The Remnant. Laura Nolen Liddell
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Название: The Remnant
Автор: Laura Nolen Liddell
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежная фантастика
isbn: 9780008113636
isbn:
I inhaled involuntarily. We stood at the edge of an enormous room. It was brightly lit, and pale blue, except for a series of shiny white stripes down each wall. The stripes led to heavy black ports, each equipped with a tangle of code-based locks.
The floor was a series of black catwalks suspended over the outer hull of the ship. The main drag branched off at certain intervals, giving access to each port in the room, and of course the entrance. The platform had landed between levels, so that I was nearly at eye level with the floor. I made to climb up onto the walk, but Isaiah placed a warm hand on my shoulder, stopping me.
“Not that we’re going in that way,” whispered Isaiah. “But I hear it’s quite a view.”
“Oh no?” I asked.
“The platform stopped halfway for a reason,” he answered, pulling me down until we were nearly lying flat. A complicated series of shafts and wires spread before me, in sharp contrast to the bright, open room on the floor above.
They lay against the platform, barely able to squeeze into the space beneath the floor. I followed, my tongue thickening in my mouth, and stumbled again, harder this time.
“Careful,” Isaiah warned. “Tons of gravity down here, and we gotta crawl. Try to keep your neck relaxed, or you’ll tweak it. We need you in fighting shape.”
We went a few steps before I could manage anything resembling a normal crawl. Isaiah continued to talk, leading us toward a particular port on the wall. “Shoulda seen me, my first time down here. It’s terrifying.”
I had to agree, albeit silently. There was something about the crawl space beneath the floor that was even more off-putting than it should have been.
“Just over here,” he called back. “Few more yards. I think you’ll appreciate where we’re going.”
“Is that—” I bit my lip, nearly afraid to ask. “Is that an airlock?”
“Why, yes it is! She can be taught. It’s the side of one, anyway. But that’s not the important part.”
“The airlock isn’t important?”
“We’re in a hangar, little bird.” He slid delicate fingers across the panel before us, then jerked it suddenly. It came off in his hands, and he placed it quietly to the side. It was bigger than me. “Or underneath one, anyway.”
I swallowed, with difficulty. “And?”
“And maybe it’s time you flew.”
I stared into the space the panel had revealed. It was dark, but I could make out some wires, and beyond that, a control panel of some kind. “You got them to give you an Arkhopper?”
Isaiah gave me a withering glance through the shadows.
I blinked at the airlock, which I figured had to be part of a hatch. “You stole one?”
He looked at me patiently. “Not exactly. But you’re getting warmer.”
“You’re about to steal one?”
“Warmer.”
I looked from Isaiah to the hatch, avoiding Marcela’s openly amused expression. “I’m about to steal one.”
“Bingo.”
I sighed.
He pulled the white panel back into place and settled himself down in the narrow space so that he and Marcela were both facing me, their outstretched legs bordering mine on either side. “It’s strange to think about, isn’t it? This is the outer rim of the ship. We’re right next to space. Makes me feel fragile.” He curled his knees into his chest. “And heavy. That’s the gravity, though.”
I stared at him.
Marcela cleared her throat. “We’ve intercepted a series of communications between Central Command—the Commander himself, actually—and the Asian Ark. Apparently, he’s not so jazzed about continuing our little ceasefire.”
“So threaten to cut his air supply or something,” I said. “Wasn’t that the whole point of stealing the Noah Board?”
Isaiah wiggled his shoulders and settled a little further down, giving his neck more room to straighten out. From where we sat, barely underneath a walkway, we could see into most of the hangar above us. The flooring was only solid on the footpaths, giving the hangar the illusion of being suspended in space. “Yes and no. They update it; Adam rehacks it and overwrites their progress. Rinse and repeat. We can handle it.”
“Then why exactly do you need me to hijack an Arkhopper?”
“It turns out we have a weakness.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Like other than the fact that they have all the good weapons? And all the supplies? And all the trained soldiers?”
They ignored that. “We—the Remnant—are on the outer rim of the ship and confined to Sector Seven. All our efforts to penetrate the rest of the ship have failed,” said Isaiah.
“We don’t need to take the rest of the ship,” I said. “We just need the rest of the ship to leave us alone.”
“Command alone, we could handle,” said Marcela. “We have a strong enough grip on their tech that we can probably survive until we get to Eirenea. The problem is that we’re right up against the hull of the ship.”
I bit my lip, hesitant to be persuaded. Eirenea was the planet the Arks were trying to reach. The plan was to build some kind of electromagnetic field, then terraform and colonize it. Like a newer, smaller Earth. Even if everything went perfectly, we were still years away from reaching it.
She paused, watching me. “It would appear that the Commander has embarked upon a more… comprehensive strategy for our defeat. Thanks to Adam, we have reason to believe he’s going to ally with Asia. Convince them that we need to be wiped out.”
I considered that. “You’re saying they’re going to blow a hole in the ship.”
“The engineers took the possibility of projectiles pretty seriously,” she said. “There are ways of saving the rest of the ship if the hull is breached. But they didn’t take the Remnant into account.”
I nodded, understanding. “No one was supposed to live on the outer edge of the Ark.”
“We weren’t supposed to live at all,” she said. “And if they hit us, we won’t survive the blast. Especially not if the Commander disables the defense systems first.”
“One shot, we’re out,” said Isaiah.
“They’d СКАЧАТЬ