smelting plant had been extended all the way to the surface and the activity he could see – the movement of glittering metal under the work lights and the steady flow of objects between the plant and the surface – was simply robots on the move. This might account for the absence of the corpse-stripping robot, and why he had spotted no others inside the rim. Maybe heading towards the centre of the station would not be as dangerous for him as he had feared, but there was something else he needed to check out first.
He turned and crossed a few hundred metres of rim to bring himself into the shadow of a steering thruster, and stepped up onto its massive turntable. The device was so crusted with soot that it took him some minutes of scraping to find an access panel. Undoing the bolts that secured the panel was slightly beyond any of the manual tools he had in his small toolkit, but he did have a small diamond wheel cutter that ran off his suit’s power supply, so he merely sliced the heads off the bolts. The panel popped out easily – two layers of bubblemetal sheet sandwiching ten centimetres of insulation – and he placed it down on the deck, holding it in place with his foot. Revealed inside was the control circuitry and, as he had hoped, a secondary transponder should the optic wiring to this steering thruster fail. He unravelled his suit’s optic connector cable and inserted its plug into the first of the transponder’s four ports.
After a second, a display opened in his suit’s visor and, using his wrist panel, he began sorting through the options now available to him. Changing the set-up was a lengthy task, but one he was trained for. He reset the output frequency, input a channel code, but then the suit display informed him of a hardware failure. Biting down on his frustration, he checked through the whole process again, then, feeling like an idiot, stretched a finger out to the transponder board and flipped over a small breaker to power it up manually.
HARDWARE INSTALLED, the display informed him.
Now his suit radio was connected to the more powerful transmitter located in this thruster, so its range now stretched somewhat beyond just a few kilometres.
‘Hello,
Eventually a reply arrived. ‘This is the
‘I would have thought,’ said Alex, ‘since I am using this particular coded channel, that who
‘If you are who I hope you are,’ said another whom Alex recognized as Clay Ruger, ‘you will be able to tell me where Alexandra obtained her Argus system modem.’
‘Rim storage 498A – a storeroom listed on the station manifest, but which hadn’t been used for at least two years and from which, according to Tactical, it was highly unlikely anyone would notice the loss.’
‘Welcome back, Alex. Long time no hear,’ said Ruger. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Hiding in that hydroponics unit Tactical directed us to,’ Alex explained. ‘My suit was damaged so I wasn’t able to leave the unit.’
‘And Alexandra?’
‘Dead.’ It surprised him how much it hurt to say that.
‘That is unfortunate,’ said Ruger, his tone hardly sympathetic. ‘What is your situation now?’
‘I have no resources but for the standard-format spacesuit I’m wearing and one VC suit I managed to steal. Right now I’m standing on the station rim, boosting my suit signal through a thruster’s secondary control transponder, and the longer I stay here the more chance there is that I’ll be spotted.’
‘Wait one moment. Let me check something.’
‘I can’t keep waiting out here.’
‘Patience, Alex.’
Alex waited, glancing around frequently to check. Long slow minutes dragged by until Ruger replied.
‘The transponder you are using is a plug-in board with the digits ELEC105 on its disc-chip?’
‘It is,’ Alex replied.
‘It’s not just a transponder.’
‘No, really?’ said Alex sarcastically. Of course it wasn’t. A transponder occupying a four-centimetre-square board was only something you would find in a museum. The transponder itself was probably too small to even see.
‘The board the transponder is sited on also serves as a navigational computer and diagnostics platform,’ said Ruger calmly. ‘In the event of hard-wiring failures, it responds to signals from the other thrusters and fires itself up in consonance. It contains judgement software too, transponder linked to station sensors – therefore a very complicated piece of kit. However, it has its own rechargeable power supply and can be unplugged.’
‘So I can get myself out of here now?’
‘Wait and listen,’ Ruger snapped. ‘If you pull that now, you won’t be able to communicate with us. On the back of it are four terminals marked AER 1 to 4. You must use just AER 4 to connect to a monopole antenna. I am told that, with our distance from you now, all you will need is a couple of metres of metal.’
‘Is that all?’ Alex asked.
‘How are you for air?’
‘Three hours left in this suit and about an hour and a quarter in the VC suit.’
