I’m jolted from my thoughts when I nearly open a registry while someone else is still in it, which would show them an additional user they couldn’t explain.
‘You okay?’ I jump at Cleo’s voice as she reappears. ‘You just yanked your hands back from that keyboard like it bit you. Looks like you got into the system?’
‘Strolled in.’
She folds her arms, and her tattoos seem to twine around each other, like she’s some disapproving greenhouse creature. ‘Don’t get too cocky, rich boy.’
I shrug. ‘Humans may settle the solar system, but they will never get better at passwords.’
‘Why do they even have them here? Why not handprints?’
‘For a start, your hands have to be pretty clean, and this is the greenhouse,’ I reply. ‘Some places they have them in engineering too, because of all the grease. I’m guessing not here, if you haven’t seen them.’
She gives me a quick shake of her head.
‘Only real problem with them is that they encourage hackers,’ I continue. ‘And obviously we wouldn’t want that.’
She gives me a flicker of a smile, and deep on the inside, I allow myself a mental fist pump. It shouldn’t feel this satisfying to make her forget our problems for a millisecond.
‘Figure anything out?’ she asks, resting her hands on the back of my chair and leaning over my shoulder, her cheek close to mine, which isn’t distractingat all.
‘Hard to say. There has to be a reason they’rehere, specifically. However ineffectual the UN is – no offense – people do still care at least a little bit when someone tries to screw with them. They’re, like, the fig leaf. The shield everyone uses to pretend we’re all being civilized up here. So I’m asking myself what Pax has that nowhere else does, apart from apparently shit security.’
‘I follow your logic. Got an answer?’
‘The UN Central Registers feel like the obvious choice. There’s a lot of confidential information. But what they want to do with them, who knows. And hang on, now one of them’s looking at the plant inventory. The life-support stuff – hydrogen, oxygen, this whole section of the base. Environmental controls.’
She catches her breath, the same fear running through her that’s just tensed my muscles. ‘They’re looking for us?’
‘I don’t think so, they’re not checking security cams or monitors. Maybe they just want to know how all the systems work. Or maybe they want to figure out how to break them into tiny pieces.’
‘I hate this,’ she mutters.
‘You’re not alone.’
‘I was thinking.’ She straightens up from where she leaned on my chair. ‘You know how they say, “You can run, but you can’t hide”? Well, we can’t hide unless we just want to crouch here until they blow us up in six hours or so. But maybe we can run? There aren’t any long-range vehicles left after the evac, but there are the short-range rovers. We could use one as a lifeboat if we had to. They’ve got life support, at least. Hell, we could hide in one now. The dust storm’s officially rolled in, that would give us cover.’
‘It would unless they spotted us. Then we’d be running away incredibly slowly – what do those things do, twenty-five kilometers an hour? – and with a limited range. We’d be sitting ducks once the short-range battery ran out and they could just come pick us off.’
‘Killjoy,’ she mutters. ‘We don’t …’ Her voice trails off, and I twist in my chair, suddenly sure she’s spotted a threat. But she’s just staring into space, curling a lock of red hair slowly around her finger.
‘Cleo?’
‘Therearelong-range vehicles at the base,’ she murmurs. ‘Theyarrived in them.’
I blink at her. She’s right. ‘You think we should boost one of their rovers?’
She shrugs. ‘They’ll go far enough to get us to a neighboring base. I think we should at least take a look at them.’
‘If we’re about to steal a car, I think we should break into that packet of cookies we found first, just in case. Blood sugar aids concentration, you know.’
‘You’ve never been in actual danger before,’ she informs me. ‘And it shows. You eat your cookie, I’ll be back in a minute.’
She disappears through the doorway that leads to the environmental-control equipment. I briefly consider following her, but … I do have those cookies. So I dig them out and crunch my way through one as I wait for Cleo to return.
She reappears with a small remote in one hand and a tiny drone hovering in the air in front of her, almost completely silent. She has a headband on now with an eyepiece flipped out from it, just a transparent screen that sits in front of her left eye.
‘Drone has a camera?’ I guess.
