"Of course!" Demeter had momentarily forgotten about the mysterious construction. "The one that the machines are building by remote control. But is there a ... place aboard it for us humans? Someplace we can breathe. I thought it would be all external surfaces and exposed structure."
"You visited there, by proxy, didn't you?" Lole asked.
"There or someplace by mistake. But I do remember a machine that was building a curved wall of heavy metal panels. It might be some kind of an environmental pod, although I got the impression of really thick plates and—oh yeah!—double walls, like for an insulating layer or a—"
"A rocket motor," Torraway supplied. "More precisely, a combustion chamber."
"Why would you think that?' Demeter wondered.
"I did have some astronaut training, you know."
"Yes," she agreed, "it could have been a motor. And a big one, judging from the curvature of that inner wall."
"That confirms something Jory said," Lole put in. "The grid was putting engines on the solar platform. It was going places, he said."
"This was the grid talking?' Demeter guessed.
"No, later, when we had him under sedation. We had already, um, severed his links to the grid by then. He was speaking true."
"The grid is going to put us aboard the platform and then send it somewhere," she summed up, feeling her way. "Somewhere safe. Now, where would that be? Back to Earth? Out to the Asteroid Belt? Europa?"
"Whatever the grid does," Lole said, "it had better move soon. Once Ellen figures out we're hostages, she's likely to take action."
"What can she do?" Demeter shrugged.
"She's got a virus planted deep in the Mars nexus, spread across a dozen or more cybers that hold tokens on the system. Once she activates it, the program will phage the grid's higher operating levels but leave the individual computers that control mechanical functions in the tunnels. Poof! No more collective intelligence."
'That's dangerous/" Torraway exploded.
"Yeah, poof! No more us," Demeter observed quietly. "If we're in transit when the system falls—"
Suddenly, Lole was trying to sound conciliatory. "Presumably, there are backups to maintain our life support and—"
Torraway wasn't buying. "How long until she pulls the plug?"
"Well, Ellen thought she could assemble the virus segments and get it rolling in less than an hour. Add to that the time she needs to get Lethe—that's our unregistered cyber—physically into position to make radio contact and launch its attack on the grid's security systems. And, for uncertainty, add the time she needs to personally decide that the grid has taken us hostage and that she needs to do something, so—"
"Four hours? Three?" the Colonel demanded.
"More like two." Lole was chewing his lower lip.
"Still not enough time," Torraway said.
"For what?" Demeter asked.
"We're already there."
Those bright stars disappeared above them, blotted out by the dark underside of the transfer station that rode at the top of the fountain. Outside the walker's side windows, Demeter saw the lower perimeter of a handling bay descend in a muted twinkle of position and docking lights and the shadows of huge magnetic grapples.
Clang! Demeter felt more than heard the dogs around the edge of the rising cargo platform release themselves while the stage slowed its ascent. The walker's deckplates surged beneath her as the vehicle lost upward momentum and went weightless in orbit. The fountainhead's controls wasted no time. Before the package represented by the walker and its inhabitants could drift out of position, the magnetic grapples caught it and slung it sideways.
Clearly, the automated equipment was used to handling inert machinery and containers, not occupied vehicles. The force of the change in vector threw Demeter forward, snapping open the buckle on her seat belt, dashing her against the sharp edges of the control panel.
On his own side of the cockpit, Lole—being taller, with a higher center of gravity—somersaulted over the panel and went upside down, heels and ass leading, against the windshield. He struck with what looked like enough force to break the glass but didn't.
Torraway folded and clattered into the backs of the two command chairs, getting himself wedged in sideways and crumpling the support pinion on one of his solar panels.
The walker immediately shunted in the opposite direction, still accelerating. Demeter fell back into her seat, cracking her elbow on Torraway's head. Lole flopped back over the control console. The idiot lights on the panel flared briefly underneath him, and the walker extended all eight of its legs.
Bang! One of the legs sheared off against a grappler head somewhere along the station's internal pathways. An instant later, the crippled walker emerged from an empty docking bay, into the starry void. The impetus from the collision made the vehicle spin slowly, its legs clutched halfway inward again, like a dead spider being washed down the drain.
A mild centrifugal force pinned Demeter against the console again, reawakening old bruises. Lole was stuffed quietly—he seemed to be unconscious— against the forward bulkhead below the windshield. Torraway had not yet fought free of his niche between the fixed sliders of the two seats.
"How fast would you say we are moving?" he asked placidly, his head and neck still caught under a chair arm.
Demeter lifted her gaze to the whirling starfield out the front window. She instantly wanted to be sick but controlled the urge.
"I don't... know, not... too fast."
"Tens of kilometers per second? Thousands?"
"Hundreds.... I can't tell."
"The Number Six solar power satellite is probably two or three thousand klicks from the transfer station. We've got a few minutes yet." The Cyborg paused. "Not long enough."
"Long enough for what?" she wanted to know.
"To get this hulk de-spun and stabilized. But then, without attitude controls, we won't be able to do it at all. Of course, there's no reason to put vector thrusters on a ground-pounder in the first place," he conceded.
"Are you tired of this spin already?" Demeter asked sarcastically.
"It's a matter of survival. The grid's observation points are fairly limited in space. It may not know that we've screwed up and are no longer oriented the way we were when those grapples gave us our last push."
"Too bad."
"Yeah, especially when we come up to the docking ring or whatever the nexus has prepared for us at the satellite. At this rate, we're likely to crash into it sideways." With an almost gentle surge, Torraway untangled his head. One solar wing fluttered weakly behind him. "I wonder if this hull will withstand the impact."
"You can breathe vacuum, can't you?" she asked.
"Yes, I can. But you two can't."
Chapter 20
Interview with MFSTO
Lole Mitsuno woke up with a low, throbbing headache. He uncramped his long body from its awkward position against the walker's forward bulkhead. That took some doing: "down" was no longer the deck but the vehicle's front end. He braced a hand against the windshield and stared out, down, at the spinning stars.
He glanced back at his friends. Demeter had strapped herself in against the spin, tying the broken ends of harness across her lap. Torraway had taken the other command chair and likewise belted himself tight. One of the Colonel's wings was bent out of shape, with a possibly broken strut; it seemed to move less freely than its counterpart on his opposite shoulder. Otherwise, Lole's companions seemed unhurt.
Mitsuno himself could catalog aches and bruises, a wrist that felt swollen and might be sprained, and that cursed headache. But he had no broken bones, no bleeding. He looked back out the window, made a rough estimate of their rate of spin: four revolutions per minute. That wasn't anything the grid had planned for them.