I told her suit to follow me and opened the airlock.

4

Going out in space in an EVAC suit was not something I did before I hacked my governor module.

(One reason was because there’s always a distance limit on a contract. So if you, being a SecUnit, go more than, say, a hundred meters from your clients, your HubSystem uses the governor module to flashfry your brain and neural system. That doesn’t mean a client won’t order you to do something that would cause you to violate your distance limit, it just means they’ll have to pay the company a penalty for destroying their property.)

But the EVAC suits I’d used since then had such good instruction modules that it was almost like having an onboard bot pilot. This one was no exception, plus being new enough to not smell like dirty socks.

(Right, I should probably mention that I find 99.9 percent of human parts physically disgusting. I’m also less than thrilled with my own human parts.)

I came out of the airlock first, towing Amena behind me, and pulled us along the facility’s hull. One of the first things I’d discovered about space was that it was boring when there were no pretty planets or stations or anything to look at. This space was empty of planets but not boring.

The EVAC suit had scan and imaging capabilities but I didn’t need it as something huge moved out from below us. (I designated that direction as “down” because it was toward where my feet were currently pointed.) It was the baseship, falling slowly away. The hostile was above us, clamped to the facility, a big scary blot on the suit’s scan.

I tapped the baseship’s feed and without the interference from the dying facility, they heard me. Roa said hurriedly, We’ve got you on visual. I’m sending coordinates and Mihail will pull you in with the tractor.

I downloaded the projected path, then said, Where is Overse? She reported that she was in the facility safepod with other survey team members.

Roa said, Copy that, we’re contacting them now.

Contacting them now? If the safepod had launched it should be on the baseship by now. But I couldn’t do anything about it, I had to get Amena to the baseship first.

Amena said, What does that mean? Is Overse and everyone okay?

I was about to trigger the suits’ maneuvering system when scan picked up an energy surge. My suit’s imaging went down and the helmet plate went dark, protecting my eyes against a flash. (I didn’t need the protection, but the EVAC suit didn’t know that.)

Amena made a startled noise. Static blotted out the feed connection, then Mihail said, That was a miss, repeat, attacker fired and missed—

Rajpreet’s fainter voice said, Are they aiming at the safepod?

The rest was lost in static. I ordered my suit to clear the visor and swung around so I could see the hostile. I don’t know why—my suit wasn’t armed. I just wanted to see what was after us as something other than a sensor blot. It was almost as dumb an impulse as some things I’ve seen humans do.