The Human Division (52 page)

Lowen caught their expressions. “What is it?” she said.

“There might be trouble,” Wilson said, hefting the bag.

“What kind of trouble?” Hirsch said.

“Sixteen mysterious ships suddenly appearing outside the window kind of trouble,” Wilson said.

Lowen’s and Hirsch’s PDAs sounded. They both reached for them. “Read them while walking,” Wilson suggested. “Come on.” The four of them made their way out of the cargo hold and headed to the main corridor of the station.

“I’m being told to head to the beanstalk elevators,” Lowen said.

“So am I,” Hirsch said. “We’re evacuating the station.”

The four of them walked through a maintenance door into the main corridor, and into chaos. Word had spread, and quickly. A stream of Earth citizens, with looks ranging from concern to panic, were beginning to push their way toward the beanstalk elevator entry areas.

“That doesn’t look good,” Wilson said, and started walking purposefully against the general rush. “Come on. We’re going to our shuttle at gate seven. Come with us. We’ll get you on our shuttle.”

“I can’t,” Hirsch said, stopping. The others stopped with him. “My team has been ordered to assist the evacuation. I have to go to the beanstalk.”

“I’ll go with you,” Lowen said.

“No,” Hirsch said. “Harry’s right, it’s a mess, and it’s going to get messier. Go with him and Hart.” He went in to give his cousin a hug and a quick peck on the cheek. “See you soon, Dani.” He looked over to Wilson. “Get her out of here,” he said.

“We will,” Wilson said. Hirsch nodded and headed down the corridor, toward the beanstalk elevators.

“Gate seven is still a quarter of the way around the station,” Schmidt said. “We need to start running.”

“Let’s run,” Wilson agreed. Schmidt took off, weaving through holes in the crowd. Wilson followed, keeping pace with, and making a path for, Lowen.

“Will you have room for me?” Lowen asked.

“We’ll make room,” Wilson said.

*   *   *

“They’re not doing anything,” Balla said to Coloma, staring at the sixteen ships. “Why aren’t they doing anything?”

“They’re waiting,” Coloma said.

“Waiting for what?” Balla asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Coloma said.

“You knew about this, didn’t you,” Balla said. “You’ve been having us count off ships as they came in. You were looking for this.”

Coloma shook her head. “The CDF told me to be looking for
a
ship,” she said. “Their intelligence suggested a single ship might attack or disrupt the summit, like a single ship tried to disrupt our meeting with the Conclave. A single ship would be all that would be needed, so a single ship is what they prepared me for. This”—Coloma waved at the display, with sixteen ships hovering silently—“is not what I was expecting.”

“You sent a skip drone,” Balla said. “That will bring the cavalry.”

“I sent the data to the drone,” Coloma said. “The drone is at skip distance. It will take two hours for the data to get to the drone, and it will take them at least that long to decide to send any ships. Whatever is going to happen here is going to be done by then. We’re on our own.”

“What are we going to do?” Balla said.

“We’re going to wait,” Coloma said. “Get me a report from our shuttle.”

“It’s filling up,” Balla said, after a minute. “We’re missing two or three people. We’re coming close to our deadline. What do you want to do?”

“Keep the shuttle there as long as you can,” Coloma said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Balla said.

“Let Abumwe know we’re holding on for her stragglers, but that we’ll have to seal up if things get hot,” Coloma said.

“Yes, Captain,” Balla said, and then pointed at a display that was focused on the station itself. From the bottom of the station there was movement. A car on the elevator was making its way down the beanstalk. “It looks like they’re evacuating people through the elevator.”

Coloma watched the elevator car descend silently for a moment and then felt a thought enter her head with such blinding assurance that it felt like a physical blow. “Tell the shuttle pilot to seal up and go now,” she said.

“Ma’am?” Balla said.

“Now, Neva!” Coloma said. “Now! Now!”

“Captain, missile launch!” said weapons desk officer Lao. “Six missiles, headed for the station.”

“Not to the station,” Coloma said. “Not yet.”

*   *   *

“Stuff them in,” David Hirsch said, to Sergeant Belinda Thompson. “Pack them in like it’s a Tokyo subway.”

