Waypoint Kangaroo (36 page)

Santamaria nods. “Wachlin's isolated. His handler's dead, and he has to guard a hostage plus watch every engineering control station—”

“If he still has a hostage,” Jemison says.

“My point is, he's already off-balance,” Santamaria says. “We just need to rattle him. Get him to make a mistake we can exploit.”

“Is that wise?” Galbraith asks. “Chief Gavilán could still be alive. If whatever we try doesn't work, Wachlin might react by doing something rash.”

“The hijacker is executing a plan,” Santamaria says. “He's not acting on impulse.”

“But you're talking about making him emotional,” Galbraith says.

She and the captain continue talking at each other. It's not quite an argument, and I know how it'll end: Santamaria will either convince Galbraith he's right, or order her to stand down. I tune them out and stare at the countdown clocks on the tabletop display.

How do we make Wachlin uncomfortable? How do we distract him from whatever he's doing? Especially if he's doing it to Ellie?

The agency teaches us some standard tactics for “disturbing” an enclosed space. Bad smells are a good way to get people to leave a room without arousing too much suspicion. Spiking the temperature is also effective. The problem is, we can't get into this particular room to do any of these things.

Or can we?

“Excuse me,” I say, then wait for Santamaria and Galbraith to stop talking and ignore their dirty looks. “How thick is that containment bulkhead? The one in front of main engineering?”

“Meter and a half,” Jemison says. “Titanium alloy. I thought you didn't have any heavy cutting tools.”

“I don't.”

But I have opened the pocket on the other side of a crowded plaza, nearly ten meters away. And I didn't need line-of-sight to the portal. I estimated the distance from where I was standing to where I saw a grenade land, and I was able to suck it into the pocket before it exploded and killed dozens of people.

Let's hope my estimating skills are still that good.

“I have another idea,” I say.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Dejah Thoris
—Deck 20, engineering section

20 hours until we either hit Mars or celebrate not dying horribly

Even if I didn't have second-degree burns throughout my left shoulder, it would be very uncomfortable in this maintenance crawlway.

The circular shaft is barely big enough for me to fit inside to begin with, but I also need to move carefully to avoid dislodging the equipment I'm wearing. There's a lot of shielding here around the ionwell, making wireless communication unreliable, so I have an audio pack strapped to the work belt around my crew coveralls. Power and data lines from that pack are wrapped around a spacewalk cable leading back down the shaft to the hatch where I entered. If I run into trouble—or when I finish this job, whichever comes first—Jemison and her security detail will drag me out backward. That's something to look forward to.

“It's a good thing I'm not claustrophobic,” I say out loud.

“Problem, Rogers?” Jemison's voice buzzes in my left ear, coming through the wired earpiece stuck there.

“I'm hot, sweaty, and I need to use the bathroom.” The throat-mic band is also very itchy.

“Didn't I tell you to go before you left?”

“But you didn't
make
me go,” I say. “So this is clearly your fault. I'm at section one alfa now.”

“Just a few more meters,” Jemison says. “You can file a complaint when you get back.”

The crawlway ends abruptly at the emergency bulkhead, which closed when Wachlin took over main engineering. I swivel my head, moving the spot of light cast by the lamp strapped to my forehead. There are no markings on the slab of titanium alloy, but according to the directions Jemison gave me earlier and the location codes etched into the metal walls, this is the right place.

“I'm at the bulkhead,” I say. “Seal is intact all the way around.”

We spent nearly an hour working this out and practicing before I started my tunnel-rat impersonation. I don't need to close my eyes, but I do it anyway. Looking won't help me.

The bulkhead is a hundred and fifty centimeters thick. I press my head up against it, visualize a black-and-red roulette wheel, and open the pocket two meters away from myself—I hope. I make the portal about the size of my palm, no barrier.

“The pocket is open,” I say.

There's nothing keeping the air in the engineering section from rushing through to the pocket universe. The emergency bulkheads also sealed the ventilation system, so main engineering has been recirculating its air supply. With at most two people breathing in there, it would take several days for the oxygen content to become too low for life support.

