Rules of Engagement

Chapter Twenty-One

“What now?” asked Hazel. Brun shrugged. She needed to think. She was hungry, thirsty—she sipped at the helmet tube—and very, very sleepy. And her legs hurt; the anesthetic spray was wearing off.

What could they do, with the few weapons they had? She could almost hear Commander Uhlis’s voice yelling at her in the class: your best weapon is between your ears. Yes, and she’d like to keep it there, preferably in one piece.

“If we could get the artificial gravity on,” Hazel said, “then we could turn it off.”

Brun supposed she meant in order to confuse their enemies—but it would gain them only minutes, if that. It would certainly reveal their presence—the gravity generator wouldn’t be on if no one was here. A vague plan began to form in her brain, shapeless as rising mist.

Exploring the controls while in a p-suit was a lot safer than playing around with them otherwise; Brun grinned as she remembered Oblo’s cautionary tales. She prodded one after another, seeing what worked.

“Lights!” Hazel said. That was obvious. But was it lights in this room or overall? Brun waved a wide-armed gesture; Hazel nodded and pushed off to explore. Brun peered at the panel. If she could figure out how to bring up station scan, there should be an idiot display somewhere on the main board that would tell her what she needed to know, in several languages and nonverbal symbols. Since the controls worked at all, she ought to be able to bring up station scan.

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.

The abomination he could understand. She was crazy, even without a voice. But the girl’s defection hurt. Prima had been so fond of her, and the other wives as well. She’d worked hard, and they’d treated her like one of the family. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe they’d been too lenient. Well, he wouldn’t make that mistake with the little girls. That bossy one, already showing off in the weaving shed—he’d see that she didn’t stay bossy. As for Patience . . . he’d already half-promised her as a third wife to a friend of his, but now that wouldn’t do.

Why couldn’t the girl have realized how much better off she was in his household? Why were women so perverse, anyway?

He almost let himself think God had erred in creating women at all, but pulled back from that heresy. That’s what happened if you started thinking about women—they led the mind astray.

If they were on the derelict station—and he was certainly sure they were—he would capture them and make an example of them. The yellow-haired abomination they would have to execute; he hated killing women, but if she escaped once, she might again. The girl . . . he would decide that later, after he learned exactly what had happened. When they’d finally found a witness, it seemed that a man had told her to get in the car. If so, she might not be guilty of anything but stupidly following a man’s orders, which was all you could expect of a woman. He hoped that was it.

“Ranger Bowie!” That was his pilot. He leaned into the cockpit.

“What, Jase?”

“There’s a weird ship out there, scan says.”

Weird ship. It must be a ship the women had planned to meet.

“What’s our defense say?”

“Says it’s weird, Ranger. Not anything they know, a lot smaller than a cruiser. But it can do those little short jumps like the Familias fleet—”

“It’s looking for them,” he said. “It’s not a warship, or it’d have shot up our ships first thing, same as we would. A little transport of some kind.” The worst of it was that it meant the Familias now knew where they were—and more ships might follow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, he told himself. First things first. Get these women under control, or all hell would break loose.

Though if he’d known, he might’ve asked for a shuttle of space-armored troops from the Yellow Rose. Their p-suits were hardened, but not against the kind of weaponry a Fleet vessel would have. Still, they’d probably hold their fire if they thought the Speaker’s daughter was in the midst of it.

His uncle had been one of those who trashed this godless excrescence in the first place; he’d grown up on the stories. They’d talked about blowing it up time and again, but always decided it might be useful someday. Useful! Just showed what happened when you compromised on a moral duty. He watched as the pilot brought them in to the old shuttle bay. When he felt the solid clunk of the shuttle’s grapples on the decking, he stood and pushed his way back to the hatch.

“Now y’all listen here,” he said. “We’re goin’ in to look for those women. Not to play around gapin’ at stuff, or even takin’ the time to trash it. There’s warships insystem; we need to get this done and get back where we can do some good. Understand?”

They nodded, but he had his doubts.

