She took a step and tilted her helmet to look at where the colonel had fallen.
He wasn’t there.
Did he blow out the door? That didn’t make any sense. The atmosphere venting only lasted a couple of seconds and never generated enough pressure to move much of anything.
Where’s the gun?
A flicker of movement made her turn away from the outside door.
“What?” Her shout was flat and echoless in her helmet. Colonel Xander stood by the inner door of the air lock, seemingly undistressed by the fact he stood in a hard vacuum. He held the gun pointed at both of them while he keyed instructions on the control panel set in the wall.
How is he still alive?
The flashing red light stopped, and Toni II stopped feeling the vibration of the klaxons through the soles of her boots. The younger Toni must have come to the same conclusions as she had, at the same time. They both jumped at the same time, low-gravity leaps that had them still in the air as they came alongside the colonel.
The gun flashed, and Toni II heard a sound like someone throwing boiling cooking grease on her hardsuit. Fortunately, the low-power weapon was designed for flesh, not polymer ceramics, and none of the warning lights came on in her heads-up display.
She grabbed for the colonel, but while her training included low-G hand-to-hand, spacesuit to spacesuit, the fact the colonel was completely unarmored gave him a maneuverability advantage. He quickly ducked down between both of them and dodged out between their legs before they could bring their bulky suits around to face him.
Their feet touched the floor, and their backs touched the inner door. He stood, facing them from fifteen meters away. Behind him, the exterior door gradually descended. He smiled and made a slow, deliberate ritual of changing the magazine on his weapon. He was slow and deliberate so they could both see the green magazine slide out, and the red one slide in.
Red meant it was no longer safe for shipboard use. The power cell in the red magazine was so highly charged that not only would the flechettes now be hypersonic and carry enough kinetic energy to penetrate their hardsuits, but the residual electrostatic charge was strong enough to act as a micro-EMP on whatever they hit—crippling even a self-healing suit.
Just having a magazine of that ammo aboard the station was a breach of regulations.
Her younger self dropped to her knees and raised her hands. She could see her downcast face through her helmet. Toni II followed suit.
There has to be a way out of this . . .
Toni II scanned the controls highlighted on the internal heads-up display. The interface was designed to respond to eye movements and a chin switch, so she could frantically scan menus as she raised her hands. The outer door reached the halfway point.
The maneuvering jets . . .
“Can you hear me?” her voice echoed in her ears from the suit radio.
“Yes.”
“You have the jet control up?”
They thought so much alike it was scary. “Yes.”
“On three?”
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
The massive door slid past the three-quarters’ mark when they both fired the thrusters on the hardsuits on full. The space in the air lock instantly clouded with propellant exhaust and the back of her hardsuit slammed into her. She had a fraction of a second to bend forward as her forward momentum carried her into the path of the closing door. She bent awkwardly, and suddenly she was rolling sideways across the ground. She could only tell when she cleared the air lock door because of the change in the character of the light.
Her hardsuit tumbled across the catwalk. She put her arms out to stop rolling and met no resistance. She flailed free for a moment until something slammed into the side of the hardsuit, stopping her.
She ended folded over the edge of the catwalk, up against a support strut, facing down, through the massive superstructure of one of the docking bays. “Down,” was over three hundred meters, beyond which was a starscape slowly drifting to the left above Styx’s luminous horizon. She reached up to grab the support, and the suit started sliding over the edge.
“Shit!”
Something snagged her ankle and pulled her back onto the catwalk.
Over the radio she heard, “You okay?”
She rolled over to look up at her twin and said, “Yes. But I think we’re screwed.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Excommunication
“A person unwilling to change is unable to survive.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
—SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-1680)
Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Styx Orbit-Sigma Draconis
“Are you okay with this?” Toni II asked her over the encrypted radio link.
“Of course I am. I’m you. This is as much my idea as yours.”
They clung to the outside surface of the 3SEC orbital platform, a dangerous place to be, where the rotation of the station made its best effort to fling them out into space. They were, in essence, dangling from a ceiling without a floor. And because the station axis pointed straight down at Styx, there wasn’t even a planet below them.
Between their insane location and killing the suit transponders, they were moderately safe from the search the colonel was conducting for them. At the moment, they were only directly observable by approaching spacecraft and other satellites.
This was a good thing, because the radio traffic they were able to passively pick up about the two of them had several flavors of “shoot to kill” peppered through them.
Apparently the two of them had graduated from bureaucratic problem straight to terrorist, courtesy of the colonel.
They had made their way across fifty meters to one of the lower-security levels, the station disk across the docking bay they had escaped into. They had managed to maneuver the suits around to the edge of the next docking bay, one that allowed the docking of civilian spacecraft.
Unfortunately, getting there had used up most of the propellant they hadn’t expended in escaping from Colonel Xander. So for the past five minutes they had dangled here, observing the docking bay and the closest merchant vessel with a tach-drive. Even with their physical conditioning, Toni doubted they would have been able to hang there without the assistance of the powered hardsuits and the magnetic safety lines.
