A moment later, he peeked again. “They’re gone. Let’s go.”
Anatol and Pearl Angelica let go of each other only long enough to slip through the doorway. Then they seized each other’s hands and ran, following Esteban.
“Do you know where we’re going?” the bot managed to ask.
“Yeah.” Anatol was panting. Before he could answer, a distant alarm began to wail. “Shit!” he said. Ahead of them Esteban gestured with desperate urgency. Anatol yanked at her wrist, and she plunged ahead until her breath burned in her throat. “They’ve caught Cherilee. Or they’ve found out we’re gone. But we’re almost there. Next corner.”
“Wrong direction,” said Esteban. “They don’t know about you yet. That one’s near the greenhouse.”
Pearl Angelica’s heart fell. If Cherilee had truly been recaptured, she would never see that woman, her friend and protector, again. “Where are we going?”
This time Anatol said nothing. Esteban was already stopping beside a doorway and pointing into a room much like the one they had just left. Instead of stacks of cartons, it held rows of four-wheeled carts loaded with sheets, rods, and bars of metal. Each cart had a hitch for attaching it to a small tractor.
When they were all inside, Anatol said, “The Teller. We’re going to steal it. Right?”
Esteban nodded. “If we can.”
Pearl Angelica almost shouted as she realized that Anatol had to be right. There was no other way to escape the base. A truck might get them onto the Moon’s surface, but the Engineers would know as soon as they attacked an airlock. They would not survive long enough to be picked up by Lois McAlois or the Orbitals. The Q-ship, on the other hand…“Hrecker said it was ready when I got here. It just needed more mass tanks.”
“But we can’t just barge in,” he said. “There’s a pair of guards on the door. I walked past earlier. And a keypad lock. I don’t know the combination. We have to wait for the next shift.”
“When’s that?”
His cuff and hers answered simultaneously, “Seven. Hours yet to go before we…” They went silent together, and then her cuff said, “Stan? Is that you?”
“Donna?”
“Whip out your tap wire, and we—”
“Shut up,” said Esteban.
“I’m not your—!”
“Hush,” said Pearl Angelica. “He’s right. This isn’t the time.”
More alarms joined the first, some hooting, some wailing, at least one ringing like the telephone of an absent god. One of the alarms was so close and so loud that the woman with the broken ribs covered her ears. Someone said, “They’re going to get us!”
“She’s supposed to come here,” said Esteban when the raucous din paused as if to catch its breath. “If she can…Is that her?”
“How can you tell?”
He reached for the door. “She limps.” As soon as he put his eye to the crack, he almost shouted. “It is!”
Cherilee stumbled into the room, almost falling. Someone’s shirt was wrapped around one ankle. In her arms she held a white cylinder, one of the greenhouse’s smaller beehives. The entrance hole at its base was plugged with a wad of crumpled paper.
“We thought they had you!” cried Anatol.
“They almost did. They spotted me. But…” She handed the beehive to Pearl Angelica. “I had two of these. I threw the other one.”
Someone laughed, short and sharp, a bark.
“I dumped the honey.”
The bot clutched the hive to her chest—it weighed only a few kilos—and thought: Even when escaping from a death sentence, even injured, even with no time at all for such things, Cherilee had remembered what she needed. She could not give her the Earth she had most truly craved, but her excuse, the bees she had said she wanted, those she had risked her life to bring. She struggled to speak. “I…I…” She shook her head so hard that the tears flew like raindrops, sparkling in the light.
Cherilee was standing on one foot, massaging her bandaged ankle with both hands. She grinned up at Pearl Angelica. “Don’t even try. It made sense at the time. And it saved my ass. Those guards lost interest in me very quickly.”
“Your ass wouldn’t have needed saving if you hadn’t—”
“Shh,” said Esteban. The alarms had quieted for a moment. Now movement and voices were audible in the corridor outside the room. “I wish we could lock this door.”
