Heretics (22 page)

The problem was, she had no idea if Colonel Xander was the only mole at work here, and she had no idea what was going to happen in the next five hours when the wormholes hit.

Better to go with their hastily cobbled Plan B, even if it stepped over the line as much as attempting to kill the colonel. They could transmit her testimony to 3SEC after the fact and let them deal with it however they wanted.

The climbing became easier as they progressed. They climbed up alongside the
Daedalus
, the skin over its drives a green wall next to them, barely three meters away. “Good,” Toni II said. “CTCx252.”

She read off the start of the ship's serial number, and Toni felt the same relief. The Centauri Trading Company had two series of very similar cargo ships, the 252 series and the x252 series. Both had the same outlines and external drive configurations. The differences were all in the internal allocation between engines and cargo space. The 252 was designed for heavy loading, and had a correspondingly small, slow tach-drive. The x252 had a third of the cargo capacity, but had a large tach-drive that was equal to most military specs.

Not that they'd waste time looking for a faster ship otherwise, but it was a sign that their luck was improving.

They climbed up about fifteen meters past the top of the ship, so they looked out over the broad flat back of the
Daedalus
. They were close enough to the axis now that they felt disturbingly close to free fall. It made Toni grip the support tighter, because she was trained to treat microgravity as more threatening than zero-G. It was too easy to ignore the tiny acceleration and build up a lethal velocity without realizing it.

Toni II tapped her finger on Toni's helmet, and Toni responded by killing the radio. The encrypted suit-to-suit comm they'd been using was low-power enough to have been lost to observers in the blare of RF traffic around the station. But the closer they were to their goal, the less safe it was.

Of course, no one should be expecting what they were about to do.

Above her, Toni II turned around so she was facing out from the impromptu ladder. She faced the
Daedalus
, nestled in a cradle of robotic arms, supply lines, and supports. Toni watched her, hearing only her own breathing, a slight mechanical hum transmitted from the strut she held on to, and, very faintly, her own pulse.

Through the material of her helmet she heard a muffled clink as Toni II jumped. Toni watched her hardsuit slowly arc into space, and she saw her fold the suit's legs and kick out slightly to rotate her suit to face “downward” in the direction the ersatz microgravity was pulling her. Part of the EVA training again. If you found yourself floating into some surface, you wanted to spread the impact over as large a surface area as you could. A novice that went with their first impulse, sticking out an arm or a leg, might abruptly find out that they weren't moving nearly as slowly as they'd thought. The suit might hold up—the things were built tough—but concentrating all the force of impact into a foot, or a palm, could still shatter bones.

Toni watched her twin fall on the back of the
Daedalus
in a perfect ballistic arc, stopping with a textbook spread-eagle landing. Toni waited for her to crawl aside before she imitated the maneuver. The fall was short enough, and the hardsuit padded enough that the spread-eagle landing was probably not necessary, but like her double, she did it anyway.

And despite the padding and support of the hardsuit, when she slammed into the top of the cargo ship, it was more jarring than she expected.

She followed Toni II across the back of the
Daedalus,
toward the causeway that led to the cargo ship's air lock. The causeway was a complicated mechanical structure that snaked from one of the inner walls of the station. It was a segmented tube with a pentagonal cross section, embedded within a complicated exoskeleton formed of rods mating with robotic joints that allowed the whole causeway to bend in any direction it chose. The causeway ended in an air lock pod in the form of a dodecahedron whose faces matched the cross section of the causeway. On each of the faces of the dodecahedron was mounted a different docking surface and an air lock door.

The purpose of the thing was to allow the docking of many different vessels just by changing the orientation of the causeway.

It also gave a way into the causeway's air lock from the outside.

Toni II continued in the lead, crabwalking along the edge of the
Daedalus'
back until she was lined up with the causeway and the twelve-sided air lock. Because of the angle at which the air lock, ship, and causeway met, there was a ridge between two faces that met the side of the ship and angled up toward the pointed top of the air lock pod.

Toni II flipped over into a seated position and slid along the slightly angled side of the ship five meters down to the air lock pod. She landed straddling the edge between the two top faces that angled toward the
Daedalus.
She stayed crouched there for a moment, then swung her legs over to the left, finding purchase next to an air lock door configured for an Indi-designed ship—including having instructions written in Kanji and Devanāgarı̄ next to the English.

When she was clear, Toni followed the slide down to the air lock.

Her double had already pulled the cover off the air lock controls and was starting a manual cycle. Toni felt a distinct rumble through the boots and legs of her hardsuit. Through the thick window of the air lock door, she saw red warning lights flashing inside the air lock itself. In a few more moments, the door sank back and swung inside. Toni II turned slightly toward her and gave a thumbs-up.

 

Toni II gave her younger self a signal for the all- clear and dropped through the slightly angled door into the spherical air lock buried in the dodecahedral pod. She estimated that, at best, they only had a few minutes to work before security knew something was going wrong. Ever since she started the air lock on manual cycle, someone's status display showed a little red warning that shouldn't be there.

There was a chance that it went unnoticed.

But that couldn't be said for the next thing she was about to do.

The air lock inside the pod was spherical, about three meters in diameter. Even that size felt a little cramped in the hardsuit. It wasn't actually intended to accommodate suited personnel in normal operation.

It became even more claustrophobic when her sister dropped though the air lock to join her. She was already pressed against the doorway to the rest of the station, another air lock door, locked against the vacuum that now filled the pod, facing a downward angle away from their entry point and the door to the ship. She flipped the panel next to it. Not the air lock controls this time, though.

