by Майк Берри
Lina realised that they were in the outskirts of the belt when the vessel’s manoeuvring jets began to give their customary little nudges here and there, trying to adhere the Kay to its planned trajectory while at the same time avoiding the sometimes-erratic asteroids as they rolled and drifted through space, occasionally bumping into each other.
‘Are you listening to me, Li?’ asked Eli’s voice, making her jump.
‘Huh? Sorry?’
‘Oh, you are alive in there, then. I called you three times.’
‘Sorry, I guess I was gathering space-dust for a minute.’
‘I don’t wanna go too far in, okay? This is almost dense enough, now.’
‘Yeah, sure, just say when.’
They flew onwards for another thirty seconds or so before Eli gave the word to decelerate and set up shop.
‘The only problem with having you along, Eli,’ said Rocko as the Kays slowed to a near standstill and began to choose their rocks, ‘is that we’ll have to actually do some work today.’
‘Not that you aren’t welcome, or anything,’ added Sal with a hint of mischief in her voice.
Eli’s Kay coasted smoothly in between Lina’s and Rocko’s, its tool arms flexing like the fingers of a metal hand, reaching for a large asteroid that shimmered in its spotlight.
‘Too right,’ said Eli. ‘Have to keep an eye on you slackers, don’t I?’
‘We have to keep an eye on you more like,’ suggested Sal as her Kay coasted away from the others towards the far left of the group. It anchored onto a rock and began its work.
As they mined, Lina and Rocko drifted gradually away from the others, leapfrogging from one likely-looking asteroid to another. Typically, their samples showed almost entirely good double-M-types. The pilots were all well-experienced, adept at identifying the best targets by sight. That was one of the few things the Kays actually needed a human pilot for. The confusingly-similar albedo ratings of silicate-heavy non-double-M asteroids in the belt made radar scanning worthless. The ships rapidly analysed samples to confirm or deny the humans’ judgement. They usually confirmed it.
Sal and Eli were soon left some distance behind and to their left. Lina tried hassling Rocko about Fionne for a while, but in truth her heart wasn’t in it. He responded with steadfast patience: no, she wasn’t sick of him yet; yes, she had been keeping him up at night, thank-you-very-much; no, Rocko wasn’t suspicious of the amount of time she spent with Alphe when Rocko was on shift. Lina soon gave up this line of enquiry, defeated by his relentless good spirits. They worked in silence for a while.
Macao sat far above them, locked into its infinitely-repeating spin-cycle, a monolithic wheel in space. Even from this close, she could hardly see it at all. It looked to her like it could easily just slip below those waves of stone and sink forever, unnoticed.
The vibration from the Kay’s cutting equipment became soporific, and Lina had to literally pinch herself to stay awake. She tried to engage herself by running a full batch of system scans, but they didn’t tell her anything new and the process was an inherently tedious one. She glanced up at the HUD-marker showing Rocko’s K6-9, which was partially hidden by a huge, gnarled asteroid that looked strangely like a clenched human fist.
‘Hey, Rocko,’ she said, bored of silence now.
‘What?’ he asked, clearly suspicious of another Fionne-related enquiry.
‘Talk to me,’ she said.
‘About what?’ he asked. His Kay looked spectral in the milk-light of Lina’s ship, only half-real, an alien avatar of the man.
And then Sal spoke, her voice small and tinny, distorted even over this short distance by the belt debris. She said one word: ‘Eli!’
Lina was alert at once. There was something in the tone of that voice, a note of shrillness, even fear. That one word echoed again in her mind, portentous. She tried to quell the sudden racing of her own heart. It was probably nothing, just her own unfounded fears.
‘What is it, Sal?’ she asked, trying to inject her voice with calm, but her words were suddenly drowned by a harsh rush of noise from the cockpit speaker. Sal screamed, once, high and wavering, the top-notes clipping over the comm, then the rush erupted into a roar, devouring her voice. And then, before Lina could react in any way, there was silence.
Silence. . .
‘What the hell was that?’ asked Rocko’s voice, trembling and breathy. His Kay was still at work, its tool arms efficiently cutting and vacuuming, its thrusters giving little kicks of gas here and there, machine and mineral caught in a mindless dance.
Nobody answered. Rocko’s Kay detached from its asteroid and came about slowly. Lina also commanded her own ship to raise anchor and turn around, but her hands were shaking and it took several tries to hit the Manual Resume control and initiate the manoeuvring jets. She was struggling to breathe, her mind completely blank and paralysed, her hands reacting of their own accord, her eyes frozen so wide open that they hurt. Her heart was a wild, jittering thing that shook her whole body. A cold sweat was on her brow. She didn’t feel real. It couldn’t really be happening. . .
‘Sal. . .’ said Eli’s voice over the comm, but it didn’t really sound like Eli at all. That voice sounded thin and scared and childlike.
‘What the hell happened!?’ demanded Rocko again, almost screaming now. ‘Eli! What happened!?’
