They were shooting out most of the cameras as they went, but as much noise as they made it wasn’t hard to keep track of them. They stopped at the intersection for a moment, then moved on. Were they patrolling?
No, wait. There was a whisper of radio traffic that hadn’t been there before. Encrypted, so I couldn’t tell what it was, but the amount of data was about right for a camera feed. I spread my arms, and concentrated on the signal.
It was coming from something on the floor, right in the middle of the intersection.
There was another signal coming from down the hall, where the bots had stopped. A third one popped up as I listened, from further down the hall. They were planting cameras.
Great. I couldn’t afford to get into a big shootout with who knows how many bots. Now what?
Circle around to a different hallway? No, the team that was planting sensors would get there before I could.
Rush past it? No, there were too many bots roaming around. They’d intercept me before I could get to the breaker panel.
I sighed. This was really embarrassing. But there was only one way to get the job done as quick as I’d promised Lina. I swept my finger down my spacesuit’s sealing strip. Smoke and Ash watched in obvious confusion as I peeled it off.
What do? Ash asked.
“You guys wait here and guard my stuff, okay?”
Grr! Guard!
Good thing they weren’t sapient. I had a feeling a smarter bodyguard would get upset with me over this, but it was the only way. I just wish it wasn’t so cold down here. I already had goosebumps, and it would only get worse. The temperature was barely above freezing.
How was I going to make my stuff stay put? No time for anything fancy, but I had a roll of duct tape in one of my suit pockets. I tore off a strip to stick my suit to the wall, peeled off my panties, and then stuffed them and the tape back into a pocket. Yeah, this was going to suck. Better get it done quick.
I went into stealth mode, and drifted around the corner.
Sure enough, there was a little box in the next intersection, stuck to what would be the floor if the gravity was turned on here. I could make out the lenses of cameras facing in each direction, but no active sensors.
My skin was as cold as the wall behind me, and my active camouflage made me virtually invisible on any wavelength from the near infrared to far ultraviolet. If I was right, and that was just some civilian-grade sensor package, I could probably float right past it without being seen. But if it was a military model…
There was no lidar or radar. No floating cloud of micromachines, or manipulator field being used as a mass sensor. No change in the radio activity either. It couldn’t see me. I breathed a silent sigh of relief, and pushed off the wall to send myself floating down the passage.
I passed a second sensor box at the next intersection, and a third when I swung into the lift shaft leading down to my destination. Still no alarms.
I didn’t feel as cold as I’d expected, either. Oh, sure, my skin was pretty much ice at this point, but my internal temperature was fine. I had a lot more energy stored up than I ever had before. I could probably do this for twenty minutes, and I didn’t need anywhere near that long. I was already almost to the breaker panel.
Then I emerged from the lift tube, and almost ran into another bot. That’ll teach me to woolgather in the middle of a sneak. I managed to stop myself in time, and froze.
This was a smaller bot than the ones I’d run into before, but it was pretty nasty looking. There was an oval central body maybe twice the size of my dragons, with eight long limbs that had a lot more joints than any animal. There were blades mounted along the sides of the limbs, and a nozzle on the front of the body that was probably designed to spray acid or something. It looked like an ugly metal spider, designed for killing things up close and personal in zero gravity. Not exactly military, but to a girl who wasn’t wearing armor those blades were no joke.
It lit up the hall with a radar ping, but that was easy to fool. I sent back a return that looked like an empty hallway, and waited for a second. Was it going to move?
It did, and for once luck was with me. It was moving away from my destination. I let it get a few more meters of distance, and then eased out into the hallway and launched myself into a long zero-g dive. Six seconds later I was grabbing a handhold to stop myself at the breaker box.
Hmm. There was a big access panel covering the power junction, and there was no way to open it without making some noise. But there was also a toolkit stored in the service compartment. Good enough. I dropped stealth so the lock could ID me, and opened the panel.
Radar pings lit up the hallway from both directions.
The cramped closet-sized space behind the panel was mostly filled by the junction box. Rows of conduits ran up and down from the box, vanishing into the floor and ceiling. Those would be the superconducting cables that carried power for this part of the ship, and the row of mechanical switches across the front of the box controlled the circuit breakers. I took hold of the lever for Bay 17, and heaved it up.
Metal limbs scrabbled against metal walls in both directions, warning me that company was on the way. Both bots had their radar on now, giving me a clear picture of themselves and everything else in the hall. They weren’t the only things moving out there.
I grabbed the laser cutter from the tool bin, flipped it to max power, and burned the handle off the circuit breaker. While I was doing that with one hand, some instinct led me to reach for the little power outlet in the corner of the panel with the other.
A slender prong of superconducting wire popped out of the end of my pinkie.
I stared at it for a few milliseconds. Yes, that really was a standard android charging port.
The smart move would have been to drop the laser cutter and go back to stealth mode, but I was curious. Instead, I plugged myself in.
A river of warm, sweet power ran up my arm to pool in my heart. Naoko was right, I had a power cell. Systems I’d never felt before lit up with the influx of life-giving energy, and I could feel my growth go into overdrive. Wow, I was actually heating up. How much power was I pulling?
Sixteen megawatts?!? Great googly moogly, I was going to melt myself in a few seconds at that rate. I wrenched my finger out of the socket, and spun back to the hallway.
Bad side: There were two of those nasty spider bots almost close enough to jump me, and I was way too hot to go back into stealth mode. Heck, my hair was actually glowing. I’d never realized each hair had a heat exchanger wrapped around the radio antenna that formed its core. That was kind of neat, but it was going to make slipping away hard.