Spin 01 - Spin State (47 page)

What Li’s soldier’s eye had seen was that, stripped down to its bones, the emergency venting system was an airlock. The inner vent separated life-support zones from the soft vacuum of the outer bladder; the outer vent staved off the void outside. In normal operations the outer vents opened only during the turbine’s power cycles. The inner vents never opened, except in the worst emergency. However, if they could open an inner vent, briefly, while the outer vent was closed, all that would show up on the station monitors was a barely noticeable local pressure drop as a few cubic meters of air flowed into the unsealed turret. And someone who had managed to slip through the turbine arms and into the duct at the end of the last power cycle could simply push the miter vent open and breach the station’s inner bladder.

If that someone was small enough to fit through the vent. If she was fast enough to climb the turret in the few minutes between venting cycles. If she was strong enough to push the inner vent open against a full g of rotational gravity and hoist herself through it.

But Li was all those things.

It was a risky way in. If it worked, though, it would put Li on-station undetected, and already through the manned security checks that separated the top-security labs from the station’s unrestricted zones.

Korchow’s inside man would open the inner seal for her. This was Li’s least favorite part of the plan. It introduced a dangerously large risk of human error. It left her life hanging on the actions of someone she had never met and had no reason to trust. Worse, she had to be down the duct when the seal opened, ready to drop through instantly. And to get there, she would have to shinny twenty meters against a full rotational g, up a chute so narrow that even her small shoulders would just pass through it. If the door failed to open, if anything went wrong, if the inside man failed her, there would be no way out except through the spinning turbines.

Li had laughed when she saw the schematics and told Cohen it was a good thing she’d started smoking young. She wasn’t laughing now.

“Let’s go over the plan again,” Cohen said, when they finished the run-through.

Li rolled her eyes. They’d gone over it four times already—which was three more than she wanted to. “Cohen,” she said, “don’t waste my fucking time, okay?”

Arkady turned to look at her, surprised. Cohen had no body on board the little Starling, but his disapproval came through the comp boards loud and clear as a bad day.

“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 Syndicatemade 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 offline 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.

02:18:00.

The outer seal slid down on the other side of the airlock just as Li finished pulling on the bulky lifesupport 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.