Spin State - Chris Moriarty [161]
“We have to work through your timing again,” Cohen said when she swam back into the main cabin.
“Later,” she said. “I need to put my kit together. I just came up to tell you I’m going down to the cargo deck.”
“That can wait.”
“No it can’t.” It was impossible to stare down someone without a body, but she shot her best glare at the main instrument panel. “You know your job, and I know mine. I need to get the arms and gear squared away more than I need to do another run-through. We’ll do that after. If I have time.”
“Make time,” Cohen said.
If they hadn’t been in zero g, Li would have kicked something.
Her mood improved briefly when she inventoried the weapons. Korchow had sent everything she had asked for. Even her most extravagant demands had been satisfied without murmur.
Two long sleek boxes held RPK midrange tactical precision non-structure-piercing pulse rifles, each fitted with custom-milled optical sights and refillable wipe baffle system silencers. Another blockier box, guarded with a double layer of vacuum seal, cradled the self-sealing pressure suit that Li would wear to crawl through the CO2 vents—and whose interactive camouflage overskin would hide her face if things went wrong and someone spotted her. A big crate held the rest of her gear and tackle: carabiners, grappling hooks, and rope for the climb outside the station; a handheld number cruncher; a lockpick’s kit for getting into the lab itself; a hacked passkey—provided by Korchow—that he claimed would get her out of the high-security lab and into the public-sector airlock where Arkady would pick her up when she had retrieved the target code.
It took an hour and forty minutes to unpack the lot and get it serviceable. The best hour and forty minutes of the last few weeks. If this was what the supply side of being private muscle was like, Li thought, she could get used to it.
When she had coiled her rope, ordered her climbing tackle, and stripped, oiled, and reassembled the pulse rifles, she stood back and surveyed the whole kit critically. Then she pulled herself forward to her cabin to retrieve the small, carefully wrapped package that she had hidden there just as a precaution.
She swam back to the cargo hold, unwrapped the Beretta, field-cleaned it, and loaded it, grunting with satisfaction at the clean, familiar snap of the ammo clip engaging the firing mechanism. She weighed the gun in her hand and glanced back toward the foredeck. She thought about the bulge it would make in her jumpsuit, the likelihood that Arkady would notice and take it away from her. She thought about just how crazy it would be to get into a solid-ammo fight on the little stripped-down Starling.
She sighed and tucked the Beretta into the pocket holster of the pressure suit. The pocket had been designed for bigger, more standard weapons; a Viper, maybe, or a snub-nosed pulse pistol. The Beretta slid in easily and barely made a bulge in the suit after she’d folded it.
“Just in case,” she whispered, and went back forward.
“I need to check ammo,” she told Arkady when she reached the foredeck. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t help letting her eyes flick to the fully charged pulse pistol at his belt.
“You checked it back on-planet.”
“And I need to check it again. Just because I saw it on the loading dock doesn’t mean it actually got on board.”
Arkady frowned. “You can do a visual check, that’s all.”
“Not good enough.”
“It has to be. Cohen checked it manually when we loaded it. Ask him.”
Right now, Li thought, Cohen was the last person she wanted to ask anything.
“It’s all there,” Cohen volunteered. “There’s no reason to check it again.”
“Gee, thanks for the help.” She shot a nasty glance at the comp board.
“Well, go look in the airlock.”
Li glanced at the instrument board again, then turned