Zero-G

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A huge ring, six miles in diameter, its cooling fins slicing through the vacuum. The Core at the centre of the ring, the sphere containing the station's fusion reactor, shines in the glowing sunlight. Three hundred miles below it, the Earth is dark and silent.

To generate gravity for the million people who live on board, Outer Earth spins – just fast enough to keep everything inside Earth-Normal. The spin is almost imperceptible, the rockets on the station firing at intervals to maintain it. It has been in orbit for over a hundred years.

The side of the station explodes.

A great wound opens up in the hull, like skin parting under a knife. The hole expands faster than the human eye can register, ripping apart until the gash is half a mile long. The pressure loss rips out everything inside, forming a cloud of glittering debris. Shreds of metal collide, bouncing off one other.

And there are bodies. Dozens of them. They tumble through the wreckage, crashing into the larger chunks of debris as they hurtle away from the station. Some of them are still moving, limbs clutching at nothing, fingers hooked into claws. One by one, they go still.

All of this happens in the purest silence.

Two days earlier

“We've got hostages.”

Royo's voice echoes around the narrow entrance corridor. The big double doors to the Recycler Plant are behind him, shut tight. A rotating light spins above them, casting flickering shadows on the assembled stompers.

“Roster says twenty sewerage workers were on duty today when it happened,” Royo says, jerking his thumb at the double doors. “It's our job to get 'em out.”

“How many hostiles?” I say.

A few of the stompers look round at me, as if they can't quite believe I'm actually wearing one of their uniforms. I can't quite believe I am either. Six months ago, I'd be doing my best to get as far away from the stompers as I could. I've never liked cops.

Royo glances at me. His bald head reflects the spinning light perfectly. “We don't have any intel on the situation inside. That's the problem.”

“What about the cameras?” says a voice from behind me.

I turn to see Aaron Carver jogging up, the top half of his black stomper jumpsuit tied around his waist, his perfectly styled blond hair swept back. He's wearing a bright red vest, exposing his toned upper arms. Behind him is Kevin O'Connell, a head taller than any other stomper here, with a closely shorn head and dark stubble across his cheeks.

All three of us used to be tracers – couriers who took packages and messages across the station. That was before Royo got us onto the stomper corps.

Royo shakes his head. “Nice of you to join us, Carver.”

“Wouldn't miss it for the world, Cap.”

Royo turns back to the group. “There were two working cams on the floor, but whoever did this shot 'em to pieces the second they got in there. Locked down all the exits, too.”

Carver comes to a stop alongside me, breathing hard. “Was over on the sector border when I got the call,” he says to me between breaths.

“Worried about us starting without you?” I say, out of the corner of my mouth.

He puts a hand on my shoulder, uses it to pull himself upright. “Only worried you'd make us look bad. Lucky I got here when I did.”

“You got something you want to say, Carver?” Royo shouts. Heads turn to look at us. My stomper jumpsuit is made of thin fabric, but right then it feels too tight around my shoulders.

Carver gives a huge smile. “Not at all, Cap. Carry on.”

“What are their demands?” says one of the other stompers, a heavily muscled woman named Jordan, leaning up against the corridor wall. Her ponytail is pulled back so tightly that it looks like her hairline is going to tear her face apart.

“Before they killed the camera,” Royo says, “they held up a tab screen with a name written on it.”

“A name?” says Jordan, her eyes narrowing.

But I know already. We all do. I grit my teeth, without really meaning to.

“Okwembu,” says Kev. His voice is quiet, but it cuts across the hubbub in the corridor.

Royo gives him a crooked smile. “Big man gets it in one.”

Janice Okwembu. Our former council leader, who nearly destroyed the station in a twisted attempt to gain more control for herself. A lot of people want her dead. More than a few have tried to break into her maximum security prison to do just that.

I guess whoever took the plant got tired of waiting.

Royo raises his voice. “We don't negotiate with hostage takers. Never have, never will. But, right now, what we don't have is –
hey
! Get those people out of here!”

I look back towards the entrance. The corridor leading to the Recycler Plant backs out onto the main Apogee sector gallery, an enormous space with multi-level catwalks running all the way up the station levels. This much stomper activity has attracted a crowd, blocking up the entrance to the corridor. They're craning their necks, looking for action. I see workers in mess kitchen uniforms, tech jumpsuits, a few people with tattoos who look like they run with a tracer crew. One man on the side is covered in filthy rags, holding on tight to a pushcart full of gods know what. Three stompers break away from our group, shouting at the crowd to fall back.

“As I was saying,” Royo says. “We need intel. That means we need people inside. So while Jordan here takes point on the assault, I need our new tracer unit—” he points at us, and I feel a nervous prickle shoot up my spine “—to get inside, and see what we're dealing with.”

“All right,” says Carver, rolling his shoulders. “About time we had some action.”

“Wait, hold on,” I say, raising my hand. “You said they locked down the exits, right? So how
do
we get inside?”

Royo smiles that crooked smile again. A few of the other stompers are sniggering.

