Safety Zone (Lunar Colony VI #1), Page 2

floor.

  “Do not attempt to escape. Our operatives have disabled all methods of egress.” The Face’s focus settled on the middle of the skywalk as its distorted voice echoed around her. “Protocols enacted as this recording initialized. Please remain calm. Attempts at escape or rescue may result in premature detonation of explosive charges. We appreciate your cooperation. The Face does not desire you to meet a cold and airless end as you fall to your death. We expect Senior Partner Schrift will save your many lives in his benevolence.”

  Scrambling away from the door, she wrenched her bag’s strap over her head and dug through its contents.

  She was not going to die in a decommissioned skywalk because The Face deemed it so. She paused, looking up to the passive face on the screen and leaned back, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves.

  With her back to the cool, transparent skywalk wall, Nala cursed her shortcut.

  “Limited” did not begin to describe her options.

  The Face no longer existed. Colony security busted the lot of them in a raid two years earlier. The few remaining members were harmless social dissidents with loads of bark, but no teeth.

  As for the benevolence of Senior Partner Shrift…. that died with him three months after his strike force purged The Face.

  Nala laughed at her current predicament. It was either that or cry.

  She was trapped by the machinations of a defunct terrorist cell whose outdated demands would help no one.

  Strobes flickered throughout the colony towers and spindles. From her perch—in her glass prison—she could see the warning lights ripple through the facility.

  If The Face’s protocol didn’t send a message to the administration control center, she’d be on her own. Shaking away that thought, she ignored her foolishness. They’d receive an alert the moment an incendiary device armed itself.

  Colony citizens streamed past the windows a level below, headed toward the emergency staging locations.

  Standard colony procedure: Evacuate, seal off, and minimize damage.

  The damage they needed to minimize was not just structural. The inter-space press met terrorism of any sort on the colonies with severe censure. This would be a PR nightmare.

  Nala sorted out her tools, taking stock of what little she had to work with. She tried not to think about how the colony’s PR mavens could spin this little disaster.

  Her attempt was a miserable failure.

  They had half of their work cut out for them. After all, one life was better than a dozen in the scheme of things. And they could play off her death as a hazard of the job she’d signed up for. Maybe they’d make her out to be a hero.

  Swallowing that moment of wry humor, she turned back to the panel.

  If they dug too far into her past, they’d cast her as the villain.

  The remains of the emergency lever’s wiring stuck out at her like the stiff legs of a dead insect. Pushing them aside, she fiddled through the electronics.

  In a handful of minutes, station security would arrive. They would take control. They’d tell her if she could fight for her own life… or if they expected her to die as an acceptable loss.

  Flicking on her flashlamp, she surveyed the damage. This panel was a mess of unequalled proportions.

  Leaving her tools, she ran to the other side of the skywalk and kicked out the opposite panel.

  There was no lever to use.

  Staring down at the empty space, her lamps beam traveled over the precise incisions in the wires. Whoever removed this emergency lever had done so on purpose and with care.

  She was stuck unless someone pulled her out from the other side of the door.

  The lamp flickered in her hand, and she smacked it three times before the beam returned to full brightness.

  “Of course the battery decides to fail now.”

  She flicked it off. Better to conserve the light for when she might need it than waste it now when she still had to figure out what she was going to do.

  Through the bright exterior lights, she squinted into the distance. The glimmering illumination of the newer colonies shimmered like a mirage. In her periphery, The Face blinked, its focus shifting as though watching over a flock under its care.

  She shivered in the eerie silence surrounding her. Outside the skywalk’s curved window, she saw straggling station denizens running for the exigency routes. The corridor that lead from Tower A’s outer walkway toward its interior stairwell was a bottleneck.

  Letting out a breath, she turned away from the bedlam, watching a shuttle land on the Lunar Twelve runway.

  The colony administration wouldn’t notify the other colonies unless the emergency protocols failed. As far as they knew, everything was business as usual.

