"Ma'am," said one of the soldiers, "we can't abandon ship. We'll be fried as soon as we leave the hull."
"Maybe not," said Rue. "I have an idea. Anyway, Crisler's got reinforcements coming. If we stay here…"
"But our boys will take them out," said the soldier.
Rue checked the time in her suit's HUD. "They appeared much closer to here than we did," she said. "Crisler's ships may reach us before our interceptors reach them. In which case, he's got both us and the construction shack as hostages. No, we've got to get back to our own ship and get out of here."
But we'll go through the shack if we can, she told herself. I won't leave Corinna and Evan behind if there's any way to get to them.
TEN MINUTES LATER they crowded into an airlock above the collapsed levels of the habitat. They had encountered no more resistance on their way here; it seemed that Crisler's people were spread out, perhaps mostly in the construction shack. If there was a way to get up past the hub and down to the other habitat without being lasered, they might well have been able to take over the Banshee. The hardened defenses of the starship were too strong, though.
Rue undogged the cover over a small quartz window and gawked up through it. "Yeah, there they are. See?" She stepped back and let Barendts look.
"Big black plates," he said. "Halfway up the cables. What the hell are those?"
"Antimatter generators," said Rue. She'd heard all about this stuff from a scientist who'd chatted her up shortly after they embarked for the Envy. "The Banshee can direct the particle stream coming in from the ramscoop through those tungsten plates. The radiation mostly just heats the plates on the way through, but a tiny fraction gets converted to antimatter and collected with magnets. That way, the Banshee can replenish her antimatter supply just by, say, orbiting close around a star and turning on the ramscoop."
"So?" said Barendts. "What's the point?"
"The point is those plates are designed to be put in the way of energy beams. The Banshee's lasers aren't going to get through one."
Barendts nodded. "So if we cut one loose…"
"Exactly. Do you think we can get there outside?"
Barendts shook his head. "We'll have to go up the elevator shaft." The shaft was an inflated tunnel that paralleled the cables, joining the habitat to the central hub of the ship.
"All right, let's do it."
They piled out of the airlock. A set of elevator doors faced the airlock in the attic of the habitat. Two of her men set to prying the doors open.
Blair was pacing up and down, trying to get comfortable in his suit. They'd taken suits from the tasered R.E. soldiers for both Blair and Rebecca. Blair's was too small.
Something behind the door broke and they slid open. Barendts jogged over and stuck a mirror on a pole out into the shaft. He examined it for a few seconds, then said, "There are autoguns in there. Antipersonnel tasers, I think."
"Can we take them out?" she asked. If not, they were stuck here.
"Simplicity itself," said Barendts. He laid the mirror pole down on the deck so that the mirror was inside the shaft, righted it so the mirror pointed upward and unslung his laser rifle. "Guys, come here. Sight off the mirror."
Rue was amazed at their ingenuity: they proceeded to shoot up the shaft by bouncing their shots off the mirror on the pole. The tasers inside the shaft had no way to shoot back, except at the pole itself. Several did just that, sending cascades of sparks back along it. Barendts and his men were standing well back and they ignored the jolts.
Sparks and bits of flaming metal fell down from above. After a minute, smoke drifted down as well. Then there came one of those rushes of air like a god inhaling and the smoke vanished. The pole twirled and would have fallen into the shaft if Barendts hadn't grabbed it. He peered into the mirror for a long while, then said, "That's all of them. Let's go."
Climbing the shaft was simplicity itself. There was a ladder inset into the wall. Barendts and two of his men went first, then Rue, with the others behind her.
The shaft towered up to a seemingly infinite height. It was almost half a kilometer to the hub from here. But as Rue climbed, her weight lessened and it became easier the farther she went. About halfway up, Barendts said, "Elevator coming."
The other men swore. "What is it?" asked Rebecca. "Reinforcements?"
"Probably," said Barendts. "Captain, may I have your permission to get ugly on this wall here?"
"I thought you were going to put up one of those inflatable airlocks and drill through inside it."
"The elevator would run over it. Yes or no? It's coming!"
"Yes!"
Barendts swung out from the ladder and slammed a disk-shaped charge against the wall of the elevator shaft. It stuck and he swung back. "Everybody hold on!"
The explosion was deafening, even through the suit. The ladder shook and tried to throw Rue off. She held on and looked up again to see smoke swirling and disappearing into a miraculous gale that had sprung up in the shaft.
Above, the elevator car had stopped moving. Rue could see the shapes of hatches in its floor. If those could be opened from the inside, then she and her people were about to be lasered.
"Come on!" shouted Barendts, his voice way too loud in Rue's headphones. He swung out and around again, but this time he was holding onto a line that he'd tied to the ladder. He disappeared into the gale. The man behind him followed an instant later.
There was no time to think. Rue grabbed the line and swung out. The wind caught her instantly and pushed her straight at a ragged black hole in the side of the shaft. She fell sideways out into night.
Barendts had calculated perfectly. As the wind vanished into vacuum around her, Rue fell against the outside of the shaft. Looming over her was one of the petallike tungsten plates. It hid any view of the hub above— so the lasers there could not touch her. One by one the others shot out of the bright tear in the side of the shaft and Barendts's men caught them. When they were all hanging from the lip of the tear— not so hard, since gravity was much reduced here— Barendts clambered up and began gluing handholds to the underside of the plate.
Rue could hear several persons' ragged breathing coming through the com lines. She said, "Everybody up now. We're going to have to use our suits' reaction jets to fly this thing. When Barendts cuts us loose we're going to fall, but coriolis effect will take us away from the habitat. Our main task is to keep the plate from spinning. If we cut loose at the right time we'll be aimed at the horizon of the shack and if we can get over that, we're safe." One after another, they climbed up. "No, don't grab with your hands," said Rue as Mina clutched at one of the new grips on the plate. "Put your feet through them. The plate is going to be our new 'down' when we cut loose. We'll fly it like those guys on Earth used to fly on ocean waves. What did they call it? — surfing."
She demonstrated. Soon they were all hanging feet-down off the plate, with the glowing habitat below and the stars streaming past under that. "Ready," she said to Barendts.
He had attached another charge to the gimbal joint that connected the plate to the shaft. Now he unslung his laser again and prepared to laser the charge.
"Ten, nine, eight, seven…" Barendts was counting down. As the Banshee slowly spun, he was lining up so that centripetal force would throw them at the shack. "…three, two, one—"