The City Who Fought (58 page)

"Could we talk deal?" Rand asked smoothly.

Joat's eyebrows went up and she cocked her head.

"Excuse me?"

"That exasperation program . . . ?"

Joat frowned and folded her arms thoughtfully. Then she sighed.

"Okay, deal, you can erase the program. Now will you help me?"

"I'll do my best." Rand's voice conveyed pride in self combined with disapproval of her plans.

Joat suppressed a smile. Sometimes Rand was downright prissy. She wondered if she'd unintentionally programmed it that way—it couldn't have caught it from
her
behavior, that was sure.

"Don't worry Rand."

"When you say not to worry, worry becomes imperative."

"Where's the station's nearest service hatch to
Wyal?
" she asked.

Rand threw a schematic on the screen, replacing the smiling policeman. Wyal was represented by a bunking yellow dot, the nearest service hatch blinked red.

"Now, show me the surveillance cameras."

A pause, then Rand indicated them on the schematic in blue.

"Whew," Joat sighed. "They have pretty good coverage. Any chance you can hack into the surveillance network and simply run a tape of empty space while I'm out there?"

"Doubtful. With so many suspect elements sharing the station's amenities, New Destinies has a fairly sophisticated security system. Something of that complexity would probably activate an alarm."

"Fardles." She drummed her fingers on the console. "What can you tell me about the lock?"

Rand threw up another schematic. "It's a standard design. Nothing complicated, with the usual tell-tales in place." As it spoke small arrows blinked on indicating the areas spoken of. "There are cameras in the corridor outside the service hatch."

Joat brushed her hair back.
Time for another trim,
she thought inconsequentially. She went to a locker at the rear of the bridge compartment and palmed the sensor. It opened, and she began to take out various useful items and slot them into pockets and less obvious hiding places in her taupe overall; also in her belt, in the heels of her boots, and one or two in special cavities in her molars.

"Is there any time when the route I'll have to traverse and the lock itself isn't under observation?"

That came out as a mumble, since her fingers were in the back of her mouth, but Rand had excellent voiceprint filters.

"For approximately ten seconds the route and the lock are clear. As it won't alter their function, I may be able to slow the sweep of the cameras so that you have forty seconds," Rand told her. "I can do nothing about the telltales, though, and the cameras inside are stationary."

She considered the diagram before her.

"It'll take me twelve seconds to get from
Wyal
to the lock," she murmured.

"Optimistically."

"Twelve seconds." She grinned. "And if I can't silence a tell-tale in twenty-eight seconds I deserve whatever happens to me. Can you take out the camera in the corridor?"

"I believe so. But it will surely be considered suspicious."

"Feh!" Joat made a contemptuous face and a dismissive gesture. "It probably happens all the time."

Then she rose and laced her fingers together, cracking her knuckles briskly. "Let's do it. You're in charge of the
Wyal
until I return.
Don't
accumulate too much time on the station's virtual reality net—we can't afford it."

"It's research," Rand said indignantly. "My interactions with humans increase my versatility."

"You can research Alvec and me for free," Joat said firmly, running a mental checklist of the devices she was carrying.
A few more?
No, the only really useful item would be a laser welder—you could do really astonishing things with a laser welder, if you knew how—but it was a bit conspicuous.

Useful, though. It was a pity. She and a couple of other students at Vega Central Institute—Simeon had sent her there for six months—had cut down a bronze statue of the Founder, cut it in half, and rewelded it around a shower fixture in the quarters of the Dean of Cybernetics. And she hadn't had to use anything but a hand-cutter and a floater platform to do it, either.

Actually Simeon had sent her to Vega Central for a year. They'd sent her
back
after six months.

Bureaucrats, she thought. No sense of humor at all.

* * *

Joat tied her hair back in a ponytail and paused to study herself in the screen set to mirror beside the airlock; large, gray-blue eyes stared solemnly back, examining delicate features in a sharp-boned face.