“That means the only way in…” I trail off, and, as one, Carver, Kev and I look down at the floor. The metal plating is perforated, and just then I realise what's below it.

Pipes. Conveying human waste from every hab in the sector to the plant. Pipes which we're now going to have to pull ourselves through.

Carver raises his eyes to Royo. “You have
got
to be kidding me.”

Morgan Knox stands on the edge of the crowd, watching Riley Hale.

Everybody gives him space. Nobody wants to go near the man with the crippled leg, the man wrapped in filthy, stinking rags. Knox barely notices the sideways glances, the muttered insults. He just stands and watches Hale, with his hands on the handle of his cart, his knuckles bloodless and white beneath the dirt.

It's not the first time he's seen her – he's been thinking about her for months now – but it's the first time he's had such a long look. He'd gone out to get supplies, and was surprised to see Hale running across the gallery in front of him, sprinting for the Recycler Plant, where the rest of the stompers were assembling.

She's got her back to him. Her dark hair falls to her shoulders in ringlets. Her black stomper uniform is a little too small for her, like it was made for someone else, and he can see the tight contours of her toned shoulders and upper arms. The bottoms of the pants show a flash of ankle above her off-white tracer shoes.

She turns to say something to one of her companions. For a moment, he sees her in profile, caught in the corridor's flashing light. Not for the first time, he catches himself thinking that she's quite beautiful.

No
, he thinks, and squeezes the cart handle even harder, as if he can pulverise the thought itself.
You're not beautiful. And you never will be.

He spits, a giant gob of saliva spattering across the ground. He feels the crowd moving further away from him, as if he's infectious. Fine by him.

He hears shouting. He looks away from Hale, to see stompers pushing the crowd back, ordering them to move along. It jerks him back to reality, and he spins his cart, using his good leg as a pivot. The cart's wheels are old and rusted, and they squeak as he pushes it across the gallery floor. He glances upwards, at the catwalks silhouetted by the vast banks of ceiling lights, and keeps moving. He can't get distracted. There's still a lot of work to do.

The noise in the corridor has gone from loud to deafening. Orders are being shouted, weapons checked, tab screens sought out. Royo strides towards us, ignoring the disgust on Carver's face.

“There
has
to be another way,” I say, glancing down at the metal grate.

Royo shakes his head. “There isn't. It's like I said. Exits blocked off.” He keeps walking, heading back down the corridor, and we fall in behind him.

“How do you know they haven't shut off the pipes, too?” I say.

“We don't. But, right now, it's the only way in we haven't tried yet. Which means you're up.”

“Cap, come on,” says Carver. “You are
not
thinking of sending us down there.”

Royo stops at a metal plate at the side of the corridor. Black lettering across it reads WASTE PIPE ACCESS AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, with smaller writing in Hindi and Chinese below it. There's a keypad on the door, its numbers faded with age. Royo crouches down and keys in a code, the beeps drowned out by the noise from the other stompers.

“You're going to get in there, you're going to get to a vantage point, and you're going to report back,” Royo says. He taps his earpiece. “I want regular contact at all times, understand?”

I'd almost forgotten about my earpiece. Every time I think I've got used to it, I realise it's still there, clogging my ear canal. The earpiece is moulded plastic, designed to fit snug in my right ear. It links me to SPOCS: the Station Protection Officer Communication System. The stompers had it before we joined up, but it was a badly maintained network, full of glitches and dead spots. Carver's big mission over the past few months has been to fix it – his first big contribution to what he calls his straight life.

“Send someone else,” Carver says, folding his arms. “I didn't sign up to crawl through shit.”

“I second that,” I say.

Royo gets to his feet. “Tracers go where other people can't. That's the whole point of your unit. That's why we recruited you.” He taps the metal trapdoor with his foot. “And by the way, try and remember that we have twenty people being held at gunpoint right now. Let's help them out. What do you say?”

Carver and I glance at each other. After a long moment, we both nod.

I look around, and something occurs to me. “Where's Anna?” I say.

“Miss Beck is currently on a staggeringly important mission further up the ring, my dear,” says Carver, imitating Anna's accent perfectly, adding the twang that people get when they grow up in Tzevya sector.

Royo glances at me. “Some punk group of tracers are getting themselves into the drug trade. She's getting dirt on them for me.”

My anger flares at his words. Not too long ago, we were a punk group of tracers, too. But, secretly, I'm glad she's not here. The fourth member of our little unit is the last person I want to deal with right now.

“We've already stopped the flow into one of the pipes,” Royo says. “It'll back up nasty down the line, but Level 3 is just going to have to deal with it.”

He reaches down and hauls open the trapdoor. The space beyond is as black as space itself. A second later, the smell nearly takes my head off.

“Gods,” says Carver, his nose and mouth buried in the crook of his elbow. Kev makes a strange noise, half retch, half disgusted groan.

“Tell me you've got some full-face filters,” I say to Royo.

