by Wil McCarthy
“I’m not fighting any saboteur,” said Delao.
To which Alice said, “Jesus, are you stupid? I’m asking you to open a fucking door. Derek and I will handle the saboteur.”
“Who is it?” Ming asked.
“The Kiwi. Bethy.” And then Derek slapped her helmet down and dogged it into place, and the sound insulation was really quite good. She could barely hear Ming’s reply, and couldn’t understand a word of it.
Then a voice rang out in her helmet: Igbal’s. “What the hell is going on out there, Sandy?”
“This is Alice. I swiped Sandy’s suit.”
“Okay. What the hell is going on, Alice?”
“Saboteur, outside,” she said. “Maybe headed for the antimatter. I’m going to need you to clear this channel and let the grown-ups talk.”
Then, because that was rude and stupid even for her, she added, “I’ll keep you posted as things are happening.”
“Roger,” he said. “I’ll provide, what do you call, operational support as needed.”
“Perfect,” she said. Then, as she made her way into the egress lock: “Actually, do you have a location on Bethy Powell?”
“Hold on. Yeah, her suit is outside the station. She must have overridden the pre-breathe cycle, because the outer hatch is already open.”
“Fuck.”
Alice might not be much of an astronaut, but she was a hell of a sky-to-scuba diver; she knew all about decompression sickness. If you reduced pressure too quickly, you risked nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream that could hit you like a liter of vodka and a fall down the stairs. In extreme cases you could outright die from it, with pink foam bleeding out of every orifice, but that mainly happened when swimming upward too quickly from deep water, with several atmospheres of pressure change over just a few minutes’ time. When dropping unexpectedly from aircraft atmosphere (say, eight hundred millibars of normal air) to jump suit atmosphere (three hundred millibars of nearly pure oxygen), the risk was permanent disability via, as the Maroon Berets called it, “the bends, the chokes, and the staggers.” It was really random, for reasons no one had ever understood, but if you screwed up enough and got unlucky enough and postponed treatment long enough, the joint pain and bone aches and flu-like malaise could dog you for the rest of your life. Alice knew a guy who’d Purple-Hearted out of the service in exactly that way.
If Bethy had cycled through the airlock in just a few minutes, then she was definitely at risk. And so was anyone following her out.
“This is a damage control situation,” she told Ming and Delao, shouting a little to be heard through the helmet visor. “As soon as I’m out of the airlock, you need to get in and out of there as quickly as you can. No fucking around. Okay?”
The two women (currently shrugging out of their coveralls, revealing bright blue and bright paisley space underwear, respectively), nodded unhappily.
“Once you unstick that hatch and get Derek where he needs to be, come back outside again, quickly again, and wait for instructions. Okay? I know it’s a risk, but the whole station is in danger.”
They nodded again, miserably.
And then Derek was closing the inner hatch, leaving Alice alone in the egress lock.
“You all right?” Igbal asked her.
“Yep,” she said, more or less meaning it. She was terrified, breathing faster than she’d like, and she had no idea what was going to happen or what she was going to do or whether she’d even be alive fifteen minutes from now. But for her that was pretty much a normal day at the office.
Igbal said, “I wasn’t wrong about you, was I?”
“You were,” Alice said. “But not like you think.”
The airlock controls were pretty self-explanatory, so she shut off the air flow, overrode the pre-breathe and egress cycles, and turned on the vacuum pump. For thirty seconds or so, the air reverberated with a kind of mechanical slurping noise as it was pumped out of the chamber and into a storage tank somewhere. In an even bigger emergency, she could vent it directly to outer space, or even blow the explosive bolts on the outer hatch, but that would be wasteful, and she still hoped there was a future where that mattered.
As the air pressure dropped below four hundred millibars, the pump noises got noticeably quieter, not because the pump was shutting down, but because there wasn’t as much air to carry the sound waves.
“Bethy can probably hear us,” she said. “Can you cut her out of the channel?”
“Yeah, hang on. Lurch, would you please take Elizabeth Powell’s spacesuit off the voice network?”
