watchful.
“I am lucky,” Bruno said. “It was not an explosive needle.”
“You’re lucky Somerset couldn’t shoot straight,” Maris told him.
“I don’t think Somerset wanted to kill me, boss.”
“We should make the fucker take the big walk without its suit,” Ty said, glaring at Somerset.
“You know we can’t do that,” Maris said.
“ I can do it,” Ty said grimly.
Somerset returned Ty’s angry glare with woozy equanimity, and said, “If you kill me, you will only prove that I was right all along.”
“Then we’ll both be happy,” Ty said.
“She’s using us,” Somerset said, slurring every s, “and no one sees it but me.”
Maris grabbed the hypo from the medical kit and swam up to Somerset. “You can’t keep quiet, can you?”
“Silence is a form of complicity,” Somerset said. Its eyes crossed as it tried to focus on the hypo. “I do not need another shot. I can bear pain.”
“This is for us,” Maris said, and pressed the hypo against Somerset’s neck. The neuter started to protest, but then the blast of painkiller hit and its eyes rolled up.
“We could fly it right out of the airlock,” Ty said. “It wouldn’t feel a thing.”
“You know we aren’t going to do any such thing,” Maris said. “Listen up. Any minute now, the ship’s crew are going to notice that their boss is missing. What we have to do is work out what we’re going to tell them.”
Ty said, “I’m not giving her up.”
“We know Alice must have killed Barrett in self-defense,” Maris said. “We can testify-”
Bruno said, “Ty is right, boss. We know that Alice isn’t a murderer, but our testimony won’t mean much in court.”
Alice waved her hands to get their attention, then pointed to the workshop’s camera.
“It’s recording,” Ty said. He laughed, and turned a full somersault in midair. “Alice knows machines! She had the internal com record everything!”
Maris shook out a screen, plugged it into the camera, and started the playback. Ty and Bruno crowded around her, watched Barrett struggle through the airlock in his p-suit, watched him question Alice, his p-suit still sealed, his voice coming cold and metallic through its speaker. He loomed over her like a fully armed medieval knight menacing a helpless maiden. Her stubborn intervals of silence, his amplified voice getting louder, his gestures angrier. Alice shrank back. He showed her his weapon. And Alice flew at him, whipping a tether around his arms and body, the tether contracting in a tight embrace as her momentum drove him backward; she wrapped her legs around his chest, smashed his visor with a jack-hammer, and emptied a canister of foam into his helmet.
The camera saw everything; it even picked up the glint of the weapon when it flew from Barrett’s gloved hand. He flung his helmeted head from side to side, trying to shake off the foam’s suffocating mask; Alice pressed against a wall, unobtrusively out of focus, as his struggles quietened.
Maris said, “It looks good, but will it look good to the court?”
“We can’t turn her over to Symbiosis or the TPA police,” Bruno said. “At best, they’ll turn her into a lab specimen. At worst-”
“Where is she?” Ty said.
Alice was gone; the hatch to the airlock was closed. Neither the automatic nor manual system would budge it. As Bruno prized off the cover of the servomotor, Maris joined Ty at the door’s little port, saw Alice wave bye-bye and shoot through the hatch into Barrett’s sled. A moment later, there was a solid thump as the sled decoupled.
Maris and Bruno and Ty rushed to the viewports.
“Look at her go!” Maris said.
“Where is she going?” Ty said.
“It looks like she is heading straight to the Symbiosis ship,” Bruno said. “She sure can fly that sled.”
“Of course she can,” Ty said. “What do you think she’s going to do?”
“We’ll see soon enough,” Maris said. “Meanwhile, let’s get busy, gentlemen.”
Bruno glanced at her. “I do believe you have a plan,” he said.
“It’s not much of one, but hear me out.”
By the time Ty and Maris had hauled Barrett’s body to the shuttle, his sled had docked with the motor section of the Symbiosis ship. They tethered the body to the tank where Alice had slept out three hundred days, and tethered the weapon to the utility belt of its p-suit. Maris dragged some of the plastic insulation out of the tank’s hatch for dramatic effect, fired a couple of shots into the tangle of bags and tubes inside, then scooted back to look at her work. The tank looked like something had hatched from it in a hurry; Barrett’s body, with its mask of lumpy foam, hung half-folded like a grotesque unstrung puppet, its yellow p-suit vivid against the black film of the vacuum organism.
“It looks kind of cheesy,” Ty said doubtfully, over their patch cord link.
“If you have a better idea,” Maris said, “let me know.”
“Maybe it’s because I don’t think he would have had the sense to tether his weapon.”
“He found where Alice was hiding,” Maris said, “and opened up the tank. There was a struggle. She killed him and took his sled. The weapon is necessary. It shows he meant her harm. If we don’t tether it to him, it’ll drift off somewhere and no one will find it. So let’s pretend that in his last moments he was overcome with common sense.”
“Yeah, well, none of that will matter if the crew knew where he was going in the first place.”
“We’ve been over that already. Barrett wouldn’t have told them where he was going because he wanted what Alice had for himself. Otherwise, you can bet that he would have come with plenty of back-up, or sat tight in the safety of his ship and let the Symbiosis cops take care of it.”
Ty looked as though he was ready to argue the point, but before he could say anything, Bruno broke in on the common channel. “Heads up,” he said. “The Symbiosis ship just broke apart. It would seem that the cable linking the two halves has been severed.”
Maris called up her suit’s navigation menu, and after a couple of moments, it confirmed Bruno’s guess. With the cable cut, the lifesystem and motor section of the ship had shot away in opposite directions. The lifesystem, tumbling badly, was heading into a slightly higher orbit; the motor section was accelerating toward Saturn, its exhaust a steady, brilliant star beyond the ragged sphere of wrecked ships. Maris’s com system lit up: the distress signal of the Symbiosis ship’s lifesystem; messages from the other two wrecking gangs; Dione’s traffic control.
“A perfect burn,” Bruno said, with professional admiration. “It is too early to judge exactly, but if I had to make a guess, I would say that it is heading toward the rings.”
“Let’s get packed up,” Maris told Ty, over the patch cord. “The cops will be here pretty soon.”
“She’ll be all right, won’t she?”
“I think she knew what she was doing all along.”
Back at the hab-module, Maris and Ty stripped off their suits and grabbed tubes of coffee while Bruno flipped through a babble of voices on the radio channels. Two tugs were chasing the Symbiosis ship’s lifesystem, but as yet no one was pursuing the motor section. Bruno had worked up a trajectory, and showed Maris and Ty that it would graze the outer edge of the B ring.
“One hears many wild stories of rebels and refugees hiding inside the minor bodies of the rings,” he remarked. “Perhaps some of them are true.”
Maris said, “She’s going home.”
A small, happy thought to cling to, in the cold certainty of days of inquiries, investigations, accusations. Wherever Alice was going, Wrecking Gang #3 was headed rockside, their contracts terminated.
“We’ll have to let Somerset go,” she said.
“I still think we should make it take the big step,” Ty said. “Anyone seen my TV? Maybe the news channels will tell us what’s going down.”
“Somerset is a fool,” Bruno said, “but it is also one of us.”
Maris said, “I can’t help wondering if Somerset was right. That we were manipulated by Alice. She killed Barrett and ran off, and left us to deal with the consequences.”
“She could have taken Barrett’s shuttle as soon as she killed him,” Bruno said. “Instead, she took a very big
