Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,94
asked.
I winced at the word window. Typical planet-bound thinking. It was nice to be reminded that, no matter how skilled he was in his own area of expertise, the killer didn’t know much when it came to ships. “Not the window,” I confirmed. “It would be easier to cut through, though not by as much as you might expect. That transparasteel is tough stuff. Not as tough as the hull, of course, or they’d just make the damn ship out of it and paint it, but not easy. But more importantly, it’s designed to display information directly, serving as both a ‘window,’” I resisted the urge to make air quotes, “and a display screen.”
“And?”
“And,” Shay chimed in, “cutting fiber-optic relays and generally mucking about with the circuitry shipboard when you don’t know what you’re doing is a bad idea.”
“Very bad,” I agreed. “So, we cut here.” I tapped the hull. “I looked up the engineering records for this class of vessel. This will drop us right onto the bridge without damaging anything important.” This time I did shake my head. “But it’s going to take time. And the fucking AI is going to be filling the space with bodies.”
“Impressive,” Korben said. “It is always nice to work with professionals. Very well, Mr. Langston. Begin your cutting. And let me worry about what we might find on the other side. I assure you, I am every bit the professional as well.”
It took almost four hours.
I was focused on the task at hand. Despite my somewhat cavalier response to Korben’s earlier question, no part of a civilian ship’s hull was entirely free of important subsystems. Cubage was the ultimate limiter in starships, and no ship designer could afford to waste space. It would be more accurate to say that, with proper cutting, I could avoid critical systems and hope that the ship’s computer hadn’t been so completely co-opted by Bliss that it would prevent the automatic rerouting that should happen.
The work was slow, methodical, and physically punishing. The only saving grace was that it gave enough time for my own nanites to do their job, and by the time I sent the command to Sarah to deactivate the plasma cutter, I could stand without pain. I wasn’t at a hundred percent—a long way from it—but I was far more functional than I had been. Neither Shay nor Korben had bothered me while I worked, cognizant of the concentration I was exercising. I had no doubt that Shay was still waging her own battle, fighting on a field of radio waves and electrons as she tried to squeeze out any advantage her unique skillset could afford us. Korben… I had no idea what the hell the assassin was doing. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t moved. At all. For four hours. He’d just stood there, a presence felt over my shoulder, statue-like against the emptiness. He might as well have been a gargoyle perched on the edge of the ship.
Or one of the corpses we’d left behind.
I realized that the starscape around me was moving, spinning. Somewhere along the line, the AI had resumed the rotation of the passenger liner’s disks. It took me only a moment to realize why. The march along the hull had shown that we—humans, that is—were better in zero-G than the Bliss-infected. The artificial intelligence had sacrificed thrust to put itself in a better position to deal with us. It was waiting, in all the comforts of gravity, to finish what it had started on the hull.
I drew a slow, steadying breath and reflexively asked, Sarah, oxygen levels?
Currently at fifty-two percent, the agent replied.
Good enough. If we needed more than another four hours for whatever was to happen on the ship, we’d be in more trouble than we could handle anyway. I sent the mental command to transmit and said, “I’m through.”
“We’ve got problems,” Shay responded at once. “I got control of the interior cameras. Only for a few seconds before the AI locked me out. Shut them down and slagged them, really, just like I did to the doors. Sending video.”
The feed that popped up in my field of vision was only a few seconds long. It showed the bridge of the cruise ship. I could tell it was the bridge, because no matter the size or configuration of a ship, all command decks had a certain sameness. I could tell that it was the bridge of this ship by the army of suited statue-like