Jennifer shook her head.
Lawrence looked hard at Winny. “You brought us this deal, Win. You got somes to say?”
Winny’s face turned ashen. “Lar, I have gotten zero indication that this is anything but a legitimate deal.”
Jennifer said, “We had the red carpet rolled out, too. Ask yourself, why the heavy escort? If it’s a signing ceremony. Shouldn’t it just be one ship?”
Lawrence rubbed his hands up and down his face and finally said, “Shit. Um, Belinda?”
“Yes, sir, standing by.”
“Sound the decompresh alarm and, um, announce . . . announce we’re doing a stow it drill, but it’s not a drill. You and everyone else with owner’s shares get rides. Put out a private with that to all the owners.”
“Hey! What?” said Spruck in alarm. “What do you mean owners only?”
Lawrence pulled a slim nerve disrupter from inside his jacket. “Life, Spruck. You know as well as I that the shutts can’t fit more than the owners with product.”
Natalie said, “Larry, you can’t be that big of a bastard.”
Whinny said, “We don’t even know that Wang Fat is going to do us the way they did them.”
Lawrence waived the weapon at everyone except Whinny. “Everything I have is here on this rock. If I have to leave, I’m takin’ what’s mine. There’s no starts-overs again out there.” He flicked the disrupter at Caleb. “Sorry, we’ll need your shuttle, too.”
A blaring alarm went off. Belinda spoke loudly over it, announcing Lawrence’s order. Caleb stared hard at Lawrence and took a step forward. Lawrence’s voice cracked “Last warning!” He started pulling Whinny toward the door while keeping the weapon aimed at Caleb. “Sorry. I’m sorry, but I will use this!” They let the door close, leaving the others in the room.
Saanvi said, “What do they mean owners only?”
Spruck said, “The ones who have a physical shar—the product, the equipment and whatnot. Nat and I are labor. We don’t own an actual stake so we don’t get a ride. And neither do you, cause they’re stealing your shuttle.”
“OK, now that’s fucked,” said Jennifer.
Caleb said, “We still have a card.” He tapped a com-link that Jennifer wore in her ear. “Get the bot on the line. He needs to keep the door locked. Can’t let anyone on board.”
When she got ahold of Bert, he responded, “I’m sorry, Jennifer Boyce. If a human commands me to open the door, I must open the door.”
“But I’m commanding you not to.”
“The announcement stated that this is an emergency and the alarm indicates a decompression. Despite our arrangement, I am required to put human life first.”
“Give me that!” Caleb yanked the come out of her ear. “Listen, you pasty white twit! You keep them out until we get there or we die. We die. Get it!”
“I am not programmed to make triage decisions, sir. However, in a life threatening situation I am to help those nearest.”
“Then bring us our weapons, and we’ll deal with it.”
“I am not allowed to touch weapons, sir.”
Spruck tapped Caleb on the shoulder. “I’ve got a ship.”
Caleb stared at the com-link in his hand with incredulity. He glanced at Spruck. “Huh?”
“It’s small. It’s something that I tinker with. It’ll hold the five of us.”
Natalie said, “That thing is in pieces in the storage hangar.”
Spruck hesitated. “It’s mostly together.”
Natalie continued, “And we don’t have any exosuits.”
Spruck threw up his hands. “The food printer hasn’t been loaded, either. All I said was, that I have a ship.”
“In pieces.”
Caleb, Jennifer, and Saanvi watched this exchange like ping-pong fans.
“So I put the pieces together. Two hours of work, tops.” He looked at the outsiders. “Any of you weld?”
“Weld?” asked Natalie. “Honey, the bad guys land in an hour.”
“Wait!” said Caleb. “You’ve got a ship that can fly in two hours? For real?”
“Tops . . . if you know how to weld.”
Caleb spoke back into the link. “Bert?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Can you bring us our exosuits?”
“I can.”
“Excellent.” He asked Spruck, “Where’s your ship?”
“The storage and product launch hangar. There’s only one.”
Caleb spoke back into the com-link. “Bert, bring Miss Jennifer’s, Dr. Saanvi’s, and my suits, and grab two more.” He sized up Spruck, who was tall but slight with a wispy brown beard. “Both women’s, size large.”
Both Spruck and Natalie protested, “Hey!”
Caleb continued with Bert. “Access the station’s directory and meet us at the storage hangar.”
