Space Stations Part 2

"Don't svark us," one of the terrorists snarled, his knuckles white where he gripped his gun. "That's a Galen R-225. Galens are designed better than that."

"This one isn't," Bob said. "And it's a Galen R-224. They didn't put in the cancel switch until the 225."

The terrorist had been starting toward Bob, murder in his eyes. Now, abruptly, he froze in midstep, doing a hard right and striding over to the medpack. "Well?" Forste asked as he crouched down beside the ident plate.

"It's a 224," he confirmed in a voice like grinding walnuts. "What kind of idiot designed this?"

"Probably the kind who got fired while they rushed the 225 into production," Bob said. "From what I heard, they only made a few hundred 224s before they figured it out and canceled the model."

"So why do you have one?" Forste demanded suspiciously.

Bob waved a hand around the room. "Why do you think? The ParkService got them cheap."

Forste's mouth worked, but it was clear he couldn't find an answer to that one. "What if we just shut the thing off, pull c.u.mmings out, and put Sjette in?"

Bob shook his head, "You pull the plug in the middle and you might not be able to get it started again," he said. "You'd have to erase the current program, which means purging the memory; and with this thing there's no guarantee you wouldn't crash it and have to reboot off the recovery disk."

"What if we just shoot c.u.mmings, then?" the other terrorist suggested tightly. "That ought to end the program."

"It would probably also end the medpack," Bob pointed out, trying not to shudder at the thought of such casual murder. "And your friend will still be burned. Look, why don't you instead let me see what I can do to help him?"

"You have medical training?" Forste asked.

"Nothing official," Bob admitted. "But I know how to handle burns and basic injuries. We've all had to learn first aid, pretty much in self-defense."

He nodded over at the 224.

Forste puckered his lips in disgust. But there wasn't anything he could do about it, and he and everyone else knew it. "Go ahead," he growled.

Fifteen minutes later, with much of his body covered in burn foam, the injured terrorist was snoring gently on a cot. "The foam works best if the subject is asleep," Bob explained as he put everything away. "I just gave him enough for a ten-hour nap."

"Yes, I know," Forste said coolly. "I was watching the dosage you measured into the hypo. Just as well for you that you didn't try to put him under for, say, the next four days."

Bob s.h.i.+vered slightly. The thought had occurred to him, actually, to do exactly that. A good thing he hadn't acted on it. "Is that it, then?" he asked.

"That's it," Forste confirmed. "Annen, take him back to his cell. And then get back to work."

So, Bob thought to himself as he was escorted back down the rusty corridor. One down. Eight more to go.

s.p.a.ce Fort Jefferson, it appeared, was on a roll.

"What do you mean, it's not working?" Forste's voice came tartly.

"It's not working, that's all," Fjerde shot back. "I've run it fifteen different ways, and it's just dead."

"What do the diagnostics say?"

Fjerde snorted. "What diagnostics? This comm system must have been built in the last century."

"I don't care if it's three days older than dirt," Forste snapped. "If we can'tget up-to-the-second positioning data from our friend aboard the escort s.h.i.+ps, we haven't got a chance of pulling this off. How fast can you fix it?"

"I'm not sure it can be fixed," Fjerde protested. "The antenna array alone-"

"You've got twelve hours," Forste cut him off. "Get it operational, or it's your own head." He clicked off without waiting for a reply.

For a moment Fjerde glared at the antiquated comm system with its joke of an antenna array. Then, cursing under his breath, he started taking it apart.

Considering the rust and mildew evident elsewhere in the corridor, Sjuende thought, the locking wheel on the door to the Number Four Torpedo Launch Center was suspiciously easy to turn. The place wasn't on the tourist route; could the rangers have some private use for the place?

Or could it be that the missing Ranger Wimbley was hiding in there?

Getting a grip on his gun, Sjuende pulled the door open- To be greeted by a puff of moist and oddly fetid air. "What's that smell?"

Attende asked uneasily from behind him.

