by K. Gorman
“One-two-three-four?” Soo-jin suggested. “Maybe they're really stupid.”
She put it in. The door gave a disapproving beep. “Nope.”
“Four-three-two-one?”
Another beep.
“What's Hopper's wife's name again? Sharon? Has it got an alphabetical input, or should we try to binary the numbers or something?”
“Won't work,” Karin said. “I think it's a four-digit code.”
“Well, I've got lots of four-digit words you can try.”
“Ha ha.”
She glanced down at the guard. He hadn't moved, but that didn't mean he wouldn't wake up. Plus there might be more of those balls around. Or, if they were really tracking her, the two from earlier might follow her back down.
Or Hopper might come down. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out where she'd gone.
“We don't have much time,” she said. “Should I try shooting it with a blaster?'
“Let's try that last. Any tools around? Crowbar? Screwdriver? Sonic screwdriver?”
She glanced down the hall. “None that I can see. We've got a communications dash, though.”
“Go. See what you can find.”
She jogged down. It lit up at her touch, making the metal gleam at its edges, and gave a simple station map and menu.
“No login,” she muttered to herself. “That's good...”
Searching through the interface, she paused at the docking file, skimming the list of ships. The Ozark had docked. No surprise there. Without her on board, they had no reason to stay away. Not when they seemed to have made nice with the station. She frowned. Hopper wouldn't have gotten those guns on board without help. Now that she thought about it, he'd have needed more help than Charise and her small group could have provided.
Something to think about later.
The Fallon vessel hadn't docked. She'd expected that, too. Fallon and the Alliance might get along now, but the feeling was begrudging and reluctant, especially on the Alliance side. With the sentiment Hopper had shown earlier toward the approaching Fallon ship, she doubted he'd let it dock.
She skimmed through the other menu options, switching through a map and a comms link and the various virtual stores, her jaw growing tenser. Nothing on station operations—well, at least nothing useful. Nothing that would help her open a door.
Maybe she could check the guard's netlink. Someone could have messaged him the door code.
“Karin?” Soo-jin's muffled voice had a metallic ring to it as it came down the hall. “Did you find anything?”
Switching out of the latest menu, she walked away from the terminal, a disgusted sneer pulling back her upper lip. Letting out a heavy breath, she turned back and headed toward the door.
Movement caught her eye. She stopped dead, eyes widening.
A metal ball floated toward her. As silent as the moon, it had already passed the threshold at the end of the hall and cleared more than half the space before she'd noticed it.
“Oh, fuck me.” She froze, vacillating on what to do, then sprinted back to the cabin door. Light flared in her hand, and she experienced a giddy rush as she threw it down the hall to skitter along the wall next to the ball.
“Soo, there's a ball. Get away from the door. I'll—” She glanced around in a frenzy, and her gaze snapped to the guard's blaster. “I'll try and blast it.”
“No! Wait—” Soo-jin smacked the wall to get her attention. “Those things are electric, right? Let it hit.”
“What?!”
“You heard me. Let it hit, then get away somehow. Even if it fails, they can open doors, right?”
Karin stared at the metal in front of her, jaw slackening. “It exploded the door last time.”
“That'll work. It shoots electricity, so it ought to do something to the panel.”
Her jaw slackened some more.
“Soo, I'm not even an engineer, and I know this is fucking insane.” And, just in cast Soo-jin hadn't registered it before, she added, “It exploded the door last time. Boom.”
“Your vocabulary has matured so much. Just let it hit and see what it does. I'll stay away and pad myself with the mattresses.”
“You are insane,” she said. “I am not—”
A sudden crackling, close enough to raise the hairs on her arm, sounded in her ear. She turned just in time to see that the ball had moved away from the distracting light show on the opposite wall, floated closer, and found her.
She jerked away and dove for the floor, intending a forward roll, but instead just fell. Her arms shot up to protect her head as a surge of heat and light exploded above her, trailing sparks that rained onto her arms and back. She hissed as the pain prickled through her skin.
