Explosion somewhere. The ship quaked.
"That might be the tanks," Fitch said.
"Shit!" She grabbed one of the hanging lines, pulled up the latch-down on her left shoulder, clamped it on the cable. "Going to the core—" She pulled Fitch a line close, threaded his hoist, wrapped her line under her right leg, pulled the lever down and held it.
Teeth slipped a little on the cable, scary as hell when you were halfway up.
Scary as hell when you thought about somebody getting into that shaft above or below and potshotting you on that cable. Had to use the night-glows, no way to see in the dark and cold what they were doing or where they were going, and it was help enough for somebody waiting at the core-access with a rifle—
Fitch was coming up all right, she saw the other cable tight, saw the cable attachments coming up fast above her on the support struts for the core-access bulkhead, good clear attachment, no gymnastics needed: she ordered the gyros, swung her feet up and planted her boots on the lip, leaned forward and made it, facing into absolute dark past the dim edges of the open access.
Graffiti on the wall, something painted—
Fitch bumped her, went back off the edge as she grabbed him, damn good thing she was holding the support. Her rig complained, the left arm slipped, but it hauled him up and his gyros got him steady.
Lot of dark. No sound except their own breathing, nothing from the pickups. Total vacuum.
The core access was standing wide open. Somebody had to have used an emergency crank to get both doors like that—big white circle and slash spray-painted across the lock controls—
—where you could see it only coming from thisdirection.
Fitch grabbed her arm, sudden shock of rig against rig.
Goddard's sign-off, maybe, when they rigged the tanks to blow?
WarningLoki crew out?
No pump, she thought. No vibration through the deck. It had stopped.
The core went straight back from here, whole length of the spine, long, dark void. The glows and the night-sight got just the beginning of the conduits, the start of the grid that was the in-dock walkway along the downside.
She stood still, spooked. Fitch wasn't moving either.
Shaft of light came into the core. Floods from the rider-ship, she thought for a heart-pounding second, then she realized it was sunlight coming through a wound in Loki'sshielding, blaze of light and glare bouncing off surfaces down the walk, glancing and dazzling off ice, so that the display and the readouts struggled to cope with contrast. The light made huge shadows out of the two giant conduit-bundles as Thule's rotation carried the sun past their zenith. Moving bars of light and shadow touched the walkway and showed blazing white shapes lying on it, the walkway itself showed bent and melted—
and icedc
Eyes wouldn't make sense out of it.
The glare from the star passed, moved up the wall, glare dimming to twilight.
She jerked a metal utility clip off her rig, threw it onto the grid.
No sparksc
Fitch caught her arm, no force against her amped rig, nothing but noise, a scrape of ceramics. "Yeager, we got nothing to do here, let it be, we got two rider-ships and a fuckin' carrier unaccounted for, come on, Yeager!"
You couldn't yell out to anybody, to see if anybody was still alive in here, you couldn't do anything, there wasn't any air to carry the sound, and the whole core was a trap, whole tac-squad wiped out—except the point-men that had gotten through and gone down the lines—
Not Goddard's work, couldn't be Goddard's work—
Power on that scale—Hell of a job. Cable from Loki'swhole damn electrical system, run right to that grid.
"Yeager!"
"Program," she said to the rig. "Fleet-com."
She got sputter back, got the hiss of distant voices, not the clear transmission of a rider-ship com close by:
"Number one? Number one?"
Some poor skut was lost out there, distant across station.
She heard, more distant still, full of breakup, "c Charlie niner one, that's forty."
And after a few seconds: " We copy forty—" . She cut back to channel B on manual, said to Fitch, "Just dropped into Fleet-com. They're 'lagged from each other, they're moving."
On the retreat. Fast.
Standard ops. Rider-captain's standing orders, always—cover your carrier. If a situation goes to hell, tac-squads are on their own, cover your carrier—
No way out for them now. They're trapped. They know it. Carrier's stuck in system.
"Time to get ourselves deep in station," Fitch said. "We're going to hear from that carrier, round-trip, damn soon. Keu's not going to take this real passive.—Come on, Yeager, dammitc"
She ignored the pull on her arm, muttered, "Go to hell. Sir." And tried to think, tried to remember where you could detach the main cables, and figure how you could set up that kind of a trap and spring it without being where you could see when to throw a switch, and you could, from Engineering—but not without monitoring the core didn't have and there hadn't been time to set up. So it had to be the dirty way—a hands-on job, where you could see your targets, get them all where you wanted them. Then throw the power on.
And maybe go with it.
She walked out on the grid, turned her helmet light on, heard, "Damn fool," out of Fitch, and just kept walking, sweating, hoping like hell the cable had burned itself away, which, by all she could figure, it had—
She scanned the shadows, sweeping her light from side to side, scared to keep to the grid, which might be melted through and loose, a broken connection that she might accidentally bridge with a step—scared of that and scared to step off the walkway and risk running into that cable in the dark.
Sun swept slowly past again, threw light and shadow onto the wreckage of the core: gridwork and pipe and the glare of sun on ice where a conduit had sprayed surfaces, ice-glare on bodies, ice coating white armor—
Long hanging shapes from one core-bundle, pieces of burned hose—
Or free-hanging power cable.
Surfaces glazed in ice, bodies embedded in it, shadow again as the sun passed the area.
She looked around, swept her light past the ominous shape of cables, saw motion bracketed, spun around with the AP in hand, fire-bracket and motion-bracket overlapped as her hand centered—
Civ hardsuit! God!
Shot slammed into her, knocked her down, smoke hanging in a cloud as she came up again, motion in the smoke, smoke from her shot, smoke from his—
She froze with the gun aimed up, he froze with his level, a nerve-twitch off, that was all that had missed him—a figure up against the forward bulkhead, man with a rifle and no lights, just sun-bounce shining off the girders, off his suit-surfaces, a hardsuit that never would have survived a direct hit.
He had to have figured it out, then, or he was out of shells: he wasn't firing again, was just wedged in there, into what cover the bulkhead and the shadow of the struts afforded.
"NG?" She tried Loki'sfrequency. She wasn't sure he could hear, wasn't sure NG was hearing anything or seeing anything that wasn't years back, some other boarding—
People in armor—
She let her gun down, lifted her left hand, walked back along the grid with a stutter in her motion, shaking in every joint—
Signed to him, Come out.
She saw him lift the gun again.
And stop.
She beckoned again. Slowly NG started hauling himself up under the hardsuit's stationside weight.