“What happens next?” Proboda sounded irritated.
She’d sent him on another wild goose chase.
“We’ll wait. Our list is very short, Viktor. I think we’re going to see a confession or an act of desperation. Not long. Maybe ten or fifteen min—”
She felt as much as heard the massive thud. The lights went out, all of them, all at once, and in the blackness the low moan of the warning sirens rose quickly to a thin, desperate wail. Wall speakers urgently addressed everyone within hearing, repeating themselves in English, Arabic, Russian, Japanese: Evacuate core section one immediately.
There is a catastrophic loss of pressure in core section one.
Evacuate core section one immediately. . . .
Proboda shouted into the commlink, loud enough to deafen her. “Are you all right? What happened up there?
Troy?” But no one answered him.
XVIII
A space station’s vital systems are both independent and redundant. Someone who knew Port Hesperus well had managed to isolate the entire starward quarter of the hub, interrupting main bus power from the nuclear reactor and cutting the lines from the solar arrays. All this in the instant that a pressure hatch blew out in the security sector— Until emergency batteries cut in, it was going to be very dark.
But not to Sparta, who tuned her visual cortex to infrared and made her way swiftly through a strange world of glowing shapes, an environment eerily resembling some giant plastic model of a complex organism lit only in red neon. Otherwise-dark light fixtures still glowed from the warmth in their diodes. Wires in the wall panels still glowed from resistance to the electricity that had recently flowed through them, and the panels themselves glowed Although most of the microminiaturized devices in the station consumed only trickles of electricity, their extreme density made for glowing hotspots in every phonelink and datalink. Every flatscreen and video-plate glowed with the alphanumerics or graphics or images of human faces they had displayed when the power was cut. Every place that human hands and feet had touched within the last hour glowed with the warmth of their passage. If there were rats in the walls, Sparta would see them.
Out in the halls and corridors the emergency lights flashed on quickly, drawing from their own self-contained batteries, throwing hard beams and stark strobing shadows down crowded passages. People swam swiftly through this flashing world like schools of squid, moving with single purpose toward the central part of the core—moving, for the most part, soundlessly, except for a few frightened cries, quickly answered by quiet commands, as emergency personnel took frightened newcomers in tow and firmly steered them to safety.
Pressure loss was the primal fear in space, but the regular inhabitants of Port Hesperus had run drills for just this sort of thing so often that when the reality occurred, it was almost routine. Old-timers were comfortable in the knowledge that so huge was the volume of air in even one quarter of Port Hesperus’s core that it would be eight hours before the pressure dropped from its current luxurious sealevel value to the thinness of a mountaintop in the Andes.
Long before then the repair crews would have done their job.
Sparta stayed in the dark, avoiding the corriders and the crowds, swimming through the dull infrared glow of access passages, along freight shafts, past pipes and cable racks in the ventilation tunnels, toward the site of the blown hatch. She was moving against the crowds but with the air; she’d needed only a moment of listening to pinpoint the wind’s destination, for it wailed through the blown pressure plate, playing the core like a vast organ pipe.
As she flew she felt the breeze, stirring gently at first, steadily freshening. Twenty or thirty meters from the hole the airflow reached hurricane velocity, and if she were to slip over that imaginary boundary she would be sucked into a supersonic funnel and shot into space like a rifle bullet. She would have to get close, but not that close.
The open hatch was in the Q3 security lock, and the purpose of this second act of sabotage was clear to her— someone had needed to create a diversion that would draw people away from Star Queen, that would make the neighborhood unsafe. Someone much cleverer than Sparta had suspected. So Sparta took the shortcut through the alleys and backyards of the space station, dashing to get to Star Queen, while the culprit was still aboard.
It occurred to her, as she approached the lock through a final stretch of ventilator duct, that the diversion had been not just clever but shrewd, provoking maximum terror with minimum risk of injury—the only people in the immediate vicinity of the blown hatch were the spacesuited guards, and even if they had been sucked into the vacuum of the docking bay they would have been protected.
A softhearted villain, then?
Not the one who blew up Star Queen’s oxygen supply.
Perhaps safety in this case was more apparent than real, the accidental byproduct of a fundamentally pragmatic scheme.
Sparta knocked the panel from the end of the ventilator and saw it skitter away, dragged by the wind; she peered from her hole into dark, howling desolation. The approach to the security lock was deserted. The guards, if not in the wrong place at the wrong time and thus instantly sucked out, would by now have been ordered to clear out. That would have been what the perpetrator planned, needed.
And if Sparta was right, the individual was still aboard the ship, having left the hatch wide open—with no time to waste putting on a spacesuit—and would be coming out again any second.
Sparta would forestall the escape. She pulled herself out of the ventilator. Clinging to the walls against the sucking vacuum, she pulled herself hand over hand into Star Queen’s docking tube. She pulled herself along by inches while the excruciating wind tore at her ears. Finally she reached Star Queen’s main hatch.
Inside the ship she punched the switches and watched as the hatch slowly sealed itself shut behind her; inside the airlock there was silence. She saw the red glow of handprints on the switches and on the ladder rungs, one person’s handprints.
The two of them were in here together. Sparta leaned close to a glowing print and inhaled its chemical essence.
Not anyone she had met on Port Hesperus, not anyone she had touched in weeks. The spicy amino acid pattern, called to full visualization, teased at her memory but was nowhere within its access. . . .
In one scenario, Sondra Sylvester was to have been in the hold, attempting to steal The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; two minutes ago, Sylvester was two kilometers away. In another scenario—Sparta’s favorite—Nikos Pavlakis was to have been in the ship, on the flight deck, setting its automatic systems to undock and blast its way out of the station, into the sun, forever burying the evidence of his and his partners’ treachery. But without accomplices, Pavlakis had had no time to rig the diversion.
Sparta pulled herself cautiously into the ship, past the stores deck—paused—then floated down through the flight deck. The glow of the console lights, running on batteries, made a soft circular kaleidoscope in the darkness. She paused again, listening— A distant careful movement, the brush of a glove, perhaps, or the scrape of a shoe against metal. She pinpointed it: her quarry was in Hold A. It was no one she had expected to find.
If whoever was in the hold was not Sylvester, it was one of her agents. Not Nancybeth, who was as somatically focused as an infant, incapable of concentrating on anything but her own needs and pleasures for more than a minute at a time. All communications to and from Helios had been tightly monitored; someone who had been aboard Helios, then. Sparta knew she’d been a fool. . . .
She crept weightless through the life-support-deck corridor with every augmented sense atingle, through the hatch of the hold airlock—which was ajar—until her face was inches from the outer hatch of Hold A. It too stood open. She moved as silently as she could, pulling herself along by the friction of the merest pressure of her fingertips, into the lock.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” he said. His voice was as warm as before, but this time it rose from a deeper, firmer base.
He was quite near. “I needed to learn something.”
His control was extraordinary, she thought. If she’d made a voiceprint of his words, they would have betrayed no insincerity.
She stopped where she was, breathless, pausing for thought. She could hear him and smell him, she knew approximately where he was, but she had no weapon and he was not in the line of sight.
“You don’t have to show yourself,” he said. “I’m not sure where you are, in fact, although I think you can hear me easily. Let me explain.”