“We have to work through your timing again,” Cohen said when she swam back into the main cabin.
“Later,” she said. “I need to put my kit together. I just came up to tell you I’m going down to the cargo deck.”
“That can wait.”
“No it can’t.” It was impossible to stare down someone without a body, but she shot her best glare at the main instrument panel. “You know your job, and I know mine. I need to get the arms and gear squared away more than I need to do another run-through. We’ll do that after. If I have time.”
“Make time,” Cohen said.
If they hadn’t been in zero g, Li would have kicked something.
Her mood improved briefly when she inventoried the weapons. Korchow had sent everything she had asked for. Even her most extravagant demands had been satisfied without murmur.
Two long sleek boxes held RPK midrange tactical precision non-structure-piercing pulse rifles, each fitted with custom-milled optical sights and refillable wipe baffle system silencers. Another blockier box, guarded with a double layer of vacuum seal, cradled the self-sealing pressure suit that Li would wear to crawl through the CO2vents—and whose interactive camouflage overskin would hide her face if things went wrong and someone spotted her. A big crate held the rest of her gear and tackle: carabiners, grappling hooks, and rope for the climb outside the station; a handheld number cruncher; a lockpick’s kit for getting into the lab itself; a hacked passkey—provided by Korchow—that he claimed would get her out of the high-security lab and into the public-sector airlock where Arkady would pick her up when she had retrieved the target code.
It took an hour and forty minutes to unpack the lot and get it serviceable. The best hour and forty minutes of the last few weeks. If this was what the supply side of being private muscle was like, Li thought, she could get used to it.
When she had coiled her rope, ordered her climbing tackle, and stripped, oiled, and reassembled the pulse rifles, she stood back and surveyed the whole kit critically. Then she pulled herself forward to her cabin to retrieve the small, carefully wrapped package that she had hidden there just as a precaution.
She swam back to the cargo hold, unwrapped the Beretta, field-cleaned it, and loaded it, grunting with satisfaction at the clean, familiar snap of the ammo clip engaging the firing mechanism. She weighed the gun in her hand and glanced back toward the foredeck. She thought about the bulge it would make in her jumpsuit, the likelihood that Arkady would notice and take it away from her. She thought about just how crazy it would be to get into a solid-ammo fight on the little stripped-down Starling.
She sighed and tucked the Beretta into the pocket holster of the pressure suit. The pocket had been designed for bigger, more standard weapons; a Viper, maybe, or a snub-nosed pulse pistol. The Beretta slid in easily and barely made a bulge in the suit after she’d folded it.
“Just in case,” she whispered, and went back forward.
“I need to check ammo,” she told Arkady when she reached the foredeck. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t help letting her eyes flick to the fully charged pulse pistol at his belt.
“You checked it back on-planet.”
“And I need to check it again. Just because I saw it on the loading dock doesn’t mean it actually got on board.”
Arkady frowned. “You can do a visual check, that’s all.”
“Not good enough.”
“It has to be. Cohen checked it manually when we loaded it. Ask him.”
Right now, Li thought, Cohen was the last person she wanted to ask anything.
“It’s all there,” Cohen volunteered. “There’s no reason to check it again.”
“Gee, thanks for the help.” She shot a nasty glance at the comp board.
“Well, go look in the airlock.”
Li glanced at the instrument board again, then turned and left without meeting Arkady’s eyes.
She made her way to the airlock and looked out the viruflex check-port.
She saw the sun. The white, unbearably bright sun of space, seen through no atmosphere. She ducked her head away from the port, blinking burning tears out of her eyes.
“Jesus wept!”
“It was Korchow’s idea,” Arkady said. As if he were apologizing, for Christ’s sake.
She looked again, and understood what she was seeing through the check-port. The airlock was open to the void, completely unpressurized. Hard vac, right there, one triple-glazed viruflex porthole away from her. All her ammo for the run was neatly taped to the airlock wall. Two pulse rifle clips, their green charge lights blinking at her like eyes. A fully charged Viper for close fighting. Even her Syndicate-made butterfly knife, which Arkady had lifted from her without comment before letting her board the Starling back on Compson’s World. What the hell had they expected her to do, anyway? Cut his throat and steal their damn ship?
“The outer seal will close and the airlock will pressurize two minutes and four seconds before you’re scheduled to disembark,” Arkady said. “You’ll have four seconds to step into the airlock, two minutes to inspect the ammo and load and stow your weapons. Then you’re out. The same protocol applies when you come back; you’ll deposit any remaining live ammunition in the airlock stow compartment, lock it, and jettison the key. The outer door won’t close and the chamber won’t pressurize until I visually confirm that you’ve disarmed yourself.”
Li stared at him, but he just shrugged, pushed off the wall with the ease of a born spacer, and pulled himself back toward the foredeck.
He was deep in conversation with Cohen by the time Li joined them. “Can we run through it again, Major?” he said. “Please?” He sounded apologetic, as if he were asking for a favor instead of giving orders to an enemy agent Korchow was blackmailing.
“You’re the boss,” Li said. She wanted to smack him. Instead, she pressed the water bottle she’d been carrying into the sidewall restraint field, pushed off and hung in mid-air, stabilizing herself with outstretched hands. “Oh-two-twenty-oh-four, I jump ship,” she recited. “Oh-two-twenty-three-oh-eight, I hit station, turn toward the turrets.”
“Which direction are they?” Cohen asked.
“East,” Li said; spacer’s argot for whatever subjective direction took you into the spin of a rotating station, toward planet-rise.
“Not good enough. You may not be able to see planet-rise from where you hit station.”
“Well, I can feel it, even if I can’t see it.”
“The inner ear can play tricks on you.”
“Fine.” She shrugged. “At 02:49 I hit the vent.” She was fully into it, tracking the station map on her internals, accounting for the guards’ scheduled routes, thinking through her approach. “The vent cycle starts at 02:50. At 02:51, the turbines go off and I slip through the outer seal. At 03:00 the cycle starts again. That gives me one minute to stash my suit and gear, and nine minutes to climb.”
“Is that enough time?” Arkady asked nervously.
“It’s enough,” Cohen said. His tone, if you could say the ship comp had a tone, suggested that if it wasn’t, it would only be because the cog called Li hadn’t functioned properly.
Li shut her eyes, partly to visualize the layout of the vent system, partly to shut out a here and now that was less than confidence inspiring. “I should reach the intake into hydroponics by 02:59:30, latest. At 03:00:00 the next two-minute cycle starts, so…”