“Like this,” whispered the man whose name Pearl Angelica did not know. He took a meter-long steel bar from one of the carts and gently set one end beneath the door’s knob. He set the other end on the floor and braced his foot against it. Then he found another bar and hefted it in his hand as if he would welcome the chance to bloody a skull in repayment for his own wounds.
“Good idea, Karel,” said Anatol.
“It’s nothing new,” he added. “On Earth I’ve seen old apartments with sockets in the floor and door for rods like this. They were supposed to keep criminals from breaking in.”
“There’s nowhere to hide in here.” Pearl Angelica was thinking of the cartons in the other room.
“It’s too late for that.” Karel smacked his steel bar against one palm. Then he eyed the beehive in Pearl Angelica’s arms. “Just don’t drop that. Please.”
Esteban whispered, “If we don’t make it—”
He didn’t finish the sentence because feet pounded in the corridor just outside the door and stopped. A voice rose, and every one of the fugitives leaned toward the door to hear.
If they didn’t make it, thought Pearl Angelica, they would have no second chance.
“The locks are covered,” cried a voice outside their hiding place. “Get the maintenance shops. If you find a truck, put someone inside it. That’s how—”
An alarm sounded just long enough to drown out his voice. Pearl Angelica filled in the missing words: That was how she had hidden before. And escaped, at least for a while.
“You think we’ll find them all there?”
“Who knows? Check their rooms. Their friends. If anyone objects…” The voice faded as the guard moved away.
Arrest them. Execute them in the prisoners’ stead. Or save the trouble and shoot them on the spot. None of the fugitives had any doubt what the rest of the speaker’s words had to be.
Someone else moved into range. “They’ve got to be in the base somewhere.”
“One was in the greenhouse.”
“That bitch put half a squad on the way to the infirmary.” This voice was just outside the door.
Several of the fugitives smiled, but no one dared to laugh or speak aloud.
“We’ll get her. And the rest. There’s no way out.”
At that, Esteban’s smile became a grin, fierce and predatory, wolfish, showing teeth. His lips moved as he mouthed the words, “There is!”
Pearl Angelica was sure he was right. He had freed them all from their cells. He had led them here. He had agreed when Anatol had suggested the Teller. There was a way, if only they remained free to seize it.
Every time a guard’s footsteps sounded in the corridor, she held her breath. So did the other fugitives.
When one guard laid a hand on the door’s handle and rattled the mechanism, the woman with the broken ribs turned white and her legs began to fold. Esteban’s arm around her chest made her leap with pain and bite her lip, and then she was once more standing on her own.
Happily, the rattling stopped. The hand and its owner left, and no other guard thought to try the door behind which the fugitives waited for their moment.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
Pearl Angelica held the beehive Cherilee had brought her tightly in her arms, afraid to let it go. She was not sure that she would ever get it to First-Stop, but she had it now. It smelled sweet and warm, and an irregular hum vibrated against her skin.
It was one of the things she had thought she wanted when she came to Earth. Was it enough? She could not have root-home. She could have…She looked towa
rd Anatol and met his eyes. Then she looked at Esteban. Had she found more than she had bargained for?
How much of it would she keep?
How long would she keep it?
She felt like she waited forever for the sounds of the Security guards to move down the corridor, away from their hiding place, and fade into the distance. Later Donna told her that the fugitives hovered by the door, their anxiety palpable even to an artificial intelligence, for only minutes before they could hear no more words or footsteps.
“Stan?”
“It’s time,” said Esteban’s cuff. “They’ll think you’re the new shift just long enough.”
Esteban held his dart gun ready as he cracked the door and peered down the corridor, first in one direction and then, easing through the opening just enough to see around the jamb, in the other. He made a muffled “Tcha!” sound and the gun went “Pft!”
The man Anatol had called Karel said, “What!” and lifted his steel bar above one shoulder. Pearl Angelica fought down the surge of adrenaline that threatened to force her heart into fibrillation. She bit her tongue to make saliva flow. She swallowed and held her beehive tighter.