Toni II found a support that could be used as a ladder, pulled herself into the docking bay, climbed up toward the station center for a few meters, then waited for Toni to follow.
“You aren’t me, Toni,” she said as Toni climbed up.
“You know what I meant.”
“But there’s a difference. I’m the ghost. I’m not a lieutenant here. I’m nothing but—at best—a temporary intelligence asset. I already gave up my life and my career. You haven’t.”
“We both tried to scrag the colonel.”
“I opened the air lock—”
“I appreciate the thought, but there’s no way I could prove it wasn’t me.”
They kept climbing upward, to where a blocky cargo ship named the Daedalus hung, cradled in the station’s grip. It was painted garish shades of electric blue and fluorescent green, and bore registration marks from half the planets in the Centauri Alliance.
Toni debated with herself briefly. Her ghost sister was right, in a sense, that she still had a chance to retain her career here. Colonel Xander was an obvious traitor serving whoever or whatever was attacking the wormhole network. If she split from Toni II to go back to the council, she might avoid a court-martial.
The problem was, she had no idea if Colonel Xander was the only mole at work here, and she had no idea what was going to happen in the next five hours when the wormholes hit.
Better to go with their hastily cobbled Plan B, even if it stepped over the line as much as attempting to kill the colonel. They could transmit her testimony to 3SEC after the fact and let them deal with
it however they wanted.
The climbing became easier as they progressed. They climbed up alongside the Daedalus, the skin over its drives a green wall next to them, barely three meters away. “Good,” Toni II said. “CTCx252.”
She read off the start of the ship’s serial number, and Toni felt the same relief. The Centauri Trading Company had two series of very similar cargo ships, the 252 series and the x252 series. Both had the same outlines and external drive configurations. The differences were all in the internal allocation between engines and cargo space. The 252 was designed for heavy loading, and had a correspondingly small, slow tach-drive. The x252 had a third of the cargo capacity, but had a large tach-drive that was equal to most military specs.
Not that they’d waste time looking for a faster ship otherwise, but it was a sign that their luck was improving.
They climbed up about fifteen meters past the top of the ship, so they looked out over the broad flat back of the Daedalus. They were close enough to the axis now that they felt disturbingly close to free fall. It made Toni grip the support tighter, because she was trained to treat microgravity as more threatening than zero-G. It was too easy to ignore the tiny acceleration and build up a lethal velocity without realizing it.
Toni II tapped her finger on Toni’s helmet, and Toni responded by killing the radio. The encrypted suit-to-suit comm they’d been using was low-power enough to have been lost to observers in the blare of RF traffic around the station. But the closer they were to their goal, the less safe it was.
Of course, no one should be expecting what they were about to do.
Above her, Toni II turned around so she was facing out from the impromptu ladder. She faced the Daedalus, nestled in a cradle of robotic arms, supply lines, and supports. Toni watched her, hearing only her own breathing, a slight mechanical hum transmitted from the strut she held on to, and, very faintly, her own pulse.
Through the material of her helmet she heard a muffled clink as Toni II jumped. Toni watched her hardsuit slowly arc into space, and she saw her fold the suit’s legs and kick out slightly to rotate her suit to face “downward” in the direction the ersatz microgravity was pulling her. Part of the EVA training again. If you found yourself floating into some surface, you wanted to spread the impact over as large a surface area as you could. A novice that went with their first impulse, sticking out an arm or a leg, might abruptly find out that they weren’t moving nearly as slowly as they’d thought. The suit might hold up—the things were built tough—but concentrating all the force of impact into a foot, or a palm, could still shatter bones.
Toni watched her twin fall on the back of the Daedalus in a perfect ballistic arc, stopping with a textbook spread-eagle landing. Toni waited for her to crawl aside before she imitated the maneuver. The fall was short enough, and the hardsuit padded enough that the spread-eagle landing was probably not necessary, but like her double, she did it anyway.
And despite the padding and support of the hardsuit, when she slammed into the top of the cargo ship, it was more jarring than she expected.
She followed Toni II across the back of the Daedalus, toward the causeway that led to the cargo ship’s air lock. The causeway was a complicated mechanical structure that snaked from one of the inner walls of the station. It was a segmented tube with a pentagonal cross section, embedded within a complicated exoskeleton formed of rods mating with robotic joints that allowed the whole causeway to bend in any direction it chose. The causeway ended in an air lock pod in the form of a dodecahedron whose faces matched the cross section of the causeway. On each of the faces of the dodecahedron was mounted a different docking surface and an air lock door.
The purpose of the thing was to allow the docking of many different vessels just by changing the orientation of the causeway.
It also gave a way into the causeway’s air lock from the outside.
