Heat. That was what he remembered. Heat, and the damp stickiness of air that hit the back of his throat, the sweat that trickled in rivulets down his skin, refusing to evaporate. There had been tension in the atmosphere, an air of waiting, but the storm had refused to break.
In the city, crammed into a single-room apartment with no air conditioning beyond an erratic ceiling fan, it had been an almost concrete thing. Duo was never able to recall, afterwards, what had made him snap; perhaps finally the sight of Heero returning from the Gundams' hideout, his tank top glued to his torso with sweat, had been simply too much. Perhaps he � they � had simply needed to work off a hormone overdose. They had been fifteen, if you counted in years.
Whatever the reason, it had happened. The two of them, twined together in a dripping, sliding heap of skin and need on the narrow bed as the steel blades of the fan whirred fitfully overhead and the fierce red glow of the sinking sun sent shafts of luminescence through the blinds. For a time � hours, no more � there had been no war, no Colonies, no mission. Just each other, and the drenching flood of desire scouring through them.
Afterwards, they'd collapsed silently atop soaked sheets, a tangled creature of limbs, hair and sweat. There had been no words, not then and not afterwards, because when Duo had woken Heero had been gone and mission specs had littered the floor. And in the weeks that followed it had been as if that night had never happened, the only evidence to the contrary being the slowly fading marks on his body, teeth and fingers reluctantly releasing their hold on him.
They had moved on. That was what Duo had told himself; it had happened, and they'd moved on with their lives, end of story. Perhaps they might think of each other occasionally with something more than friendship, but like all memories it belonged in the past.
Now, huddled into a computer chair in a darkened room with only the feeble glow of a few blinking LEDs for illumination, Duo was horribly aware that he had never moved on at all.
He loved Heero. And everything he had been desperately trying to believe for the past five years was a lie. All the clubs, all the guys, all the faceless nights that inevitably ended in desperate denial and self-hatred�
He loved Heero. And he knew why, now. Why nothing else, no one else, could ever be enough. And it terrified him.
Because Heero had been the one to move on, all those years ago. Heero had been the one to build a life for himself outside of war; he had been the one to request Duo as his partner, the one to set the boundaries of their relationship. Friends, maybe even best friends, but nothing more.
He had been refused before he'd even realised what he wanted. It was almost funny, in a bitter way; just another rejection in a string of so many, after all.
It hurt. Hunched in on himself in the darkness of Quatre's IT lab, Duo watched the slow green blink of the monitor lights, and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do now.
***
Quatre and Hilde found him there a few hours later, fast asleep with his head on the keyboard. At the first hesitant touch to his shoulder Duo bolted upright, only to regret it as his cheek peeled away from the plastic with a clatter of keys. "Ow," he muttered hoarsely, rubbing at his abused face and glaring at his erstwhile pillow with an expression worthy of his partner. It made him wonder how many times Heero had woken up in a similar position�
He cut the thought off abruptly as Hilde leaned down to peer at him. "Did you know you have little square imprints all over your face?" She traced some of them with a fingertip, and he had to suppress a flinch. "I can even see some of the letters."
"Hmph." Pulling himself into a sitting posture with an effort, Duo scooted the chair up to the desk and turned the machine on. God only knew when � or how � he'd managed to fall asleep, but he had work to do. There would be time for thinking later � far too much time. Leaving the computer to boot itself up, he fumbled beneath the desk for Heero's laptop bag.
When he straightened up, Quatre and Hilde were staring at him. He mustered up a nervous grin, but it didn't help much; they seemed to be trying to bore through him with their eyes alone. Reminded him far too much of another pair of eyes which had always been able to see straight through him� He held back a flinch by sheer will, hands automatically going about the task of setting up the laptop.
It hurt to look at that, too, hurt to touch the shiny spots on the casing where it had been worn by handling � by hands that had touched his own skin in passion. Once.
Hilde's touch on his arm stilled him, and he looked up to see her giving him a sympathetic gaze. "I know you miss him, Duo." Behind her Quatre nodded slowly, eyes holding something far too close to pity for Duo's liking.
