“Done,” Teague said, pulling out the little yellow-tipped device.
“Enter 72RZ459. That’ll give us directional control of video scan from down here. How long to get them all done?”
“Captain says several hours to get from one to another if you don’t want them bumped out of orbit.”
“Fine. Sleep when you need to. Pull all those components, bring them back here—though they may self-destruct so ask if there’s a good solid vault in the ship. Same codes for each, run the same Analytics before you pull ’em.”
“I’m okay. See you when I get back.”
Teague closed the maintenance hatch gently and wiped the surface with a cloth that left a slight glaze on the shiny paint. Maybe someone else would like to contribute trace data.
Back in the ship, he asked about safe storage for something that might blow up or melt or otherwise self-destruct.
“Safe? That would be throwing it into a star. How big is it?”
Teague pulled it from the carry-bag. “This.”
“Oh, well. And there’s more than one? They’ll all fit in the ammo storage; it’s supposed to withstand all the ammunition blowing at once. Never tried it, though.”
He looked at her and did not ask. He had seen no signs of weapons aboard Morningstar. “You’re cold and you’re still in trans,” Daran said. “Sit here and I’ll fix you some tea. Strap in; Gin’s going to shove us again.”
Teague did as he was told; Daran fixed him tea and handed him a couple of ginger biscuits, then headed aft. Through the open cockpit door, Teague could see the captain wiggling the handset gently, easing them away from the repeater before throwing them at the next. He sipped the tea, realizing he was in fact cold and hungry, and had finished one of the biscuits when Daran came back with a thick-walled box.
“This should do it, unless they’re really suicidal,” Daran said. “And we can monitor what’s going on inside.” He pointed to a readout on one side. “Put it in there, and I’ll put this back in the vault.”
Teague dropped the little object in the box; Daran closed it, carried it back aft… Teague thought better of looking around the corner to see exactly where. He himself was neither Vatta nor ISC. And he wished his bones would quit writhing around.
Three hours later, they were hanging about three meters off another of the repeaters, and Teague suited up again, readying his carry-bag. The procedure was the same, except that he did not call Rafe this time, and he came back aboard feeling more tired than he expected, until he added up the hours since he’d slept last. “I need to rest before the next one,” he told the captain. “My hands aren’t steady.”
“We’ll go back to the station,” the captain said. “Only safe place to hang out, close in like this. Bunk in Vatta’s crew overnight quarters, start again in eight hours. You can catch some sleep now, if you want.”
“No thanks. Knowing I’ll have to get up and walk steadily when we reach the station, I’d better stay up until then.”
“Hang on, then, it’ll be rough.”
Teague had never imagined a pilot of anything—water-boat or spacecraft—taking such delight in pushing a vehicle near its limits. Then he considered what little he knew of the Vattas, the few he’d met and those he’d heard about. Apparently they liked a kind of danger he hoped never to encounter.
By the time they reached the station, he felt nauseated as well as exhausted. Captain Vatta steered him firmly into the hands of the Vatta section’s medbooth, where he got a shot of something to settle his stomach and a tab for sleep. “You’d best stay here,” the medic said. She was entirely too cheerful, he thought, but he was asleep before he knew it.
Grace arrived home to the news that Teague was bunked in on the station, and Rafe had confirmed the blocking of scans over Miksland, and unblocked them.
“We can expect whoever did this to notice,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t unblock normal communications channels, just the satellite visual scan. If Ky’s people found out their comunits were working, they might give the other side too much info.”
“What about your special link?”
“Nothing yet. Here—I’ve got the scans loaded up for you. I can block them again, from here, with the changes Teague made.”
“Very resourceful,” Mac said.
“My code still gives me access to all ISC equipment,” Rafe said.
The scans came up on Grace’s main screen. “That cloud will pass,” Rafe said. “There—you can see the coast—that bay—that orange dot on the white?” He froze the image. “Zooming. It looks like some kind of fabric.”
“Part of a life raft, it could be,” Mac said. He glanced at Grace. “So they made it that far.”
“Now heading away from the water,” Rafe said, “you can see shadows on the terrain—and there are the buildings. And the runway.”
“What’s the tower?”
“I don’t know, but it’s there. Those two look like hangars, and these two look like ordinary military prefab huts. Guard post, maybe?”
“If they could get there—” Grace did not finish the sentence.
“Somebody’s there.” Rafe reached over and tapped out a code. The display darkened, but the two smaller buildings glowed. “Heat signature. If the bad guys can snag the scans—and they probably can—they’ll know someone’s there. That’s why I want to turn the scans off, now that we know for sure they’re there.”
Grace nodded. “Do it.”
Rafe tapped in another series of commands. “It’s blocked. We have these to look at—some from their night, a few from their day. But I’m still sure they have an automatic warning to let them know someone’s been tinkering with the satellites.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Merced Tolganna frowned as a light blinked orange on the third box, second row, of a stack positioned in the last row. No lights ever came on there; she’d been told they were old tech, kept for scavenging spare cubes and connectors, but nobody had ever touched them, at least not on her shift in her twenty years in Central Data’s secure vaults. She looked up the manual she’d been issued the day she arrived, and scrolled along until she found the list. Inactive reserve units, outdated, no maintenance needed. Right. Then the curly mark that meant a footnote somewhere.
“Should a unit spontaneously activate, inform supervisor—” followed by a list of names and dates. Her current supervisor was Nils Rolander. The one time she’d called him for an anomaly, he’d chewed her out for interrupting him and threatened to dock her pay if she called for “a simple matter you could have taken care of” again. She couldn’t afford to lose pay, not with Stan’s cough getting worse. “Include serial number, time of activation, and type of code.”
Code? The box was ancient; she had no idea what code it might have started with. She called up the schematic, looked at that serial number, then walked over to the stack where she could see the original blinking light, just as it had been mirrored on her display. On, off, on off, very simple. Orange. Serial number… yes, the same.
Maybe she could fix it herself and not have to call Rolander. At least she could check if some mischievous person on another shift had reconnected it to power, but the boxes fit snugly enough in the rack that she couldn’t see behind it. She put her hands on either side of it and tugged. It didn’t move. Been there so long it had grown onto the shelf. Probably the footpads had deteriorated into black goo. She tried to lift the front a little, break the contact. No movement.