More than the fatigue earned by the last few days made her walk slowly. But Angel held her head high, knowing that she had just won the first very important skirmish of the battle to come.
Marchey’s ship had approached Botha Station like a steel bee homing in on the center of a gargantuan chrome poppy, bathed in the light reflected from the vast spreading petals of silvery superfilm reflectors arrayed around the complex. Beyond it, Jupiter’s Cyclopean bulk blotted out the stars with a seething chaos of color endlessly swirled by a madman’s brush; its staggering size dwarfing the imagination. Earth herself could disappear inside old Jove like a pea in a bucket, and its untrammeled breadth never completely fit inside the human head. Jupiter was always far vaster than you remembered, even if you had just seen it less than an hour before.
Botha’s artificially maintained heliostationary orbit kept it always in sight of the bright nailhead of the distant Sun. That took energy to burn. Its existence made a loud, all-but-impossible-to-ignore statement about the wealth and power the company had at its command.
The station was OmniMat’s center of Jupiter operations, a sprawling complex of docking trees, free-fall manufactories and materials dumps, transfer site for the refined raw materials extracted and excreted by the huge autofactories gnawing at the moons in toward the planet’s surface. Reaching out from its center like ten-kilometer-long stamens were the magnetic catapults used to launch ships and fling containers of the more durable goods sunward.
Botha was a place of endless day and ceaseless activity. The autopilot in Marchey’s ship had locked into local traffic control and begun picking its way through busy swarms of workpods and past ponderous container tugs a while earlier. Jon called back just as Marchey’s ship was sliding into its assigned berth at one end of the main residential cylinder of the sprawling complex.
Marchey had already changed into soft gray trousers and a pristine white tunic, and was just putting the bent silver pin in its place over his heart when Jon came back on-line.
“We got trouble, Doc,” he said without preamble.
“Tell me.” The pin in place, he picked up his coffee. He wasn’t thirsty, but he needed something to do with his hands, and thanks to his prosthetics he would have splintered his teeth trying to bite his nails.
“I think I’d best show you.”
Jon’s feed blipped into a small inset at the upper left corner of the screen. The rest of it changed to a view of Ananke’s loading bay as seen from high above. Marchey assumed that the feed came from one of the spyeyes Fist had put in every corner of his empire.
“They came into the same dock you used,” Jon explained over the muted grumble of sound coming from the bay. “No big surprise there ’cause we only got the one workin’. But they overrode the locktube somehow, jammin’ their lock right up against ours, bustin’ the outer doors.”
Another inset appeared, the view from the pickup outside the lock skewed off at an angle, but showing a section of matte black hull up tight against the stone wall. There was nothing to keep them from leaving their ship and coming through the inner airlock doors.
Nothing but the small, white-clad figure standing in the middle of the wide ramp before the inner doors and barring the way.
“Angel,” Marchey said, feeling his insides go cold as methane snow.
“Mebbe not.”
“Then who?” he demanded, the moment he said it knowing what Jon’s answer would be, and his foreboding warping into dread.
“Scylla.” Jon made a helpless gesture. “Angel’s not a fighter, but she sure as shootin’ is. Hell, none of us are fighters, you know that. Since the greatest danger seemed to come from lettin’ them split us up, we planned to all get in front of the lock, sit down and link arms—try to use passive resistance. Just as we were getting’ ready to put ourselves in place she showed up, pushin’ right through, ignorin’ everybody ’cept to tell ’em to get back. She planted herself there, and an’t moved a muscle since.”
The pickup zoomed in closer, but revealed little more. The robe she wore concealed her exo, its hem brushing the floor to hide even her feet. Her head was bowed as if in prayer, the robe’s hood shrouding her head and face. Her arms were crossed before her chest, her hands hidden by the robe’s sleeves.
“She may have slowed them down a mite,” Halen continued. “Nothin’s happened in the time it took me to get back here from the bay, but—”
“But sooner or later they’re going to try to come out,” Marchey finished with leaden certainty. He glanced at the stacks, seeing that he would be locked in and cleared to debark in about two minutes. His gaze was drawn back to the small white figure standing guard before the lock’s double doors.
Somehow he knew he was seeing Angel, not Scylla. Scylla would never hide her exo, for instance. Nor would she have waited passively, she would have gone in after them. But it wasn’t really a matter of Angel being there and Scylla being off somewhere safely out of the way, like Luna or Limbo or Los Angeles, was it?
She’s in here with me. That’s what Angel had told him. Like a violent genie in a fragile bottle. Rub it the wrong way and out she would burst in all her awful glory.
Angel was in way over her head. No matter how good her intentions, if the situation turned ugly, it could all too easily crack the fragile shell she had built around the creature Fist had made of her and cause her to revert to Scylla.
If that happened, the threat would probably be neutralized. He knew that the combination of Scylla’s fierce persona and that combat exo probably made her a match for the half dozen or so mercys who would be on the ship. There would be no hesitation, no quarter given. She’d chew them up, spit them out, and grind their remains into the ground.
Chewing up and spitting out what was left of Angel in the process. There was no way she could escape what she had been twice.
“Damn,” he muttered, cursing the situation, cursing himself for accusing her of being afraid to shed her exo and truly be Angel. He had a sinking feeling that she was trying to prove him wrong by a test of fire, willingly stepping into the sort of inferno where her darkling sister self could take control.
There was a drawer under the commboard. He pawed frantically through it, searching for a remote. When he found one he held it up for Jon to see. “I’ll wear this so I can stay in touch. Scare one up and send it down to her…”
Hesitation overcame him as he tried to think of too many things all at once. He took a deep shuddering breath and started again.
“Have one of the children take it down to her if you can. That will seem less threatening to the people on the ship, and she might be more likely to take it.”
Jon nodded. “Hang on.” He looked away, speaking in a hushed, urgent voice to someone offcam, listening for a few moments, then nodding curtly. He faced Marchey again.
“We’re working on it. Marcy is here with me, and she’s talking to the ship. They’re acting all innocentlike, saying they only want to come out and help.”
“Stall as long as you can,” Marchey implored him, slipping the remote into his ear, his body heat turning it on. He tapped it with one silver finger. “Keep me advised.”
[You got it, Doc.] Jon’s voice whispered over the remote as well as over the monitor. He cocked his head a moment, listening to Marcy. “Danny’s on his way down with the remote. You think talking to her will help?”