Up Against It - M. J. Locke [91]
They had to take turns at the lock. Moriarty went first with the big welding rig. Then Ian, Kam, and Amaya squeezed in. Geoff went last. The lock opened, he kicked off, and was expelled out onto the Hub in a puff of air.
Moriarty had not been joking about the wind—it buffeted and shrieked at him. He knocked his mask askew, flailing, and missed the handhold. The Hollow smelled of dust, iron, and ozone. Amaya and Ian grabbed his arms as he tumbled past. They pulled him down, and the grips in his boots grabbed the Hub’s surface.
He readjusted the mask, and flipped on his lights. The howling dark was itself an enemy: his headlights barely seemed to penetrate it. And it was cold—frost had already formed on the unprotected lower half of his face, and icy drafts seeped under his collar. He shivered. How were they going to fight in this?
They tethered themselves to each other, not to the bulkhead. Just like with ice slinging, they would need to be able to range afield. They did not want to be fixed to one point.
“Where are we?” Geoff asked.
“Halfway to the WeSuzee Spoke,” Amaya replied. “On the Hub flat. The lifts are those lights right there.”
Geoff squinted at where she pointed: a nearby set of lights crawled up the cable and entered the tunnel that led to Phocaea’s surface. It vanished from view. Near the base of that cable they could see two figures wrestling the welding cart into position: Kam’s diminutive figure and Moriarty’s bulky one.
Amaya squatted and pointed at a structure against the hull. “These must be the ROV tracks.”
Geoff bent over, too. “Yeah, and they’re laid in a gridwork all across the hull. This must be the power, here. See the warning symbol?”
Ian said, “So, no-touchy the big red stripe, and what’s underneath it. Got it.”
“Come on.” Geoff started crosswind toward the base of the buckyball cable. Walking in sticky-boots was cumbersome, a bit like walking through sand, and he had to lean over at what felt like a forty-five-degree angle to keep from being knocked over by the wind. He fiddled around till he found the right toggle, and brought up the livemap built into his mask. A golden, spidery, shining mesh appeared: a topographic overlay on the dim surroundings.
He clicked on a link Amaya sent him. Their destination appeared in sparkling green, straight ahead. “We’re nearing your position,” Geoff radioed, and Moriarty acknowledged.
Geoff looked overhead. Moriarty hadn’t been joking—the Hollow wall was only five meters away or so—so close he felt he could jump up and touch it. The rocky surface moved past at a brisk pace.
Suddenly they heard a terrible grinding, and felt a lurch underfoot. They swayed and struggled to keep their balance. Geoff could see on the overlay that the Hollow’s walls were slowing down. The feral must be reversing the polarity of the spin generators. The city was being decelerated. Here at the Hub, it was not such a big deal, but out at the Rim, the deceleration would be extreme. He, Ian, and Amaya exchanged frightened looks.
Geoff radioed the old man. “What do we do now?”
Moriarty replied, “We’ve still got our job to do. Stay focused. Keep back about ten meters from me and Kamal, so you have room to maneuver without getting boxed in. If the feral hasn’t figured out what we’re doing yet, it will when we start cutting.”
“Take your suits offline,” Kam warned. “You might get hacked.”
“Yikes! Good point.”
Geoff, Ian, and Amaya spent a couple of seconds trying to figure out how to shut off their suits’ wavespace connections, while fierce blue sparks from the welder lit up the Hollow, making Kam’s and Moriarty’s shadows stretch across the Hub and dance on the walls of the Hollow. Smoke swirled, genielike, in the eddying winds.
Amaya said, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we can use a kite-catch formation on them.” Kite-catch was a three-biker method they sometimes used for netting ice. You tethered yourself to the corners of a net in a big triangle.