His Kay was close behind Lina’s own — too close, really — but for all she knew she could have been in the belt completely alone. Time spun out; empty space became a viscous fluid that her ship struggled to force its way through, desperately slow, and the blackness around her gathered in like drawing curtains, threatening to close on her. Not real it’s not real it’s not real it’s–
Spat!
Spat!
Spat-spat-spat!
Blood was raining across the cockpit window of Lina’s Kay. She recoiled in horror, releasing the ship’s controls, and the autopilot smoothly took over, correcting her flightpath to avoid a large and twisted hunk of metal that came whickering towards her from between two rocks. As it flew past, narrowly missing Rocko, too, Lina managed to read the legend K6-8 stamped onto its twisted surface. More debris flowed around her ship, twisted bolts and splinters of metal that bounced off the cockpit window and away into her wake. And the blood. . .
But it wasn’t just blood, now. There were specks and flecks of gristly, fibrous matter in there, too. Then when something that looked horribly like a human tooth ricocheted off the front of Lina’s ship with an audible ping, she put her head between her knees and vomited onto her boots.
Chapter Thirteen
Danyal Halman sat at his desk, watching the slow but continuous activity out in the belt, shown magnified in his office window. The Kays were doing their best to clean up after the accident, which mainly, sickeningly, meant vacuuming up the all-but vapourised and homogenised remains of Sal and her ship, now stirred into a diffuse cloud by the roving asteroids. At least nobody else had been caught in the blast. Thank whatever god you may subscribe to for small mercies.
Explosive decompression — the words wandered darkly through his mind, for about the thousandth time that night. He tried to imagine — tried not to imagine — the sucking, ripping, terrifying sensation that Sal Newman must have felt in that brief moment before her grisly death, when she had been blended through a tiny hole in the skin of her Kay, just before the ship’s structure disintegrated into flak.
He sat, watching, feeling physically weighted down, his stomach burning with acid indigestion, as if someone had lit a fire in there. He wondered absently if he was developing a stomach ulcer. Wasn’t that a fairly normal reaction of the human body to prolonged stress? Didn’t matter, he decided. He could use some time off in sick-bay, maybe let somebody else have a turn at being Station Controller for a bit. His large hands idly toyed with a small square of ceramicised germanium, turning it this way and that, twirling it between their fingers. It was the burned out chip from the scrubbers, its label blackened in
to unreadability. It was as light as a shard of bone.
The belt lay spread out like a solid swathe of desolate, rugged landscape — a hostile vista across which a man might stumble, dying, beneath the cold light of Soros forever. The little glimmers of the Kays were as insignificant as fireflies, the merest seeds of life.
Sal. Sal Newman. Sal was dead. She was not the first to die in a belt accident, but she was the first in many years now. Halman felt cheated. It shouldn’t have happened. How, damn it, how had it happened?
Eli said that her Kay had bumped into a pointed rock, piercing the hull. Simple. But that wasn’t the whole story, was it? Because the Kays weren’t supposed to be that damn stupid, or it would happen every time someone flew one through the belt. The Kays — the bloody unreliable, treacherous Kays that any humane and sensible company would have condemned — were supposed to know better. Something else had failed, and this time a person had died. Make that one more fuck-up for those greedy Farsight tight-asses. It was almost good that the array was down or Halman might have been unable to help sending them some sort of damning, ranting, career-ending message. He’d worked his whole life for the company — hell, he’d even fought for them — but he’d never been as angry with them as he was now.
On the upside, if there was one, Eli was seemingly okay. He had seen Hobbes, who had given him the once-over, offered him a sedative, which he had refused, then released him. He was shaken, but he would live. Lucky Eli. Lina had refused even to see the doctor, and had just gone home to her son. Halman thought that Marco’s company would be more beneficial to her than Hobbes’s at any rate, so that suited him just fine. Rocko had gone to see Fionne. Ditto there.
He wondered if Ella Kown should be involved, maybe interview the survivors. But what, really, was the point? Statements would have to be taken, he supposed, but there was no real rush. After all, they couldn’t be sent back by laser, and until — unless — the shuttle arrived, they couldn’t be sent via that, either. So fuck it.
The little lights moved, swarming, in the belt. They looked like carnivorous fish excited by blood in water, and the analogy made his stomach turn. He supposed that he should eat something. What time was it? Late, he thought, but the wall-clock in his office had been broken for months. It was on Sudowski’s list of things to fix, but it was way down near the bottom of Sudowski’s list of things to fix, and as such, remained broken.
And also, worryingly, the air was beginning to taste bad. At first, he’d thought he was imagining it. But as the hours ground on, he became more and more convinced that he was right. The air was beginning to taste bad. There was a chemical tang to it, like burnt ozone, that caught in the back of the throat. The scrubbers were scrubbing, but at a reduced, cautious rate designed to prolong the life of the barely-suitable replacement chip. How long did they have before it, too, burned out?
