Spin State - Chris Moriarty [165]
No turning back now. The pressure suit would keep her alive for fifteen minutes in hard vac. Twenty at most. The amphibian genes engineered into her chromosomes for cold-shipping would buy her a little more time on top of that. But an hour in the pressure suit and it wouldn’t matter if she got what she’d come for, or if Alba security caught her.
She nudged the bladelike turbine arms to make sure there was no spring tension left in them. She wondered how Korchow pulled the inside man into his web. Either money was changing hands, and a lot of it, or Li wasn’t the only one with a dirty little secret. She took a breath, acutely aware that it was one of a limited number of breaths left in the suit. She put everything out of her mind except the next ten minutes. Then she wormed through the jagged half circle between the blades and into the chute.
02:51:43.
She pushed, legs straining, lungs burning. She made the best time she could, but she was climbing against the full rotational gravity of the station, and her enhanced strength and reflexes were little help in such tight quarters.
In the end, it was her haste that did her in. She took a wrong turn, disoriented in the narrow tunnels, strayed into one of the lateral vents that lined the inner bladder. She fetched up against the dust-fuzzed vent of a baffle like an exhausted salmon. She was so close. She could smell yeast, feel the soft, growing air of the algae bay on her face. But it was a cheat, a dead end. And the only way out was back up the shaft, into the teeth of the turbines.
She hit the junction with just fourteen seconds left. She was overheating. Her internals were hitting the red zone, warning lights flashing all over her peripheral vision. Too bad. They’d either fail or they wouldn’t. And if they failed, she wouldn’t be around to regret it. She hauled herself forward, internals blaring, her heart banging out a tempo as hot and urgent as the warning lights.
02:52:38.
She hit the end of the chute suddenly, with less than twelve seconds left, and slammed into the miter seal.
It wouldn’t budge.
At first she thought it was locked, that the inside man had betrayed her. Then she saw the problem; the hinges were clogged with a greasy coat of dust, hair, and organic matter from the hydroponics bays, all the things that drifted on the air currents of the station and washed ashore in the stagnant back eddies of the outtake ducts.
Now that she saw it, it was so obvious she could have kicked herself. But then the things that got you killed always were obvious. Obvious and stupid. This door hadn’t been opened in years. Decades maybe. Not since the last mold epidemic. And because it wasn’t really life-support vital, it would be chronically neglected. A system you could shortchange without getting caught. A system that went to the bottom of the list when it needed a new part—and stayed there.
Korchow’s man had done what he promised all right; she had heard the sharp snick of the catch flipping open, could still hear a trapped-fly buzzing from the hinge hydraulics. But flipping a switch with the name and number of the vent on it was one thing. Actually getting the door to open in realspace was something entirely different. And Li was stuck in realspace.
She poked her fingers through the parts of the door she could reach and scrabbled frantically at the scummy deposits. Her breath rasped in her throat. Her nails scratched on metal. Cohen had warned her about the need for silence, told her there could be people in the bays next to the vent, but she was beyond caring. The whole universe had narrowed into one pure and burning thought—getting out alive.
Finally she felt some give. She twisted in the cramped duct, wrenching her body around, using feet, hands, anything, to get a purchase. She gave a tremendous kick and drove into the seal shoulder first. It held. She felt a wrenching pain in her shoulder and a cold burn like a blade being drawn down the