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  But Emry had grown up with cats—surely she could use a few of their tricks herself. Hell, she was wearing tiger-print panties. The next time Bast’s claws slashed from around a vertical pipe, Emry swept around the other side and collided with her. They fell together in a Coriolis arc. Emry struggled to hold Bast and make sure the she-cat landed on her back. But Bast’s tail gave her the advantage in midair twisting, and Emry ended up on the bottom (not her favorite position), just managing to splay her arms in time to absorb the impact wrestler-style. Which made them unavailable to stop Bast from going for her throat again. So she slammed her forehead into Bast’s. Not for the first time, her thick skull came in handy; Bast yowled and fell back, letting Emry get her legs up into the she-cat’s midriff, launching her backward. She landed in a three-point crouch, though, and Emry struggled to rise and face her, though she found it hard to get beyond a sitting position. “Anybody got a ball of yarn?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” came Arkady’s voice, “just shoot her!” Emry grimaced. She hated guns, even the nonlethal kind—nasty things, and they took all the fun out of a good fight. But Arkady had a point—they didn’t really have time, what with the other terrorists on the loose.

  The clincher was that Bast was pouncing again, all her pointy bits deployed for the kill, and Emry couldn’t dodge fast enough. In one smooth, swift move, she fell back, drew her dartgun, and placed shockdarts in Bast’s exposed midriff and neck. The she-cat convulsed and fell heavily atop her, burying Emry’s face in her thick, silky mane. “Sorry,” Emry said. “This was just starting to get good.” She rolled the dazed panther-woman off of her, taking a moment to appreciate how soft her fur was, and feeling irrationally tempted to stroke it back into smoothness. But there was no time for that now. She drew binders from her belt and swiftly secured Bast’s wrists and ankles before she could recover.

  Emry turned to see Arkady hovering nearby in his armor suit, its wingjets keeping him airborne and correcting for Cori drift. She always thought the bulky thing made him look like something out of an old anime. Apparently he’d just lifted out of the way of the bull-man, Taurean, who was extricating his horns from a dented wall panel and shaking his head. He must’ve given up on the gun or been disarmed. Arkady fired a shock laser, but Taurean dodged surprisingly fast, the electric arc hitting the wall. Arkady deployed his arm-mounted sonic pulser, but before he could fire, Taurean leapt up and took him in the chest, smashing through several overhead pipes. Taurean landed smoothly on his feet, but Arkady fell badly and hit headfirst, a number of heavy conduits landing atop him.

  “You okay, Papa Bear?” Emry called—but then noticed Taurean eyeing her and pawing at the ground. “Ohh, bull…” She fired off some shockdarts as he charged her headfirst, but they bounced off his skin as though it were light armor, not holding contact long enough to deliver an effective charge. No wonder Arkady had switched to beam weapons.

  But Emry would not be cowed. Like a Minoan daredevil, she seized the bull-man by the horns and flipped over him, letting out a whoop. That’s one way to tackle a dilemma! By the time she landed, she’d not only spun to face him, but had holstered her dartgun, drawn her laser pistol, and set it to shock mode. But he’d spun too, with no pause for rumination, and was charging her again. “It’s the red hair, isn’t it?” she asked, shaking her head a bit. Priorities, kid! she thought, and fired, the laser ionizing a path for the electric discharge. Taurean convulsed from the sustained shock, but still had enough momentum to bowl her over, knocking her sidearm from her hand and the wind from her lungs. She ended up on the bottom again, grateful for the low gravity, although his weight upon her chest was still suffocating.

  But he was already stirring, the charge apparently too small for such a massive body. Before she could catch her breath and wriggle free, he had an oversized hand around her throat. His other hand held down her right arm in a vise grip, and his tree-trunk legs pinned hers. She gripped his wrist in her left hand, but he tightened his hold on her throat when she did, giving her pause. “Damn, you’re beautiful,” he said in a surprisingly mellow, good-natured voice. “Too bad I have to kill you.”

