People screamed. Papers, datasheets, emergency-ration wrappers, and drink bulbs pelted Marcus, then whipped past him up the access shaft. As the wind lifted him, too, but more slowly, the hatch rebounded from the shaft wall to slam into his side and send him spinning. Someone shoved him aside to clamber up the ladder into the station. Someone in a blue counterpressure suit and helmet. Suddenly air gushed the other way: down the shaft. Toward the shelter. Marcus crashed into a wall. Debris swirled about. As did an eight-legged something. A silvery tourist bot. “I knew you would hear me,” he told Valerie. And passed out. * * * “So what shall it be, hmm?” Jonas floated above a terminal, hands poised. “I see beacons lit for a solar farm in Cuba, a garbage-fueled municipal power plant on Aruba, and a tidal power plant in the Azores. What’s your pleasure?” Dillon shivered. Pleasure? “You know how I feel.” “I’ll take that as a vote for something dramatic, something to get this over quickly.”
