself she had a long cold night ahead of her. She shook the bags to jump-start the internal heating elements, dumped the now-lukewarm contents into a battered suckbag, and drifted back toward the foredeck.
“We have to work through your timing again,” Cohen said when she swam back into the main cabin.
“Later,” she said. “I need to put my kit together. I just came up to tell you I’m going down to the cargo deck.”
“That can wait.”
“No it can’t.” It was impossible to stare down someone without a body, but she shot her best glare at the main instrument panel. “You know your job, and I know mine. I need to get the arms and gear squared away more than I need to do another run-through. We’ll do that after. If I have time.”
“Make time,” Cohen said.
If they hadn’t been in zero g, Li would have kicked something.
* * *
Her mood improved briefly when she inventoried the weapons. Korchow had sent everything she had asked for. Even her most extravagant demands had been satisfied without murmur.
Two long sleek boxes held RPK midrange tactical precision non-structure-piercing pulse rifles, each fitted with custom-milled optical sights and refillable wipe baffle system silencers. Another blockier box, guarded with a double layer of vacuum seal, cradled the self-sealing pressure suit that Li would wear to crawl through the CO2vents—and whose interactive camouflage overskin would hide her face if things went wrong and someone spotted her. A big crate held the rest of her gear and tackle: carabiners, grappling hooks, and rope for the climb outside the station; a handheld number cruncher; a lockpick’s kit for getting into the lab itself; a hacked passkey—provided by Korchow—that he claimed would get her out of the high-security lab and into the public-sector airlock where Arkady would pick her up when she had retrieved the target code.
It took an hour and forty minutes to unpack the lot and get it serviceable. The best hour and forty minutes of the last few weeks. If this was what the supply side of being private muscle was like, Li thought, she could get used to it.
When she had coiled her rope, ordered her climbing tackle, and stripped, oiled, and reassembled the pulse rifles, she stood back and surveyed the whole kit critically. Then she pulled herself forward to her cabin to retrieve the small, carefully wrapped package that she had hidden there just as a precaution.
She swam back to the cargo hold, unwrapped the Beretta, field-cleaned it, and loaded it, grunting with satisfaction at the clean, familiar snap of the ammo clip engaging the firing mechanism. She weighed the gun in her hand and glanced back toward the foredeck. She thought about the bulge it would make in her jumpsuit, the likelihood that Arkady would notice and take it away from her. She thought about just how crazy it would be to get into a solid-ammo fight on the little stripped-down Starling.
She sighed and tucked the Beretta into the pocket holster of the pressure suit. The pocket had been designed for bigger, more standard weapons; a Viper, maybe, or a snub-nosed pulse pistol. The Beretta slid in easily and barely made a bulge in the suit after she’d folded it.
“Just in case,” she whispered, and went back forward.
* * *
“I need to check ammo,” she told Arkady when she reached the foredeck. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t help letting her eyes flick to the fully charged pulse pistol at his belt.
“You checked it back on-planet.”
“And I need to check it again. Just because I saw it on the loading dock doesn’t mean it actually got on board.”
Arkady frowned. “You can do a visual check, that’s all.”
“Not good enough.”
“It has to be. Cohen checked it manually when we loaded it. Ask him.”
Right now, Li thought, Cohen was the last person she wanted to ask anything.
“It’s all there,” Cohen volunteered. “There’s no reason to check it again.”
“Gee, thanks for the help.” She shot a nasty glance at the comp board.
“Well, go look in the airlock.”
Li glanced at the instrument board again, then turned and left without meeting Arkady’s eyes.
She made her way to the airlock and looked out the viruflex check-port.
She saw the sun. The white, unbearably bright sun of space, seen through no atmosphere. She ducked her head away from the port, blinking burning tears out of her eyes.
“Jesus wept!”
“It was Korchow’s idea,” Arkady said. As if he were apologizing, for Christ’s sake.
