Spin State - Chris Moriarty [160]
Mold thrived in the recycled, condensation-rich air of orbital stations, and an unchecked infestation could make a station uninhabitable in a matter of months. Some epidemics—and every station with any history remembered one or two of them—were so resistant that the only cure was to evacuate the station, void the atmosphere, and rebuild the O/CO2 cycle with fresh flora. Alba’s turret vents had been designed with that in mind. Each turret contained both an outer and an inner vent. The outer vents opened into the unused space off the station’s outer rim. The inner vents opened into the huge oxygen-producing algae flats. Faced with an incurable mold infestation, the station engineers could open both inner and outer vents and blow algae, air, condensation, and mold out into open space.
What Li’s soldier’s eye had seen was that, stripped down to its bones, the emergency venting system was an airlock. The inner vent separated life-support zones from the soft vacuum of the outer bladder; the outer vent staved off the void outside. In normal operations the outer vents opened only during the turbine’s power cycles. The inner vents never opened, except in the worst emergency. However, if they could open an inner vent, briefly, while the outer vent was closed, all that would show up on the station monitors was a barely noticeable local pressure drop as a few cubic meters of air flowed into the unsealed turret. And someone who had managed to slip through the turbine arms and into the duct at the end of the last power cycle could simply push the miter vent open and breach the station’s inner bladder.
If that someone was small enough to fit through the vent. If she was fast enough to climb the turret in the few minutes between venting cycles. If she was strong enough to push the inner vent open against a full g of rotational gravity and hoist herself through it.
But Li was all those things.
It was a risky way in. If it worked, though, it would put Li on-station undetected, and already through the manned security checks that separated the top-security labs from the station’s unrestricted zones.
Korchow’s inside man would open the inner seal for her. This was Li’s least favorite part of the plan. It introduced a dangerously large risk of human error. It left her life hanging on the actions of someone she had never met and had no reason to trust. Worse, she had to be down the duct when the seal opened, ready to drop through instantly. And to get there, she would have to shinny twenty meters against a full rotational g, up a chute so narrow that even her small shoulders would just pass through it. If the door failed to open, if anything went wrong, if the inside man failed her, there would be no way out except through the spinning turbines.
Li had laughed when she saw the schematics and told Cohen it was a good thing she’d started smoking young. She wasn’t laughing now.
“Let’s go over the plan again,” Cohen said, when they finished the run-through.
Li rolled her eyes. They’d gone over it four times already—which was three more than she wanted to. “Cohen,” she said, “don’t waste my fucking time, okay?”
Arkady turned to look at her, surprised. Cohen had no body on board the little Starling, but his disapproval came through the comp boards loud and clear as a bad day.
“I need food,” Li said into the suddenly silent cabin, and pushed off toward the galley.
The galley racks yielded nothing but a small sack of algae-colored imitation kasha and a thoroughly squashed packet of reconstituted vegetables. The kasha tasted like mold, and the vegetables looked