A ten-centimeter-wide hole into hard vacuum, on the other hand, will evacuate all the atmosphere in about two and a half minutes.

I put a countdown timer in my left eye HUD to distract myself from the dry-mouthed tension I'm feeling. There's a small chance that Alan Wachlin will look up at this corner of the engine room and see a wavy, disk-shaped mirror floating in mid-air, but even if he does, he can't do anything to stop me.

According to Jemison, a life support alarm will automatically sound when the passive sensors in main engineering detect less than twenty percent oxygen in the air, or atmospheric pressure below nine hundred millibars. We're hoping Wachlin won't know what the hell those lights and sounds mean at first, and will waste precious time panicking while Ellie—who will know exactly how long she has before she can't breathe—can get free of whatever restraints he's got her in and get to an emergency breather first.

I imagine what will happen to Wachlin when all the air vanishes from his locked room. If he holds his breath, his lungs will explode from the pressure differential. Meanwhile, his mucus membranes and most exposed capillaries will also burst. He'll be bleeding from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth before hypoxia renders him unconscious, fifteen seconds later. He'll have suffocated by the time the X-4s arrive and cut through the bulkhead.

I don't feel bad about any of that.

The timer in my HUD flashes. “Two minutes, thirty seconds,” I say. “Air's gone.”

“Copy that,” says Jemison.

I wait a few more seconds, just to be sure, then close the pocket and prepare to open it again on my side of the bulkhead. Now comes the tricky part.

Let's see what you're up to, asshole.

One of my emergency gadgets is an omnidirectional spy camera, designed and built by Oliver. It looks like a casino betting chip, but hidden in its edge are multiple lenses feeding into an imaging array. Activate it by squeezing, then flip it up in the air like a coin. Accelerometers inside detect the spinning motion and turn on the cameras, capturing still images from all angles as the chip turns in midair. Catch it when it comes down, and you've got a panoramic, bird's-eye view of your surroundings.

Doing this completely blind, and in zero-gravity, will be a little different.

I think of a poker hand—five very specific playing cards—then open the pocket and push my hand through the barrier to grab the camera chip. I squeeze to turn it on, then flick the chip away from me. I've switched my left eye to EM sensing, so I can see when the cameras activate. I watch the chip tumble away for a second, check its speed, and then close the pocket.

Now I'm going to open the portal rotated around the chip and on the other side of the bulkhead, inside main engineering. The compartment should be airless now, so I can open the pocket without the barrier and not worry about the chip getting sucked back into the portal. Throw it in the front door, let it fly out the back door.

The trick will be making sure the portal is far enough from the bulkhead to give the camera chip a good view of the compartment when it comes sailing out to do its reconnaissance, and making the portal big enough to catch the chip after it bounces off the bulkhead at some random angle. I can control how I use the pocket, but it's not like I can dial in specific numbers. I just have to guess at what feels right.

I press my head up against the bulkhead and visualize the card backs of the same poker hand as before. Then I open the pocket, rotated, on the other side of the bulkhead. I count to ten with my fingers crossed and close the pocket again.

“Mission accomplished,” I say. “Ready to—”

Something clangs behind me. The vibration ripples up the shaft on the left side of my body. I press myself against the opposite side of the shaft and tuck my chin down so I can look back along the crawlway.

The circle of light from my headlamp flashes across what looks like crumpled, dark blue cloth. The noise changes to a scraping, shuffling sound. I tilt the headlamp to the side and see a face—smeared with something dark, but still recognizable. I can't believe it.

“Ellie?”

She blinks and squints at me. “Evan?”

“Say again, Rogers,” Jemison says in my ear. “It sounded like you said—”

“Ellie's here! Chief Engineer Gavilán! She's here in the crawlway!” I move the lamp so it's not shining directly in her face and shimmy backward toward her, stopping when my feet reach the junction she emerged from. “How did you escape? What did—”

She shakes her head. I realize the smudges on her face are dried blood. “Not now. You're on comms with Andie?”

