“Hell no,” said El. “My hands are too soft for hard labor.”
“Great,” said Grace. “I’ll be trying not to die in space while you sit here. You need a holo or something while I’m doing all the work?”
“I’m good,” said El, but with a smile. “You know Grace, I don’t know why Nate let you onboard.”
“Needed an Assessor,” Grace said, but felt herself tensing inside. Keep it casual. Relax. She was picking up nothing hostile from El, which made it easier. Breathe. Just breathe.
“He really didn’t,” she said. She looked like she was about to say something else, but the dropship chimed, the holo lighting up. “Look at that, we’re there. An hour out, an hour back, and you’ve got ten hours to bolt that transmitter up to the Bridge.”
“I can do it in five,” said Grace.
“Hope could do it in five,” said El.
“Hope could do it in one,” said Grace. “I’m no Engineer. I’ll make it in five.”
“Bet on it?”
“If you like,” said Grace. Win or lose, you build trust. “What’s the wager?”
“One Earth beer,” said El. “Your choice of brand.”
“You’re on,” said Grace.
“Outstanding,” said El. She clicked a few switches on the console, then leaned back. “We’re here. Timer starts now.”
“See you in five hours,” said Grace, shimmying out of the acceleration couch. She slipped the visor on her helmet closed — officer black, sleeker than the Tyche’s castoff she’d had before — and went back to open the dropship’s doors to the hard black.
• • •
The Guild’s Bridge hadn’t been visible from the cockpit because of their deceleration burn. El had left the rear of the dropship angled towards the Bridge to make access easier for Grace. Maybe she doesn’t want to win the bet either. Grace opened the back of the dropship to space, and stood in awe.
Never been this close before.
The Bridge was a massive ring, metal and ceramicrete stretching away, a hula-hoop that would be at home around the girth of the Gladiator. The Guild builds these things. Humans built this. It wasn’t strictly true: they sent robots out here to construct the Bridges. Automated factories at a larger scale than the Gladiator had constructing wormhole gates. Bolt a big enough reactor to it and you could move any mass instantaneously through space. The Guild made cash based on the mass they shifted — and no one lied about the mass they carried, because the Guild powered the gate for that specific load. If you tried to cheat them, they’d shut the gate down as your ship was half-way through. A ship shorn in two by a collapsed wormhole wasn’t something Grace had seen first-hand, but it didn’t sound like a great time.
She clicked the controls on her suit’s arm, instructing the autoloader carrying the transmitter to follow her. Her suit knew where to go, setting her on a course for the transmitter mount on the side of the Bridge. While she took the two-minute journey through the hard black, she looked around her. Absalom Delta, blue-green beauty hanging in the sky. The Gladiator, an almost invisible spec. The asteroid, still visible to the naked eye. That rock was huge. How in all hell had it got there? Rocks didn’t just orbit planets. The ones that did were called moons, and didn’t arrive unannounced.
Her suit chimed, and she turned back to the Bridge. This close, it was a massive slab of metal she could get her mag boots on, a thing so big that her mind said it’s just a different kind of ground rather than it’s a huge ring in space. The boots clumped onto the metal, the autoloader following behind her like an obedient hound. The arrived at the installation point for the transmitter. Grace looked at it, then clicked her comm. “El, you there?”
“No, I left you out here to die alone. I’m already on my way back to the Tyche.” Not the Gladiator, because that wouldn’t be home. Not for any of them, because you didn’t make your home in graveyards or murder scenes or whatever it was.
“Okay great. Look, while you’re flying away, can you point your nose at me and tell me what you see?”
“Sec.” Humming, then, “Huh. Yeah, that’s what we saw before. Transmitter’s there.”
“I know, right?” Grace looked up at the transmitter already installed in the Bridge and let her breath out. “We came all this way for nothing.”
“Well, cool,” said El. “I mean, you win the bet, so beer’s on me.”
“That sounds like half a job,” said Grace. “We don’t know why the Bridge isn’t working.”
“Probably won’t, without Hope,” said El. “Also, we don’t get paid for why. We get paid for what and how.”
“Uh huh,” said Grace. She told the autoloader to hold steady and moved around the transmitter, boots clumping with each step. Like walking in treacle, these were. She’d hate to have a fight in zero G. No way to dance with her sword, just a lot of ugly brute movements. Kohl would be right at home. Okay, there. A console was set into the side of the Bridge’s transmitter. She pulled a powered multitool from her belt, ready to work on the console’s protective housing. Before she could begin, the housing drifted open.
“Uh,” said Grace, looking at the console within.
“The suspense is killing me,” said El.
“I thought you didn’t want to know why,” said Grace. Her fingers traced a set of cables clipped from the transmitter computer back to a small device.
“I said we didn’t get paid for it. By proxy, it means I don’t want to work for it. But if you’ve done the work already, it would seem insensitive of me not to share in your victory. Go on. Tell me what you found.”
“Looks like a bypass,” said Grace.
“A what?”
“Bypass,” said Grace. “Someone’s subverted the transmitter’s controller.”
“Why would someone do that?” said El. “Out here, the Bridge is everything. It’s how they get food. Meds. Holo shows. It’s how they get home.”
“Yeah,” said Grace. “It’s how they get home.” She swallowed. And they don’t want to get home. She didn’t know why she thought it, but she knew it was true. These people had broken their own Bridge.
“Well, just yank the bypass,” said El. “Job done. And maybe we can sell this other one for salvage.”
“Won’t help,” said Grace. “Not anymore. These things run on a schedule. A probe comes through to get the Guild’s roster for the next world-to-world Bridge schedule. No probe through, no roster. This whole thing is just dead metal without one.” She toed the ring beneath her.
“What about the new transmitter? Yank the schedule from that. Put it in here?”
“I thought you didn’t want to know why?” Grace started back towards the autoloader.
“We’re still on what and how,” said El. “What is the roster. How is a download.”
“One thing,” said Grace. She paused in front of the autoloader. “Anyone could have done what we’re doing. The Ravana. The Gladiator. Anyone. And no one did. Why?”
“Not the why we’re being paid for,” said El.
“I suppose not,” said Grace. She pried open the console on the transmitter held by the autoloader. Ran a finger over the components within, cards slotted in for swappable replacement. Central control, no, Bridge dynamics, no, Guild protocols, no — ah. Bridge roster. She pulled the card, shut the transmitter’s console, and moved back to the already-installed transmitter.