She looked again, and understood what she was seeing through the check-port. The airlock was open to the void, completely unpressurized. Hard vac, right there, one triple-glazed viruflex porthole away from her. All her ammo for the run was neatly taped to the airlock wall. Two pulse rifle clips, their green charge lights blinking at her like eyes. A fully charged Viper for close fighting. Even her Syndicate-made butterfly knife, which Arkady had lifted from her without comment before letting her board the Starling back on Compson’s World. What the hell had they expected her to do, anyway? Cut his throat and steal their damn ship?
“The outer seal will close and the airlock will pressurize two minutes and four seconds before you’re scheduled to disembark,” Arkady said. “You’ll have four seconds to step into the airlock, two minutes to inspect the ammo and load and stow your weapons. Then you’re out. The same protocol applies when you come back; you’ll deposit any remaining live ammunition in the airlock stow compartment, lock it, and jettison the key. The outer door won’t close and the chamber won’t pressurize until I visually confirm that you’ve disarmed yourself.”
Li stared at him, but he just shrugged, pushed off the wall with the ease of a born spacer, and pulled himself back toward the foredeck.
He was deep in conversation with Cohen by the time Li joined them. “Can we run through it again, Major?” he said. “Please?” He sounded apologetic, as if he were asking for a favor instead of giving orders to an enemy agent Korchow was blackmailing.
“You’re the boss,” Li said. She wanted to smack him. Instead, she pressed the water bottle she’d been carrying into the sidewall restraint field, pushed off and hung in mid-air, stabilizing herself with outstretched hands. “Oh-two-twenty-oh-four, I jump ship,” she recited. “Oh-two-twenty-three-oh-eight, I hit station, turn toward the turrets.”
“Which direction are they?” Cohen asked.
“East,” Li said; spacer’s argot for whatever subjective direction took you into the spin of a rotating station, toward planet-rise.
“Not good enough. You may not be able to see planet-rise from where you hit station.”
“Well, I can feel it, even if I can’t see it.”
“The inner ear can play tricks on you.”
“Fine.” She shrugged. “At 02:49 I hit the vent.” She was fully into it, tracking the station map on her internals, accounting for the guards’ scheduled routes, thinking through her approach. “The vent cycle starts at 02:50. At 02:51, the turbines go off and I slip through the outer seal. At 03:00 the cycle starts again. That gives me one minute to stash my suit and gear, and nine minutes to climb.”
“Is that enough time?” Arkady asked nervously.
“It’s enough,” Cohen said. His tone, if you could say the ship comp had a tone, suggested that if it wasn’t, it would only be because the cog called Li hadn’t functioned properly.
Li shut her eyes, partly to visualize the layout of the vent system, partly to shut out a here and now that was less than confidence inspiring. “I should reach the intake into hydroponics by 02:59:30, latest. At 03:00:00 the next two-minute cycle starts, so…”
/>
“Korchow’s inside man will open the internal miter flap at 02:59:30 exactly. He’s rigged it to stay open until the cycle starts. That gives you thirty seconds, which should be plenty.”
“Just as long as he really opens it.”
“He will.” Arkady gave her a dark, serious look. “I promise.”
“Thanks,” Li said, and felt a lump in her throat that made her ashamed. How had she ever let it come to this? Grappling onto the skin of a full-g station. Shinnying down a turbine shaft and waiting like a rat in a plugged hole for some traitor to sneak her into a station she could walk onto openly if her own business were anything but treason. She thought about backing out. But it was too late for that. She was on Korchow’s ship, with Korchow’s pilot at the controls, holding all the ammunition. She was going out that airlock tonight, one way or another.
If she could count on Cohen—really count on him—it might not be too late. But she’d be crazy to do that. Better to risk what she knew she could pull off, if all those little gambles broke her way. Better to settle her nerves, stop worrying about what she couldn’t change, and get ready for a walk in starlight.
“Well?” said the stranger who was Cohen. “What did you forget?”