Not much trace of the feral child she'd been when Simeon and Channa found her hiding in the ventilation ducts of SSS-900-C; she'd been living in a nest of stolen blankets and cobbled-together computer parts.

Good training to be a high-tech guerrilla during the Kolnari occupation of the Station, but not so hot as a preparation for life.

She pursed her lips and looked at the package she was to deliver.
I
must
have grown up. I haven't
opened it.

CenSec would have all sorts of cyberdog guardians built in, but that just increased the itch. Her fingers twitched as if they held micromanipulators and a datacode bar. She sighed and shook her head. No, it wasn't worth the hassle. She'd made up her mind to that the first time she'd agreed to take on a CenSec shipment at Simeon's request.

The less she knew, she'd told herself, the better. Because CenSec was the kind of organization that considered you were in their debt if
you
did
them
a favor. They started out owing you and ended up owning you. That might appeal to straight-arrow types brought up in boring rectitude, who fell down on their knees in thanks at getting to play Galactic Spy.

Not me,
Joat thought defiantly.
Nobody's gonna get a piece of my soul.
She'd gotten far more adventure than she wanted by the age of twelve. And she knew that, for preference, adventure was somebody
else
in deep doodly, far, far away.

She gave herself one last appraising look, then picked up the CenSec package and zipped it into one of her pockets before heading for the suit-storage locker.

* * *

Joat suited up quickly. It was a process she'd always handled well, winning a fair number of credits in Brawn school betting on just how fast she could do it.

No gruddy sense of humor there either,
she thought. Her knack for separating her fellow students from their disposable income was just one of many reasons she'd finally been asked to leave. By the time they finally got around to asking her, though, she was already half packed.
I don't understand how Channa
ever got through without freezing into an icicle.
Then again, a lot of people thought she had.

The fact was she and her teachers and fellow students were fundamentally incompatible. She regarded them as too stiff-necked, they saw her as
far
too flexible.

Her only concern in leaving Brawn training had been the possibility that she might be disappointing her adoptive parents. She grinned reminiscently, remembering their words as she stepped out of the Station airlock—Simeon had waited, "standing" beside Channa in his favorite vid persona, a big blond bruiser with a dueling scar and a Centauri Jets cap turned backwards.

"Toldja," he'd said blithely.

"I knew they'd never hammer you into a straight arrow," Channa said with a warm smile. "You were born to be independent."

"Or to hang," Simeon added.

* * *

Joat tapped the lock controls. Air bled out; the telltales in the rim of the helmet below her chin showed hard vac. She crouched in the open door of the lock, studying the surface of the station, pronged and spiked with various sensors and antennae. This close even a modest station loomed immense, a metallic god-sized lathe twirling forever against the orange glow of its planet. It turned with a slow ponderous inevitability; at this range your gut refused to see it as an artifact. She turned her head, looking for the flashing red light that indicated the location of the service hatch.

Joat sighed. This little excursion would be so much easier if she'd never revealed the secret of the device that had rendered her invisible to virtually all sensors and recording devices. Simeon had
insisted
on letting everyone know how to counter it. Of course the patent had accounted for a big part of the down-payment on her ship.
Create the problem, solve the problem, collect the money,
she thought.

Ah, well, New Destinies was one of the few windowless stations. They'd spun it up from the nickel-iron of a single asteroid, and nobody had bothered putting in luxuries. So at least she didn't have to worry about some tourist catching her in the act with their holo camera and immortalizing this exploit for the delight of station security.

Light strobed across her target. She estimated the angle and aimed the magnetic grapple built into the sleeve of her suit, leaning forward, arm extended.

"Ready," she said into her suit com. "Say when, Rand."

"Standing by, Joat." Rand paused a moment. "Now."

There was a slight twitch that pushed her arm gently backwards as she fired the grapple. The contact plate spun out on its near-invisible line and clung to the station's skin about a meter from the small service hatch. Joat activated the mechanism in her sleeve that would reel her towards the station, then gave a jerk on the line that propelled her outward.

