Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [107]
She kept a close eye on him as he wandered around the dock area—purposefully, but accomplishing nothing that she could see. Gradually though, he worked his way in closer and closer to her slip, and little mental alarms began going off as she watched him and the way he kept glancing at her lock out of the corner of his eye.
Around sixteen-hundred she watched him removing control-panel plates and cleaning in behind them, work too delicate to trust to a servo.
Except that he'd just cleaned that same area two hours ago.
That was senseless; regs stated that the panels only had to be cleaned once every two weeks, not every two hours.
Furthermore, there was something not quite right with his uniform. It wasn't exactly the same color of gray as everyone else's; it looked crisply new, and the patches were just a little too bright. There were plenty of dockworkers' uniforms in Presley storage, there was no reason for someone to have had a new one made up unless he was an odd size. And this man was as average as anyone could possibly be. He was so very unremarkable that she noticed his uniform long before she noticed him.
That was bad enough—but just as seventeen-hundred passed and everyone else in the dock-crew went on supper break, another man in that too-new uniform showed up, while the first man kept on puttering about.
"Alex?" she said, unhappily. "There's something going on out there I don't like."
He looked up from his perusal of Hank's holos; he had prints made from them spread out all over the floor and was sitting on his heels beside them. "What's up?"
She filled him in quickly, as a third and a fourth person in that same uniform ambled into the dock.
There were now four crewmen in the docks during break. All four of them in a dock area where there were no ships loading or unloading and no new ships expected to dock in the next twenty-four hours.
"Tia, I don't like this either," he said, much to her relief, standing up and heading for the main console. "I want you to get the station manager online and see what—"
Abruptly, as if someone had given the four men a signal, they dropped everything they were pretending to do and headed for her docking slip.
Tia made a split-second decision, for within a few seconds they were going to be in her airlock.
She slammed her airlock shut, but one of the men now running for her lock had some kind of black box in his hands; she couldn't trust that he might not be able to override her own lock controls. "Alex!" she cried, as she frantically hot-keyed her engines from cold-start. "They're going to board!"
As Alex flung himself at his acceleration couch, she sent off a databurst to the station manager and hit the emergency override on her side of the dock.
The dockside airlock doors slammed shut, literally in the faces of the four men approaching. Another databurst to the docking-slip controls gave her an emergency uncouple—there weren't too many pilots who knew about that kind of override, still in place from the bad old days when captains had to worry about pirates and station-raiders. She gave her insystem attitude thrusters a kick and shoved free of the dock altogether, frantically switching to external optics and looking for a clear path out to deep space.
As her adrenaline-level kicked up, her reactions went into overdrive, and what had been real-time became slow motion. Alex sailed ungracefully through the air, lurching for his chair; to her, the high-speed chatter of comlinks between AIs slowed to a drawl. Calculations were going on in her subsystems that she was only minimally aware of; a kind of background murmur as she switched from camera to camera, looking for the trouble she knew must be out there.
"The chair Alex—" she got out—just in time to spot a bee-craft, the kind made for outside construction work on the station, heading straight for her. Behind it were two men in self-propelled welder-suits. Someone had stolen or requisitioned station equipment,