Behind her, the door gave a heavy clunk. The display panel beside it shivered with different colored lights, all pixelated together.
Grunts came from the cabin. Slowly, and with great reluctance, a gap slid open. Soo-jin's fingers wrapped around its edge. Her eye appeared above, gaze finding Karin on the floor. “Give me a hand?”
Electricity crackled.
Karin spun. Barely a meter from her, arcs of light and plasma snapped across its front, ready to shoot. She yelled a warning and threw herself to the side, the impact slamming all of the air from her lungs as she rolled over her shoulder. Pain knifed through her bones.
Soo-jin swore. Metal shrieked, followed by the grinding sound of a door being forced back on its track, then she was out and skipping in front of the ball as it floated closer to Karin.
“Hey, hey! Look at me!” She waved and bobbed, jumping in front of it. “Over here!”
Eyes wide, Karin lifted her head. “What are you—”
“Shut it, I'm way more agile than you. Comes with being part ninja. Now, move. I can't do this forever.”
Air whooshed over Karin's head. A faint clunk came a second later.
Did she just kick it?
“Over here, ugly!” Soo-jin danced away, leading the ball toward the wall where Karin's light still glowed. A whine sounded from it, rising in pitch.
Soo-jin leapt to the side as the electricity shot, executing a perfect roll on the metal floor. A second later, she was back up and sprinting for Karin. She grabbed the blaster and netlink from the fallen guard, stuffed them into her pockets, then helped Karin up. “Come on. We got a couple seconds' cooldown. Let's go.”
Pain shot through her knees and ankles, but Karin forced herself to go on. Half-running, half-limping, they made for the end of the hall. The air had a smoky smell to it that burned in her nose. Another whine sounded behind them, and they jerked out of the way as the ball sent a charge of electricity after them.
Light flared in Karin's hand. She threw it back, hoping to distract the ball, then Soo-jin hauled her forward by the arm. Their pounding footsteps filled the corridor as they sprinted for the door. She stubbed her toe into the threshold and almost fell over herself trying to get to the panel on the other side. Soo-jin slapped it. As she turned back, she had a view of the door sliding closed as the ball floated up the hallway.
The door panel flashed red. Then Soo-jin shot it.
“There,” she said, holding the blaster. “Now it has to work for its meal.”
“I don't think it wants to eat us.” Karin bent down to her knees, panting. “It just kind of zapped people last time.”
“Yeah, well, can never be too sure. Let's go. See if we can't fool its tracking ability.”
On the way down, Karin took out every light she could and absorbed it into her skin. The feeling of nausea still sat in her gut, but the emptiness under her skin had lessened. They passed through an elevator, standing tense as it dropped them to the next level, and came out on a floor of office spaces. Hallways pulled away from them on all sides, changing from the station's metal and plastic siding to a surprising luxury of wood and drywall. Dark, plastic-glass windows faced the hallway, only some of their internal blinds shuttered.
Station management, probably. And the
marketplace coordinators. They ducked into an office close to the next junction, wedged against a supply closet with only one set of windows facing out. The lights flickered on as they entered, and Karin pulled their glow away.
“Okay.” Soo-jin turned. “I don't know about you, but I'm going to need to see.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Just didn't want to be targets, you know.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. Now, where's my Karin flashlight? The computer, please.”
A knock and a rattle sounded, as if her hands had just bumped into something on the desk and then caught it before it could fall.
Karin let out a breath. With a thought, she let the light drift back through her palm. The mercurial tint washed out the white, plastic desktop, sending faint shadows pulling away as she moved closer.
“Another netlink. Perfect.” Soo-jin snapped it off the desk, then her hand went to Karin's wrist, pointing it around the room. “All right. There. That looks like a cabinet I want to investigate.”
She tucked the blaster back into her pocket and turned away, opening the cabinet. Her dreads fell over her back, beads glimmering in the light as she bent over and started rooting around.
