Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

She didn’t give him time to respond. She just pulled away and bolted for the transmitter.

The stairway hatch loomed in the lamp beams from Al Shei’s helmet. When the power cut out, its hatch had cycled open automatically. Faint light streamed through it. That meant the stairway was still powered, which meant the cameras and the waldos were still working. The AIs could see her in there, and reach her.

Her gloved fingers scrabbled clumsily at the nearest maintenance panel. The waldo next to her twitched and fear squeezed her heart painfully. Her sabotage on this section would not work for much longer. She made herself stare at the wiring diagram on the panel’s back. Something fizzled in the distance and another waldo twitched. Al Shei clenched her teeth and counted up two panels. She heaved the new panel aside and shone her lamps on another set of wafer stacks. Her gloved hands were fully insulated now. She was able to yank them out without hesitation. The light from the stairwell blinked out. She let stacks go and swam through the hatchway to the stairs.

She lifted her head and shone her lamp up and down the elevator shaft. Nobody, yet.

Al Shei pulled the cutting torch out of its holder and let herself drift over towards the elevator shaft. She could see the platform three or four levels above her head. She examined the support brace. Like most freight lifts, it relied on the centuries old cable arrangement. She braced her back against the ramp-like railing and aimed the torch and the nearest cable. She touched the stud on the handle and the blue-white flame shot out. It hit the black cable and in a moment the casing glowed red, then white. Al Shei was glad the suit filtered out the smell of burning rubber. Sparks showered orange and white against the suit, which didn’t even notice them. The cable separated into two halves. Both of them dangled in the air, waving their glowing ends as if to cool them down. Al Shei glanced up to shine her light against the undercarriage of the elevator. She picked out the brakes and saw, with satisfaction, that they were firmly closed against the shaft. They wouldn’t open again until somebody fixed the cable. Until then, no drones that couldn’t run on the ramps were getting between decks.

The problem was, that might have set off an alarm and she wasn’t done yet. Using one hand to turn herself, she set the torch’s flame against the ramp-rail. More sparks lit the darkness as she cut a deep, black gouge down the center of the ramp. She pulled herself over the rail and repeated the treatment on the other side.

Now, at least no little things are sneaking up behind me.

A hatch cycled open over head. Al Shei jerked her head up. A pair of bullet-shaped drones coasted down both stair ramps. They hit the gouges, wobbled and stopped, listing drunkenly on the rails.

Smiling grimly, Al Shei rested both feet against the ruined ramp and, as she had aboard the Pasadena , she jumped.

She flew straight up past the drones. They might have seen her, but there was nothing she could do about that now. She had business elsewhere.

Six, seven, eight, came in on one, I hope, nine… Al Shei tried to count the hatches as she shot past, but she knew any count would only be an educated guess.

At what she hoped was ten, she grasped the edge of the ramp and levered herself towards the wall. She pushed herself up the stairs past the hatch and used the torch to cut through both ramps. That still gave them plenty of decks to send things up and down on, but if they had a command center at either end, like many set ups did, they’d be stuck, at least in the stairwell.

A quick check of another diagramed panel showed her that this time she had no major power breakers in easy reach. She could, however, trace the lines on six of the cameras. She bit her lip. If the cameras went out, they’d know where she was by process of elimination.

She kicked back over the ramp again and pulled herself down to level eight, keeping a line of sight on the panels as she went. She pried open one directly below the one she’d opened on level ten. The camera lines were bundles of white wires. Al Shei unhooked her wire cutters again and snipped through them. A host of reader lights on the alert board next to them blinked from green to red. She carefully replaced the panel and swam back to level ten and pulled herself through the hatch.

“She’s on eight!” She bawled to the world at large. “I’m going to secure the med bay!”

No waldos twitched, none of the cameras moved to track her. Al Shei’s heart hammered in her chest as she used the inert waldos to pull herself along the corridor. Maybe it worked. Maybe it worked.

Dobbs hurtled through the Mars Exchange. She stretched herself to the breaking point, trying to touch as much of the path around her as possible. Hastily constructed searchers ahead and behind her said the pathways were clear of talent. But that didn’t mean anything. She skated past black holes and left the randomizer matrices intact behind her. The others would have to come take care of those. She had to get to Earth.

A searcher located a path to a transmitter it said was clear. Dobbs moved carefully anyway. It might be wrong. Something might have changed. It might not even be her searcher.

Nothing happened. Dobbs reset the transmitter and sent a ping-copy to Luna Station 10. She didn’t even bother tampering with the log. As it had every other time, the copy came back whole. Dobb’s private mind tightened. This was wrong, this was all wrong. Something should have happened by now. There should have been some kind of massed attack. The Fools were dismantling the Curran’s plan as fast as they could. Why weren’t his talent there to stop them?

Jump.

“I’ve got you at ten clicks at twelve minutes and fifteen seconds even,” the voice of the port watch sounded through Yerusha’s intercom. “Good trip, Great Falls .”

“Thanks, Berryman.” Yerusha glanced from the view screens to Schyler. He was looking at his boards, but she was willing to bet he wasn’t seeing them. She bet he was thinking about anarchy, about the loss of worlds and people he could depend on. She wondered if he had noticed the idea of losing his world struck him as hard as the memory of that kind of loss did Lipinski. She wondered if he realized it was driving both of them right now.

It’s driving all of us, right now, she told herself. And if I think about it too much, I’m going to get sloppy.

She could not afford to get sloppy. She was flying without an engine crew. It was just her and the ship. Lipinski was in the comm center and Schyler was beside her. Resit stayed behind with her “client,” Marcus Tully, reasoning that she might as well do what she could to get one of her cousins out of trouble. If there was any collateral damage left from their eventful run, there was no one to fix it. She needed to keep her eyes on the window and fire the torch in short bursts. She needed to avoid doing anything she couldn’t correct in a hurry.

She had the torch give Pasadena a final nudge, checked her levels, and leaned back. “Intercom to Lipinski.” She leaned back. “We’re there.”

“Thanks, Pilot. I’m starting. Intercom to close.”

Yerusha sighed and glanced at Schyler. He was rubbing the side of his nose and looking thoughtfully at the intercom.

“Do you think he’s considered he might catch Dobbs in this trap of his?” asked Yerusha.

“Yes, I do.” Schyler lowered his hand to the edged of the memory board. “And I think that’s what’s gotten him so quiet. I think he’s trying to reconcile too many feelings.” He turned a little so she could see his whole face, especially his deep eyes that were way too old, like the rest of his face. “I think there’s a lot of that going on around here.”