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  They walked closer to the man as he struggled with his gear. Chris saw the man wore the lowest ranking blue. His cheeks were flushed red, and he breathed heavily while yanking off his shoulder coverings.

  “You can take your gear off now,” the man said testily. He bent down to pull off his own shin pieces.

  Cinmei pointed her taser at the back of the man’s neck and activated it. Chris heard a sharp crack. The man grunted and jerked forward as his muscles convulsed. His knees hit the deck followed by his face, propping his body up in a ludicrous position. Cinmei kicked him over sideways causing him to flop limply across the floor onto his back.

  She took off her helmet and looked at Chris.

  “Leave rest on,” she said. “Just in case. Maybe good protection.”

  Chris nodded. He understood her point. The thick suit might stop several types of nonlethal weapons, like their tasers.

  “What about his link? If he wakes up and sends out a message …”

  “Link dead now,” Cinmei said. She pointed at her taser.

  Chris realized that the weapon must be more sophisticated than he had estimated. If it neutralized links, then that covered his first worry. Then he had another thought.

  “But if we zap the pilot’s link, the shuttle might—”

  Cinmei put up her armored hand. “Know. Have link to take over.”

  “But the pilot’s link must have a series of one-time codes used to communicate with …” his voice trailed off as Cinmei shook her head.

  “Know,” she said again. “We have codes, too. Only need password to make navi … navigation changes.”

  Chris sighed. He was only along for the ride. Apparently, Cinmei and her people were quite competent. He might as well shut up.

  Cinmei shuffled quickly to the other door. It opened to reveal a short corridor that seemed to run the spine of the cargo shuttle. The white passageway had an ugly beige floor. The bottom edge of the space had square corners but the ceiling had smoothed out edges, making Chris think the passage must lie immediately under the top surface of the shuttle. She headed toward the front of the vessel with Chris close behind her.

  Cinmei paused at the end of the corridor. Chris accessed the shuttle map through his link. He could clearly see that they stood at the entrance to the vessel cockpit.

  “Your entrance is not authorized,” a soft voice told him through his link as he centered it on the cockpit.

  Chris saw the control space beyond the door was only four by six meters. He saw a picture of the interior showing a large acceleration couch and two banks of manual controls that he assumed were only for emergencies.

  The door opened. A man in a jumpsuit uniform of blue and white lounged in the acceleration couch he’d seen on the diagram. The room had the banks of equipment shown by the link, augmented by a few potted plants. The man looked more slender than his comrade looked but had the same graying hair. He didn’t gaze at the newcomers, but simply stared into space. Most likely, he focused on his PV.

  “So, what’s up?” asked the man. Chris detected an accent in the voice. Maybe German or Austrian, he thought.

  Cinmei pointed her taser at his chest and let him have it. The pilot yelped and went limp. After a split second, a rivulet of blood ran down the man’s chin. Chris winced. The pilot had bitten his own lip or tongue.

  “Help carry,” Cinmei entreated.

  Chris nodded. He took the man’s upper arms and pulled him from the couch. Cinmei helped to pull the body into firefighters’ carry position on Chris’s back. A single drop of blood splattered onto the floor, marring the dull beige floor with an oasis of crimson.

  Cinmei led Chris down the hall and into a room of storage lockers. The ceiling was rounded and low overhead and lit by glow panels nestled between dark grilled vents. Four or five white chairs were around a table that folded out of the wall. Cinmei pulled a chair out into the center of the room, so Chris dropped the pilot into it.

  Cinmei opened up a locker. Chris saw some duffel bags inside. Cinmei shuffled things around in the locker and produced some slender yellow rope.

  “Tie up,” she told Chris, tossing him some rope. Then she hurried out.

  Chris had just managed to get the pilot seated when she returned dragging the other man. He helped her sit him down on another white plastic chair.

