Chapter 9: The Long Walk Down
The approach lane narrowed to a channel of guide lights, and at the end of it the main bay of Hephaestus opened up like a slot cut in the dark. Dave stood at the port and watched it come. Four hundred metres of floodlit hull, gantries folded flat against the ribs, and one loading door with a yellow border pulsing around its seam.
"Ready to hear it?" Solano asked from the pilot's chair.
The comm crackled before he could answer. "Inbound hauler, identify."
Solano keyed the mic. "Bay control, hauler Sable-Ember, out of the Tycho run. Registry on file. Requesting clearance and a fuel top-off."
The pause ran six seconds. Dave counted them.
"Sable-Ember, transponder reads clean. Hold at the outer marker. Deploy nothing."
"Understood. Holding."
Jane hadn't looked up from the console since the guide lights started. The manifest was folded to a square in her fist, and she kept checking the same page against the green crawl like it might have changed while she wasn't watching.
Then bay control came back on, and the officer's voice had lost its flatness.
"Sable-Ember, we have a discrepancy on your inbound declaration. You logged medical stores against a doubled consignment number. The bay commander wants your master on the deck in person, with papers."
Solano's fingers flexed on the yoke, then eased. "Tell him I'll be glad to."
She clicked off and turned in the chair. "There's the internal hit. Somebody's been waiting for this hauler to walk in with crooked papers."
"Or somebody wrote those papers," Jane said. "Same thing, if he's the one checking them."
"Either way it's a hook, and I bite it." Solano stood, slow, working a stiffness out of her hip. She looked at Dave. "You know what to do with the account books."
"Locked and wiped," he said. "Beacons are dead in their housings. They'll read as scrap."
"Then get behind the fuel bunkers and don't move until the ramp's down and the noise starts."
She pulled the restraints out of the locker and held them up. Jane took them off her without a word, checked the ratchet on each cuff, and closed them on Solano's wrists. The spring steel bit down hard enough to leave a line.
"Tighter," Solano said. "A real prisoner doesn't get a loose cuff."
Jane pulled the second ratchet two more clicks.
Dave went aft through the cargo hatch. The frame was dark except for the two strip lights, and he moved down the port rack to the bulkhead where the fuel bunkers butted against the hull. The service hatch was set in below a pipe run, hidden behind a bank of strapped canisters, and it took him a minute to work the canisters loose without making noise.
The ramp went down behind him with a groan of hydraulics. Cold air came in, smelling of ozone and hot metal, and with it the sound of the bay, a vast hollow racket of gantries and voices.
Then the guns. He heard the safeties come off, a dozen of them at once, a dry clicking like hail on a roof.
"Captain Solano." A man's voice, amplified. "By authority of the depot commander, you're under arrest."
"I know the drill," Solano said. "Walk me, or carry me. Your choice."
Boots on the deck. A lot of them. Dave counted fourteen at least, then stopped counting, because Jane was at his shoulder and the hatch was open.
He went first.
The service passage behind the fuel bunkers was a crouch-height tube of bundled conduit, warm against his back and cold against his knees, and it ran thirty metres before it opened into the station's spine. They came out behind a pump housing and stood up into the sound of it.
The spine of Hephaestus was a canyon of steel. Three storeys of open catwalk climbed the walls above a floor of pipe runs, and every surface dripped or hummed. Somewhere far below, the station's engines put out a low note you felt in your teeth. The air was cool and metallic and tasted like a coin.
"Left," Jane said.
"You read the layout?"
"I read the manifest. The fuel bunkers are aft of the core. Everything else is forward." She was already moving. "So it's left."
They walked. The catwalk rang under their boots, and Dave kept them to the inner rail where the shadows held. Down two ladders and through a maintenance cutout, past a bank of transformer cabinets throwing off heat like an open oven. Twice they stopped flat against a bulkhead while a crew of four in gray coveralls went by on a gantry above, tools clanking on a cart.
No one looked down.
At the second junction Jane pulled up short and put a hand on his chest. A wall terminal glowed at shoulder height, a docking ledger running in Council green, and she leaned into it like it was an old friend.
"Bay 3, prisoner intake, logged twelve minutes ago," she said. "Bay commander's flag on the file. He's the receiving officer."
"The one with the expired stamp."
"The one with the expired stamp." She scrolled the ledger. "He's got the prisoner flagged for command tier. Transfer at the top of the hour."
Dave checked the time on the terminal. They were forty minutes into Solano's ninety.
"Then she's got twenty to get back to the dock band," he said. "And she'll be in an interrogation room by then, not a dock."
Jane shut the terminal down to dark and stepped back from it. Her face had gone flat and careful the way it did when she was doing sums.
"Which means we don't have ninety," she said. "We have whatever's left before somebody opens her up."
Dave looked down the corridor. It ran straight and lit toward the core, and somewhere at the end of it was a data stack with eleven years of Solano's hunting written inside it, and the name of every man who'd paid for a girl from Venus Colony.
"Then we stop walking," he said. "Start running."