"We're all scared for him," the blond chimed in quietly as he turned to the main computer and began feeding in disks. "But we're going to get him back, Duo. He's going to be okay."
Duo bit his lip. How could he tell them that his partner's safety was only the tip of the iceberg? Even if Heero was returned to them safe and unharmed, their pasts and futures would remain unchanged. He could see himself a year, two years, ten down the line, smiling and laughing, saying all the right things, being Heero's friend and partner and dying a little more inside every time Heero looked at him with nothing but friendship in his eyes.
How the hell had he managed to get himself into such a stupid situation?
"Yeah," he murmured, ducking his head in a pretence of concentration as he linked the laptop to Quatre's server and began uploading his and Heero's work-related files across the secure connection. We'll find him, but� "Which Colonies did they tell Une to get Preventers out of?"
"Hmm?" Hilde turned to him, setting aside the datareader she had been concentrating on. "L1 C sector. Why?"
"There must be something there they don't want Agents seeing," Quatre answered from across the room just as the doors opened again and the other four entered, Dorothy looking distinctly the worse for wear while Sally and Wu Fei seemed to be arguing in hissed whispers. Duo checked the time on the laptop display and started; it was almost nine GMT already; he must have slept for a good six or seven hours, despite not feeling at all refreshed.
There were more than enough workstations in the room for the seven of them to spread out, and almost inevitably they divided into their customary 'teams,' the Changs taking over one corner of the room where Sally immediately proceeded to get on the vidphone to Une. Trowa joined Quatre and they put their heads together, discussing something quietly while Dorothy leant on the back Hilde's chair and stared blearily over her head at the screen. Duo was somewhat surprised to see Hilde pat her hand briefly before going back to her work; he hadn't thought the two were particularly close, but then they had been partners for almost two years.
Returning to the laptop, he felt a knot form in his gut as he abruptly realised that he was the only unpartnered agent in the room. Suddenly Heero's absence felt like a physical thing, as though part of himself was missing; he hunched over the computer to try and avoid or deny the sensation. His partner should have been there � should have been the one doing this work, Duo thought bitterly as he connected the laptop into the Preventer vidphone lines and defined the parameters for the tracking programs. He should have been the one hanging over Heero's chair and watching his progress, making stupid suggestions that his partner had already considered and discarded. Oh, he could do the work fairly easily, but it just wasn't the same.
It was why he'd joined Preventers in the first place � the chance to work with Heero again. After the abbreviated reminder that had been the Eve Insurrection, he'd realised how much brighter the world seemed when the adrenaline of a fight was pumping through his veins. Only how much of that had been real, and how much had been Heero? Working with other partners, on the few occasions when Heero had been injured or unavailable, wasn't the same. He didn't know any of them, he couldn't read them the way he could Heero, to know every detail of him, to follow his every move before he made it.
Duo shivered unconsciously, rather belatedly realising just how attuned he'd become to the quiet Japanese man he worked with. Knew. Loved, damn it. Why was it so fucking hard to admit?
The connection was made, the tracking codes integrated into the data receivers, and suddenly Duo was staring at an empty screen. Waiting. Just as he'd waited, in vain, for words from Heero, some acknowledgement of that night they'd shared. It had never come, proof enough that Heero had indeed moved on.
"Duo." Quatre put a hand on his arm, attracting his attention before giving him a reassuring smile. It was that expression that always said 'everything is going to be OK. I have a plan,' but although Duo felt it warming over his surfaces, the core of him was still frozen. Still, habit made him smooth a grin across his face.
"I'm done setting up the link. What's next?"
"We've got half an hour or so; let's go back over the old stuff." Quatre glanced aside at his monitor for a moment, then turned back to Duo. "Did you ever find out where that van you followed last week went?"
