Suddenly a shot rang out, and a moment later a small object struck him in the chest, hard enough to drive him back against the wall and knock the breath out of him. It bounced off his armored jacket and skittered to the floor, blue sparks flying. A charge bolt. From where? Desperately looking around the dome, he saw that yet more copies of Ru had appeared—the dome was full of them!—and two that were heavily armed were engaging the one that only had the knife and garrote rings. She must be the real one. Before he could even try to get to her, two of the Rus were rushing him, one of them pointing a charge gun at his head. He threw up an arm in front of his face just in time for the armored sleeve to protect him, but the bolt pierced through far enough to get stuck in the fabric, and it hung from his arm, crackling with blue-white energy. Were the bolts even real? It no longer mattered. The malware that had taken control of his senses could make him feel an illusionary shot as if it were real, and he’d be down for the count regardless of whether it existed in the material world.
They were fucked, he and Ru, royally fucked. And he had made that possible. Insisting on connecting to this infected station, he had given their enemy the means to distract and then divide them. And now they were both going to die for it.
But the Ru who had fired at him would need a second for the next bolt to charge, so he threw himself at her, one hand thrusting with his knife, the other reaching out for her gun hand. She blocked the blade and managed to evade his grip, but the struggle gave him an opening to slam his body into hers, desperately trying to throw her off balance. As soon as he made contact he realized his mistake. Whoever the person behind this delusional mask really was, he was much larger and heavier than the image of Ru which disguised him. It was all Micah could do to twist his attacker around enough to block an assault from the other Ru. A third Ru had joined the fray and began pounding on his back, but that attack wasn’t on the scale of what the first two were attempting, so he judged her a fake and tried to ignore her.
There was pain after that, and a chaos of blows—some real, some imaginary, but all equally painful. A fist drove into his gut, a blade sliced through his collar and just missed his throat, and he was almost choked to death. He managed to break that grip with an elbow driven into one Ru’s nose, and he heard bone crack as she fell back from him, making room for yet another copy. This one pointed a charge gun directly at his head, point blank, and he braced himself for the shot that would fry both his brainware and his brain into oblivion.
But before that Ru could fire, another one stepped in and whipped a length of razorwire around her forearm. It cut through clothing and flesh as if through butter, severing muscles that controlled her hand. As she dropped the gun Micah grabbed it, and he turned around and fired into the face of another attacker. The bolt went into her eye, sparks exploding from her face as she fell. He whipped around to see where his third attacker was, but the real Ru must have taken that one down. Now was he was not surrounded by assailants, but by copies of Ru arranged in a semicircle around him, each one holding out a hand to him.
“They won’t stay down long,” a Ru said. “Come on!”
“They won’t stay down long,” another Ru said. “Come on!”
Then a third.
Then a fourth.
One of the fallen Rus was getting up again. Soon the others would also, and battle would be rejoined. Maybe more attackers would appear. There was no way he could sort it all out in time. Thanks to his foolishness in embracing Hydra’s malware, their adversary had won this battle, at least as far as he was concerned.
“Go!” he gasped. Ru could still save herself. “Get the data to the ship!”
“Not without you,” three of the Rus said simultaneously. They reached into their rear pockets and pulled out matching packets: the Seti drug. They dragged the packets across the tips of their knives, cutting them open. The sickening stink of the drug filled the air . . . but it was only coming from one of the Rus. He reached out for that one, grabbed her hand, and let her drag him through the chaos. Past bleeding Rus, over Rus moaning in pain on the floor, past Rus who screamed that the one holding his hand was the real enemy. Not real, Micah told himself. Not real. Not real. Not real. As they ran through one of the doorways, into the tunnel beyond it, he sucked in that glorious putrid smell of the Seti drug and filled his lungs with the perfume of reality. This Ru was real; no others could be.
By the time they reached the next doorway—another airtight hatch—the fake Rus were gone. The real one went to the touch screen beside the hatch and activated the controls, searching for the icon that would unseal it. A few seconds later the heavily reinforced panels unsealed and the door began to open. As soon as they were through Ru turned back immediately to find the control panel on that side, and as Micah leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath, she shut the door again. “Can you lock it?” she asked. “So it can’t be opened from the other side?”
“I can try.” He pushed himself away from the wall and took her place in front of the panel. It took little effort for him to access the hatch’s settings, but altering them turned out to be a whole other challenge. “It needs an administrative code,” he muttered. “Which I don’t have.”
“Can you hack it?”
He looked at her. “You’re joking, right?” He turned back to the panel. “But I do have an idea. Give me a minute.”
As he’d suspected, the hatch’s sensor array wasn’t subject to the same level of security as its operational settings. As quickly as he could, he fed information into the control panel. Suddenly the red light of an air lock warning began to flash over the hatch, and scarlet letters appeared on the screen: EMERGENCY SEAL ACTIVATED.
“What did you do?” Ru asked.
“Convinced it that there was a vacuum on the other side. For as long as it thinks environmental controls have been compromised, it won’t open. They’ll figure that out eventually, I’m sure—I just bought us some time.”
They both looked around at the space they were in. It was little more than a Y-shaped intersection with the hatch at its base. “If we are where think we are,” Ru said, “one of those two branches should lead to the docking facilities. The other—hopefully—to a flyway.” She drew in a sharp breath. “Only we can’t use it now.”
“What do you mean? That’s what we’ve been trying to get to all along—”
“But now we know that someone on this station wants to kill us. And if Shenshido’s mastermind is involved, he probably has control over the entire station. Do you remember what Ivar told us about how Hydra was constructed?”
His eyes widened as understanding dawned. “The flyways aren’t permanent.”
She nodded. “All it would take to kill someone inside them would be to separate the segments. Our adversary wouldn’t even have to separate them completely; as soon as there was an opening, our air supply would be history. Or maybe an emergency breach program would kick in, and seal each section off, like a portable tomb. Same difference, as far as we’re concerned.” Her expression was grim as she looked toward one tunnel, then the other. “I don’t know about you, but stealing spaceships isn’t in my skill set.”