“Yes, sir.”
Caleb handed the com-link back to Jennifer and turned to Spruck. “Let’s check out your ride.”
The station was in pandemonium. The population was bigger than Caleb had guessed. Judging by the packed halls, he figured ninety adults or more in the immediate vicinity and at least twenty-five kids. Most people were under the impression that there had really been a depressurization and wore thin temporary emergency suits. They bashed into one another and collided with the walls and equipment as their adrenaline-charged bodies overcompensated for the low gravity.
It was a struggle to keep up with Spruck and Natalie (who, of course, knew the place). As they bounced off and banged into panicked people loaded down with all manner of things, Caleb wondered how Bert was faring. The bot was going to be like a salmon fighting upstream carrying five suits with helmets and full life-support packs. He didn’t doubt the robot’s strength, but getting past all these people . . .
Meh, it would figure it out
. Once given a task, a robot didn’t stop until it was accomplished.
They saw Spruck and Natalie duck into a double-doored room that was being cleared out like a bucket brigade. To their right, a woman slumped to the floor and began crying. Another woman screamed at her, “What the hell, Jane? Move your ass!”
Jane looked up and said, “Move your own ass, Lu.”
“I am moving my ass!”
Jane said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s owners only. Didn’t you hear? No room for us.”
“What does that mean?”
Caleb, Jennifer, and Saanvi moved past them, already knowing the answer. Caleb was stunned at how fast word had gotten out. They turned into the room, a large carved-out cavern with an elephant-door airlock. People heaped supplies onto anything that might roll and pushed them toward the door they had just come through.
They could just make out Natalie in the distance waving at them to come to what appeared to be a mechanic’s shop near the airlock door. A lump of a spaceship with flames painted on the side sat like an abandoned heap on an overgrown front lawn. It was slightly larger than a school bus and just as boxy, with wings that looked like they could never deal with the near-nothingness of space, much less deal with an atmosphere. A cowling was propped up on the rear with a long piece of rusty rebar exposing the thrust cone of a very ancient, beat-up engine. Next to this, they saw a series of makeshift tables covered in scattered tools and parts.
Caleb stopped short. “You fucking kidding me?”
Spruck turned and pointed at Natalie. “You and Sandy go grab some—”
“Saanvi,” interrupted Saanvi politely.
“Sorry. Sammy. Get some food stock before it’s all gone. I wasn’t kidding about the printer.”
“On it,” said Natalie, pulling Saanvi by the arm into the crowd. Spruck waved his finger back and forth at Jennifer and Caleb. “Which one of you can weld?”
Caleb said, “I made my own dirt bike when I was a kid in Vermont.”
Jennifer said, “I can weld. I’ve built shipping containers for chemical solvents. Anything up to hard carbon stainless.”
Spruck waved Caleb away. “Make sure your robot finds us. We can’t lift off without suits.”
“Why?” Caleb waved at the box of a ship. “Because this excuse for a”—he flashed quote marks—“
spaceship
will kill us the moment it leaves this rock?”
“It’s your only ticket, dick. Find your bot.”
Caleb didn’t like being called a dick. Still, he prided himself on keeping his cool so shook it off, pointing at the pandemonium behind him. “If this is a storage space and that is an airlock big enough to fly a ship through, why in hell is everyone dragging these supplies out through that little door and down the hallway?”
“Because the big door is locked down in a decompression.”
Both Caleb and Jennifer paused at this. Caleb said, “But there’s no decompression.”
“Doesn’t matter. They hit the button for the alarm, so it’s locked down. You’re wasting our time. Find your bot, douche.”
Douche was a bit much. Caleb dropped his head and stretched his neck, feeling bones click along his shoulders. He took a breath and said, “What did you call me?”
“Are you for fucking real?” Spruck pointed at the chaos. “Go! We’ve got work to do.”
Caleb licked his teeth and straightened his spine. When he lifted his head, Jennifer offered him a pair of black dagger eyes. It immediately broke his whole game, and he looked back at the floor, silently swearing. Taking a deep breath, he pursed his lips and said, “On it,” and walked into the melee.
Man, was he steamed. Something about being called a douche really got his blood up. He shoved his way past a robot pushing an overflowing wagon full of fertilizer components, knocking over half the pile, and kept pushing until he was back out in the hallway, cursing Bert for not being there already. A man in an exosuit without a helmet awkwardly and mistakenly bashed his head straight into Caleb’s nose, bloodying it. The man mumbled an apology as he pressed past. Caleb took a swing at the guy’s back and missed while yelling, “Douche!”