Duo straightened with an abrupt and vicious curse, hands flickering to the computer keyboard. "Shit, I forgot all about it!" Damn, how could he have been so stupid? They'd ignored that little piece of information in favour of retrieving the data from Ibsen HQ, and somehow it had just been forgotten. He flipped through to their current case files and tried to find Heero's report of the previous week's trip to London.
"Here; 112 Lansdown Place."
"Right." Quatre typed the address into his palmtop and scooted his chair over to Duo's. "Can you get into Ibsen's database from here? Find out whether they actually had legitimate reasons to be there."
"Good idea," Duo muttered, minimising the tracker programs and connecting to Spacenet via Quatre's servers. It was almost ridiculously easy to get into Ibsen's client records; they hadn't changed their passwords in the week since he'd been in, and he was able to bypass the firewall without much effort, running a search on the address. The waiting was somewhat agonising, but nothing came up. Muttering to himself, Duo tried searching the registration code of the delivery truck, and discovered that according to official sources it was supposed to have been in for repairs that day.
"Huh." Duo frowned, logging back into the Preventer database and starting a data grab on 112 Lansdown Place, London, England. "Q, look at this." He pointed to the screen showing the Ibsen vehicle's supposed whereabouts. "Whatever they were doing, they weren't supposed to be doin' it."
"Hmm." Quatre peered over his shoulder, patting him on the back absently in what was probably supposed to be soothing gesture. "It lends some credence to the theory that this is an undercover operation within the company."
"I dunno." Duo folded his arms, chewing on his lower lip. "You really think no one knows about this? I mean, it's gotta be a pretty damn big operation."
"I'm guessing that someone near the top is masterminding this, and most of the innocent employees don't know that what they're being told to do is illegal." Quatre folded his hands in his lap, sighing. "The best thing to do would probably be to dismantle the company completely and get a full audit in, find out just who is working on the wrong side of the law."
Duo swallowed. "Holy shit, Q, we'd need a hell of a lot of evidence to justify that�"
Quatre shook his head. "There are a couple of obscure paragraphs in business law that allow freezing of all assets by Preventers if more than one executive or board member is suspected of working against the peace. I'm more worried that they'd be able to find out about the seizure and make a break for it before we could question them."
Duo set his jaw, fiddling with the laptop's touchpad. "We have to get Heero and the kid back first, before we even consider going that far." God only knew what might happen to them otherwise.
"You think Ibsen are that far into this?" Quatre asked, his eyes worried. "I have the feeling that there's something to this beyond smuggling. What we really need to know is who they deliver the weapons to."
"Yeah, but presumably the real bad guys'll know what's going on at Ibsen," Duo objected. "And I bet you they won't like it much; they might decide we're getting too close, and�" His throat closed up; he couldn't say it, but just then the computer beeped at him to attract his attention.
"Done." With a sigh of relief, he brought up the screen, scanning the information quickly. 112 Lansdown Place, secondary residence of Sir Martin Vincent Chatham, minor baronet and head of Perfect Light Laser Systems, Inc.
"Perfect Light?" Quatre was looking over his shoulder again, frowning. "I've never heard of them, they must be fairly small. I'll run a search on the company, hold on�"
But Duo never got to know what Quatre might have found out, because at that moment the laptop beeped again, signalling an incoming transmission. He checked the time and swore, raising his voice. "Guys, this is it!" He pushed back from the desk, making room for everyone to crowd around him. Quatre moved back to his own monitor, opening up the connection so that they could watch the transmissions there and leave Duo room to work.
"Can they hear us?" Hilde whispered in his ear as the line picked up with a click. Duo shook his head, absorbed in decoding the tags on the data sets that were scrolling across his screen. They'd combined the channels and blocked the originating signature, but�
"Yes!" he hissed over the sound of Relena's shaky voice answering the call. Fucking idiots, gets 'em every time� They'd secured the line by combining the audio and video feeds on the video channel and scrambling them, but neglected to realise that because of Spacenet's bandwidth restrictions, vidphone calls were parsed and streamed separately. Which left Duo with packets of empty audio-channel data being transferred to HQ � and copied through his tap.
