"Sorry," he said, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He ordered the weapon to fire with his link, but it still didn"t activate.
Chris stood staring at the malfunctioning weapon. Cinmei skipped and shoved her foot into his groin. He instinctually bent over, but realized she had missed his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. She grabbed his head to knee him in the face. Chris blocked the strike by putting his hand on her knee. He couldn"t stop the blow, but he slowed it down enough that it had no effect. He groaned again, feigning weakness.
She stepped in to throw him over her hip, but he pushed her back. Her arms dropped to steady herself. Chris. .h.i.t her in the face with a one-two combination as hard as he could. His knuckles felt sharp pain, but the effect on Cinmei was devastating. She crumpled back. Blood welled out from her nose. She moaned.
"The d.a.m.n thing didn"t work the whole time?" he said.
Her hand came up to cover her nose. Tears rolled from her eyes. "The cybloc. Not set you fire at you or me." Her breath came in ragged gasps from her open mouth.
Chris understood. The taser wouldn"t fire at either of them. He felt a fresh wave of shame for betraying her. He pushed it aside.
"I"m sorry, but I"ll be d.a.m.ned if I"m going to China! I"ve heard that company people who end up there never make it back!"
"Please ... let me go there," she said.
"I"ll think about it," he said. "If there"s a way to get us each to our own destination then I"ll take it. Right now, to the locker room. March!" Chris pointed to the exit door of the c.o.c.kpit. Cinmei walked back out. Chris herded her back into the locker room. Drops of blood from her nose sprinkled the white floor of the connecting corridor. He looked down and saw his own blood dripping from his throbbing knuckle. It reminded Chris of the blood from the pilot"s chin and keyed an odd thought.
I wonder if someone back on Earth will be a.n.a.lyzing every drop of blood down this corridor to figure out what happened.
They entered the locker room again.
"Get into that storage locker; at least until I can figure out what"s going on."
Cinmei tried to wipe the blood from her face but she only covered her hand in blood as well. She rolled onto all fours and crawled into the locker. Chris watched carefully, alert to a trick.
"Stay in there!" he said harshly.
She refused to look at him. She sat with her back against the side wall and covered her bruised face with her hand. Chris gratefully slammed the door and locked it with his link.
From out here, millions of miles away, Earth must be a tiny pinpoint. He told himself the course couldn"t be much different between the Western hemisphere and the Chinese bloc until the end of the journey.
I have to get back to Europe. I have no choice. One of us will go home a hero and the other a prisoner. It was her or me.
Chris realized that at some point the pilot and his coworker had stopped yelling. They must have caught some of the exchange outside in between their calls for help and banging on the locker door.
If things don"t work out, I hope at least I have the opportunity to go back and thrash her for it before I let myself out the airlock. Better to die than spend the rest of my life at subsistence or worse as a slave in the Chinese bloc.
Chris picked up both the tasers. He accessed his weapon and removed Cinmei from the safety lockout. Then he removed Cinmei from the access list so she couldn"t tamper with it. He couldn"t do the same for her weapon, but he figured physical possession would be enough. He put a link watch on the doors of the lockers so he"d get a warning if they opened up.
He turned and started to walk back toward the c.o.c.kpit. He accessed the controls through his link as he walked.
A new interface blossomed in his mind"s eye. He saw the shuttle, a tiny spindle aligned on a grand white line arcing away out into s.p.a.ce. With a thought, he accelerated along the line, pulling out, and zoomed in on the Earth.
His link enumerated the many control options available to him.
Course change, he selected with a simple thought. Another section opened in his mind, ready to accept his commands.
He raised his clenched fist and smiled. He was going home.
Twelve.
Welcome to Avalon. Gauss Systems would like to remind you of a few rules required of guests visiting our s.p.a.ce habitat ...
Aldriena sighed deep inside her gear. She wondered how many of the rules she"d break this time, disabling the deep s.p.a.ce radar and hunting an alien ten times more dangerous than she was.
Gear is required for all activity outside your allocated quarters. For your own safety, your movement is restricted to certain zones of the station ...
Aldriena paid little attention to the spiel piped in through her link. The airlock to her courier closed behind her as she stepped onto the bay concourse and rode a conveyor into the city. Her Cascavel prowled the local service network, already gathering information by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Western Link Protocol.
Divide and conquer, she reminded herself. Step one-locate Avalon"s local radar.
Aldriena figured she could probably simply ask for the radar control through the civilian half of her Cascavel, but a slight chance existed that the request might be flagged by security. She decided to keep direct queries as a last resort.
