Spin State - Chris Moriarty [164]
Damn it, Cohen, she thought; it didn’t take a heat signature for a really sharp observer to spot a jetpack. And getting caught outside, even in a heated support suit, would be disastrous.
At the last moment before impact, she kicked her ZKs into reverse and hovered, trying to track the station’s spin. She took a deep breath, readied her grappling gear, and jumped.
The impact snapped her head back and left her eyes watering. The universe turned inside out and the sky fell on her head. The freight train that had been shooting past her face was now a wild horse intent on bucking her off into open space. The rotational gravity that had been purely theoretical when she was hanging in the void watching the station slide by was now a solid full g sucking her body back, out, and sideways.
She clung to the station and waited for her brain to accept the irreconcilable conflict between eye and inner ear. Then she half closed her eyes, questioning muscles and ligaments, forcing herself to ignore the deceptive visual cues and listen to gravity. A few heartbeats later, she pegged the direction of the Coriolis effect and was able to orient herself to station east and start climbing.
Her right shoulder was all wrong; she was favoring it before she had climbed ten meters. Korchow’s hired medics had tried to patch it up again—another jury-rigged field repair on top of the last one—but the whole arm was going to have to be stripped out and rewired. Not now, though. Now it had a job to get through.
She saw the fan turrets a long way off, knobby sixteen-meter towers that poked out of the station’s skin like mushrooms. She needed the fourth turret, and she counted down the line carefully, knowing that a mistake would mean an ugly death.
02:49:07.
She reached it seven seconds behind time.
Had she climbed too slowly? Was there something wrong with her internals? With Cohen’s schematics? She crouched under the turret, checked her systems, and cursed.
By her reckoning the turret was a good twenty meters farther from her landing point than their schematics had said it was. Any way you looked at it, the miscalculation spelled trouble.
Though Li might have fallen behind schedule, Alba hadn’t. At exactly 2:50 she felt a thud and shiver under her feet, looked up, and saw a glittering ice cloud burst from the vent hole. Dust and condensed moisture, freezing as they hit hard vacuum in the new morning’s first venting cycle; the station was getting ready for the CO2 overload of the coming workday.
She huddled in the lee of the turret until the ice cloud dispersed. Then she put her faceplate to the tower’s virusteel skin and listened as the vibration of the fans slowed and finally died. She imagined miter seals shutting twenty meters below, closing off the flow of pressurized air that drove the turbines. She tried not to imagine what would happen if both sets of seals opened while she was still in the turret. Well, it would be quick, anyway. That was something. She clipped onto the guard line that ringed the bottom of the turret and tapped the unseal code into the wrist plate of her suit. She pulled off her helmet. Her pressure suit activated as the hard vac hit it, dropping its reflective visor over her face. She felt the first bite of the burning cold that would leach through the suit’s thin membrane and kill her in a matter of minutes if she didn’t get inside. She removed the rest of her support suit, rolled it into a tight bundle, and stuffed it into her already-iced-over helmet. She tossed the helmet out into space and shot it with a disruptor