Tell them watch out for a schiz Systems man and get him out alive—
On India. Take NG into the 'decks.
Sure, he'd thank her for that.
She followed Fitch out the lock, down the ramp, onto docks she had bad dreams about.
Section-seals-were in place, like walls at either end of the section. Personnel access to get through those was down at the coreward edge of the seals, airlock passage in the arch of the seal-doorways. Four section-seals on Thule, to separate the docks and keep a decompression from going station-wide. Up above, she could see the constant yellow flash of movement in the hoses, the pump still shoving its load into Loki'sgut.
They said Mazian still had ways of supplying himself, said he had some deep base, maybe old Beta Station itself, where nobody in his right mind would go—but supply lines only went so far, and Fitch said Indiawas that desperate. That meant Indiawas likely being shoved, run, pushed off her regular supply points, off in the deep—and that meant Alliance ships able to keep her from moving on stations.
Little Lokicould have gone on as she was, sat silent while Indiarefueled and provisioned herself off Thule—and Lokiinstead put herself in the way of trouble. Chance was, Lokihadn't known Indiawas coming in, just had the bad luck to be going into dock, leaving a heat-trail Indiacould pick up like a beacon, and Lokicouldn't run.
But chance also was that Wolfe hadknown Indiawas in the game. Chance was, when they'd dodged out-system in a hurry that had killed a man, when Wolfe had been on the general com after that, saying they'd had a carrier-class bogey—Wolfe had known what he was playing tag with.
They'd talked with some Alliance ship, Wolfe had said that much. They'd traded information, after which Lokihad jumped to Thule.
Old spook, her systems chancy to the point of suicide—a mostly-stripped station due for demolition—
Easy equation, the way high commands did math.
"Know something?" she said to Fitch. "We were supposed to have help here. And we sit out there waiting. But we got to have fuel, we don't get this ship out of here without it, so we decide to move on our own, we were going to go in, raid that fuckin' tank, blow the pump and get out, hell with the stationers. But it wasn't our support showed up, it was India—am I right?"
No answer from Fitch, she thought. Then:
"Half-right. We come in on inertial approach, close and quiet as we can. We could've blown that pump, could've ordered station to do it. If we could get that fuckin' carrier out of the equation our last rendezvous could have spared us enough to get us to 'Dorado, but it wasn't and they couldn't. So we come in here with a problem, Ms. Yeager, and it hasn't gotten anything but worse. Right now, we got those riders sepped off at low V. The way they're acting, the speed they used getting here, we're right and they're that low, nomass in those tanks to speak of. So we're playing dumb little merchanter—like they can move in here real fast and easy and make a little ship like us spit it up again. Only by now they've got a look at us up close, now they know they got a real problem unless they can takeus, and they know it's a trap that's going to close. That what you want to know?"
Made sense. For the first time she got the feeling Fitch was on the level.
"Meaning we got help possible?"
"Meaning we've caught ourselves a Fleet carrier. Meaning that sonuvabitch Keu is dead Vat this star and we're blowing every skimmer Thule's got, disabling the section-seals, we're going to take out that pump, and we're sitting here throwing missiles at those rider-ships they can't throw back, because they don't want to blow the pump or our tanks.
We've been getting amnesty-offers for the last half hour."
Fitch surprised her. You got him started and the man could talk.
"Keu won't keep his word," she said. "Kreshov might, he's one captain in the Fleet that might, but not Keu —You trusting Mallory, by any chance?"
"Not by choice," Fitch said.
Funny as hell. Spook officer and an Afrikerwith the same opinion. She almost appreciated Fitch for that half-second
"Don't trust you, either," Fitch said then. "But you've got Ramey to think about. Ship blowing up's not the worst thing that could happen to Mr. Ramey—not with his particular problem. Boy can't take orders. How long do you think he'd last, on India?"
She didn't say anything. Didn't think it called for it.
"Just insurance," Fitch said. They got to the seal-door airlock, likeliest access with the giant seal-doors disabled from Central. Fitch waved a hand in the general direction of the lock, invited a fool to go ahead, try to open it. "You want to critique the job, Yeager, you go right ahead."
"Hell, no, sir, if Mr. Bernstein or Mr. Smith had anything to do with those airlock controls, I got every confidence. I just want to do me some basic wiring, if you don't mind, sir, a half-dozen AP rounds, just put their caps in and peel their backsides off."
Fitch hitched his shell-slings up on his shoulder. "You want to do that, I'm going to take me a little walk over there."
She halfway grinned. "Know what mof stands for—sir?"
"Yeah," he said, and walked off. The com said: "It stands for, I stand over here, and you wire it, Yeager."
CHAPTER 29
SOMETHING blew, you could feel it through the deckplates, and a nervous skut with a glove off, that being faster, doing wiring on a job like this one—really hatedto hear sounds like that.
But the air stayed.
Thank God for favors.
In spite of which, she had her tether-hook fastened to the nearest metal strut, because decompression was a real likelihood, and there was an equally good chance of something like a missile coming right up through the deckplates or the blast-wall, a hello from India'snumber two rider that they knew was out there.
Touchy little job, Fitch was right, you called it a grape-cluster, nobody remembered why—a little group of AP shells with their back ends peeled off and bare wire stuck under their end-seals, right over the little black dot where the contact was. You twisted the tails together for good contact all the way down the bunch, finished it off with a little Gibbs-cap in the middle of the wires, then you just bent the twist-tail of the cluster and hooked it over something convenient.
Mostly you hung them head-high, on girders and such. And in this case, made extra-long twist-tails and a good solid knot in those tails to make sure they held fast.
Another explosion, off in some other section.
She kept at it, with the bare hand freezing, because Thule's power was down, and bitter cold air coming through the vents on the rig, because they had six hours, longer if they didn't ask anything out of the circulation, and longer, too, because she wasn't asking anything out of the armor while she was sitting here making fussy little wire-tails and worrying more about static charges than she was about the booms and blowups around the rim.