“Here?” Bobbie asked.
“This is the place. Boost me up.”
Bobbie locked her fingers together into a cradle, and Katria put her foot into it. She didn’t weigh much. Bobbie hauled her up toward the ceiling. Could have kept her there for hours, she thought. Katria caressed the ceiling with her palm, then found what she was looking for, pressed hard enough that Bobbie felt it, and slid a panel aside. A little gap, hardly more than a decimeter, between the panel and the structural beam above it. Katria hoisted her toolbox, checked its orientation, and slid it into place. She pulled the ceiling tile back and tapped Bobbie on the shoulder to be put down.
“That’s it?”
“No,” Katria said, and pulled a bit of black tape from her pocket. After a moment’s consideration, she curled it around a bit of pipe just beside the bomb, then took her hand terminal out and shifted to a screen Bobbie had never seen before. A rough, grainy image of the hallway appeared on it, including her and Katria from the tape’s perspective.
Katria stood directly under the bomb, then tapped her own image on the screen. Red script came up—LOCKED—and she put the terminal back in her pocket.
“Now, that’s it,” she said.
“Okay,” Bobbie said. “Let’s go outside.”
The maintenance airlock was uncrewed. Two vac suits hung in the lockers, a large gray transport box with its lid open and unsealed, and inside of that, a yellow ceramic box beside them with ZEMÎ TOR stenciled on it in black.
The transport box’s wheels were retracted, the steering handle stowed on its side. The walls and lid were only a little thicker than the real thing. Whatever they were using for shielding, it was thin. She hoped it was light too.
Bobbie put on the environment suit, checked her seals and air supply. She and Katria checked each other. The suit had a magnetic tether built into it, a ribbon as wide as her hand and thick as her pinky, dirty from years of use. The airlock itself was set into the floor. The little platform to carry them out to the drum’s surface, and hopefully not fling them out into the emptiness of the slow zone. With both of them and the box, it was a tight fit. Bobbie watched the suit’s sleeve puff out a little as the lock cycled out the air.
Katria pressed her helmet against Bobbie’s and shouted. With only physical conduction to carry the sound, her voice was distant and muffled. “Last chance to back away.”
Bobbie smiled and made an obscene gesture. She could see Katria laughing, but she couldn’t hear it. The lock cycled, and the platform descended.
The body of Medina’s drum curved away above her to the left and right, extended ahead of her and behind. She felt like she was hanging on to the belly of some massively vast whale. The gates were only pinpoints of eerie and erratic light, as regular as a printed pattern against the surreal darkness below her. The gates and the tiny dot of the alien station in the center of ring space. It wasn’t her first time outside a ship in the slow zone, but she shuddered all the same. Falling off a spin station in normal space meant drifting out at whatever velocity the station had given her until someone came to haul her back or she ran out of air. Losing her connection here meant falling into the blackness between the gates and vanishing into whatever existed—or failed to exist—on the other side. Normal, star-strewn space could feel like an infinite ocean, vast and glorious and uncaring. The slow zone felt like being in something’s mouth.
Katria put her safety tether on the surface of the drum, then lay on her back and pushed her feet up until her mag boot locked to the station. Bobbie waited to follow until she’d taken a couple of awkward, swaying steps. And then she was also hanging upside down from the turning station. The crate in her hand wanted to fly up like the loop of her safety harness. Blood rushed into her head, filling her ears with their own distant roar as they walked—release, swing, push up, and reconnect to the station—back along until they found the stretch of plating that would become the breach point. Katria gestured to the crate—two fingers pointing, the Belter’s gesture for opening or deploying. Bobbie nodded yes with a closed fist.
The mining net was a square of woven steel cable reinforced by carbon fiber. Rock hoppers and subsistence miners had been using things like it since humanity had first crawled up the well and started harvesting the near-Earth asteroids. The primary piton was thicker than Bobbie’s thigh. She fastened it to the skin of the station, then waited for a moment as the external elevator shaft that ran along the drum from engineering to the command center passed overhead. She and Katria took different edges, pulling and stretching the net as they navigated around the target, placing the secondary pitons until the whole thing lay like a low, black blister on the side of the drum.
The trap set at last.
Katria dropped the box, and it flew up and away into the darkness, gone in an eyeblink. She led the way back almost to the airlock platform, then turned off one mag boot, and then the other, and swung on her safety harness, feet to the void. Bobbie did the same. It felt better to be right-side-up again, and worse to know that only one failure point was keeping her alive. Trade-offs. There were always trade-offs.
Katria slaved her hand terminal to the suit’s arm display, copied the output to Bobbie’s, and set up a low-power radio connection between them. The corridor where they’d set the bomb appeared in the same grainy, muted colors as before. Empty for now, but not forever.
“Now we wait,” Katria said through the radio. “The patrol puts their foot in our trap, or someone notices that we’re out here.”
“Yeah,” Bobbie said.
“Don’t worry. These Laconians are just like Earthers. They only think of ships and stations as inside. Comes from growing up in free air.”
“‘The predictable limits of a conceptual framework,’” Bobbie said. A phrase from her classroom on Olympus Mons. “It’s always where to hit the enemy. Whoever they turn out to be. When I learned how to do things like this, we were thinking about Earthers and pirates.”
Katria laughed. “When I taught myself how to do this, I was thinking of people like you. Strange how the wheel turns.”
The elevator passed above them again, the glowing orb of the alien station at the slow zone’s heart appearing like a moon on her left, vanishing again on the right. Bobbie turned to look toward the docks. The Rocinante was down there somewhere. Her home and her ship. Or Holden’s. Or neither of theirs.
Strange how the wheel turns.
The minutes stretched. Became hours. Twice, people passed through the corridor. A pair of electrical technicians. A sketchy-looking young woman pulling a child by the hand and looking over her shoulder as she walked. Bobbie wondered what the story was there, but it wasn’t hers. Her anxiety slowly faded into a kind of dull anticipation, and then to both at the same time. The void passed beneath her feet again and again and again. She switched her air to the secondary bottle.
“Ah,” Katria said. “Here we go.”
On the monitor, two people walked down the hall toward the camera. Bobbie couldn’t mistake the Laconian power armor for anything else. The patrol they’d been waiting for. The enemy approaching. Without a word, she swung back, set her feet against the station, and reengaged her mag boots. The spin gravity would try to straighten her legs, but that was exactly the wrong thing. She bent double, put her hands behind her knees, and held herself there. Katria did the same. Bat-brace position. It was hard to relax like that, especially knowing what was coming. She took a deep breath starting in her belly and moving through her whole chest, then let it out. Shook her shoulders to get out the tension. Smooth and loose. That was the way to be.