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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A hundred meters above the roof of the outer ring they came to a landing, where the spoke elevators could stop in case of emergency. Daslakh found a control which slid a pressure door into place across the stairway leading down. “It won’t stop Kamaitachi forever, but it’ll take a minute or two to hack through that.”

“The gravity’s lighter up here,” said Solana. “I can feel it.”

“Anybody have any painkiller patches?” asked Jaka. “I’ve run out.”

Nobody answered her.

Time passed weirdly. The climbs seemed to take forever, but when Anton actually timed the next leg of the ascent he found it only took five minutes to go up fifty meters. The rest breaks were as long as the climbing parts, but felt too brief.

The elevator landings were spaced a hundred meters apart, but as they approached the second one Atmin spotted something wrong. “The stair is blocked against us by a pressure door. I cannot say what lies beyond.”

“Could be a trap,” said Pera.

“Or damage to the hab,” said Solana.

“Daslakh, can you tell if there’s air beyond that door?” asked Sabbath.

“Of course,” said the mech, and climbed cautiously up the wall to where the pressure barrier blocked the stair. “Pure vacuum beyond,” it said after a moment.

“Seal up,” said Sabbath. “We’ll have to cut through.”

“Still could be a trap,” Pera pointed out. “Good place for one.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“Drop back a bit and cut through the floor, not the pressure door.”

“Unless Kamaitachi thought of that,” said Daslakh.

“Randomize,” said Sabbath. “Daslakh, divide that ceiling into half a dozen sectors and pick a number from one to six.”

“Right. Cut there,” said Daslakh, pointing at a section of ceiling four meters away from the pressure door. Pera’s laser made short work of the ceiling panel and then the sturdier floor deck above it. As soon as the beam cut through the floor layer a strong breeze began to blow toward the hole. Everyone sealed up their suits at once. The wind intensified as the cut grew bigger, so that Atmin had to land his travel sphere on the stairs and stick to the surface.

With the final cut the panel dropped down in front of them, and Daslakh scrambled up the wall to peer upstairs. “I don’t see anything. Just a lot of vacuum.”

“Laser’s down to fifty seconds of juice,” said Pera.

“Keep moving,” said Sabbath. “Solana, can you carry Atmin until we’re closer to the hub? I’m guessing that sphere doesn’t have much propellant for vacuum.”

“In zero gee, or close to it, my thrusters can support my sphere for half an hour or more. But here they would run dry much sooner leaving me imprisoned in a diamond cage.”

The travel sphere plus Atmin massed about seven kilos—not too heavy, but the sphere was bulky and awkward to carry. Anton watched as Solana held it in her arms, then rested it on one shoulder, then transferred it to the opposite shoulder, and tried to prop it on her hip. Atmin was obviously not happy with the arrangement, and fidgeted in irritation every time Solana moved the sphere around. Finally the bird activated the sphere’s manipulator arms and clung to Solana’s back.

Climbing in the airless section of the spoke made Anton even more paranoid. The only sounds he could hear were his own breathing and the blood pulsing in his ears, and the whines and creaks of his antique suit as it labored to keep up with the demands of his lungs. He kept looking back, fearful that Kamaitachi could be creeping up behind him in the silent vacuum. When he looked ahead he found himself waiting for the thrust of a blade in his back; when he looked over his shoulder he feared turning back to see the others massacred in silence ahead of him.

The lighter gravity did offset the strain and exhaustion of climbing up three hundred meters of stairs a tiny bit. Tired and sore leg muscles didn’t have to work as hard as their apparent weight dropped to only two thirds of what it had been at Safdaghar’s outer rim.

About thirty meters above the closed pressure door they discovered the reason this spoke section was in vacuum. Daslakh, in the lead as usual, came scuttling back down the wall, its shell hazard red. “We have a problem,” it said over comms.

They followed it up the stairs until they could see the orange glow of the Great Ring and the circling bright dot of some large nearby hab through a huge gap in the wall. “Looks like impact damage,” said Pera. “Not an explosion. Probably happened while Safdaghar was tumbling.”

Something had hit the Sun-facing side of the spoke a glancing blow, knocking away a ragged oval of the outer wall about six meters long and four meters high. Nine steps were completely missing, and another sixteen were attached only to the inside wall. Five of them were bent or partly broken, the others looked intact…

“We can climb up the inner wall to the end of the gap,” said Sabbath. “That seems safest.”

“Safest for you and me, and maybe the three female humans,” said Daslakh. “But someone’s going to have to carry Atmin’s fishbowl, Anton’s suit doesn’t have sticky surfaces, and you may have noticed that Pera’s missing a leg.”

