She was thinking as hard and fast as she could. Airlocks are up on the next level, but they’re all guarded. So are the suits. Even if I could grab a space suit the guards would grab me before I had time to put one on. And there’s the damn-dratted solar storm outside, too. Not the best time for a walk on the surface.
I could use the softsuit, she reminded herself. It’s right here, tucked into my travel bag. Never used the blow-up helmet before but Doug said it works okay. Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. What choice do I have?
The big problem was to get to an airlock without being seen. Suddenly Pancho broke into a fierce grin. No, the problem is how do I get some explosives so I can make a new airlock for myself!
Doug Stavenger tried to busy himself with catching up on the minutes of Selene’s governing council meetings. But as he read the reports of the water board and the maintenance department and the safety office, the words blurred into meaningless symbols before his eyes. Irritated, nervous, he told his computer to show him the latest report on the solar storm.
One wall of the office in his home seemingly dissolved into a three-dimensional image of the Earth/Moon system. It was bathed in a hot pink glow that represented the radiation cloud. Stavenger muted the sound, preferring to read for himself the figures on radiation intensity and predicted time duration of the storm displayed across the bottom of the holographic image.
“Add traffic,” he said quietly.
Several yellow dots appeared in the image. One of them was identified as Elsinore, the ship Edith was aboard.
“Project trajectories.”
Slim green curving lines appeared, the one attached to Elsinore arcing out to the right and out of the cloud.
“Add destinations.”
Elsinore’s projected path ended at a dot labeled “Ceres.” Stavenger noted almost subliminally that of all the ships in the region, there was one named Cromwell but that had no projected destination visible. No course vector for it showed at all. It was deep inside the radiation cloud, too.
As he watched, Cromwell’s dot winked out. Stavenger stared at the display. Either the ship’s suddenly been destroyed or they’ve turned off all their tracking and telemetry beacons. There were no other ships near it, as far as the imagery showed. So it can’t have been attacked by somebody.
Why would they turn off all their beacons? Stavenger asked himself. It took only a moment’s thought for him to understand.
Pancho jumped off the cart as the minitractor rolled past a jumbled pile of equipment and crates of supplies lying in what seemed a haphazard disorder on the dusty concrete floor. The driver saw her and yelled at her over his shoulder in Japanese as the tractor trundled away from her.
“Same to you, buddy,” Pancho hollered back, bowing politely to the driver.
Slinging her travel bag over one shoulder, she ducked behind the nearest pile of crates and started searching through the trove. No explosives, but in the midst of the scattered pieces of equipment she saw something that might be almost as good: a welding laser. Kneeling beside the laser’s finned barrel, she clicked its on switch and felt her heart sink. The power supply’s battery indicator was way down in the red. I need a power source, she told herself.
Suddenly the loudspeakers hanging on poles every fifty meters or so blared into harsh, rapid Japanese. Pancho didn’t understand the words but she knew the tone: There’s an intruder sneaking around here. Find her!
All the construction noise stopped. It was eerie, Pancho thought. The banging, buzzing, yelling construction site went absolutely still. It was as if everybody froze.
But only for a moment. Hunkered behind a crate, Pancho saw the blue-clad construction workers looking around uncertainly. Foremen and women strode out among them, snapping orders. The workers gathered themselves into parties of four, five and six and began methodically searching the entire floor. Pancho figured they were doing the same on the other levels, too.
Feeling like a mouse in a convention hall filled with cats, Pancho knelt behind the crate. The laser was within reach, but without a power supply it was useless. And even if I get outside, she told herself, I’ll have to sprint through the storm to get into one of the hoppers sitting out on the launchpad. The outlook ain’t brilliant.