‘Thousand Names, this is the Konrad’s Hope evacuation committee. We’ve gathered the high-priority evacuation cases in one location. Send your shuttle to these coordinates…’
‘Thousand Names, my name is Jananna Smith. I’m the only true-born left. I’ve got a lot of wealth tied up in other cities—take me away from here and I’ll see that you’re rewarded—’
‘Thousand Names, please, there’s a birthing village full of children still here. They don’t even know what’s happening. For God’s sake, you’ll have room for them, please—’
The breathless voices sounded in the background of the Thousand Names’s bridge, coming across what had once been the city’s traffic control channels. Everyone with the means to detect them would hope that they were a late-coming evac ship, and everyone with access to a transmitter was bargaining for passage.
‘Thousand Names, this is Sister Greyda of the Konrad’s Hope Scriber chapel. We’re delighted you’ve chosen to join us—’
‘Brenn, turn that shit off.’ Olzan’s voice came out more strained than he had expected.
Brenn looked a little startled, but the voices shut off. Vazoya squeezed his hand and muttered something reassuring, but Olzan knew whom she was really trying to reassure.
Without the chatter, the silence was oppressive. Olzan replaced the live view on the screen with a city map, and began running through the plan again, to take his mind off the approach as much as anything else. ‘The collection is housed in a hangar near the bottom of that starscraper,’ he said, pointing. ‘We’ll take a shuttle in. Docking with a rotating ’scraper will be tricky but Vaz can do it.’
‘Of course, I can do it.’ Vazoya’s normal arrogance seemed forced now.
‘The power’s out in that ’scraper so it should be empty, but we might get company when folks see the shuttle docking. Most likely the elevators will be down so they won’t reach us too quickly.
‘There’s one exhibit in particular that Mr Glass wants. It’s called the Seagull, and it’s the centrepiece of Zhu’s collection. I don’t know what it is, but Mr Glass said we’ll know it when we see it. It’s vacuum-safe, so we can just open the hangar doors and push it out, then the Names can pick it up. We get in and out as quick as we can. I don’t want any encounters with the inhabitants.’ He didn’t want the crew to see them: it would make them real, make it harder to leave them to die. He didn’t want to see them himself, for the same reason.
‘Understood,’ said Keldra from the back of the room. Olzan shot her a look. No one had asked her.
The city spun above Olzan’s head, the shadows of the starscrapers processing like raking fingers across the grey surface. He could feel the gravity change as Vazoya teased the shuttle into a powered orbit that matched the city’s spin. There was a shift in perception, and then he was sitting in a steady one gravity, with the city stationary above him, both of them in the middle of a rotating sphere of stars. Vazoya was gently manoeuvring the shuttle up, towards the hanging mass of Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper.
Olzan was crammed next to Keldra in the shuttle’s tiny cargo section, both of them dressed in stuffy vacuum suits. If she had such an interest in Planetary Age artefacts, Olzan had decided, then they might as well put that to use. Brenn and Tarraso were still on board the Thousand Names, keeping it in a wide orbit of the city, ready to pick up the artefact and then make a rapid escape once the shuttle was back on board.
Vazoya moved the shuttle up to the side of the starscraper. Olzan could see the blue-white reflections of their thruster flames in the windows. One wide gap between the windows resolved into the door to the hangar housing Anastasia Zhu’s collection.
Vazoya stabilized the shuttle next to the small personnel airlock at the edge of the hangar door. A magnetic grapnel line shot across the gap and latched onto the starscraper’s metal wall, and then the shuttle’s hatch swung open. The external airlock wasn’t built to take this type of shuttle, and hovering too close to the wall would be dangerous. They would have to cross the gap in vacuum suits.
Keldra’s face was pale behind her visor. She hadn’t said much on the shuttle flight, despite her constant talk of the Earth artefact while they were still on the Names. It was vertigo, Olzan realized with amusement. With the rotational pseudogravity in place, they were suspended over an infinite drop filled with shooting stars. Keldra had been a habitat engineer, working in her city’s spine, well away from the outer skin. For someone not used to these manoeuvres the experience could be terrifying.
Olzan wasn’t in much of a mood to spare Keldra’s feelings. ‘All right, Engineer, get that door open. Your precious artefact’s in there.’ Keldra hesitated. For a moment Olzan thought she wasn’t going to move. ‘Go on. We’ll retrieve you if you fall.’
‘Might not be worth the fuel,’ came Vazoya’s voice from the cockpit.
Keldra scowled, stood up, and clipped her suit to the wobbling grapnel line. She swung out into the gap and climbed hand-over-hand to the personnel airlock, moving confidently now that she had started. She reached the ledge beneath the airlock door and began fumbling with the door control.
‘It’s not going to open,’ she said after a minute.
‘What’s the matter with it?’ Olzan asked.
‘The lock’s physically jammed. We might be able to open it from the inside.’
‘We can blast it,’ Vazoya said. ‘Get the charges. The decompression might even push the thing out for us; problem solved.’
‘No!’ Keldra snapped. ‘It could be damaged.’
‘Then we can give Mr Glass the damn pieces and tell him that’s how we found it. Olzan, let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘Mr Glass won’t be pleased,’ Olzan said. The approach of the Worldbreaker was a nagging presence in the back of his mind, but every time he thought about cutting corners or doing a less than perfect job, he thought back to Emily’s last message. Do a good job here and he could marry her, get sterility reversal treatment, live like a true-born…‘Vaz, find another airlock. We’ll work our way round the inside. Keldra, get back here.’
They found another airlock a few levels up. Once again Vazoya brought them alongside and fired the grapnel, and this time Keldra climbed across without hesitation. Olzan watched her tinker with the lock for a moment and then the outer door hinged open.
‘Vaz, hold the shuttle here,’ Olzan said as he clipped himself to the line. ‘We might need to come back out this way. I’ll let you know when we reach the hangar.’
‘Take your time. If you’re not back, it’s my ship.’
‘We’ll be back.’
‘I’m serious, Olzan. I’m not waiting for the Worldbreaker to—’
‘Neither am I. We’ll be back.’
Olzan strapped the explosive charges to his suit’s backpack and then pulled himself along the grapnel line, carefully avoiding looking down. Keldra had already dealt with what little was left of the security system, and she cycled them through using the airlock’s emergency power.
The interior of the starscraper was dark, lit only by sporadic emergency lighting and the bobbing circles cast by their helmet lamps. A sound of dripping water echoed to them from somewhere deeper in the maze of metal corridors. Olzan called up a floor plan from his implant and laid it over his vision. The elevators wouldn’t be working, but there should be stairs in the central atrium. With the city’s datanet offline the implant couldn’t plot a route for him, but it wasn’t hard to see which way to go.