Rimrunners (40 page)

with a glove off, that being faster, doing wiring on a job like this one—really

hated to hear sounds like that.

But the air stayed.

Thank God for favors.

In spite of which, she had her tether-hook fastened to the nearest metal strut,

because decompression was a real likelihood, and there was an equally good

chance of something like a missile coming right up through the deckplates or the

blast-wall, a hello from India's number two rider that they knew was out there.

Touchy little job, Fitch was right, you called it a grape-cluster, nobody

remembered why—a little group of AP shells with their back ends peeled off and

bare wire stuck under their end-seals, right over the little black dot where the

contact was. You twisted the tails together for good contact all the way down

the bunch, finished it off with a little Gibbs-cap in the middle of the wires,

then you just bent the twist-tail of the cluster and hooked it over something

convenient.

Mostly you hung them head-high, on girders and such. And in this case, made

extra-long twist-tails and a good solid knot in those tails to make sure they

held fast.

Another explosion, off in some other section.

She kept at it, with the bare hand freezing, because Thule's power was down, and

bitter cold air coming through the vents on the rig, because they had six hours,

longer if they didn't ask anything out of the circulation, and longer, too,

because she wasn't asking anything out of the armor while she was sitting here

making fussy little wire-tails and worrying more about static charges than she

was about the booms and blowups around the rim.

At least Fitch wasn't a nag, man sat down and shut up and just watched the way

he said, saving it too, faceplate up, talking back and forth to Goddard, maybe

clear to Central and Wolfe or Orsini, on Loki's sealed-line phone, there at the

pump-station.

She took another cap, turned its tiny edge-dial, set it as number three, was

wrapping it in when the dock quaked and Fitch stumbled up to his feet.

She wound the tail, laid it down, unclipped her safety and jammed her right

glove on, then grabbed up her gun and the rest of the shells. "Program," she

said, "Vent seal, amp 220, gyros."

Second blast as she was standing up. Readout said this one came from dead ahead.

Loki's berth—either Loki or the station wall around it.

Dammit!

She ran for Fitch's position behind the main pump housing, came in heavy-footed

and needing the gyros on the stop. "They're in, sir, that was the ship took that

hit—Get Goddard and NG off, tell them get down here!"

"I just did," Fitch said. "Goddard's on his way out. Your damn merchanter-boy

isn't answering his com, Yeager."

"Shit!"

"There's the phone. You're patched into general com up there, you tell him get

his ass out here."

She grabbed the phone, unplugged the line and shoved the plug into the

com-patch. "NG? NG, it's Bet. Answer your damn page!"

The deck shook. Readout said behind her. Airlock, then. She saw Fitch ducked

down behind the pump-housing, figured if the tac-squad was worth anything they'd

probed the airlock before they sent anybody through, and they were just going to

blast through the layers, one after the other. Took a minute or so more. "NG?

Never mind answering, just get suited and get the hell moving! Come on, dammit!"

Flicker of bracketing on the ramp, somebody in a hard-suit.

She hoped it was NG, she didn't think it was.

Goddard's voice said, "I can't raise the son of a bitch."

Could've ducked out before this, maybe nobody was paying attention. Maybe he was

on the docks and scared to answer…

Maybe he was gone-out, ducked into some hole on the ship—not tracking on here

and now—

That damn hole in back of the storage-rack—

God!

"NG, get out of the ship!"

Flutter of bracketing as Goddard got into cover with Fitch, Goddard carrying an

AP and a couple of shell-slings, give him credit for that much, the son of a

bitch—

She wanted to kill him.

"NG!"

Wanted her hands on NG at the moment, wanted to shake him till he rattled, damn

it, damn his spook ways—

"NG! Get out here!"

More shocks in the readout, marker-dot flashing on the airlock at her back. You

didn't need to face a thing in a rig. But she kept looking toward the ramp,

hoping for a damned fool to show up.

Dot still flashing, sound-reading coming up, secondary dot intermittent with

brackets as Goddard was trying to get his gun loaded—

No more time to spend, no more. She unplugged the line, squatted down with Fitch

and Goddard, pulled her safety-clip and attached to the buffer-skirt support on

the pump-housing, only thing she could see that might hold. Fitch followed suit,

got Goddard clipped.

NG, dammit!

Puff of fire at the airlock, sudden vapor following that—

"God!" Fitch's voice.

Air freezing as it met hard vacuum.

As the dockside blew out the airlock.

She got a grip on the buffer herself, as dust and junk flew past, as the rig's

pickups registered a whistling howl of escaping air—

"You got to get them when they show!" she said to Fitch and Goddard. "Got Loki

at our backs, another damn squad coming behind us—"

Things left the ground and flew, stuff hit the seal-wall and stuck under the

wind-pressure, stuff skidded and rolled across the decking, a couple of shipping

cans flew like so much foil-scrap, and lights started going out, old-fashioned

floods popping in the vacuum, other things started exploding, less and less

audible as the air went away.

No way the tac-squad was standing in the path of that storm. They were hooked

in, tucked down, never in the rigged airlock when it blew, just out there

waiting for Thule to bleed to death.

Same as they were.

Coming through the first instant it was safe, and she had the remote, Fitch and

Goddard had the AP's, and when the India team came through they met a barrage

and started handing it back, firing as they went for the cover of girders on

either side.

She let them. She hit 001 on the keypad, and the clusters blew, head-high, about

the time wave two came in, straight into the AP fire, and the three-team came

through—

002, 003.

Didn't want to look at what it did.

Faceplates were where you didn't want to get it.

"We got 'em," Goddard gasped.

