Cho snorted. "In case Nadayki is, as you say, talking out of his ass."
"As far as his organs are concerned, a few more hours will make no difference."
"And your third point?"
"Ryder's crew. No one gives a shit if you kill a prisoner, but you can't kill a member of the crew for puking."
"Doc's right, Captain." Huirre sounded pretty much exactly the way Craig imagined a man caught between a rock and a hard place would sound. "I mean, you've got to keep discipline, sure, but if puking's a killing offense, whole crew'd be dead a couple of times by now."
"I can kill anyone I want to!"
"Yeah, but…"
Craig cracked the eye again. Huirre was looking to Doc for support. Surprisingly, he got it.
"You can kill anyone you want to," Doc agreed. "But that's not a philosophy people will follow, and you need a minimum of four crew to keep the Heart of Stone profitable."
Huirre shifted nervously back and forth, toes flexing against the deck, but it seemed that Cho was actually thinking about what Doc had said. From anyone else, the observation would have sounded like a threat, but it hadn't taken Craig long to learn that Doc didn't make threats.
Breathing shallowly, one arm wrapped around the newly rebruised ribs, Craig began to relax. He didn't want to die and now, it seemed as if he might get through this little adventure in one piece. Not counting the pieces of his gut he'd already hurled to the deck down in the pod.
"You're right," Cho said at last. "If Ryder's crew, he gets treated like crew. Nadayki could be full of shit about his chances of getting through that last bit of code, and he could be bullshitting about Ryder doing this…"
The toe of his boot jabbed the bruise rising from the earlier kicks. Pain surged out from the contact like waves of flame. In its wake, his body felt burned.
"… to himself, but maybe he isn't. Maybe Ryder's worried that once he gets me into that armory we won't need him anymore, so he's fukking around. Fukking around delays the payout to the crew. We can't have that." Cho sounded pleased with himself.
"No, we can't." Doc still sounded reasonable.
"He needs to be taught that the crew comes first. That we don't fuk around and delay payouts. Take a toe."
Huirre had him held down before Craig realized what take a toe meant. He got an elbow up, Huirre grunted, then Huirre's foot closed around his forehead and slammed the back of his head into the deck. Struggling to escape became weak flopping between the four points Huirre had locked down.
Doc got his boot off with terrifying efficiency.
He felt cold air against his sole.
A strong hand closed around his ankle, grinding the small bones together.
Metal pried the smallest toe on his left foot out from the one next to it.
Given the spikes of pain in his head, it wasn't the new pain that dragged the cry out of him. It was the crunch of the blades going through the bone.
The salt-copper smell of blood.
Closely followed by the crunch of Huirre's jaws.
Then the new pain hit. Over the years, the squatters had made very few changes to the layout of the station. Outside of the additional docking arms, most changes seemed to be a case of areas being used in ways the planners hadn't intended.
"Not much they can do to the internal structure," Ressk noted as he climbed out the lip of yet another double decompression hatch. "This thing's been designed to break apart into independent segments rather than hole and blow in case of an explosion. Limits the damage. It used to be the default for stations supporting mining operations, but these days, not so much."
Mashona shook her head as she stood just the other side of the opening, watching back along their six. "You're just a font of knowledge, aren't you?"
"Knowledge is power."
"I think you're overcompensating for something."
"You think?"
"Less chatter, people." They weren't saying anything Torin gave a H'san's ass if Big Bill heard, nothing about Craig or the Heart or why they were actually here since they'd left the masking noise of the Hub, but she saw no point in sending up flares, giving him sound on top of everything else.
"Big Bill's got this whole place under surveillance, Gunny." Ressk brushed a hand over his slate. The gesture would have meant nothing to anyone watching, but it told Torin he was mapping that surveillance out.
"Eyes and ears in the whole place limits him," Werst grunted, dropping down into the new section. The double decompression hatches were wide enough the Krai found it easier to climb over than step over. "He can't watch the whole serley place at once."
"We get into an area that's off limits, we'll trip a sensor. Talk, don't talk; doesn't matter. He'll know we're here."
Werst waved it off. "He didn't say this area was off limits. He didn't say any area was off limits."
"He's too smart to lay down those kind of rules for these kind of people," Mashona said, falling back into position behind the two Krai.
"You head out here when you're tired of rules," Torin reminded them. That was why they'd told Big Bill they were on Vrijheid. Better to leave it at bad things happen to people who go where Big Bill doesn't want them to; that implied choice.
Each new section as they moved away from the Hub had been less used than the one before. The pale gray bulkheads of this section had been scored and dented by old machinery-Torin neither knew nor cared how they got machinery over the hatch lips-but it felt as though it had hardly been used since. Every other light was out in the band along the ceiling, and the black rubber treads running down the center of the deck were barely worn. It felt abandoned.
This was the most direct route to the ore docks. Once the ore carriers stopped, there'd been no reason to use it.
"They're still using the smelter," Mashona said suddenly, as though she'd been following Torin's thoughts. "Not the actual smelters but the area they were in. Machinery's gone, and it's a big open space like… a parade square. They use it for things that affect the whole community. Trials and shit. Oh, and fights every now and then."
"Fights that affect the whole community?" Ressk asked.
"Fights the whole community makes book on, you ass."
Torin picked up the pace. According to the original schematics, this was the last section before the storage pods. This was the last hatch, last pair of hatches, between her and Craig.
The first hatch was closed.
And locked.
The lock had been added recently.
"Ressk…?"
His nose ridges flared as he exhaled long and loud, fingers stroking the screen of his slate. "That's a good question, Gunny. Under normal circumstances, no problem, but this isn't going to take a simple digital jimmy. I need a way into the system, and this place is locked down tight. So far, no cracks."
"Not surprising," Mashona acknowledged, "given the rumors about how Big Bill scored this place."
"Yeah, exactly. I can break it. I can break anything eventually, but it'll take time."
How much time did Craig have left?
"How much time?" Torin asked, voice hard.
Given Ressk's expression, he'd heard the first question, too. "From outside the system? I couldn't tell you."
The gray plastic housing around the lock remained a gray plastic housing under her touch.
"Let's go." She pressed her palm against the hatch-Craig was on the other side-then turned and headed back the way they'd come.