“Hey—screwdriver!” Flashing a grin over her shoulder, she twirled it against her shoulder, the yellow handle bright against her slate-gray shirt.
Karin leaned to look inside. “No keycards or anything?”
“Not a chance. They're all wearing them. I—shit.” Her voice dropped. A second later, the cabinet closed with a quiet click, and she was pulling Karin to the floor. “Quick. Put that out.”
Confused, she doused the light in her hand. The room went dark.
Quiet, Soo-jin pulled her under the desk with her. Karin's knees bumped over the legs of the chair. In the dark, they froze, still as deer in a floodlight, straining to listen.
It remained silent. She frowned. Her head brushed the underside of the desk, and she ducked down. “What—”
“Shh.”
A beveled window sat above the desk. Enough of a gap existed that some light filtered down—enough to outline Soo-jin's huddled form as she braced herself, one palm flat against the wall. Her eyes caught it only as a reflection, liquid dark on her pale face. If she hadn't been acting normal for the past few hours, she might have been one of the Lost.
Karin strained to listen some more. Then, hearing nothing, she settled in to wait.
A minute late, voices came up the hall.
Hopper.
“—I don't care what the hell those things are, I want them off my station. Find out where they are, disable them, and put their metallic corpses in the Rec room as trophies. And find out where those two women went. Get the Ozark online. Maybe they know.”
Karin didn't question how Soo-jin had known they were coming. She'd seen stranger things in her life. As Hopper drew closer, with what sounded like three or four of his security men, she shrank down and held her breath. His voice sounded right next to her.
“They can't have gone far. Not without a ship. And we know every inch of this station.” A door clunked—the one at the end of the hall that they'd almost gone through before deciding to search the office—and the sound of the men’s boots grew fainter. “I want them alive. Both of them. If—”
The door closed, cutting him off.
They waited a few beats, listening. Then Soo-jin blew out a slow breath. “He wants us alive. That's encouraging.”
Karin's jaw stiffened. “I still don't want to be caught.”
Soo-jin squeezed her shoulder, then wiggled her way past. “Well, he may know every inch of the ship, but there's no way you healed all his crew. And he's got those balls to think about. We might just have a chance.”
Chapter 23
It looked like any other panel to her, but Soo-jin must have seen something in it that Karin didn't, because she tapped her shoulder and pointed. “Equipment store.”
It creaked open on its hinges, and Soo-jin poked her head in. A second later, she pushed a packet into Karin's face. “Here, take this.”
Karin wobbled at the sudden weight and leaned onto the wall for balance. A second pack followed the first, and then came the crinkle of plastic wrappers. The smell of peanuts filled the air as Soo-jin tore into a food packet and gave it to her. “Here. Did they feed you anything?”
“No.”
“Seriously? I mean, we had snacks in the room, but... they want to keep you alive, right?”
As Soo-jin's eye roll came into view, Karin slipped her a sly smile. “Well, I did throw up on the floor.”
“Serves them right. Good girl.”
She patted her on the shoulder, slung another pack over her back, and ripped into another plastic wrapper. A crowbar dangled from her arm as she leaned back, hooked over her elbow like some kind of engineering answer to the fashion canes the nobility used in some parts of Nova Earth. Attempting to eat the package one-handed, she hunched as a flurry of crumbs dropped to the floor.
“Shit. I'm going to Hansel and Gretel us.”
They dropped down another stairwell, not bothering to keep their steps quiet. The air hung muggy and close around them. Sweat soaked the hair at the back of Karin’s neck, and she found herself pulling the ponytail around the front to let it breathe. The pain in her bones and muscles had rescinded to a dull, begrudging ache that showed its stiffness with each step.
Still a long way to go.
Stations did not come small. Even the automated ones, which grew fewer and fewer every year as pirates picked them clean on the outer banks, held the capacity to house and support ten thousand in a crisis. Part Alliance protocol, part efficiency—if one was going to build a station in space, it might as well be noticeable.
