Angeleyes - eARC (21 page)

CHAPTER 26

Three jumps later we were in Sol system, and cleared for cross-system with a beacon. We finally arrived at Sol JP3 across from Caledonia.

I guess the reports of other “terror” attacks were true. The station was locked down tight. The engineers had built a jetty, and we docked to that. They sent a crew to detach the train, and a powered dock to take the onboard cargo. Some of the V-suits read “INSPECTOR” or “SECURITY.” They ran scanners over everything, and I was worried we’d get nailed.

“Are they billing us for that?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Roger said. “We’re barely making a flip on this leg.”

Pretty soon ships would stop calling if they did that.

“What are we loading?”

“Dried and nitro-packed food, sundry goods and administrative technical gear for the Freehold occupation forces.”

“. . . they’re paying us to take stuff to our own system?”

“It’s times like this that war is awesome. Now, if we can just get them to pay us to bring it back . . .”

They were still unloading, and charging us dock time for the time it took them to do it, even though we weren’t docked.

I wondered how many of the other ships were somebody’s spies only here for some leverage.

Roger said, “It’ll be late tomorrow night before they finish reloading us.”

Once the unloading crew had cleared ship, Jack and Teresa went aft with scanning gear.

“Look what we found,” she said when they returned. She had a plastic jar with layers of gel padding and something inside those.

“I’m assuming that’s a bug?”

“It was. It’s now getting a lot of white and pink noise that sounds like engine testing and fluid transfer.”

“Interesting,” Shannon said. “Just us, all ships, random, or specific craft?”

Glenn asked, “And how much could it pick up from back there?”

“It would have taken a lot of filtering but anything in the bay would have been audible. It’s isolated now.”

“What about outside the hull?” Mira asked.

Bast said, “I ran a pretty strong microwave beam around. We’ll want to check for intel, but I should have cooked anything.”

Juan said, “Nevertheless, keep chatter even less than minimum, and . . .” he nodded to Mira, who did something with her console. “. . . we’ll continue this with audio jamming.”

He sat back and brought up an external view of the station.

“We’re trying to both have a logistical effect and a psychological one. We can’t readily get through the triple gate they’ve got. So we need an alternate way into the terminal, via personnel lock. Inboard container C-five W has the stuff.”

I remembered that one. It was one of the “rich people” stash of cargo we kept re-manifesting with help from local shills.

“That stuff?” I asked. “It’s recreational beach equipment.”

“Which can hold pressure and supply oxygen.”

I thought through the manifest I’d seen months ago. They were actually planning to use wetsuits for EVA.

“Underwater gear in vacuum?”

Bast said, “Dive tanks and fishbowls, with gaskets and harnesses. Jack will set you up.”

“How reliable do you think that will be?” I was thinking they were going to use friction tape and insulation foam. That was spacer engineering.

“As long as it gets us in, and hopefully out, it’s fine.”

“I’m guessing you need a map?”

“No. Now you really earn your pay.”

I gulped and my guts tensed up.

“I really don’t know this station well.” This was another one I’d visited once.

“We trust your knowledge of the stations generally, and culture,” he said.

What they came up with was more sophisticated than I expected. The bowls had foam gaskets on a yoke, and strapped and pilehooked to the top of the wetsuit, with oxy bottles on the back. The fittings for the oxy lines looked very professional, and professionally mounted into the helmet with bearing locks and gaskets.

“Can you get fitted?”

“Me?”

“We’ll come back in and need to be out of sight. You’ve got to lead.”

This was insane, and probably deadly. And I’d signed a contract for exactly that.

It was the most intimate, non-sexy thing I’ve ever done. Shannon, Bast and I stripped naked to get into the suits, and Teresa and Jack helped us.

The wetsuit went on over what felt like a gallon of lube. It was exactly the same lube used for sex toys. That made sense. Jack slathered it all over my back, I got my front, breasts, thighs and down, then he got my arms while I did my own collar. It was slippery and sensual, and damned cold in the air.

It wasn’t even sexy watching them lube Roger up. This was business, and someone was going to die in the process.

I wiggled and pulled with Jack’s help, getting the flexible membrane over me. The suit was a tight barrier. The boots were military arctic issue, solid elastomer, and then covered with polymer bags and elastic. The gloves were done the same way. The oxy and nitry hoses were clicked into the fish bowl, and I wondered why the hell I was doing this.