“I brought some cord, and Jaka’s smart-metal strips,” said Pera. “With your suit helping, you can haul Anton and me up.”

“My travel sphere has low-thrust jets. I can expend some precious mass to launch myself up past the gap. You need not fear how I may pass this awful gulf.” Without another word Atmin fired a burst of cold gas and shot himself upward at an angle, aimed at the intact stairs above.

Anton watched the sphere rise, and saw with horror that Atmin had misestimated the Coriolis effect. The diamond ball arced forward faster than it should, on a path which would take it under the bottommost step and off into space.

“Pull up! More thrust!” he shouted, and then remembered his implant was broken. He fumbled for the microphone control on his helmet.

Atmin himself noticed, just before it was too late. He fired the thrust jets at maximum power, pushing his sphere just high enough to hit the lowest step, bounce upward, tumble, and ricochet off another stair before starting to roll back down. On the second to last step Atmin activated the ball’s sticky patch and it came to a stop, only thirty centimeters above the yawning gap into empty space.

After a couple of seconds the bird croaked over the open channel. “I do not recommend the method I did use. All you who can should come some other way.”

“Jaka, you go next,” said Sabbath.

“Why?”

“You’ve got weapons. If Kamaitachi’s managed to get above us, you won’t be helpless.”

“I’m not going to be your human trap detector,” she said. “Tanaca, get up there.”

Tanaca looked at Jaka as if she had never seen her before and couldn’t make out what she was saying. “I don’t like this,” she said to no one in particular. “I want it to go back to before.”

Daslakh scuttled up the wall. “Traveling with you idiots is like having a cable welded to my leg. I could be up at the hub undocking the shuttle by now.”

“Go on, Tanaca,” said Sabbath in an encouraging tone. “It gets easier from here.”

She shook her head, but started climbing up the wall. Jaka followed, but kept looking back at Sabbath as if afraid he was going to slip away when her back was turned.

“Okay, I’ll go next and pull you two up. Weapons hot in case Kamaitachi shows up.”

“Shut up and go,” said Pera.

Sabbath simply walked up the wall as if it was a level floor. He paused just past the lowest step and attached one of Jaka’s smart-metal strips to the wall, with a five-centimeter bulge in the middle through which he passed the end of the cord. He tossed the other end down to Anton. “Hitch her up first,” he said.

Anton started to loop the cord under Pera’s arms but the dino stopped him. “Won’t work for me. I’ll just slip through. There’s an attachment point on my back; use that.”

He found the loop on the back of Pera’s armored suit and tied the cord in an old-fashioned knot before sticking the end to the cord. Then he slid off the dino’s back and stood with his back to the inner wall. He wished he could see in all directions at once, like a mech. He had to content himself with flipping back and forth between watching Sabbath haul Pera up and nervously eyeing the stairs leading down.

Sabbath’s suit had sticky hands and feet, so he simply braced himself on the stairs and hauled on the cord hand over hand. Pera rose in short jerks, sixty centimeters at a time. When she got to the smart-metal loop, Pera stuck her one good foot to the wall and extended her tail to Sabbath. Hauling on her tail like a grabby toddler trying to catch a kitten, Sabbath dragged Pera up to the safety of the intact staircase.

Anton keyed his mike. “Don’t forget about me,” he said, mostly joking.

As he spoke he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look down the stairs, with his helmet lamps at maximum, he couldn’t see anything. And then, all of a sudden, he could: that patch of discolored wall was Kamaitachi’s fused and burned body, sliding slowly over the graphene.

Anton pointed the designator in his forefinger at the mech and activated his laser backpack. The little emitter ball sticking up over his shoulder locked on to the target and lit up Kamaitachi with a rapid series of pulses. The beam was invisible at first—just a scattering of intense white spots on Kamaitachi’s body—but then the puffs of vaporized smart matter and soot coming off the mech’s body became a series of dazzling grainy lines.

The pulses shifted suddenly as Kamaitachi threw a sliver of debris at Anton, too fast for him to see. The laser backpack spotted it, and went into defense mode automatically, vaporizing the projectile before it could hit Anton.

“Get me out of here!” he shouted into his helmet mike. Unable to look away from the killer he didn’t dare move—not with broken stairs above him and an opening to space just a meter to his left.

Kamaitachi began to throw heavier pieces of debris at Anton. Not at hypersonic velocity, but a jagged chunk of graphene didn’t need more than twenty or thirty meters per second to make a nasty hole in Anton’s crude spacesuit and fragile body.