He shakes his head. “Those are back at HQ. We're only supposed to break them out for emergencies, not bad smells.”

I close my eyes, willing the contents of my stomach to stay put. Royo calls out for a tab screen, and another stomper brings one over. As he passes it to Royo, I catch him staring at me. I meet his gaze, and he looks down, disappearing back into the chaos further up the corridor.

Six months on, I'm still the woman who had to kill her own father, plus the leader of her tracer crew, to save Outer Earth. Six months on, people are still treating me like a freak, or a saviour, or both. That includes other stompers. I don't mind the stares – I've got used to them. They're part of the job, and the job is what takes my mind off what happened. It's what makes going to sleep easier.

I turn back to Royo. With a few taps on the screen, he calls up the schematics of the plant.

“There are access points for maintenance here, and here,” he says, pointing at the outline on the map. “My guess is the hostage takers won't know about them, but it won't stop them from spotting you if you get careless. I want to know how many, their approximate positions, what they're armed with. Once we've got that, we'll hit the door with shaped charges and come and get you.”

He snaps the tab screen off. “Carver, Hale, get going. O'Connell, you come with me.”

“Wait – what?” Carver says. “Since when is Kev exempt from shit-pipe duty?”

“Since he's too big to fit in the shit-pipe,” Royo says. “Besides, we don't want him getting an infection.”

“Oh come
on
,” says Carver. “His op was months ago.”

He jabs at Kev's midsection, aiming for the spot where the scar is. Kev dodges back, smirking.

It took us a while to recover from the insanity of a few months ago. We were all injured – cuts, bruises, deep muscle strains. Carver's shoulder was dislocated, and it took quite a few physical therapy sessions before it was back to full strength.

Kev got it the worst. The ligaments in his ankle were torn, and while the surgery to fix them went OK, there were complications. Pulmonary embolism, Kev told us – a blood clot that originated in a leg artery and travelled upwards, lodging itself in his lungs. He collapsed a few days after the first op, spilling a cup of homebrew all over the floor of his family's hab. Emergency surgery, followed by months in hospital – that was his reward for helping save the station. It's only in the last few weeks that he's been back at full strength.

I was worried about him for a while – and not just because of his physical injuries. His closest friend, Yao, died last year. But he's thrown himself into his new life. Out of all of us, he's the one who's settled in the best. It's like he was born to be a cop, and being a tracer was just an interlude. I actually heard him telling some of the other stompers a joke – when we were tracers, he hardly ever spoke unless you asked him something first.

Royo looks Carver and me up and down. He steps in closer, lowers his voice. “I send any of my guys in there, they'll get caught. You've got agility, you've got speed, you've got your stingers, and you've got each other. We'll be right on the other side of the door if things go wrong.”

I nod, suddenly aware of my stinger, the small pistol holstered on my left hip.

Royo claps his hands. “O'Connell. On me.”

Kev fist-bumps Carver, squeezes me on the shoulder. “Stay in touch,” he says, tapping his ear, and then jogs off after Royo.

“Riley,” says Carver quietly, as soon as they're out of earshot. “I can take this if you want. You don't have to go down there.”

I look up at him, surprised, thinking he's suggesting I can't handle it. But there's nothing but concern on his face, and my irritation drains away.

“Not a chance,” I say, forcing a smile. “If I'm not there to help out, you'll make us look bad.”

He returns the smile, then digs in his pocket and hands me a stomper-issue torch. Its grainy metal surface is ice-cold. I click it on and off, and he winces as the light flicks across his face.

“Want some after-market gear?” he says.

“Like what?”

He digs in his pocket, and hands me a small box. It's a good thing the bottom is covered with sticky adhesive, because I nearly drop it when I realise what it is.

“I can't carry a
bomb
,” I say. Carver raises his eyebrows, motioning at me to stay quiet. I look over his shoulder, but nobody appears to have heard me.

I thrust the box back at Carver. When we were tracers, he was the one who built us gadgets, who designed our backpacks and shoes. And, occasionally, he'd make something a little more deadly.

The box is a sticky bomb. It's palm-sized, modified from a small plastic food container with a tight-fitting lid. Inside the lid is a sharp spike, tipped with chemicals. Just below it, on the other side of the box, is a wad of explosive putty. Slam your hand down on the box, and you've got four seconds to clear the hell out.

“Relax, Ry,” Carver says. “This one's self-assembly.”

He holds out his hand. The explosive putty is in his palm, a shiny blue glob. “Totally inert,” he says. “Until you combine them.”

“And what exactly do you think we're going to need these for?”

He gives me an evil grin. “Use your imagination.”

I shake my head, but I know he's not going to take them back. I put the box in my left jumpsuit pocket, and the putty in my right, as far away from each other as possible. The gunk has left a little residue on my hand, and I wipe it on my leg, which does nothing more than add a thin layer of lint to my skin.

Carver nods at the pipe. “Ladies first.”

I lean away from the smell, taking a last breath of cold air. Then I slip down into the darkness of the tunnel.