Spin State - Chris Moriarty [163]
If she could count on Cohen—really count on him—it might not be too late. But she’d be crazy to do that. Better to risk what she knew she could pull off, if all those little gambles broke her way. Better to settle her nerves, stop worrying about what she couldn’t change, and get ready for a walk in starlight.
“Well?” said the stranger who was Cohen. “What did you forget?”
Li sighed and pushed off the floor, coming to rest high up on the Starling’s curving bulkhead. “Nothing. I will goddamn well remember to hook in before the internal vent opens. I’m not an idiot.”
“You were the one who insisted on running off soft memory,” the not-Cohen insisted. “You’ll be off-line for twenty-seven minutes. Any memory lapse will result in a fatal loss of synchronization.”
Li flip-flopped so her feet were facing up, her head down. She looked at Arkady, at eye level but inverted, and raised an eyebrow. “I think she understands that,” Arkady said, sounding embarrassed.
“Look,” Li said. “I’ve been to the dance before. You boys just keep your flies zipped and make sure you save the last dance for the girl you came with.”
She picked out a faint spot on the opposite wall, a faded fingerprint left by some crewman of missions past. She closed her eyes and kicked off the bulkhead into a tight backflip, testing her inertial systems, troubleshooting, recalibrating the network of Fromherz nodes and ceramsteel filament that spidered down her spine and out to every muscle, tendon, and fingertip.
It was a neat trick, as well as a good diagnostic test. One of her favorites. Especially in zero g. And it was just the kind of silly thing Cohen always teased her for doing.
Well, he wasn’t teasing her tonight, she thought as her left foot hit the deck .28 centimeters off target—and she realized, suddenly, just how scared she was.
Alba: 28.10.48.
02:18:00.
The outer seal slid down on the other side of the airlock just as Li finished pulling on the bulky life-support suit and checking her heater and air feed. Arkady drew his pulse pistol, thumbed off the safety, and leveled it at Li’s chest. He lifted his thin shoulders in a sad little shrug. “Sorry.”
Li didn’t answer; he wouldn’t have heard her through the double-sealed faceplate of her helmet anyway. When the inner seal rose, she glanced back, checked her status lights again, and stepped forward.
02:20:04.
She floated out of the airlock and into open space, spinning slightly with the pull of an imperfectly calibrated frog kick. She did a fast recalculation of her trajectory, toggled her Zero-K jetpack to get back on course, assured herself she was still going to hit Alba’s exostructure reasonably close to target, and relaxed, watching the meters and seconds tick down on her internals.
She looked back at the Starling. It was already invisible, its fractal absorption sheeting effective enough to outsmart Li’s eyes even at this range. She toggled her infrareds just to be safe and scanned for a heat signature, but there was only a faint blur of warmth that could have been a heat plume from the station or the thermal wake of the last commuter shuttle. She hoped the shielding was good enough to fool not just her, but the Peacekeeper techs who monitored Alba’s fiercely enforced no-fly zone.
02:23:07.
As she neared the station, not even all her outside training and fighting experience could prevent the inevitable disorientation. The station’s metallic skin spun faster and faster. By the time she got within five meters of it, it was whipping by her like a freight train.
Cohen had put her on-station in the middle of a forest of radio and ansible receivers, reasoning that the thicket of antennae would camouflage her approach, making the risk of a hang-up worth running. She had to choose her spot carefully