“All the weapons they can have is what that guy had in his shuttle. Maybe a couple of knives, a .45 or two. And they’re women, and not used to zero-G or vacuum. They’ll have p-suits on, probably ones that don’t fit good. So we don’t have anything to worry about if we use sense. Just don’t go wanderin’ off where one of ’em can blow you away too easy. And be sure your personnel scans are set on high power.”

He pulled his helmet shield down, locked it, and checked the suit seals of the man in front of him; the man checked his. Terry Vanderson—good man, reliable. Then he turned and led the way out of the shuttle’s airlock.

The regular airlock from the shuttle dock to the station corridor operated normally, but there was no air inside. He’d expected that. The women would’ve taken a tank or so from the shuttle when they left it, and they’d be low on air by now.

Inside the airlock, they stood in a short corridor that ended in a T-intersection. He’d looked at his uncle’s old notes, and knew that each arm of the station was a warren of laboratories and storage rooms—they would have to clear each of these. He looked at his scanner. Nobody near—but they would check, then close and secure each compartment.

“Don’t forget the overheads,” he reminded his men. Not that they needed it; they’d been on more than one hostile boarding.

Lewis and Terry peeled off to check the outer end of the arm. It seemed to take forever, but it probably wasn’t more than five minutes before they were back. Now they moved along the corridor toward the station hub.

“I can’t believe this,” Oblo muttered. “They’re just walking along like they’re on a picnic.” On scan, the twenty suited figures moved in a clump, checking compartments and doors, but without any real caution. Nobody on point, nobody watching their backs. “And they’re not in space armor, just p-suits. Brun could just about take them herself, if she had any kind of weapon.”

“They think they’re up against two unarmed women,” Esmay said. “Once someone calls to tell them we’re here—”

“Someone should have, by now,” Oblo said. “Unless they’re not listening.”

That led to questions Esmay had no time to answer. Was there someone else in the Militia eager to have this mission fail? And why?

The assault troops moved forward, secure in the knowledge that their armor would foil scan not specifically designed to penetrate it. Esmay felt the familiar surge of excitement; she wanted to be up with them, but more important was finding Brun and the girl. Scan showed a pair of p-suited life signals on this side of the core, in a compartment off a side corridor. The problem would be letting them know she and the others were friendly—the armor, designed for combat effectiveness, did not have insignia in the visible spectrum.

All the compartments in that wing had been checked and secured, and Mitch Pardue felt pretty good as he led his men into the central core. Careful scanning had shown nothing there—the women, if they were alive, would be huddling somewhere in the far wing, close to the hotspot where they’d had the shuttle. He felt a pleasant tension as he thought of them—of the fear they would be feeling, the helplessness . . .

“Let’s go, boys,” he said, and stepped out into the wider space of the core corridor.

They passed what had been a lounge area, the chairs now in a random tumble on the deck, and came to the control area. Here, Ranger Bowie paused. It had been a little surprising to find the artificial gravity still on—he clearly remembered his uncle talking about how they had pushed the bodies down the corridors in zero-G—and he wondered if perhaps the women had knocked the controls about by accident.

“Wait a minute,” he said to the others. “I wanta check on somethin’.” They drifted across the space with him, as interested in the old station as he was. He leaned over the control panel, trying to read the labels . . . not in decent Tex, but in scripts he recognized as those used in the Familias Regnant, the Guerni Republic, and the Baltic Confederation. Heathens, all of them. Sure enough, the dust had been messed around; he could see what might be the marks of suit gloves here and there. He saw the gravity control panel, and was reaching for it when his vision blanked and he was pulled violently backwards.

“Lambs to the slaughter,” Esmay heard through her comunit. “We should space ’em now, or you want prisoners?”

“Can you get any ID?”

“Well, one of ’em’s got that star thing on his p-suit, and he looks like the leader of the bunch that took the Elias Madero.”

“Yes, we want prisoners,” Esmay said firmly. “Especially that one.” She wanted to hear how it went, but finding Brun was still a priority, and the scan traces kept moving—as if Brun were deliberately evading them. Perhaps she was.

