Stokes shrugged. “The ship was here only because it needed repair. We were never able to make it run.”
Amos clapped the man on the shoulder. “You just go get me all the tools you were using. This is something I know how to do.”
Stokes trotted away, shouting to the others from his group. Erich’s people seemed to be equally divided between setting up a defensive perimeter and looking for the most expensive things that would fit in their pockets. Erich and Peaches came to stand beside him.
“How fucked are we?” Erich said.
“Don’t know,” Amos said. “First guess, there’s something hinky with the power supply. Too much noise. A bad coupler. Something that’s triggering the safety shutdown. But I’ve got to get between her hulls and take a peek.”
“I’ll help you ring the circuits,” Peaches said. Erich looked over at her, confused. “I spent a few months as an electrochemical technician,” she said.
“Well of fucking course you did,” Erich said.
“You bring a deck?” Amos asked.
“Sure,” Erich said. “Why?”
Amos pointed at the drive cone with his chin. “You can get the diagnostics running, and I can tell you what the output means.”
Erich frowned and scratched his neck thoughtfully with his tiny arm. “Sure. Figure I can do that.”
Peaches coughed once, then chuckled. “Erich? Did you ever, you know, kill anyone?”
“I run a drug empire in Baltimore,” Erich said. “Of course I’ve killed someone. Why?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just here we are, three murderers, and what’s going to save our asses if anything does is that we happen to have the skill set to repair a fusion drive.”
Erich smiled. “We are kind of well suited to this, aren’t we?”
“Well, we’d better set up some lookouts while we do it, though,” Amos said. “My plan to get out of here before trouble comes back may not work out.”
“I can have Stokes help with that too,” Peaches said. “They can’t fight, but they can watch. And I can get a few of the savvy ones to help us put the ship together if you want.”
“More the merrier,” Amos said. “Long as they don’t touch anything unless we tell them.”
“When we go, are we taking them with us?” Peaches asked.
“Yup,” Amos said.
She smirked. “Because they’re tribe?”
“Shit no. My tribe is the crew on the Roci, maybe you two, and a dead woman. I don’t actually give a shit if every damned one of ’em dies.”
“So why take them?”
One of Erich’s people called out. Another one laughed, and one of the servants tentatively joined in. Amos rubbed the raw spots on his knuckles and shrugged. “Seems like the sort of thing Holden’d do.”
Chapter Forty-one: Naomi
Naomi lifted the handles of the resistance machine over her head then let them slowly down. Sárta sat on the box of resistance gel and watched her like someone a little bit bored at a zoo. Naomi didn’t care. They didn’t talk. For every purpose but the ones that mattered most, Naomi was alone.
The trick, she’d decided, was not to remove just one EVA suit, but all of them. Corrupt the data, and no one would know whether she’d taken something or not. But if she only broke the inventory for the suits, that would be telling too. She lifted the handles. The muscles in her arms and shoulders ached. She let the handles down, savoring the pain. If she could get one of the scanners she’d used before, she might be able to feed false data into the system. Fill it with a few thousand phantoms. A million EVA suits filling every square centimeter of the ship. Then even if she couldn’t erase the data, she could render it useless. The problem was—
The warning Klaxon sounded. Naomi’s heart sank into her belly. They were preparing to go to free fall. She was out of time. She wasn’t ready. Outside the ship right now, the umbilical was still in place. As soon as it was hauled in, the Pella and the Chetzemoka would peel apart, and all her fragile hopes would die. She let the handles drop. The cable pulled them back into place, ready for the next person.
She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t going to be ready. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t try.
She walked the few steps to the resistance gel and nodded at the guard. “Going to the head.”
“Just been, you.”
“Going again,” she said, turning away.
“Hell you are. Hey!” Naomi pretended to ignore the woman, listening as she scrambled down to come after her. She’d been a model prisoner up to now, and the defiance took Sárta by surprise. Well, it was meant to. The warning sounded again, and the count. Zero g in three. Two. Naomi put both hands on the doorframe. One. Up and down vanished, and she pulled her body into a tight curl and exploded out toward Sárta. Both her feet hit the guard in the belly, sending her back through the wide empty air of the room. She grabbed Naomi’s left shoe, prying it off as she spun away. It would take her seconds to reach the other side of the room and something to push against. That was her head start. Sárta was already shouting.
Naomi flipped herself through the hatch, then down the hall, too fast for safety. She had minutes. She had less than minutes. Had she really thought she could pry open a locker, pull on a suit, and cycle the airlock? The math had worked at the time. She couldn’t imagine it now.
Sárta was somewhere behind her, shouting. Raising the alarm. But Naomi was already around the corner. With sight lines broken, Sárta would have to guess where she’d gone. With luck, it would buy her a few more seconds. She only needed seconds. She only had them. The crew airlock was closed. She cycled the inner door open, then started pulling at lockers. If someone—anyone—had slipped up. Left one unlocked. The metal clanked and rattled under her fingertips as she tugged and tugged and tugged. Was the umbilical unhooked yet? Were they pulling it in? It seemed like they must be.
There were voices raised from down the hallway. Men and women shouting. One of them was Sárta. Another one was Cyn. She felt herself sobbing and ignored it. She couldn’t fail. She couldn’t. Not this time. Not now.
For a sickening second, she didn’t feel the decompression kit at her waist. She slapped the place where it had been pressed against her skin, and it was there. If she could just get a suit. She tried another locker. Her heart skipped as it opened. A simple EVA suit hung there, suspended in the null g by thin bands of elastic. She reached for it.
She stopped.
They’ll know the suit is missing, a small voice said in the back of her mind. They’ll know where you’ve gone. They’ll come after you.
Her breath was heavy and fast, her heart racing. The thing she’d been trying not to think for the last hours came to the front of her mind like an old friend. Fewer than fifty meters. It isn’t far. You can make it.
She closed the locker. The inner door of the airlock was open now. She launched herself toward it, forcing herself to pant. To hyperoxygenate. She couldn’t tell if the dizziness she felt was from too much oxygen or a kind of existential vertigo. She was really going to do this. Naked in the void. She braced her palms against the outer door of the lock. She expected it to be cold. That it was the same temperature as any decking seemed wrong.
Fifty meters in hard vacuum. Maybe less. Maybe it was possible. She couldn’t depressurize first. The long seconds matching the airlock to the outer nothingness would take more time than she had. She’d have to blow it out. Full pressure to nothing in a fraction of a second. If she held her breath, it would pop her lungs. She would have to blow herself empty first, let the void into her. All around her heart. Even if it worked, it would do her damage.