Kizzy threw herself back against the wall as if burned. Run, she thought. Run. But she didn’t run. She stared.
“Kizzy?” Jenks called. “You okay in there?”
She swallowed hard, trying to work some spit back into her mouth. “Mines,” she said.
“What was that?”
“Mines,” she said, louder. “The wall. The entire fucking wall. It’s full of mines.” And big ones, too. Earlier, she’d found a piece of casing from the one that had knocked out the atmospheric regulator. Intact, it had probably been as wide across as her pinky. These ones were about the size of an outstretched hand. Things that big weren’t made for knocking out an isolated system. Things that big were made to go boom.
Back in the room, Jenks and Oxlen were making a lot of noise, talking over each other, calling their respective captains. But to Kizzy, they seemed distant. Her heart was in her ears. Her muscles started to shake. Her body begged to get away. But a quiet thought cut through the panic, holding her steady. How long before they go off? She thought about this. If they were ready to go off in seconds, running away wouldn’t make any damn difference, not for her, not for the cargo ship, nor for the Wayfarer. But if there was more time, even just a minute or two, maybe… could she?
She looked at the evil metal jellyfish nearest to her. Explosive or not, it was still a machine. She understood machines. Machines followed rules.
“Oxlen,” she called. “Do either of those soldiers happen to be weapons techs?”
“What? No, no, they’re just guards, we don’t have anyone who—”
Kizzy ignored the rest of whatever Oxlen was saying. She unhooked a pair of clippers from her belt, flicked her globulbs back on, and climbed up close.
“Kizzy,” Jenks said. “Kizzy, you need to get out of there.”
“Quiet,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
“We may not have a minute, Kizzy, get out of there.”
“If we don’t have a minute, it won’t make any fucking difference where I am.”
“Kizzy—” Oxlen started.
Kizzy flipped her scanner lenses into place. “Both of you. Shut up. I can do this. Just—just shut up.”
Somewhere very far away, she could hear more yelling, and a clanking sound—probably Jenks climbing over the pipes to come get her. She ignored it and peered through the lens into the heart of the mine. Its interior was solid explosive material—kedrium, given the density—which was seriously great news. For starters, that meant the triggering mechanisms were only on the outside of the mine, so there were no surprises inside that she needed to worry about. Better still, she knew kedrium. Back in her teens, she’d been grounded for her whole summer break after she and her friends had blown up an old junker skiff with a block of the stuff. Cheap explosive, used for clearing rock. You could get it at any market stop. If the mine used kedrium, that meant there had to be two triggers—one to start a heating device, and one to spark the kedrium once it was hot enough to be reactive. She took off her gloves and felt around the edges of the mine. Still cold. That was a good sign. She ran a finger over the seams. There. She shifted around so that she was hunched over within the fuel tubes. From that vantage point, she could see little trigger knobs sticking out from the backside, surrounded by dried beads of sealant. This wasn’t some fancy-pants military-grade tech. This was hackjob work.
She placed the clippers between her teeth and pulled a heat awl from her belt. The sealant fizzled and thinned under the awl’s searing tip. She switched back to the magnification lens. Okay. That looks like the primary trigger, so if I just pop it loose—The yellow light blinked steadily, unchanged from before. There’s the heater. And there—She held her breath and pulled the knob away from the frame. A thin cable trailed after it. She let the awl fall to the floor and took the clippers from her mouth. Her hand began to shake. The clippers rattled. She cut the cable.
The light switched off.
“Kizzy—”
She pried the blasting cap free of its gutted frame. It fell into her hand. Heavy. Cold. Harmless. A shudder of air burst from her lips. Her vision swam. She slumped against the wall and slid down to the floor, pressing her free palm against her forehead.
“Holy fuck,” Jenks said, falling against the door frame. “You did it.”
Kizzy took a deep breath. Her muscles shook all the harder. She laughed.
One of the problems with talkboxes was that operating them required no small degree of mental concentration. If the wearer was distracted or impaired, the computerized words would come out jumbled. Such was the case with Pei, who was more upset than Ashby had ever seen. She stood fuming over the pieces of the disarmed mine that Kizzy had placed on the dinner table. Her cheeks were purple with anger, dark as a bruise.
“I can’t—bastards on—what we might—brought you into—sorry for—”
“Pei,” Ashby said. He raised a halting hand, minding his tone with care. They were surrounded by her crew and his. He was alarmed, she was furious, and their people were afraid. It was just the sort of situation that might make one of them slip. “Try to slow down.”
She took a shuddering breath. The colors in her cheeks flared, but held steady. “Saery. I can’t believe he was a coincidence.”
“What do you mean?” said one of her crew. Sula, a short female.
“Think about it. If the Aeluons give you sand between your teeth, and you want to cause some damage, why go to the trouble of taking out one cargo ship when you could take out a docking hub? Or a repair station?”
Oxlen’s cheeks darkened. There were a lot of purple faces at the table. “They knocked out a vital system so that we’d have to stop for repairs. They figured we’d pull into port somewhere. That’s why the mines haven’t gone off yet. They timed them to wait a few tendays, because that’s how long it would take us to get to a dock. They weren’t planning for us to get help along the way.”
Sula’s eyes narrowed. “And they made sure we didn’t have a tech to fix it. He wasn’t mugged. They must’ve watched him.”
Pei took a few steps toward the window, fists balled against her sides. Ashby stuck his hands in his pockets and pressed his feet to the floor. Sissix caught his eye. Almost imperceptibly, she flashed him the Aandrisk gesture for sympathy.
“We can get angry later,” Pei said, turning back. Her cheeks had dulled to a dusky blue. “Right now, we have a bigger problem. Ashby, I can’t believe I got you mixed up in this. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not,” Ashby said. “You might not have known anything was wrong if it wasn’t for Kizzy.”
“See, this is why fixbots are stupid,” Kizzy said. “There are so many things they—”
Jenks lay a hand across her arm. “Not now, Kiz.”
Tak picked up one of the pieces of the mine. “It must’ve been one of the dock workers. Slipped away while the others were unloading cargo. This is our fault. We should’ve been more vigilant.”
“Nobody expected this,” Pei said. “I’ve been running cargo for ten standards, and whenever somebody wants a piece of what I’ve got, they come at me directly. I’ve never dealt with anything so underhanded.”
Tak’s second eyelids darted in, then back again. “I don’t understand why they’d use such crude tech after going to all the trouble of getting aboard our ship.”
“If you were at a public docking port, that’s the only way they could do it,” Jenks said. “How are they supposed to get fully assembled explosives through security? It’s way easier to bring in the pieces individually and put them together in a closet somewhere. Kedrium has legitimate uses on its own. It’d be easy to sneak through. And the rest of this stuff, it’s just odds and ends.”