“Aye,” Haral agreed, and clicked out of contact. The lift slammed into the
bottom of the rotation ring and took a sudden jolt afterward for the holds.
“Know which can?” Chur panted beside her, clinging to the rail.
“Gods, no. You think Goldtooth labeled the gods-rotted thing? Couldn’t use the
small cans, no. Couldn’t consign it direct to us. Had to trust the stsho.
Gods-rotted mahen lunatic.”
The lift accelerated full out, lurched to a second stop and opened its door on a
floodlit empty cavern of tracks below the operations platform where they stood.
Their breaths frosted instantly. Moisture in the hold’s lately acquired air
formed a thin frost on all the waiting cans and the machinery. The cold of the
deckplates burned bare feet. The gusting blasts of the ventilation system
brought no appreciable relief to unprotected hani skin and nose linings.
“Hilfy?” Pyanfar shouted, leaning on the safety railing to look down into the
dark. Hilfy-Hilfy-Hilfy the echo came back in giant’s tones.
“Aunt!” A figure in a padded cold-suit crouched far below the operations
scaffold, a glimmer of white in the shadow of the first can to reach its cradle
at hold’s end. “Aunt, I can’t get this cursed lid off! It’s securitied!”
“Gods fry that bastard!” Pyanfar ignored the locker with the coldsuits and went
thumping down the steps barefoot and barechested. The air burned her lungs,
froze her ribs. She heard noise behind her, a locker-door rattle. “Get those
suits!” she yelled at Chur, and her breath was white in the floodlight glare.
Another can locked through with a sibilance of pressurized air and a resounding
impact with its receiving cradle as she came down beside the can-track rails
that shone pewter-colored in the general dark. The incoming can rumbled past
like a white plastic juggernaut and boomed into the cradle-lock as she arrived.
Hilfy scrambled to the side of it and jerked the lever that secured the lid.
Internal-conditions dials glowed bright and constant on the top-plate.
“Locked too,” Hilfy said in despair, rising, her voice muffled by the cold-mask
she wore, overwhelmed by the crash of another arriving can headed up the outside
ramp. “That Goldtooth give us any key-code?”
“Gods know. The stsho might have it.” Pyanfar shivered convulsively as Chur came
pelting up with coldsuits and masks and thrust a set into her numb hands. She
stared distractedly as the third can locked through, ignoring the coldsuit,
thinking of stsho treachery the while the can rode the hydraulics down and
jolted into the third cradle. She shouldered aside Hilfy’s move to check its lid
and tried it herself. Locked too.
“Gods-rotted luck,” Pyanfar said, rising, fumbling the slot-apertured cold-mask
into place with fingers that refused to set their claws. The pads of her feet
felt the burn of the decking plates. She stared helplessly at Chur, who had
gotten her own mask on and held out the cold suit she had dropped. “It has to be
the last one, that’s all.”
“What if there is a key?” Hilfy asked. Her teeth chattered fit to crack, despite
the cold-suit. “And the stsho have got it.
“Number four’s coming in,” Chur yelled over the rising thunder of machinery, and
the fourth can locked through and rumbled down the track toward them as they
scrambled to meet it. Chur got to it first, crouched down and tugged fruitlessly
at the lid. “It’s locked too.”
“Gods and thunders!” Pyanfar yanked her pistol from her pocket and fired past
Chur into the lid mechanism, stalked down the row and fired at the next and the
next and the next. Maintenance lights on the lids went out. The smoke of burned
plastics curled up in the actinic light, mingling gray with their breaths. “Get
torches if you have to! Get those lids off.”
“It’s coming!” Chur cried, tugging at the smoking lid, and Hilfy dived to help,
past Pyanfar’s own numb-footed advance on the can.
It was fish, a flood of dried fish, that sent its stench into the supercooled
air; the next one, dried fruit. The third–
“This is it,” said Chur, pawing past the cascade of stinking warm shishu fruit,
for a second white lid showed through the spilling cargo. She reached it on her