The rocker switch, when she found it, was located underneath a foldout panel. Brun pushed it with a silent prayer for luck . . . and the displays came up, flickering badly at first but steadying. How long had they been off? And what was powering them now? She looked for the idiot display.
There. As she'd expected, one of the languages on the display was her own . . . another was Guerni. She couldn't read the third at all, but that didn't matter now. She flicked through the opening menu: station layout, environmental system controls, life support, emergency procedures (which included a section on biohazard containment), power system, communications.
Station layout made clear what the place had been—a biological laboratory of some kind; probably—Brun thought—one of those fairly common at colony startup, which tailored biologicals for the specific conditions found downside. Many colonies had them . . . but why, then, was this one derelict?
The station had been clearly divided into living space for the workers, and eight labs separated by locks and seals—three on one arm, and five on the other. The big open gap was, Brun saw, out near the end of one arm; they had docked under a solar-collecting panel halfway down the other.
Deep in the station's core, the system's expert slept, as it had slept for decades of local time. All peripherals were offline; all sensors shut down. Its last instruction set lay uppermost, ready to execute if anyone turned on the power, but hard vacuum and random radiation had changed a few bits here and there. Normally that would have been no problem; its self-repair mechanisms were necessarily robust, designed for industrial use in space. But they were not designed for decades on a derelict that had been vandalized in a hurry, its expert laid to rest in half the time required.
When the lights came on, a trickle of power ran through its connections, shunted there by the designers who intended the expert to be functioning whenever the station was occupied. Slowly—slowly for its design—the expert woke, layer by layer. Power in the lines meant someone had returned; that gave permission for it to draw power on its own and engage the self-check and self-repair routines. The topmost instruction set began executing, inhibiting return of some active functions. Those who inhabited the station now might be either legitimate employees or intruders . . . if they were intruders, the expert was not to reveal itself by independent action, but instead isolate them and transmit a call for help.
Passive scan devices collected information. Two humans, female by all parameters, wearing female-design employee p-suits whose code numbers were in the directory: emergency evacuation suits from Laboratory Two. The expert engaged suit telemetry cautiously; the suits' inhabitants didn't notice. Neither human fit a known profile, but a quick check of the decay data from the reactor indicated that it had been decades since the expert was put to sleep. Therefore it was unlikely that these employees would be known to it.
One, in the control room, was following a rational restart procedure on station control functions. The expert did not interfere, but observed. She seemed to know what she was doing. The other was exploring the corridor leading to the second arm. The expert turned its attention to the outside world.
Hazel came back to the control room. "Lights are on all down that corridor. I couldn't see into all the compartments, though. The ones I could, some were dark and some weren't. You must've hit a main switch."
Brun nodded, and pointed to the panel that controlled lighting. It indicated power to the lights throughout, with a summary of lights switched off, and lights not functioning even though switched on. She pointed at other panels; Hazel leaned closer. She had found the power reports for both the internal reactor—now nearly depleted, and producing less than 40% of its former power—and the solar panels, also below nominal. With the damage they'd seen on the outside, she could believe that. Still, the station had been designed to support research and manufacturing; the power still available would easily restore life support throughout, if they could find the air for it.
The air for the central core she had already found—the heat generated by the reactor had nurtured the base beds of the environmental system all these years, and the slowly accumulating air had been stored under pressure. But should they air up? External air would free them from the need to carry tanks around, and extend the effective life of the ones they had. Yet airing up the station would prove someone was aboard—it would be easily detectable from the outside. Moreover, if intruders blew the station, and they didn't have their suits on, they'd die.
Brun was still mulling this over when Hazel brought her a handcomp with voice output . . . Brun grinned, and grabbed it. It had the standard plug connections, so Brun jacked it into the suit intercom connection on the outside, and tapped some of the preset message keys. She had a choice of three languages, and twenty preset messages. "All correct," said a tinny male voice with a strong accent. She looked at Hazel and cocked her head.
"I didn't hear it," Hazel said. "Maybe you have to hit the transmit key inside the helmet to transmit to other suits."
A nuisance. Brun fumbled with the comp and bumped the helmet transmit button with her chin as she keyed the preset message. "All correct."
"Got it!" Hazel said. "Now maybe we can find one with more capability."
"All correct," Brun tapped again. Then she hit each key once, to be sure what the messages were, and again to practice how to say "Help!" and "Danger!" and "Shift report." One of the keys transmitted no voice signal, but an electronic bleep that was probably, Brun thought, some kind of ID code for a central computer. She hit that one only once.
Besides the preset messages, the handcomp had key input for other data. Brun tried tapping out "Does this work?" but Hazel shook her head.
The expert system awaited whatever instruction would follow the authorization signal. "Does this work?" fit no protocol, but its natural-language processing was up to the task of interpreting it. It must mean "Did the expert system receive that authorization and can it receive keyboard input?"
"At your service," it transmitted through the correct frequencies. Both humans stopped in the way that humans did when presented with novel or unexpected data.
"What was that?" asked the one who had not transmitted the authorization code. The expert waited for the other to reassure her, meanwhile retrieving a complete suit readout indicating fatigue toxins and mild hypothermia and analyzing the vocal patterns to conclude that this individual was a pubertal human female, a native speaker of Gaesh with the accent common to the nearby merchanters of the Familias Regnant rather than that of the Guerni Republic. It instructed the suit to warm up a bit, and increase oxygen flow.
