No Surrender - Jeff Mariotte [11]
They both watched a twisted, scorched chunk of metal that had once been part of an instrument panel flip past them, smashing into a wall beneath them.
Gomez shrugged and drew a phaser from a pocket of her environmental suit. Corsi understood what she was up to and did the same. They targeted the big pieces of wreckage, and within a few minutes had vaporized them. There would still be some danger from smaller bits of flying debris, but the danger was minimized.
“That worked,” Corsi said.
“Thought it would.”
“Are we going in or what, Sonnie?” Duffy asked from behind her.
“As soon as Commander Corsi clears us, we are,” Gomez replied.
“It’s all yours,” Corsi said.
“There you go, Mr. Duffy. Happy?”
“As a clam, Commander Gomez,” Duffy said.
Gomez started into the operations center, but Corsi grabbed her arm, stopping her. “One more thing,” she said.
Gomez looked at her through their helmet windows. “What is it?”
“Do you realize what we haven’t seen?”
“Anything right side up?”
“A living being. Or a dead one, for that matter. Nobody. There should have been someone on duty in ops, trying to restore equilibrium. I would have thought there’d be crew members in the corridor, or in the staging area by the shuttlebay. Someone, somewhere.”
Gomez’s brown eyes widened. “You’re right,” she said. “We haven’t seen a soul.”
“I’m going to look around some more,” Corsi said. “Hawkins, you stay here with Gomez, Duffy, Blue, and Soloman. Frnats, Drew, you and Stevens come with me and Lense. We’ll go into command, maybe the infirmary, and see what we can find.” Even as she made the decision, she questioned her own motivation for doing so. Why did she want to keep Stevens close to her?
“Makes sense to me,” Gomez said, giving her approval.
“Stay in touch,” Corsi said, gripping a wall rung as the station tipped again. “And the sooner you can get the floor to stay under our feet, the better I’ll like it.”
* * *
“Empty.” Fabian’s voice over the comlink was almost weary. This was the third place they’d looked for life—the command center, the infirmary, and now the prison staff’s mess hall had all been deserted. Progress from point to point was slow because of the incessant lurching of the platform, and Corsi felt like her stomach would never settle again. At least none of them had been sick yet, though, and Fabian’s fears of encountering vast amounts of vomit had not been borne out—since there was no one around to get sick.
Still, she didn’t like it. This was a busy, populated prison station, she thought. So where is everybody?
The ceiling she was walking on started to slip out from underneath her feet, and she latched onto a railing just in time.
And what’s taking the engineers so long to restore the damn stabilizers?
“Progress?” Sonya barked.
Kieran was concerned about her. Sonnie could be all business when she wanted to be, when it was important. But she’d been a little snappish since they’d arrived here. It was more than taking the job seriously—he respected that. But this seemed more like an unhealthy degree of tension revealing itself through her tone, well beyond anything demanded by professionalism.
He didn’t like it—but he also knew that to ask her about it now, while she was exhibiting the behavior, would be asking to have his head bitten off. With Sonnie, you just had to know when to push and when to back off. In getting to know her as well as he did—getting romantically involved with her, again—he had learned that lesson the hard way, more than once.
“Most of this equipment is so old,” Pattie’s voice came back. “I’m making progress, I think, but I still need some time.” The bug-like Nasat had rolled herself into a ball and gone underneath one of the remaining consoles, where she was working on restoring the atmosphere on the station. Kieran didn’t want to take the suit off until the gyrostabilizers were restored as well—it provided some cushioning for the inevitable falling objects and people—but he looked forward to being able to take it off and breathe normally again. The suit felt a bit claustrophobic after