wondered how many had been deafened by the tremendous bang of the explosive charges that Steel had used to smash open Wilson’s barricade, a noise that still seemed to reverberate from the walls of the battered hull.
“I wonder where they got the charges from,” she muttered. “Maybe explosive bolts from the docking hatches, the emergency-separation stuff. But how did they get it inside the hull without sounding the alarms? And where-”
“Here they come!” Grace yelled.
Whatever small war had gone on in the hull nose was evidently concluded. Steel and her party came down out of the smoke, clinging to dangling cables and wall handhelds. They were all blackened, their clothes shredded; some of them looked injured. But that gun in Steel’s hand was clearly visible. She waved it around, triumphant.
And they had prisoners, men held by their arms and legs and hair. Holle tried to count them. Naked, bloodied, the men all looked the same. There should have been six up there, Wilson and his five “advisers,” his five closest thugs. She counted three. One might have been Theo; none looked like Wilson. They weren’t resisting.
Steel seemed to be directing them down toward a particular equipment rack on Deck Seven or Eight. Some of the rebels had gone on ahead to move the rack, exposing the curved wall behind it. It looked to Holle as if some kind of work had been done on that hidden section of wall, behind the rack. Now a couple of Steel’s people started to pull away a mesh covering, and turn screws in the panels.
Holle understood immediately, and saw that Helen had been right about what they intended to do. Holle hadn’t believed it. “No,” she breathed. “There’s no water tank behind that section. Just the fuselage. No, no-”
One of the captured men started struggling, screaming. Maybe he had figured out what was happening too. It might have been Dan Xavi, the one the mistreated children called the Pig. He almost got free, and the rebels fell on him, clustering like flies around a wound. Somebody got Xavi around the neck. Another got hold of his arm and did a kind of somersault, so the arm was twisted, breaking with a sharp snap. Fists slammed into his mouth and nose and eyes, and Xavi’s screams were choked by a bubbling noise.
“They’ve lost it,” Grace said. “They’re going to kill him.”
“He doesn’t matter,” Holle said. She was still watching the rebels patiently removing screws from that wall panel. “It’s our fault. My generation. Wilson, you prick, you couldn’t control yourself. And you mad-man, Zane, look what you’ve done! OK, OK.” She made an effort to calm down, to think. There might only be seconds left. “We have to get people to shelter. Somewhere airtight.”
Helen said, “The cupola. The shuttles-”
“Not shuttle A. Venus said somebody launched it, it’s gone. Wilson, maybe. Shuttle B, and the cupola. Get everybody in there, one or the other. Everybody who will come.” But the rebels wouldn’t come, no matter what she said. “And get Zane. Don’t forget Zane. Move, move!”
Grace cast one despairing glance at Helen. Holle saw a lifetime of love and helpless anxiety compressed into that one expression.
Then the three of them scattered, launching themselves toward knots of bewildered people.
The rebels shoved Jeb Holden and Theo Morell up to the curving wall, behind the detached equipment rack. Theo could see what they were doing, removing screws that secured some kind of temporary panel there. Jeb was weeping steadily. Tears and snot scattered in the air every time he shook his head. Dan Xavi was already dead, Theo could see. Blood-smeared rebels hovered around his twisted body.
And they were opening up the hull.
Theo struggled against the grip of those who held him. He couldn’t help it. But they only held him tighter, and some bastard launched a barefoot kick into his ribs. It was one thing he’d learned today, that this new generation who had grown up in microgravity were a hell of a lot better at fighting in it than any of Wilson’s men. They seemed to have an instinctive grasp of how to use their bodies: how to pivot in the air, when to grab something to push against so they could punch you or kick or head-butt or barge.
He gave up struggling, and shook his head to clear it. Think, Theo! If you don’t think now you’re not going to get the chance to work it out tomorrow.
“You can see what we’ve done,” Steel said. “What we’re ready to do. Today’s the day, Theo Morell. Today’s the day we expose the lie. Today’s the day we break out of this stupid sim tank, and then-”
“And then what? Even if you’re right-what do you think you are going to do, Steel? Take over Denver? Build a raft? Oh, God! This is crazy.”
There was a flicker of doubt in Steel’s eyes. Maybe she hadn’t actually thought it through that far, not past her fantasizing of this moment of rebellion and revenge. But she was full of momentum. “At least this will be over,” she said. “The lies, the wasted lives.”
“I remember Denver flooding,” Jeb Holden said, and he coughed, spraying blood and snot. “I remember Gunnison and Alma. I remember how I fought my way onto this ship. Broke my knuckle on some fucking Candidate’s face. I remember the launch, all those fucking bombs. It was real! Can’t you stupid kids just listen-”
Max Baker silenced him with a slam to the head with his heavy wrench. Jeb went limp, floating.
They had got the last screw out. Now, Theo saw, that plate was held in place only by the pressure of the air within the hull. Since the launch they had all, including illegals and gatecrashers, been trained for decompression accidents. Theo knew that a hole the size of that plate, around a meter square, would drain the hull of its air in seconds-twenty seconds for the pressure to reduce to a tenth nominal, another twenty seconds for it to reduce by another factor of ten.
Steel stared into his face. His reaction seemed to mean as much to her as the reality of the moment. “Are you ready, Theo Morell? Ready to face your controllers?”
He tried to dredge up something to say, to stop this, at least to stall her. “You’ve won, damn it. You’ve beaten Wilson. Isn’t that enough? We can put the ship back together. We can talk about how we go forward, how we live together…”
Steel just laughed. Max took a jemmy and slid the edge under the loose plate. He braced himself on a bracket, ready to use his weight to pry it loose.
Theo looked at them, at Steel with her battered face, at fifteen-year-old Max Baker, at Magda Murphy, who even now held on to her baby. They could all be dead in seconds. “Steel, for God’s sake, I swear, I swear by my life, my mother’s-nobody’s lying to you. Not about this. The ship is real. If you take that hatch off you’ll kill us all.”
Steel began to say something.
But Max roared, drowning out any further talk, a lifetime of confinement and frustration redeemed in a single moment, and he slammed his body down on the jemmy. The plate flew back.
The decompression was an explosion, a deafening thunderclap.
Theo saw the loose plate whirl like a leaf and fly out through the hole in the wall. There was a tearing in his lungs, and a powerful pain in his ears, as if iron splinters were being driven into his head, and he remembered to open his mouth wide. People squirmed around him, but their screams were snatched away on the howling wind.
He faced the hole in the wall, a hole in the world, and the wind shoved him in the back. He saw the stars with his naked eyes. Even now he might have a chance, if he could hang on until the air was gone, the wind subsided, and find a pressure suit before he blacked out. But strong hands grabbed him and pinned his arms to his side and shoved him out, bodily.
He spun slowly. He saw the ship’s outer wall with its pocked insulation blanket, and the brightly lit hole, square and neat, receding from him. Suddenly he was beyond the wall- outside the hull, naked. A kind of fight was going on, people climbing over each other to stay inside the hull. But they were tumbling out after him. Theo saw a child, writhing, helpless in space.
He was cold. He couldn’t see anymore. The pain in his chest was agonizing, tearing, burning. He thought of his mother.
Something burst inside his head.
The decompression wind was already dying. The thinning air dumped its water vapor in a mist that pearled