"I don't know." Sjuende reached for the light switch, twitched his hand back again as he remembered the faulty electrical circuits that had fried Sjette. Using the edge of his insulated flashlight instead, he flicked on the lights.

He was expecting to see the drab gray and the grim, no-nonsense metal and ceramic of a s.p.a.ce Force weapons room. What he got instead was Garden Club Headquarters.

"What the h.e.l.l?" Attende gasped, crowding in beside him.

"It's a hydroponics room," Sjuende said with a twist of his lip. He glanced across the row of torpedo tubes "Uh-oh," he muttered.

"What?" Attende demanded. "-oh. Oh."

"Oh, indeed," Sjuende agreed tightly. All eight tube covers had been flipped all the way back to accommodate extra rows of various vegetable-looking plants. Even from across the room, he could see that years of neglect and careless watering had rusted every single cover solidly in place.

"Let's try another room," Attende suggested. "Numbers Two, Seven, and Eight are still available."

"Hardly," Sjuende said, shaking his head. "Two's tubes are open to s.p.a.ce, which means the covers are pressure-sealed; Seven is being used as a junk storage room, with more stuff in there than we could possibly move out in three days; and Eight has no floor."

"No floor?"

"Part of the big renovation, I suppose." With a sigh, Sjuende lifted histhumb. Forste, he knew, was not going to like this.

Forste didn't. "I suppose you'd better get busy and clean it all off, then,"

he said when he was finished swearing.

"You don't understand," Sjuende said. "I'm not talking about a little rust.

I'm talking about a whole lot of-"

"Then it's going to take you a whole lot of time, isn't it?" Forste cut him off. "There's a storage locker at the corridor intersection near Rooms Three and Four-Annen said there were some spray bottles marked 'Rust Remover' in there. Get busy."

Sjuende sighed. When he'd signed up for the revolution, this was not exactly what he'd had in mind. "Yes, sir."

"Yes, there are hydroponics in here, too," Annen told Forste, looking around the Number Six Torpedo Launch Center. "Vegetables, mostly.

Considering the selection we found in the galley pantry, I don't blame them for growing their own."

"Very charitable of you," Forste growled. "Now, can we concentrate on the problem at hand?"

Over by the Disabler, Femte muttered something under his breath. "Of course," Annen said, giving an annoyed glare of his own at his thumbnail.

Pressure or not, Forste had no call to be so sarcastic. "Everything's rusty, but it doesn't look bad enough to have damaged the tubes. We'll have to move some of the plants out to confirm that, of course."

"Well, then, do it," Forste snapped. "Call me when you've got good news.

And not until you've got good news."

"Yes, sir," Annen said stiffly, shutting off the radio with an unnecessarily hard snap.

"Testy, isn't he?" Femte commented.

Annen took a deep breath. "Things are not going exactly as planned," he reminded the other. "Come on, let's get these plants out of the way. You pick the tube you think looks cleanest; I'll pick the one I like best. Between us, we'll hopefully get one that'll work."

They set to their task, lifting the planters out of the tubes and tube covers and carrying them across to the far wall where they could be set down out of the way. Femte continued to mutter under his breath as he labored, his half-heard diatribe against welfare and the cod industries punctuated by grunts as he hefted a particularly heavy load and the occasional curse as an overfull planter spilled dirt or water onto his bulkyjacket or the floor.

Annen, for his part, worked in silence.

Which was probably why he was the one who first noticed the gentle hissing.He froze in place, eyes narrowed and head swinging back and forth as he tried to locate the source of the sound. It was a leak, of course; but was the gas coming into the room or going out? Either way, it could be very bad news indeed. Across the room Femte grunted again as he lifted another planter- "Quiet," Annen snapped. "Listen."

Femte paused, the planter cradled in his arms like a green leafy baby. Then his head jerked up, and a second later the planter had been heaved across the room and he was making an Olympic-cla.s.s dash for the door. "Wait!" Annen shouted, diving around the end of the tube in a desperate attempt to cut him off.

