She opened her eyes to look without moving, and saw dark shapes against the starfield moving toward her. Odd. They were coming from the wrong direction. She lay very still, reviewing in her mind the exact sequence of movements that had brought her here . . . yes, that way lay the shortest route to the shuttle bay, and this way led around the circumference of the ship . . . but no one was supposed to be coming that way. All the other personnel hatches had been glued shut. Hadn’t they?
The cutouts enlarged, changed shape, and finally her eyes adjusted to the perspective and she realized they were almost on her. They held weapons . . . real weapons . . . they had to be the mutineers, and they’d come up behind her friends . . .
Without even thinking, she pumped the glue gun and took careful aim at one target, then another. First the leader’s rearmost foot, a half meter from her head, adhering to the hull so that he lurched forward, off balance . . . she got another’s arm as it brushed past his side.
Inside the ship, Miranda watched Anseli with a satisfaction limited by the knowledge that they’d both probably be dead in a few hours. She had been able to help the girl, to bring her out of that listless, terrified submission that was worse than death . . . it was satisfying to be able to do for Anseli what she had not been able to do for Brun. Compensation, and she knew it, was fully conscious of it. That didn’t make it less real, or less valuable to Anseli.
But the girl was nothing like Brun. Now that she was too far away to explain to Brun, or apologize, she saw that the daily irritations of living with a young genius had blinded her to what Brun really was. Anseli, so different, brought it home.
Brun had that reservoir of vigor, of sheer vitality . . . Anseli needed to feed on the vitality of others. Brun’s mind sparkled, raced, with a thousand bright ideas—most of them impractical, many of them foolish or dangerous, but the dazzling coruscation was, in itself, entertaining and struck sparks off other people.
Anseli was not exactly stupid, but she was so rule-bound that Miranda even had to argue that it was all right for them to escape—and she had not relaxed and been truly willing until one of the petty officers reminded her of the regulation which made attempts to escape from an enemy a duty, and had led her, step by laborious step, through the reasons why the mutineers were lawful enemies.
Miranda rued all the times she had wished Brun were more down-to-earth, more persistent. When she got home—if she ever got home—she promised herself that she would take her wild, insouciant daughter into her arms and admit she’d been wrong, from the beginning. How had she ever been so stupid as to think that Brun could be put in such a harness as would suit Anseli perfectly? Why hadn’t she realized where Brun’s genius lay—and that it was a genius, not an aberration?
And why had she let herself ignore, for all those decades, the same genius in herself—why had she pretended to be the sedate, serene Miranda, the beautiful wife and consort, and not admitted even to herself the piratical nature, the crackling energy, which she’d inherited in full measure from her own family.
At least Brun was free to run her own life now. At least that much had been saved. She glanced at Anseli’s taut, anxious little face and sighed inwardly. And she would save this one, too, if she could, to live out her own much more limited destiny. Poor thing. Free and cosseted, she would never be a tenth what Brun was . . . she taunted herself inside for that maternal burst of pride, then pushed both pride and taunt away. Her own children were fine people—she let herself linger just a moment on the memory of each face, as a child and as an adult, then locked those memories deep. In the next hour or so would come her last chance, it might be, of mothering anyone, and Anseli deserved the same fierce loyalty.
Their distraction group was headed for the engines, as if they intended to sabotage them. Miranda had no idea how that might be accomplished even if they got that far; she didn’t even know what FTL and insystem engines looked like. She followed the others blindly, with a rear guard behind her, noticing that the crew—even Anseli—seemed to know how to do things that set alarms ringing and lights flashing almost every place they went. They had left a trail of broken glass, smashed cabinetry, locks pried open, lighting units darkened. They had been attacked twice, but by gluing shut the doors behind them, their pursuers had been slowed and finally foiled.
Now they were in a maintenance passage of some sort. The crewmen had done nothing for the last ten minutes but now paused where another passage joined theirs. One of them had opened a hatch in the overhead, and pulled down a folding ladder.
“Where is this?” Miranda asked.
“Aft communications nexus,” Petty Light Kouras said. “Another one of those things they could rebuild to communicate with, if we left it untouched. Pivot, pass up that tool kit.” Anseli passed it forward. Kouras led the way up the ladder into a dark crowded space full of more incomprehensible shapes. When they were all jammed in, she turned on her headlight. “Miranda—glue us up.” Miranda and Anseli pulled up the ladder, then the hatch, and sealed its edges with a glue gun.
Under Kouras’s direction, they clipped lengths out of all wires and cables, making them too short to rejoin, and then turned the ends back and glued them into knobbly masses. “Some of this is probably also navigation stuff,” Kouras said. “Doesn’t matter . . . whack it all out.” A few minutes later, she led them between long cylindrical shapes to another folded ladder. But when she tried to open the hatch, it wouldn’t move.
“Locked?” asked one of the men.
“No.” Kouras pointed her headlamp at the seam between hatch and deck, where the telltale bubbles of yellow sealant were still glistening. “They’re using our tricks now.”
“We have solvent,” one of the others reminded her.
“Sure. And we can walk right into a trap that way. Let me think a minute.”
Miranda sat back against one of the long shapes—rejuv or no rejuv, her back was aching from the crawling and stooping and she would like to have had a long nap. Suddenly Kouras moved again.
“They’ve got the shuttle bay open . . . let’s go!” Kouras urged them faster. Miranda wondered if the mutineers knew that the groups aboard would try to get to the shuttle bay—surely they would—and where they might try to intercept them. She still didn’t understand the ship’s layout well enough to predict that, but she trusted that Kouras took that into account. Certainly their route seemed circuitous enough. In this hatch and out of that, up into the space between decks, then back down . . . she was completely confused, and would not have been overly surprised to find herself dropping cleverly back into their cell in the brig.
But at last she saw the warning signs on the bulkheads: shuttle bay airlocks: extreme caution topped by a row of red status lights. To either side were personnel airlocks, one with a green light and one with red.
Then she saw the bodies lying sprawled like piles of old clothes being sorted for the wash . . . except for the blood, bright as Pedar’s blood, on the polished deck. And the men and women in uniform, with weapons, across the compartment from them . . . but surely that was Hartung . . . ?
“Hurry up, we’ve got to get suited up!” It was Hartung; Miranda’s heartbeat steadied again.
“Perimeter?”
“Holding for now. Come on!”
The EVA suit lockers inside the shuttle bay held most of the suits; normally anyone using the shuttles would be aboard before the hatch opened to vacuum. Three of Hartung’s people had suited up in the only suits left inside, and gone through the locks to bring back enough for the others. Each could fit only four of the bulky suits at a time through the personnel locks, and fewer than half of Hartung’s group were now out in the shuttle bay helping the outside group break into and activate a shuttle. The red light on one lock turned green, as the one on the other turned red, the hatch opened, and four more pressure suits tumbled out, to be grabbed and donned as fast as possible by the crew nearest the lock. Then they crammed into the lock and cycled through. The second lock disgorged another four suits.