Toni II continued in the lead, crabwalking along the edge of the Daedalus’ back until she was lined up with the causeway and the twelve-sided air lock. Because of the angle at which the air lock, ship, and causeway met, there was a ridge between two faces that met the side of the ship and angled up toward the pointed top of the air lock pod.
Toni II flipped over into a seated position and slid along the slightly angled side of the ship five meters down to the air lock pod. She landed straddling the edge between the two top faces that angled toward the Daedalus. She stayed crouched there for a moment, then swung her legs over to the left, finding purchase next to an air lock door configured for an Indi-designed ship—including having instructions written in Kanji and Devanāgarı̄ next to the English.
When she was clear, Toni followed the slide down to the air lock.
Her double had already pulled the cover off the air lock controls and was starting a manual cycle. Toni felt a distinct rumble through the boots and legs of her hardsuit. Through the thick window of the air lock door, she saw red warning lights flashing inside the air lock itself. In a few more moments, the door sank back and swung inside. Toni II turned slightly toward her and gave a thumbs-up.
Toni II gave her younger self a signal for the all- clear and dropped through the slightly angled door into the spherical air lock buried in the dodecahedral pod. She estimated that, at best, they only had a few minutes to work before security knew something was going wrong. Ever since she started the air lock on manual cycle, someone’s status display showed a little red warning that shouldn’t be there.
There was a chance that it went unnoticed.
But that couldn’t be said for the next thing she was about to do.
The air lock inside the pod was spherical, about three meters in diameter. Even that size felt a little cramped in the hardsuit. It wasn’t actually intended to accommodate suited personnel in normal operation.
But things aren’t normal, are they?
It became even more claustrophobic when her sister dropped though the air lock to join her. She was already pressed against the doorway to the rest of the station, another air lock door, locked against the vacuum that now filled the pod, facing a downward angle away from their entry point and the door to the ship. She flipped the panel next to it. Not the air lock controls this time, though.
This time she started cycling the docking controls.
The pod was an independent structure, the dodecahedron mating to the causeway the same way it mated with its ship. Within moments she heard a grinding noise through the material of her suit, and the causeway drifted away.
It wouldn’t stop people forever, but it made it a pain in the ass to follow them.
Behind her, the younger Toni dogged shut the way they had entered and hit the controls to repressurize the air lock. She looked at her younger self and felt a near-overwhelming surge of guilt. It was irrational, as Toni had said to her, “I’m you.”
But she wasn’t, and never would be. Her younger self had never defied orders without Toni II’s prompting. And despite the fact that Toni II knew very well what would have happened without her intervention—the fact was, it hadn’t. She bore the bulk of the responsibility.
Pretty condescending thoughts for someone a week or two younger than you. She knows her mind as well as you do.
For some reason, telling herself that didn’t help.
The red lights in the air lock chamber stopped flashing red.
By now it would be clear to the security forces on the station and to whoever was on the Daedalus that something was wrong. They still had some time because confusion would work in their favor. While piracy happened occasionally, it never happened here.
Toni II watched herself open the door that mated with the Daedalus. The two doors, the air lock door and the shipside one, folded in as a unit. She heard a distinct sucking sound, audible even through her helmet, as the remaining pressure differential equalized.
They both ducked into the doorway, one after the other, and Toni closed the door behind them. Even with atmosphere on the other side, the interlocks on a shipbo
ard air lock would never let both sides open at the same time.
This air lock wasn’t as cramped as the one outside. While this wasn’t built for cargo, it was built for EVA use by personnel in full suits. Both walls held racks of three suits, but unlike the utilitarian hardsuits that they were wearing, these had extensive custom paint jobs in bright, garish colors. It made it easy to tell who was where just by looking, who had the blue-on-orange tribal pattern, who had clusters of large purple eyes on a crimson field, who had the lemon yellow and lime green jigsaw puzzle pattern.
If they were lucky, the owners of these suits were on the station.
Once the outer door was sealed, Toni II’s younger self opened the inner door. It opened on a large corridor that fed into the main passage in the Daedalus in a T-intersection ahead of them. Just turning the corner were a pair of excited-looking gentlemen. The younger one wore a thin linen undershirt and a pair of shorts, and by the wild black hair and red eyes Toni II suspected he had been asleep until a few moments ago.
The older one had gray hair and wore a pair of utilitarian overalls. He also had a very large slugthrower in his hand, one with a projectile that would probably easily put a hole in the hardsuits they were wearing. Toni II was very conscious now that they were unarmed.
He shouted at them, “What is the meaning of this? Who are you? What are you doing on my ship?”
For a moment, Toni II froze, and her younger self stepped forward. “I am Lieutenant Valentine of the Stygian Security Forces. We’re on emergency maintenance detail investigating a severe structural failure in level beta, bay one-five—”
“You fascist twits, this is bay sixteen, now I want you to—”
Toni II listened as her younger self channeled the worst of their old drill instructors into her voice. “A structural failure that is propagating clockwise around the station. We’ve lost one scout ship already, along with the causeway here.”