This time she started cycling the docking controls.

The pod was an independent structure, the dodecahedron mating to the causeway the same way it mated with its ship. Within moments she heard a grinding noise through the material of her suit, and the causeway drifted away.

It wouldn't stop people forever, but it made it a pain in the ass to follow them.

Behind her, the younger Toni dogged shut the way they had entered and hit the controls to repressurize the air lock. She looked at her younger self and felt a near-overwhelming surge of guilt. It was irrational, as Toni had said to her, “I'm you.”

But she wasn't, and never would be. Her younger self had never defied orders without Toni II's prompting. And despite the fact that Toni II knew very well what would have happened without her intervention—the fact was, it hadn't. She bore the bulk of the responsibility.

For some reason, telling herself that didn't help.

The red lights in the air lock chamber stopped flashing red.

By now it would be clear to the security forces on the station and to whoever was on the
Daedalus
that something was wrong. They still had some time because confusion would work in their favor. While piracy happened occasionally, it never happened
here
.

Toni II watched herself open the door that mated with the
Daedalus
. The two doors, the air lock door and the shipside one, folded in as a unit. She heard a distinct sucking sound, audible even through her helmet, as the remaining pressure differential equalized.

They both ducked into the doorway, one after the other, and Toni closed the door behind them. Even with atmosphere on the other side, the interlocks on a shipboard air lock would never let both sides open at the same time.

This air lock wasn't as cramped as the one outside. While this wasn't built for cargo, it was built for EVA use by personnel in full suits. Both walls held racks of three suits, but unlike the utilitarian hardsuits that they were wearing, these had extensive custom paint jobs in bright, garish colors. It made it easy to tell who was where just by looking, who had the blue-on-orange tribal pattern, who had clusters of large purple eyes on a crimson field, who had the lemon yellow and lime green jigsaw puzzle pattern.

If they were lucky, the owners of these suits were on the station.

Once the outer door was sealed, Toni II's younger self opened the inner door. It opened on a large corridor that fed into the main passage in the
Daedalus
in a T-intersection ahead of them. Just turning the corner were a pair of excited-looking gentlemen. The younger one wore a thin linen undershirt and a pair of shorts, and by the wild black hair and red eyes Toni II suspected he had been asleep until a few moments ago.

The older one had gray hair and wore a pair of utilitarian overalls. He also had a very large slugthrower in his hand, one with a projectile that would probably easily put a hole in the hardsuits they were wearing. Toni II was very conscious now that they were unarmed.

He shouted at them, “What is the meaning of this? Who are you? What are you doing on my ship?”

For a moment, Toni II froze, and her younger self stepped forward. “I am Lieutenant Valentine of the Stygian Security Forces. We're on emergency maintenance detail investigating a severe structural failure in level beta, bay one-five—”

“You fascist twits, this is bay sixteen, now I want you to—”

Toni II listened as her younger self channeled the worst of their old drill instructors into her voice. “A structural failure that is propagating clockwise around the station. We've lost one scout ship already, along with the causeway here.”

“We haven't heard—”

“It's affecting communications through the whole station. Now hand over the gun and take us to the bridge and I won't have you fined for possession of an unsafe projectile weapon in an orbital habitat.”

“Now wait here, I want—”

“Or you could be charged with threatening deadly force against a Stygian officer in the performance of her duties. There's considerably more than a fine involved for that.”

The older man sighed and lowered the barrel of the weapon. The younger one finally spoke. “Dad, you aren't going to—”

“You need to know when it's time to shut up, Stefan.”

He flipped the gun around and handed it over, butt first. Her double took it in a gauntleted hand and passed it over to her. “Wait here, Corporal Beth.” Toni II startled a little at both the demotion and the use of her middle name as a surname. It struck her that, at the moment, to Stefan and his father, they were separate individuals. The hardsuits were identical except for serial number, and the visors only allowed an unobstructed view of the face from brow to the bridge of the nose—unless they were paying really close attention, their two hosts probably missed the fact that the suits' occupants were also identical.

“Corporal Beth” watched “Lieutenant Valentine” activate the seals on the hardsuit. The limbs froze in a standing position as the torso clam-shelled open. She watched herself climb out of the suit and order her, “You stay here to direct the engineers when they reach us. I'm going to the bridge.” She turned to the two crew members and snapped, “Now.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” the older man said, and led the unsuited Toni and his son down toward the main passage, leaving Toni II by the air lock.

For some reason, seeing her other self improvise her way onto the bridge was deeply disturbing. Especially since her own reaction had been to freeze up as soon as some civilians arrived with a gun.

We really
are
different people.

“The most severe wounds do not bleed.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“One has to die several times while one is still alive.”

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

“The other is here. There is no time.”
Mallory stared at the midnight-black apparition in the room with them, trying to understand exactly what it was.

Then, from the hallway beyond it, he heard Kugara's voice scream, “
Nickolai!
” followed by a massive feline roar that held only the suggestion of language. Kugara screamed again, and her voice was accompanied by an awful metallic crunch.

The alien humanoid seemed—as much as Mallory could tell—focused primarily on the four now-disarmed militiamen. Above him, he could hear the rear guard catching up to them, following the sounds of commotion.

Mallory ran, praying that the fact that none of his escort had been killed by this thing was an indication of its intent.