“Hey,” Katria called down the corridor. “You coming?”
Amos floated back toward them as Katria slid the panel back into place and slipped her knife back into her boot. They were skimming along through the air together when it all fell apart.
“Um,” Alex said. “I think we’ve got a problem here.”
“What’s up, Alex?” Bobbie asked.
“Well, I got my little pixie looking through this vent. I’ve got eyes on both of these Laconian fellas, and one of them’s got his hand on something that sure looks like a dead man’s switch.”
“That’s not protocol,” Bobbie said.
“It ain’t Martian protocol,” Alex agreed. “But I’m pretty certain that’s what I’m seeing here. If I move forward with this, I won’t even have the door open before the Laconian fellas know about it. You’re going to be ass deep in alligators pretty damned quick.”
“We knew we were going to have to move fast,” Bobbie said. “This just means we move faster.”
“It means more than that,” Clarissa said. “It means they’ll log the alarm. The whole point of blowing out the pressure tanks was so they wouldn’t know we’d compromised them. If the secure room shows an alert right before the explosion, they’ll know what we did. They’ll change all the procedures. The data we recover won’t be worth anything.”
The silence lasted one long breath. Then another. Holden felt something in his chest loosen, it was almost like relief. And almost like dread too.
He knew what had to happen before anyone else did.
“All right,” Bobbie said, and Holden could see her clenched jaw as clearly as if she were there with him. “Let me think.”
“You’ll be fine,” Holden said. “Just wait until the … I don’t know. The tenth alarm goes off.”
“The tenth what?” Alex said, but Holden plucked out his earpiece and the mic and tossed them to Amos. The big man caught them in one wide hand.
“You going somewh
ere, Cap?”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “Can I borrow that wrench?”
Amos pushed it gently out to him. It was massive enough that Holden had to readjust his grip on the handhold to stop it.
“Am I getting that back?” Amos asked.
“Maybe. You get Katria to the shelter. Everything goes forward, just like we planned.”
Amos’ face went still as a mask for a moment, and then he smiled his empty smile. “You got it.”
Holden squared himself on the wall’s footholds and launched down the corridor. In an instant, Amos and Katria were behind him. It’ll be okay, he told himself, but he didn’t dig into why that might be true. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t hold up.
It only took about twenty seconds to find a panel with a manual fire alarm. He flipped the case open, pulled the switch down, and a Klaxon started screaming. One.
In the next corridor, he picked a thin copper pipe, set the wrench around it and pulled until it popped. Green fluid that stank like vinegar and acetate spewed out into the hall. Somewhere, the system would register the pressure drop and raise a flag. That was two. He heard voices shouting from the main deck. They weren’t raised in panic, not yet. More like they were trying to be heard over the alarm. He passed a radiation alarm and tripped that too—three—then headed toward the voices.
Naomi would understand, even if the others didn’t. She knew him well enough to follow his mind without so much as a question. There were two ways to hide something. Either put it where no one could see it or leave it in plain sight with a thousand others just like it. If the alarm went off in the secure room, that would mean one thing. If a bunch of alarms went off all through the engineering and dock levels, and it was only one, maybe the guards had panicked. It would just be more noise in the chaos. Unremarkable.
In the wide space leading to the transfer hub, half a dozen people were clinging to a wall, each of them talking over the others. He recognized the electrical tech they’d passed going in.
“Hey,” he shouted, waving his wrench. “Can’t you people hear? Get to the shelters!”
It was enough to start them moving. He picked another corridor at random and launched himself down it. He broke three electrical conduits, tripped another fire alarm and another radiation. If he could make his way down closer to the reactors, there’d be more he could break, but there would also be guards there. The wrench was unwieldy and massive enough that cracking the conduits and pipes open was starting to leave his shoulders and palms aching. He ducked into an access crawl and pulled two power exchanges out of the wall. That had to be good for at least one alert. He floated out into another hallway. The engineering deck was drowned in a cacophony of blaring alarms. He pulled himself toward a ladder. When the station was under thrust, it would lead down toward the drive cones.
It took the Laconians about two minutes to find him, but it felt like longer. Holden was trying to fit the wrench behind a support strut when two Marines in power armor came around the corner, their suits clicking as the actuators fired. Holden started to raise his hands, but the first one slammed into him before he had the chance. The impact knocked a few seconds off his awareness. The next thing he was sure of, there was a barrel pressed just above his left eye and his ribs hurt badly when he tried to breathe.
“You just fucked up, old man!” the guard growled.