Jessica solar's Arc

Chapter 12 of 15

Jessica pulled the folded page from her jacket and spread it flat on the deck plate. The alien marks stared back at her under the corridor's dim light. Michael crouched beside her, pad on his knee, watching her face. "They can't have both," she said. "If they take the wall, they still need mine to read it. If they don't have the wall, mine is the only one left." Michael's jaw set. "You want the original gone." "I want it dust." He looked at the hatch that led down. Then at her. "I know the way. You don't. And you can't cross the drydock floor. Snipers have the gantry. They'll drop you before the door." She knew he was right. She had walked that floor a hundred times. It was open plating for forty meters, no cover, and the gantry ran the whole length above it. "You go," she said. It cost her to say it. "I go." He tore a clean page from his pad and pressed a fresh copy of the chart into her hand. "Two copies now. One stays with you. The other burns with the wall." She folded the second copy against the first. "How." He reached under the crate by the hatch and dragged out the hauler drone she had gutted for the greenhouse. He had kept it. He had reset the clamps. "Cargo run. I ride under the belly, clamped to the frame. It flies low along the trench wall. They shoot at drones all day and hit nothing. I drop through the floor hole. I do the job. I come back the same way." "What do you use on the wall." He patted his belt. Two thermite sticks from her welding kit. She had not seen him take them. "Michael." "Don't." He fixed his glasses. "You paid me to draw. I'm drawing the ending." She helped him strap in under the drone's frame. His arms shook again. He did not mention it and neither did she. She keyed the drone to its lowest profile and sent it out the service vent. She watched the feed on her wrist screen. The drone skimmed the trench. A rifle cracked twice and missed. It dropped through the hole in the drydock floor and the feed cut to stone. She waited. Boots hammered the deck above her. She did not move. A white flash washed the feed. Then a second. Then static. The drone crawled back up the trench four minutes later, scorched along one flank, Michael still clamped under it. He rolled free onto her deck and coughed soot into his sleeve. His beard was singed. His glasses were cracked across one lens. "Wall's gone," he said. "Room's gone. Ceiling came down on it." Jessica pressed the two folded copies flat against her ribs. The only map in the world was hers now. The boots above were closer, and they did not know it yet.