As for her own immediate ancestors, Shiori hoped to hell they were out there howling somewhere in the void. Because you didn’t get to be like Shiori without having had some help, and Shiori had certainly had plenty.
Chapter Thirty-Five
One over the Nine
Two hours after LizAlec realized her pod was taking her back the way she’d come the over-priced silver coffin dumped her back at The Arc. Only, when she checked the screen, there was a cargo shuttle parked between the pod and Sister Aaron’s spinning silver promise of a new Eden.
A shuttle wasn’t due for six weeks, she’d checked that herself. Fuck it, LizAlec was certain she had. There was no way one was due... Which didn’t alter the fact that a battered black Harland & Wolff was tethered to the outer edge of the ring. Whoever was piloting the thing had just parked up and tied off, like they were leaving a horse at a hitching post. LizAlec knew all about equus. Girls from St Lucius/Paris rode every Saturday morning in the Bois de Boulogne. Or at least they did back when the Parisian franchise of St Lucius was still located in the Sixth Arrondissement and the Bois had not yet been chopped down for firewood or shelter. The horses, of course, had gone the way of cats and rats, straight down the throats of hungry Parisians, just a lot faster.
Focusing in with her screen, LizAlec had to admit the shuttle hadn’t just been tied off. Someone had flash-welded a ring to the outer skin of the arc and clipped on a bounty cable made from spun monofilament.
Wreckers maybe, or truckers... They were the only highrisers who used bounty cables, at least they were on tri-D. But no trucker would choose The Arc as a stop-off, wreckers neither, now LizAlec came to think about it.
LizAlec sucked at her teeth. Like she needed to be back at The Arc when she’d been safely on her way to Earth. Though how she landed and avoided burn-up had both crossed her mind, so maybe the pod’s AI wasn’t as stupid as she thought.
LizAlec searched the screen in front of her face, searching for some icon that might activate a transmitter. She was blindside to the cargo shuttle, so just maybe The Arc didn’t know she was there. But the cargo ship must do.
She watched helplessly as modems whirred and diodes lit in syncopated dances across the console in front of her. LizAlec knew the two vessels were communicating frantically, she just didn’t know what they were saying, though it sounded like something Fixx might dream up, the dance of suicidal fireflies remixed with the sound of dolphins reading aloud.
Only the main screen remained blank and none of the surrounding icons looked remotely like the international sign for vidmail, voicemail or synaptic link. In fact most of the screen was icon-less, just keys labelled in Hebrew, a script LizAlec had never seen before.
“Shit.” LizAlec drummed her fingers on the pale yellow fascia of the console. The last thing she needed to do was hit the wrong key, but still she had to do something.
She wanted out of there.
The ceramic wrist implant was almost perfectly healed round its edges, the porous matrix of the implant’s lip melding seamlessly with her flesh. The spiders had done a neat job, it was just a pity she had to ruin it.
LizAlec gripped the end of the tube feeding her wrist and yanked, pulling free the pastel blue tube. Warm liquid kept dripping across LizAlec’s fingers until she tied the tube into a half hitch. Reaching down between her legs, LizAlec found the catheter that drained her bladder and pulled, slowly. Removing it stung, but the pale pink tube came free. The designers obviously liked pastels, LizAlec decided. Some LokMart focus group must have told them pastel hues were soothing.
That left... Well, Liz Alec didn’t like to think what that left...
The restraining bodyweb was woven neoprene with velcro fastenings. As an original touch, the designers had made the belt a reassuring grey and coloured the velcro buckle bright red, probably so you couldn’t loose the fastening in an accident. LizAlec peeled back the velcro and instantly every alarm in the pod went off at once.
The fucking belt had a smart buckle, which should have been obvious, though why the moronic AI should object to her loosing the gravity-web when it hadn’t minded her shedding the catheters, LizAlec didn’t know.
She hurriedly refastened her buckle.
“Listen,” she told the AI. “I want to get out, okay?”
Nothing. Just the odd blip from a diode.
She was going to have to do it the hard way. Of course, she’d seen Sophie Thorland crash her way out of a burning escape pod in Alien Empire III, but that had been on Fixx’s tatty tri-D recorder, the CD-ROM had been ancient and all LizAlec remembered was that Sophie got turned inside out by a vacuum long before she reached the rescue ship. (Having been turned inside out fifteen minutes earlier by the hero. It was one of those parts.)
Okay, so check the door. If you could call the upper half of the pod a door. LizAlec checked it anyway, looking for an emergency release. Everything might be smart but doors still had to be fitted with a protected manual override. It was in the NASA standard.
A recessed T-bar handle rested under a clear polymer cover to the right of her knee, its cover held in place around its edge by a row of tiny glueseals. Which took care of that one. Now all she needed was a bubble suit or an oxygen mask, any oX/m would do, but preferably the type you bit between your teeth.
There wasn’t one.
LizAlec even prised away the plastic moulding behind her head but there wasn’t a mask. At least not one that she could find. LizAlec was going to have to do it cold, literally.
Gripping the polymer cover, LizAlec applied steady pressure and slid it to one side. She was so impressed with herself that she slid the cover back into place and did it all over again. Jerk at it, knock it with her knee, and the cover stayed where it was, push on it with a steady conscious push and the glue liquidized. Which was neat, but tough luck on anyone who was in there panicking, which she wasn’t — at least not yet.
Time to go.
Yanking up the red T-bar, LizAlec felt rather than saw the half-pod in front of her blast free to bounce into the cargo shuttle in front of it, then spin away like a maniacally tumbling surfboard. Retros on her half of the pod fired up, holding the pod to gyroscopic steadiness.
Nine seconds and counting.
In her right hand she held the emergency anchor and wrapped into her left she held its handle, her fingers pushed through its central slot to grip a dead-man’s handle, her thumb tucked in over the top. Still strapped into her chair, LizAlec hurled the anchor and saw it fasten to the skin of the shuttle, next to an airlock. Without thinking, LizAlec squeezed hard on the line-adjust and almost dislocated her shoulder as the handle automatically reeled in any slack and then some.
Light line monofilament, with a b/s of five thousand Kg and impervious to cold down to absolute zero. Wind in any further and her shoulder would pop long before the line did. Keeping tight hold of the handle, LizAlec reached quickly down with her other hand and unbuckled her gravity web. This time the pod didn’t complain. One squeeze on the anchor handle and LizAlec catapulted out of the pod towards the Shockwave Rider, only just managing to bring up her feet as she slammed into its surface. Then she was there, crouched to one side of the airlock, ripping off the cover to its emergency handle.
Thank God for NASA standards.
A steel door swung in, crashing on its hinges, and LizAlec went scrabbling hand over hand into the small airlock, pulling herself along on the airlock’s luminous emergency rail. At the far end was a yellow handle that LizAlec slammed down as hard as she could. Behind her, the outer door began to shut slowly in a hiss of hydraulics. Faster. Faster. The girl would have been sobbing but her lungs were sucked dry, her arm muscles in spasm from toxin overload. Water vapour was being pulled up her throat in a steady hiss that flash-burnt her lips as it exited.