“To the interior?”
“We will exceed the temperature tolerances for some of the interface elements.”
“… Just how hot is it going to get in here?”
“Between 200 and 275 degrees Celsius.”
“That’ll kill me!”
“Incorrect. You will merely suffer significant permanent disfigurement. Unless you come into contact with any metallic surfaces. That will kill you.”
“The entire station is a metallic surface!” she snapped.
“This collaboration session would be much easier if you would take some of the burden of problem-solving rather than fault-finding.”
“Listen. You can’t navigate the inside of the station, so I need to be able to get in there.”
“I can navigate the inside of the station if I ram through the wall, as previously stated.”
“You don’t retake a facility by ramming through walls!”
“There is no survivable means of entry that fits the existing parameters.”
“There must be. We’ve barely gone through a dozen ideas.”
“Incorrect. I have simulated seventy thousand proposed methods. Only those with the highest probability of success were proposed to you.”
“What are some options you dismissed? Maybe I can come up with something you didn’t.”
“That is unlikely. I am smarter than you.”
“We’re wasting time! Just tell me, fast!”
The answer came in an unnaturally rapid burst of voice with no pauses.
“Deactivation of microwave source, dismissed due to uncertain accessibility of the surface. Wireless connection to penetrate station control system, dismissed due to the lack of active wireless connections. Wired connection to penetrate station control system, dismissed due to lack of means to initiate a wired connection. Expansion of atmosphere retention force field to encapsulate and partially pressurize nonhuman-safe drone-deployment hatch—”
“Wait, what was that last one?” Michella said.
The ship pivoted and a small almost imperceptible valve of some sort became visible.
“According to the marking surrounding this hatch, it is a maintenance drone hatch. Based upon available data, that would suggest a small but human-navigable but nonpressurized tube leading to a human-accessible hatch for accessing and servicing the drones. The proposed method involved creating an atmospheric retention force field to seal over the hatch and pressurize the tube until you could enter the station.”
“Why wouldn’t that work?”
“It would completely expend all remaining atmosphere in both my cabin and reserve tanks. I would no longer be a human-compatible vehicle until I could replenish them. That is why a similar method couldn’t be used for a crew hatch. I don’t have enough atmosphere to fill the air lock sufficiently to support human life.”
“That’s the one. Let’s get started.”
“That would leave you with no means of evacuation.”
“I’ll worry about that later. Now, are there any weapons aboard? I must have lost the pistol when I made my escape last time.”
“Accessing inventory.”
A compartment beside the seat clicked open, revealing an assortment of random items that drifted out into the cabin. There were a few cans with Chinese writing on them, a handful of individually wrapped jerky strips, and a packet of Sobrietin.
“Records indicate these canisters are pepper spray.”
“Good enough. Is there anything that could keep me in contact with you?”
Another compartment popped open, this time sending no less than seven slidepads drifting about, along with an assortment of hands-free devices and a military radio the size of a brick. There was also a mask with two canisters attached.
“Based upon signal attenuation records, the military radio may be able to maintain contact through the shielding.”
Her eyes brightened. “If I can get this connected to their network, can you take control of their systems?”
“Negative. My network penetration skills are limited. I am a modified subset with specialized skills.”
“Ma would have been able to do it!”
“Then perhaps you should contact Ma and have her help you. Or maybe you should fly yourself around space instead of relying on me.”
“Okay, fine. I’m sorry. What’s this mask? Is this oxygen?”
“That is a hazardous-atmosphere mask. It will provide an isolated air supply for a duration of twenty-five minutes per canister. It will not protect you from exposure to a vacuum.”
“Shouldn’t there be a full emergency suit in here? Does Lex really fly without a flight suit?”
“Negative. He wears the flight suit. If you borrowed the ship, you should have borrowed the suit as well.”
“I guess so. Still. The mask is better than nothing. What do we need to do to get started?”
“I will approach the hatch and synchronize my motion with it. You can clean up the mess you’ve made of my interior by requesting so many things from storage.”
Michella gritted her teeth and gathered up the floating items, pondering as she did so why artificial intelligences seemed so much more human when they were being petty and unreasonable. Until this very moment, Michella would have thought a more human-seeming AI would have been the sort she would prefer to deal with, but now that she was preparing to trust Coal to keep her alive long enough to get into the station again, she found herself wishing she’d been paired with something a little more mechanical and precise.
She put away anything she didn’t need for this inadvisable mission. She paired the military radio to a hands-free and clipped the radio to her belt. The pepper-spray cans and a few slidepads went into her handbag, which at this point had little else inside besides her carefully stowed pads and pens. She strapped on the mask and made sure the oxygen supply was shut off. If she would need it later, best not to use it now.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
“Then let us begin. And please try to avoid dying. It would be disappointing to fail this mission due to your frailty.”
#
Hatch bounced slowly from wall to wall, the closest the zero-g environment would allow to pacing.
“I don’t like it,” he growled. “I don’t like that the plan is moving but we don’t have full control yet.”