It was a vacuum suit. It had no heat or cooling, no relief mechanism. There were no transponders or even latches for lines. The only gauge was a blood meter clipped to my ear, and I was expected to adjust the O2 feed with a knob on my left shoulder.

“Can you reach it?” Jack asked.

“Just,” I said.

“Good. Keep your color above orange and below violet.”

“Got it,” I said. Yes, I wanted to keep breathing.

The maneuver harness was the most professional looking bit. I’d never used one, but it looked right. I don’t know if they’d built those or bought them. Or stolen them.

We had a crew lock next to the rear cargo hatch, that was officially connected to the escape pod.

The others cycled through first, then greenlit me. I locked in, pumped down, locked out, and the pod had been shifted a half meter on its ways. I could just squeeze out into space.

I’m EVA-qualified and have used several crawlie pods to traverse a cargo train. I’d done it in a rated suit once, a few weeks before. In all cases, I had two tethers or a trolley cable to hold me in place.

Now I had neither.

I didn’t have any commo, either.

I can’t tell you how absolutely terrified I felt right then. We were unattached, in improvised suits with no commo. Any mistake would mean either instant depressurization or lingering hypoxia.

I climbed out and pointed myself toward the control blister on the hub. I was told the thrust vest should be aligned with my mass, close enough, and that I could make small corrections in flight. Shannon had been very specific.

“You eyeball with both eyes to make sure you’re aligned, then just the barest gas, and repeat every hundred seconds or so. You don’t want to hit at speed, and you don’t want to ricochet or flyby.”

“Have you done this before?” I asked.

“Yes, in training, never like this.”

“Okay,” I said. At least it wasn’t just some clever-assery they’d come up with.

Very slow
, they’d cautioned. We had divs. I stared at my target, checked with each eye alone, then took a deep, deep breath. It was almost too much oxy, and my head spun. I held it in until I leveled out, then did it.

I opened the valve just a RCH and closed it. I waited, counted a full hundred seconds, and looked around. I’d moved about fifty meters. The rough parallax scale I had, printed on paper, confirmed that. Yes, that was probably a good velocity.

It was hard to see any movement, and I was still twitchy with no line. I was in free space. The money wasn’t enough for this, so, I obviously wasn’t doing it for the money.

It was fucking cold. We were in shadow, and radiated heat. My hands and feet were numb by the time we were a half K along.

It was a half div before we reached the lock. It had apparently been either an emergency or cargo lock at some point. Now it was an inspection and maintenance lock with steady traffic.

As we approached the lock blister, I saw others EVA. They were doing repairs and inspections of two ships brought to this end for close examination. I hoped they didn’t examine us.

I wondered how we’d avoid attention. There were several other people pulling maintenance on the station hull and sensors, using crawly-drones. I guess they were just too busy to pay attention.

No one gave us a glance. I figured it was three things. We wore pressure suits, so we must belong outside. There are so many models and styles, no one would pay attention to one unless it was really sexy and techie. And even improvised, they were well-made and looked professional.

Besides, most spacers aren’t familiar with wetsuits. Hell, I wasn’t.

We locked through with several others and nobody gave any notice or said a word. I was sweating even though I was still shivering, and trembling a bit from fear of the outside, fear of notice, and recovering from it all, but no one mentioned that, either. The guy next to me looked pretty wiped out from whatever work he was peforming.

Most of the EVAs had lockers inside the personnel dock for changing. A few did wear them all the way back to their ships. Juan didn’t want us hanging out here. We planned to change elsewhere so we didn’t leave a trail either way.

There were locker rooms, showers and dolly-boxes all the way through. We made our way, and were almost out when a guy looked up and said, “Hey, are those amphibious suits?”

Shannon said, “I dunno, might be. We got them used.”

“Military surplus?”

“Dunno. Suit Cycler had them on special a few years back.”

“Neat.”

We kept walking, hoping for no more interaction with anyone. All the cameras and sniffers were threat enough.

I was on new deck here. I’d never been in any controlled areas off-dock. All the hatches in the passage were sealed.

But there was a vestibule around one that would give us room to change if we hurried. It had some stacked crates that weren’t even dogged down, so it was probably not used much.