He ignored the others utterly, letting them crowd around the larger monitor and watch the transmission, whispering among themselves. He was too busy putting a tracer on the audio-stream, watching with bated breath as it slowly tracked the data back through server relays and Spacenet intersect points to�
"L3!" Wu Fei's voice was loud in the hushed room; Duo blinked and hastily saved the data he'd collected before turning a puzzled frown on the others. They were staring intently at the monitor; Trowa was tapping something into a datareader and Hilde was muttering under her breath.
"I have already begun withdrawing Preventers from the colonies you specified�!" Une's voice was cut off into a crackling fuzz of static as the connection was severed; Duo winced, unable to meet Dorothy's bloodshot eyes or Sally's worried ones.
"L3 isn't close enough." Quatre turned to Duo. "What did you get?"
"Hmm? Oh. L3-D4993 � tail end of the cluster." He peered over their shoulders at the monitor, but it was showing nothing but static. "How'd you know�?"
"Look." Trowa tapped a key and brought up the saved file, rerunning the transmission. Duo gasped in a hissed breath as Heero's face filled his view again, deep blue eyes intent between bruised forehead and taped mouth. At least they'd let him shower, Duo thought inanely, unable to tear his gaze away from those eyes that seemed to look right through him. Eyes that closed, and opened, and�
"Morse code," Duo breathed, enlightened. The soft, brief sweep of lashes over piercing blue was making him think of warmth again; the warmth of Heero's skin against his own, the heat of desire running through them. He felt it like a physical ache from his throat to his groin, a clenching paralysis of terror mixed with raw need. Oh Christ, Heero�
He had to wrench his concentration back to the quick letters spelt out by his partner's eyes. L R G F C L T L 3 W L G R D D 0 2 R Q D I N F.
The sense of it � the message Heero had been trying to give him � struck him all at once, and he jerked in his seat, unable to look away from the gentle tip-tilted curve of lashes against cheek. Soft skin, he remembered. So soft�
No. He locked it away, ruthlessly shunting the reality of emotional connection away behind the smiling devil-may-care fa�ade that had served him so well in the past. He ran over the data again in his mind, fitting the facts together, and had decided on his plan of action before he'd finished shutting down the laptop. L3� it's near enough.
Hilde and Wu Fei were looking at him, although the others had hurried back to their terminals. Duo threw them a saucy grin, zipping the laptop back into its carrying case and shrugging into his uniform jacket. The shuttle should have some civilian clothing onboard.
"What exactly do you think you're doing?" Wu Fei asked in the strangest tone of voice Duo had ever heard from him. He'd stood up, and Duo rose to face him, flipping his hair back over his shoulder.
"What I'm told. '02 required to infiltrate,'" he quoted softly, wincing as Hilde shivered a little, clutching the arms of her chair. Wu Fei folded his arms across his chest, giving Duo a distinctly unimpressed glare.
"Like hell. You're not going anywhere without backup � 'well guarded,' remember?"
Duo grinned. "Hey, I didn't say I was going to bust in there and blow the place just yet!" He swung the laptop case idly in his hand, assuring himself that it wasn't a lie; he really hadn't said that. "I'm just gonna� check it out. Get a feel for the place, evaluate, or whatever they call it these days." He held up a hand to forestall Hilde as she began to protest that he didn't need to do it alone. "Nuh-uh, don't wanna hear it, okay?" He ruffled her hair reassuringly, getting a half-hearted growl out of her though her eyes were still worried.
Wu Fei was still looking at him like he'd suggested surrendering or something. "And the real reason you don't want backup?" Duo could see he was narrowly refraining from tapping his foot.
"Can't fool you, huh Fei?" He could feel the darkness seeping around the edges of his smile and made a conscious effort to haul back on it. "I thought, since I was gonna be there anyway, I might as well fetch my ship." He saw the confusion on Wu Fei's face and waved a dismissive hand at Hilde, whose mouth was an O of comprehension. "Ask her, man; I'm outta here." And before they could protest or even call out, he was through the door and jogging back through the corridors towards the entrance hall.
