FORTY-FIVE

 

 

NYQUIST WAS BREATHING hard. He had managed to get a hazmat suit and arrive in front of Terminal 81 in less than the ten minutes that Murray had allowed him. Putting the damn suit on, however, was proving a problem.

Fortunately, the Traffic Quarantine Squad that Murray assigned to this job was willing to wait for him. Besides, they had to figure out how, exactly, to get to Palmette.

Apparently, she was deep inside Terminal 81, near an old ship without a lot of data attached to it. The old ship records were sketchy at best. Most of those ships were supposed to leave Terminal 81 when their owners or some government reclaimed them.

But not all ships got reclaimed. And some had remained in port for decades.

Like this one, apparently.

The squad was trying to figure out the best way to get to the ship, a way that took them through the fewest webs of protection, and away from the most dangerous quarantines.

Nyquist wondered if Palmette had thought about any of that.

Probably not, since she wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit. Or, if she had been coerced, she probably figured it didn’t matter: she was dead no matter what she did.

That thought sent a little twinge through him. Wouldn’t she have insisted on a hazmat suit? And if not, if she knew the result of cooperating with whomever was trying to coerce her was her own death, then what was the point of cooperating?

The corridor here was narrow and dark. When he had arrived, he noted how forbidding it was, compared with the corridors leading to the other terminals. It was as if someone wanted anyone who entered here to feel uncomfortable, to know that they had gone to the wrong place.

Most of the squad had arrived ahead of him, and they had already started a discussion about entering Terminal 81. It wasn’t a matter of hitting a palm on the identification pad. It took access codes from four different people, authorization codes from higher ups, and the ability to go through fifteen different webs of protection just to get to the standard identification pad at the front of the door.

It took Nyquist a minute to put on his helmet. He hated hazmat suits. They made him think of the worst investigations he had participated in, the ones that ended badly, the ones that had led him to question his job.

Nyquist pulled on the suit’s helmet. He had asked for a face-hugging helmet even though it meant that he wasn’t as protected as he would have been in a larger one. He wanted Palmette to see him.

The helmet made him even more aware of the suit.

Oddly, the cases where he had needed a hazmat suit and hadn’t had one—the day he saved Palmette’s life came to mind—had given him a kind of inner strength that he hadn’t had before. On the afternoon of the bombing, as he waited for the dome section to open, he thought about the murder, about Alvina, about Palmette—about his terrible life—and he had had a realization.

Instead of making him want to quit his job, that dark day had made him realize how much he loved his work—and how frightened he was of losing it. He had been afraid that everything would change after that, and many things did. But not his job, not investigation, not police work in general.

And he had changed. He knew he was strong enough to face all kinds of terrible odds—which helped him later when he found himself alone with Bixian assassins. It helped him now, because he knew the city would get through this.

But he wasn’t sure how many people would die in the meantime. And every second it took the squad to open a web of protection made extra loss of life even more probable.

He wanted to tell the squad to hurry, but he knew better. They didn’t dare avoid protocol. If any of those webs of protection were tainted, it would cause Terminal 81 to get sealed off. If the damage in Terminal 81—or the threat in the terminal—was too bad, then someone (probably DeRicci) would have to decide whether or not to destroy the entire area.

After evacuations, of course. After the dome protections had fallen, so that any explosion would be contained.

If there was an explosion. This terminal had also been designed to open directly into the vastness of space, the nothingness that was the Moon itself. If the threat was chemical, then the chemical would disperse in the lack of atmosphere. If there was a fire or an explosion caused by something lethal, then the lack of oxygen would shut that all down.

Any contagion would disperse as well.

So theoretically, Terminal 81 was the safest place to have a crisis in all of Armstrong.

But that didn’t explain why Nyquist’s heart was pounding, why he was having so much trouble regulating his own breathing.

He was nervous, maybe even a little frightened. And as much as he told himself that such feelings were normal in a situation like this, he didn’t really want to believe it.

He couldn’t believe it, and be effective.

He had to stay calm.

He had to do this right.