“Acknowledged,” said a too-deep voice.
Take that, Bethy. Now you’re alone.
Was she, though? During field engagements, if a lone operative fled on foot into the ocean, it meant only one thing: there was a submarine standing by to pick them up.
“Ig, where is Bethy now?”
“Floating free,” Igbal answered. “She’s activated her jets, heading for the Hub. Heading for the particle accelerator, actually.”
“Fuck. That’s not good.”
“I agree.”
“Hello?” said Derek’s voice.
“Derek, where are you? Are you at the stuck hatch?”
“Close to it, yes. Alpha Corridor comm panel.”
“Okay, stand by. Igbal, how much would you say that block of antimatter is worth?”
“That depends. Who’s buying?”
“Let’s say it’s Cartel vengadores.”
“Instead of a nuke? They could build a big nuke for about twenty billion dollars. Or a lot of little ones.”
Fuck. Stealing an unguarded brick of antimatter would surely cost a lot less than that. Hell, subverting a government operative probably cost next to nothing, which made Alice wonder why she’d never been approached, the way Bethy and Dona clearly had. Too fucking honest? Too fucking stupid?
Operationally, it was better if Bethy were planning to steal the antimatter rather than simply igniting it in place. But not a lot better, because she’d want to cover her tracks, make the whole thing look like an accident. Leave no witnesses to report anything missing.
Alice could feel the spacesuit inflating around her as the pressure dropped below two hundred millibars, then one hundred. But then it started to slow down, as the pump had a harder and harder time biting into anything. The lights dimmed, as if to show the air was no longer breathable. Alice found the control for her headlamps, and switched them on, turning the airlock chamber into a puppet show of light and shadows.
“Guys,” she said, “I think there might be some sort of stealthed spaceship in our vicinity. Maybe not very large. Bethy’s got to have some sort of an exit plan.”
“Okay,” Igbal said carefully. “I’ll see what the real Sandy can pull up on sensors.”
“Maybe nothing,” Derek warned. Alice was inclined to agree. There wasn’t much that could hide from high-end entangled radar, but regular navigation sensors were easily spoofed. That and a good coat of black paint could take you pretty far against the night sky. You could still track an aircraft by star occultation, but the Air Force rumor mill insisted true invisibility was also a thing, where light rays were bent all the way around an object, or recreated verbatim on the opposite surface. Alice had never seen it, but she had no reason to doubt it was possible.
“If Bethy gets to that ship,” she said, “we’re probably all dead. Hell, if she gets to the antimatter we could all be dead.”
For example, if Bethy were a saboteur on a suicide mission, or a thief with less than perfect technique. Did Alice really want to wait around for that?
She said, “This is taking too long. I’m venting the airlock.”
She did so, and with a little popping sensation the last of the pressure fell away from her. The suit stiffened, like an old-fashioned air-pumped tire.
“I’m opening the outer hatch.”
“If there’s a ship,” Igbal said while she did this, “it could also be listening. I’m going to encr
ypt the channel.”
“Good idea,” said Derek.
“We’re suited up and ready to go,” said Delao.
Okay, then. Outside the airlock was a cold, starry night, in the shadow of the Hub. Stepping out into it was actually much gentler than jumping out of an airplane.
She took a breath.
Looked around.
Drank in the wonder of it all. Above her: the stars, the full Earth and the full Moon behind it. Below: the station, the Shade, the Hub. She could even see Bethy, about a kilometer away, by the side-glare of Bethy’s own headlamps. She hadn’t thought to stealth herself and drift in the darkness. She was halfway to the Hub and a third of the way to the particle accelerator.
“I’m closing the hatch,” Alice said, and did so, dogging it shut. Then she turned toward Bethy, let go of the handrail, and leaped out into the void with all her might.
Which was stupid, because her suit was equipped with jets. There was a two-nub controller on either pointer finger, so you could make a fist and steer with either thumb. She spent about ten seconds familiarizing herself with the controls, which were video-game easy. Then she somersaulted for fun, and engaged the jets for real. A speedometer in her helmet display ticked upward, and upward some more.