***
Three hours into the journey to L3, Duo abandoned all pretence of decoding files and slumped against the cockpit bulkhead, staring out at the darkness. Absolute blackness filled the tiny viewing window, dotted with bright pinpricks of stars. From this angle, no colonies were visible at all; the slightly larger red sparkle in the upper right quadrant was Jupiter approaching perigee. Nothing could be seen of humanity's influence on the solar system, just the grandeur and enormity of the planets' dance.
Maybe we really don't matter, in the long run. Sighing, he shut down the laptop and resolutely turned back to the little ship's control panels. It wasn't a patch on the Inferno, but he'd have her back soon � he'd even be able to legitimately use the capabilities he'd built into her. It was a good thought, and it almost distracted him from the image of Heero taped and helpless against a wall.
Is he really helpless, though? Setting the autopilot and proximity alarms to shipwide, Duo eased out of the pilot seat and propelled himself carefully towards the main cabin hatch. He was still wearing his blasted uniform, and not only was it getting more than a little ripe after almost thirty hours, it was damned conspicuous.
Tugging himself gracefully into the larger space, Duo made his way hand-over-hand along one wall towards the equipment lockers. That was another disadvantage of his current gear; he was wearing Earthside boots. Colonial footwear inevitably had magnets inserted in the soles in case of gravity failure.
The first compartment was code-locked, and prompted him for his badge number. Shrugging, Duo keyed it in and waited for the panel to slide aside, unsurprised by the small range of weaponry thus revealed. There wasn't anything there he could use; he stood only a small chance of being able to smuggle a handgun onto the colony as it was. He moved on to the next locker, and was pleased to discover it stuffed full of clothing. Of course, most of it turned out to be uniform or otherwise recognisable, but he managed to find a pair of blue jeans that weren't too big, and a couple of plain t-shirts.
It'll have to do. Stripping off the soiled uniform, Duo wandered over to the head compartment and was pleased to discover it fitted with a sonic cleanser. Thirty seconds of vaguely uncomfortable buzzing in his earbones, and he was at least un-dirty, if not clean. He'd been in worse fixes.
Surveying himself in the mirror, he rolled his eyes; he looked like space trash again. The appearance wasn't helped by the fact that his hair had gone unbrushed for longer than he cared to think about, and was straggling out of the braid like the tail of an angry cat. He looked thoroughly disreputable.
Heero, if I wasn't doing this for you� He swallowed back bitterness, kicking off from the floor and floating slowly back to the cockpit. Soon enough he would have to begin deceleration and landing, but for now he felt� useless. Empty. This little trip � he knew as well as the others had that even with the best luck in the world it was unlikely he'd be able to find Heero, let alone rescue the pair of them. Hell, he didn't even know the precise location of the kidnappers' bolthole, just that it was a large facility on D4993.
It was just that he hadn't been able to stomach the idea of sitting around in Quatre's fancy house doing make-work. Not while Heero was at the mercy of unknown parties, not when he couldn't even close his eyes without seeing that furious expression as his partner struggled against bonds. Duo shivered, watching again in memory as those intent eyes called to him � to him. Heero had as much as asked him to come, and there was just no way Duo could disobey that summons.
Bitterly, he wondered if this was going to be the blueprint for the rest of his life. Heero would call, and Duo would drop everything to go to his aid only to be thanked with a smile as Heero marched off to the next mission � the next dinner with Relena.
Oh, Heero needed him, but not in the way he could wish for.
Slumping against the bulkhead wall, Duo buried his face in his hands with a groan. Ignorance had been easier than this. Lying to himself about his feelings had meant he didn't have to hurt.
Damn it, he raged impotently, he had been happy as Heero's friend! Turning sluggishly in the minimal gravity, Duo watched with a sense of surreality as his braid imitated the movement of his body, wrapping itself around him like a streamer.