But he was too late. With visions of either leaking air or poisonous gas clouding his vision, Femte was unstoppable.

Unstoppable, that is, until he hit one of the patches of muddy water between him and the door.

"Looks like you've got a mild concussion," Bob told the man, flicking off his pupil light and reaching for the bandages. "Must have hit the wall pretty hard."

"I'm all right," the other insisted, wincing as Bob applied the bandage to his still-oozing head wound. "Just give me a shot of something."

"Sure," Bob a.s.sured him. "I'll do that; but then I think you should sleep for a while."

"Sleep?" Forste put in suspiciously. "You want to sedate him, too?"

"It would be the safest thing to do," Bob said, pulling the sedative and painkiller hypos out of their slots in the first-aid kit. "The medpack has another-" he peered across at the countdown display, "-fifty-nine hours to go, and until it's free, we can't do a complete diagnosis. He's probably okay; but if he isn't, and we don't make him rest at least overnight, he could die."

"Just overnight?" Forste asked. "That's all you want?"

"What I want has nothing to do with it," Bob countered. "I'm just trying to deal with the reality of the situation."

"Of course," Forste said. "You're never responsible for anything around here, are you?"

With a sigh, Bob set both hypos down on the table. "It's your call," he told Forste. "You tell me what to do."

Forste looked down at the hypos; and as he did so, there was a click from his thumb. "Forste," he said, raising his hand to his lips.

"It's Sjuende," a faint voice came back. "I found the leaking canister."

Forste's gun lifted an inch closer to Bob's face. "Poison gas?" he asked."Nitrogen," Sjuende said, sounding disgusted. "I've shut it off."

Forste frowned. "Nitrogen?"

"To make nitrates for the plants," Bob explained, frowning to himself.

There was something odd about Sjuende's voice. A faint slurring, perhaps?

"I already told you there wasn't anything poisonous in that room."

Forste took a deep breath, let it out. "All right, Sjuende," he said. "Stay there. Annen's on his way back; help him get Disabler One in place."

"You sure?" Sjuende asked. "Attende and I still have a lot of work to do before Disabler Two can be set up."

"Disabler One can be in place in thirty minutes if Annen has enough extra hands to help him," Forste snapped. "Let's try to get at least something ready to go before we quit for the day, shall we?"

"Yes, sir," Sjuende muttered.

Forste tapped his thumbnail and turned to Annen, who was glowering silently over by the door. "Well? Get going."

"Yes, sir." Annen sent one final glower toward the injured Femte, then turned and left.

Forste looked back at Bob and gave a nod that managed to be curt and reluctant at the same time. "Put him to sleep."

"But I'm fine, sir," Femte protested.

"Shut up," Forste said. "You just concentrate on getting a good night's sleep. You'll need it when we play catch-up tomorrow."

Femte sighed. "Yes, sir."

Five minutes later he was stretched out on the cot next to his burn-foamed comrade. "I expected the possibility of injuries while neutralizing the Secret Service agents," Forste muttered under his breath.

"Or possibly after the attack, if any of the Marines survived long enough to get into suits and packs. I didn't expect we'd lose two men while we were just setting up."

"s.p.a.ce Fort Jefferson isn't exactly your average work area, of course,"

Bob pointed out absently, still trying to figure out what in Sjuende's voice had caught his attention. "This can be a risky place if you're not familiar with it."

"Apparently so." Forste lifted his thumbnail. "Fjerde? Any progress with the comm system?"

"I've got the antenna apart now," the other reported. "It's got a lot of rust and dirt embedded in it. I'll clean it and see if it works any better then."

Bob felt his stomach suddenly tense. Rust? "Mr. Forste-"

Forste cut him off with a glare. "Consider it break time," he told the other. "Get down to Launch Center Six and help Annen and Sjuende.""Yes, sir."

Forste tapped the nail and hefted his gun toward Bob. "Don't you ever interrupt me-"