  Chris tied them up, securing their hands behind the chairs. Then he tied their ankles to the legs of the chairs. He pulled the cords as tight as he dared. He remembered hearing something about serious consequences of tying someone up so tightly that their limbs did not get enough blood. When he was done, he wasn’t sure the bonds would hold forever, but he figured it would take at least a couple of hours to escape from them.

  Cinmei opened a dispenser panel in the wall and filled a transparent plastic cup with water. The first man was already coming around. Cinmei threw the water across the pilot’s face. He sputtered and groaned.

  “Let us go, you whack jobs,” the first man said. Chris figured this guy had to be subservient to the pilot. He didn’t have a uniform and he hadn’t been in the cockpit.

  “I change course,” Cinmei said. “We need authorization.”

  “No!” spat the first man.

  The pilot shook his head, opening his eyes and staring glumly at his captors. “We won’t cooperate with you,” he said. The accent was almost certainly German. “My link does not work. By this time, the vessel is locked down and help is on the way.”

  “Does the ship look locked down to you?” Chris asked. He walked over to a locker and asked it to open through his link. The door popped open. The simple gesture was not lost on the pilot.

  “We need authorization,” she repeated.

  “Go fuck yourself, Chink!”

  Cinmei set her mouth in a straight thin line. She produced a short knife from her gear. The blade glinted. It appeared razor sharp on one side and had a wicked looking serration on the other.

  Chris stared at the knife and swallowed. He felt uncomfortable, even though he wasn’t the one being threatened.

  “I’m not talking,” said the pilot. The other man didn’t speak.

  Cinmei calmly sliced through the pilot’s waistband and slid his pants down to his ankles. The man wore blue undersheers, simple clinging underwear that went halfway down his thigh.

  “You do not want me continue,” Cinmei said. The pilot didn’t respond.

  Chris didn’t want her to continue either. He felt he needed to stay to lend weight to Cinmei’s presence. Psychologically, the man should feel more pressure among more enemies. Cinmei adjusted her taser then thrust it hard into the pilot’s groin. Chris heard a sharp snap.

  The man screamed. Chris shifted on his feet uneasily but kept his face calm.

  “You crazy bitch!” the other man yelled.

  “Give us,” Cinmei said. The pilot didn’t answer. His face had turned crimson. His jaw clenched.

  Cinmei grabbed the man’s shorts and sliced them open with her knife.

  “Oh, my god,” whimpered the man next to the pilot.

  “I never liked watching this part,” Chris stated matter-of-factly. “Let me know once he’s told you.” Chris fled from the room, barely keeping rein on his emotions.

  Behind him, the pilot let loose with a strong, panicked scream. The wavering wail made Chris wince. His hands moved nervously over his body.

  Oh, my god. Did she cut something off?

  Chris froze, transfixed between a need to see what had happened and a need to run and hide. The pilot screamed again. It was a long, strained wail of despair. Chris shook his head and paced.

  Thirty seconds later, Cinmei emerged from the room. There was blood on her knife. He knew it would, but somehow seeing the blood forced him to accept what had happened. A part of him decided he was glad she had done it. Now he could get home and put this behind him.

  My hands are clean. She did everything.

  Their gazes interlocked. He looked for any sign of horror or ple
asure on her face. She gave Chris a faint smile.

  “We have authorization,” she said.

  Chris nodded. He couldn’t utter a word of criticism.

  She did what was necessary. I couldn’t have done it. Should I ask … what exactly she did?

  “I locked them out of computer,” she told him. He nodded again.

  Chris remembered his security training and realized the pilot was probably a VG man like himself.

  “Wait,” Chris said. “I know you’re good. But he didn’t say the password was argus five zero five, did he?”

  Cinmei stared at him.

  “How you know that?”

  Chris shook his head. “I work for VG, remember? Argus five zero five is a security alert password. If you use that, the ship will lock down. He’s been trained to give you that password. It changes every month.”

  Cinmei stood still for a moment. Chris wondered if she would believe him.

