“What’s the matter?” he said. It was only when he got no answer that he realized all the Marines had stopped. Their visors were opaque, their radios silent, their power armor in lockdown. Singh stood, suddenly alone and terribly aware of his own vulnerability. The back of his head itched at the idea that someone might be targeting him right then, and he had no protection.
For a moment, he saw Kasik again, dying before him. Was all of this a distraction to pull him away from safety? Hands trembling, he strode fast down the corridor to the first door. A public restroom. He stepped in, made certain he was alone, and locked the door behind him. His heart was beating hard enough to feel the ticking of it in his neck. Leaning against a narrow sink, he pulled his monitor and keyed in his security codes. His Marine lockdown hadn’t been triggered. The Marines shouldn’t have been disabled. Someone was putting out a false shutdown signal.
Overstreet answered his connection request at once.
“My fire team is disabled,” he said.
“Yes, sir. I’m seeing the same with all the powered teams. Stay where you are. I am sending a conventional escort to your location.”
“What the hell is going on out there? I need a report!”
Annoyance flickered across Overstreet’s face, gone almost before Singh could register it. “The loss of functioning fire teams has let the situation at the detention cells deteriorate. I have initial reports that something’s happening at the dockmaster’s office. I’m waiting for better intelligence on that, but I am seeing what looks like several ships getting ready for launch. The
“I will wait for the second escort,” Singh said. “Carry on.”
He dropped the connection. In the mirror, he looked small. Frightened. He stood, straightened his uniform, and composed himself until his reflection looked more like a man confident in his control of the situation. It was important when his people came that he give the right impression. That was all he could do now.
Something thumped deep below him. A strike on the station drum, maybe. A sign of the battle going on all around him while he hid in a public toilet.
The underground had caught him unprepared. To give them their due, he’d underestimated their coordination and their numbers and their will. He had been told that the Belters of the old regime had a culture of violent resistance. After the sabotage of the oxygen tank, he had thought he understood what that meant, but he hadn’t appreciated the depth of it until now.
Their plan was unfolding right now all around the station. All he could hope was that the one place he knew that he was ahead of them would prove decisive. If disabling the sensor arrays was critical to their plan, he could still bring all the rest of it crashing down.
Bobbie’s harness consisted of three magnetic locks about the size of her palm and two bands of woven nylon that looked like they’d been green sometime in their past. Basic safety equipment, standard on any ship, any dock, any station outside a gravity well. Wondering whether they worked was like wondering if her next footstep would sink through the atoms of the deck.
“You think these things are going to hold?” she asked. Her radio was set to a broadcast strength so low a thick T-shirt would have jammed her. Amos, beside her, looked up the long curve of the
“If it doesn’t, this’ll be a weird day.”
The surface of the ship wasn’t like anything Bobbie had ever seen. Faceted like a gem, without the protrusions of PDC cannons or sensor arrays. The pinks and blues seemed less like the color of the material itself and more like some kind of refraction. Something that it did to light that was much weirder than selective absorption. The darkness of the slow zone was profound. Her helmet had to enhance everything with what it picked up from the glow of the ring station. It even stretched the edges, pulling ultraviolet and infrared into the visible range, just to have more to work with. It was always like this, but waiting—exposed and uncertain—made it seem ominous.
