“I think we’ll be fine,” Alex said. “My little pixies here are armed for bear. But I’m pulling five of them back around the corner here so they don’t get mussed up when the vent goes.”
Katria closed the case, set it in behind the access panel, squinted at it, shifted it fifteen degrees. What was it like, Holden wondered, being able to picture blast cones in your mind? What kind of life did you have to lead to have that come naturally? Katria rubbed her throat, and when she spoke, her voice had doubled, coming from the air they were breathing and through the earpiece. The reverb gave her words a weight.
“We’re done here. We’ll see you in the place.”
Meaning, the shelter. Where, when Naomi and Bobbie joined them, they could trigger the blast and wipe out the evidence.
“Hey,” Katria called down the corridor. “You coming?”
Amos floated back toward them as Katria slid the panel back into place and slipped her knife back into her boot. They were skimming along through the air together when it all fell apart.
“Um,” Alex said. “I think we’ve got a problem here.”
“What’s up, Alex?” Bobbie asked.
“Well, I got my little pixie looking through this vent. I’ve got eyes on both of these Laconian fellas, and one of them’s got his hand on something that sure looks like a dead man’s switch.”
“That’s not protocol,” Bobbie said.
“It ain’t Martian protocol,” Alex agreed. “But I’m pretty certain that’s what I’m seeing here. If I move forward with this, I won’t even have the door open before the Laconian fellas know about it. You’re going to be ass deep in alligators pretty damned quick.”
“We knew we were going to have to move fast,” Bobbie said. “This just means we move faster.”
“It means more than that,” Clarissa said. “It means they’ll log the alarm. The whole point of blowing out the pressure tanks was so they wouldn’t know we’d compromised them. If the secure room shows an alert right before the explosion, they’ll know what we did. They’ll change all the procedures. The data we recover won’t be worth anything.”
The silence lasted one long breath. Then another. Holden felt something in his chest loosen, it was almost like relief. And almost like dread too.
He knew what had to happen before anyone else did.
“All right,” Bobbie said, and Holden could see her clenched jaw as clearly as if she were there with him. “Let me think.”
“You’ll be fine,” Holden said. “Just wait until the … I don’t know. The tenth alarm goes off.”
“The tenth what?” Alex said, but Holden plucked out his earpiece and the mic and tossed them to Amos. The big man caught them in one wide hand.
“You going somewhere, Cap?”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “Can I borrow that wrench?”
Amos pushed it gently out to him. It was massive enough that Holden had to readjust his grip on the handhold to stop it.
“Am I getting that back?” Amos asked.
“Maybe. You get Katria to the shelter. Everything goes forward, just like we planned.”
Amos’ face went still as a mask for a moment, and then he smiled his empty smile. “You got it.”
Holden squared himself on the wall’s footholds and launched down the corridor. In an instant, Amos and Katria were behind him. It’ll be okay, he told himself, but he didn’t dig into why that might be true. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t hold up.
It only took about twenty seconds to find a panel with a manual fire alarm. He flipped the case open, pulled the switch down, and a Klaxon started screaming. One.
In the next corridor, he picked a thin copper pipe, set the wrench around it and pulled until it popped. Green fluid that stank like vinegar and acetate spewed out into the hall. Somewhere, the system would register the pressure drop and raise a flag. That was two. He heard voices shouting from the main deck. They weren’t raised in panic, not yet. More like they were trying to be heard over the alarm. He passed a radiation alarm and tripped that too—three—then headed toward the voices.
Naomi would understand, even if the others didn’t. She knew him well enough to follow his mind without so much as a question. There were two ways to hide something. Either put it where no one could see it or leave it in plain sight with a thousand others just like it. If the alarm went off in the secure room, that would mean one thing. If a bunch of alarms went off all through the engineering and dock levels, and it was only one, maybe the guards had panicked. It would just be more noise in the chaos. Unremarkable.
