Heretics (21 page)

He shook his head and pulled out a small large-bore needlegun—the subsonic kind that threw out hundreds of low-velocity projectiles that tore up flesh but wouldn't penetrate through walls into vital systems aboard the station.

“I'd stay where you are,” he said.

The younger Toni stared at him and said, “You're part of this.” Toni II glanced at the door back into the station and realized the MPs probably were part of it too. She glanced up to look for a security monitor, but even without finding it, she could assume that this air lock, and the corridor leading to it, were probably dark on the station's security feed.

It began to make a disturbing amount of sense: the confusion, the near paralysis when Toni had called in the situation, the bizarre commands from 3SEC to sit tight—Whoever was attacking the wormhole network had agents here, facilitating things.

Somehow, in retrospect, it wasn't that surprising that Colonel Xander was one of those agents. He shook his head and said, “You should have stayed where you were . . .”

Toni II stared at him as her younger self said, “You're more pathetic than I gave you credit for.”

“Watch your language, Lieutenant.”

“This isn't even about your masters, whoever they are.

The power that can amass the kind of resources to attack the whole wormhole network—what we've seen isn't that much of a threat to them. Anything we'd say about the attack, the 3SEC command staff either knows now, or will know very shortly.”

“You don't know what you're dealing with here.”

She had gotten under the colonel's skin. He was tracking Toni with the gun as she kept edging to the colonel's left. Toni II knew she was being given an opening, but the air lock was huge. She'd have to clear the five meters between her and the colonel before that gun turned and went off.

Toni kept goading him. “I know I'm dealing with a traitor.”

Toni II saw the colonel tense, and she flinched inside. But the colonel had pretty much told them that he needed them alive. She just hoped her twin would stop short of angering him enough for him to forget that.

“You don't understand what is coming. A new age that will render provincial institutions like Styx and Centauri irrelevant.”

Her younger self snorted. “I wasn't talking about you turning on Styx, Xander.”

“What?”

Her younger self, being the focus of the colonel's attention, was doing very well in not giving any signals at all. Toni II frantically looked all around the air lock . . .

“You failed your new masters because of your own adolescent pique.” Younger Toni narrowed her eyes at him. “Or did
they
tell you to order me stationed in the path of that wormhole? The people pulling your strings, they probably won't be pleased to know you risked your position as a mole doing that.”

“I was within my authority. You were insubordinate—”

The younger Toni had edged up next to a rank of hard-shell EVA suits. There was a similar rank of suits on Toni II's side of the air lock. They were designed for heavy maintenance work, so the torso clam-shelled open like the exercise machine on the station. Probably would seal up in fifteen seconds or so.

But it wouldn't be quiet.

“I'm sure you justified it to yourself, Xander. But it will be awkward for you if the command staff asks why I was ordered to stay where I was. If they ask that, they might ask why I was stationed there. From there, they might ask what it was you knew when you had me assigned there.”

“This is bigger than any issues between us,” the colonel said while Toni II quietly slid herself into one of the open hardsuits. The one that was closest to the emergency manual release for the air lock.

If Toni II had any doubts about what her younger self intended, it was dispelled when her twin grabbed hold of a strut in the wall next to her. “I find it amusing that this didn't occur to you when you were ordering me to sit in the path of the attack.”

“It was the universe pointing out that I still clung to the obsessions of the flesh. And as much as it still pains me, I'm willing to give you the same gift that was given to me. I brought you here to show you what it means. Just take my hand—”

Toni II smashed the cover on the emergency release with her fist, reached in and pulled the lever.

Klaxons sounded and red lights began flashing. The colonel turned toward Toni II and yelled, “No, not
yet
!”

The outer door started its crawl upward, and the sound of rushing air filled the still-pressurized air lock. As Toni II pulled the carapace of the hardsuit down over her, her younger self leaped in a low-G back kick. Her hands kept a solid grip on the wall, as both her feet left the floor to connect with the colonel's gun hand. The weapon spun out of his grip, bouncing off the ceiling as the colonel himself took a low-G tumble into the center of the air lock.

Toni II's suit sealed itself with a pneumatic hiss. Outside, the sound of rushing air ceased, and the air lock filled with tiny motes reflecting the red warning lights. Toni now only felt the klaxon through the armor of the hardsuit where it touched the walls and the floor. Otherwise, it was suddenly silent.

She turned her head to see her twin getting into a hardsuit of her own. As the younger Toni pulled the suit closed around her, the gun fell down between them and the exterior door silently slid home into the ceiling, revealing a broad catwalk extending the maint corridor into an unfinished, walless space.

The realization started sinking in as the pressure check beeped on her hardsuit, and it released from its docking cradle. Toni II had been in the military most of her adult life, but the Styx Security Forces had been a peacetime force for decades. She had never even fired a weapon in anger. Now she had scragged her commanding officer.

She took a step and tilted her helmet to look at where the colonel had fallen.

He wasn't there.

Did he blow out the door?
That didn't make any sense. The atmosphere venting only lasted a couple of seconds and never generated enough pressure to move much of anything.

A flicker of movement made her turn away from the outside door.

“What?” Her shout was flat and echoless in her helmet. Colonel Xander stood by the inner door of the air lock, seemingly undistressed by the fact he stood in a hard vacuum. He held the gun pointed at both of them while he keyed instructions on the control panel set in the wall.

