Providence - Max Barry Page 0,32

normally needed to go. In the gloom, Anders’s face glowed beneath his film. He stopped before a hard door marked:

LASER BATTERY 4

HOT ROOM

DO NOT ENTER

“What?” she said. “No.”

Anders pressed the tactile panel. The door emitted two short blares.

“Anders. It’s a hot room. They’re dangerous during engagements.”

“They just say that, Beanfield.” He probed around the door with his fingers.

She thought they said it with good reason. But before she could argue, a panel beside the door popped out. Anders retracted it all the way. Another warning tone sounded. Anders yanked a newly revealed lever and the door split down the middle. Heat and light spilled out in such quantity that Talia’s film clamped down, plunging her into darkness. When it equalized to restore her vision, Anders was shouldering open the door and stepping inside.

“Follow me!” he said.

She breathed. Then she followed. Because she was committed to Anders; he was her job. She moved into the chamber and heat closed on her like a fist. She couldn’t get a sense of the room’s scale; it was too densely packed with thick cable bundles and treelike pipes. It might have been huge, a techno-jungle that went on forever. The air roared and shimmered and there was a rhythm to it, a tightening every few seconds. It felt biological, like being inside someone’s bowels.

“Don’t touch the pipes!” Anders shouted. “They’re hot as fuck!”

He clambered over a snarl of cable toward a beige tube taller than he was. As she drew closer, she made out the identifying markings of a burn feeder, part of the system that fed the long-range laser batteries. Anders touched it experimentally. Then he pressed his body against it like a hug, his arms spread, one up, one down.

“What are you doing?” she shouted. Sweat trickled down her back. “Did you not just say not to touch them!”

“The small ones! Touch this one!”

“Why?”

“Just do it!”

Jackson and Gilly burbled in her ear. Outside the ship, where she couldn’t see, salamanders were dying. She looked at Anders.

Fuck it. She pressed herself to the pipe. There was a tingling sensation, maybe? She didn’t know.

“If they get close, the ship deploys laser batteries!” Anders shouted. “You know how big those are?”

Pretty fucking big, she thought. Maybe she could feel something. That tingling sensation was building. The rhythmic tightening of the air, each time it lessened, it didn’t go back all the way. Anders had his face against the pipe. She didn’t want to do that.

Anders shouted, “What they put out, it comes through here!”

Jackson in her ear: “Contact in five.”

Talia began to pull away, because it sounded like Anders wanted her to hug a laser feed housing at the exact moment it gushed enough fire to erase an enemy at distance, and was that not the worst possible time? Was that not precisely why the door read DO NOT ENTER? But he was staring at her and this would decide something, she saw. It might be the moment she won or lost him.

She put her cheek to the housing. She felt it coming. There was an uncoiling, like a dragon waking from sleep, its tail rising, wings unfurling, its head coming up, and she hadn’t known it was so big. The air in the room thickened until she couldn’t speak. It pressed against her body and she couldn’t expand her lungs. She thought, Oh no, this was wrong, I’m dying. Then a colossal release of energy passed through her, a rush of starfire that dissolved her body.

Her legs didn’t work. She sprawled in a mess of cable, her head full of stars. Her legs were numb. Anders was on the floor beside her, laughing. In her ear, Jackson said, “Hostiles down. Area clear.”

“You with me?” Anders said.

She nodded. She breathed. The air was cooling. The chamber was shedding heat, transforming from a furnace to a room. She was with him.

He laughed again. They were close enough to touch. He was looking at her like he was thinking about doing something but then