Meanwhile, the other, without speaking, was tapping rapidly on the keyboard of her handcomp. The expert was able to interpret, despite errors in input, that she knew she was communicating with an expert system.
"The system will take over vocal communication," the expert said to the other one.
"All correct," Brun transmitted, hoping Hazel would understand that the expert was going to relay from her own keyed input.
"There are vocal synthesizers of more power and suitability in laboratory 1-21," the expert said. "Although major equipment was destroyed, my optical sensors report that some of the small synthesizers seem to be unbroken."
"Can you guide us there?" Brun asked, aware that the expert was echoing her input as a voice to Hazel.
"Easily, but I have instead empowered a mobile unit to fetch them. Spacecraft approach; my analysis suggests that they are upcoming from the surface."
"Plan?" Brun asked.
"Data," the expert replied. "Non-enemy spacecraft in system . . . too far away."
Non-enemy . . . Fleet?
"Can you contact them?"
"Transmitters nonfunctional. Estimated time to restore transmission capability . . . 243 standard seconds. What are the parameters?"
Hazel, who had said nothing for several exchanges, said, "How could we know Fleet frequencies and codes?"
Brun smiled to herself. She knew. One after another, she entered the figures, carefully defining each: frequencies, frequency changes with intervals, identification codes, including the one she had been given once as her personal ID. Then, with great care, she entered the message she wanted to send. Her eyes kept blurring, but she blinked the tears back fiercely. Time enough to cry if she got Hazel to safety.
And the little children.
But she could not think of that now. One thing at a time.
"These frequencies and codes are not those in my library for the Regular Space Service of the Familias Regnant," the expert said. It was capable of expression, and it sounded fussy.
"Check date," Brun keyed in. "Codes change."
A long pause ensued. "It has been a very long time," the expert said finally. "I assumed the date was an error resulting from damage done when the station was overrun. . . ."
"Time to intruder arrival?" keyed Brun. Some expert systems were complex enough to lose themselves in endless recursive self-examination. "And transmitter function?"
"Ninety-seven seconds until transmitters functional; I will send your message as soon as confirmed. There is a high probability that nontarget vessels may be able to intercept the message; you have provided no cipher."
"They already suspect we're here," Hazel said, voicing Brun's thought. "And if the Militia know we're here, it's better that Fleet knows it too. I suppose, Brun, it's because of your father—"
"All correct," Brun keyed. She really did want a better voice synthesizer; her fingers were already tired, and she had a lot more to say.
"ETA of intruder shuttles from the planet now ranges from one hour ten minutes, to three hours one minute," the expert said. "Unless they change course, which they have the capacity to do . . . now, three shuttles apparently approaching from the planet."
Three shuttles . . . why did they think they needed four shuttles to capture two women? Or were they coming out to fight Fleet with shuttles? Surely they weren't that stupid.
"Weapons discharge," the expert system said. "Nearby ship, identifying itself as Militia cruiser
Yellow Rose
, launched missiles at Fleet vessel of unknown type."
The enemy shuttle had been run right into the gaping hole in one arm of the station. No doubt the Militia knew what was open and what wasn't—assuming they were the ones who'd made it a derelict. If they'd been in a regular warship, Esmay would have lobbed a missile into that bay, and blown the shuttle first off. But an SAR shuttle did not normally venture into hostile territory; it mounted no external weapons, and they had had no time to improvise. With that in mind, Esmay kept the length of the station between her shuttle and the enemy's, and snugged in under one of the power panels at the far end. Again, mission constraints changed the usual procedures. They dared not blow a hole in the derelict's hull, lest Brun and her companion be hiding behind just that piece of hull. They shouldn't be, but no one knew what conditions were like inside. Moreover, it would take at least four hours to rig one of the portable airlocks and carefully incise a new hole in the station hull. So the teams would have to insert through a known entrance, which all concerned knew was the best way to make a target of themselves.
The best they could hope for was that the Militia intruders weren't already in place. The neuro-enhanced squad didn't seem too worried. Esmay, waiting near the tail of the line, saw the bulky figures pause at the emergency lock, and then move in, far faster than she had expected. Perhaps this meant the station had no air pressure.
"Lieutenant, the artificial gravity's on."
That shouldn't be . . . the station was a derelict. But she could feel through her own body the tug of a gravity generator. Which meant a sizeable power source, more than could be accounted for by the tattered, misaligned power panels. Would there be air? Had Brun turned things on? Esmay shook those questions off. What mattered now was getting in. If there was gravity, then the fighting would not favor the zero-G trained.
Inside, they were met with the chaotic remnant of systematic vandalism, all visible under ordinary ceiling panel lights. P-suits cluttered the corridor, all turquoise with a BlueSky logo and code number on the back. Someone had drawn five pointed stars and other curious symbols on the corridor bulkhead in brown pigment—or blood. The tank locker beside the suit locker was empty of breathing tanks. Air pressure was as near vacuum as made no difference . . . but why was there any pressure at all? Why were the lights on?
Esmay tried a cautious hail on the frequency Koutsoudas had given as that of Brun's transmission . . . no reply.
Nothing damaged a man's reputation more than unruly women. Mitch Pardue knew even before he launched that he could kiss the Captain's position goodbye for at least ten years. He might even be voted out as Ranger Bowie. Even if he got them back, those fool women had cost him something he'd worked for twenty years and more.