The two of them had been assigned to keep order at the elevator cars, which were “cars” in only the strictest sense. Each of the cars was more like a large conference room in size, torus shaped around its cable. The car could comfortably fit a hundred or so; Hirsch planned on jamming in twice that number. He and Thompson shoved people in, none too gently, and yelled at them to go all the way to the back of the car.

A thrumming vibration in Hirsch’s soles told him that one of the other elevator cars was finally under way, sliding down the cable toward Nairobi and to safety.
Two hundred fewer people to worry about,
he thought, and smiled. This was not the day he’d been planning to have.

“What are you smiling about?” Thompson wanted to know, shoving another diplomat into the car.

“Life is full of little surpris—,” Hirsch said, and then was sucked out into space as six missiles targeting the departed elevator car smashed into the car, destroying it, and into the beanstalk cable, wrenching it askew and sending a wave up the cable into the car-boarding area. The wave tore open the deck, sending Hirsch and several others tumbling into the vacuum and tearing open the deck, crushing the car Hirsch and Thompson had been filling into the hull of the boarding area. The air sucked out of the gash, launching several unfortunates into the space below the station.

The station’s automatic overrides took control, sealing off the elevator-boarding area, dooming everyone in it—three or four hundred of Earth’s diplomatic corps—to death by asphyxiation.

Elsewhere in Earth Station, airtight bulkheads deployed, sealing off sections of the station, and the people in them, in the hope of stanching the loss of atmosphere to only a few areas and protecting the rest still inside from the hard vacuum of the outside cosmos.

For how long was the question.

VII.

Wilson felt rather than saw the emergency bulkhead springing up in front of him and saw Hart Schmidt on the other side of it. Wilson grabbed Lowen and tried to push his way through the now thoroughly panicked crowd, but the mob pushed him and Lowen back and into their flow. Wilson had just enough time to see the shock on Schmidt’s face as the bottom and top bulkheads slammed shut, separating the two of them. Wilson yelled at Schmidt to get to the shuttle. Schmidt didn’t hear it over the din.

Around Wilson, the screams of the people near him reached a crescendo as they realized the bulkheads had sealed them off. They were trapped in this section of Earth Station.

Wilson looked at Lowen, who had gone ashen. She realized the same thing everyone else had.

He looked around and realized that they were at shuttle gate five.

No shuttle here,
Wilson thought. Then he thought of something else.

“Come on,” he said to Lowen, grabbing her hand again. He went perpendicular to the crowd, toward the shuttle gate. Lowen followed bonelessly. Wilson checked the doorway at the shuttle gate and found it unlocked. He pulled it open, pushed Lowen through it and closed it, he hoped, before any of the mob could see him.

The shuttle area was cold and empty. Wilson set down the bag he was carrying and began to dig through it. “Dani,” he said, and then looked up after he got no response. “Dani!” he said, more forcefully. She glanced over to him, a lost look in her eyes. “I need you to take off your clothes,” he said.

This snapped her out of her shock. “Excuse me?” she said.

Wilson smiled; his inappropriate remark had gotten the response he’d hoped for. “I need you to take off your clothes because I need you to get into this,” he said, holding up the CDF combat unitard.

“Why?” Lowen said, and a second later her eyes widened. “No,” she began.

“Yes,”
Wilson said, forcefully. “The station is under attack, Dani. We’re sealed off. Whoever’s doing this has the ability to peel the skin off this station like an orange. We missed our ride. If we’re getting off this thing, there’s only one way to do it. We’re jumping off.”

“I don’t know how,” Lowen said.

“You don’t have to know how, because I do,” Wilson said, and held up the unitard. “All you have to do is get into this. And hurry, because I don’t think we have a whole lot of time.”

Lowen nodded, took the unitard and started unbuttoning her blouse. Wilson turned away.

“Harry,” Lowen said.

Wilson turned his head back slightly. “Yeah?”

“For the record, this was not really how I planned to get undressed with you,” Lowen said.

“Really,” Wilson said. “Because this was how I planned it all along.”

Lowen laughed a shaky, exhausted laugh. Wilson turned away, to let Lowen retain her modesty and so she couldn’t see the expression on his face as he tried to ping Hart Schmidt.

