“Now,” she said, “jump!”

They pushed off in unison, or near enough. At the same instant the room began to glow with an intense emerald green. Tania felt the vibrations begin and hoped she’d pushed off hard enough.

Forty meters to the floor. She doubted they’d be in any kind of danger when the energy release occurred, but she didn’t want any residual shock wave to send them tumbling, either, or their landing might be nasty indeed.

Thirty meters. The vibration grew. She stole a glance at the readout inside her mask, sure enough there was nothing but vacuum outside her suit, and yet somehow pulsations that went along with the brilliant glow buffeted her. The suit’s external microphone picked up no sound, so everything she was hearing must be simply her own suit, her helmet, being shaken by subsonic vibrations.

Twenty meters to go. Despite the distance, the visor, the fact that she wasn’t looking directly at it, when the light peaked and cascaded into a burst of white-green energy Tania found herself momentarily blinded.

Ten meters now. Her vision began to return. Her legs caught a wisp of momentum, but nothing more than that. Not enough to drastically change their path toward the bottom of the room.

Only …

“What’s happening?” Vanessa asked.

Everything looked blurry all of the sudden, as if condensation had suddenly formed on her visor. She swiped a hand across it, to no avail, and realized the room had filled with something. Smoke? Steam?

She glanced at her HUD again. The red text VACUUM DETECTED no longer floated there.

“We’ve stopped moving,” Vanessa said. “No, wait—”

Tania felt the tug then. The inexorable pull of gravity.

She was no longer drifting toward the floor; she was falling sideways toward the wall that glowed blue.

In the miserable tin can of a ship, Tim watched the suit telemetry indicators wink off again. They’d done this six times in the last few minutes, leaving him holding his breath for the handful of seconds that elapsed before the connection reestablished.

This time, though, the seconds ticked on.

“C’mon, goddammit,” he muttered. “Come back to me, Tania.”

The display remained blank.

“Tania, Vanessa,” he said into the microphone. “Please, say something. Can you read me?”

No response came. The indicators remained blank. No EVA suits detected in range.

He had no suit of his own. There wasn’t room in the tiny ship for three. Besides, someone needed to remain in the sealed cockpit to fly the thing.

Tim wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and dialed the cabin temperature down. “Keep calm, keep calm, keep calm,” he whispered.

Movement out the window caught his eye. He glanced up and stared once again at the object being lifted up from Earth. From this distance and angle, it looked like the tail of a wasp, yanked from the body proper. He’d seen footage of such a thing once, in the sensory chamber on Anchor Station. The insect would sting its target and then pull away, leaving both stinger and a good-sized chunk of its own body behind. Little glistening wisps of bodily fluid would stretch between the two sections as they pulled apart. What he saw now resembled that process, only in reverse. The Elevator cords spanned the gap between the Key Ship and this new component. They were attached to protrusions of varying height—the spikes that had been on the bottom of the larger vessel originally, he guessed, though clearly they’d sunk most of their length into the gigantic object they lifted.

He felt helpless, parked like a chauffeur at a polite distance. He couldn’t go outside, he couldn’t go in, and he damn well wouldn’t leave. He’d rather suffocate on his own stale air than abandon Tania to this place.

So Tim settled in, ground his teeth, and waited. Every time he glanced at the object coming up from Earth, it seemed a little closer, a little larger, and little more terrifying.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Above Darwin, Australia

2.APR.2285

Between the three of them the box of crackers vanished almost instantly.

Skadz kicked aside the formerly locked door of the emergency supply cabinet and rooted around some more. “Blankets? Moist towelettes? They must be fucking joking.”

Sam couldn’t bring herself to smile. Instead she forced herself to chew the last bite of her cracker. It tasted like salty cardboard, with the familiar sour aftertaste of Preservall. Unfortunately there was no alcohol to wash it down, much less to offer a toast to Prumble.

