Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,82
A pair of personal thrusters that snapped around the ankles. They had limited fuel, but enough to get me from the shuttle to the passenger liner. Another set that wrapped around my waist—this one with enough fuel to get me to the ship and back again, but with less overall maneuverability than the ankle thrusters. A third set for my wrists—useless for much more than quick adjustments, but with the way the passenger liner was tumbling, I was going to need plenty of those. Various tools for more refined salvage than the cutting torches offered went into pockets or snapped onto magnetized patches on the suit. Emergency oxygen, in case my suit went dry. The Gauss gun already on my hip. That would ordinarily have done it, but there was also the submachine gun I’d picked up as a countermeasure to the cyber-zombies. It clipped onto a two-point sling that left it dangling across my chest with the business end pointed down and to the left and immobilized against my chest via another magnetic plate. Extra magazines—for the chemical burner—and extra rounds for the Gauss gun went into more of the dump pouches on the web gear.
All told, the load wasn’t too bad. It massed out at about forty kilos—enough to be uncomfortable, but it was well distributed across my entire body. In full gravity, it would slow me down, but only a little. In zero-G… well, I’d operated with heavier loads. Not into quite so dynamic an environment, but the whole point of a salvage operation was to get the important bits from one ship to another, after all.
Sarah chimed softly in my mind. Ms. Chan is requesting a connection.
Go, I replied.
The window opened in my vision with the avatar of Shay as she saw herself. “I’m plugged in up here, Carter,” she said. “The psycho’s on his way back to you. You ready?”
I shifted my weight, settling the bulk more comfortably. I really didn’t like the fact that I had no second to check my gear. Standard policy—and it was standard for a reason—was to use the buddy system to make sure everything was properly secured and all the seals were tight. I supposed I could ask Korben to do it for me but trusting the guy who originally wanted to put a bullet in you as your safety backstop didn’t sound like a great idea. “As ready as I can be,” I muttered in response.
“Good,” she replied, her voice taking on a slightly distracted note. “This AI or whatever running the counter-intrusion over there is good. Way better than any passenger liner should have, at any rate. Bit and I are trying to break it.” She paused, and her avatar frowned. I had no doubt it was replicating the expressions on her coil’s face. “If we can get in, I doubt we’re going to have access to anything truly important.” It was the first time I’d ever heard her admit that there was something she might not be able to hack her way through, and it gave me a new level of respect for the AI we were up against.
“Not a problem,” I assured her, speaking the words aloud, putting more confidence into my voice than I felt. “That’s where I come in.”
“Where we come in,” a new voice said. I hadn’t noticed Korben’s approach, distracted as I’d been by the conversation. He said nothing further as he began his own preparations for disembarking. They were much more minimalistic than my own. Like me, he was already wearing his vacc suit. He strapped thrusters around his waist, ankles, and wrists and put on web gear of his own. But his gear bore none of the heavy equipment I’d strapped on. Almost every available inch was covered in weapons or ammunition. A nasty-looking machine pistol of unfamiliar make rode each hip, with another pistol at the small of his back and yet another riding in a holster high on his chest. Dump pouches bulged with ammunition and an eight-inch fighting knife went into a sheath near his ankle. A forward-bending blade was strapped to each thigh, a distant part of my mind identifying the weapons as kukris. The man was a walking arsenal, but if I were being honest, I was glad to see it. I still didn’t know how the two of us were going to manage to deal with whatever we found on the other side of the bulkhead—assuming Korben could survive the EVA—but half a