Page 46 of Kavan

I have stopped waiting.

CHAPTER 27

SOPHIE

The hold state costs me eleven minutes and thirteen elements and it stands as the best work I will ever manage.

I can't shut the fortress down. I lack element fourteen and I won't be getting it, so instead I do the archaeologist's version of a stalling tactic: I find, in the sub-clauses of the seventh element, a maintenance provision. Weapons cannot be discharged while a housing is flagged for inspection.

So I flag all forty-one for inspection.

This is no shutdown. It's a lie told in a dead language to a machine that has no reason to doubt me, and the moment it takes hold every housing above Osiris stops tracking and rotates to standby, and Zuri screams, and somebody down the walkway starts crying, and I brace both hands on the console and take my first real breath in an hour.

"How long?" Kavan asks.

"Until it audits the flags. Hours. Maybe one hour."

"And then?"

"Then it discovers that nobody is inspecting anything, and it goes back to what it was doing, and it won't accept the provision twice."

They arrive through the aperture nine minutes later.

There are six of them, and the woman leading is the one who cut through two of Kavan's officers to take the crystal off Obuya, and Ansel gets three rounds away before they put her down. Kavan takes the second one through the lip and I don't watch that part. What I know is that when it ends there are four smugglers standing on my platform and Kavan is down by the rail with Vesk trying to get him upright, and the woman has a weapon on the back of my head.

"Sela Brant," she says. "Mr. Rourke's second. Bring the housings live again."

"No."

"Doctor, I've watched you work for nine days through a scope. You aren't a martyr, you're a specialist, and specialists negotiate." The muzzle touches my hair. "Put them back on track and every person in this room walks out through the tube at Cove Three."

"He turned the crystal. Did you see him do it?"

"I saw it."

"Then you saw that he thought he was setting up a bargaining position and instead he armed the planet." I keep working the console. This is the important part. "Sela. There's no version of this where you sell anything, because there's no orbit left to sell it into. Your own extraction ship is up there and it has already been designated."

Her breathing changes.

So I give her exactly what she wants.

I put my hands into the housing directory and I begin, visibly, competently, in full view of a woman who spent nine days learning what my hands look like when I work, to release the inspection flags.

And I release nothing.

What I actually do is open the eleventh element and start signing district counts into a subroutine that governs no weapon at all and every door down here. Every district signature I have memorized, one after another, in a sequence meaningless to any firing solution and everything to a transit system that has been sitting in emergency lockdown since the day Sophie Larkin turned four rings on a wall.

Three, seven, eleven. Then four, nine, eleven. The counts scroll and Brant watches the numbers change and cannot read one of them.

Two hundred meters beneath us, in the spire base, the transit corridors reopen.

"Marchant," I say, conversationally, to a man at the rail holding a detonator he hasn't been asked to use. "Eli. Now would be good."

Eli Marchant, geological survey specialist, thirty-eight-year-old coward by his own repeated description, picks up the wounded man nearest to him and shouts the word transit down all that curving walkway, and eleven people who have been waiting fifteen days for somebody to tell them where to run, run.

Brant's weapon leaves my head for about a second and a half.

That isn't enough time for me to do anything useful, and I don't try. I stand exactly still and let her come back to me, because the moment I flinch she reconsiders everything.