1
RUE PAUSED JUST long enough to catch her breath. She had reached the outer station now, far from her bedroom, and was breathing hard enough to use up a day's ration of oxygen. Add that to my bill, she thought sourly.
Jentry and the others couldn't be far behind. She had been unbelievably stupid, she knew; but this time Jentry had gone too far. She reached up and absently stroked the small stone disk that hung on a thong around her neck. Jentry could insult her, he could restrict her access to vital parts of the station; he could poison the minds of the workers against her. But to steal her birthright--no, if she had to do it again, she would still have gone to steal it back. Maybe more carefully, though ...
Her uneven breath frosted in the dim weightless air. The outer shells of the spherical station were a maze of corridors and cells, relying on what little warmth trickled out of the core for energy. This corridor was one of the rarely used ringways--a long hexagonal tunnel outside the Earth-G centrifuge, intermittently lit and lined with filmy shipfur. As she rapelled from handhold to frosted handhold she looked for signs. In the Core, especially the centrifuge, everything was labelled: Mom's poor substitute for the baroque carving that covered every surface of more wealthy stations. Out here, the only markings were the ones Rue had made for herself over the years, during the hours and days she spent hiding out from Father and Jentry and the others.
There--she spied interlinked triangles scratched near a bulkhead door. They glittered faintly with hoarfrost and for the first time she shivered. Rue knew that the temperature beyond that door was little more than 250 degrees Kelvin. She had come this way many times partly because she knew the others wouldn't venture down here. The halls beyondthat bulkhead were unusually cold for this level and unless you knew to dress for it in advance, the cold would ward you away. She'd used that fact to her advantage many times.
The only problem was, she wasn't dressed for it herself tonight. She wore only the light thermals she had donned in her bedroom.
"There she is!" Despite her years and independence, Jentry's voice still had the power to freeze Rue. A flashlight beam jiggled crazily over the frost on the walls and blinded Rue for a second. She shook herself and spun away, groping for the handle of the bulkhead door.
"Come back here, you little leech!" Jentry had called her that for so long that the insult had lost its force years ago.
"Suck vacc!" she shot back.
Her knuckles rapped the door handle and she grabbed it. The cold hit her palm like fire, but she ignored it as she yanked on the door. It groaned open and the puff of air that emerged made her gasp. She let go of the handle, leaving skin behind and dove into the dark opening.
Talking back to her half-brother was the quickest way to a beating, but this time Rue had worse things to worry about. Mom was dead three weeks now; the last roadblock in Jentry's plan to sell Rue was removed. She knew a cometary cycler would be passing the station in two weeks time and Jentry had sneeringly told her that there was a man on it who needed laborers for his station. Allemagne's tiny ecology couldn't support Rue, he'd said. She just wasn't productive enough. She would have to go--one way or another.
There was no time to shut the bulkhead door behind her. Rue dove shuddering into the cold. Her thin shipfur jacket was no protection at all here. She clamped her mouth firmly shut and breathed through her nose, feeling a ring of fire around her nostrils every time she did so. A single fullmouthed intake of air could freeze your lungs here; she had to be careful. And she avoided touching the snow-coveredwalls with her skin, using taps of her boots to keep herself moving forward.
"She's crazy! Rue, get back here! You'll freeze your sorry little ass down there." Shadows from Jentry's head moving in the doorway loped ahead of her. He wasn't dressed for this part of the station either--her only advantage at this point.
"Rue, come back here this minute or I'll send the miners after you." He'd adopted Father's tone of authority of late and seemed to relish using it on Rue. She snarled but didn't succumb to the temptation to talk. The skin of her face and hands felt tight from the cold; the air here was perfectly dry and she'd start to dehydrate soon. Scraping snow off the walls would not satisfy that thirst; the finer whisks of that frost were made of carbon dioxide, not water.
At least her frost-burned hand no longer hurt. She came to the end of the long corridor, where another ringway started. The walls here were nearly cold enough to liquefy nitrogen. To breathe was to drink fire; she held a hand over her face so that the weak heat of her fingers would help warm the air. She probably had less then a minute to live if she didn't find what she was after.
Years ago, there had been an accident on a visiting rendezvous shuttle. It had slammed into the half-mined comet that loomed next to Allemagne and bits of hull and debris had flown everywhere. Jentry and the other favored lads had spent the better part of six months rounding up all the flotsam that had drifted away into interstellar blackness. Rue, who was never allowed outside, had instead used some miner robots--probably the same ones Jentry was about to send after her--to patrol the outer hull of the station looking for breaches.
She had found one--a hole punched by a section of the ship's hull. In the zigzagging lamp light of her miner's headlight, she had beheld a rough triangle of wall, torn and peeled along the edges, wedged into a gap of brokenfullerene spars. Clouds of shipfur floated everywhere. In the very center of the triangle was an airlock door.
Before she reported her find, Rue had pried open that door, to find an almost intact cylindrical airlock beyond it. Its lockers were filled with treasures.
Now she raced down the leftward arm of the ringway, hands held in her armpits, breathing shallowly while her ears and face went numb from the gentle movement of air past her face. She was shivering uncontrollably now and her back was dangerously close to spasm. Rue tried to calm herself; she had calculated this distance quite carefully when she stashed her discoveries all those five years ago. She should have time.
She bounced herself to a stop over a frost-rimed door. The only illumination here was a single blue tube ten meters down the corridor, but Rue knew where the doorplate was and she used a corner of her jacket to wipe it free of frost. Then she breathed on her thumb to warm it and tapped the plate.
Nothing happened. Rue cursed; she didn't want to hold contact with the thing for more than a split second, or she would freeze to it. She prodded the plate again.
This time it flashed and the door grated open, light blooming from inside. She couldn't breathe and her hands had gone completely numb by the time she maneuvered herself around the icy metal doorjamb. Here, though, was her treasure: a storage room containing three EVA suits, reaction pistols, rolls of fullerene cable, and bundles of shipfur. Also, an addition that she had stolen from Father's stores a week after stashing this stuff: an emergency thermal pack.
She dove for the thermal pack and looped her unresponsive fingers through the big ring on its side. One good pull and it began to throb with warmth, stronger every second.
For a while she just huddled around it, soaking up the warmth. After a minute or two she heard a faint hissingcoming from all around her. some of the frost on the walls was evaporating.
Rue had...