We all peeled and squirmed out of the suits. They clung worse than wet spandex, sticking then pulling loose, and the lube gel had dried sticky. Bast handed me some wipes that first made it all slippery again, then cleaned it off.

Not bad. He had nice tone, nice lines and I could definitely see him spreading me. It was a shame we wouldn’t have a chance until this was over, if ever.

Shannon was also quite acceptable. They had intelligence, fitness from exercise and that emotional strength I could feel.

Shannon had shipsuits in his satchel, and slipper boots. We had no underwear. We had passes that were fake, but people generally don’t look at them inside a perimeter. Bast had a tool pack across one shoulder. Hopefully with the pouches and suits we’d blend in enough.

Rolling the wetsuits was tough. There was no way they’d pack small enough. Even being modern ones, and I gather the old ones of rubber were huge, they would fill a fair-sized backpack. Bast used some line ties and turned them into discreet bundles. He ripped the tubes off the helmets and stacked those behind the crates.

We were on the night hours by system time, but it was getting close to morning. There are people up all cycle round, and more were going to be up soon.

CHAPTER 27

As we walked out of the service passage into the terminal passages, someone challenged us.

“Hey!”

Sebastian said, “Sorry, we got lost. Thought there was a service vator we could use.”

“No. This is operations only.”

“I said we’re sorry.”

We made it out and into the station service passage behind that. We were still in restricted volume, even more so. This was the public access for the processors, not the underdeck for the maintainers.

Someone had seen or said something. A squad of security goons came at us from three sides. They had carbines out, and I was staring at a muzzle.

“All of you face down on the deck and do not move.”

I raised my hands and puckered up, imagining interrogation Round Two.

I don’t know who moved first, but it was suddenly a melee. Sebastian had one guy bent backwards over his knee and his hand around the throat armor of a second. Shannon was on the ground with two others in a tangle.

One of the last pair waved his carbine around, looking for a spot to shoot, I suppose. The last one had me covered. I couldn’t do anything without getting shot.

Then he turned his head a fraction to watch the thrashing legs in Shannon’s fight.

I tuellered him. I have no idea why, I just shoved and sprinted. He glanced back at me, I heard the safety click, and why was his weapon on safe after a fight started? And I hit him, my left arm around a thigh, my right hand heel under his chin. He staggered into the wall and fell on me.

I tried to roll on top, then realized his buddy might shoot me if I did. I was safer here.

He was heavier than me, of course, and had armor. He broke my grip and struggled to get up until I thumbed him in the throat and squeezed. It was just above his armor, and he started choking and coughing.

Then a foot kicked him in the face and almost broke my thumb in the process. It was Shannon’s.

“Let’s move,” he said, and dragged me from under.

I hobbled behind him as he pointed up the ladder. Sebastian led the way, applied a power shear to the lock and opened it. We climbed up and were in a ventilation and power conduit.

Those all look the same, and I knew what we needed.

“Over there, behind the plenum,” I said.

Once there, I found the access door. You can actually walk inside them, and the engineers do, for maintenance. Sebastian cut it, Shannon opened it, and a gust blew dust all around. That wasn’t good, because it would be a sign of us, but it also meant they didn’t get back here for at least days at a time.

The airflow isn’t fast because there’s a lot of volume in there. It’s a slow breeze. There is noise from the fans, but it’s tolerable and not dangerous unless you wanted to live there.

“Did I kick your thumb?” he asked.

“Yeah. But you got him.” Goddam it hurt.

He looked it over and had me wiggle it.

“Seems to be mostly soft tissue. Analgesic and a quick genstim when we get back.”

“If we get back.”

“It’ll take more than a few of those dorfs to stop us,” he said. He held up one of the carbines and a coder. They’d block signal on that soon, but in the meantime, we could make distance. On the other hand, they might try to track where it got used. I said so.

“Oh, I don’t plan to use it,” he said. “We’ll pull some data, though.”

“What will that do?”

“Maybe nothing, but it’s all intel. This guy’s movements, that schedule, some incident. Add it all up, pattern it all out, eventually some of it becomes intel for the fight.”

I knew that was how intel worked, but I didn’t see how this one would matter.

“Caught your breath?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My thumb and my tailbone hurt.” They weren’t crippling, but they were going to be sore for a few days. I wouldn’t be lying on my back comfortably.

I don’t know what they did in there, but they installed some kind of small module.

