Spin State - Chris Moriarty [159]
She woke up with a hammering headache that had less to do with the sedatives than with her rising apprehension about the run ahead of them, and listened halfheartedly as Arkady and Cohen talked through the bones of the run again. Her new wire jack itched atrociously, a nagging reminder of the irritation of the last few days in the union safe house. She reminded herself not to scratch it, scratched anyway, cursed Korchow, and brooded about staph infections.
Korchow and Cohen had infested the safe house like locusts, shunting haphazardly through Bella, Arkady, Ramirez until even Li hadn’t known who the hell she was talking to. Not that it would have made much difference; Cohen had been harder to talk to than Korchow recently. Was he just angry, or was this new distance more than anger, an obscure symptom of some shift in the tidal flow of the AI’s associated networks?
They had taken Cohen off-line for the run—dumped his systems into the Starling so that there would be no interstellar communications to give them away while they drifted off the station’s dark side. No shipboard comp could even come close to accommodating Cohen’s vast web of associated intelligences and enslaved subsystems, of course. Li doubted there was a self-contained net that big anywhere in UN space, outside of a few zealously defended corporate and military sites. So Cohen had dumped systems, left them behind, wherever “behind” was, and downloaded only what he thought was needed.
He had sworn it wouldn’t be a repeat of Metz, that when they powered down the Starling for the run and gave him control of the ship comp he would be there, willing and able to pull her out safely. But now that they were committed, all Li knew for certain was that Cohen, her Cohen, wasn’t there. He had stranded her in hostile space with no one to cover her back but a Syndicate agent and a stranger who didn’t seem to remember any of the promises the Cohen who claimed to be her friend had made her.
“Let’s go over it again,” said the disembodied ship’s comp voice that she still couldn’t think of as his. Li and Arkady settled at the narrow crew’s table, and they ran through the whole intricately choreographed plan again.
It was getting Li on-station that had been the real problem. And though it had taken days to work out the details, the solution was still the same blindingly simple one Li had spotted in the station schematics: the ventilation system.
Like most spacer-designed technologies, Alba’s O/CO2 cycle was obsessively efficient. It built on existing systems, recycling every available piece of material and energy, rolling many problems and purposes into one solution. It pushed breathable air down the long curve of the station’s inhabited zones, insulated the station’s pressurized inner bladder, sucked excess CO2 out into space, and powered the motors that turned the long dragonfly wings of the solar arrays. Air, warmth, and life-giving power all from one system. And the fuel that drove the system was always there, always free: space itself.
The pressure differential between the void outside and the full atmosphere of breathable air inside pulled freshly oxygenated air through the station, into the remote cold-storage bladders whose robot retrieval systems used no oxygen and created no CO2 load. When the CO2-loaded air reached the end of its journey inside the life-support bladder, it flowed through vents into the soft vacuum of the station’s outer bladder, a second skin that provided insulation and radiation shielding, that protected the inner bladder’s life-support zones from the hard vac beyond the viewports.
The returning air served three functions in the outer bladder. First, it put a baffled, compartmentalized partial vacuum around the life-support bladder—a safety feature