She picked her way back to the airlock, let herself in, and sealed the outer door behind her. She knew it was useless, knew there was nothing but vacuum on the other side, but it was something that had been impressed on her very strongly. When you go through a door, you lock it behind you. Lock it tight. If you don't, the breathsucker will get you in the middle of the night.
She shivered, and went to the next lock, which also led only to vacuum, as did the one beyond that.
Finally, at the fifth airlock, she stepped into a tiny room that had breathable atmosphere, if a little chilly. Then she went through yet another lock before daring to take off her helmet.
At her feet was a large plastic box, and inside it, resting shakily on a scrap of bloody blanket and not at all at peace with the world, were two puppies. She picked them up, one in each hand—which didn't make them any happier—and nodded in satisfaction.
She kissed them, and put them back in the box. Tucking it under her arm, she faced another door.
She could hear claws scratching at this one.
"Down, Fuchsia," she shouted. "Down, momma-dog." The scratching stopped, and she opened the last door and stepped through.
Fuchsia O'Charlie Station was sitting obediently, her ears pricked up, her head cocked and her eyes alert with that total, quivering concentration only a mother dog can achieve.
"I've got 'em, Foosh," Charlie said. She went down on one knee and allowed Fuchsia to put her paws up on the edge of the box. "See? There's Helga, and there's Conrad, and there's Albert, and there's Conrad, and Helga. One, two, three, four, eleventy-nine and six makes twenty-seven. See?"
Fuchsia looked at them doubtfully, then leaned in to pick one up, but Charlie pushed her away.
"I'll carry them," she said, and they set out along the darkened corridor. Fuchsia kept her eyes on the box, whimpering with the desire to get to her pups.
Charlie called this part of the wheel The Swamp. Things had gone wrong here a long time ago, and the more time went by, the worse it got. She figured it had been started by the explosion—which, in its turn, had been an indirect result of The Dying. The explosion had broken important pipes and wires. Water had started to pool in the corridor. Drainage pumps kept it from turning into an impossible situation. Charlie didn't come here very often.
Recently plants had started to grow in the swamp. They were ugly things, corpse-white or dentalplaque- yellow or mushroom gray. There was very little light for them, but they didn't seem to mind.
She sometimes wondered if they were plants at all. Once she thought she had seen a fish. It had been white and blind. Maybe it had been a toad. She didn't like to think of that.
Charlie sloshed through the water, the box of puppies under one arm and her helmet under the other.
Fuchsia bounced unhappily along with her.
At last they were out of it, and back into regions she knew better. She turned right and went three flights up a staircase—dogging the door behind her at every landing—then out into the Promenade Deck, which she called home.
About half the lights were out. The carpet was wrinkled and musty, and worn in the places Charlie frequently walked. Parts of the walls were streaked with water stains, or grew mildew in leprous patches. Charlie seldom noticed these things unless she was looking through her pictures from the old days, or was coming up from the maintenance levels, as she was now. Long ago, she had tried to keep things clean, but the place was just too big for a little girl. Now she limited her housekeeping to her own living quarters—and like any little girl, sometimes forgot about that, too.
She stripped off her suit and stowed it in the locker where she always kept it, then padded a short way down the gentle curve of the corridor to the Presidential Suite, which was hers. As she entered, with Fuchsia on her heels, a long-dormant television camera mounted high on the wall stuttered to life. Its flickering red eye came on, and it turned jerkily on its mount.
Anna-Louise Bach entered the darkened monitoring room, mounted the five stairs to her office at the back, sat down, and put her bare feet up on her desk. She tossed her uniform cap, caught it on one foot, and twirled it idly there. She laced her fingers together, leaned her chin on them, and thought about it.
Corporal Steiner, her number two on C Watch, came up to the platform, pulled a chair close, and sat beside her.
"Well? How did it go?"
"You want some coffee?" Bach asked him. When he nodded, she pressed a button in the arm of her chair. "Bring two coffees to the Watch Commander's station. Wait a minute... bring a pot, and two mugs." She put her feet down and turned to face him.
"He did figure out there had to be a human aboard."
Steiner frowned. "You must have given him a clue."
"Well, I mentioned the airlock angle."
"See? He'd never have seen it without that."
"All right. Call it a draw."
"So then what did our leader want to do?"
Bach had to laugh. Hoeffer was unable to find his left testicle without a copy of Gray's Anatomy.
"He came to a quick decision. We had to send a ship out there at once, find the survivors and bring them to New Dresden with all possible speed."
"And then you reminded him..."
"...that no ship had been allowed to get within five kilometers of Tango Charlie for thirty years. That even our probe had to be small, slow, and careful to operate in the vicinity, and that if it crossed the line it would be destroyed, too. He was all set to call the Oberluftwaffe headquarters and ask for a cruiser. I pointed out that A, we already had a robot cruiser on station under the reciprocal trade agreement with Allgemein Fernsehen Gesellschaft: B, that it was perfectly capable of defeating Tango Charlie without any more help; but C, any battle like that would kill whoever was on Charlie; but that in any case, D, even if a ship could get to Charlie there was a good reason for not doing so."
Emil Steiner winced, pretending pain in the head.
"Anna, Anna, you should never list things to him like that, and if you do, you should never get to point D."
"Why not?"
"Because you're lecturing him. If you have to make a speech like that, make it a set of options, which I'm sure you've already seen, sir, but which I will list for you, sir, to get all our ducks in a row. Sir."
Bach grimaced, knowing he was right. She was too impatient.
The coffee arrived, and while they poured and took the first sips, she looked around the big monitoring room. This is where impatience gets you.
In some ways, it could have been a lot worse. It looked like a good job. Though only a somewhat senior Recruit/Apprentice Bach was in command of thirty other R/A's on her watch, and had the rank of Corporal. The working conditions were good: clean, high-tech surroundings, low job stress, the opportunity to command, however fleetingly. Even the coffee was good.
But it was a dead-end, and everyone knew it. It was a job many rookies held for a year or two before being moved on to more important and prestigious assignments: part of a routine career. When a R/A stayed in the monitoring room for five years, even as a watch commander, someone was sending her a message. Bach understood the message, had realized the problem long ago. But she couldn't seem to do anything about it. Her personality was too abrasive for routine promotions.
Sooner or later she angered her commanding officers in one way or another. She was far too good for anything overtly negative to appear in her yearly evaluations. But there were ways such reports could be written, good things left un-said, a lack of excitement on the part of the reporting officer...
all things that added up to stagnation.
So here she was in Navigational Tracking, not really a police function at all, but something the New Dresden Police Department had handled for a hundred years and would probably handle for a hundred more.