Shannon had two carbines as well, and extra ammo sticks, and handed me one. It was easy to figure out. Insert, cock, release, shoot.

“Ever shot anyone?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“You will very soon. Are you okay with that?”

He sounded so matter of fact and educational.

“Better than getting shot,” I said.

“Exactly. Don’t shoot unless you need to or hear us, but then shoot fast and think later. Get past the hurdle. These people want us dead.”

“I know,” I said, gripping my bruised thumb for a moment.

Bast did something with the coder.

“General call. I’d hoped to avoid this, but we’re going to have to shimmy as far as we can and shoot our way through, then get underdeck as soon as we’re in another area.”

Shannon nodded and boosted him up into the plenum. He pulled me up, then we both pulled Bast.

“I have no idea where this goes,” I warned them.

“It goes toward main pressure,” Shannon said. “For now, that’s what we need.”

“Will they figure out where we were?”

“Depends on if we get out unseen.”

I said, “I won’t know where we are until we get out, and I may not even then.”

“We do what we can.”

“Okay.”

The duct twisted around in several long curves and dips. We slithered to keep quiet, and stirred up dust that blew behind us. I shifted sideways so Bast’s dust didn’t get me in the face, but there was still some. It was fluffy clumps, probably from static.

We came to a dip and had to slide down, the joints between sections caught and bruised me. Then we had to crawl up the other side using those joints for fingergrips. G wasn’t high here, only about .3, but it was still tough to haul myself up by fingertips. Then the duct split three ways. They were secured with large metal mesh.

Shannon looked at something in his hand, pointed to the right and said, “Hub is that way.” His voice was a whisper, and it echoed.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

He held up a clear disk with markings and a pointer.

“EM and grav compass. It’s tracking the emergency nav marker, and the rotational G.”

“Ah,” I said. I knew what a compass was. I’d seen and used them in training, long years back. This was something different. “I hadn’t realized the station had that.”

“Most do, or else light beacons. If everything fails, emergency crews need to orient.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

The echoes ran down the conduit and turned into scary feedback. I didn’t want to talk much.

Bast pulled out a tool and tightened it around one of the bars, then kept cranking it with a lever. It was some sort of shear blade that wedged its way through a bit at a time until there was a loud pop, almost a bang, and the bar snapped. He repeated at the other end.

With a section removed, he whispered very quietly, “Can you fit through there?”

It was only two squares wide with sheared ends sticking out, but I got my head through, then one shoulder, and the other got stuck until I shimmied a bit. The sharp end at the bottom gouged me but I got past it. Then my ass required serious gyrations to get my hips through one at a time.

After that I was through.

I sat there while he cranked the wedge through another bar to create a V-shaped hole that he could get through, with difficulty. Shannon slid right through.

Then it was back to crawling along ducts and watching the dust blow.

After a lot of that, we came to a grating over industrial access.

“I vaguely know where this is,” I said.

“Good, get us to the ship.”

Why hadn’t we come in this way, I wondered?

Bast had a tool that reached through the grating, around, and undid the fasteners from the outside. Shannon caught the mesh as it came loose, and hauled it up.

“You’re down first, Angie. Shoot anything you see.”

I gulped. “Okay.” That order seemed to be a complete violation of the Law of Armed Conflict, but I realized it was probably the only thing we could do.

Bast dropped down next to me, Shannon stood on his shoulders, and reattached the grating.

I stood there sweating, with my pulse racing. We were standing in a passage, and there were cameras somewhere around here, and sensors that would want to see ID chips we didn’t have.

Nothing happened, and we moved at Shannon’s gesture. We were clear for now. His tracker told him to turn right, which was spinward, then left again for south.

We came around a passage bend and ran into an entire squad of police in riot gear. They were about ten meters away and closing in our direction. Eight of them. They’d obviously been alerted because they were moving in leapfrog and cover.

They started pointing weapons at us, and it was obvious they weren’t in any doubt as to who we were. It took me only a moment to figure out I should be shooting at them.

Shannon already was. He caught one right under his visor, above the neck armor, and right through the chin. That spot is barely a couple of centimeters wide. He nailed it. While advancing.

Bast had hit one in the thighs, one shot each, right above the knee armor where there’s a gap. The guy staggered and fell. He screamed and convulsed and screamed more from the damage.

