Project Charon 2 by Patty Jansen (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

it. With the older system, I’ll need to get into the one that’s associated with the control panel, and there’s a greater risk of accidentally doing something stupid. Anyway, that’s not to be helped. The box is probably above the door. I’ve installed a lot of those systems. Give me a leg up.”

Tina took off her boots and stepped into the linked hands of someone, probably Evelle. She heaved herself up and ran her hands over the wall above the door and the nearby ceiling.

After a while, Evelle said, “Oof, you’re heavy. I’m going to have to put you down.”

“Are you calling me fat?” But she jumped down. Evelle was slight, and Tina had the build of a middle-aged woman. “I better lift you instead.”

“Okay. What am I looking for?”

“A panel that can open or anything that feels like it’s not part of the wall.”

Evelle stepped into Tina’s linked hands and moved around, feeling the wall as far as she could reach. “I don’t feel anything. What if they put it somewhere else in the room?”

“Then they’re stupid. You put the camera over the door, because when people walk through the door, they always face the same way. It’s your best chance to get a look at their face. If you’re only going to have one control box, you put it next to the camera.”

“Sheesh, of course,” someone else said.

Then Evelle said, “I think I have something. There’s a smooth panel here.”

“Can you find a groove or screws?”

“Not really.”

“Let me have a look.”

A reshuffle ensued, where Evelle used another woman’s hands and a few more women helped Tina up. She ran her hands along the smooth wall until they met Evelle’s.

“You have cold hands.”

“Sorry.”

Tina found the panel. The edges were slightly elevated above the metal of the wall. There was no groove between the wall and the panel. Yet there had to be some way to service the equipment. She pushed on the panel. It moved into the wall and sprang back to its original position.

Ah.

Now she pushed two corners with both hands at the same time. The panel popped out of the wall. She handed the cover down to the women who stood there.

Inside the panel she found wires neatly bunched together and tied with a clip. She’d need some light to see which ones she could cut.

There was also a small display, which lit up when she touched it.

Now they were getting somewhere.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Tina jumped to the ground.

“Before I touch that computer, we need to have a plan for what we’re going to do. As soon as I start fiddling with the wiring and sending people messages, they’ll know we’ve broken in and they’ll be over here in no time. We have a very short time frame to get out of here, warn my people off-site that we’re coming, and find a safe place to hide. Do you know anything about the likely situation we’ll face in the area around this room?”

Evelle replied, “When we came here, it was from the ground floor. To the anti-spinward direction an exit leads to a corridor that goes to the docks.”

That was different than the way Tina had come in, but likely the way through the agriculture sector was quicker. Of course the pirates had avoided taking prisoners through the labs.

She described, as best as she could, the layout of the rest of the station as she remembered from the map.

It was hard to do this without visuals, but one woman called Margot, who was a cook, proposed to allocate letters to the chambers that Tina described. They worked through chambers A—the old hospital—to the lab which was B and the recycling plant which was C and then the agriculture plant which was D. Talking about spinward and anti-spinward was second nature to people having grown up in space, but Tina hadn’t, and she had forgotten how subtle hints in how things moved and weight shifted told the inhabitants which was which.

She led the group on a virtual tour of the route to the docks twice. She asked if they knew how to find the ship and, as it turned out, Aliz was one of an experimental generation of pilots who were awarded their position for the duration of their careers and carried an implant that linked them with the ship.

“It doesn’t work in here, of course. The silence in my head drives me nuts, but once I’m close enough nothing will stop the ship showing me how to reach it. And I need to get back to the ship as soon as possible.”

Tina asked, “Do you think you can stabilise the ship enough that we can use it, or do we try to get out some other way?” Although that might be hard, because as far as she knew, the docks were still closed, and there might not be time to wait for the Alethia to come in. Tina didn’t think they’d all fit aboard her ship, anyway.

“I don’t have a choice,” Aliz said. “I either stabilise the ship or die. I would love to have at least one engineer.”

And Finn, of course, was not at the station.

“I may be able to get someone who is pretty good at maintenance,” Tina said. Although this ship was likely to be far out of Thor’s experience and capability.

Aliz said the first concern was that they had to take the Manila out of dock. Some repairs could only be done in zero gravity. If there was extensive damage, they might have to wait for Federacy engineers to turn up, but that was a worry for later. An added problem was that everyone who had been in the departure queue had just plundered all the ship’s rations. How many people would they be able to take?

Another problem was that the ship was likely to be guarded. No one had weapons. They could try to overwhelm some guards and steal their weapons. They agreed that was messy and to