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
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.
She remembered the young Marine she’d flirted with when the Laconians had first taken the station. She wondered if he was on one of the patrols walking above her now, the soles of his feet unknowingly against her own.
The station hit the bottoms of her feet like a hammer. Her legs slammed into her chest, blowing the air out of her. One mag boot threw an error, but only for a second. Then it was done. She turned, walking fast toward the net. It wasn’t a low blister anymore. It was a hemisphere of debris and cables. Bent plating, shredded foam, and at the heart of it, trapped like two fish hauled out of a tank, human figures. Above her, the debris small enough to escape the net seemed to fly away from her, though it was really her spinning away from it.
“Hurry,” Katria said. “They’ll already be on their way.”
“I know,” Bobbie said.
At the net, they undid one of the pitons, opening it like the mouth of a tent. The gaping hole that led up into the station leaked water and coolant out, flying down past them as they hung. The nearer of the two bodies had taken the worst of the explosion. A crack along the collar and chest assembly. The inside of the helmet was a soup of blood. Bobbie wrestled the corpse closer, holding the arms and waist in a rescue hold while Katria fastened grips to the Laconian suit.
“Hold still,” Katria said. The low-power radio made her voice seem farther away than she was.
“I’m doing my best,” Bobbie said through clenched teeth.
“All right. He’s solid.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Katria said, and disengaged the primary piton. The net pulled free and fell away below them into nothing. Bobbie turned, forcing herself back to the airlock. Her muscles were burning from the effort. Twenty years ago, they wouldn’t have been. The spin of the station made it feel like the dead Marine was pulling her down toward the depths, or else up into the emptiest sky in the universe. The power-armor helmet knocked against the back of hers. The dead arms and legs hung loose. Blood leaked from the crack in the chest plate.
“I hope this suit’s not too fucked up,” Bobbie said.
“Hope later,” Katria said. “Walk now.”
At the platform, Bobbie shifted her weight and the dead Marine’s with a cry of effort loud enough that Katria turned off her radio. She hung from her safety tether and motioned Bobbie up. There wasn’t room on the platform for all three of them. Bobbie didn’t even nod, just turned the controls, and the platform rose. While the air cycled in, she sat across from the armor. Her heart was pounding. Her muscles ached. She’d just killed two of the enemy. There would always be a little something—that tug on her humanity that came from doing violence. There was a satisfaction too. It didn’t mean she was a good woman or a bad one. It meant she was a Marine.
Somewhere in the station right now, security forces and maintenance techs were scrambling to figure out whether the hole in the station or the possibility of rushing into more bombs was the greater threat. By the time they came to a decision, she needed to be as far away from here as possible.
