No Surrender - Jeff Mariotte [4]
She laughed, a little uneasily, Kieran thought, and shook her head, then finger-combed strands of thick black hair away from her eyes. “Yeah, me and Helen of Troy,” she said. “The face that launched a thousand starships.”
“Exactly.”
“Flatterer.”
“I only say what I mean.”
“Sure you do,” she said. “Come on, there’s a lot to cover here. What’ve you found out?”
Kieran breathed a long sigh. Back to work, he thought. Sonnie sure has a way of getting down to business when she wants to. “Like you say, it’s old,” he said. “Fairly primitive. The prisoners are kept here, in the middle.” He pointed to a conical section—wide at the top, narrowing at the bottom—wrapped around a center core. “They’re in stacked cells through here, the cells ringing the central passageways. Guards move through the core passageways, and they can see into or access any cell from there.”
“How many prisoners does it hold?” Sonya asked him.
“A thousand,” Kieran answered. “The worst of the worst, the Kursicans say. The ones they don’t ever want to see again, I guess.” He indicated a ring below the bottom of the cone. “Down here is where the guards’ barracks are, between the cells and the support offices and operations facilities.” His hand traveled down further. “This ring and corridor array is where ops is, all the prison authority offices, life-support systems, infirmary, mess, all that. Down here”—he pointed to the bottom-most section of the station—“is a very closely regulated transporter room—”
“I would hope so,” Sonya interjected. “Closely regulated, I mean.”
“Right. Also, the power supply is down here. And the shuttlebay and escape pods are all here, too.”
“So anyone who wants to get on or off has to go through there,” she said.
“That’s right. And the prisoners, I gather, go higher up the cone the nastier they are. Your everyday murderers are kept down low, near the bottom. Your mass murderers go higher up, with the lawyers and politicians.”
Sonya laughed. He liked the sound of that, and the way her white teeth gleamed, pearlescent in the soft light from the display screen.
“Basically,” he said, “we’re looking at a small, floating city.”
“Although not one you’d want to live in if you had a choice,” Sonya commented.
“True. Especially now, since if you lived there you’d probably be having your head slammed against the walls of your cell every thirty seconds or so.”
“Here’s the tricky part, as I see it,” Sonya said. “The station may be old, but the one thing they’ve kept up to date are the defensive systems.”
“Makes sense. No point in having a prison station if just anyone can land on it and take away the prisoners.”
“Right,” she continued. “So when we get there, we can’t simply beam ourselves onboard. We can’t get too close without setting off phaser arrays, photon torpedoes, a whole range of defensive weapons. Even if we could bypass those, can you imagine trying to land in a shuttlebay that’s spinning and whirling around in space with no set pattern?”
“I guess maybe we’ll find out,” Kieran said. He took her hands in his own. “You know, sitting here with you—even doing something as mundane as looking over the plans of a Kursican prison … there’s just something about it that makes me want to—”
“Not here, not now.” Captain David Gold stood in the doorway of the briefing room. “The Kursicans were very hesitant to even hand over those plans. I’d rather see you focused on them instead of each other.”
Sonya stood quickly; Kieran could see her cheeks flush. “We were, Captain,” she said. “I mean, we had just finished going over them again. I think we know as much as we’re going to until we see the real thing.”
“Good,” Gold said. “Because we’ll be there within the hour. Gomez, I’d like you to call your team together and let them know what they’re up against. I wish I could go with you, but that’s only for personal reasons. My place is here, on the da Vinci. You’ll be heading