  “Wait here,” she said. Even through the suit, Chris could detect the edge to her voice.

  The screams started quickly. This time, he forced himself closer to the door. It wasn’t an airtight seal. He could hear the awful noise inside very clearly. He kneeled down and put his ear close to the door.

  If she gets that password, I need to know it, too.

  The screaming continued for more than a minute in intermittent, ragged bursts. Then the other man started to scream. But only once. Chris heard a sob.

  “Give me,” Chris heard Cinmei demand again.

  “Zeus five. Capital eight nine nine,” a man said.

  She got it. She really got it. Capital eight? Oh. He must have said ‘capital A.’

  “Zeus?”

  “Z, e, u, s. With a capital Z,” the man clarified.

  Chris quickly backed away from the door. A second or two later, Cinmei came back out.

  This time the knife was covered in blood. The black glove of her suit had been splattered with gore. She threw the bloody knife onto the floor in front of her.

  Cinmei pulled off her gloves and let them drop. She detached an arm piece from her gear. Her brown skin was covered in a sheen of perspiration. She dropped the other arm covering and started taking off the torso armor.

  Chris copied her slowly. He was still looking at the knife when he caught a glimpse of her body and refocused on her. She had removed the gear from her top, revealing beige undersheers clinging to her small breasts.

  Am I scared or attracted? Both, I guess. How is that possible?

  She glanced up and met his stare with a frown. Then she started to remove the gear leggings. Chris resumed his own stripping, but he couldn’t pull his eyes away from her. He shook his head. His time on Synchronicity had really changed him.

  Cinmei finished removing her gear. She looked great for a longtime space station inhabitant. He appreciated her slender figure and smooth brown skin. Her undersheers hadn’t been designed to be sexy, but they were so scant and translucent that they showcased her body nicely. Chris wanted her again.

  How can I care at a time like this? Oh, well. That impulse is never rational.

  “This way,” she said.

  Chris dropped the last of his gear and gazed at the locker. It appeared secure. His link reported that Cinmei had locked it and placed a watch alarm on the mechanism.

  Cinmei returned to the cockpit. She didn’t get into the acceleration couch, but Chris could tell she worked on the controls because she stared blankly out the window.

  He watched the guest display in his PV to keep track of the shuttle’s destination as she worked. He saw a pane with the shuttle’s position and a slender line extending through space before it. He panned out and followed the line with his mind. The display altered and the Earth came into view at the end of the line. The current destination was central Europe.

  After a minute, the logged destination in Europe disappeared from the target queue. The line shifted. The destination was listed in a side pane: Qian Nian Men, a near-Earth Chinese station.

  Chris took a deep breath and considered his situation. The shuttle had departed. The onboard staff had been incapacitated, tortured, and locked up. He didn’t feel his life was still in direct danger. But he wasn’t heading home. The shuttle’s course ultimately brought him to a near-Earth station in control of the Chinese bloc.

  When we get there, I’ll be put on subsistence. If I’m lucky enough to survive interrogation and whatever punishment the Chinese decide to inflict. In fact, if I don’t do anything, the next one to get tortured will be me.

  He turned with his back toward her. He accessed the controls through his link.

  “Authentication failed, Chris Adrastus.”

  Chris ignored the warning and used the emergency authorization option. He entered the password: Zeus5A99.

  “Emergency authorization enabled, Chris Adrastus.”

  Chris changed the password quickly: GetMeHomeNow. He saw Cinmei’s authorization and flushed it from the system. Then he faced her again.

  She looked up at him, a surprised look on her face.

  Chris brought his weapon up and pointed it at Cinmei. She recoiled immediately, holding one arm up between them.

  “What you do?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” he said, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He ordered the weapon to fire with his link, but it still didn’t activate.

