Squishy's Teams by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch [Rusch, Kristine Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

The elevator took Koh to the main level of Zargasa Station. She wiped the back of her arm over her face, then wished she hadn’t. Her skin came away gray, like that dust.

It was probably in her lungs. She knew it was in her nostrils, her eyes, and it coated her lips. She wanted to wipe them off and she wasn’t quite sure how.

The elevator opened into the physical plant. It had taken Noor nearly three weeks to get the codes which allowed her into the physical plant. If Noor had the educational background, he could have done the work himself. It would have been easy for him to be in here—working as he did for security—and it was odd for her to be here.

Not to mention that she was leaving actual footprints. That dust from the backup level covered every inch of her, which she hadn’t expected.

She kept trying to tell herself that it was all right; that the dust would simply make the equipment on this level malfunction quicker, but the dust—and her footprints—looked like a confession.

She had gone slightly crazy down there, in her claustrophobic state. She had scurried from floor to floor, not paying as close attention as she should have when she placed the devices. She had been working from the bottom of the facility to the top, which she had initially thought caused her claustrophobia, but she had to wonder. Maybe she’d had it all along and hadn’t realized it.

Because the elevator had unnerved her as well.

The physical plant held the controls for a wide variety of things, from the environmental system inside the entire station to the mechanical room that housed the equipment to the supply cabinet that held all of the tools for fixing things.

There were many ways to tamper with everything in here, which was why this area was locked off and considered the most secure part of a scientific research station. But it wasn’t secure enough, since she got in here.

The dust didn’t coat everything in this room. It looked relatively clean, albeit old. The equipment seemed like it had come from a deep dark time in human history, with its gears and cranks and wheezing fans.

This was the oldest of the backup sites, a repurposed station that had once housed—she had no idea what it had housed. But something old and important to the Empire.

She had gotten used to the way things were at Lost Souls, with the new equipment and the clean lines of Fleet technology. Here, in the Empire, people were allowed to assemble equipment out of whatever they found. The Empire actually took pride in repurposing things it had found or things that had been abandoned or left behind.

And the standards—they were so low as to be nonexistent, at least in her mind. The columns and posts below, where she had set the explosives, were different sizes and different shapes. Some were made of a metal that was clearly rusting, which just appalled her.

The weight of the building (and the mountain?) might come down on everything even without her help.

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