The laser couldn’t blast the bigger projectiles into harmless dust, but its idiot-savant mind could knock them away by pulsing on one side or the other to deflect their path. And every time the backpack turned its attention to a thrown missile, Kamaitachi surged closer. It peeled itself off the wall and formed into a curiously flat shape, edge-on to Anton with the old damage in front as a shield, bounding toward him on three legs.

Just as Kamaitachi extended an arm tipped with a vicious-looking spike, something grabbed Anton from behind, and a moment later he was yanked upward. The spike jabbed at him but the laser saw it as a projectile and unleashed a flurry of pulses. He could see a second bright beam cutting through the haze around Kamaitachi as Pera’s engineering laser opened fire.

Anton slammed into the upper stairs and through his suit and body heard whoever was holding him give out a grunt as they hit.

He felt a shock of panic when he realized his backpack had gone quiet, and then saw that Pera was no longer firing either. Kamaitachi was gone.

Sabbath hauled Anton to his feet. He turned and saw that Solana had been the one who had acted as a human grapple, with a line tied to the back of her suit so that Sabbath could pull them both to safety.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“A few more bruises. I’ll manage.”

“Got to keep moving,” said Pera. “It’ll be back.”

They moved out again, Anton bringing up the rear as usual. He did manage one look at the view through the gap in the spoke wall. It was lovely: the sky was golden with the glow of millions of habs orbiting Jupiter. Against that backdrop was the black disk of a major moon—he couldn’t tell which—showing a bright crescent edge.

Ten meters of climbing brought them to the next landing. The pressure door there was sealed, of course, so Pera had to cut a way through again. As before, she picked a random spot to cut, in case of traps. But once they were through, she pulled a tube of sealant from one of the pockets of her armor and handed it to Solana. “Put the panel back and seal it up. No sense wasting all this air.”

This landing marked the halfway point between the habitat wheel and the hub. A small ring connected the spokes at that level, supporting and providing access to the solar panels and radiators in the space between the spokes. There was even a small lounge area with a diamond hemisphere window. Before the disaster someone had decorated the walls and ceiling with sculpted faces. Some looked like ceramic, others aerogel or foam, and a few were unnervingly realistic synthetic skin. Their expressions ranged from joy to anguish.

Despite their mounting fatigue, nobody wanted to spend a lot of time resting. The knowledge that Kamaitachi was somewhere close had everyone on adrenaline overload. The screaming faces everywhere didn’t help, either. Sabbath had to insist that everyone pause long enough to drink some water.

“That way,” said Daslakh, pointing with three limbs at the maintenance access passage leading spinward from the lounge area. “I generated a random number. It can’t predict which way we’re going.”

Sabbath hesitated less than a second, then nodded. “Right. Let’s move.” He got Pera balanced on his back and set off at a brisk pace.

“Half a kilometer of extra walking just for a slight chance it can’t track us? That means it’ll be waiting at the hub,” said Jaka.

“Best place to meet it,” said Pera. “I won’t need two legs in microgravity.”

“My sphere will soar as well as I can do myself,” added Atmin.

“What’s your power level?” Anton asked Pera.

“Forty seconds. You?”

“Sixty. I hope that’s enough. How many more doors do we need to cut through?”

“Four, probably more.”

“That won’t leave much if the mech comes back.”

“No,” said Pera, and that seemed to make any additional comment unnecessary.

The ring around Safdaghar at the half-kilometer height was a simple tube, with a flat floor covering conduits and the main structural members. The walls alternated opaque sections with stretches of transparent diamond, the north and south sides of the passage offset so that some parts were entirely sheltered, some had a window on one side or the other, and some looked like a footbridge through empty space. Hatches with pressure membranes every hundred meters allowed access to the solar panels and radiators above and below.

The group made good progress. A level floor and half-standard gravity meant they could move at a brisk pace, limited only by Daslakh’s ability to watch for hidden traps as they progressed. The biggest difficulty was for Sabbath to avoid banging Pera’s head into the ceiling, as there was less than three meters of headroom. He had to travel bent almost double, with the dino holding her head low and her laser powerpack slung on one side.

“It could be worse,” said Sabbath. “We could be wading through sewage. I’ve done that a couple of times.”

“Was it for work, or do you just like it?” asked Daslakh.