*   *   *

Earth Station gave a shudder, sirens went off and that was enough for Jastine Goeth, the
Clarke
’s shuttle pilot. “Buttoning up now,” she said, and sealed the door to the shuttle.

“I have two people left,” Abumwe said. “We wait for them.”

“We’re leaving,” Goeth said.

“I don’t think you heard me,” Abumwe said, using her coldest
Don’t fuck with me
voice.

“I heard you,” Goeth said, as she worked her departure sequence. “You want to wait? I’ll unseal the door for you for five seconds so you can get out. But I am
going,
Ambassador. This place is blowing up around us. I don’t plan to be here when it breaks apart. Now leave or shut up. You can string me up later, but right now this is my ship. Sit down and let me work.”

Abumwe stared at Goeth for several seconds in cold fury, which Goeth ignored. Then she turned, glared one of her staff out of a seat and sat.

Goeth pushed the “Emergency Purge” option on her control panel, which overrode the station’s standard purge cycle. There was a bang as the shuttle bay’s outside portal irised open with the bay’s atmosphere still inside, sucking out through the dilating door. Goeth didn’t wait for it to open all the way. She jammed the shuttle through, damaging the door as she went. She did not believe at this point that it would matter.

*   *   *

Schmidt saw the bulkheads go up, saw Harry yell something at him he couldn’t hear and then took off running again toward gate seven, which he could see at the far end of the section. Schmidt knew at this point that his time had likely expired, but he still had to get there to see for himself.

Which was how Schmidt saw the shuttle leave, through the wide window of the seating area just as he came up to the gate.

“So close,” Schmidt whispered, and could barely register the words over the screams of those trapped in the section with him. They were all going to die in here together.

He wished they wouldn’t be so loud about it.

Schmidt looked at the seating area, shrugged to himself and collapsed onto one of the benches, staring up at the ceiling of the gate area. He’d missed his ride by a matter of seconds. It was sort of appropriate, he supposed. At the end of the day, he was always half a step behind.

Somewhere in the section, he could hear someone sobbing, loudly, terrified of the moment. Schmidt registered it but didn’t feel the emotion himself. If this was the end, it wasn’t the worst end he could imagine. He wasn’t scared about it. He just wished it weren’t so soon.

Schmidt’s PDA went off; the tone told him it was Wilson.
The lucky bastard,
Schmidt thought. He had no doubt that even now Harry was figuring out some way out of this. Schmidt loved his friend Harry, admired him and even looked up to him in his way. But right now, at what looked like the end of his days, he found the last thing he actually wanted to do was talk to him.

*   *   *

“Two new missiles launched,” Lao said. “They’re heading for our shuttle.”

“Of course they are,” Coloma said. Whoever was doing this wanted to make some sort of point about people leaving Earth Station.

Fortunately, Coloma didn’t have to stand for it.

She went to her personal display, marked the missiles heading toward the shuttle and marked the ship that had fired them. She pulled up a command panel on her display and pressed a button.

The missiles vaporized and the ship that launched them blossomed into flame.

“What was that?” Balla said.

“Neva, tell the shuttle pilot to go to Earth,” Coloma said. “These ships are firing Melierax missiles. They’re not rated for atmosphere. They’ll burn up. Get that shuttle as deep into the atmosphere as it can go, as fast as it can go.”

Balla passed on the order and then looked back at her captain.

“I told you the CDF was expecting one ship. So they gave me one of their new toys: a drone that fires a beam of antimatter particles. It’s been floating alongside the
Clarke
since yesterday. I think they wanted it to have a field test.”

“I think it works,” Balla said.

“The problem is that it has about six shots to it,” Coloma said. “I put a beam to each of the missiles and three beams into that ship. I’ve got another shot left, if I’m lucky. If there was just one ship out there, that wouldn’t be an issue. But there are fifteen others. And I’ve just made the
Clarke
a target.”

“What do you want to do?” Balla asked.

“I want you to get the crew to the escape pods,” Coloma said. “They’re not firing at us now because they’re still trying to figure out what just happened. That’s not going to last long. Get everyone off the ship before it happens.”

“And what are you going to do?” Balla asked.

“I’m going to go down with the ship,” Coloma said. “And if I’m lucky, I’m going to take some of them with me.”