  Chris stood staring at the malfunctioning weapon. Cinmei skipped and shoved her foot into his groin. He instinctually bent over, but realized she had missed his testicles. She grabbed his head to knee him in the face. Chris blocked the strike by putting his hand on her knee. He couldn’t stop the blow, but he slowed it down enough that it had no effect. He groaned again, feigning weakness.

  She stepped in to throw him over her hip, but he pushed her back. Her arms dropped to steady herself. Chris hit her in the face with a one-two combination as hard as he could. His knuckles felt sharp pain, but the effect on Cinmei was devastating. She crumpled back. Blood welled out from her nose. She moaned.

  “The damn thing didn’t work the whole time?” he said.

  Her hand came up to cover her nose. Tears rolled from her eyes. “The cybloc. Not set you fire at you or me.” Her breath came in ragged gasps from her open mouth.

  Chris understood. The taser wouldn’t fire at either of them. He felt a fresh wave of shame for betraying her. He pushed it aside.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to China! I’ve heard that company people who end up there never make it back!”

  “Please … let me go there,” she said.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. “If there’s a way to get us each to our own destination then I’ll take it. Right now, to the locker room. March!” Chris pointed to the exit door of the cockpit. Cinmei walked back out. Chris herded her back into the locker room. Drops of blood from her nose sprinkled the white floor of the connecting corridor. He looked down and saw his own blood dripping from his throbbing knuckle. It reminded Chris of the blood from the pilot’s chin and keyed an odd thought.

  I wonder if someone back on Earth will be analyzing every drop of blood down this corridor to figure out what happened.

  They entered the locker room again.

  “Get into that storage locker; at least until I can figure out what’s going on.”

  Cinmei tried to wipe the blood from her face but she only covered her hand in blood as well. She rolled onto all fours and crawled into the locker. Chris watched carefully, alert to a trick.

  “Stay in there!” he said harshly.

  She refused to look at him. She sat with her back against the side wall and covered her bruised face with her hand. Chris gratefully slammed the door and locked it with his link.

  From out here, millions of miles away, Earth must be a tiny pinpoint. He told himself the course couldn’t be much different between the Western hemisphere and the Chinese bloc until the end of the journey.

  I have to get back to Europe. I have no choi
ce. One of us will go home a hero and the other a prisoner. It was her or me.

  Chris realized that at some point the pilot and his coworker had stopped yelling. They must have caught some of the exchange outside in between their calls for help and banging on the locker door.

  If things don’t work out, I hope at least I have the opportunity to go back and thrash her for it before I let myself out the airlock. Better to die than spend the rest of my life at subsistence or worse as a slave in the Chinese bloc.

  Chris picked up both the tasers. He accessed his weapon and removed Cinmei from the safety lockout. Then he removed Cinmei from the access list so she couldn’t tamper with it. He couldn’t do the same for her weapon, but he figured physical possession would be enough. He put a link watch on the doors of the lockers so he’d get a warning if they opened up.

  He turned and started to walk back toward the cockpit. He accessed the controls through his link as he walked.

  A new interface blossomed in his mind’s eye. He saw the shuttle, a tiny spindle aligned on a grand white line arcing away out into space. With a thought, he accelerated along the line, pulling out, and zoomed in on the Earth.

  His link enumerated the many control options available to him.

  Course change, he selected with a simple thought. Another section opened in his mind, ready to accept his commands.

  He raised his clenched fist and smiled. He was going home.

  Twelve

  Welcome to Avalon. Gauss Systems would like to remind you of a few rules required of guests visiting our space habitat …

  Aldriena sighed deep inside her gear. She wondered how many of the rules she’d break this time, disabling the deep space radar and hunting an alien ten times more dangerous than she was.

  Gear is required for all activity outside your allocated quarters. For your own safety, your movement is restricted to certain zones of the station …

  Aldriena paid little attention to the spiel piped in through her link. The airlock to her courier closed behind her as she stepped onto the bay concourse and rode a conveyor into the city. Her Cascavel prowled the local service network, already gathering information by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Western Link Protocol.