He moved with natural, lanky grace, rolling across the bed and onto his feet, striding the step or two to the doorway and extracting the recorder, rolling back across the bed with the machine in one hand. He set it on the table beside her chair and punched in the recording sequence.
She put the cup of tea beside him, then realized it was her only cup. Giving a shrug, she carefully raised the pan in both hands and sipped the tea from the lip before settling down again.
She could have gone next door and borrowed a cup, perhaps, but she didn’t know the people and she felt that if she interrupted this moment, it wouldn’t return. She might never again have the courage to discuss it. She certainly would never again have the kind of total attention she had from Scan Shongili.
“I’m not sure what’s classified,” she said to begin with. “Except that I’m not supposed to tell you how the terrorists infiltrated the station.” She shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know that for sure anyway, though I could speculate. The thing is, Scan, the deaths were unnecessary. None of those people had to die. None of them should have. The terrorists were after food, medicine, and supplies.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I lay there on the floor playing dead, watching them loot the place, and that’s all they bloody well took.”
“We heard that they systematically ran through the place executing everyone they found alive,” Sean said.
Yana shook her head. “There was no need of that. I think they did make sure of a few of the crew, but the station commander and supply officer just happened, by pure coincidence mind you, to be visiting another ship that day. My ship. It had just transferred supplies, and I was bringing fresh recruits over to familiarize them with a Class One station and demonstrate some of the equipment. I-um- I was just showing them how the snorkel worked.”
“The what?” Scan asked, leaning forward.
Her voice had been clear and matter-of-fact so far, but suddenly she was having trouble forcing it above a whisper. Her throat began to spasm and she started coughing again. Scan held out the bottle of Clodagh’s medicine, and she took a good swig before she continued.
“The snorkel. It’s for short repair jobs in airless sections of the ship, so that you don’t have to suit up. There’s an exchange unit in it that returns oxygen for CO2, breath for breath, without the need to carry heavy tanks or wear a full space suit that might be too bulky to do some of the inside repairs in tighter places. Also, you can send snorkeled personnel into certain areas of the ship without having to flood the whole area with O2. New invention. They discovered the exchange material on Bremer.”
She stopped and watched him. She had lit the lamp earlier, and now its glow and that of the moons and stars through the window illuminated the room. The planes of his face were shadowed, and his eyes held hers, silently pulling more out of her. The tension was broken when the cat jumped up onto her knees and settled down, purring, as if knowing she needed reassurance that she was here, on firm ground, with living people and in no immediate danger, instead of back there.
He nodded slowly, an almost imperceptible movement.
“I stepped back into an air lock with the mask in place and let the inner door close. The students were looking through the view plate and watching me on the screens on either side of the door, as I explained the mask to them.
“I saw the vapor pouring in through the ventilation duct before any of them did, but I couldn’t speak to them because of the snorkel. I signaled them to stand back and hit the O2 button for the lock, waited a beat, and hit the exit panel for the door. But then I realized the vapor was pouring in behind me, too. 1 heard an explosion-felt it really-and the door jammed half-open between us. The recruits were coughing and crowding the outer door.”
She stopped for a moment and took a swig of cough syrup, seeing the faces in front of her. “An eighteen-year-old girl blocked my way back into the hold. She was trying to get through to the outside, I guess, and was coughing so hard she couldn’t straighten up. People were vomiting, crying. The girl’s nametag said Samuel-son and she had almost white hair, cut into a crew cut. You know, trying to look the part of a company cadet. Her scalp was bright red through her hair, and her eyes were bulging. I exhaled into the mask, tore it off, and tried to wrestle it over her face, but she fought me. I-uh-had to knock her down to get past her, into the room. I put the mask back on and breathed into it but the O2 that came back wasn’t pure. I must have let some of the gas leak in while I was trying to rebreathe her. The yellow vapor was still swirling, and through it I saw the viewscreens. Masked figures were running around, carrying weapons and containers, grabbing all the new supplies. My first thought was that they were station crew investigating the gas in the ventilation system. But that didn’t jibe with the weapons and the way they were ignoring the people dying under their feet. I tried buddy-breathing with the nearest cadet who still had some life in him, and he seemed to realize what I was trying to do, but when he breathed into the mask, it fouled it, and he died too. They all died. Every damned one of them died and I just lay there, playing dead, on the floor breathing through the contaminated mask, exhaling the gas and CO2, sucking in poisoned oxygen while the terrorists ran through the station. The alarms were blaring and the station computer calling for help, but the last thing I saw was the masked face of one of the terrorists through the viewport leading to the main corridor.