Tiffany obeyed, holding tight to the EVA pack and repair kit. It worked. Spreading out dissipated her angular momentum, like a skater coming out of a spin. The stars slowed.
Miko continued to talk her out of her tumbling. “Now tell your suit to counter the spin.”
Again she obeyed. Mini-thrusters at the hips and shoulders dampened her head over heels roll. The cosmos steadied. But the tiny thrusters had brought her to rest facing away from Miko.
“Now have your suit turn you around.”
She did it. Miko came slowly into sight, facing her but upside-down. That would have to do. Miko drifted toward her, reaching out, taking hold of Tiffany’s knees. She worked her way down Tiffany’s torso, until their helmets touched. “Hi, gorgeous.”
“Hi yourself.”
“Turn off your comlink,” Miko told her.
Tiffany did it, so Hesse could not listen in. Conduction carried their words from one helmet to the other.
Miko laughed. “You hang here often?”
“Only when I have to.” Tiffany felt her panic fading. It did seem absurd, standing head to head, feet resting on nothing. And she felt genuine hysterical relief at not having to stare down those 20mm muzzles. Bad as this was, Hesse and his merry mutants had had it in their power to make things worse. A whole lot worse. Which could still happen. Tiffany asked, “Can you see the ships?”
“Sure.”
“Turn me toward them.” She wanted to see if the slaver really meant to maroon them, or was still playing cat-and-mouse. Trying to soften them up with a scare. Miko turned her until she was looking straight at the ships. The starship had grappled onto Archangel nose to tail. They looked like unrelated insects—Archangel sleek and tapered, Hiryu big and bulbous—in the middle of some bizarre mating, backed by black starry void.
Hesse seemed good to his word. The ships did not hang around to see if she and Miko had second thoughts. They fell away at once, accelerating upsun at close to 1g. Falling together into infinite distance, they became a single point of light—no longer separable by the eye—losing themselves amid the sea of stars. Bon voyage.
Tiffany’s heart sank as she watched them dwindle. Terrible as Hesse was, it was still a come-down to find that you were totally expendable. Set adrift like living garbage, without so much as a parting gloat. Hesse had never even asked their names. Miko had been right. Tiffany was used to getting more out of guys than that. That young Choctaw at the Belt City starport probably still hoped she would show up again. Fat chance.
“Now turn me toward Floreal.”
Miko did it. The huge habitat hung just downsun from them, completely blocking out Orion 3645B, and half the nebula beyond. “How far away are we?”
“Forty klicks. We aren’t going to get there with orientation thrusters. Not anytime soon.”
Tiffany opened her EVA pack and got out the line gun. “I’m going to try and snag it.”
Miko laughed again. “Girl, you are obsessed. That gun has only got twenty kilometers of line.”
“That’s why I told you to grab a pack. There should be more line in the repair kit. If we splice it all together we’ve got more than enough.”
“Might work,” Miko admitted.
“You got something better in mind? My social calendar is godawful empty at the moment.”
“I said it was worth a try.”
They did the best job they could of splicing the lines together. “This will hold,” Miko decided. “But the gun is never going to reel it back in.”
“Won’t have to.” Tiffany had thought this through. She took aim and fired. Even at this range, the recoilless line gun was not going to miss a target twenty klicks tall and eighty klicks wide. The rocket propelled grapple took its time getting there, but at last the line went taut.
Holding tight to the gun, Tiffany let the habitat’s slow rotation reel them in. By the time their adhesive boots made contact, the line was wound twice around Floreal.
Leaving them hanging head-down from the barren surface of a sealed habitat in a doomed system—better than being adrift, but not by a lot. The pitted surface rolled slowly from frying to freezing, with no sign of life aboard. Tiffany fought the awful vertigo that came from standing on the outside of a spin gravity habitat, where every direction was down. She felt that if she so much as took a step, she would fall into a void thousands of light-years deep.
Miko touched helmets. “Welcome to Floreal.” She did not seem the least troubled by the starry chasm around them. “Now what?”
Tiffany gripped Miko’s shoulders to steady herself, swallowing the gorge rising in her throat. “According to the original specs, there should be a manual entrance lock nearby. A whole line of them actually. Spaced at intervals around the surface.”
“Where?”
“Anti-spinward. About half a klick. Can you guide me?”
“No sweat.” Miko acted totally at ease, aboard ship, in a v-suit, or hanging from a habitat. No wonder Faith found her useful. She led Tiffany over the rotating surface to the lock. There was no need for complex electronic entry codes. Miko undogged the hatch, pulled it open, and they were in.
There was no air in the narrow lock, and barely room for both of them. No light either, so they had to turn on their suit lamps. But it felt fantastic to be inside something, standing upright, no longer hanging over the awful gulf between the stars. Spin gravity seemed about .5g. Miko climbed up to the inner door, then came back down to touch helmets. “No pressure on the far side.”
Not a good sign. No air. No light. If the habitat was an empty hulk, Tiffany would have thrown away her life for not very much. She stifled that thought. “Let’s get going. There has to be pressure up there somewhere.”
They climbed up and undogged the inner door. Dark airless tunnel curved in two directions, leading along the circumference of the habitat. Tiffany touched helmets. “Let’s try spinward.”
They set out, passing through two more pointless pressure doors. Each time they carefully sealed the doors behind them, hoping the one ahead would be holding air. Then they came to a hatch in the tunnel roof. Tiffany hoisted Miko up to check it. In half a g, she felt amazingly light.
Miko dropped back down and touched helmets. “There’s air up there.”
Tiffany felt vindicated. “We’ve made it!”
“Maybe. Possibly. The hatch opens upward.” That meant tons of air pressure was holding it shut. They might as well try to lift a moon.
“Which is why I brought the repair kit.” Tiffany was amazed at her own foresight. “We can punch a hole in the hatch and equalize pressure.”
They first checked to see that the length of tunnel they were in was sealed at both ends, then they walked up the curved wall to huddle at the hatch, hanging by their boots. Miko took the anaerobic torch out of the repair kit and cut a crisp hole in the hatch. Air gushed through. When the pressure equalized, she flung open the hatch. They scrambled through, emerging in an even larger tunnel. Still dark, but filled with breathable air.
Triumph swept through Tiffany as she unsealed her suit and tipped back her helmet, taking deep gulping breaths. Miko did the same. Then she reached over, taking Tiffany’s cheeks in the flat of her slim little hands. Holding Tiffany’s head steady, she kissed her.
Miko let go. Tiffany stared at the smaller woman’s smiling face. “What was that for?”
Dark eyes danced with delight. Black hair lay plastered with sweat to her white cheek. “For being a beautiful blonde genius.”
Tiffany took it as a compliment. She had not been kissed on the lips in a long time—and hardly ever by a woman. She was shocked at how good it felt. Miko acted like it was all perfectly normal. “Let’s look for a shaft leading up,” Tiffany suggested.