Spin 01 - Spin State (48 page)
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.
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.
She hit the junction with just fourteen seconds left. She was overheating. Her internals were hitting the red zone, warning lights flashing all over her peripheral vision. Too bad. They’d either fail or they wouldn’t. And if they failed, she wouldn’t be around to regret it. She hauled herself forward, internals blaring, her heart banging out a tempo as hot and urgent as the warning lights.
02:52:38.
She hit the end of the chute suddenly, with less than twelve seconds left, and slammed into the miter seal. It wouldn’t budge.
At first she thought it was locked, that the inside man had betrayed her. Then she saw the problem; the hinges were clogged with a greasy coat of dust, hair, and organic matter from the hydroponics bays, all the things that drifted on the air currents of the station and washed ashore in the stagnant back eddies of the outtake ducts.
Now that she saw it, it was so obvious she could have kicked herself. But then the things that got you killed always were obvious. Obvious and stupid. This door hadn’t been opened in years. Decades maybe. Not since the last mold epidemic. And because it wasn’t really life-support vital, it would be chronically neglected. A system you could shortchange without getting caught. A system that went to the bottom of the list when it needed a new part—and stayed there.
Korchow’s man had done what he promised all right; she had heard the sharp snick of the catch flipping open, could still hear a trapped-fly buzzing from the hinge hydraulics. But flipping a switch with the name and number of the vent on it was one thing. Actually getting the door to open in realspace was something entirely different. And Li was stuck in realspace.
She poked her fingers through the parts of the door she could reach and scrabbled frantically at the scummy deposits. Her breath rasped in her throat. Her nails scratched on metal. Cohen had warned her about the need for silence, told her there could be people in the bays next to the vent, but she was beyond caring. The whole universe had narrowed into one pure and burning thought—getting out alive.
Finally she felt some give. She twisted in the cramped duct, wrenching her body around, using feet, hands, anything, to get a purchase. She gave a tremendous kick and drove into the seal shoulder first. It held. She felt a wrenching pain in her shoulder and a cold burn like a blade being drawn down the length of her triceps. She backed up the chute and rammed the seal again. It gave a little. But not enough. Not nearly enough.
Twenty meters below her, she heard a click, then the whirr of circuits flipping on to feed power to the turbines. She tried to get her left shoulder forward, protect her bad one, but she didn’t have the space or the time to get turned around. She flung herself at it again, right shoulder first. A lick of cold ran down her arm from shoulder to wrist and her hand went numb … but the vent opened. She shot through just as the outer vent opened, and found herself hanging along the wall above an algae tray.
A full atmosphere of air pressure hit the miter seal. It slammed shut behind her like a bear trap, and she dropped into the bright, humid air of the hydroponics dome.
02:53:19.
She crept into a sheltered space between the dome struts and a dripping-full rack of algae trays. She crouched there, panting, waiting for her internals to settle down a little, waiting while she pulled her head together.
Evaluate and adapt, she told herself. Accept what is, and act on it. She was behind schedule. They had somehow gotten bad information. Bad information that could still make or break the mission. Her arm was numb, weak, close to useless. But she was in. She was through the most dangerous part of the run, and the only way out now was through.
She checked the open sunlit expanse of the dome in front of her. Empty. She stepped forward—and slipped on something slick and wet. She caught her balance, looked down and saw blood dripping from her right hand and pooling on the decking.
Her combat-application virucules would break her blood down, destroying telltale genetic evidence, leaving only the sterile universal-type plasma the field medics needed for their IV feeds. But in the meantime, there was still blood on the floor. A lot of it. Rose red drops on the silver deck plating, a glistening gingerbread trail for the guards to follow—straight to her.
She unzipped her pressure suit, pulled up the thermal shirt she wore under it, and ripped, wincing at the loud sound of tearing fabric. It ripped easily though, and it was elastic enough to make a tourniquet. She knotted it around her arm and sealed up her pressure suit again, being careful to activate the reflective visor; it wouldn’t do to get caught on vid there. When she had stanched the bleeding, she surveyed the damage to her suit. It was repairing itself, or trying to. But the tear was so big that she doubted the smart fibers would form a solid seal again. And if the suit wasn’t spacetight, how the hell would she ever get back to the Starling?
She shook her head, forced everything out of her mind but the immediate problem. Get to the lab comp. And don’t bleed all over the floors doing it. She’d worry about the pressure suit and all the rest if and when she had to.
03:12:09.
Getting to the comp was easy. Li had expected to have trouble with the DNA reader at the start of the last corridor, but to her surprise, the field dropped almost instantly to let her through. She shivered with apprehension. Did Nguyen know more than Li had told her? Had she slipped her an ace under the table for her own inscrutable reasons? Or was someone else at work here?
She slipped down the corridor, alert for patrols, scanning the labyrinth of ducts and wires that lined the ceilings for the faint pulses of security cameras. Nothing. Could a high-security lab really be so lightly protected? Or was it just that this was Alba, and the Corps knew that no thief who managed to breach the orbital fortress would ever get out safely? She counted down the doors until she reached the one that separated her from the lab spoke’s mainframe.
Here goes
, she thought. She slipped the lockpick kit out of her suit’s kangaroo pocket and unrolled it on the deck.
The lock work went slowly; she was used to having Catrall do this. But Catrall was dead. And even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t be helping her on this job. Not when it meant selling out Alba to the people who had killed so many of their comrades on Gilead.
03:19:40.
Footsteps. She froze. Were they coming toward her or moving away? Toward. She rolled up her tools, ducked around the curve, and climbed into the shadows of the ceiling.
Two women walked by. Guards, not scientists; she could hear their lug-soled boots, and the coarse, hardedged slang that was the UN grunt’s native tongue. “Catch the spins today?” one of them asked. “Assembly voted PKs to Compson’s to get the mines open.”
“What a shit hole. Well, long as we don’t have to do it.” “Do what? Go to Compson’s or open the mines?”
“Either. I didn’t sign on to shovel coal. Or shoot miners. Whole planet’s fucked, ever since the Riots. Ask me, we oughta just cut ’em loose and kick ’em into hard vac.”
“And we would if they could get those synthcrystals over in Lab Eight to format properly.” “Yeah, yeah. And if wishes were horses …”
“… horses wouldn’t be extinct!”
The guards laughed and their voices faded away down the corridor.
Li counted to twenty, holding her breath, then dropped to the floor. When she got back to the lab door, she saw something that nearly stopped her heart: her own quantum pick, sticking out of the control panel like a hangnail.
For one panicked moment she thought the patrol had seen it, that they were coming back for her, that the whole lazy gossiping act had been nothing but subterfuge. Then she got a grip on herself. It had been no trick. Luck had been with her; the two women had walked right past the pick, busy talking, and never seen it. The one plus of storming an impregnable fortress was that no one expected to turn a corner and catch an intruder.