The guy everyone called Gypsy stood first, five foot two of pure flex-steel, and mean as a snake. The other five stood up after. Jankins, the miner, said “Good luck,” and then joined Gypsy and the others in the airlock. Just before the door closed behind them, Piering said: “Take the Scorpion around to the next door. And… good luck.”
Waiting for the lock to cycle to green felt like the longest minutes of his life. One of his compatriots, an ex- police officer named Chambers who had retired to Luna, spoke first.
“If the atmosphere is good… I mean if the dome still has integrity, do we shuck suits?”
“I don’t think so,” Piering said. “What if they depressurize the dome? It’s their best threat. Remove that, and they might back down.” He didn’t like the unspoken possibility: That in the next minutes, every unsuited human being in that dome might die.
Kendra stood in the control center, examining the holographic model now shimmering on the stage.
“We’ve retasked the mining satellites,” she said. “But I really didn’t expect to have the images so quickly-or with such clarity.”
“That,” Xavier said, “is because you were not expecting me. Then again, how could you?” There was just enough self-mockery in his voice to take the edge off. A miniature gaming dome shimmered in the air before them like a floating crown. “I’ve created a map,” Xavier said with a hint of real pride. “Mining deep-scans, some infrared information, reports from this Kowsnofski woman.”
With a wave of his hand, the dome’s outer skin peeled away. Tiny human figures in red and green were clustered in various bubbles. “Our best guess. We must accept that they’ve probably screwed with the inputs. I would. However, if the information is accurate, then our people are down here ”-he indicated something near ground level-“and our antagonists are here.” He indicated two levels up.
“That’s good,” Kendra said. “And that means that our best bet is to insert our people between… what did Angelique call them? Pirates? Fine. Pirates and gamers. At the very least, we slow them down. And maybe we stop them completely.”
She took a closer look. The dome had seven public entrances and three service entrances. “We’re assuming that they’ve mined some but not all of the entrances. Piering is going for door six.”
Magique’s fingers flurried with sign. Wu Lin watched, and then interpreted. “Why don’t you think all of them were mined?”
“Because we know the pirates probably acquired their explosives here, and we’ve run inventory. About enough missing material to make four or five explosive devices. There is a very good chance that here on level C, where Asako Tabata’s body was left, might still be clear. We can reach it up an access ladder from a service entrance on ground level G. We have no data suggesting that more entrances have been mined since the gamers broke free, and we have to assume that our gamers put a crimp in the pirates’ plans. We’ll split into two teams. One will go in at F, the other at C. And then we’ll see what happens.”
“We have movement in the dome.” Kendra’s voice in Piering’s ear. “Power surges.”
“Which doors?”
“ Maintenance two and three.”
“What about door seven?” Piering asked. He could smell the chicken sandwich he’d had for lunch, his own sour breath bouncing back at him from the faceplate. Nerves.
“Nothing so far. We picked up security camera blips, just after the attack went down. Look-they wouldn’t be able to do everything at once, and when the gamers complicated things, it may have changed their focus.”
“We’ll find out in about sixty seconds,” Piering said. “Let’s get ready to move, people,” he said, trying to shut the doubt out of his head. “We better have three ‘esses’ on our side: speed, silence and surprise.”
“And serendipity,” muttered Hazel Trout, the round woman from Communications.
“And shit-storm,” Chambers said. “We’d better bring the pain.”
The four heroes of group B opened the inner lock. The access ladder was only a meter away, and Piering grabbed a rung and began to climb.
It took about five minutes to crawl from ground level to C, and another minute to locate the correct maintenance doors. Piering punched in a code, and the door slid up. The first thing Piering saw in the lock was Asako Tabata’s pod. It crowded the little room, so that they had to squeeze past, but none of the four rescuers could resist looking in through the polyglas lid. Her face was turned to the right side, pale and slightly bluish. He didn’t know her, had never met her. But she seemed so small and vulnerable, so much like a sleeping child that his heart almost broke.
We’ll get them for you, he thought. Every one of the bastards.
The airlock’s inner door bore a single window, inch-thick composition plastic harder than glass and stronger than steel. And all he could see beyond it was an empty corridor.
“Unhook the door from the grid,” he said, “and open it.”
Chambers opened the inner panel, and slotted a handheld scanner into place. Piering watched as the guy manipulated glowing red and green lines, effectively isolating the door from the maintenance grid. If the pirates were monitoring, this might… might… bamboozle them.
He held his breath as the door slid open. No explosion.
Piering and his three partners stepped out onto a metal walkway. He motioned Hazel and Lee around to the right, while he and Chambers went left. The walkway curled around the inner wall, separating it from a maze of pipes, wiring and support struts. The microphone in his suit helmet picked up his own footfalls, and a mixture of small hollow machine sounds.
“Anything, Lee?”
Lee was a tall brunette from the tool and die workshops, a veteran of the Second Canadian War. “Nothing so far. Hazel and I are on point. Can you find our gamers?”
A map of the inner bubble layout played on his faceplate, a framework of intersecting green lines. The gamers’ last known location was marked in red. Around the curve of the dome, and then in through a few rows of bubbles, then down a level. They just might make it. If they could find their targets, it might be possible to evacuate the gamers to the Scorpion, or at the least form a security wall between the innocent and the guilty… and then hang on for dear life until more help arrived.
His nail gun had an effective range of about a dozen meters. Beyond that they would tumble and act as dull projectiles, still capable of stinging but no longer lethal.
“Piering…” Lee whispered. “I see something-”
Red mist clouded Shotz’ vision. He fought to keep it from swallowing logic, wished desperately to maintain perspective. He had known that Prince Ali Kikaya III could be grabbed. Anyone could be kidnapped or killed, given the appropriate resources and commitment. He had trusted that political pressure on Earth could control the security response. It had always been possible that the gamers might try to escape, but his soldiers had bottled them in the dome. Conceivably, even if their targets escaped, but remained within the dome, the political situation in Central Africa would not be negatively affected.
And now, in defiance of her own superiors, the Griffin woman was striking against them. Though it was invisible to their monitors, Douglas Frost had finally done something useful and spotted the Scorpion transport through one of the dome’s few external windows. Shotz had positioned his people to protect the unmined doors. Pure strategy: Give your opponent an apparent entry point, bottle them there and set up a kill zone.
And then: Demonstrate the price of disobedience.
Two of his men were positioned at the dome’s base level, with complementary fields of fire directed at different doors and maintenance ladders in the southern section of the dome. Others were positioned on levels C and E.
When he first glimpsed his adversaries, he cursed silently. Damn! They were wearing pressure suits. Well, of course they were, but frankly he hadn’t factored that in when designing their assault and defensive gear back on Earth.
Celeste might be right: There was no way to deal with these problems if their highest priority was zero casualties. Celeste was often right.
That was one of the reasons he cared for her. He wouldn’t call it love, exactly. Wasn’t entirely certain he
