She reached for her own helmet. The hinge was at the back of her neck so she couldn’t see what she was doing. Dasi’s big hand gently brushed hers away.
“Hunch a bit, mistress,” the sailor said. Adele tried to obey but the edge of the helmet still grazed her forehead as it pivoted down over her head.
There was a click and a cool pressure as the helmet sealed. The oxygen bottle switched on. Simultaneously Adele felt the rasp of the cutter’s docking mechanism interlocking with its mate on the command node’s surface.
The sailors drifted in the weightless cabin. Heavy wrenches dangled from their belts. They couldn’t carry real weapons because the programmers wouldn’t open the airlock’s inner hatch to an obvious threat, but burly sailors with wrenches should take command of the situation without difficulty.
Woetjans was opening the cutter’s hatch. Adele tried to get up. She couldn’t. Dasi—or was it Barnes?—reached down and released her safety strap.
The hatch released and pivoted inward. The gush of cabin air into vacuum would have carried Adele with it if Dasi—she was almost certain it was Dasi despite two distorting layers of faceshield—hadn’t gripped her.
The node’s airlock was three feet away, hard to see because of the flat lighting. Woetjans spun the wheel and pulled the lock open, using the cutter’s hatch for purchase. She entered; the sailors launched themselves after her. Dasi and Barnes each held one of Adele’s hands in the process, and Lamsoe clamped the outer lock shut behind them.
The chamber’s interior was illuminated. Adele could tell that atmospheric pressure was building by the way the figures of her fellows filled out as air molecules began to scatter the light.
The sailors unlatched their helmets. Adele struggled with hers for a moment before Dasi did the job for her. The air was thin, frighteningly thin for a moment, but the sailors didn’t seem to mind.
The hatch to the node’s interior had a small window with a speaker plate directly beneath it. An eye showed through the window and the plate demanded, “What the hell are you doing here?” in a tinny voice.
“We’re from the Katlinburg,” Adele said in her Bryce accent. “She exploded in the harbor. Let us in.”
“You don’t belong here,” the voice said in a mixture of anger and puzzlement.
“For God’s sake, let us in!” Adele said. The Katlinburg was one of the Alliance transports; very possibly she had exploded by now. “We can discuss what we’re doing here then!”
The eye vanished. For a long moment Adele was afraid that this was the end: the frightened programmers simply weren’t going to let strangers into the command node.
The inner lock rang as bolts withdrew. The hatch pivoted into the station.
Four worried-looking technicians were in the node’s central concourse. They were unarmed. From their dark complexions and hazel eyes they were natives of Willoughby, a world the Alliance had conquered less than five years earlier.
The technicians were probably political prisoners. At any rate the Alliance authorities obviously didn’t trust them because there was also a detail of four uniformed soldiers with them on the command node.
The soldiers had submachine guns. They were pointed at the Cinnabars.
Daniel Leary sat at the command console of the Princess Cecile, as integral a part of the corvette as the sensor suite or the High Drive that responded to his touch.
He was braking at 1.8 gravities, the most strain he was willing to put on the corvette’s structure. Even that was harder than he’d initially intended, since he knew the hull was modular and had been maintained by personnel with lower standards than the RCN would accept.
Daniel had been unjust to the Princess Cecile. Liftoff had proved the craft was as tight as a unit-built Cinnabar hull. Whatever else you said about Kostroma, they knew how to build starships here. The Princess Cecile would be a prized command in Cinnabar service, a handy little vessel whose crews would love her. All she needed was a once-over to make right a decade of neglect.
And of course she needed to survive to reach Cinnabar. Daniel wasn’t concerned about that ultimate result now, because every thread of his being was focused on the actions that would make it possible.