  The lights flickered on overhead, and the thrum of the air pushers gave her something to listen to besides her own thoughts. It meant they’d reconnected life support—something she’d failed to think about as she ran from one side to the other. Unlimited air wouldn’t solve her problems, but it meant she wasn’t alone.

  A crackling buzz at the door pulled her attention from the air vent.

  The broken speaker was a memento from a disgruntled Partner moments after the others removed him from his position. She’d never fixed it because the order to decommission the skywalk went through days earlier.

  Three removed screws, one half-connected wire twisted, and she could make out the scratchy voice on the other end.

  “If you’re in there, let me know you can hear me. If you’ve already tried I can’t hear you, knock on the Tower A-side hatch.” Boudri’s voice was faint.

  “You’re supposed to be off duty, Ethan.”

  “That makes two of us. Whatever you triggered made its way to the mainframe while I was still up there,” Boudri said. His distant voice echoed against the mangled parts in the panel. “I wasn’t going to leave you up here by yourself.”

  “No, but you could have left this decision to someone else. It might have been easier.” Nala sorted through her kit. “You might have to make the hard call.”

  “We’re going to get you out of there.”

  She breathed out a slow sigh, trying to let herself believe the lie. “What did The Face tell you? It says it’s got explosives and that trying to get out will trigger them early.”

  “You think it’s a bluff?”

  A quick glance at the airless vacuum beyond the skywalk’s windows and she shook her head. “I don’t think I’m willing to find out.”

  “The official communique is that they have hostages. There are charges on either side of the sky walk, and they’re going to blow them if we don’t meet their demands”.

  “That could be a lie. You know they were notorious for misleading security about the placement of their bombs…. What are their demands?”

  “They want the nonexistent lunar penal colony to release a dozen political prisoners. And they want the late Partner Schrift to give them a million dollars. They say the money will help return the released prisoners to their previous life status.”

  “How many of the prisoners are already dead?”

  “Seven, but that doesn’t matter. There is no Face to hand them over to. As far as I know there are only a handful that made it out alive when the UN and Lunar Colony Alliance stamped them out.”

  She heard the implication in his voice and fiddled with her bag’s knotted strap to ignore it.

  She did not want to fight about that here, or now. “Who’s on your side to help?”

  “The incendiary specialist is on her way over from Tower C. I sent everyone else to deal with evac. I figured they’d just get in your way.”

  So they were alone.

  She laughed, though the prickling sensation in her eyes suggested she was closer to crying. She wouldn’t do that.

  “Do you think this is some sort of cosmic karma? I mean… today has been a real shit storm, and now this?”

  “Don’t start with that.”

  “Two blown toilets, a b
uggy stove, the chem lab spill, and some kid decided to use the boiler pipes as a drum set. Don’t even get me started on the wild goose chase this afternoon. And now this?”

  The Face glared down at her, unblinking. She had no idea how much time she had left. “If it was anything else, I wouldn’t wonder… but The Face?”

  “The Partners think it’s a left over from before they rounded the stragglers up for execution.” Ethan said, his voice fuzzing loud and then quiet again. “I’m not going to lie to you. Right now, the partners feel their best option is to let this play out.”

  “I thought it might come to that.”

  Ethan kept talking as though he hadn’t heard her. “But I refuse to let that be the only thing we do. We’re going to try to get you out. And our incendiary specialist is here.”

  “Hey Angela, thanks for making the trip.”

  “No worries,” Angela’s voice came through the comm chipper as always. “If a bomb blows on this colony, I’m the one who looks bad. And I’d be pretty upset if we lost you. Who would my little Susie have to play dolls with if you don’t get out of here?”

  The comm connection cut out and she looked up at the gray image on the screen. Ancient and interrupted by bursts of static, The Face had an air of smug self-importance. A computer construct shouldn’t make her skin crawl.

  As Ethan worked on the other side of the door, she crossed her fingers this wouldn’t link back to anything she’d done.

  Even if Angela defused the bomb in Tower A, there was no telling if she’d have time to get to Tower B to deal with the second one. The Face wanted to drop the skywalk. It would make for a beautiful headline. And the