In the wide space leading to the transfer hub, half a dozen people were clinging to a wall, each of them talking over the others. He recognized the electrical tech they’d passed going in.
“Hey,” he shouted, waving his wrench. “Can’t you people hear? Get to the shelters!”
It was enough to start them moving. He picked another corridor at random and launched himself down it. He broke three electrical conduits, tripped another fire alarm and another radiation. If he could make his way down closer to the reactors, there’d be more he could break, but there would also be guards there. The wrench was unwieldy and massive enough that cracking the conduits and pipes open was starting to leave his shoulders and palms aching. He ducked into an access crawl and pulled two power exchanges out of the wall. That had to be good for at least one alert. He floated out into another hallway. The engineering deck was drowned in a cacophony of blaring alarms. He pulled himself toward a ladder. When the station was under thrust, it would lead down toward the drive cones.
It took the Laconians about two minutes to find him, but it felt like longer. Holden was trying to fit the wrench behind a support strut when two Marines in power armor came around the corner, their suits clicking as the actuators fired. Holden started to raise his hands, but the first one slammed into him before he had the chance. The impact knocked a few seconds off his awareness. The next thing he was sure of, there was a barrel pressed just above his left eye and his ribs hurt badly when he tried to breathe.
“You just fucked up, old man!” the guard growled.
Holden blinked. “I surrender,” he said. Breathing really hurt. There were bones broken. He was sure of it.
“You don’t have that option,” the guard said. Holden realized his life was now based on whether a Laconian Marine who looked like he was maybe in his early twenties had the self-control not to shoot his brainpan empty out of anger and excitement. Holden nodded.
“I understand, sir,” he said, and hoped that submission and respect would be enough to keep that one critical neuron from firing. “I am not resisting. You got me. I’m no threat.”
“CJ,” the other Marine said.
The one with the gun snarled, pulled back a few centimeters, and hit Holden along the side of his face hard enough to split the skin. Bright red globes of blood flew in a cloud and painted the pale anti-spalling cloth of the hallway. The pain was dull first, and then bright.
“You are an ungrateful piece of shit,” the Marine—CJ, apparently—said. “If we were someplace civilized, your sad ass would be in the pens.”
“What are the pens?” Holden asked, and the guard hit him again, hard against his right ear. He had the impression that CJ enjoyed this kind of thing. Holden wasn’t frightened so much as resigned. He’d known that he’d be trading his freedom for the chance that Bobbie’s plan would work. And for the electrical tech’s life. He was past the good part of his plan now, and the bad part might last a very long time or a very short one. Either way, probably the rest of his life.
CJ hauled him out into the free air where there was nothing for Holden to grab onto. A drop of his blood smeared the Laconian’s faceplate.
“What the fuck do you have to say for yourself now, asshole?” CJ said, shaking him just enough to make his teeth rattle. Holden took a deep, painful breath.
“We should probably get to an emergency shelter,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Three: Bobbie
Tenth what?” Alex said. His voice was reedy and distant. Not all of that was because of the tiny speaker it was coming out of. Alex understood what Holden was doing just as much as she did. One alarm was significant. One alarm out of a dozen meant less. Holden was giving them cover, and Alex was asking Bobbie to say that Holden hadn’t just decided to sacrifice himself to keep the mission on track.
Her mouth was dry.
“You heard him,” she replied, keeping her tone all business. “As soon as that tenth alarm goes off, blow the vent, take out the guards, and get us into the room.”
“Am I getting that back?” Amos asked, but not to them.
Naomi was staring at her, wide-eyed. She was on the radio, too. She knew what was happening. But she tightened her grip on her tools and pressed her lips together, then gave Bobbie a nod. Good to go. The Roci’s former XO would finish her mission. Then she’d worry about Holden afterward. They both would.
The sound of the alarms had started close to them, and grew more distant as new sirens joined the cacophony. Holden was moving away from them. Which was good, considering what was about to happen.