Li sighed and pushed off the floor, coming to rest high up on the Starling’s curving bulkhead. “Nothing. I will goddamn well remember to hook in before the internal vent opens. I’m not an idiot.”
“You were the one who insisted on running off soft memory,” the not-Cohen insisted. “You’ll be off-line for twenty-seven minutes. Any memory lapse will result in a fatal loss of synchronization.”
Li flip-flopped so her feet were facing up, her head down. She looked at Arkady, at eye level but inverted, and raised an eyebrow. “I think she understands that,” Arkady said, sounding embarrassed.
“Look,” Li said. “I’ve been to the dance before. You boys just keep your flies zipped and make sure you save the last dance for the girl you came with.”
She picked out a faint spot on the opposite wall, a faded fingerprint left by some crewman of missions past. She closed her eyes and kicked off the bulkhead into a tight backflip, testing her inertial systems, troubleshooting, recalibrating the network of Fromherz nodes and ceramsteel filament that spidered down her spine and out to every muscle, tendon, and fingertip.
It was a neat trick, as well as a good diagnostic test. One of her favorites. Especially in zero g. And it was just the kind of silly thing Cohen always teased her for doing.
Well, he wasn’t teasing her tonight, she thought as her left foot hit the deck .28 centimeters off target—and she realized, suddenly, just how scared she was.
Alba: 28.10.48.
02:18:00.
The outer seal slid down on the other side of the airlock just as Li finished pulling on the bulky life-support suit and checking her heater and air feed. Arkady drew his pulse pistol, thumbed off the safety, and leveled it at Li’s chest. He lifted his thin shoulders in a sad little shrug. “Sorry.”
Li didn’t answer; he wouldn’t have heard her through the double-sealed faceplate of her helmet anyway. When the inner seal rose, she glanced back, checked her status lights again, and stepped forward.
02:20:04.
She floated out of the airlock and into open space, spinning slightly with the pull of an imperfectly calibrated frog kick. She did a fast recalculation of her trajectory, toggled her Zero-K jetpack to get back on course, assured herself she was still going to hit Alba’s exostructure reasonably close to target, and relaxed, watching the meters and seconds tick down on her internals.
She looked back at the Starling. It was already invisible, its fractal absorption sheeting effective enough to outsmart Li’s eyes even at this range. She toggled her infrareds just to be safe and scanned for a heat signature, but there was only a faint blur of warmth that could have been a heat plume from the station or the thermal wake of the last commuter shuttle. She hoped the shielding was good enough to fool not just her, but the Peacekeeper techs who monitored Alba’s fiercely enforced no-fly zone.
02:23:07.
As she neared the station, not even all her outside training and fighting experience could prevent the inevitable disorientation. The station’s metallic skin spun faster and faster. By the time she got within five meters of it, it was whipping by her like a freight train.
Cohen had put her on-station in the middle of a forest of radio and ansible receivers, reasoning that the thicket of antennae would camouflage her approach, making the risk of a hang-up worth running. She had to choose her spot carefully and toggle the ZKs to avoid getting tangled in the poles and guy wires.
Damn it, Cohen, she thought; it didn’t take a heat signature for a really sharp observer to spot a jetpack. And getting caught outside, even in a heated support suit, would be disastrous.
At the last moment before impact, she kicked her ZKs into reverse and hovered, trying to track the station’s spin. She took a deep breath, readied her grappling gear, and jumped.
The impact snapped her head back and left her eyes watering. The universe turned inside out and the sky fell on her head. The freight train that had been shooting past her face was now a wild horse intent on bucking her off into open space. The rotational gravity that had been purely theoretical when she was hanging in the void watching the station slide by was now a solid full g sucking her body back, out, and sideways.
She clung to the station and waited for her brain to accept the irreconcilable conflict between eye and inner ear. Then she half closed her eyes, questioning muscles and ligaments, forcing herself to ignore the deceptive visual cues and listen to gravity. A few heartbeats later, she pegged the direction of the Coriolis effect and was able to orient herself to station east and start climbing.
