“Nothing will be inward-bound while that freighter leaves,” Bel said, her eye on a blocky supply freighter. “So we just slip out behind it.” She must have noticed Gairad’s suddenly pale face, because she grinned and said, “Don’t panic, I’ve done this before.”
“Suddenly everything about your speeding fines makes sense,” Kiem said. He snapped himself into the zero-grav restraints. The interior had no windows, so he tapped his fingers on his knees and watched the glass walls recede on one of the pokey viewscreens.
Sitting still was agony. It felt like there was a pile of coals lodged under his rib cage, and all he could do was hang against the straps as they accelerated and watch the lighted bustle of the docks give way to black space. The viewscreens flickered and sharpened to brighten the pinpoint scattering of stars. Kiem knew their slow glide was an illusion—the other habitats in the cluster were kilometers away—but he wanted to shake the controls to eke out some speed. Jainan had been taken hours ago. He must be bored and tired, Kiem told himself. He must be sitting there wondering when Kiem and Bel would turn up. Other options were unthinkable.
The silver shells of the other habitats in the cluster rose around them, mainly automated manufacturing plants and storage stations as big as asteroids. The Kingfisher refinery came into view with the excruciating slowness of a planet turning toward the sun.
“Hah!” Gairad said, leaning forward. “Look, I was right about the secret module. They have detection fields,” she added sharply. “Bel! You’re flying right into them!”
Bel’s mouth was, unusually, a straight line. “Kiem, permission to corrupt comms.”
“What?”
“I can’t completely block their signals,” Bel said. “Not without a proper rig. But I can corrupt them, which will give you some time before they reset.”
“How long?” Kiem said.
“Maybe twenty minutes. No messages in, no messages out. Not even if the habitat is on fire.”
“There’ll be safety controls,” Gairad said.
“All safety controls have a fail state,” Bel said.
Gairad opened and shut her mouth, and then said, “How do you know how to do that?”
“Do it,” Kiem said, watching the refinery fill their screen.
He couldn’t see where the detection fields began, though Gairad went tense a few seconds later, anxiously watching some antennae protruding from the shell of the refinery. Their shuttle slipped away from the well-lit side of the refinery with its docking lights, around the curve of the habitat to the module Gairad had pointed out on her plan. It all looked the same to Kiem, who wasn’t an engineer or a pilot. All he knew was he would have drilled into layers of rock to find where they were holding Jainan.
It took them another endless three minutes to close with the hull. “There,” Gairad said. Kiem took his eyes off the time display to recognize the cracks in the hull ahead of them as a set of docking ports, unlit and closed. There were a couple of emergency pods, flimsy one-person things with enough fuel for a single hop, so people must use it occasionally.
Bel had brought up a separate screen to communicate with the refinery’s systems and was flicking her way through docking commands at high speed. It didn’t seem to be going well. “The main dock wants keys we don’t have.”
“Emergency,” Kiem suggested, snapping himself out of his straps. “They must have an emergency port. One of those tiny ones.”
“I’m a systems breaker, Kiem, not a combat specialist,” Bel said, in a voice that was nearly a snap. “I can’t protect both of you if you try and fight your way through a chokepoint!”
“Bel,” Kiem said. She paused, one hand hovering in the air in front of the screen, and gave him the most hostile look he’d ever seen from her. “Bel,” he repeated. “Look at us. If we have to fight, we’ll get slaughtered anyway. Our only hope is to get in quietly.”
Bel clenched her hand, deleting her docking commands, and breathed out. Her face relaxed back into a more familiar expression. “Okay,” she said. “Emergency port. We’ll open it quietly. You two had better not get yourselves hurt. Kiem, you do the bridge.” Kiem gave her a thumbs-up and floated to the release lever by the shuttle’s hatch.
“Wait,” Gairad said, “has he ever done an emergency bridge?”
“I’ve seen safety vids,” Kiem said, pulling the lever.
The side of the shuttle blew in with a bang. Kiem hadn’t been expecting it and was blown backward, slamming into the opposite wall of the hull as the emergency docking skin filled a third of the shuttle with a pale, jelly-like mass. He scrambled dizzyingly around until he could get his feet under him.
The door hissed open behind the skin. Kiem recoiled at seeing hard vacuum behind it, but the semitransparent bridge gel did its job, sealing the door and keeping the atmosphere inside. “Help me extend it.”
“Oh, God,” Gairad said, but she pushed herself across the shuttle and thrust her hands into the pale gel.
A fierce rush of joy went through Kiem at the prospect of finally doing something. He kicked his foot into the gel to stretch it, forcing it to bulge outward from the doorway, and attacked the rest of it with vigor. Gairad did the same, both of them squeezed back-to-back in the cramped door, until the skin had stretched out enough to bridge the last meter to the hull of the refinery. Bel cycled through some more docking prompts.
“Fifteen minutes,” Kiem said, pressing the skin to the hull of the refinery. He tried not to think about the vastness of space on the other side of the semitransparent gel. “Is it—”
“Got it,” Bel said.
Gairad yelped and slammed her hand on the skin, finishing the seal just as the emergency hatch slid open. The gel was starting to solidify into a hard, waxy shell, forming a narrow, air-filled tunnel between the shuttle and the refinery’s hull. Kiem slithered through it first.
He fell out onto a metal floor. As he picked himself up, his eyes had to refocus: the space was enormous, as if this whole module was just an empty shell. The only lights were blinking indicators and dim glows in the distance, highlighting the dark clutter all around them without being enough to see by. It looked like a warehouse.
“We were wrong,” Kiem said. It was hard to remember to keep his voice low when his chest felt like something was ripping inside it. He pressed the toe of his boot against one of the nearest pieces of machinery, repressing the urge to kick it. “He can’t be here. This isn’t a detention block, it’s storage for some kind of mining rig.”
White light flared. Gairad had clambered through the tunnel, feetfirst and swearing, and now fished a marble-sized flashlight out of her pocket. It lit up their surroundings like a miniature star.
Bel had frozen in the act of picking herself up, staring at the nearest pile of clutter. “Kiem,” she said. Her voice sounded very distant. “Why am I looking at a stack of reaper warheads?”
Kiem stopped just before nudging another rack with his foot.
Gairad was already moving over to a nearby rack with the flashlight. “These are military drones. Guess we are in the wrong place.” Kiem could hardly bear to listen. Anything could be happening to Jainan while they were in the wrong place. But if not here, then where? Gairad was still restlessly moving around. “Why the fuck would you put an armory up here?”