The Service of the Sword

And then, suddenly, the smooth stream of glowing gas was ripped apart as she kicked in the impellers. The pod darted away like a bat out of hell, turning straight into the sun and clawing for distance.

Two of the approaching boats responded immediately, breaking away from the others and charging off to the chase. 'What are you going to do if they get close enough to grab it?' Cardones asked.

'They won't,' Sandler said, concentrating on her controls. 'I'll make sure to destroy it first.'

'Okay,' Cardones said slowly. 'But won't that kind of ruin the illusion that there's a crew aboard?'

'They're not going to get hold of the pod intact,' Sandler said tartly. 'Other than that, I'm open to alternative suggestions. Here, make yourself useful.'

She let go of the drive control long enough to dig a forceblade from her pocket and drop it into his lap. 'Pull all the data chips from the recorders and put them in with the collection by the player over there.'

'Right,' Cardones said, standing up and slipping the forceblade into his own pocket.

'And then,' Sandler added, 'start cutting everything up.'

Cardones froze in midstep. 'You mean the recorders?'

'I mean everything.' She glanced a thin smile up at him. 'Yes, I know. Millions of dollars worth of equipment down the tubes.' She nodded at the displays. 'But two of those boats are still on the way, and I'm not expecting them to be satisfied with just looking in the windows. We're going to have company soon; and we'd better not have anything here the average honeymooning couple doesn't.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' Cardones said, looking around the room. 'Only, once we've shredded it all, how do we get rid of the pieces?'

'You'll see,' Sandler said, her attention back on her controls again. 'Get to work.'

Manticoran law required a forceblade to emit a horrible, tooth-twisting whine whenever its invisible blade was activated. Sandler's version, ONI issue no doubt, gave out only a soft buzz instead. Cardones had retrieved all the data chips and hidden them as instructed—they had come prelabeled, he noted, with music and vid titles—and he was in the process of slicing up the receiver when Sandler abruptly straightened. 'Well, that's it,' she announced grimly. 'The pod is officially history. How's it coming?'

'Not very quickly,' he admitted, glancing back toward the windows. The approaching assault boats were still too distant to be seen, of course, but even that illusory safety wouldn't last much longer. 'I hope you're not planning to dump everything into the disposal.'

'That's the first place a suspicious mind would think to look,' Sandler said, crossing to the orange-rimmed emergency suit locker door and pulling it open. 'Here.'

Cardones looked up in time to catch the vac suit she'd tossed to him. 'Throwing it all outside isn't going to be much better,' he warned as he closed down the forceblade and started climbing into the suit. 'Besides, won't we set off decompression alarms if we start cutting open windows?'

'Not if we're careful,' Sandler said, already halfway into her own suit. 'Suit up, and I'll show you a trick.'

The vac suit was designed to accommodate a wide range of body sizes and types, and was therefore bulkier and looser than the skinsuits Cardones was used to. Still, emergency equipment was fairly standardized, and he had it on and sealed in ninety seconds flat. 'Ready,' he called as the status bar went to green.

'Right,' Sandler said, her voice coming over his helmet speaker from her own helmet. She had pried the cover off the air-pressure sensor on the wall and was fiddling at it with a screwdriver. 'Come over here.'

Cardones stepped to her side. 'See this little lever?' she asked, pointing with the screwdriver. 'Hold it down. And don't let it up.'

'Right.' Gingerly, Cardones took the screwdriver and wedged the blade against the lever. 'What does it do?'

'It tells the sensor that we're all breathing just fine in here,' she said, stepping to the couch and retrieving the forceblade from where Cardones had left it. 'It also keeps the ventilator system shut down, which means it won't try to add more air once we evacuate the suite.'

'Handy lever,' Cardones commented. 'How come you know about these things? I thought you were a command officer, not a tech.'

'You don't get to command a tech team without first having been a tech,' Sandler said, crossing the room to the far corner, which sported a large potted plant on a low wrought-iron stand. Moving the plant and stand aside, she knelt down and set the business end of the forceblade against the wall. 'Here goes.'

She activated it; and suddenly Cardones felt a stirring of air around him. He shifted his attention to the window, wondering what would happen if someone aboard the approaching boats noticed the telltale plume of leaking air.

But of course they wouldn't, he realized suddenly. Not with all the ice crystals and other gases already flowing past the suite. The perfect cover. 'I think it's working,' he said.

'Thank you for that update,' Sandler said dryly. Shifting position, she eased the tip of the forceblade into the narrow gap between the wall and the thick carpet pressed up against it. A little cutting, a little probing with her gloved fingertips, and she was able to pry up a corner. 'Okay,' she muttered, getting to her feet and pulling on the loosened carpet until she'd exposed a square meter of flooring. 'Now comes the tricky part.'

'What's tricky about it?' Cardones asked, understanding the plan now. Instead of throwing the incriminating evidence out the window for everyone to see, she was instead going to bury it beneath their suite.

'The need to cut a hole in the floor without shorting out the grav plates down there,' she said tartly. 'Or don't you think they'd notice if they wandered into this corner and bounced off the ceiling?'

Cardones swallowed. 'Oh. Right.'

He watched in silence as Sandler carefully cut a rough circle in the floor, beveled so that it could be seated solidly in place once it was put back. Lifting it out, she set it aside and peered down into the opening. From his vantage point across the room, all Cardones could see was that there were pipes and cables laid out against a metal grid. 'How's it look?' he asked.

'Tight, but doable,' she said, kneeling down and starting to dig into the opening with the forceblade. 'And there's nothing but open comet head underneath the support grid. Should work just fine.'

A fresh cloud of white was beginning to boil out now as her slashing movements and the rapidly decreasing air pressure combined to sublimate the ice beneath the suite into vapor. 'Provided we have enough time,' Cardones warned.

'We should,' Sandler said, stretching out on the floor as she dug deeper. 'Keep an eye toward the main complex—that's where the boats will probably land. And no talking from now on. I've cranked down the gain on these radios, but we don't want them accidentally stumbling over our frequency when they get closer.'

Nodding inside his helmet, Cardones shifted his attention to the view out the side window.

The minutes crawled past. The breeze in the room faded away as the last of the air vanished out into the passing mists. Faint white clouds continued to drift up out of Sandler's pit as she dug, until finally she straightened, gave him a thumbs-up, and crossed to the table and their equipment.

And as she did so, across the frozen landscape, the two assault boats touched down beside the main complex.

Cardones opened his mouth to speak, remembered in time, and waved his free arm instead. Sandler looked up, and he pointed out the window. She took a moment to glance that direction, nodded to him, and got back to work.

For the next few minutes Cardones alternated his attention between her and the window, the frustration of his situation welling up in his throat like excess stomach acid. At least aboard Fearless he had work to do, duties that could theoretically make a difference. Here, there was nothing for him to do but stand around and watch Sandler work.

That, and maybe think.

Okay, he thought, trying to clear his mind. The boats carried no markings that he could see—big surprise there—but they looked to be fairly standard Peep issue. A maximum of thirty troops, fifteen if they were paranoid enough to put them in full armor, and they would probably go through the whole of the main complex before they tackled the outlying buildings.