Henry Lo Wang stood on the faux gravity rotating bridge of his ship,
Wang Fat One
, and contemplated the meaning of the stir on Albiorix. The heat signatures emanating from the tunneled moon indicated a high volume of human activity. Yes, like on Dione, the Albiorix co-op should have been arranging a welcome celebration, but this activity seemed urgent in a different way. Perhaps they were pulling out all the stops, but that might be wishful thinking. Henry Lo hated wishful thinking. He caught himself pacing in front of his command and stopped, spread his legs, and put his fists decisively on his hips. Not for a moment would he allow himself to be seen as anything but in control, and he chastised himself for the brief loss of composure. This operation was going to be messier than Dione in that Henry Lo and the board had voted unanimously to retain the Albiorix facilities. It was the only tropic zone outside of Hanson and Soul and, therefore, far more valuable than what had basically been redundant farms on Dione that were skewing the price of pharmaceuticals too low. Wang Fat ran a lean operation. Profits were not to be shared with some co-op. That meant a more surgical operation here than on Dione. Once the current tenants were cleared out, they would install the already vetted employees and robots on board the
Wang Fat One
into the Albiorix facility.
Henry Lo Wang was, at forty-five years of age, a true Analog. In other words, one could accurately guess his age. Tall and fit, he was nevertheless graying at the temples and wore the bright sidewalls with pride. He, like all humans, benefited from basic advances in medicine and could count on a long, healthy life. However, he frowned deeply on the kind of nanobot augmentation that he considered the purview of the vain and lazy. As the scion of the Wang Fat import-export empire, Henry Lo Wang had taken his ancestor’s company to the Saturn System and focused exclusively on its pharmaceutical endeavors. As an undiagnosed psychopath, he was deeply enjoying this latest experiment in mergers and acquisitions.
The walls and ceiling of the bridge were made up of assorted projections of the space around the ship, with horizon-level panels offering analysis of the operation. When cruising, Henry Lo’s preference was to leave all the panels projecting the space around them, as if flying a planetarium, the heavens a constant source of awe to him. At present, the view was spoiled by the necessities of battle. One large panel showed the tiny moon and the intended landing spots for the police ships. Others offered infrared and radar profiles of the activity below. Behind him was a projection of the
Wang Fat One
’s shuttle bay, with his crisply uniformed personal troops lining up in antilaser armored exosuits. The shielding on the suits was highly polished, a fairly effective measure against both the blast of a McMaster nerve disrupter and lasers, weapons designed to extinguish only biological matter. Given the inherently self-defeating nature of projectile-based weapons being fired in a delicate pressurized environment, Henry Lo felt quite certain that if the scientists on the approaching moon were to fight back, it wouldn’t be with traditional guns. Lasers would simply not work against his troops unless a lucky shot presented itself on some unlikely exposed skin.
He glanced at his right-hand man, Vice President Zheng, who was in discussion with the
Wang Fat One
’s captain and the ship’s observations officer. Zheng felt his master’s gaze and stepped away from the quiet conversation, sidling up slightly behind Henry Lo’s left shoulder. “Director, sir. We’re seeing signs of engine warm-up on several ships on the surface.”
“Hmm. Have you hailed Lawrence Boetiger yet?”
“We were awaiting your instructions, sir.”
The rest of the ears in the room remained alert to the conversation, but mouths stayed mute. Henry Lo hated the control freak that was the foundation of his personality. He knew how inefficient it could make things, but every time he let others make important decisions, he was invariably disappointed . . . or driven to a fit of rage, causing the occasional overreaction. He had once ordered the chief engineer for life-support spaced after the woman had been unable to control the humidity in the main conference room during a tense negotiation. Was the woman trying to undermine him? To his regret, he hadn’t been able to replace her with someone of equal competence, and the conference room would occasionally still turn into a steam bath. The spaced chief engineer had been right; they’d have to pull off a lot of paneling to trace the bug. He’d order it after this operation when he could be off ship, organizing his new facility. The notion of engineers pulling the panels off the walls of his gleaming ship simply twisted his guts. He nodded at Zheng, offering the slightest glance over his shoulder, but without making eye contact. “So hail him.”