“At least he went down fighting,” Sam mumbled to herself. No one responded. She’d said the same line three or four times since they’d lifted from Nightcliff. She and Skadz had reminisced a bit. It felt forced, though, and neither of them had the appetite to go on for long. What they both wanted was to raise a glass to their fallen friend and then raise a few more to dull the pain of leaving him behind.

She glanced at Kelly. The woman had discarded her Jacobite robe not thirty seconds after clearing the tower at Nightcliff. Underneath she wore a black bodysuit, just like the kind she’d favored when sneaking about Gateway. In fact, it might well be the same one, Sam realized. Kelly had probably hidden it somewhere in those early days of captivity under Blackfield. The fact that she wore it now spoke volumes about how successfully she’d conned everyone in Grillo’s organization over the last two years. As good a ruse as Prumble’s bum knee, really.

Kelly stood, as she had been, near the car’s single terminal screen, monitoring their progress. If her manipulation of the climber’s programming held, they would pass right through Gateway at a speed high enough to obliterate the station should anyone try to get in their way, and continue on up to Penrith Assembly. That station, she’d explained, had been all but abandoned a long time ago when raw materials became scarce. By her reckoning there should be ample shuttles or ERV-type vehicles parked there, any one of which should support an escape.

“Ah,” Skadz said. “Not a total bust. Chocolate.”

Sam held out a hand. “Gimme. Anything to drink?”

“Negative. We’ll have to wait to toast our fallen brother.” He handed her a thick square of chocolate. Sam couldn’t read the label, but she knew the Preservall logo well enough to assume the treat would taste like wax on the finish. To her surprise, it wasn’t half bad.

Skadz passed a portion to Kelly, who took the chunk without looking. “Almost to Gateway,” she said.

“What’s the plan?” Skadz asked.

“Well, if we start slowing, then our control of the climber is gone and we get ready to fight our way out. If we don’t slow, we either sail through Gateway as I hope, or we crash into something, in which case we won’t have to worry about a plan.”

Silence greeted the comment. They were working on the assumption that the security forces aboard Gateway, as well as Grillo, knew about their heist and subsequent climb. The question was, would Grillo order everyone to back off due to the presence of the object, or would he sacrifice it rather than let some nonbelievers take the thing?

No attempt had been made to contact the climber, not even a cursory call from the control center on Gateway to inquire about their excessive speed.

Sam took another hunk of the chocolate bar and gave it to Vaughn. He’d been mostly quiet during the climb, recognizing that the others might not trust him the way Sam did, even though she’d done her best to convince Skadz and Kelly that he was on their side. The thing was, she couldn’t quite decide why she accepted his defection so readily, other than the simple fact that she wanted it to be true.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the candy. He gave half to Martin, the poor climber control operator who’d also been dragged along.

“Five,” Kelly said, “four, three, two …”

Sam braced herself against the wall. If the climber slowed then gravity would shift from below her feet to above her head.

But nothing happened. The climber kept going, accelerating toward Gateway at more than 200 kilometers per hour. Then it passed the station. No catastrophic impact occurred, in fact not even a wobble to mark the event. The climber sped through the station’s closed docking rings and out the other side.

Kelly turned from the display and cracked a grin at Sam, and she returned it. Maybe this was going to work, after all. Skadz let out a little whoop.

The screen mounted on the wall next to Kelly did something odd then. The image flipped upside down. Sam saw this, blinked. She had time to think it would be good to point this out to Kelly, who was looking at her instead of the display. But before she could even open her mouth, gravity flipped.

In a split second Sam went from standing on the floor to falling from the ceiling, headfirst. She managed to get her hands over her head just in time to break the fall. Skadz landed next to her with a grunt, and Kelly fell on top of both of them, one elbow slamming into Sam’s stomach like a well-aimed punch. Vaughn and the other captive landed somewhere behind her, both crying out in surprise.

Sam tried to stand and found she couldn’t. She felt as if a blanket made of lead had been thrown over her. Above her came the whirring sound of machinery. She looked up and saw the couches, mounted on one wall, moving down toward the new floor on tracks, their cushions reconfiguring as they descended. “Vaughn, head down!”

