Light strobed across her target. She estimated the angle and aimed the magnetic grapple built into the sleeve of her suit, leaning forward, arm extended.
"Ready," she said into her suit com. "Say when, Rand."
"Standing by, Joat." Rand paused a moment. "Now."
There was a slight twitch that pushed her arm gently backwards as she fired the grapple. The contact plate spun out on its near-invisible line and clung to the station's skin about a meter from the small service hatch. Joat activated the mechanism in her sleeve that would reel her towards the station, then gave a jerk on the line that propelled her outward.
Joat pulled her feet forward and her knees up against the suit's resistance, rolling herself head over heels in a controlled somersault; timing it so that the stickfield on the soles of her boots would strike first, and her bent legs absorb the impact.
When she left Wyal's gravity field the blood in her veins leapt within her, rushing to her head in a dizzying surge. The weightlessness made every part of her feel strange, as though she'd been bounced upward, never coming down, only climbing, soaring. Swimming in the universal sea, a friend at Brawn school had called it. No lie. The few moments of queasiness until she adjusted was worth it; then gravity returned as centrifugal force spun her outward. The stationary docking ring fell behind, and suddenly up was towards the rotating bulk of New Destinies. It was the docking ring that seemed to move, with the Wyal embedded in it like a pencil in a sharpener.
She felt closest to Simeon, her adopted father, when she moved through space in her suit. Encased, as he was, in a machine that kept her alive in a murderous environment, yet personally in contact with the infinite.
Joat watched the universe flick by, ship, stars, station, three times before she reached her target.
The stickfield on her boots held her to the station against the surge of recoil and Joat clasped an extended hand around a utility handle jutting out from the station's skin. Her inertia surged, balanced and stabilized by the grip and the automatic flex of leg and thigh. The anchor cord finished reeling itself back into the sleeve of her suit with a small definite click, de-energizing the disk and whipping it back into the slot. Her eyes were telling her that she stood upright on a huge metal plain. Weight said that she was hanging from her feet with a great metal plain above her. Both were wrong, and she had no time to waste.
"Now," she muttered. "Down the rabbit hole, or I'll be very late."
Her suited fingers traced the exterior of the airlock. Standard model, a fiber-steel oval with memory putty sealant around the edges and a mechanical doglock wheel in the center for emergencies. No use trying that, it would be safetied. Instead she took out a multitool and began opening the access cover of the lock control, whistling soundlessly between her teeth.
Well, and aren't you clever, she thought, as the first choice undid the couplers that held it closed. You found some of the weirdest nonstandard components on these out-of-the-way Stations.
Her suit had some nonstandard components, too. She unclipped an extension datalink from her belt and clicked the connector into the link on the control card. Then she closed her eyes and subvocalized a series of code words.
A chittering voice sounded in her inner ear. "Whhhaaat's up, boss?"
"Got a little job for you, Speedy."
She opened her eyes again. Playing across the thin-film crystal of her suit visor was a holo of a ferret. Not a real ferret; this one was vaguely anthropomorphic and wore a beret. One hand clutched a smokestick in a long ivory holder. Stylish, she thought. There was no point in being mechanical when you designed an AI, even the fairly simple specialized type.
This one, for example, was a specialist in locks.
"Cycle this airlock, but don't let anyone know about it."
"Rrrright, boss."
The holo image vanished. It was replaced by a schematic of the circuitry and the control program for the access. The picklock program slunk through the commercial programming with sinuous ease, then struck. Red slivers appeared on the green circuitry, marking the spots where false data was being fed back into the systems central monitor. That severed the controls from the Station's computers, at least for a while.
Of course, there was always the chance that some interfering type would be actually looking at the inside door of the airlock when she came through. Harder to fool the ol' Eyeball Mark I.
"Rand, is there any way for you to tie into the vid monitor covering this accessway and let me know if anybody's out there?"
"No, Joat, there isn't. I've already knocked it out. But this access is located in a maintenance area that's not very thickly populated. It's a chance you'll have to take. You have seven seconds."
"Fardles!"
Joat imagined some passerby attracted to the mysteriously cycling lock, watching in puzzlement the flashing of the warning light that showed the lock was in use.
What if there's a klaxon or a bell? she wondered. She sighed mentally. Then I get arrested, I guess. Bad planning, Joat. If the worst happens it'll serve you right for being so impulsive.
She gripped the handholds on either side, disdaining the steps set into the doorway, and popped herself feet-first through the hatch with a grunt. That left her straddling the entranceway, now a hole between her feet. Reaching back, she pulled the hatch closed behind her and glanced at the chrono display down at the chinbar of her helmet. Well within the time limit.
Jack Of All Trades strikes again, she thought, slightly smug. Breaking-and-entering was one of those pleasant hobbies you didn't have much opportunity for when you'd gone legitimate. A pleasure to indulge the skill on good, legal-well, quasi-legal-Central Worlds business.
Air hissed into the narrow airlock, quickly growing thick enough to hear through the exterior pickups. A faint ping told her when the pressure was near-enough ambient. Immediately she popped the seal on her helmet and began stripping off the suit, wrinkling her nose slightly at the metallic smell. No excuse for that, in a station-even a small one.
Snaps, locks, and seals parted before her fingers with the easy grace of a lifetime's practice; she had the full measure of finicky neatness common to the vacuum-born. She folded the suit tightly, tucked the gauntlets into the helmet and pulled a small black rectangle from a pocket. It clung when she tapped it onto the inner airlock door over her head, and she snapped a thin cord into a jack on its side. The other end of the cord was pressed against the bone behind one ear. She scanned the sounds from the other side of the metal.
Nothing, she thought cheerfully. Nothing but mechanical noise, none of the irregular thumps and gurgles that indicated an organic sapient. Carbon-based life-forms had messy sonic signatures.
"Rand, can you give me the name of an outfitter? I might as well have my suit seals checked as carry it around with me."
"There are sixteen outfitters licensed to maintain suits. The nearest specialty store is Stondat's EnviroSystems Emporium, Spin Level 3"-that would be counting inward from the outermost deck, standard throughout human space-"Stack 14b, corridor 9. The camera block is running." Rand's passionless voice took on a faint overtone of contempt. "Very bad security."