Aldriena asked for a map to the zero grav laboratories. The route appeared in a diagram in her PV. An option existed to include external routing. But anyone asking for routes extending outside the station into the vacuum of s.p.a.ce might well be flagged by security as well.
She thought about heading somewhere popular and waiting to see if her Cascavel could uncover the information by snooping through a lot of link traffic. It would probably work eventually, but she had to finish before the UNSF arrived. They"d given her a lead of only hours in which to prepare the station for their arrival.
Aldriena inquired about station tours for new inhabitants. The standard tour package came up and she stepped through the sites one by one, as they worked around the station. She put the map into browse mode and moved the view through several angles. When she rotated a view beyond the bulkhead of the section being ill.u.s.trated, it showed nothing. She found an option on the pane called "complete view." Suddenly, the interface rendered the areas beyond the bulkheads, including some features outside the station.
Aldriena blinked. She recognized the local radar array almost on top of the section in which she stood. She realized sheepishly that the s.p.a.ceport was a logical place to put the Earthward-looking radar station. According to the map, it sat beyond and "above" a bulkhead separating the pa.s.senger embarkment zone and the control tower.
It was very close!
Step two-plant the spoofer at the radar station.
Aldriena studied the map for a minute longer. Then she laughed. She took a right and strode down the crowded corridor until she found the women"s restroom entrance on the right wall. She walked inside an open pa.s.sageway into the room and found the corner most stalls.
According to the schematics, the women"s restroom on the arrival deck was within seventy meters of the local radar antenna covering the Earthward hemisphere of s.p.a.ce around the station.
Within the confines of the stall, Aldriena fiddled with the spoofer device, readying it inside her right glove. She didn"t worry about making a lot of noise, since anyone trying to solve the logistics problem of using a public restroom while in full gear would make a racket.
Aldriena left the stall. A woman stood in front of a mirror staring at her own face. Aldriena automatically judged the stranger"s looks: the long black hair looked too frazzled; the thin nose drooped too much at the end. Otherwise, the person looked healthy, but ordinary. The woman"s helmet sat on the counter.
"I"m trying to memorize my face now while I can see it," the woman said.
Aldriena flashed a fake smile. "Good idea," she said, and removed her own helmet. She splashed her face with water from the sink in front of her. She saw hand dryers and luxurious white towels, so she grabbed a towel and wiped her face, then let it drop into a receiving bin.
"It must be harder for you to wear the helmet all the time. You"re so beautiful," the woman said.
"Me? Oh, thank you," Aldriena said. Compliments from women were harder for her to absorb, since they usually came with less agenda than those from men.
Aldriena let her spoofer slip into the towel return opening. "Oh, d.a.m.n, I dropped my manual," she said. "So stupid, why"d they give us a hardcopy, anyways?"
The woman across from her smiled. "Leave it in there," she said. "That"s where it belongs."
Aldriena laughed. She pulled open the access doors below the counter and kneeled down. The woman, having delivered her joke, donned her helmet and walked out of the restroom.
Aldriena peeked under the counter. There were four, square ports the size of her open hand for robotic delivery of soap and toiletries. The rest of the cabinet was empty. The station had been built with attention to detail; even under the sink, the white plastic was clean and flawless. No errant holes or bad material cuts marred the underside of the countertop. Aldriena mentally shrugged. Her spoofer only had to go undetected for a few hours. She attached it to the upper right hand corner of the cabinet s.p.a.ce and closed the doors.
Aldriena laughed.
Who would have guessed? she thought. My first and second objectives are as easy as throwing something away in the women"s restroom.
Aldriena emerged from the restroom and headed out of the debarkation area of the s.p.a.ceport.
Step three-find the spinner.
Aldriena brought up her station map browser again to check for the closest security stop point. It looked to be only three minutes away. She fell into a beautiful concourse of white and purple. The ever-present ads on the walls were only outnumbered by the purple airscrub-gra.s.s vases.
The nearest ad suggested a switch of her undersheers, claiming that men "could tell from your eyes" if a woman had s.e.xy undersheers or plain white ones under her clothes.
Implausible. Besides, I"m already wearing the finest available under Momma Veer.
This time she had decided undersheers alone wouldn"t cut it. She needed the protection of her military skinsuit if she saw action. And the likelihood of action seemed high, considering her a.s.signment to ambush a warlike alien cyborg.
She came to the checkpoint. An alcove in the wall held a desk and a guard. Beyond them, a large metal door stood closed.
Aldriena stepped forward. The guard stood up before her.
"Where"s the spinner?" she asked.
"What makes you think-?"
The guard stopped short. Aldriena had pulled her helmet off. She leaned forward on the counter and let her hair spill to one side.