He curled up, chin to chest. The couches moved into their new position just a few centimeters above his head. Had he not moved, the metal frame would have given him one nasty bruise.

“What the hell is going on?” Skadz asked. He’d come to a sitting position and made no attempt to stand. Sam did the same, and then the others followed suit.

“Deceleration,” Kelly said. “Two times Earth norm.”

“Passengers put up with this shit?”

The woman shook her head. “Normally it’s gradual, with a period of weightlessness and lots of charming bells and soothing voices explaining the cabin will realign for the new ‘down.’”

“In other words,” Sam said, “the jig is up.”

“’Fraid so. We’re too far from Penrith or even Hab 2 to be slowing for them, and we’ve passed Hab 1 already. My guess is they are turning us around, back to Gateway.”

“Or back to Nightcliff,” Skadz said.

Sam thought not. “Why didn’t they just stop us when we went through the first time? Or turn us around well before we passed Gateway?”

Kelly considered this, then shrugged. “Whatever the case, we’ve lost control. They can take us wherever they want.”

“Or,” Vaughn said, “just let us sit out here until our air runs out, then reel us in.”

Skadz wheeled on him, an awkward move in the press of double gravity. “Bloody hell, mate. Thanks for the downer.”

“Take it easy, Skadz,” Sam said. “He’s right. They don’t have to do anything but wait us out.”

Skadz grumbled something, then nodded at Vaughn in a silent apology.

After what felt like an eternity, the blanket of weight began to lift. An easing back to normal weight, then further still until they were floating about like balloons. Floating meant stopped, Sam knew. She glanced at Kelly. She and Skadz both were looking up at the ceiling, waiting to see if their direction would change again, back toward Earth.

The climber car reverberated as something clanged against the airlock door.

“Fuck,” Kelly said. “I’ve no idea where they brought us, but we’re docking. Get ready, just like we talked about.”

Skadz pushed off for the door, while Kelly tugged herself along the wall to a position on the opposite side. Sam moved near the back, taking a position behind the couch with Vaughn and the other prisoner, Martin. There’d been considerable debate about how to use the prisoners. Skadz had advocated lining them up in front of the door in a situation like this, forcing Grillo’s people to have to shoot some of their own just to get inside. Sam had been emphatically against this, though, and not just because of her feelings for Vaughn. She also knew what Grillo was capable of; she didn’t think he’d have a second thought about giving the kill order.

So the prisoners would be used only when the situation called for it. Traded for a resupply of air, or more likely water, given the climber’s dry state. Sam wasn’t sure what she would do if the time came to trade Vaughn away for a damn drink. She wasn’t sure what he would do, either.

A hiss of pressure equalization from the door killed her line of thought. Sam hunkered down as best she could in the lack of gravity and checked her weapon. Mentally she recounted their supplies. Six bullets in her gun, five in Skadz’s. Kelly had twelve, and of a different caliber or else she would have divvied them up. A dire situation by any measure, so they’d all agreed on the tactic required should a shooting scenario come up: Let them get close, drop the front line, and scavenge.

It all comes back to being a scavenger, Sam thought.

Another thought came to her, like the first flash of lightning on a night about to turn stormy. Scavengers. Could the Builders be looking for that trait? Is that what this has all been about? To find out if our species can dawdle on by picking at the remains of our cities?

She grimaced. So what if we can? She couldn’t imagine how that would matter to a bunch of aliens who could travel the cosmos, gift space elevators seemingly at will, and engineer pandemic diseases as well as magical fucking force fields that defend against them. What the hell would they gain by finding out if a species could rummage through its own garbage?

The hatch opened and intensely bright light flooded the cabin of the climber car. A crumpled white umbilical tube surrounded the perimeter of the door, leading straight off, though to where Sam couldn’t see from her position. She watched as Kelly stole a glance, leaning out and then whipping back into position. She repeated the motion a few times, careful to time her looks at random intervals. After four looks she turned and whispered. “The tube leads out of a cargo bay, and there’s a spotlight at the end. Can’t see anything else.”