“Team Blue!” That was from outside, from the other team’s scan specialist.

“Lieutenant Suiza here.”

“Two shuttles approaching, with unshielded transmissions. They’re planning to go in and kill everyone they find.”

That made no sense—and then it did. If these people were as given to factionalism as reported, then this would be an excellent chance for one faction to rid itself of the leaders of another.

“They know we’re here, right?”

“Yeah—but they think they can take us. I estimate twenty per shuttle—total of forty, say again four-zero armed personnel. No heavy weaponry.”

That was lucky. If they’d had heavy weapons, or ship weapons, they might have decided to blow the station.

“Have they indicated where they’re going to land?”

“One of them coming into the same shuttle bay as the first. They want to get in behind the others—the one’s going to come in on the end of this wing.”

“Ah . . . the old pincers movement.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Vissisuan,” Esmay said. “Expect forty intruders, in two shuttle loads, small arms only. According to backscan, they know we’re here, but think we’ll be easy to subdue. They’ve divided their force, and expect to catch us between them.”

“Sir. Plan?”

“Until we have Brun and the girl safely away, that has to be our first priority. Right now it looks like Brun is between us and the incoming shuttle. So we’d better move fast. Beyond that, secure the prisoners we have, and take prisoners if possible.” If they could pick off some high-ranking Militia, perhaps they could avoid a battle and get the children out safely.

Brun hoped the expert system knew what it was doing. It kept shifting them from one compartment to another, supposedly far from the Militia’s personnel scans. It said it was still trying to retrieve a better vocal synthethizer, too, and had dispatched another two mobile units. She wanted to ask if it had received any answer from Fleet—surely they’d be doing something—but she simply could not get her fingers to work on the keyboard, and Hazel could not understand her gestures. She was so tired . . . she hoped it was only exhaustion and not hypoxia.

“Brun—wake up!” That was Hazel’s voice; she sounded on the edge of panic. “I feel things in the decking—vibrations—”

It must remind her of her own capture. Hiding in these vandalized rooms, waiting for someone to come, not knowing who—it must bring back all her nightmares. Brun tapped her arm, and grinned. Hazel grinned back, but there was no mirth in it.

She could feel the knocks and vibrations herself. Someone closer, and more than one. She tried again with the compad keyboard, and keyed “Fleet assistance?”

“I’m not sure,” the expert system said in her ear. “There have been two landings, another two are imminent. Multiple intruders aboard, hostile to one another.” Then some of them must be friendly, Brun thought. But she wasn’t sure. “Not all the same shapes of shuttles, but no recognizable ID codes from the ones that appeared nearby.”

Appeared? Launched from a larger ship that had microjumped nearby?

“Try Fleet codes on com channels,” Brun keyed.

“I cannot access any transmissions from one set of intruders,” the expert said. “I don’t know what frequencies to use.”

Shielded suit communications. That sounded more and more like Fleet, but how could she contact them? Someone should be listening in for unshielded transmissions—“All bands,” Brun said. “Use the codes I gave you.”

The deck bucked, and Brun and Hazel lost contact in the low gravity, bouncing into one of the bulkheads. Brun’s compad flew another way, its jack yanked from her suit connection. Hazel scrambled after it, as another series of vibrations and blows shook them. Something must have rammed the station, something with a lot more mass than a single person. Brun could see into the next compartment, where the bulkhead had torn loose at the corner, leaving a triangular hole. The station could be coming apart around them; they might be flung loose into space, tiny seeds from a puffball head.

Brun fought down the panic. Right now, right this instant, they still had air, they still had intact p-suits, and they weren’t freezing or full of holes. Hazel edged back to her and held out the compad and connector.

The scan tech watching the incoming Militia shuttles reported that one was likely to impact rather than dock. “He’s coming in with way too much relative vee; gonna knock this station sideways—counting down . . . seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—” The deck bucked; in the minimal artificial gravity, a cloud of dust rose and hung like a tattered curtain. “They’ve made a mess out of the end of that arm, but don’t seem to have damaged themselves much, worse luck.”