Her right shoulder was all wrong; she was favoring it before she had climbed ten meters. Korchow’s hired medics had tried to patch it up again—another jury-rigged field repair on top of the last one—but the whole arm was going to have to be stripped out and rewired. Not now, though. Now it had a job to get through.
She saw the fan turrets a long way off, knobby sixteen-meter towers that poked out of the station’s skin like mushrooms. She needed the fourth turret, and she counted down the line carefully, knowing that a mistake would mean an ugly death.
02:49:07.
She reached it seven seconds behind time.
Had she climbed too slowly? Was there something wrong with her internals? With Cohen’s schematics? She crouched under the turret, checked her systems, and cursed.
By her reckoning the turret was a good twenty meters farther from her landing point than their schematics had said it was. Any way you looked at it, the miscalculation spelled trouble.
Though Li might have fallen behind schedule, Alba hadn’t. At exactly 2:50 she felt a thud and shiver under her feet, looked up, and saw a glittering ice cloud burst from the vent hole. Dust and condensed moisture, freezing as they hit hard vacuum in the new morning’s first venting cycle; the station was getting ready for the CO2overload of the coming workday.
She huddled in the lee of the turret until the ice cloud dispersed. Then she put her faceplate to the tower’s virusteel skin and listened as the vibration of the fans slowed and finally died. She imagined miter seals shutting twenty meters below, closing off the flow of pressurized air that drove the turbines. She tried not to imagine what would happen if both sets of seals opened while she was still in the turret. Well, it would be quick, anyway. That was something. She clipped onto the guard line that ringed the bottom of the turret and tapped the unseal code into the wrist plate of her suit. ‹Cannot unseal,› the suit told her internals. ‹Insufficient atmospheric pressure outside.›
‹Manual override,› she sent.
‹There is no air outside,› the suit said in deliberate tones designed to break through the dangerous euphoria of oxygen debt. ‹Are you sure you want to remove your life-support equipment?›
‹Unseal,› she sent again, a
nd keyed in the emergency override code. A moment later, she heard the hiss of escaping air.
She pulled off her helmet. Her pressure suit activated as the hard vac hit it, dropping its reflective visor over her face. She felt the first bite of the burning cold that would leach through the suit’s thin membrane and kill her in a matter of minutes if she didn’t get inside. She removed the rest of her support suit, rolled it into a tight bundle, and stuffed it into her already-iced-over helmet. She tossed the helmet out into space and shot it with a disruptor blast, frying its circuits and making it indistinguishable from the rest of the abandoned deadware that littered Mars orbit.
No turning back now. The pressure suit would keep her alive for fifteen minutes in hard vac. Twenty at most. The amphibian genes engineered into her chromosomes for cold-shipping would buy her a little more time on top of that. But an hour in the pressure suit and it wouldn’t matter if she got what she’d come for, or if Alba security caught her.
She nudged the bladelike turbine arms to make sure there was no spring tension left in them. She wondered how Korchow pulled the inside man into his web. Either money was changing hands, and a lot of it, or Li wasn’t the only one with a dirty little secret. She took a breath, acutely aware that it was one of a limited number of breaths left in the suit. She put everything out of her mind except the next ten minutes. Then she wormed through the jagged half circle between the blades and into the chute.
02:51:43.
She pushed, legs straining, lungs burning. She made the best time she could, but she was climbing against the full rotational gravity of the station, and her enhanced strength and reflexes were little help in such tight quarters.
In the end, it was her haste that did her in. She took a wrong turn, disoriented in the narrow tunnels, strayed into one of the lateral vents that lined the inner bladder. She fetched up against the dust-fuzzed vent of a baffle like an exhausted salmon. She was so close. She could smell yeast, feel the soft, growing air of the algae bay on her face. But it was a cheat, a dead end. And the only way out was back up the shaft, into the teeth of the turbines.
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