Soo-jin peeked out of a doorway several levels down, paused, then stepped through.
Space opened up before them—via one of Caishen's viewing platforms.
Not an impressive display, all told. Without a planet close by, space was little more than a speckled field of black, and the platform's interior lights, not in viewing mode, turned the thick windows an almost sheer black. Only Aschere, the closest star, made a begrudging, haloed dot to the side. Lokabrenna, the second closest star, twinned to Aschere's orbit, would be just out of view.
“Camera. Let's go.” Soo-jin turned right and stalked up the hall.
Like much of the station, it had a worn-out look to it. The floor dipped in a couple of places, and black smudges, as if someone had moved furniture by grinding it against the sides of the room, marked the base of the wall. On several of the windows, a kind of dirt and scratch combo frosted up from the corners on the inside of the double panes. The air had a stale smell.
As they reached the halfway point, the door on the opposite end of the room behind them hissed open. They whirled, meeting the gaze of two station security guards.
Everyone froze. The guards seemed to hesitate, as if surprised to see them.
“Go!” Soo-jin hissed.
Karin yelped and wobbled as she put a step wrong, and Soo-jin hauled her forward. With her shoes slapping hard against the floor, the door bounced back and forth as she sprinted for it, pushing speed into her stiff, leaden legs.
“Hey! Stop!” A blaster cracked.
She flinched. The bolt smashed against the ceiling above them, close enough she heard it crack into the metal. Hot sparks burned down on her head and shoulders. The second one screamed past her side and slammed into the wall next to the door. The floor beneath them rang with the sound of boots pounding down. Another blaster bolt cut into the floor by her feet, and she jumped.
Child, I thought they want us alive.
Soo-jin slammed into the door control. It flashed green, and they piled into it as it opened, squeezing through the gap. Karin lurched into the next room, then spun, lunging for the other control on.
A warning tone sounded. The door paused. Through the gap, the two men raced for them. Sparks flew as another blaster bolt hit frame. The smell of hot meta
l rose in the air.
Soo-jin shoved the door along its track. Another warning tone beeped, but it began to move. Karin sprang to help, sliding the metal along. Muscles ached on her ribs as she put her weight into it.
The two men slammed into the other side. Before it closed completely, one man got his forearm through the gap, grabbing around for them.
As one, they slammed the door into his arm.
“Shit!” Soo-jin jumped forward, trying to stuff his arm back through and wedge the rest of the door closed.
The panel beeped another warning at them, and a whine of machinery sounded in the wall. Karin gritted her teeth and pushed her weight as it tried to slide back, holding it in place. On the other side, grunts and swears came through the gap as, she assumed, the men attempted something similar. Fortunately, one must have had a bad angle with his arm stuck in the door, because she managed to hold it from closing.
Soo-jin grabbed the crowbar and wedged it in between the lip of the door and its frame. “Here, use this.”
As Karin adjusted her angle to include the bar, Soo-jin stepped out. Taking the blaster out of her pocket, she paused, considering the arm in front of her.
Karin's eyes widened. “You're not going to—”
“Fuck me, yes, I am.” She clicked the safety off, pressed it against the meaty part of his arm, where it met the door, and raised her voice. “Hey, buddy, remove your arm before I fucking shoot it.”
“Fuck you, bitch.” The muscles in his forearm tightened, as if he were trying to pull past the wedge they'd made with the crowbar.
Karin leaned into it, keeping the ends steady. His hand felt around in the air, trying to grasp something—but, at that angle, he had miles to go before either of them came in range.
Soo-jin's lips pursed, watching. Then she pulled the blaster away and took aim.
Karin flinched at the crack.
The man screamed. Sparks exploded in front of them. Raw pain ripped from his throat. When the sparks and light died, the man's skin had turned black. Blood oozed from the open wound.
