Chris Moriarty - Spin State

She hit the first hydroponics dome at a tendon-snapping sprint and was through the open containment door and halfway across before she realized she had made it.

The dome was separate from the main curve of the station—a self-contained, light-flooded globe of zero-g-manufactured viruflex. Li’s feet clattered on a narrow catwalk between stacked, dripping algae flats. High overhead, bright heating panels blazed on the station’s underbelly. Below her, clearly visible between the catwalk’s gridplate, curved a finger’s width of clear viruglass… and beyond that only bright, blinding sunlight.

She looked back and saw her pursuers charging through the open pressure door behind her. Okay. Next dome. And she’d have to be quicker this time. She sprinted across the slick decking, skidding on a wet patch, wrenching herself upright, pushing her ligaments and tendons to near rupture. Another corridor, ribbed with heavy struts, armored with virusteel. At the end, like the lights of an oncoming train, more sunlight.

She raced into the second dome, whirled to face her pursuers, leveled the Beretta at them. They skidded to a stop and threw themselves into the inadequate shelter of the corridor’s pressure struts. “What the hell are you doing?” one of them shouted.

She jerked the gun at him. “I’d stay there if I were you.”

He looked at her, and she knew he was thinking about whether she would shoot or not, whether he could talk her down or not. She saw his eyes flick toward her shoulder, note the blood on her sleeve, the partly repaired rent in her suit. She watched him consider what it meant to go into hard vac in an emergency pressure suit, even one that wasn’t compromised. She saw him think about suicide attacks. That thought, and the single heartbeat of indecision that accompanied it, gave her the time she needed. She stepped to the catwalk railing and let herself fall backwards over it like a diver flipping off the side of a landing boat.

She’d planned to catch herself and hang from the walkway just long enough to get the first few critical shots off before she fell. But she’d forgotten about her shoulder. Her hand came up a fraction of a second too late. She felt the rail slip between her weakened fingers, just too far away to grab hold of.

This would be the time to pop that emergency chute , she thought, and remembered an idiotic joke from jump school about a malfunctioning parachute. She aimed the Beretta between her feet and squeezed off two shots. As the shots hit the dome, the containment plates slammed down at both ends of the catwalk, locking the guards out. A spider’s web of fractures raced across the dome, but it held. Then the curve of cold, hard viruflex was rushing up at her and it was time to think about not getting her legs broken.

She landed hard, but she kept her knees together, thank God. She even managed to hang on to the Beretta through her tuck and roll. As she hit the dome, she felt a ripple run through the viruflex like an earthquake. She caught her breath, twisted onto her stomach. For a fraction of a second, she lay there belly to space, blinking at the blazing infinity of stars reflected in the shattered viruflex. Then the dome blew and launched her into a blinding, glittering glass storm.

She couldn’t orient herself in the spinning chaos of algae, metal, viruflex shards, so she let herself drift. She’d played her whole hand, maybe her last hand. Now it was up to Cohen to pull it out of the hole. If he could. If he was willing to risk it.

‹Suit breach,› her oracle told her. ‹Reestablish outside pressure in seventy seconds maximum.›

She counted to seventy, but no ship showed up to rescue her. According to her scans, she and her debris field were the only things moving this side of the vast station.

She opened her eyes. The glittering storm still whirled around her, but it had dispersed enough for her to see open space beyond it. Stars wheeled across the far horizon. The station rose and set in her visor as if it were orbiting her. She watched its gossamer wings flash in the perfect, blinding light of the void and thought about the life she’d lived.

Then a door opened, blinding white in the black star field, and a silver line rippled out like the hand of God and caught her.

She woke up in dark water, cradled in the hot salt tears of a medtank.

She imagined she was breathing though she knew she was hooked to an umbilical line, her lungs suffused with superoxygenated saline solution. She imagined she could feel smart bugs swarming over her organs and membranes though she knew she couldn’t.

Her arm was mercifully silent for the first time since Metz, but a new pain had replaced it. It radiated from her backbrain and licked hotly at her eyes and temples.

The intraface.

She had bleary memories of Cohen explaining the process and the risks to her, but she hadn’t paid much attention. It was an equipment upgrade. Routine maintenance. You trusted the mechanics not to damage a pricey piece of technology and hoped they put you under for longer than the pain lasted. Start thinking more than that and you were well on your way to a career-ending wetware phobia.

She slipped in and out of consciousness several more times before she really surfaced. Once the lights came on. Someone in a scrub suit peered down at her and spoke to another person outside her line of vision. She tried to ask where she was, but her lungs were full of saline, useless. Later there was prodding, splashing, the cold bite of air on her skin. Then a sense of being rolled under bright lights, of warm blankets and merciful quiet.

“Catherine,” Bella said, taking Li’s dripping hand in hers. “Are you back with us?”

Only it wasn’t Bella behind the violet eyes. Bella had never looked at her that way. It was Cohen. Where were they? What had happened on Alba? Did she even remember?

“Shantytown,” Cohen said, answering her unspoken questions. “Daahl’s safe house. Arkady and I managed to pick you up after you shot your way out of there. That was, er, characteristically unsubtle. And impressive.”

“How long… how long was I under?”

“Five days.” He put a hand to her brow, brushing her hair back. “You were dreaming. Do you remember?”

She shook her head. Her skull was buzzing, humming, drowning out his words.

“About a man. Dark. Thin. He had a blue scar on his face.” Cohen ran a finger down Bella’s smooth cheek.

“My father,” Li said.

“You killed your father?”

“What?” Li asked, her heart suddenly hammering in her chest. “Are you crazy?”