“They’re shooting the ring?” Holden said.
“Yes. And in particular, they’re shooting at my office. I’m starting to get the feeling they don’t like me.”
Together, they struggled forward. In the wide corridor, people were scampering to hardened shelters and evacuation stations.
An older man with close-shaved hair and a mouth set in a permanent grimace saw Fred and the blood. Without a word, he took Fred’s far arm across his shoulder.
“Are we heading to medical bay or evac?” Grimace asked.
“Neither one,” Fred said. “The bad guys are trying to take engineering. My men got jumped. They’re pinned down, and there are two enemy torpedoes on their way to disable the engines. We’ve got to relieve our people, and get the grid back up. See if we can’t start firing back.”
“Are you joking?” Holden said. “You’ve been shot. You’re bleeding.”
“I’m aware of that,” Fred said. “There’s a security transfer up here to the left. We can take it. Get to the construction sphere. What’s your name, chief?”
Grimace looked at Holden, asking by his expression who Fred was talking to. Holden shook his head. Fred knew his name already. “Electrician First Class Garret Ming, sir. Been working for you about ten years, one way and another.”
“Sorry I haven’t met you before,” Fred said. “You know how to use a gun?”
“I’m a quick study, sir.”
Fred’s face was gray. Holden didn’t know if it was blood loss or shock or the first symptoms of a deeper despair. “That’s good.”
Tycho Station was built like a ball half a kilometer across. The construction sphere was big enough to accommodate almost any ship smaller than a battleship in its interior space. At rest, the two rings at its equator gave spin gravity to a city’s worth of the Belt’s best engineers and technicians. The great drives at the sphere’s base could move the station anywhere in the system. Or out of it, now. Tycho had overseen the spinning up of Ceres and Pallas. It was the beating heart of the Belt and its loudest boast. The Nauvoo, the ship that would have taken humans to the stars, had been too large to fit inside the construction sphere, but it had been built in space next to the massive station. There was no better place for the construction of grand dreams than Tycho. Along with the terraforming of Mars and the farms of Ganymede, it was a living testament to humanity’s ambition and skill.
Holden would never have imagined it could feel fragile.
The transfer from ring to construction dome was like taking a particularly awkward lift. They began at the full one-third g of the station, lurched, and their weight began to leach away. When doors opened again, they were in free fall. The blood that had started dripping from Fred’s arm was a fluid coating now, the liquid held to his body by surface tension as it gradually thickened into a kind of jelly. Garret was covered with it. Holden was too. He kept expecting Fred to pass out, but the old man didn’t lose focus or determination.
Visible from the long translucent tube of the access corridor, the construction sphere looked like a network of purified functionality. Other corridors curved between the ship berths, the walls tiled with a subtly repeating pattern of access panels, power transfers, storage and equipment lockers, and mech parking plates. The steel and ceramic bones of the station showed everywhere, and the light was as bright and harsh as sunlight in vacuum. The air in the access corridor was sweet with the scent of carbon lubricant and electrical discharge. Together, the three of them pulled themselves headfirst toward station south, the engineering decks, and the massive fusion reactors. Holden’s body couldn’t decide if he was falling down a long, bent well or swimming along an underground river of air.
“Drummer!” Fred snapped. “Report.”
The audio feed from his hand terminal was confused for a moment, then the woman’s voice came, her syllables clipped, calm, and measured in a way that sounded like the professional version of raw panic.
“Understood. Main engineering has been shut down by the hostiles. They are holding auxiliary engineering with a force of approximately twenty well-armed enemy, sir. We’re in a mutual holding action.”
“Can you disengage?”
“Not safely, sir. They can’t move, but neither can we.”
“Do we know—”
Something loud happened on the other end of the terminal, and a second later, a bone-deep ringing shuddered through the corridor. Garret swore under his breath.
“The first torpedo has made impact, sir,” Drummer said.
“The ring?”
“No, sir. The drive cone. The torpedo targeting the ring hit a few minutes ago, but failed to detonate.”
“Small favors,” Fred said. “Do we know the armament of the insurgents?”
“Small automatic weapons. Some grenades.”
“Can you shut down their air?”
“There’s a manual cutoff, but I haven’t had the spare manpower yet.”
“I’ve got an electrician first class with me,” Fred said. “Tell me where to take him.”
“Understood. We’re looking at an access on service deck four. Environment controls Delta-Foxtrot-Whiskey-slash-six-one-four-eight.”
“They had vacuum suits,” Holden said. “The ones in your office. They had emergency suits. Turning off the air may not matter.”
Drummer answered from Fred’s hand terminal. “We’ll keep them in place until their bottles run out if that’s what we need to do.”
“Good,” Fred said. “We’re on our way.”
“Don’t stop for beer, sir,” Drummer said, and the background hiss of the connection dropped. Fred made a small, satisfied grunt and pushed himself farther down the hall.
“It’s not going to work,” Holden said. “They’ll figure out what we’re doing and cut through a bulkhead or something.”
“You know the difference between a code and a cipher, Holden?”
“What?”
“A code and a cipher. Cipher, you encrypt text so that no one can tell what the words in the message are. A code, you say the words right out in the open, but you change what they mean. Anyone with a smart computer and a lot of time can break a cipher. No one can break a code.”
Holden launched himself across a wide intersection where three passageways came together. For a moment, the station extended around him on all three axes. Fred and Garret floated close behind him but pushed off faster, so that they reached the far side before him. Fred turned to his left and gestured for them to follow.
“Service deck four’s the other way, sir,” Garret said.
“But the four people on the ambush team are this way,” Fred replied. His words were getting slushy. “Level six, section fourteen, berth eight. Once we’re in position, I’ll try to pull the bad guys out, and we’ll take them in the flank.”
Holden thought for a moment. “You had a whole system set up in case this happened. But what if Drummer had been one of them?”
“I had other systems set up with Oliver, Chu, and Stavros,” Fred said. “Secure, open communications with whoever I had left.”
“Tricky,” Holden said.
“I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while.”
The ambush team was where Fred said it would be: three male Belters and a woman with the thick build of Earth, all in light armor with riot guns and suppression grenades. Fred gave Garret a short-barreled shotgun and a position at the rear where he could be both useful and safe. One tried to tend to Fred’s gunshot wound, but he waved the man away.
Near the bottom of the station, the curve of the corridors was tighter, the horizon close. They were less than ten meters from the doors to auxiliary engineering, and the bent wall offered them cover. When the time came, they’d have to get even closer.