The navcomp beeped at him, intruding into his self-pity to point out that he had five minutes until deceleration. Spurred into action, Duo kicked off again, strapping himself securely into the pilot seat and undocking Heero's laptop from the shuttle computer. He settled it carefully into the padded carrier, zipping up the sides. If he remembered correctly, Heero had ordered this thing himself, and it should have�
Ah. His searching fingers found the carefully concealed catch and tugged, opening the metal-lined compartment at the bottom of the hard-sided case. Nimbly pulling the Ruger and Beretta from his waistband where he'd stuck them, he checked the magazines and then slid them carefully into the small space that had been created beneath the false bottom of the laptop case. The knife from his boot followed after a moment's thought, and his lockpicks, though he left the wire in his hair for emergencies.
The nav computer beeped more urgently, and Duo muttered something unpleasant, hastily programming in the deceleration vector and starting up the retros before toggling the com. "D5150 Port Control, this is Shuttle CP813 requesting docking clearance, over." The numbing formality of it choked him, and abruptly he longed for the contoured grips of his own vehicle beneath his fingers. Soon enough, he reassured himself.
"This is D5150 Port Control, please state your current position and vector of entry," the automated voice came back. Duo reeled off the numbers glibly, trying not to think of Heero. This next bit was probably going to be complicated.
Landing seemed to take forever, though the actual mathematics of matching speed and rotation with the torus-shaped colony was child's play to him. He fired off a message to Hilde's account while waiting for the bay to be pressurised, just to let the others know he was ditching the shuttle; he didn't want to think about what they'd do to him if they recovered the vehicle without him on it.
Finally the red light above the controller's window in the bay turned green. Breathing a sigh of relief, Duo pushed himself to his feet, stretching out the sudden kinks in his back that had presented themselves for his attention upon the resumption of apparent gravity. Cracking the airlock, he ambled down the mobile steps the docking crew had already attached, swinging the laptop case jauntily and flipping a grin at the workmen standing by to refuel.
It was more effort than he'd expected to pretend that he had all the time in the world. Everything in him was screaming that Heero was in trouble, could be in danger, needed him, and he had to remind himself rather forcefully that he was effectively undercover here. As it was, the slowness of the security guards at the spaceport checkpoint as they ushered people through the metal-detector arches almost made him scream.
The line shuffled forward slowly, and by the time it was his turn Duo was about ready to fidget himself right out of his clothes. He presented his ID � one of his alternates that dated back to the war, now used only on Preventer missions � and gave up his baggage for inspection. Since this consisted entirely of the laptop case, all the bored-looking guard did was pass it through the scanner, then pull one zip down to verify the contents. Duo sauntered through the arch with a grin on his face and accepted the bag and identification back, slipping his wallet into the back pocket of the jeans he wore and making a mental note to detour via an ATM and get hold of some cash in case he needed it.
"Welcome to New Anselm," was all the dull-eyed guard said as he was waved off to the glass-fronted spaceport plaza. Duo grinned and waved and made his way out into the throng of people crowding the main thoroughfares, making damn sure to keep a tight grip on the computer case. His destination wasn't all that far from the passenger terminal, but it was both easier and simpler to take the long way around rather than attempt to make his way through the back halls of the spaceport structure, where it would be immediately obvious that he didn't belong. A certain amount of sneaking was going to be needed anyway.
There was a cash machine on the corner of Cheap Street, directly opposite the entrance to the commercial spaceport. Duo used one of the Preventer open accounts, withdrawing a couple of hundred credits and tucking them away in his wallet just in case. Wandering away to let someone else use the machine, he kept the corner of his eye on the guards gossiping in the small security booth. He'd only need to get past them; the Inferno was docked at the far end of the port facility in a rented bay, and Duo was the only person with the locking codes.
Shouts and a loud crash from a bar down the street signalled the start of a fight, and both of the guards wandered out of their little hut, leaning on the barrier and laughing to each other as they watched the action. Duo seized his chance, dropping effortlessly into stealth mode as he sprinted across the concreted 'street' and ducked behind the guard post, shimmying through the narrow gap between the prefabricated hut and the high chain-link fence into the parking lot.