  Emry seized the opening. “Well, you don’t have to,” she lilted with what breath she could muster, lowering her eyelids seductively. “I’ve known some horny men, but you take the beefcake. Why don’t we have our own little rodeo, see how long I can ride you?”

  Taurean looked tempted … but smiled regretfully. “I’d love to—but I’m not that stupid. I like girls with more fur, anyway,” he added with a shrug. “Sorry. I’ll make it quick, okay?” His fist tightened brutally around her neck, in stark contrast to his easygoing manner. Emry tried to wrench it free, but his arm wouldn’t budge and she was already weakening. She could hold her breath fairly long given a chance to prepare; but she’d already had the wind knocked out of her, and her metabolism was high from the fight, demanding oxygen that just wasn’t coming. She choked soundlessly, striving to remain conscious. He gave her a reassuring smile, like an anesthesiologist telling her to relax, count backward from ten, and just let oblivion take her.

  But then a plasma bolt erupted in his face. It knocked him for a loop and he reflexively let go. Emry was dazzled herself, despite her corneal filters, but was able to push him off and scramble free. Arkady fired enough tanglewebs to make sure he was securely bound. Still choking and struggling for breath, Emry was tempted to leave the webs across his face and let him suffocate for a while. But his attempt to kill her had been without malice, just a guy doing his job, and she found that she bore him no ill will. So she moved in and extended her diamond thumbnail blades to cut his nose and mouth free as he struggled ineffectually against the restraints. Your loss, bully-boy. Would’ve been a wild ride.

  “You okay?” Arkady asked. Even with the helmet concealing his face, she could tell he was looking her over with concern.

  She quizzed her biometrics and got the HUD readout on her retina. The cuts from Bast were clotted, the cells already being knitted back together by her repair nans, and no significant toxins had been introduced. Taurean’s impact had bruised a couple of ribs, again nothing her repair systems couldn’t handle. The cartilage around her windpipe was bruised as well, but its polymer reinforcements had held up. Her ears were ringing from the plasma bolt, but there was no serious damage. “I’m fine,” she said hoarsely. “I could’ve handled him.”

  “Of course. But I thought I’d save you the trouble.”

  “I am trouble,” she said with self-mocking arrogance.

  “As I know better than anyone. You should focus less on your wisecracks and more on the battle.”

  “What fun is that? Plus it loosens up the imagination, keeps me flexible. Good to have in a—”

  Then the habitat rumbled. Then it groaned. Then it heaved.

  * * *

  Arkady Nazarbayev knew space habitats. Back before Independence, he’d been a construction worker, helping to build the things. It had been a booming business what with all the emigrés coming up from Earth—many voluntarily, others not so much, but all needing homes. Once Earth had gone to war with Ceres and Vesta for control of their abundant resources, it had only seemed natural to use his heavy-duty construction symbot—which augmented his strength twenty times over and was hardened against vacuum, radiation, and construction hazards—to defend his home and family. He’d modified the powered exoskeleton into a fighting machine, though he’d striven to keep its weapons mostly nonlethal. After all, many Terrans were still family, as far as he was concerned.

  Not everyone had agreed, of course, and matters had very nearly come to a cataclysmic level until the Great Compromise was struck, granting Earth rule over everything in its orbital space (including the Moon and all five Earth-Moon Lagrange points) in exchange for the independence of the Main Asteroid Belt. Afterward, the newly independent Striders had perhaps relished their individuality too much, and the wartime coalition had collapsed. Rivalries had erupted—between the powerful states of
Ceres and Vesta and the smaller independent habitats, between the Cereans and Vestans themselves for economic dominance, between the puritanism of the pioneer generation and the rebelliousness of the young, between all of them and the new habitats that had relocated, voluntarily or otherwise, from cislunar space. And many of the mods, both states and individuals alike, had exploited the chaos to assert dominance over the less enhanced. So it had only seemed natural for Arkady to keep using his combat-rigged symbot to defend his home and family. And then it had only seemed natural to help his neighbors when they couldn’t help themselves, to fend off the conquerors and raiders and mobsters so they wouldn’t keep hurting good honest folk. After all, he was hardly the only vet to do that sort of thing, though others had done it in their own ways, with their own special tech or mods.