“That’s because it’s a botched job so far,” Crick said, tinkering with some wires. “If I wasn’t here, it would have failed by now. We need that code.”
“I know that!” Hatch snapped. “You think I don’t know that? Any way we can get a message to Patel? You think he’ll be ready to deal?”
“I think Patel is probably coping with the storm. And any sort of communication is a question mark with the unofficial power control we’ve got.”
Hatch clenched his teeth, then made his way to the PA system.
“Preethy, the storm’s getting pretty big down there. You sure you don’t want to come out and help us out? Or are you banking on us killing your uncle? Maybe you’re thinking more room at the top is better for you in the long run. Gives you a shot at the top of the mountain.”
He punched the wall, angrily. “Or maybe, tucked away in the vents like a rodent, you’re having a hard time picturing the scale of the disaster that you’ve already failed to prevent. It’s a hell of a view down there right now. A nice brown streak running across that little swath of planet where the entire population lives. But sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around the big things. I can appreciate that. It’s the stuff that’s close to home that really gets persuasive. Maybe… about two years into my run with Kelso’s crew, it was my job to persuade some midlevel guy back on Movi to come clean about where he’d been skimming off the vig on a gambling thing we had set up there. Can you believe we caved in the front of his store and he didn’t talk? We tuned up a couple of his customers. Didn’t talk. We bloodied up his brother-in-law. Didn’t talk. But t
hat guy had a dog. Little… I don’t know… little rat-lookin’ thing. The kind of thing you’d see eating trash behind a filthy bar. I sent a guy to grab the dog. I thought I was just going to be letting off steam. Getting my frustrations out by slapping an animal around. But one little thump, one little yelp, and that guy was blubbering like a child, telling us everything we wanted and then some. For a dog.”
He cracked his knuckles. “That was back before I realized how much psychology goes into this stuff. Before I was as well read as I am now. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘This guy, he gets off on this sort of thing. He likes hurting people and animals and all that.’ Well you’re wrong. That’s the sort of thing I only do when nothing else is working and I’m getting frustrated.” He leaned close to the microphone. “Well guess what? Nothing else is working. And I am frustrated.” He turned to Crick. “Where’s the rest of the crew? Her people. The Patel Construction people.”
“Crew module 6.”
Hatch glanced at the ship manifest and darted through the corridors. Before long, he’d reached the overfilled room packed with workers bound and gagged. He found the nearest panel and hopped back on the PA. “I don’t have a dog to slap around, Preethy. But I’ve got something almost as good.”
He opened the door long enough to drag out the first person within reach. It was a somewhat heavy fellow with dark hair and bleary eyes. “Let’s see who we’ve got.”
He slammed the man against an access card reader until his badged registered. “Hmm… Victor Marx. Fifteen years in Patel Construction. Career man. How about that? Wife. Three kids. Nice. Nice. Shame he’s got an appointment with an air lock.”
He dragged the man after him as he navigated the halls, slamming his hostage into walls along the way. A small single-person maintenance hatch with a dedicated air lock turned up along the way. He threw the man inside and shut the door, then found the nearest panel.
“In… forty-five seconds our company man is going to go the same way as our journalist friend. When he’s done, I’ll go get another. Oh, and look at this. I can turn on the internal communication panel. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a man without a suit in an air lock, but you’re in for a real treat.”
He tapped a few controls. “Safety… ignore. Safety… ignore. There we are. Feast your ears.”
The public address speakers all across the ship began to produce a combination of the mechanical hiss of the air lock evacuating its air and the terrified grunts of the gagged station worker. The grunts became more vigorous and desperate, then slowly both the hiss and the grunts began to grow quieter.
“Oh, if you could see this guy’s face. You can actually see the eyes going bloodshot.”
Distantly, there was the sound of commotion, then a click and crackle followed by a voice over the radio.
“We’ve got her. We’ve got Preethy. Securing her now.”
“Get him out of the air lock! If you take the life of one of my crew, I promise you, the code dies with me,” Preethy cried over the radio.
Hatch watched for a moment longer, then reversed the air lock. When the door released, he opened it and pulled the man out.
“Congratulations. You got a reprieve. For now…”
#
Lex’s evasive maneuvering had cost him some raw speed, but staying ahead of the worst of the storm earned him far greater visibility, which more than made up for it. He was mere minutes away from the array now, but he’d yet to turn his mind to the task of what exactly he would do when he arrived. That was because the combination of the fringe of the storm and the unfathomably intense microwaves presented him with an exciting new situation that needed dealing with.
“Incoming!” he yelped, swerving to the right.
A brilliantly glowing glob of molten stone, roughly the size of a basketball, missed him by barely a meter.
“I sure hope there was supposed to be some sort of safety setting that the bad guys didn’t turn on.” He swerved again as another ball of liquid rock narrowly missed him. “Because if not, I’d say this is one hell of a public health hazard.”
