Her voice was lost as he disconnected his suit from the fighter’s com link and support system. He was surprised and delighted that the Challenger had held her fire on the way in; that was something he had anticipated but not expected. All he had hoped for was to create a state of complete confusion to hide the landing of the assault team.
After fully depressurizing the cockpit, he opened the canopy and cautiously climbed out. They had landed on the side of the Challenger and were in fact on a vertical portion of the hull, like spiders walking up the wall. But that hardly mattered, since there was no gravity on the outside of the ship. Electromagnetic inserts in their boots kept them on the surface of the ship, although the hold was feeble through the quartzite shielding.
The rest had gathered in front of the fighters, staring off across a flat expanse of open hull. Lenna arrived behind him; he could identify her easily by the fact that her armor had only one set of arms. Consherra was even more clearly identified by her white armor, an almost shocking contrast against an angular black landscape populated by black fighters and Starwolves in black armor.
“Out there?” Tregloran asked uncertainly. “We could waste half an hour looking for that airlock.”
“You should have looked for it on the way in,” Velmeran told him. “You might have landed on it.”
He walked out eleven carefully paced steps and stopped at the edge of what now appeared to the others as a pit opening in the smooth surface of the hull. As they drew nearer, they could see that the rectangular depression was no more than ten centimeters deep, the lip designed to receive the hermetic seal of a docking tube. Inside that was the door itself, its two halves firmly sealed. They could also see now how he had found it so easily; the nose of his fighter was pointed directly toward it.
“So, wizard, you have found the hidden door,” Baress remarked. “Do you know the secret word?”
“You have access to Velmeran’s library,” Consherra said accusingly. “How did you acquire that privilege? I was his mate for half a year before he opened his shelves to me.”
“Needless to say, I found an easier method,” Baress said dryly. “I asked. Perhaps you never thought of that.”
“I lock the doors to keep the books on the shelves,” Velmeran explained, interrupting his silent examination of the airlock. “Not to keep people out. A book serves no function unless it is read.”
“Well, do you have any magic words?” Consherra asked impatiently.
“Certainly.
The doors snapped back instantly, revealing the brightly lit interior of the airlock. A second set of doors at the bottom were securely closed; the Union did not have the containment fields that Starwolves used on their own locks and bays.
“Quickly, now,” Velmeran warned. “There are sensors on these doors that I am having to hold inactive.”
“Right,” Lenna agreed. Before anyone could stop her, she reached down to take hold of the edge of the lock and flipped herself inside. Gravity interfered halfway through her free-fall somersault and she fell heavily on her back on a wall that suddenly became a floor.
“Great stars!” She wheezed, and struggled to pick herself up. “Watch that first step.”
Velmeran was the first to recover from his surprise. He turned and lowered himself cautiously into the airlock. Kneeling on the floor, he reached up to assist Consherra and Baress. Last of all, Tregloran passed their guns down to them.
“We have to get through this airlock before I let something slip,” he said. “You remember what I told you. When the time comes, the three of you are to get away from here. If we are not back by then, we will not be coming back. Not to worry, though.”
“Do I look worried?” Tregloran asked. “You can take on the lot of them, and bring this ship home for salvage. Especially now that you have Lenna to help you.”
“I cannot tell you how reassuring that is,” Velmeran remarked with droll sarcasm as he allowed the outer door to snap shut. He turned immediately to the control panel by the inner door and ran his upper right hand lightly over the surface, not quite touching, as if tracing hidden wiring. He quickly found what he was looking for, or so it seemed. Air began cycling into the lock, and a moment later the inner door snapped open.
Baress and Lenna were out the door immediately, rifles ready as they scouted the corridor in either direction, while Consherra stood with her rifle trained down the larger hall immediately ahead. Velmeran peered at them curiously.
“I could have told you nothing was there,” he remarked. He turned to look at the door, and it obediently slid shut. “There. No indication that we ever came through.”
“First things first,” Lenna remarked as she set down her rifle. Taking her bundle of extra clothes, she headed for the suit room adjacent to the airlock. She immediately began stripping off her armor, hanging it on an empty suit rack in the wall beside the door, where it was less likely to be seen.
“Remember to avoid the sentries,” Velmeran reminded them, having pulled off his helmet. “What one sees, they all know. It does us no good to destroy one before it has seen you, since its destruction will be noted and investigated. We need to conduct our business undetected, and leave the same way… if we can.”
“Are those beasties able to identify legitimate crewmembers on sight?” Lenna asked.
“No. Visual identification is a complex function with a long history of accidents,” Baress told her. “The uniform and the forged magnetic ident you carry will identify you as a legitimate crewmember.”
“Just turn on the old Kanian charm,” Velmeran added. “That should be enough to baffle even an automaton.”
He glanced inside the little room to check on her progress, and found that she had just come out of her armor. It was his first sight of a naked human, and he did not care for another. The lack of a second set of arms made her look pitifully deformed.
“Since you will be on your own, remember to keep track of the time,” he continued. “And give yourself enough time to get out. You have to be back inside your armor before you can leave.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lenna assured him absently as she struggled into her uniform.
“And above all, do not get yourself in more trouble than you can manage.”
“Sure. All ready.”
She emerged from the room, abruptly transformed into a stranger. She had put on her makeup in advance, hiding her Trader ancestry with a slightly different appearance to her slightly slanting eyes along with the hollow cheeks and wide, thin-lipped mouth of a native of the Lokuivea worlds, who still reflected their strong Polynesian and Amerindian background. Curiously enough, that might also explain any peculiarities in her speech.
“Ah, the girl of a thousand races,” Baress said approvingly. “A true artist.”
“That was my name at the bottom of the painting.” Lenna retrieved her gun and joined the others. “Lead on, wizard.” The first task was to find a main corridor that would lead the Starwolves to the forward portion of the ship, and where Lenna could find a lift to serve as the shortcut that she alone dared to use. There was a basic logic to the construction of this ship. In a sense the Fortress was a large ship inside a larger shell. The outer shell was the hull itself, its quartzite shielding and the vast sockets that held the guns and engines. Three hundred meters inside that was the inner hull that housed the mechanical workings of the ship itself as well as several cubic kilometers of crew quarters, storage bays, and machine shops.
The only inhabited regions in the outer hull were the rider bays and airlocks such as the one they had just entered. A single wide corridor extended tunnel-like to the interior portion of the ship, where a second airlock sealed it against emergency decompressions. Velmeran cycled this lock as he had the first, stepped boldly through the moment the inner doors opened, and found himself face-to-face with an automated sentry.
“Hello! Where did you come from?” he asked in mild surprise.
The sentry said nothing. The pair stood motionless as Velmeran stared into the glass eyes of the machine’s cameras. Moments passed, and the apprehension of the others turned to complete mystification.
“Well, now, that is better,” Velmeran said with disarming familiarity, as if he had just run across an old friend. “Do you have a name?”
The sentry appeared surprised. “I am called Ecs23-18.”
“Oh, that is no name!” Velmeran declared. “What if we give you a real name? Bill, I think. Do you have any friends, Bill?”
“I have no friends. I am security automaton.”