  But not all of them had been as concerned about nonlethality as Arkady, or as hesitant to profit from their “protection” efforts. Before long, these “Troubleshooters” were fighting each other as much as the bad guys, or at least clashing over methods, jurisdiction, and miscommunications. So when Yukio Villareal, one of the architects of the Great Compromise, had proposed to his fellow Troubleshooters that they found a corps to coordinate their efforts and regulate their own members—an independent, nongovernmental organization recruiting and training the best and brightest from all over the Belt—it had only seemed natural to sign on.

  The media may have painted Arkady as some great frontier hero, but he was just a guy who’d done what came naturally. At heart he was still just a simple, brawny lug who was good at driving a symbot.

  And he knew space habitats. So he had a pretty good sense of what was wrong with Chakra City even before he tapped into their security web. As soon as the groaning began, he gathered up Emerald in his arms (something she accepted far more easily now than on that terrible day nine years ago) and rocketed for the nearest exit into the habitat’s interior space. He had to blast out a few conduits to get there, but that was the least of Chakra City’s problems—as he and Emerald saw clearly as soon as they were in view of the skylights that arched overhead, forming the inner half of the toroidal shell. The radiators—the two long, narrow panels that extended from the axis on the northern side of the habitat rings, permanently edge-on to the Sun—were gone. White-hot stubs remained where they had connected to the hub, and a glowing scar ripped across the industrial block between them. “Oh, Goddess,” he heard Emry gasp, sounding like she actually meant it for once. At least some good might come out of this, then, he thought—though he preferred a more traditional interpretation of the divine.

  The security reports and his suit cameras complemented each other in telling the tale. A ship docked to the hub beyond the radiators, no doubt under Neogaian control, had ripped free of its cradle and turned its fusion-drive nozzle toward the station hub, sweeping a cone of exhaust plasma across it and severing both radiators at their connection points. The pressure from the drive exhaust and the vaporized coolant that burst from the ruptures conspired to accelerate the radiators toward the habitat rings, striking their northern side with some force. One had bounced off the uncompleted northernmost ring, smashing a number of the heavy, chevron-shaped mirror strips that directed sunlight into the torus while shielding it from direct radiation. The mirrors had been knocked into the skylight panels below, shattering several and causing an atmosphere breach; however, it would take hours for the pressure loss from that breach to become significant.

  But by misfortune or design, the other radiator had snagged on the end cap of the newly added ring section he and Emerald were in. Suddenly imparted with angular acceleration, the radiator had acquired weight, falling down and antispinward. That, combined with its existing motion athwart the rings, had caused the long, flat array of panels to wrap around their top half—or rather, to crash against them, for its weight grew quickly as it fell. The skylight arch on the next ring over was badly damaged; it looked as though it might have caught the edge of the ship’s plasma exhaust as well.

  Worse—from the way the skylight sagged under the twisted panel, Arkady could tell that the radiator wasn’t breaking apart as it should. He cursed the antiquated design of the thing. Now there was a long strip of material massing kilotonnes hanging down over a hundred meters below the ring, weighted down by gravity approaching and maybe even surpassing Earth’s. And it was tugging on the rest of the panel, worsening the strain on the mirror strips and skylight and threatening to tear clear through it and smash down on the people below—not to mention the far worse air loss that would result from a breach of that size. It was night, so there were few people outdoors to be hit by falling debris; but that wouldn’t matter if the whole sky fell on their roofs. And the sun mirror to the south had already switched from black to reflective as the habitat went into emergency daylight mode.