She said, "We got 'em up our ass, dammit!" She unclipped, grabbed up the

shell-slings and her gun and stood up. "We got one ship down there to deal with,

we got more of 'em coming up our backsides—they breached the ship, they got to

come here, dammit—"

She didn't care where Fitch and Goddard were going, she heard Fitch's, "Wait,

Yeager," and she didn't stop to argue, she ordered the rig to max and headed up

the ramp for Loki's airlock.

Airlock blew out, all of Loki's air hit her like a fist, knocked her down, the

gyros brought her up and she rode the limb-movements, synched with them and had

the rifle up before the rest of her was, was halfway up when vibration on the

ramp told her something heavy had hit it running—

Gut told her it was armor, brain didn't have time to debate it: hands knew where

to put the shell and the conscious brain got the fact a target was bracketed

before it knew it had already pulled the trigger.

Conscious brain wondered was it a hardsuit or armor before the explosion went

off in the guy's face.

Before she knew a shell had hit her and knocked her flat and the rig was

bouncing her up again, headed for Loki's insides…

Didn't stop for grace.

Didn't stop when she came face-on in the airlock with half a tac-team who maybe

for a couple of critical ticks didn't reckon an oncoming rig belonged to a spook

ship—till she got another one and took a shell from him, and yelled

Program-gyros-off, while she was wondering if that leg was breached, it wasn't

moving right.

She fired up as her opposition came up on gyros, got him in the groin and blew

him out the inner door, as his AP tore hell out of the bulkhead and you couldn't

see anything for smoke.

Spatter and soot all over her faceplate. She was still moving, leg still worked,

loose, but it worked, she felt cold there and maybe the autoseal was working,

didn't know, heard Fitch panting and gasping, "Goddard's dead—"

She walked Loki's downside deck, she had a rattle in her armor, wasn't sure

whether that tension screw in the left shoulder hadn't gone, wasn't sure that

leg wasn't freezing in vacuum, she was getting that body-display that meant

armor problems, whole left leg blinking red, shoulder blinking yellow…

They got to the lift shaft. The door was open, the car wasn't there, just lines

hanging in the dark of the shaft, the kind troopers used for a fast drop.

"Core," she said to Fitch, "they got in from the ship core."

She wanted, dammit, to stop and get on ship-com, see if she could raise

Engineering, but there wasn't time, was a chance of any damn thing happening—

Explosion somewhere. The ship quaked.

"That might be the tanks," Fitch said.

"Shit!" She grabbed one of the hanging lines, pulled up the latch-down on her

left shoulder, clamped it on the cable. "Going to the core—" She pulled Fitch a

line close, threaded his hoist, wrapped her line under her right leg, pulled the

lever down and held it.

Teeth slipped a little on the cable, scary as hell when you were halfway up.

Scary as hell when you thought about somebody getting into that shaft above or

below and potshotting you on that cable. Had to use the night-glows, no way to

see in the dark and cold what they were doing or where they were going, and it

was help enough for somebody waiting at the core-access with a rifle—

Fitch was coming up all right, she saw the other cable tight, saw the cable

attachments coming up fast above her on the support struts for the core-access

bulkhead, good clear attachment, no gymnastics needed: she ordered the gyros,

swung her feet up and planted her boots on the lip, leaned forward and made it,

facing into absolute dark past the dim edges of the open access.

Graffiti on the wall, something painted—

Fitch bumped her, went back off the edge as she grabbed him, damn good thing she

was holding the support. Her rig complained, the left arm slipped, but it hauled

him up and his gyros got him steady.

Lot of dark. No sound except their own breathing, nothing from the pickups.

Total vacuum.

The core access was standing wide open. Somebody had to have used an emergency

crank to get both doors like that—big white circle and slash spray-painted

across the lock controls—

—where you could see it only coming from this direction.

Fitch grabbed her arm, sudden shock of rig against rig.

Goddard's sign-off, maybe, when they rigged the tanks to blow?

Warning Loki crew out?

No pump, she thought. No vibration through the deck. It had stopped.

The core went straight back from here, whole length of the spine, long, dark

void. The glows and the night-sight got just the beginning of the conduits, the

start of the grid that was the in-dock walkway along the downside.

She stood still, spooked. Fitch wasn't moving either.

Shaft of light came into the core. Floods from the rider-ship, she thought for a

heart-pounding second, then she realized it was sunlight coming through a wound

in Loki's shielding, blaze of light and glare bouncing off surfaces down the

walk, glancing and dazzling off ice, so that the display and the readouts

struggled to cope with contrast. The light made huge shadows out of the two

giant conduit-bundles as Thule's rotation carried the sun past their zenith.

Moving bars of light and shadow touched the walkway and showed blazing white

shapes lying on it, the walkway itself showed bent and melted—and iced…

Eyes wouldn't make sense out of it.

The glare from the star passed, moved up the wall, glare dimming to twilight.

She jerked a metal utility clip off her rig, threw it onto the grid.

No sparks…

Fitch caught her arm, no force against her amped rig, nothing but noise, a

scrape of ceramics. "Yeager, we got nothing to do here, let it be, we got two

rider-ships and a fuckin' carrier unaccounted for, come on, Yeager!"

You couldn't yell out to anybody, to see if anybody was still alive in here, you

couldn't do anything, there wasn't any air to carry the sound, and the whole

core was a trap, whole tac-squad wiped out—except the point-men that had gotten

through and gone down the lines—

Not Goddard's work, couldn't be Goddard's work—

Power on that scale—Hell of a job. Cable from Loki's whole damn electrical

system, run right to that grid.

"Yeager!"

"Program," she said to the rig. "Fleet-com."

She got sputter back, got the hiss of distant voices, not the clear transmission

of a rider-ship com close by:

"Number one? Number one?"

Some poor skut was lost out there, distant across station.

She heard, more distant still, full of breakup, "… Charlie niner one, that's

forty."