He sighed, hoping he was doing the right thing. It seemed right, he thought, looking at it from all angles. The Spin Axis was forbidden, and the captain had to officially uphold that ruling, even though everyone on the crew knew there was an awful lot of unofficial and sinister rule-breaking going on at Exchange.
But the habitat was not Terran territory, and the Queen's crew had no influence. Just the opposite, in fact, if someone was spreading bad rumors about them to the other spacers. Dane would have liked to explain his idea to the captain, and get his okay—but then that placed the burden of the decision on the captain. Dane couldn’t do that. So he was going to have to take this risk on his own.
He looked down, saw Tooe watching him, her crest half-raised at a hopeful angle. "Lead on," he said.
They zapped through the dock tubing to the access lock, but instead of bouncing their way down the concourse, she looked around carefully, then said, "We go this way, us." And she retreated toward an area jumbled with cables and cranes. Again a look, then she slipped behind a monster automated loader. Dane squeezed after her, cursing to himself when he klunked his head against an unseen pipe. That wouldn’t have happened in normal grav. But here, it's all too easy to launch yourself fast enough to knock your brains out, he thought sourly as he pushed after his charge. And maybe that's just what I need.
Tooe kept looking back, her yellow eyes bright with a chatoyant glow, as she picked her way past a jumble of outdated equipment. Then she clambered up onto a pipe and jumped into an open air shaft. Sighing to himself, Dane followed.
The microgravity of their level had made it easy to follow her up the shaft at first, but after they had climbed for a while Dane found himself losing all sense of orientation. He realized they were now in the Spin Axis proper—that area of the habitat where the gee force was too small to influence the human vestibular canals sufficiently to give any sense of up and down at all. He wondered briefly if the boundaries were different for Kanddoyd and Shver, or how their physiology worked.
They came out on a deck canted at a weird angle, and vertigo tugged at Dane. He shut his eyes for a moment, then hastily opened them again.
That was worse: without vision to orient him, free fall was just that—an endless fall that made his monkey hindbrain gibber in terror. He tried to force himself to abandon the concepts of down and up. Now he had six directions to choose from, instead of four. The deck wasn’t canted; he was.
Again Tooe launched into a dark hole. Dane pushed after, his heartbeat accelerating. Was this going to be the stupidest— and the last—impulsive decision he’d ever made?
At first Tooe led him through abandoned air shafts and service hatchways cramped with poorly lashed, corroded cargo pods and other ancient junk, all dimly lit by random console or emergency exit lights. Dane frowned at the sight of one particularly large tangle of pipes and reaction vessels—perhaps an autochem or something—that was fastened
down so loosely that Tooe’s impact on it when she changed direction sent it slowly toward the bulkhead. That kind of carelessness killed people, he thought, then grimaced as he remembered where he was. On a ship, yes, badly stowed cargo could be a death sentence for ship and crew, but anything that hit the habitat hard enough to make this junk move would open the habitat to space and kill everyone on it long before shifting junk up here had any effect.
As he followed the little hybrid, he thought over the last couple of days. All his instincts favored Tooe, but he realized now that that might just be because she was so small and flimsy she didn’t seem to constitute any kind of threat. But that was aboard the Queen, in their territory. Here in this weird hinterland, she could always get a lot of small creatures together, and they could do what they wanted with an unarmed spacer.
Suddenly his breath caught in his throat as the space around them opened up abruptly to a vast cavern, with huge spokes reaching off at thirty-degree angles, their shadowed depths dwindling in impossible perspective. He realized they had to be at the top of twelve of the Kanddoyd towers—down the center of each spoke was the slender tube of a maglev, bedizened with the strange liquescent light-lines favored by the insectile aliens. The maglevs came together in a twelve-pointed star; suddenly, to Dane’s already stressed perceptions, the sight suggested nothing so much as some immense denizen of undersea with twelve luminescent tentacles, and he half expected one of them to curl towards them with feral intent.
But Tooe spared the spectacle not a glance. Instead she pulled herself gracefully along the interstice between two spokes and thus across the cavern, taking care to stay under the structural bracing—out of sight of inimical eyes, no doubt. Following her maneuver more clumsily, Dane put his hand on a pipe and yanked his fingers back with a hissed curse. The insulation was tattered and the pipe was bitterly cold. Only then did he note the ideograph denoting inert cryogenics. Probably nitrogen, he thought, then dismissed the thought, resolving to be more careful. He saw many more pipes like it, carrying different gases and liquids, some quite dangerous, and realized with mild appreciation the wisdom of the design: the emissions from any ruptures would tend to stay localized in zero gee, giving more time for repairs.
They traveled through air shafts for a while longer, finally emerging
into an intersection off which led five dark tunnels. The sixth was closed behind steel doors. Fog drifted out of one of the tunnels, veiling the faint lights that illuminated the open space and further confusing his sense of orientation. Dane’s danger sense prickled at the back of his neck. Where was the fog coming from?
Tooe paused, and when they saw a slight movement in the shadowy alcove just beyond a pool of light, she whistled quickly, a complicated series of notes, then rapped her knuckles on a loose piece of sheeting. It boomed softly; Dane noticed the center of it was shiny and dark, as if from years of steady use.
His ears caught the sound of movement, no more than a scrape, but Tooe swiftly followed up her whistle with another pattern, then visibly relaxed when from the shadows came a rapid clicking noise.
She gestured quietly to Dane, pushed off, and rocketed into the dark hole from which the fog was drifting. As they flew through the tunnel, Dane heard a faint hiss and saw the source of the fog: a leaking pipe. This must be a very old part of the Spin Axis, he thought; and indeed, as they went on, there were more and more leaks.
Occasionally Tooe would stop and whistle, or call, or tap some kind of signal, and on receiving a signal—usually from unseen watchers—she’d go on. At first Dane tried to memorize the trail, but had to give up before long. At the end, he was fairly certain they had doubled back.
He was about to ask what was going on; then an unsettling thought occurred to him: he’d been so busy wondering whether she could be trusted, he’d forgotten how Tooe must be feeling, taking a stranger to the place where her group hid out.
After what he’d heard over the last couple of days, Dane had a pretty good idea how life was in the Spin Axis. In the mostly abandoned space away from the area where the mysterious and sinister Shver Deathguard claimed, there were plenty of hidey-holes where various gangs lived, and none of them particularly liked or trusted the others. Sometimes there were fights—bad ones, since there were no Monitors to stop them. Mostly, though, the gangs seemed to exist in a kind of uneasy truce, lest the authorities suddenly decide to swoop down with heavy weapons and flame the place clean.
There were those groups that made their living from theft, or worse things. Tooe’s gang bartered.