She didn’t look happy with her job, but she never swore, not even when the DustBuster broke one time and spat everything out of the other end again, much like the animals.
“Family,” LizAlec told Lars, who just looked puzzled.
“Yours?” His voice sounded doubtful.
LizAlec grunted with frustration. Being trapped for hours in the hold of a filthy cargo shuttle with some slack-jawed retard had worn her patience so thin it was practically transparent.
No,” LizAlec said abruptly. “Family.” She said it like the retard should know what she was talking about, which she figured he should. “Oh fuck... Forget it.” She crept forward and looked down through an air vent at the goats. She was sure one or two were looking back at her.
They’d started out in a cupboard, locked into a tiny side room by Leon, the combat kid, who only just remembered to click the oxygen/atmosphere on before jumping shuttle and heading back to Fracture. It was Lars who’d prised off the grille to a ventilation shaft in their original hiding place and wriggled up, leaving her trapped and almost crying until frustration slid into skin-slicked fear as LizAlec remembered the bioSemtex worm wrapped away inside her skull. Just how far Lars had to wander before he broke the connection and splattered her brains against the utility-green walls of the tiny cupboard wasn’t something LizAlec liked to think about.
Two hours later, Lars reappeared. Not back down the shaft, but in through the cupboard door to find a hysterical LizAlec crouched behind it, clutching the door handle in a desperate attempt to stop herself floating away, one fist raised to protect herself. She’d tried to punch him anyway, slashing clumsily at his face, but Lars twisted out of reach with a zero-gravity grace LizAlec knew she’d never manage. One chop from Lars to her wrist and she’d let go of the door handle and gone spinning, straight into the cupboard’s opposite wall.
Since then they’d been hiding in a ventilation shaft in the roof of the hold, keeping a safe distance from each other. Ten to eighteen hours was the usual shuttle time and LizAlec reckoned they were now way beyond that. The shuttle should be down, its livestock stashed in quarantine pods outside Seattle, and LizAlec should long since have worked out how to escape the shuttle without being seen, closely followed by discovering how to get that fucking bioSemtex worm out of her head, and finishing off with a call to her mother:
Make that Lady Clare, LizAlec corrected herself. She was looking forward to that bit least of all. But they weren’t in Seattle, they weren’t even in minimal enough gravity to suggest they might be getting close. They just seemed to be hanging around in space doing nothing.
“What’s that noise?” Lars asked suddenly.
“What noise?” All LizAlec could hear was the snuffle of the goats and the steady thud of an oxygen unit that pushed a warm fug past her ear.
“Noise,” Lars insisted, head twisted slightly to one side. With his oversized head, lower canines and protruding jaw, he looked positively simian. One of the three monkeys from the ivory statue that stood on the desk in Lady Clare’s study. The one LizAlec had in mind had its hands clamped over its mouth, except it was LizAlec not Lars who was trying not to throw up her guts from weightlessness.
“Someone,” said Lars and rammed his feet, hands and back against the walls of the vent until he was solid and still. Below them a door clanged open, startling the goats. Only this time it wasn’t the wide-hipped woman with her industrial Hoover, it was a broad man with a greying beard and thin ponytail.
High-sided grey boots stuck him to the metal floor. Suction, thought LizAlec, but she was wrong. They were ReeGravs, magnetic sneakers with a diode on each heel that flashed red just before the man took a step and turned green each time his foot hit the floor. He made a two-part slapping noise as he walked, slip/slop, like the sound of an old man shuffling in slippers.
It wasn’t the goats he was worried about. That much was obvious from the Moby in his hand. A small and neat one, but a Moby just the same. From where she crouched above him, LizAlec could see a spool of micro-thin monofilament wound tight behind the Moby’s sharp electric dart. Taiwanese then, no one else still made harpoon tasers... At least, that was what Fixx had said that afternoon they curled up on his sofa to watch a rerun of Death Patrol.
LizAlec blushed and wrapped her arms tight around her knees, huddling herself. From the Crash&Burn, the hippest b/beat club in le Bastille, to this... She’d go up against the taser if she absolutely had to, but she wouldn’t win. She knew that in advance. Even a street samurai couldn’t take 50,000 volts in the chest and keep standing.
The grey-bearded man looked at the meshed-down goats, glanced round the pen and shrugged. “Nothing here, Brother,” he said into a geek mike slung in front of his face. The ear bead squawked something back and the man nodded, shutting the goat pen behind him.
A clang in the next pen told LizAlec the man was checking there, too. Another clang followed a few seconds later and then he was gone, kicking free of the ground and pulling himself through free fall by grabbing at the red polymer handholds set neatly into the corridor wall.
“They know.” said Lars. The sandrat somersaulted slowly backwards, only just brushing the sides of the vent as he tumbled. Lars liked free fall even better than one-sixth G. He could move upwards and along with only the slightest effort, using splayed fingers as springs to bounce off walls or break his trajectory. Being on the ship was like being back in the tunnels, just easier.
He liked the animals too, dropping through a ventilation grille to pet the goats whenever he thought it was safe. The only thing Lars still wasn’t happy about was having left the ice bucket behind. Ben would never come back if his head unfroze. Or if he did, he’d probably be just stupid or something.
“They know,” Lars said again, prodding LizAlec in the back to get her attention.
“No, they don’t,” said the girl, not bothering to look around. She didn’t know any such thing, but she didn’t want the little freak to see she was worried.
Lars grunted and began to run his hands along the side of a large grille just over his head. The grille blocked him off from a tunnel above and Lars was feeling for screws, rivets, anything he could slide a blade under and snap off. The shuttle was old and its conversion to bulk carrier had been cheap. Most of the new panels were just sheet Duralumin staple-gunned at the edges and sprayed over with liquid polymer. The rest were compressed polycrete. Only the original fixtures were welded and Lars had been busy avoiding those.
“Go somewhere else,” he told LizAlec, pushing his broken blade under the edge of the overhead grille. Flakes of yellowing resin began to build up where he cut into epoxied polycrete. Up and down counted for little in zeroG — not that Lars had given them much attention even back on Luna — but he was squatting with his feet pushing down towards the goats, so maybe the tunnel he was trying to enter counted as up. If only he could break the epoxy...
Pushing the knife deeper into a gap, Lars twisted, feeling one corner of the grille crack free a second or so ahead of his own wrist reaching breaking point. LowG leached calcium from a body faster than it could take it in, even if you swore by Bayer-Rochelle’s complete Traveller’s Deep-Space Pac. And Lars hadn’t even heard of Bayer-Rochelle.
Lars wasn’t sure the narrow tunnel he crouched in counted as an air vent, since all of the hold was full of air. And although the air pushing toward them was warm it didn’t really seem hot enough to count as heating. He’d asked LizAlec what she thought but she hadn’t bothered to answer.
Maybe she didn’t know, thought Lars. Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to him. Shaking his hair out of his eyes, Lars slid the point of his blade under another corner of the grille and pulled up. Nothing much happened, so Lars went back to worrying the tired epoxy that kept the ceramic mesh in place. Staying put made no sense to him, but then a tunnel with only two ways out made even less. Apart from his own tunnel below the Arrivals Hall, which was different because no one but him knew about it.