“He was just coming around the corner,” said Esteban. “There’s no one else. Let’s go.”
He remained in the lead as they left the storeroom, passed the body on the floor, and marched around the corner, where coveralled workers were filing out the already open door to the construction bay. A pair of guards waved at the fugitives, not recognizing them for what they were until Esteban’s dart gun was already firing.
Someone inside the construction bay knew what to do. The door began to slam shut, but two workers had fallen in its way and their bodies kept it from closing. An alarm began to hoot, closer and louder and more strident than anything Pearl Angelica had already heard.
The refugees flowed forward and through the doorway. When a worker tried to attack Esteban with a wrench, Karel’s steel bar blocked the blow and broke the attacker’s arm with an audible snap. The dart gun felled several more workers. The rest drew back until Esteban told them to pull the bodies from the doorway and close the door.
He pointed the gun at one of the few workers who wore the usual Engineers’ shirt and trousers. The shirt had been lovingly embroidered with spidery mechanisms on a checked background that only slowly defined itself as a panel of photovoltaic cells; the mechanisms were antique satellites. “How do you disable the keypad outside?”
The man stared back defiantly, glanced at his fallen colleagues, and finally indicated a small metal box on the wall beside the door. “The circuitry’s in that.” When Karel raised his steel bar as if to smash the box, he cried, “No! There’s a switch.”
No switch was visible, but Esteban ran his fingers around the box, stopped in the middle of its lower edge, grinned, and pressed. Pearl Angelica thought that if there had been no alarm to drown out quiet sounds, she might have heard a click and a grunt of satisfaction.
The Engineers’ Q-ship, the Teller, towered above them all. Its pointed prow nearly touched the ceiling. Its flanks gleamed, untouched so far by the radiation and dust of space. The two tanks of reaction mass Pearl Angelica had seen so many weeks before were now four. One more lay in a rack to one side. Another was held in the arms of a massive robot, ready for installation.
The ship’s hatch stood open at the end of a catwalk high above their heads. When Pearl Angelica scanned the room to find the stairway or elevator that must lead to that level, she saw a worker clambering onto the catwalk.
“Esteban!” Anatol’s cry was almost totally drowned out by the din of the alarm. But he was pointing too. The worker was running now, heading for the hatch. Did he intend to close it? To bar them from seizing the ship he had devoted his energies to building? Or did he have some thought of firing the engines and destroying them—and everyone else in the construction bay—with the incandescent exhaust?
The alarm paused for a moment. The “Ding!” the first dart made as it caromed off the metal catwalk or its rail was clearly audible. So were voices in the corridor outside the construction bay, something pounding on the door, the sliding of a foot on the floor as a worker moved toward the box of circuitry that controlled the door. So too was a “Don’t!” and a crash as Karel raised his bar once more, ignored all attempts to stop him, and destroyed the box. Esteban had turned it off. No one else would turn it on.
The second dart brought the worker down just before he reached the hatch.
The clamor of the alarm returned.
Esteban waved an arm, and the refugees followed him toward the ladder the worker he had just shot down must have used to reach the catwalk.
Pearl Angelica found herself last in the short line of climbers, struggling to hold onto the beehive with just one arm while leaving the fingers free to steady her against the ladder rungs. The others were rapidly drawing ahead, all but the one woman just before her. “What…?” She swore when she realized that she too was trying to climb with only one hand. The other hand, the arm, was confined to a sling; even its fingers were useless. The bot set her shoulder against the woman’s buttocks and lifted. There was a muffled , “Thanks,” and they began to move a little faster.
When they were halfway up the ladder, Pearl Angelica looked over her shoulder. The workers they had left below were clustered by the door. Even as she guessed they were trying to repair or bypass the damage to its controls, the door began to open.