“Yeah, but—”

“The hijacker is Alan Wachlin. He's not dead.”

“We know,” I say.

Ellie blinks. “He's overwriting our system software. Tell my guys to kill the network and run a full diagnostic on rack ten in the computer core.”

I repeat her instructions to Jemison. “They're on it. Are you okay?”

“I'll be fine.” Ellie frowns. “What the hell are you doing in here? No, tell me later. We need to move.”

“It's okay.” I'm almost close enough to touch her. “I just sucked all the atmosphere out of engineering. Wachlin's suffocating even as we—”

Ellie grabs one sleeve of my jumpsuit. “You
what
?”

I smile. “I took away his air.”

I hear a high-pitched humming noise.

Ellie says, “Oh, shit.”

My entire body seizes with pain, and then the world goes black.

*   *   *

I wake up zipped into a Sickbay bed. Jemison is on my left, tapping at a tablet. Fritz Fisher is on my right. I don't recognize the patients in the other beds, but they look like a mixture of passengers and crew, most with minor scrapes and bruises.

“What happened?” I ask. My mouth feels like it's been wicked dry by cotton balls and then scraped out with steel wool. “Where's Ellie?”

“We don't know,” Jemison says.

I'm not sure I heard her right. “What do you mean, you don't know? She was right in front of me. I
talked
to her.”
She touched me.

“Calm down.” Jemison stares at me. “Was she hurt?”

“There was—” My mission recorder's been going since the hijacking, but I don't want to review the vid right now. “There was blood on her face. Dried blood. I don't know if it was hers.”

She was alive. She was
alive
! Did I just get her killed? But we didn't know, I couldn't possibly have known—

“Did she say anything else?” Jemison asks. “Other than what you relayed on comms?”

My head is pounding. “She said shit.”

“Don't be an asshole.”

“No, she literally said the word ‘shit,'” I explain. “I told her we'd sucked all the air out of engineering, which should have been good news, right? But she said, ‘Oh, shit.' Then I blacked out. What happened?”

“The crawlway walls double as electromagnets,” Fritz says. “We can electrify them to clean out any loose metal debris or stray equipment.”

“Wachlin figured out how to turn on the power and keep it on,” Jemison says.

That would explain why I feel like I've been hit by a personnel stunner at close range. “But you didn't find Ellie?”

“We flew a cam-bot into the crawlway,” Fritz says. There's an edge on his voice. “There was no sign of anyone else.”

“I didn't imagine her.”

“I'm just telling you what we found,” Fritz snaps.

“We need to know what Wachlin's doing in Main Eng.” Jemison pulls the privacy screen around my bed, with herself and Fritz inside. I suddenly realize they're both floating. We're in zero-gee again. “Let's see those pictures, Rogers.”

“We're not accelerating anymore?” I ask.

“The hijacker finished his course change,” Fritz says bitterly. “If we can't alter our trajectory, we'll hit Mars in just over eighteen hours.”

“Pictures,” Jemison says. “Now.”

I look at Fritz. “I'm doing this with him watching?”

“What, are you shy or something?” Fritz barks.

“The captain briefed Fisher. He knows about your wormhole device,” Jemison says. That's right, even the pocket has a cover story. Welcome to the agency. “We need those images.”

I nod and focus. I have to use the barrier so I don't suck all the air out of Sickbay. Five playing cards. The pocket opens. Here's hoping I got all the variables right earlier.

I push my hand through the barrier. I don't feel anything at first, and I move my hand around slowly. Something touches my palm. I close my fist around it, then pull out my hand before it starts freezing. I close the pocket and realize I'm holding my breath.

“You got it?” Jemison asks.

I open my hand and see the camera chip. I exhale as Jemison plucks the chip off my palm and plugs it into her tablet.

“That's…” Fritz gapes at me. “How long have we had this tech?”

“It's classified,” I say. It's not a lie. “The captain did make it clear how absolutely secret this is, right?”