All I managed was suppressing fire. I buzzed a burst and watched it ricochet off walls and visors.

With three down and two limping, they started to retreat, falling back in echelons in good order.

Then Shannon threw some sort of grenade. The bang was deafening and the walls flexed. Two more of them flailed. I watched their limbs flop like hoses. The human body doesn’t bend that way.

He led, Bast brought up the rear, prodding me along as they went. I figured whatever we’d wanted to do was wasted, and we were just trying to unass the area as fast as possible.

As we passed the downed wounded, one of them pointed his weapon at us. Before he could shoot, Bast swung, fired and kept moving. The guy was dead, hit in that hollow near the throat.

Klaxons and sirens started, and we were at a run.

We reached a marked entry point just as four more cops did. I butt stroked the nearest while exhaling in a “Yah!” I followed with a kick to his shin, one to his knee, and basically stomped over him as he went down. Screwing up my face, I smashed the edge of my foot down against the throat joint of his armor. Then again. It hurt. He flailed and tried to grab me, then clutched at his throat.

Bast just stomped on one as he ran over him and beat the next into the bulkhead. Shannon damned near ripped the fourth’s arm off, twirled her like a dancer, grabbed her head and pulled. I heard the neck bones crunch and the girl dropped, twitching like she’d been shocked. Residual neural impulse, I was sure. She was dead.

I was pretty sure if mine wasn’t dead, he was going to be in critical support unit for days.

I’d followed their lead and not opened fire, so I’d kept noise and sensor tag to a minimum. I was proud of that at least.

The door blinked and slid open and we were out.

There was someone at a reception desk, and Bast shouted, “Get down!”

The guy did.

We were out the next door and into public area.

“Lead, Angie,” Shannon said. He reached out and gestured for my carbine. I handed it back.

We were still in government cube. I slowed to a walk, and waggled my arms down and away. As we passed a recycle post, I heard one of the guns go into the waste can. I turned to keep us moving south on the station axis line, toward commercial space.

I know we were being watched on camera. I had no idea what to do, but I got us into back commercial passage. There was a rear employee’s exit for something, and someone just coming out. We went past them, I grabbed the door and held it.

The woman coming out said, “Hey! That’s—”

I winked at her and said, “Shhh!” with my finger up over a coy grin as the guys went ahead of me. She looked flustered and embarrassed and said nothing.

The door latched behind us.

“We’re in the Hilton,” Shannon said.

He peeled out of his coverall and tossed it into a rag bin. Bast and I did the same. We were naked, and needed to dress up if we were going in public.

Bast pulled three vacbags out of his kit. One of them had a blazer and tie for me, the others had jackets and pullies for the men. I found someone’s brush on a shelf, and hoping it was clean, dragged it through my hair.

Then he went to a trash can and dumped three severed hands into it. They had patches over the stumps. I’d completely missed where he got those.

“Biobatteries,” he said when I looked at him.

“Is that how we got through the checkpoint?”

“Yes.”

Fuck. If we got caught at this point, we’d killed cops, mutilated bodies, violated security, and goddess knows what sabotage was about to happen. If we were lucky, they’d just space us.

We walked through the doors to the rear of the public area, and there was one guest by the slide pod.

I improvised, “I think we’ll need to move some of the tables from the middle.”

Bast got it at once. “How many guests was it?”

Shannon said, “Forty-three.”

“That should work, then.”

By then we were around a corner and out of sight.

“I have an idea,” I said.

I found a door that I was pretty sure went to table and chair storage. I pointed to the lock, Shannon whipped out some small tools, and in five seconds the door was open.

Yes, that’s what it was.

“We can hide here for a few.”

“Only a few,” Shannon said. “Breather, water, keep moving.”

Bast pulled out a ProTeem bar and took a bite, popped a water bulb and swigged. He handed them to me and I took a bite and gulped a couple of gulps. Shannon finished them, crushed the bottle flat and stuffed it and the wrapper in a pocket.

Shannon also had an actual comb. I cleaned up my hair a bit more and rolled the back. He straightened his. Bast combed his luxurious wave over his right ear.

“Okay, where to?” he asked me.

I led us out the front in plain view of everyone, toward a restaurant I’d heard of, because I knew they had a back entrance into maintenance space. We were able to go to the restrooms then out the back.

“How are we going to avoid alerts since we don’t have any chips now?” I asked.