"Commit," said Sola tersely. The rocket was in control now; this would either work, or they would be dead in seconds.
Rue braced herself as she'd been coached to do. Suddenly the rocket lit and they were surging forward— it felt like upward. They'd left the countermeasures behind and here came the habitat. Rue had a strange perceptual moment when she felt as if she were standing on some high peak on Treya; someone had put glowing Erythrion on a chain and was swinging the whole halo world at her.
The habitat seemed to leap at them— then it faltered and stopped, barely meters away. Rue gaped at it. Suddenly the wall of translucent plastic began to rise, as if yanked up by some capricious child god. But by then Sola's man had leapt across the intervening space and slapped a sticky patch to it. Another man had performed the same maneuver from the other rocket.
A tether attached to the patch zipped up with the wall and yanked Rue and Sola and all the others off the rocket. The metal cylinder tumbled away while Rue swung wildly and in gravity now with nothing but stars below her.
A brilliant flash lit the wall, casting a long crazed shadow upward from the dangling soldiers. "They're on to us," said Sola tersely.
"What was that?"
"The rockets. They lasered them."
Rue clung to her thin rope, heart pounding. She was disoriented by the stars spinning past and the odd feeling of looking down at them. She could only watch as two soldiers glued a transparent emergency airlock to the hull. Once it was inflated, they entered it and began lasering a hole through the hull itself.
"Incoming defenders," somebody said. The others raised their weapons; Rue craned her neck up to see things that looked surprisingly like Jentry's mining spiders clambering down the side of the habitat. They were having trouble getting around the bunches and folds of material that had been tied together after the habitat was holed, days or weeks ago, by the construction shack's lasers. In surreal silence, the robots glowed and exploded as her men targeted them.
"We're in." Sola tugged Rue's tether. She looked down to see two of her men entering the Banshee through a ragged hole in the hull. Glowing flinders plummeted past her; red-hot droplets splattered on Rue's shoulder, hissed, and went out. A whole spider fell past, its legs scrambling and one flailing limb caught Rue's tether. Feeling oddly detached, she saw the tether part.
She was falling. Rue screamed and reached out, catching Sola's ankle. For a wild second she hung above the wheeling stars. Bright flashes pulsed below her as the lasers in the Banshee's weapons pod targeted the falling spiders. If she let go, she would share their fate.
Then strong hands pulled her up and she flopped over the resilient lip of the airlock. Sola fell onto her and the airlock gulped closed. In another moment she was being dragged into bright calm light and landed on all fours on the familiar decking of a corridor in the Banshee.
Rue needed a moment to compose herself. She sat up, watching her men fan out in either direction. They were in one of the ring-shaped corridors that ran around the outside of the habitat. About five meters to her right was a T-intersection; the hallway there would lead to the hub of the round habitat.
In the other direction the smoothly curving wall was interrupted after a few meters by a tightly wadded and stapled bundle of hull material. The decking and ceiling here had been cut away and sections of the inner wall removed. The habitat was basically just a big plastic balloon and here was a spot where the balloon had been gathered and twisted to make it smaller.
"Countermeasures," directed Sola. One of the men set a squat gray cylinder on the floor and flipped a switch on its side. The solid-looking can hopped, its sides bulging and smoking slightly. Rue heard a series of loud clicks, that seemed to originate inside her head.
"What was that?" asked Rue.
"We're using optical networks and coms exclusively," said Sola. "That was an EM bomb. It made a burst of microwaves that should have fried all the electronics in the vicinity. Hopefully it'll shut down their intercoms and sensors."
Somebody had dumped a satchel full of little buglike things onto the floor. They rose on buzzing wings now and swarmed off down the corridor. "Hunt bots," said Barendts.
Rue thought she recognized where she was. "They should look one deck up, northeast quadrant from our position," she said. "There's storage spaces there that could be used as a brig."
"Come on." Sola waved his men into motion. They trotted to the nearby intersection. Before they got there, Sola raised his hand. "Hostiles!" His men crouched back against the walls; a second later, Rue did likewise.
Pure crimson light flashed out of the intersection. She saw one of the little hunt bots twirl, flaming, out of the axial corridor.
Sola pitched a grenade around the corner; Rue was thinking no that can't possibly be one of the explosive variety— and then it went off and blue-black smoke poured back. She let out a whoosh of relief, though naturally Sola wouldn't have used an explosive in here; the blast could have torn the hull open.
The smoke made normal vision impossible, but her suit's HUD display showed a sketchy view of her surroundings, rendered from laser or sonar. It wasn't an inscape display; she and her men had their inscape temporarily disabled as a precaution against spoofing.
Sola's men were diving and rolling into the side corridor now and she heard taser fire. She hurried after them on wobbly legs. She had just rounded the corner when somebody swept her legs out from under her and she fell on her back. Bright flashes and the sound of gunfire surrounded her. Rue righted herself and looked ahead— catching confused sonar glimpses of man-shapes wrestling in the smoke. Somebody's discarded taser lay near her and she picked it up before thinking to unholster the one on her belt.
One of the fighting figures went down (others running away from her beyond it) and just at that moment a powerful gust of wind blew through the corridor. The smoke glided away in a single solid mass as though suddenly reminded that it should be somewhere else. Rue sat up.
Two spider robots and three space-suited men lay on the deck. The prone men's suits were all R.E.-issue. Rue's own men were already moving on toward the hub of the corridors.
Rue got to her feet unsteadily. She couldn't help looking down at the faceplate of the man nearest her.
She recognized the face behind the glass. This was a man who had sometimes joined her crew at lunch in the cafeteria. He was quite a joker. Now he was unconscious and turning blue as he tried to breathe.
"Captain!" Barendts was waving at her to hurry up. Rue knelt down and undogged the man's faceplate. Jared, that was his name. As soon as the glass was open he sucked in a deep breath.
"Come on!" She stood indecisively. There was no time to examine the other two. Rue ran after Barendts, feeling sick at what they were having to do.
The others were already going up the spiral staircase at the hub of the four spoke corridors. Rue caught up to them at the top of the stairs. There had originally been two more floors above this one, but now the staircase continued up in its cylinder past two sets of sealed doors. The ceiling visible through the opened doors on Rue's level was bunched and bundled. The walls had been partly dismantled, so that they only rose to head-height now, like partitions.
Rue nodded when she saw this. "If they're on board, they'll be here," she said. "Crisler wouldn't house any of his own people in such a dangerous spot." One pressure leak and the whole level would be in vacuum.