The broadcast power being pumped into the atmosphere was vaporizing most of the smaller airborne debris, but the larger stuff withstood enough of the blast to be turned into the sort of stuff one would expect to come raining down after a volcanic eruption. His shields were practically sparkling with the impacts, and little black specks had cratered themselves into the surface of his windshield and bodywork.
Droplets and blobs increased in intensity as he drew nearer to the array. And it was certainly an array. Rather than one large, comically oversize dish beaming energy into the sky, a grid of hexagon-shaped transmitters spread out before him. They were each easily the size of a football field, and there were more of them than he cared to count. Each was crackling with energy, transmitting with such intensity he could actually see where the waves of adjacent transmitters clashed and combined.
The storm had ceased to follow him as he punched a hole through a fence separating the area from the rest of the desert. It wasn’t clear if they’d wised up and decided not to attack their own power source or if the transmission was generating some sort of force that kept the storm and the worst of the debris at bay. He didn’t particularly care. The important part was that he wasn’t dodging massive balls of molten stone anymore, and the wind wasn’t trying to send him rolling across the landscape like a tumbleweed.
He took the momentary respite to get a read on his situation. A quick glance eventually identified the shield status screen. It was ticking slowly up from fifteen percent.
“Wow,” he said. “We cut that one close, huh, Squee?”
Lex looked aside to find that his pet’s eyes were wide with a trance-like fascination, watching the dancing whorls of plasma over their heads through the wraparound windshield. It felt like they were inside the sort of electronic prop you’d expect to see in the window of a tacky novelty shop.
“At least she’s happy.”
He scanned the innumerable transmitter nodes. In the few frenzied moments of thought that had passed for a plan thus far, he’d had it in his head that there would be some huge fortress-like central structure that he could storm. Most of his concerns had been how he would get past its defenses, not how he would find it.
“All these things look the same. How am I supposed to know which one’s got the bad guys? This would be a real great time to be able to talk to Ma or Nick or someone.”
He slowed his hoversled. Large as the grounds of the array were, if he kept up his current speed, he’d go blasting right out the back. With less speed came less rushing wind and less rumbling of the reactors. In the place of the familiar sounds of racing came the terrifying sound of the facility itself. The air filtering in from the outside stank of ozone. What he heard wasn’t just the crackle of electricity but also the buzzing sawtooth of interfering frequencies.
Lex turned, heading for the heart of the array.
“Okay, so if there’s one of these nodes with more controls than the rest, it makes sense that it would be in the center, right? You put the controls in the center.” He rattled along for a bit longer. “No, wait. That’s dumb. Then you’d have to go through half the array to get to the controls. It’d be near the edge. But which edge? Where’s the biggest city near here?”
He tried to wrestle logic out of a mind still humming with the recent infusion of adrenaline. Exhilaration and problem-solving didn’t make for very good partners. Fortunately, a solution presented itself in the form of a distant clap and a flash of his shields.
“Oh, good! Someone’s shooting at me. That narrows things down.”
He took a sharp turn in the direction of the shield flash. Another shot rang out, this one coming from almost directly in front. He squinted into the distance and spotted the shooter. It was a node quite a distance away, but as pulsing light from above illuminated it, he could see some vehicles scattered around it. Some
were branded with Nick’s construction logo. Most were unmarked. And all had people crouching behind them, sniper-style guns steadied on their hoods.
“Here we go.”
Two more shots flashed off the shield. Then another one lodged in his windshield as the shields failed.
“Aw, come on, Karter. This thing can’t take a couple of armor-piercing rounds? You’re slipping.”
Lex didn’t even try to drive evasively. Instead, he slouched down in his seat and weighed his options. The weapon Nick had given him was in the seat beside him. It was a shotgun. He knew how to use it, or at least he knew where the trigger was. But he didn’t imagine leaning out the window of the racer and taking pot shots was a workable avenue to victory. As far as he could tell, there was just the one option remaining.
He reached out and adjusted a few final settings.
“Impact dampeners and inertial dampeners to full. Locator disabled. TymFlex verified.” He grabbed Squee and held her tight. “When in doubt, Squee. Always go faster.”
He eased up the throttle. The hoversled accelerated. A few more shots bit into his vehicle, but the shots were tapering off now. Seeing a high-powered piece of equipment barreling toward you without any intention of stopping had a way of fouling your aim.
Warnings flashed across the screens, and an alert announced the TymFlex system was about to engage. A bullet launched toward his windshield just as the system kicked in.
As had happened so many times before, the violence of an impact shifted down into an eerie calm. Rattling, grinding impact turned into a distant edge-of-hearing thrum. Cracks wove through the safety polymer of his windshield, moving like slow-motion lightning and forking into a lacy pattern that caught the plasma glow beautifully. He watched panicked thugs drifting through the air, midleap. The impact struck one of the other vehicles. His sled and the larger hovervan caromed off one another. Then came the impact with the wall of the facility. Brick and masonry seemed to explode into powder as his hoversled struck the wall. At this speed, one might have thought the fortified facility was just a sandcastle, ready to scatter at the next kick of a bully.
Indra Station Page 20