It was easy enough to put a shipping container or three between himself and the guards who were only really there to stop the depot from being used as another playground by the local kids. Once he'd covered enough distance to be easy about the thought of pursuit, Duo straightened up and began walking with a jaunty step across the tarmac towards the private bays. Every so often a forklift loader would trundle past him to fetch another outgoing load, but none of the drivers so much as gave him a second look.
The private docking bays were built directly into the colony shell, accessed through a short corridor leading from the commercial loading bays. Duo was relieved to discover no one around as he slipped down the hallway, counting off the numbers over the airlock doors. Thirty-one, thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight� Here. His fingers had reached automatically for the keypad before his eyes registered the slow blink of the green light on the panel.
Duo froze, arm still outstretched. Green? It should be red � someone's in there! A chill shot through him, curdling his stomach and crawling down his limbs in spasms of freezing fire. Someone had accessed his shuttle bay, had entered his codes, could even now be sabotaging his ship�
There was no choice. Stepping carefully to one side, Duo gripped the laptop case tightly in his fist and pressed the door panel, sliding it open with a hiss. No sound greeted him, and when he chanced a peek around the frame, the airlock was empty, a single turquoise-blue vacuum suit hanging from its niche on the wall. The iris door leading to the bay was sealed, but the panel beside it was red rather than green.
Duo breathed a sigh of relief; perhaps whoever it was had managed to break the initial code, but the airlock release was a lot more complicated. Except� he was sure there'd been two suits on the wall the last time he'd been there.
Narrowing his eyes, Duo set the heavy black bag down on the bench and carefully closed the outer door behind himself, resetting the code so that it would appear the airlock was unoccupied. Tucking his braid down the back of his shirt, he yanked down the spacesuit and began the laborious task of struggling into it, linking up the ox-gens and locking the helmet securely into place. Shrugging uncomfortably in the heavy and cumbersome rig, he wriggled his fingers into the thick gloves and carefully punched the override code into the interior door.
Nothing. Not Authorised flashed at him in big red letters, and Duo growled, stabbing his fingers into the keys again. Still nothing; someone had changed the code.
Every hair on his body tried to stand on end. It hadn't been a mistake or a prank; someone had changed his authorisation codes. Which could only mean that someone had hacked his records with the rental firm.
They knew who he was. Duo couldn't quite suppress a shudder at the thought. Even more importantly, they knew what the Inferno was. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who even knew of the ship's existence, and not one of them would have any reason to be on New Anselm.
Without taking his eyes off the still-blinking keypad, Duo reached for the computer case and opened the base compartment, extracting his weapons. The guns he stowed in his suit's thigh pockets; the knife he took to the control panel. Once he'd pried the fascia off the wall, it was easy enough to work out which wires to connect to open the airlock. Ducking as it irised slowly open, Duo snatched up the precious machine and hurled himself through, sprinting across the floor of the bay towards the sleek black machine he had built from scrap and spare parts two years ago. He could already hear the slow whine of the engines charging up, see the orange-red whirl of the warning light on the bay doors as depressurisation began.
He slammed bodily into the side of the shuttle just as it began to move into launch position, scrabbling desperately across the hull towards the secondary airlock near the tail. His own curse rang hollowly in his ears as he damned to Hell and back the sons of bitches who were trying to steal what was his. Bad enough they had stolen Heero from him, but not his Inferno. Fuck if he'd let them get away with it.
He hit the manual override for the airlock as the bay doors began retracting into the colony hull, clinging to the safety bars as a whirlwind of escaping air whooshed past him then flinging himself bodily into the tiny space, slamming a palm down on the door release and cursing as the secondary engines fired and the shuttle gathered speed. By now, whoever was piloting had to know that they'd picked up an extra passenger, but Duo had built this ship, and knew her back to front. Stowing the laptop case in the spare suit locker, he pulled the Beretta from his left pocket and cocked it as he waited for the airlock to repressurise. Whoever these guys were, they were about to get one hell of a surprise.