“Keep us informed,” Esmay said. She had Meharry and five others with her as she tried to follow Brun’s scan signal through the maze of passages.

“Lieutenant!” That was the backdoor scan again. “I’ve got transmissions in Fleet code from the station itself—identifies itself as the station expert system.”

“What’s it want?”

“Says two employees told it to contact us and gave it the codes. Says it’s trying to protect them, and can we prove we’re friendly?”

“The only person here who might know any Fleet access codes was Brun—but she was supposedly unable to talk.”

“But it can’t contact this individual now—says a communications device failed.”

Great. “Can it direct us to her?”

“It says yes, but it won’t until we can prove that we have a legal right to be here, and that she knows us.”

Worse and worse. Expert systems had a reputation for rigid interpretation of rules.

“Tell it to confirm to her that we respond to Fleet codes, and ask her to sign a yes or no acceptance of our ID.”

“Yes, sir.” A pause followed, then, “It’s trying, sir.” After another pause, “It says she wants to know who it is. A name.”

Esmay thought a moment. According to her father, Esmay was the last person Brun would want to see, or should see. But that was a name she’d know.

“She knows us, Lieutenant,” Meharry said. “Methlin and Oblo—she’ll recognize that.”

“Go ahead,” Esmay said. “Tell it that.”

Another brief pause, and then, “It’s agreed. It’s going to mark the way, and tell Sera Meager someone’s coming.”

“Tell it to give her a description of our suits, so she’ll know us from the others,” Esmay said.

Now her helmet display lit with the icons of the intruders: twenty red dots displayed on a graphic of the station wing. Esmay followed the expert system’s directions with her team; the others moved down the main corridor to intercept those landing.

Here in the secondary corridor, occasional turqoise p-suits lay like dead bodies. Every one gave Esmay a chill, but the expert urged them on, via the relay through the scan tech. At last, a compartment door slid open ahead of them. Cautiously, Esmay edged forward . . . and there they were. Brun, recognizable through the facemask of the p-suit, and a scared-looking young girl. Meharry moved past Esmay and cleared her helmet faceshield so Brun could see her. Brun staggered forward, moving as if she had serious damage, and fell into Meharry’s grip.

“Medical team,” Esmay said. They came at the double, and unfolded the vacuum gurneys that allowed life-support access to a p-suited patient outside pressure. Only then did she think of asking scan for the frequency that the expert and Brun’s suit must be using. She glanced around the compartment, to see an obvious gap where bulkhead sections had warped apart. Was that from the recent impact of the Militia shuttle, or old damage? She couldn’t tell; it didn’t matter.

Brun struggled to free herself from Meharry’s grip, and gestured at the girl. The medics unfolded another of the gurneys, and unzipped it. They rolled each woman into her own, then zipped and sealed, and popped the tanks. The transparent tents inflated, leaving sleeved access ports for treatment.

The girl started talking right away. “Please—she can’t talk—she needs a way to communicate—”

“Sure, hon . . . what’s your name, now?”

“Hazel—Hazel Takeris. And she’s Brun—she was using a compad with voice output, but the plug broke.”

Esmay found the compad, and slid it into the transfer portal of Brun’s gurney. She could see Brun cycle it through, then hold it without using it. Plug broken? It must mean that she had needed to plug it into her p-suit. Brun made the universal sign for Air up? and Esmay responded. Brun popped an arm seal on her suit, just as their safety instructor had taught them: never trust anyone’s word on air pressure. Then she peeled back one glove, and tapped one of the compad’s keys.

“All correct,” announced the audio pickup from inside the gurney.

“Sera Meager?”

“All correct.”

“Can you describe your current status?”

“No.” That, as Esmay could see, was another button. The thing must have had preprogrammed messages. What was the keyboard for, then?

“Can you type complete answers?”

“No.”

Esmay turned away to consider their overall position. The Militia that had crunched into this wing were about halfway to their part of the wing, though coming down the main corridor.

