She kept low and stayed behind the tractor, hoping that anyone searching for her up at this level would see nothing more than a tractor parked near an empty section of the wall. Until the laser starts flashing sparks of molten metal, and by then it’ll be too late to stop me. I hope.
Why is Yamagata backing Nairobi? she asked herself as she plugged the power cable into the tractor’s thermionic generator. Nobuhiko told me Yamagata’s not involved in space operations, they’re concentrating all their efforts on Earth. Yeah, sure. What was it Dan Randolph used to say: “And rain makes applesauce.” Nobu was lying through his teeth at me. Sumbitch is using Nairobi to get established on the Moon. But why?
It wasn’t until she had the laser ready to go and was pulling the soft-suit out of her travel bag that the answer hit Pancho. Yamagata’s getting ready to take over the Belt! They’re letting Astro and Humphries slaughter each other and they’ll step over the bloody corpses and take control of everything! They’re even helping us to fight this damned stupid war!
Suddenly Pancho felt angry. At herself. I should’ve seen this, she fumed silently. If I had half the smarts god gave a warty toad I would have figured this out months ago. Damn! Double damn it all to hell and back! I’ve been just as blind as I made those people downstairs.
Okay, she told herself. So you’ve been outsmarted. Just don’t go and kill yourself. Check out this suit carefully.
The softsuit was easy to put on. You just stepped into it the same way you stepped into a pair of coveralls, put your arms through the sleeves, and sealed up the front like it was Velcro. The nanomachines are activated by the body’s heat, she knew. Wriggling her fingers inside the skin-thin gloves, she wondered all over again how the virus-sized nanobugs could keep her safe from the vacuum of space without stiffening up the way normal gloves and fabric suits did.
She had never worn a nanotech helmet before. It hung limply in her gloved hands, like an empty plastic sack. Reading the illustrated instructions off her palmcomp, Pancho blew it up like a kid’s balloon. It puffed out to a rigid fishbowl shape. It felt a little spongy to her, but Pancho pulled the helmet over her head and sealed it to the suit’s collar by running two fingers along the seam. Same as sealing a freezer bag, she thought.
No life-support pack; only a slim green cylinder of oxygen, good for an hour. Or so the instructions said.
Okay, she told herself. You got one hour.
It was difficult for the Nairobi security woman to understand what the nearly hysterical Japanese woman was saying. She kept pawing at her eyes and sobbing uncontrollably. The two African guards, both men, were still sprawled on the concrete floor, unconscious.
She called her boss on her handheld and reported her finding: one tractor driver and two guards, all three of them incapacitated, blinded.
“Where’s the tractor?” Her boss’s face, even in the handheld’s minute screen, scowled implacably at her.
“Not here,” she replied.
The boss almost smiled. “Good. All tractors have radio beacons. Get the number of the tractor out of the driver, then we can track its beacon and find out where the fugitive is.”
“Assuming the fugitive is with the tractor,” she said, before thinking.
His scowl deepened. “Yes, assuming that,” he growled.
It wasn’t wise to second-guess the boss, she remembered too late.
Pancho hesitated as she held the laser’s cutting head next to the curving metal wall. I cut a hole and the air whooshes out. None of the people up here are in suits. They could get killed.
Then she shook her head. This dome’s too big for that. The air starts leaking out, they’ll pop some emergency sheets that’ll get carried to the hole and plug it up long enough for them to get a repair crew to fix it. Nobody’s going to get hurt except you, she said to herself, if you don’t get your butt in gear.
She thumbed the laser’s control switch. Its infrared beam was invisible, but a thin spot of cherry-red instantly began glowing on the metal wall. Holding the laser head in both her gloved hands like an old-fashioned power drill, Pancho slowly lifted it in an arc-like shape. She felt nothing inside the softsuit, but noticed that dust was swirling along the floor and disappearing into the thin, red-hot cut. Punched through, she thought. Nothing but vacuum outside.