“Work. Had to get into a command post under a city on Earth—I can’t say which one, of course, but it was one of the old ones. Still had a sewer system and centralized waste-processing. Thousands of years old. We crawled four kilometers through a one-meter sewer pipe to reach a spot where it passed over the bunker. Couldn’t use a plasma breacher because of all the water, so we had to drill in and place charges. I had a mech with me made of smart matter, like our friend out there—” He waved vaguely to indicate Safdaghar around them. “It sealed off the pipe to shield the rest of the team, then set off the charge. We turned every drain for a kilometer around into a brown fountain.”

As a tactical environment the passage was worrisome. Once Kamaitachi figured out which way they had gone, it could come at them from almost any direction—sprint ahead and wait in ambush, approach from behind by stealth, or break in through a wall. They could only plod ahead, confined in a tube, able to see only fifty meters ahead and behind before the floor curved up out of view.

Having air around them again meant it wasn’t so unnervingly silent. All eight of them kept listening, speaking little. Anton wasn’t the only one constantly looking back. The only exceptions were Sabbath, whose rear view was blocked by a dinosaur’s hindquarters, and Tanaca. She plodded along silently, looking straight ahead and seemingly oblivious to everything. From time to time she slowed down until Jaka or Solana urged her forward.

They had covered about three-quarters of the distance to the next spoke when something came to a crisis inside Tanaca. She stopped walking, turned to Jaka, and said “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want it to stop.”

“No time for that now. You can rest in a little while. Come on, keep going.” Jaka took her by one arm and gave an ungentle tug.

“No!” said Tanaca, showing more emotion than anyone had seen from her before. “I don’t want this! I want to exit. Right now.”

“Sweetie, this is life, not a sim. We are where we are, no exiting. Now come on and stop being silly.”

Tanaca didn’t move.

“I can’t punish you now. We have to keep moving. I’ll do it later, okay?”

Daslakh, clinging to the ceiling above Jaka and just out of her field of view, turned dark blue with a bright yellow timer on its shell, counting seconds down from ten. When it reached zero the mech went bright red.

“We need to go now. I don’t know what bizarre meat-people games you two like to play but this isn’t the time or place for that. YOU WILL MOVE NOW! MOVE NOW! MOVE NOW!” Daslakh’s voice shifted from its normal neutral tone to a strident, harsh sound exactly matching one of the more common alert message voices.

Without really thinking, all of the biologicals including Tanaca began to hurry along the passage. Daslakh scuttled ahead to look for traps.

They were just a hundred meters from the spoke when Kamaitachi smashed through the graphene wall between Daslakh in the lead and Sabbath carrying Pera. The air in the passage gusted out, carrying dust and bits of decades-old trash into space.

Entirely by reflex the dino snapped up her engineer’s laser and put a spot of brilliant violet onto Kamaitachi’s main body. Sabbath extended his left hand and unleashed a volley of hypersonic darts.

The mech dodged and twisted, turning the hard-fused section of its body to act as a shield. The laser left a glowing trail across the surface and a couple of darts struck there, each blossoming into a spot of intense heat that dug a fist-sized pit as it expanded and dimmed.

Kamaitachi really didn’t like that. It jabbed a tentacle at Sabbath’s face, and only his suit’s quick reactions got his other hand up in time to knock the bladed tip aside. Pera shifted her laser to burn the tentacle.

The mech flipped itself back outside through the hole in the ceiling.

“This way!” said Daslakh. “I can sense it moving behind us.”

The others sprinted ahead, Jaka pushing past Sabbath and Pera to take the lead. Anton turned and walked backward, keeping his laser backpack ready to target Kamaitachi if it should appear.

He bumped into someone and found it was Tanaca, once again standing immobile. “Come on,” he said. “We need to get out of here.” A sound reached Anton’s ears, carried through his suit and the decking underfoot: a creak, a rapid couple of snaps, and then a louder creak. A mech-sized hole and the strays from Sabbath’s volley of mysteriously energetic little darts had compromised the structure, which was not a good thing in a narrow tube spanning a quarter-kilometer between supports.

Anton backed up past Tanaca and tugged at her shoulder, but she didn’t move. The others were twenty meters up the passage and he had no idea where Kamaitachi was.

“Please?” he said, taking a reluctant step back away from her.

Just then the wall of the passage exploded inward, sending fragments flying as Kamaitachi burst through.

Tanaca was between Anton and the mech so he didn’t dare use the backpack.

“Make it stop!” she said. She turned to face Kamaitachi. Anton couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing. “Make it stop,” she repeated, and began to walk calmly toward the mech.

“Tanaca, get out of there!” said Anton. “We’ll get you away from Jaka if that’s what you want.”

She made no reply, and spread her arms as if welcoming a long-lost friend.