"You ... you should put that back on," the guard said.
Yep. It"s a guy, she thought.
"Just tell me where the spinner is. Whaddaya call it?"
There was a pause.
"Claw."
"Claw. Nice. So where is it?"
"Why would I know?"
"Because you"re security. Of course, you know. Look, tell me where it is and I"ll owe you one."
Aldriena knew that no one on the stations really believed in the spinner"s rules or wanted to follow them. And most men were happy to discover a woman brazen enough to ignore a rule or two, provided she was stunningly beautiful.
She gave him her best smile. She hoped he was tired of staring at black helmets. Seeing a beautiful face would be more powerful in an environment like this. When people see something all the time, they become attenuated to it. Take it away, and they starve for it. Aldriena fed a starving man.
The guard looked down at the featureless console. No doubt, he had a PV pane anch.o.r.ed there. The counter held information displays only he could see.
"Spinward," he said. "There"s a lab. They"ve been building something and I believe Claw oversees it."
Her link received a pointer. She opened it and saw a lab outlined on her PV map.
"Thanks ... what"s your name?"
"Drago."
Aldriena smiled. "Thanks, Drago. I"m Aldriena. I"m busy right now, but I"ll be back."
Actually, I won"t be back. Poor guy. I still have a ways to go, though, before I"ve used men worse than they"ve used me. Or tried to use me, anyway.
She slipped back into her helmet and traipsed away. She cursed the bulky armor she wore for the thousandth time. How could she make a memorable exit looking like a black robot soldier? She sighed. It occurred to her that the faceplate of the armor never fogged up. At least the suits were well designed. She had never felt hot or cold in them, either.
Aldriena picked up the pointer in her PV and changed course to find the lab. The lab extended across an entire quarter section of the station, spanning more square feet than a soccer field. Her curiosity awakened. She pictured an alien from a distant star, working on a secret ... what? A way back home? A personal a.r.s.enal with which to attack Earth? An entertainment system?
Her link told her she was only a few steps away from the closest lab entrance. She took a turn and saw the corridor ahead ended at the lab door. It clearly wasn"t an ordinary door: it stood seven feet tall and twice as large as the bulkhead doors near the s.p.a.ceport. Her link bathed the end of the pa.s.sageway in a virtual red haze signifying a forbidden zone. A real-world bright green biohazard symbol and a red stop sign at chest-height on the wall completed the warning ensemble.
Probably a HIT here somewhere, too. A well-hidden one.
She came up to the bulkhead door and slid her hand over the biohazard sign affixed to the wall. Her fingers felt a ridge. It was real.
Please turn around and depart, this area is off limits, came the warning piped through her link.
Security wanted there to be no doubt: this area was closed. Her Cascavel didn"t pick up packets leaving the network beyond the door. The communications might be routed more securely, she thought.
She turned back. Right now, she looked like someone who had made a wrong turn, not a potential terrorist.
Something or someone had to go past the doors. Aldriena considered the possibilities. The lab workers had to come and go ... unless the spinner worked alone?
Presumably, technicians might need to fix hardware glitches here and there. Things that a spinner might consider beneath its notice. If a spinner thought anything like a human. Impossible to say. Aldriena decided to keep thinking along the route anyway. So that meant they would be replacing parts. Most likely, the parts would be fabricated on the base, given the extreme remoteness of the location.
How would they bring in the parts? A cart? A toolbox? A robot?
"Merda!" she spat.
If only we"d gone with a software hack to swap out the identification signatures of the UNSF ships with fake transport signatures. But the colonel with the bad link bias pointed out that it would be too obvious to anyone on the lookout for an incursion ... d.a.m.n him.
He was probably right, though.
Aldriena hated working in the suits. How the h.e.l.l was she supposed to break the rules and get away with it when she looked like everyone else? At least it made it somewhat easier to take the exact opposite tactic and impersonate someone. Easy enough to grab someone"s gear and wear it. The person"s link complicated things.
Her Cascavel could clone another link for a short time. It had to break into the target link and steal its authentication secrets, then disable the target link so it would be isolated from the network. Unlike legal links, the Cascavel could charade as other hardware for a time. The copy wouldn"t work forever, but Aldriena felt confident it would last long enough to get in there and hand a spinner her special delivery.
She sped up her stride toward the nearest fabrication module on her PV map. She pa.s.sed other station inhabitants in their gear, each one treading along on unknown business. She could see resignation in their strides. Humans weren"t meant to operate this way. The suits were dampening their interactions to the point of smothering everyone"s natural social behaviors.