Rebecca and Blair both ran forward when they recognized her. They were alone in this small room. Both began talking at once and Rebecca grabbed onto Rue's gloved hand like a free-faller reaching for a safety line. A hot stab of pain in her hand made Rue pull back. She looked down and realized with a shock that her right glove was burned and fused. Waves of pain were radiating from her hand.
"I've been shot," she heard herself say. She had to keep her priorities, she reminded herself. "Where are Corinna and Evan?"
"They're aboard the cycler mother," said Mina. "Crisler's using them as explorers."
The room was spinning. "Rebecca, my people are outside," Rue said. "Get them…" She couldn't manage the rest, as everything blurred and roared together. For a few seconds she was sure she was going to pass out and she sat down heavily on the deck waiting for it. The tide slowly receded and she looked up to see the four remaining members of her squad crowding into the room.
This place had been set up as a prison cell. The walls were cut off near the top, as elsewhere on this level, but here they'd been stapled into the folds of hull material. There were four cots, a small table and a footlocker.
Blair was grimly rummaging through the locker. Rue's men clustered around Sola; he was obviously dead.
Rebecca was crying. "Rue, you're alive," she said. "They told me you'd drowned."
"How did you get here?" asked Blair. He was filling a satchel.
"It's a long story," she said, trying to smile. "Are those your records, Blair?"
He nodded to Rue, looking grimly relieved. "They were going to wipe it all. All my work." He had recorded everything, from the day they left Erythrion to Rue's discovery of the Lasa habitat builder at Jentry's Envy.
"What do we do about Sola?" asked Barendts sharply. "Leave him?"
They had discussed this before the mission. Casualties might have to be left behind; these men were here because they had accepted that risk. Now that they were in the situation, though, Rue found herself shaking her head.
"We take him as far as we can," she said. "If we have to abandon him to escape, then that's what we'll do. But I'm not leaving anyone behind if I don't have to."
"Have you taken over the ship?" asked Rebecca.
"Not yet," she said. "That's next on the agenda."
Mina nodded sagely. "So those are your ships out there."
"Yeah." Rue waved one of her men over. "I'm hurt, can you give me something?"
All four of them were suddenly looming over her, scrambling in their belt pouches for analgesic patches. "Your glove's been wrecked," Barendts pointed out. "We'll have to seal it."
"Go ahead."
He sprayed the glove with a plastic aerosol that hardened on contact. Meanwhile Rue fumbled her faceplate open with her other hand and let someone apply a patch to her forehead, which was the only exposed piece of skin large enough. She was sure she looked like a dolt now, with a military-black square on her brow like a little target. But there was nothing for it and anyway, the pain was receding now like a half-remembered dream.
"Crisler'll have to surrender now," said Mina. She took Rebecca's hand. "You're sure the halo'll have me?"
"Of course."
"I know you must have taken a cycler to Maenad," said Mina. "What I can't figure out, though, is how you managed to bring a big enough force with you to be able to take over Crisler's other ships. And you faked the transmissions perfectly— I mean, you even got the voices and faces right."
Rue and all her men turned to stare at Mina. "What?" said Rue.
"Admiral Crisler relayed the chatter through inscape," said Mina. "Half an hour ago— we watched the video feed from here, from the freighter and the other cruisers…" She stopped. "Why are you staring at me like that?"
Rue got to her feet. "What freighter? What cruisers? How many?"
"The… the three cruisers. You know, the old decommissioned ones Crisler had refitted and moved to Maenad."
Rue looked at her men. They looked back expectantly.
Sola was gone. It was up to Rue now; she would have to improvise. "Plans have changed. Everybody, get ready to abandon ship. Mina, tell me more about these ships."
Mina looked confused now. "They came out of hyperdrive an hour ago, just twenty thousand klicks away. Like I said, a freighter and three decommissioned cruisers. Crisler managed to get the rights to them after they were liberated from the rebels a couple years ago. They signaled us right away. I thought you must have been aboard them, I mean that you faked out Crisler… But if those aren't your ships, where did you come from?"
"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."