With gentle but relentless acceleration, she quickly gained speed on Bethy; in just a few seconds, she could see the distance between them getting smaller. She gave it a few seconds more, all the way up to fifty kph, and then reverted to coasting, with just occasional steering pulses to keep herself from rotating too far off her motion vector.
When you were skydiving, you used the slipstream itself to rotate and steer your body. This was different, and yet weirdly not that different. Cruising at fifty kph felt really pretty normal to her—actually a bit on the lazy side. She was simply flying downward at an angle to form up with another skydiver, same as she’d done a thousand times before. Literally, a thousand!
“We’re depressurizing,” said Delao.
“Good,” Alice told her. “Do it quickly.” Then: “Igbal, what does the antimatter look like?”
“Used to be too small to see, but the last time I looked it was a softball-sized sphere. Growing one atom at a time, like a tree.”
“What does it look like?”
“It’s a soft, shiny metal, like tin. Spinning around in a magnetic vacuum bottle that looks like a gumball machine.”
“Can you shut the accelerator off?”
“I already have.”
“Okay. And these magnets that hold your softball, are they permanent magnets?”
“No, tunable electromagnets, very strong. Run by a little computer that keeps the sphere from approaching the walls.”
“Huh. Okay, well, what happens if I hit your gumball machine really hard?”
“It’s designed to withstand a fifty-thousand-gee impact.”
“Meaning what?”
“Golf club, very hard, in exactly the right spot. I doubt you could do it.”
“You doubt it? That’s your fail-safe system? Jesus. What happens if the magnets fail?”
“They won’t. They’re fueled by trace annihilation events. The closer the sphere gets to the walls, the stronger the field gets. Thing puts out gamma rays, by the way, so I wouldn’t handle it any longer than absolutely necessary.”
“Ah. Great.”
Bethy seemed to have realized she was being followed, probably because Alice’s headlamps were clearly visible in her rearview mirrors. Her jets plumed to life for a few seconds, adding additional velocity. Alice matched it easily, and it suddenly occurred to her that Bethy had no great body of skydiving experience to fall back on. She’d jumped out of a plane maybe ten times in her life, so even though she’d spent three months kicking Alice’s ass at the Marriott Stars, she was at a disadvantage now, and probably scared. Lit up like a runway at night, crawling along at a slug’s pace, wobbling visibly as she fussed with the controls. Even flailing her arms a little, as though that would accomplish anything.
“Lurch,” Alice said, “would you cut Bethy back into the voice channel, please?”
“Acknowledged,” said Lurch.
“Bethy?”
No response.
“Sergeant Powell?”
Again, silence.
“I know you can hear me,” Alice said. “You’re falling, girl, and I’m right on top of you.”
“Fuck off,” Bethy said, finally.
“You’re not getting away, you know. If you give up now, I’ll send you back to Earth in hibernation, no questions asked. If you don’t, I’m going to have to kill you.”
“Stay out of it,” Bethy said. “I’ve got your gun. I’ve got your number. How many times do I have to press your face against a wall before you understand that?”
“You’re not getting out of here,” Alice repeated. “Even if you get past me, whoever you’re working for is most likely going to kill you. And everyone else here. Kind of people want a chunk of antimatter, you think they’re squeamish about collateral damage? You think they keep promises to little Kiwi government girls?”
“Fuck off,” Bethy said again. “You have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Last chance,” Alice said. “No? Lurch, cut Bethy out of the channel again, please.”
“Acknowledged.”
“We’re opening the outer hatch,” said Delao.
“Good. You know what to do.”
Bethy added speed again, a dangerous amount of speed, and Alice realized that in order to catch up, she herself would now need to add more speed than she could safely bleed off before slamming into the particle accelerator.
Fuck.
“She’s going to get there before I get to her.”
“Uh oh,” said Igbal.
“Yeah. What happens if that thing goes off? Will we all very definitely die?”
