"Not mine. Not mine. Not mine!" Gretchen wailed, clutching desperately at carefully hoarded memories of two little girls and one little boy. The sound of Isabelle crying, swaddled in fluffy blankets. Duncan's face screwed up in a pout, thin little arms crossed over his chest, one of his grandfather's flannel shirts rolled up sixty times to fit. Tristan declaring she would be planetary president right after third form. Everything they had ever done or said or shouted. Bare feet pattering down wooden stairs into the kitchen.
A sharp sense of disassociation overtook her, a threshold breached by urgent need.
The sense of brilliant clarity from her dreams was suddenly there, around her, a perfect, frozen world of absolutes. Black stains upon her memory shone very clear in this incandescent vision. Mine, she raged, driving back the distorting clouds. Where the shimmering visions had lain entwined with her own imperfection, she summoned up every detail from faint traces, from ghosts, from the neural residue left in the rubble of invasion. Mine!
For a moment, she hung in a balance, staring into endless corridors of memory, where every lost day, every forgotten word, every kiss was still alive, poised for her to plunge into them again. Youth. Tiny wrinkled pink babies drawing breath for their first wailing cry. Tiny hands clasped in hers. Frost on the porch in the morning. Melting snow plunging from the steep, slate roofs of the university halls as spring sunlight shone through the last clouds of winter.
Freezing cold engulfed her hands and Gretchen hissed in pain. Her eyes were still open, staring at sand spun with a web of jewels, but the vision was very distant from her thought. A jolt of physicality shook her body, tearing her mind away from the swarm of memories and plunging her once more into the cold, bruised, bleeding, frightened body crouched on a bare stone outcropping amid desolation. "Ahhhh! Oh Sister…that hurts!"
Her work gloves and the z-suit covering her forearms had been eaten away, leaving nothing to protect her skin from the subzero Ephesian night. Her fingertips were turning black. Gretchen clutched both hands to her chest and cried out at a fresh burst of pain.
A rasping cough tore itself from her chest, then another. Tears froze at the corners of her eyes. Still afraid to move, she curled herself up on the bare stone, trying to protect her ruined hands with the bulk of her body. Cold closed in on her, heat seeping away through the damaged suit into the open sky.
In the darkness, Anderssen frowned, displeased. There are no answers here.
Aboard the Turan
Tonuac, shipgun at high port, scuttled up to a pressure door at the end of the corridor. A dozen yards back, Hadeishi tensed, waiting for Heicho Felix — who was covering the Marine on point with her Whipsaw — to wave him forward. Tonuac crouched, keeping his head below the level of a glassite panel set into the door, and listened intently. A moment later he made a hand sign. Felix did not turn, but her hand slashed at the floor of the corridor. Traffic ahead.
Hadeishi settled in to wait. Maratay was right behind him, making sure the hardwire for the comm relay spooled out properly while keeping an eye on the chu-sa, who as an officer — a Fleet officer at that — needed constant supervision. Clavigero was ten meters behind, at the last bulkhead frame, watching the backtrail for unwanted visitors.
Nearly two hours had passed since they'd broken in through the airlock. The Turan had proved vaster than Hadeishi had expected. The schematics did not do justice to the endlessly snaking passages, countless levels, ramps, elevators, and gangways they had traversed to reach this point. From his handheld, Mitsu knew the corridor ahead was a main artery in the primary hab core of the refinery. Here, at last, they were reaching territory where they might encounter the crew.
"There's a galley and common area listed on the spec," he whispered to Felix. "Through the hatch and to the right about twenty meters."
"I know." The heicho grinned mischievously over her shoulder. "You know, in the sims, everything was very shipshape."
Hadeishi swallowed a guffaw. Nothing they'd seen so far had been clean. A thin layer of oily, pastelike grime covered every visible surface. Some of the gangways they'd climbed had left black stains on his gloves and boots. The chu-sa had neglected to pack an analysis comp with a sampler, but he suspected all this finely coated debris was residue from the refinery operations. He could feel the ship vibrating through his boots and shoulder — somewhere downship enormous machines were grinding raw asteroid rock down to a molecular grit for ore separation. Some process of the sort was leaking this slippery, invasive grime. Civilians…is it like this on commercial, licensed miners, too?
Shaking his head slightly, he nodded to Felix. "Is this a bad spot? In the sims, I mean."
"No." Felix adjusted her grip on the Whipsaw, dark brown eyes troubled. "So we're going to go careful."
Tonuac motioned, drawing her attention back to the door. The point-man keyed the pressure door open, revealing a brightly-lit corridor with rubberized carpet. Tonuac eased out, swinging his gun sharply from side to side, then signed all-clear. Felix was moving the instant Tonuac cleared the door, one hand guiding Hadeishi through the opening. Behind them, Maratay scuttled along, playing out hardwire from his spool. Clavigero sprinted up the passageway, running as quietly as he could to catch up.
Hadeishi caught a glimpse of a broad passage lined with working, reasonably clean overhead lights. There were even 3v posters of beaches and wooded mountainsides on the bulkheads. Tonuac punched the access plate of a door facing them as Felix and the chu-sa reached his side. The two Marine privates were crowding in behind, shipguns covering the hallway in either direction.
The door hissed opened and a man — a crewman with short, sandy hair and an armload of briefing binders in his arms — stepped through into their midst.
Hadeishi froze, startled. Felix smashed the butt of the Whipsaw into the man's face without so much as a heartbeat's hesitation. The miner jumped back with almost equal speed and the gunstock slammed into his binders. They flew everywhere in a spray of paper and diagrams.
"Intruder…urk!" The man's scream was cut off abruptly. Felix seized the throat of his braided jacket, lifted him bodily — an easy task for her suit — and flung him back through the hatch. Tonuac had already leapt ahead — the map showed a cross-passage leading to a maintenance shaft which rose to the bridge deck — and slewed to a halt, cursing.
Instead of a narrow, pipe-lined corridor, there was a ready room with an entertainment center, a wet bar and four very startled-looking miners. The clerk crashed past the Marine and took out a card table in a clatter of shattering plastic and plywood. The other men leapt up, shouting in alarm.
"Other way," Hadeishi and Felix shouted simultaneously. Tonuac short-stroked the trigger on his shipgun and jumped back through the doorway. A sharp bang! flung a room-suppression munition into the compartment. The miners scattered away from the bouncing black sphere.
"Portside," Felix shouted, shoving Hadeishi past her. Maratay darted ahead, still concentrating on the hardwire spooling out in a silvery ribbon behind him as he ran. The heicho cranked a round from the Whipsaw into the access panel for the compartment door. A violent, concussive boom followed and smoke billowed out of the wall. A second, muffled whoomp followed hard on its heels as the room suppression munition blew apart inside the ready room.