  They forced open the hatch and crossed into the damaged section, where air and debris were rushing out of the growing rift in the skylight. The occupants were running for the exits, and the Troubleshooters hastened to assist in an orderly evacuation. Emerald called, using her subvocal transceiver to be heard over the wind and the groaning of the skylight framework. Hence the severing of the radiators, Arkady realized. Even these hull breaches wouldn’t be fatal for the habitat; there was plenty of air to spare if the holes could be patched in time. But with no radiators, a habitat this small and this close to the Sun would become uninhabitably hot in less than a day. And Chakra’s daily seventy-odd minutes in Earth’s shadow had ended barely an hour ago.

  Emry went on. Arkady had been wondering about that. A ship that even warmed up its fusion or plasma drive anywhere near a habitat would set off alarms and be blown out of the sky if it didn’t shut down before its engines were ready to fire. They would’ve had to bribe or otherwise compromise the human dock monitors as well. This was a bigger operation than he’d realized.

  Still, he didn’t get one thing. “There wouldn’t have been time for the viruses to spread yet!” Not that Arkady doubted Emry’s insight—despite her brawn-over-brain impulses, she had it in her to be a fine detective. He was so proud of her for that, even though he’d had nothing to do with it. Arkady was just a big lug who needed things explained to him.

 

  “He’ll be heading up to the spaceport, then.” The passage to the docks led through the damaged industrial block, but should be deep enough within it to remain passable.

  But a renewed groaning brought Arkady’s attention back to the immediate problem, as the skylight framework buckled a little more under the weight of the radiator and mirror strips, causing several more heavy window panels to fall from the sky. Unfortunately the radiator slanted directly over one of the more heavily populated sectors of the ring. “We have to get the people out! We’ll worry about Krieger when we reach the port.”

  After that it was an efficient scramble, coordinating with the Chakran police and emergency crews to manage the evacuation, to hurry the people toward the nearest elevator shaft to the hub, to keep them calm despite the terrifying groaning and the shuddering and the ominous whistling of the air across the twisted girders of the skylight frame. Arkady tried to estimate how long it might take Wulf Krieger to get to the port and infect its ships with his polyviruses. He got on the comm and issued instructions that no escaping ship be allowed to land on Earth or dock with any other habitat until a medical team checked it out, but he couldn’t be sure how fully that would be heeded in the chaos. He just had to hope that the crush of the crowd would impede Krieger, giving them time to head him off. If there was any comfort here, it was that the bad g
uy had been forced to improvise.

  But then the skylight frame buckled and gave way with a terrible shrieking sound, and tonnes of glass, metal, and composite rained down as the radiator panel overhead sagged and twisted, its connections to the adjacent panels breaking free one by one, way too late. Arkady realized it would come down virtually on top of the last group of stragglers he was with. “Everybody, run! Move, move, move! Quickly!” he cried, amplifying his voice to shock them into motion. Emerald caught his sense of urgency and began herding them forward as fast as she could.

  But a large chunk of the skylight frame was falling right for him, a pair of massive mirror strip panels riding on its back. Without a second’s thought, Arkady stopped running and lifted his arms skyward, bracing his legs and locking the symbot’s joints. The impact drove his arms and torso down and his servos whined and overheated, but the symbot held, and the last few Chakrans were able to start scrambling out from under once he urged them out of their terrified paralysis.

  The problem was, the servos were starting to give out. Arkady realized he wouldn’t have the power left to push this thing off, not in the brief moments before the radiator panel gave way and came down on top of him. All he could do was hold it and make sure the Chakrans—and Emry—got to safety.

  But then Emerald had to go and turn around. And then his wonderful, brilliant student had to be an idiot and run back to him. “Arkady!”

  “Go! Save the others! My suit’s shot!”

  “No, I won’t leave you!” Emry saw what was going to happen, he knew she did. But still she looked around desperately, grabbed a fallen girder and tried to use it to brace the ceiling fragment. She knew it was futile. But the poor lonely child couldn’t face it, couldn’t bear another loss. She’d blame herself, he knew it, and he hated doing this to the sweet girl. But she needed to live. Humanity needed her, needed the magnificent Troubleshooter she was destined to become.