“Korchow’s inside man will open the internal miter flap at 02:59:30 exactly. He’s rigged it to stay open until the cycle starts. That gives you thirty seconds, which should be plenty.”
“Just as long as he really opens it.”
“He will.” Arkady gave her a dark, serious look. “I promise.”
“Thanks,” Li said, and felt a lump in her throat that made her ashamed. How had she ever let it come to this? Grappling onto the skin of a full-g station. Shinnying down a turbine shaft and waiting like a rat in a plugged hole for some traitor to sneak her into a station she could walk onto openly if her own business were anything but treason. She thought about backing out. But it was too late for that. She was on Korchow’s ship, with Korchow’s pilot at the controls, holding all the ammunition. She was going out that airlock tonight, one way or another.
If she could count on Cohen—really count on him—it might not be too late. But she’d be crazy to do that. Better to risk what she knew she could pull off, if all those little gambles broke her way. Better to settle her nerves, stop worrying about what she couldn’t change, and get ready for a walk in starlight.
“Well?” said the stranger who was Cohen. “What did you forget?”
Li sighed and pushed off the floor, coming to rest high up on the Starling’s curving bulkhead. “Nothing. I will goddamn well remember to hook in before the internal vent opens. I’m not an idiot.”
“You were the one who insisted on running off soft memory,” the not-Cohen insisted. “You’ll be off-line for twenty-seven minutes. Any memory lapse will result in a fatal loss of synchronization.”
Li flip-flopped so her feet were facing up, her head down. She looked at Arkady, at eye level but inverted, and raised an eyebrow. “I think she understands that,” Arkady said, sounding embarrassed.
“Look,” Li said. “I’ve been to the dance before. You boys just keep your flies zipped and make sure you save the last dance for the girl you came with.”
She picked out a faint spot on the opposite wall, a faded fingerprint left by some crewman of missions past. She closed her eyes and kicked off the bulkhead into a tight backflip, testing her inertial systems, troubleshooting, recalibrating the network of Fromherz nodes and ceramsteel filament that spidered down her spine and out to every muscle, tendon, and fingertip.
It was a neat trick, as well as a good diagnostic test. One of her favorites. Especially in zero g. And it was just the kind of silly thing Cohen always teased her for doing.
Well, he wasn’t teasing her tonight, she thought as her left foot hit the deck .28 centimeters off target—and she realized, suddenly, just how scared she was.
Alba: 28.10.48.
02:18:00.
The outer seal slid down on the other side of the airlock just as Li finished pulling on the bulky life-support suit and checking her heater and air feed. Arkady drew his pulse pistol, thumbed off the safety, and leveled it at Li’s chest. He lifted his thin shoulders in a sad little shrug. “Sorry.”
Li didn’t answer; he wouldn’t have heard her through the double-sealed faceplate of her helmet anyway. When the inner seal rose, she glanced back, checked her status lights again, and stepped forward.
02:20:04.
She floated out of the airlock and into open space, spinning slightly with the pull of an imperfectly calibrated frog kick. She did a fast recalculation of her trajectory, toggled her Zero-K jetpack to get back on course, assured herself she was still going to hit Alba’s exostructure reasonably close to target, and relaxed, watching the meters and seconds tick down on her internals.
She looked back at the Starling. It was already invisible, its fractal absorption sheeting effective enough to outsmart Li’s eyes even at this range. She toggled her infrareds just to be safe and scanned for a heat signature, but there was only a faint blur of warmth that could have been a heat plume from the station or the thermal wake of the last commuter shuttle. She hoped the shielding was good enough to fool not just her, but the Peacekeeper techs who monitored Alba’s fiercely enforced no-fly zone.
02:23:07.
As she neared the station, not even all her outside training and fighting experience could prevent the inevitable disorientation. The station’s metallic skin spun faster and faster. By the time she got within five meters of it, it was whipping by her like a freight train.
Cohen had put her on-station in the middle of a forest of radio and ansible receivers, reasoning that the thicket of antennae would camouflage her approach, making the risk of a hang-up worth running. She had to choose her spot carefully and toggle the ZKs to avoid getting tangled in the poles and guy wires.
Damn it, Cohen, she thought; it didn’t take a heat signature for a really sharp observer to spot a jetpack. And getting caught outside, even in a heated support suit, would be disastrous.
At the last moment before impact, she kicked her ZKs into reverse and hovered, trying to track the station’s spin. She took a deep breath, readied her grappling gear, and jumped.
The impact snapped her head back and left her eyes watering. The universe turned inside out and the sky fell on her head. The freight train that had been shooting past her face was now a wild horse intent on bucking her off into open space. The rotational gravity that had been purely theoretical when she was hanging in the void watching the station slide by was now a solid full g sucking her body back, out, and sideways.
She clung to the station and waited for her brain to accept the irreconcilable conflict between eye and inner ear. Then she half closed her eyes, questioning muscles and ligaments, forcing herself to ignore the deceptive visual cues and listen to gravity. A few heartbeats later, she pegged the direction of the Coriolis effect and was able to orient herself to station east and start climbing.
Her right shoulder was all wrong; she was favoring it before she had climbed ten meters. Korchow’s hired medics had tried to patch it up again—another jury-rigged field repair on top of the last one—but the whole arm was going to have to be stripped out and rewired. Not now, though. Now it had a job to get through.
She saw the fan turrets a long way off, knobby sixteen-meter towers that poked out of the station’s skin like mushrooms. She needed the fourth turret, and she counted down the line carefully, knowing that a mistake would mean an ugly death.
02:49:07.
She reached it seven seconds behind time.
Had she climbed too slowly? Was there something wrong with her internals? With Cohen’s schematics? She crouched under the turret, checked her systems, and cursed.
By her reckoning the turret was a good twenty meters farther from her landing point than their schematics had said it was. Any way you looked at it, the miscalculation spelled trouble.
Though Li might have fallen behind schedule, Alba hadn’t. At exactly 2:50 she felt a thud and shiver under her feet, looked up, and saw a glittering ice cloud burst from the vent hole. Dust and condensed moisture, freezing as they hit hard vacuum in the new morning’s first venting cycle; the station was getting ready for the CO2overload of the coming workday.
She huddled in the lee of the turret until the ice cloud dispersed. Then she put her faceplate to the tower’s virusteel skin and listened as the vibration of the fans slowed and finally died. She imagined miter seals shutting twenty meters below, closing off the flow of pressurized air that drove the turbines. She tried not to imagine what would happen if both sets of seals opened while she was still in the turret. Well, it would be quick, anyway. That was something. She clipped onto the guard line that ringed the bottom of the turret and tapped the unseal code into the wrist plate of her suit. ‹Cannot unseal,› the suit told her internals. ‹Insufficient atmospheric pressure outside.›