Joat pulled her feet forward and her knees up against the suit's resistance, rolling herself head over heels in a controlled somersault; timing it so that the stickfield on the soles of her boots would strike first, and her bent legs absorb the impact.

When she left
Wyal
's gravity field the blood in her veins leapt within her, rushing to her head in a dizzying surge. The weightlessness made every part of her feel strange, as though she'd been bounced upward, never coming down, only climbing, soaring.
Swimming in the universal sea,
a friend at Brawn school had called it.
Nolie.
The few moments of queasiness until she adjusted was worth it; then gravity returned as centrifugal force spun her outward. The stationary docking ring fell behind, and suddenly
up
was towards the rotating bulk of New Destinies. It was the docking ring that seemed to move, with the
Wyal
embedded in it like a pencil in a sharpener.

She felt closest to Simeon, her adopted father, when she moved through space in her suit. Encased, as he was, in a machine that kept her alive in a murderous environment, yet personally in contact with the infinite.

Joat watched the universe flick by, ship, stars, station, three times before she reached her target.

The stickfield on her boots held her to the station against the surge of recoil and Joat clasped an extended hand around a utility handle jutting out from the station's skin. Her inertia surged, balanced and stabilized by the grip and the automatic flex of leg and thigh. The anchor cord finished reeling itself back into the sleeve of her suit with a small definite
click,
de-energizing the disk and whipping it back into the slot. Her eyes were telling her that she stood upright on a huge metal plain. Weight said that she was hanging from her feet with a great metal plain
above
her. Both were wrong, and she had no time to waste.

"Now," she muttered. "Down the rabbit hole, or I'll be
very
late."

Her suited fingers traced the exterior of the airlock. Standard model, a fiber-steel oval with memory putty sealant around the edges and a mechanical doglock wheel in the center for emergencies. No use trying that, it would be safetied. Instead she took out a multitool and began opening the access cover of the lock control, whistling soundlessly between her teeth.

Well, and aren't you clever,
she thought, as the first choice undid the couplers that held it closed. You found some of the weirdest nonstandard components on these out-of-the-way Stations.

Her suit had some nonstandard components, too. She unclipped an extension datalink from her belt and clicked the connector into the link on the control card. Then she closed her eyes and subvocalized a series of code words.

A chittering voice sounded in her inner ear. "
Whhhaaat's up, boss?
"

"Got a little job for you, Speedy."

She opened her eyes again. Playing across the thin-film crystal of her suit visor was a holo of a ferret.

Not a
real
ferret; this one was vaguely anthropomorphic and wore a beret. One hand clutched a smokestick in a long ivory holder.
Stylish,
she thought. There was no point in being mechanical when you designed an AI, even the fairly simple specialized type.

This one, for example, was a specialist in locks.

"Cycle this airlock, but don't let anyone know about it."

"Rrrright, boss."

The holo image vanished. It was replaced by a schematic of the circuitry and the control program for the access. The picklock program slunk through the commercial programming with sinuous ease, then struck.

Red slivers appeared on the green circuitry, marking the spots where false data was being fed back into the systems central monitor. That severed the controls from the Station's computers, at least for a while.

Of course, there was always the chance that some interfering type would be actually
looking
at the inside door of the airlock when she came through. Harder to fool the ol' Eyeball Mark I.

"Rand, is there any way for you to tie into the vid monitor covering this accessway and let me know if anybody's out there?"

"No, Joat, there isn't. I've already knocked it out. But this access is located in a maintenance area that's not very thickly populated. It's a chance you'll have to take. You have seven seconds."

"Fardles!"

Joat imagined some passerby attracted to the mysteriously cycling lock, watching in puzzlement the flashing of the warning light that showed the lock was in use.

What if there's a klaxon or a bell? she wondered. She sighed mentally. Then I get arrested, I guess. Bad planning, Joat. If the worst happens it'll serve you right for being so impulsive.