She wished the alarm would quit once more, that she could shout, “Lookout! Hurry up! They’re coming!” and have some hope of being heard. She shouted anyway, and then she saw that Esteban must have been looking back as well. He had one arm wrapped around the side of the ladder, had swung to one side to let the others pass, and was aiming his dart gun toward the door.
She looked again just in time to see one Security guard fall to the floor and two more recoil. Then the alarm did quit for a second, and she heard Esteban swear. She swung her gaze back to him. He was hurling the gun toward the workers below.
“Idiot!” she said, but he did not seem to hear.
“Run!” he screamed at the others on the catwalk.
They ran, all of them, as the Security guards saw his gun bounce on the floor and realized he was out of ammunition and charged into the bay and began to fire their own guns upward.
The woman just ahead of Pearl Angelica on the ladder grunted and went limp. Her one good hand lost its grip on the side of the ladder. She began to lean out and to one side. The bot tried to stop her movement, to hold her in place with the pressure of her chest and the hive, to keep her safe, but then her feet slid off the rung she stood on. She seemed to shrug away from Pearl Angelica. She fell.
“She’s gone, Angie,” cried Esteban. He was sliding down the ladder to seize her wrist and yank her up, toward him, toward the catwalk and the Teller’s hatch and safety. “Come on. Hurry!”
They were both on the catwalk when Esteban grunted the same dire note Pearl Angelica had already, on the ladder, heard once too often. She spun in time to see him stumble to his knees and clutch at her roots. A spot of red was blossoming on his thigh.
For a moment, she wanted to drop the beehive, but her arm tightened around it quite automatically. With her free hand, she seized his right arm and lifted. He grunted and tried to get his feet under his weight but could only use one leg. She swore, knowing she could never have carried him one-armed on Earth or First-Stop, and staggered with him to the Teller’s hatch. She gasped in relief when Anatol slammed it shut behind them.
“I can’t fly this thing,” said Anatol.
“I can fly ours,” said the bot. She studied the cabin they were in and recognized that this ship’s similarities to the Quebec and its kin were more than skin deep. The Engineers must have stolen not only the plans for the Q-drive, but also those for the ship itself. “If this isn’t too dif—”
“I’m not dead, goddammit,” said Esteban. “I just can’t run. And I’ve studied the documentat
ion on this thing.”
“More hacking.” Pearl Angelica’s grin said all that needed to be said about how she felt to hear him speak.
Something slammed against the outside of the ship’s hatch.
“Just get me to the pilot’s seat. And someone plug these holes in my leg.”
Pearl Angelica used his own shirt for that. Then the men carried him to the seat he wanted. He ran his fingers over the controls while she looked over his shoulder and decided that all the displays and knobs and buttons were as familiar as anything else about the ship. There were differences, of course, but she could fly it. She probably should, for she had had at least a little experience. But…
The slams against the hatch were louder now, and faster. Someone was using a hammer. In a moment, she thought, they would realize that the ship’s skin might be thinner. It probably was. Or someone would find a tool sharper than a hammer. Or…
All sounds stopped.
“Now what?” asked Anatol.
As if in answer, a loudspeaker began to bellow: “We must have the murderer! Send out Anatol Rivkin. We will put the rest of you on the next shuttle.”
“It’s right against the hull,” said Karel.
“Don’t believe them,” said Cherilee Wright.
“I won’t,” said Esteban. “They just don’t want us to take this ship.”
The hammering and the alarms returned. A hissing sound announced that a torch or laser cutter had been brought into play as well.
Esteban activated the Teller’s engines. Their roar was quickly loud enough to drown out the din, yet the screams of the Security forces and workers outside the ship remained clearly audible. Through the viewport, they could see superheated gas billowing in the construction bay. The screams stopped.
“How did they expect to get it out of here?” Anatol was pointing through the port at the ceiling above them. A puncture-repair Spider was visible to one side. There was no sign of hatch or iris. The Engineers had apparently made the same mistake as any do-it-yourselfer who had ever built something—furniture, a boat—too large to fit through the home workshop’s only door.
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