The flashing red light stopped, and Toni II stopped feeling the vibration of the klaxons through the soles of her boots. The younger Toni must have come to the same conclusions as she had, at the same time. They both jumped at the same time, low-gravity leaps that had them still in the air as they came alongside the colonel.

The gun flashed, and Toni II heard a sound like someone throwing boiling cooking grease on her hardsuit. Fortunately, the low-power weapon was designed for flesh, not polymer ceramics, and none of the warning lights came on in her heads-up display.

She grabbed for the colonel, but while her training included low-G hand-to-hand, spacesuit to spacesuit, the fact the colonel was completely unarmored gave him a maneuverability advantage. He quickly ducked down between both of them and dodged out between their legs before they could bring their bulky suits around to face him.

Their feet touched the floor, and their backs touched the inner door. He stood, facing them from fifteen meters away. Behind him, the exterior door gradually descended. He smiled and made a slow, deliberate ritual of changing the magazine on his weapon. He was slow and deliberate so they could both see the green magazine slide out, and the red one slide in.

Red meant it was no longer safe for shipboard use. The power cell in the red magazine was so highly charged that not only would the flechettes now be hypersonic and carry enough kinetic energy to penetrate their hardsuits, but the residual electrostatic charge was strong enough to act as a micro-EMP on whatever they hit—crippling even a self-healing suit.

Just having a magazine of that ammo aboard the station was a breach of regulations.

Her younger self dropped to her knees and raised her hands. She could see her downcast face through her helmet. Toni II followed suit.

Toni II scanned the controls highlighted on the internal heads-up display. The interface was designed to respond to eye movements and a chin switch, so she could frantically scan menus as she raised her hands. The outer door reached the halfway point.

“Can you hear me?” her voice echoed in her ears from the suit radio.

“Yes.”

“You have the jet control up?”

They thought so much alike it was scary. “Yes.”

“On three?”

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

The massive door slid past the three-quarters' mark when they both fired the thrusters on the hardsuits on full. The space in the air lock instantly clouded with propellant exhaust and the back of her hardsuit slammed into her. She had a fraction of a second to bend forward as her forward momentum carried her into the path of the closing door. She bent awkwardly, and suddenly she was rolling sideways across the ground. She could only tell when she cleared the air lock door because of the change in the character of the light.

Her hardsuit tumbled across the catwalk. She put her arms out to stop rolling and met no resistance. She flailed free for a moment until something slammed into the side of the hardsuit, stopping her.

She ended folded over the edge of the catwalk, up against a support strut, facing down, through the massive superstructure of one of the docking bays. “Down,” was over three hundred meters, beyond which was a starscape slowly drifting to the left above Styx's luminous horizon. She reached up to grab the support, and the suit started sliding over the edge.

“Shit!”

Something snagged her ankle and pulled her back onto the catwalk.

Over the radio she heard, “You okay?”

She rolled over to look up at her twin and said, “Yes. But I think we're screwed.”

“A person unwilling to change is unable to survive.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”

—SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-1680)

“Are you okay with this?” Toni II asked her over the encrypted radio link.

“Of course I am. I'm you. This is as much my idea as yours.”

They clung to the outside surface of the 3SEC orbital platform, a dangerous place to be, where the rotation of the station made its best effort to fling them out into space. They were, in essence, dangling from a ceiling without a floor. And because the station axis pointed straight down at Styx, there wasn't even a planet below them.

Between their insane location and killing the suit transponders, they were moderately safe from the search the colonel was conducting for them. At the moment, they were only directly observable by approaching spacecraft and other satellites.

This was a good thing, because the radio traffic they were able to passively pick up about the two of them had several flavors of “shoot to kill” peppered through them.

Apparently the two of them had graduated from bureaucratic problem straight to terrorist, courtesy of the colonel.

They had made their way across fifty meters to one of the lower-security levels, the station disk across the docking bay they had escaped into. They had managed to maneuver the suits around to the edge of the next docking bay, one that allowed the docking of civilian spacecraft.

Unfortunately, getting there had used up most of the propellant they hadn't expended in escaping from Colonel Xander. So for the past five minutes they had dangled here, observing the docking bay and the closest merchant vessel with a tach-drive. Even with their physical conditioning, Toni doubted they would have been able to hang there without the assistance of the powered hardsuits and the magnetic safety lines.

Toni II found a support that could be used as a ladder, pulled herself into the docking bay, climbed up toward the station center for a few meters, then waited for Toni to follow.

“You aren't me, Toni,” she said as Toni climbed up.

“You know what I meant.”

“But there's a difference. I'm the ghost. I'm not a lieutenant here. I'm nothing but—at best—a temporary intelligence asset. I already gave up my life and my career. You haven't.”

“We both tried to scrag the colonel.”

“I opened the air lock—”

“I appreciate the thought, but there's no way I could prove it wasn't me.”

They kept climbing upward, to where a blocky cargo ship named the
Daedalus
hung, cradled in the station's grip. It was painted garish shades of electric blue and fluorescent green, and bore registration marks from half the planets in the Centauri Alliance.

 

Toni debated with herself briefly. Her ghost sister was right, in a sense, that she still had a chance to retain her career here. Colonel Xander was an obvious traitor serving whoever or whatever was attacking the wormhole network. If she split from Toni II to go back to the council, she might avoid a court-martial.