“Very definitely, yes,” Igbal agreed. “That’s one bad softball. I mean, normal antimatter doesn’t actually convert to pure energy all that fast by itself. Surface reactions tend to drive it away from whatever it’s reacting with, which makes it a lousy fuel. Skitters around like butter in a frying pan, spraying gamma rays every which way. That’s why we made it antilithium antideuteride. That’s, uh, basically H-bomb fuel. Once the reaction starts, a fusion explosion disperses an antimatter plasma that reacts instantly with everything it touches. Boom. We’d never even know what hit us.”
“Ah. Great. I’ll, uh, see what I can do.”
A few seconds later, Delao’s voice said, “We’re outside. Our blood is probably fizzing like soda, but we’re doing it. We’re halfway to the south egress lock.”
“Okay,” Alice singsonged. “Thank you. Clear the channel, please.”
Bethy seemed to know exactly where she was going. The particle accelerator looked like a kilometer-wide ring of end-to-end cargo containers, and she was headed for a wide spot—a building, basically—that was on the side of the ring closest to the station. Presently, Bethy jammed on her deceleration jets and started to slow down. Alice did likewise, judging the rate so that she’d hit the building—hit Bethy, basically—at a velocity she could safely absorb with her legs. Like jumping off the roof of a car instead of jumping off a three-story house.
Bethy struck the surface of the Hub, bounced away, jetted back down to it, and grabbed hold of a grab bar—one of many situated on and around the building. Then, pulling herself hand over hand, she approached a red-and-white-striped door, and activated some kind of control next to it.
That’s when Alice struck her, feet first.
Bethy slammed hard against the side of the building, then bounced and tumbled away into space. Alice herself bounced and tumbled in the opposite direction, but corrected with her jets—they were not difficult to operate, even in a dizzying spin.
Bethy flailed for a moment, apparently disoriented and probably hurt even more than she already had been. Alice came down on her back, octopussing around her with arms and legs, freez
ing her in a spread-eagle splay. The two of them joined as one object, tumbling vaguely and also drifting slowly Earthward. Bethy struggled, gave up, then started fishing around in a belly pouch.
“Lurch! Let me talk to her!”
Lurch, the sort of quick-on-the-uptake AI that was comfortable acting on sparse information, understood her meaning and said, “Acknowledged.”
“Bethy! Stop it!”
“Get off me!”
“Bethy! Stop! It’s over. It’s over. You’re not getting out of here.”
“One of us isn’t,” Bethy said, then reached behind her to press Alice’s gun against the faceplate of Alice’s space helmet.
“Wait! That’s—”
Too late.
1.13
26 April
✧
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
A phrase of Igbal’s rang in Alice’s mind: ten thousand layers of micro blah blah diamond-sapphire polyschmolly. That’s what the windows in Igbal’s office were made of, so no meteor—no matter how fast!—could penetrate.
That’s probably what Alice’s faceplate was made of, too, because Bethy’s shot—whose impact was extremely loud inside the confines of a space helmet—bounced right off and tore through the much more delicate material of Bethy’s right spacesuit glove.
Alice’s suit radio came alive with screaming, as their two bodies separated. Bethy’s arm fountained gray-white gas, along with jewels of freezing/boiling blood and little gobbets of bone and hamburger meat. Then the spraying stopped, the suit having inflated a tourniquet of some sort. Alice hadn’t known it could do that.
The gun itself spun out of Bethy’s hand and tumbled away into the night.
Fuck.
Launching herself off of Bethy’s body, Alice flung herself in the direction of the gun, before she could lose sight of it in the gloom. Aside from her wits, it was her only weapon, and she wasn’t about to lose track of it when she was deep in enemy territory. Her headlamps caught it as a series of flashes bright-dim-bright-dim as it tumbled away, so she jetted toward it. She still had her own actual mission to complete, and was dubious about her ability to do it alone (if Derek chose not to help her with Step Two) and unarmed (if she didn’t catch that damned gun). She gave her jets a few pulses, closed the distance, and in another twenty seconds or so, caught it. Then turned herself around and jetted back toward—
