There were rumors about these abandoned hab sectors. Dismembered bodies buried in the cable ducts, surveillance cams that would look away if you knew the secret gesture to bypass their programming, invitingly abandoned houses where one of the rooms was just a doorknob away from hard vacuum. But she’d never heard rumors of entire segments that were blacked out, where you couldn’t call someone or talk to your agents or notepad, where maintenance ’bots feared to crawl. That was beyond neglect; it was actively dangerous.
She walked through a wide, low-ceilinged hall. From the rails along one side and the lack of decoration it looked to have been some kind of utility tunnel, back when people lived and worked there. Empty doorways gaped to either side, some of them fronted with rubble — crushed dumb aerogel and regolith bricks, twisted frameworks. Most of the lights were dead, except for a strip along the middle of the ceiling that flickered intermittently. The air was stale and smelled musty, as if nothing much stirred it. For the first time Wednesday was glad of her survival sensor, which would scream if she was in danger of wandering into an anoxic gas trap.
“This can’t be right,” she muttered to herself. With a twitch of her rings she brought up a full route map, zoomed to scale so that this corner of the colony’s public spaces was on the display. (The rings were another thing that rubbed it in; back in Moscow’s system they’d have been a bulky, boxy personal digital assistant, not a set of hand jewels connected to her nervous system by subtle implants.) The whole segment was grayed out, condemned, off-limits. Somewhere on the way she’d gone blundering through a doorway that was down on the map as a blank wall. “Bother.” The party — she dumped her follow-me tag into the map — lay roughly a hundred meters outside the shield wall of the pressure cylinder. “Shit,” she added, this time with feeling. Someone had put Johnny up to it, spiking her with a falsie — or, more subtly, run a middleman spoof on his hacked ring. She could see it in her mind’s eye: a bunch of mocking in-things joking about how they’d send the little foreign bitch on a climb down into the dirty underbelly of the world. Something rattled in the rubbish at one side of the hall, rats or -
She glanced round, hastily. There didn’t seem to be any cams down there, just hollow eye sockets gaping in the ceiling. Ahead, a dead zone sucked up the light: a big hall, ceiling so high it was out of sight, opened like a cavern off the end of the service tunnel. And she heard the noise again. The unmistakable sound of boots scuffing against concrete.
What do I — Old reflexes died hard: it took Wednesday a split second to realize that it was no good asking Herman for advice. She glanced around for somewhere to hide. If someone was stalking her, some crazy — more likely, a couple of Bone Sisters who’d lured her down there to whack her bad for wearing team invisicolors and carrying a cutter on their loop — she wanted to be way out of sight before they eyeballed her. The big cavern ahead looked like a good bet, but it was dark, too dark to see into, and if it was a dead end, she’d be bottled in. But the doorways off to the left looked promising; lots of housing modules, jerked airlocks gaping like eye sockets.
Wednesday darted sideways, trying to muffle her bootheels. The nearest door gaped wide, floor underlayers ruptured like decompressed intestines, revealing a maze of ducts and cables. She stepped over them delicately, stopped, leaned against the wall and forced herself to close her eyes for ten seconds. The wall was freezing cold, and the house smelled musty, as if something had rotted in there long ago. When she uncovered her eyes again, she could see some way into the gloom. The floor paneling resumed a meter inside the threshold, and a corridor split in two directions. She took the left fork hesitantly, tiptoeing quietly and breathing lightly, listening for the sound of pursuit. When it got too dark to see she fumbled her tracker ring round, and whispered, “I need a torch.” The thin blue diode glow wasn’t much, but it was enough to outline the room ahead of her — a big open space like her family’s own living room, gutted and abandoned.
She looked around the room. A broken fab bulked in one corner next to an exposed access crawlway. A sofa, seat rotted through with age and damp, occupied the opposite wall. Holding her breath, she forced herself not to sneeze. Words came to her, unbidden, on the breeze: “—fuck da bitch go?”
“One o’ these. Youse take starboard, I taken the port.”
Male voices, with a really strange accent, harsh-sounding and determined. Wednesday shuddered convulsively. Not the Sisters! Bone Sisters were bad — you crossed them, they crossed you and you needed surgery — but the white sorority didn’t hang out with -
Crunch. Cursing. Someone had stuck a foot in the open cable channel. Teetering on the edge of blind panic, Wednesday scurried toward the half-meter-high crawlway and scrambled along it on hands and knees, headfirst into a tube of twilight that stretched barely farther than arm’s length. The tube kinked sharply upward, pipes bundled together against a carrier surface. She paused, forced herself to relax, and rolled over onto her back so that she could see round the bend. Can I … ? Push from the knees, begin to sit up, stick boot toes into gaps in the carrier trunking, push …
Panting with effort, she levered herself up and out of view of the room. Please don’t have infrared trackers or dogs. The thought of the dogs still woke her up in a cold, shivering sweat, some nights. Please just be muggers. Knowing her luck, she’d crossed paths with a couple of serial fuckmonsters, transgressive nonconsensual looking for a meat puppet. And she didn’t have a backup: that cost real money, the kind that Mom and Dad didn’t have. She shuddered, forcing back panic, braced her elbows against the walls of the duct, and flicked her rings to shutdown. She switched off her implants — backup brain, retinal projectors, the lot. Completely off. She could die there and nobody would find the body until they tore down the walls. There could be a gas trap, and she’d never know. But then again, the hunters might be following her by tracking her emissions.
“She come ’ere? I not am ’inking ’dis.” Scuffling and voices and, frighteningly, a faint overspill of light from a hand torch. A second voice, swearing. “Search’e floor! Have youse taken beneath dat?”
“I have. Tracer an’ be saying she — shirting vanish. Tracer be losing she. Signal strong al’way from she’s home. Prey be wise to sigint ’striction.”
Not some girl gang shit: they were stalking her, had followed her all the way from home. Forget muggers, forget ordinary sickheads. Wednesday stifled a squeak of pure cold terror.
“I an’ be checking over the way. You be clearing dis side an’ if-neg we-all be waiting mid-way. If she be hiding, she-an be come out.”
“An’ we be dumping nitro down here? Bath she in unbreathable?”
The second one replied, contemptuous: “You-an’ be finding rotten meat after, you be dumping ’de breathing mix. Contractees, t’ey wanting authentication.” Footsteps clattered over the grating, stopped.
They’re going to wait me out in the corridor? At least they weren’t going to flood the entire sector with nitrogen, but even hearing them talking about it was frightening her. Rotten meat. They want to know I’m dead, she realized, and the dizzying sense of loss made her stomach heave. How do I get out of this?
Just asking the question helped; from somewhere she dredged up a memory of her invisible friend lecturing her, an elevator-surfing run during happier days back home. The first step in evading a pursuit is to identify and locate the pursuers. Then work out what sort of map they’re using and try to locate their blind spots. Not to take the stairs or the elevator, but to go through a service hatch, carefully step onto the roof of a car, and ride it to safety — or as a training game, all the way to Docking Control and back down again without showing up anywhere on Old Newfie’s security map. She’d learned to ghost through walls, disappear from tracking nets, dissolve in a crowd. Ruefully, Wednesday recalled Herman’s first lesson: When threatened, do not let yourself panic. Panic is the most likely thing to kill you. At the time, it had been fun.