“Trouble . . .” scan said. “Big trouble.”

“Bad guys on the other end are carrying explosives. Can’t see if the ones on this end are, but they could be.”

The mobile units available to the expert system were secondary models which had survived the initial vandalization by looking like simple boxes. It had taken longer than the expert expected to recharge one of them, get its tracks moving, and send it off to Laboratory 1-21 to look for voice synthesizers. But now it was on its way. The expert kept an area of higher artificial gravity moving along with it, to keep its tracks in firm contact with the deck plating. The expert prided itself on carrying out all orders, no matter how complex, simultaneously. It dispatched another, and then another, in case the first should be disabled somehow. Clearly it was important to get a communications device to the taller human.

The first unit reached the lab, and extended a pincer-arm to pick up one of the synthesizers, just as an impact rocked the station. The unit flipped off the deck, and out of the area of higher gravity; it flew across the lab, into the corridor, and impacted the opposite bulkhead just behind the group of neuro-enhanced marines that had stalked past. The rear marine slagged it before it had time to fall to the floor, yelling “Hostile!”

“What is it?” Kim Arek asked. She was surprised and delighted to find that her voice didn’t crack.

“This thing just flew out the hatch at me—”

“Something bounced loose by the hit?”

“Looked like one of those robot bomb-crawlers, what I saw of it.”

“Well . . . keep an eye out for others.”

Pete Robertson, Ranger Travis and Captain of Rangers, had plenty of time to think on the way up from the surface. It was all Mitch’s fault, and God’s judgement on Mitch’s hasty ways and unhealthy attachment to outlander technology was about to land on all of them. He made up his mind, and called the others—they would make sure no one used that heathen station for anything ever again, and that Mitch paid the price for his unbelief.

He had no real hope that they’d get out of this in good shape—not with the appearance of enemy ships in the system—but at least they’d take care of their own dirty laundry first. And Mitch would never be Ranger Captain: he would see to that himself.

The two enemy shuttles that had docked to the derelict would present no problem if they simply blew the derelict up—and he’d toyed with the idea of having Yellow Rose and Heart of Texas do that before they went out to fight the invaders, but he’d rather do it himself. It felt right.

So, huffing a little in his hardened p-suit, he shuffled carefully off the shuttle with the rest of the Travis crew, and led the way down the corridor that lay open before him. Sam Dubois, Ranger Austin, had landed at the far end of the long structure—both groups would set explosive charges as they converged on the enemy, and then retreat—and blow the station. The odd thing was, his personnel scanners detected only a small cluster of life forms way up ahead, in the central core, and two off to the right somewhere. Hadn’t Mitch caught the women yet? He smiled to himself, forgetting for the moment the missing enemy from the shuttles.

When the little tracked crawler trundled out of a side corridor, he spun and with practiced ease drew and fired. Bullets ricocheted off the thing’s hard shell and holed the bulkhead in a scattered pattern. The machine came on, a jointed arm holding some device . . . behind it was another one, just coming into view around a corner.

“Git those!” he said, and drew again. Behind him, the Travis crew clumped up, and someone’s shot shattered the device the thing was holding. But the crawlers came on, more slowly. “They can’t catch us,” he said. “Come on—” and turned back to move on the way they’d been going.

Which was now blocked by huge figures in black armor, holding weapons he’d never seen.

“Get’m boys!” he yelled, and fired.

Then the strange weapons belched streams of something gray that shoved him back into his men, and glued them all into one immobile mass. When the next explosion came, from the far end, he had a sudden stark fear that it would ignite the charges his crew had left behind, and blow them all. He was not, he discovered, nearly as ready to meet his Maker as he’d always claimed.

“Dumber than dirt,” Jig Arek said, with some satisfaction. “You’d think they never heard of riot control.”

“We still have one bunch loose,” Oblo said.

“Belay that,” Meharry said, in what for Meharry was a tense voice. “We’ve got worse problems. Brun and Suiza fell off the station.”