The men took a few minutes to depilate their faces, making them look more like the beardless mutineers; the women could do nothing about their hair, but—as Chief Jones said—“It’s grown out a little, and from a distance we might be taken for men. Some of us, anyway. And you, Cecelia, if we get you into a uniform . . .”
Uniforms they could find, in the squad bay lockers, along with a variety of other useful objects: personal knives, ration bars, more gas masks, and p-suits. Miranda, in uniform, looked as perfectly groomed as in her usual expensive silks. Cecelia looked rumpled; she glowered at her mirrored image.
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Look like that. D’you have a spell you put on cloth, so it won’t wrinkle when it’s on you?”
“No—I don’t know how it works. It just does.”
Once the groups separated, Cecelia quickly lost track of the turns, the ascents and descents, through unmarked passages. She struggled to keep the coil of rope she’d been given from falling off her shoulder, and the several tubes of adhesive tucked into her “uniform” poked her uncomfortably. How did they know they were going the right way? Yet Chief Jones hardly hesitated, moving with swift silence.
They came out into a little room whose far side curved noticeably. The hull? Cecelia shivered. She had volunteered for this, but now that she saw that curve, the reality of what she was about to do struck her cold. Chief Jones was already slapping squares of stickypatch to the overhead and bulkheads. It made no sense to Cecelia, but she didn’t ask—Jones always had a reason, whatever it was. After another two patches, Jones grinned at her. “Blanking the sensors. Buys us some time.” One of the men had already carded the suit lockers. These EVA suits were heavy-duty models, intended for hours of use outside, with their size color-coded on the left shoulder. Jones quickly sorted them into a sequence of sizes and started them into their suits, tallest first.
Cecelia was third; she stepped into the open lower legs, and someone behind her lifted the back of the suit, until she could work her arms into it. Then it wrapped around to overlap the front section. Chief Jones checked the lower seals, helped seal the helmet, and then loaded the dual air tanks which should supply four hours of air. She attached Cecelia’s load of rope, tubes, dispenser to the suit exterior, and waved Cecelia to one corner, while the rest suited up, working in pairs. Then came the tedious business of working through the small airlock, one at a time.
Cecelia had no idea how big a cruiser was, and seeing the outside didn’t really help. Its surface, matte black, looked as if it had been cut out of the starry expanse or as if it were a cave, rather than an object that rounded out. Worse than that was the sudden loss of gravity—outside the ship’s hull, the artificial gravity had no force. She felt disoriented, and was very glad of the safety line clipped to a ring on a stickypatch outside the hatch. As she’d been told to do, she followed the line from one clip to another, around a dull black plain that fell away from her in all directions. Suddenly she saw something different—something glittery.
Chief Jones’ directions had been clear: if it sticks up, break it off; if there’s a hole with something in it, glue it up. Cecelia stared at a transparent flattened dome with what looked like an array of daisies under it. It wasn’t exactly sticking up, but she couldn’t see how squirting glue at it would damage it. Something tapped her arm, and she jumped. Another figure, pointing at the dome. It held a large hammer in one hand and very slowly leaned over to put a pair of stickypatches on the hull beside the dome. Then it stepped onto the stickypatches and swung the hammer.
Cecelia had never really paid attention to gravitational effects before, and had certainly never wondered what happened when someone in zero-G performed a violent maneuver. As the person beside her swung down with the hammer and the hammer cracked the dome, its feet tore away from the stickypatches, and it rotated overhead, feet describing a broad arc, and hammer swinging away from the dome toward Cecelia. She grabbed for it automatically, and the other person’s momentum rotated around this new center, wrenching her shoulder. Then the person bounced off the hull and rotated back the other way. One foot caught on a stickypatch, and the inertia rotated his body around the long axis this time.
Finally the wild gyrations damped, and the figure tapped Cecelia’s arm. She presumed it was a sort of thanks. Then, very carefully, the figure knelt, and hacked at the cracked dome. This gave access to the delicate floral shapes of the sensor heads themselves. The petal shapes came away easily . . . the other figure went on to another dome, leaving Cecelia to peel them out one by one. It was ridiculous . . . it was like the childhood game of plucking petals from a sunflower and counting out the answer to some childish questions. “They find us . . . they find us not . . . .they kill us . . . they kill us not . . .” Not, according to the last of the petals she tossed away. She took her dispenser of adhesive and squirted globs of it over the ends of the stalks to which the flowers had been attached. According to Chief Jones, this would make repair very difficult indeed.
Cecelia wondered, if this ship were ever found, what some repair dock would say about the damage they were doing. She, a taxpayer, was costing herself a lot of money, probably. It didn’t seem important enough to worry about for long. She decided that if she survived this, she would not prosecute herself for wasting taxpayers’ money—she would cheerfully pay more to repair whatever damage she was doing, so long as it kept her alive.
She looked around and noticed a metallic stick protruding through the hull covering a short distance away. She started to move toward it and her tether caught her short. She almost unclipped before remembering the person she’d caught and saved. Instead of unclipping, she added a length to her tether, carefully, and made her way over to the stick. It seemed shorter, and, as she watched, it crept down past her waist toward her knees. She gave it a whack with her glue tube, and found herself hanging by her tether. That didn’t work . . . she pulled herself in until she was clinging to the last attachment point. Then she thought to squirt more adhesive around the base of the rod; when it slowed, she formed a large glob on the tip. The stick didn’t move; she hoped it couldn’t.
Cecelia had no part in the assault on the shuttle bay—Chief Jones had put her around the hull curve and told her to lie flat. She had the pleasant task of watching her oxygen level crawl down as time passed, while she wondered what was going on a meter below her and all through the ship.
The others of the outside team, she knew, were surrounding the shuttle hatch, where they hoped the mutineers would come out to save the rest of the FTL nodes from gluey destruction. They seemed confident that they could disarm such a group and steal a shuttle of some kind, and Jones had promised to pick her up. It seemed a meagre chance to Cecelia. As she had faced reality in those long months of apparent coma, she faced it now—she would probably be dead in a few hours, her long life over.
She would like to have known if Ronnie and Raffa were doing all right . . . what Brun was up to . . . if Miranda could possibly get that girl Anseli out safely . . . but life wasn’t always cooperative, and she expected to die without knowing. At least they’d had a chance and she’d bought them that. She reflected a moment on the irony of someone widely renowned as selfish having humbled herself for all those weeks just to have a chance at breaking some others out of jail.
She lay trying to rest easy and conserve her oxygen, as Chief Jones had recommended, and almost dozed off in the peaceful dark silence, when a faint vibration in the cushiony hull covering roused her. Was it over? Had they already extracted a shuttle, and was someone coming to retrieve her?