Kamaitachi stopped. It had no visible eyes to watch her with—like Daslakh it saw with its entire surface. But its posture was intent, obviously focused on Tanaca. It even drew back half a step as she came nearer.

“Please?” said Tanaca, now just a couple of meters from the mech.

It shot out a limb, blindingly fast. What had been a foot at the end transformed into a hooked blade as the limb swung. For a moment it looked as though the blow had missed, and then Tanaca’s head neatly parted from her body as she fell.

Underfoot Anton felt another crack, and this time he didn’t hesitate. He turned and sprinted along the passage away from Kamaitachi. The backpack hummed and popped as it targeted the pursuing mech with a steady barrage of laser pulses.

He made it ten steps before the passage broke in half just behind him. Anton felt a loud crack, then a second, then a dozen in quick succession and the floor dropped about a meter. He looked back to see that the floor had parted, and there was a gap about a meter wide stretching from one of the holes Kamaitachi had made to the other. Only the ceiling still held, and as Anton watched a bright violet spot appeared there and swept across it.

Ahead he saw Pera holding her laser. Sabbath held Pera in one hand and Solana in the other, while Solana clutched Atmin’s travel sphere. Jaka was somewhere beyond them, out of Anton’s view. The floor gave a final sickening lurch and then the whole passage began to pivot downward. Daslakh launched itself at Anton, trailing a rope back to Pera’s combat armor. The little spider mech landed on his helmet, gripping it with all eight legs as the passage became a vertical shaft.

Behind Anton, Kamaitachi stood on the other side of the widening chasm, then leaped for the end of the passage as the section behind it—much longer and more massive—went into freefall. But just before it landed at the end, a spray of darts from Sabbath’s weapon struck Kamaitachi in a perfect hexagon of bright spots, knocking it off course.

The mech stretched a tentacle, desperately trying to grab the passage end, but another violet laser spot from Pera vaporized it. Anton watched it fall, hoping desperately to see it tumble away into deep space, but its course curved back out of view so he lost sight of it before it reached the rim.

He found himself hanging by his helmet, looking down half a kilometer at the roof of the habitat ring. To his left, a sheet of photovoltaic cloth hung in shreds. To his right, the disk of Jupiter swung in and out of view every minute.

For a moment nobody said anything. Then Solana spoke over the comm channel. “The poor thing.”

“We can burn incense later,” said Sabbath. “Now we have to get out of here before this section falls off the station as well.”

It proved to be a tricky problem in process management. Solana and Pera had suits with sticky feet and gloves, so they could stay secured to the walls and floor. Sabbath’s suit could do the same, and amplify his strength. Anton’s kept air in, and that was all. So first Sabbath hauled Anton—with Daslakh still acting as an increasingly unhappy grapple on his helmet—up the hundred meters to where the passage met the spoke. He more or less tossed Anton through the open doorway into the spoke, then went back for Solana and Atmin.

Finally the three of them hauled Pera up with the cable. Throughout the whole process Jaka just hovered about—neither helping nor willing to get too far away from the others.

“Keep moving,” said Sabbath once all were up in the spoke lounge area. “There’s still half a kilometer to climb.”

“Can’t we rest longer?” said Solana. “My legs really hurt.”

“No,” said Daslakh. “Kamaitachi could still be on board.”

“It fell away!” said Anton.

“It fell toward the habitat ring, which is half a kilometer wide. I give it an eighty percent chance of still being on Safdaghar. Plus or minus two percent.”

All the humans sagged a little at that. After a couple of seconds Anton got to his feet. “All right, then. Let’s go. At least we’ve bought a little time. It will be easier as we get closer to the hub.”

Sabbath gave a dry chuckle and then hoisted Pera onto his back once again. Solana picked up Atmin’s sphere, and the six of them trooped toward the emergency pressure curtain at the bottom of the staircase, with Daslakh in the lead. Nobody even looked at Jaka, who sat looking sulky and then hurried to follow. She pushed past Anton on the stairs and gave him a poisonous glare.

“You let Tanaca die,” she said, loud enough for the others to hear now that they were back in atmosphere again.

“You drove her to suicide,” he replied.

“That’s impossible. Tanaca loved me. She was the only person who ever really cared about me. You could have saved her but you were too cowardly.”

Now that she no longer had a traitor inside his brain, Anton discovered that he didn’t even hate Jaka anymore. He felt a considerable degree of annoyance, mixed with scientific curiosity at how anyone could be so utterly solipsistic. Hating her was like hating Kamaitachi—one might as well hate gravity, or the vacuum of space.


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