He held up the scorched square of the original chip, superimposing it over the dark rectangle of the office window where endless rocks processed away into infinity, letting the light catch on its dull edges. He turned it over, running his calloused thumb across its surface, inwardly cursing it. He felt like crying. And then, with no knowledge that he had intended to do so, he dashed it against the wall of the office with sudden ferocity. Brittle with heat-induced fatigue and age, it shattered into dust with a dry and understated little noise, its remnants raining down like ash.
Halman put his head in his hands, elbows propped on his desk, massaging his temples. His stomach ached and burned inside. He looked at the fragments of the chip, shocked that he had destroyed it, appalled at himself. What if Nik thought of some way to repair it? That, he decided, would barely surprise him at all. He tried to imagine how he’d explain his actions if that happened: Er, sorry, Nik, I smashed it in a fit of childish rage. Yeah, I guess we are all going to die, then. Did I mention I was sorry? But really, logically, he couldn’t imagine that the possibility of fixing it would ever come up anyway. Was that a good or a bad thing, bearing in mind that he had just destroyed it? He couldn’t work it out.
Sal.
Dead.
Shit. . .
He sat like that, head cradled in his big hands, smoothing the hair around his ever-enlarging bald spot, for some time. His mind became mercifully blank. He didn’t know how long he stayed that way.
And then, decisively, he got up, tapped the window several times with one knuckle until it went blank, and strode from the office without bothering to lock the door behind him.
He walked down bare and rusting corridors, large boots clanging and banging loudly, passing nobody. The heavy equipment of the refinery, usually audible through the ceiling here, was conspicuously silent.
He walked through the rec area, between the pillars that housed the supply-chutes to the dispatch department. The place was deserted, the benches below the long windows unusually empty. He exited into the plaza and soon stood in front of The Miner’s Retreat. As he approached its understated exterior, Halman heard the bubbling sound of conversation from inside. So this was where everybody had got to. He briefly considered turning away, maybe heading off to bed. But he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he did.
He pushed open the scarred and slightly-buckled door, making a bell above it ring, and surveyed the interior of the bar. It was a low-ceilinged and dimly-lit room: stark metal furniture crammed closely; small corner bar made from hideous plastic wood; a few windows, boarded over. Usually the air inside lay in blueish strata of tobacco smoke, but smoking was now banned on board in the hope that this would reduce the load on the scrubbers.
People were pressed into every available nook and cranny, talking in muted, secretive tones. There was none of the usual pleasant atmosphere, no music playing, nobody at the games machines, nobody laughing.
He pushed his way to the little bar, turning sideways and using his powerful shoulders to force through the crowd like a human wedge. He noticed, with a pang of loneliness, that his mere presence was enough to kill several conversations as he passed. Off to his right, in a shadowy corner, he saw two women from the refinery leant together, crying together, over two apparently-untouched glasses of beer. The rest of the crowd, despite the cramped confines, had left a small, respectful circle of space around them. In fact, there seemed to be a few other people crying, too. Halman knew how they felt.
He leant against the drink-slicked surface of the bar and tried to catch the eye of Gregor, the proprietor. Gregor was deep in conversation with Petra Kalistov, serving drinks mechanically to other patrons almost without looking. His hands logged sales on the computer and gave out glasses with deft autonomy.
Halman turned, looking about himself, huffing impatiently, hands stuffed into his pockets.
‘Hey,’ said a voice at his right elbow.
He started slightly and turned towards the source of the sound. It was Lina, sitting on a bar stool and cradling a tall glass of beer. She looked wan and tired, but somehow her sadness had turned her faded prettiness into a kind of ghostly beauty. Her face was paler and more drawn, but her delicate bone structure stood out more clearly than usual. Her bright green eyes and tangle of blonde hair accentuated the pallor of her skin even further, giving it the appearance of fine porcelain. Halman wondered how that idiot Jaydenne — now somewhere in Platini system — could ever have left her. He supposed that should have been a good thing for the remaining men of Macao, but Lina had never shown an interest in any of them. She was all about Marco these days. Marco first, friends second, mining firmly third. That seemed like a fair order of importance to Halman.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How long does it take to get a fucking drink in this place?’
She seemed to consider this question more deeply than it really warranted, biting her lower lip as she did so. ‘Kinda busy, isn’t it?’ she said at last.
The person to Halman’s left abruptly rose and weaved away through the throng, and Halman grabbed the vacated seat immediately, pulling it closer to Lina’s.
&nbs
p; ‘Yeah, it is,’ he agreed.
‘What d’you want?’ she asked. For a moment, he thought she meant What are you bothering me for? but then he realised she was offering to buy him a drink.
‘Oh, er, just a beer, please. Real beer. Thanks, Lina.’
She signalled with one slim hand and, to Halman’s amazement, Gregor responded immediately, as if by telepathy, flicking her a little wave in return.
‘There isn’t any real beer, remember?’ she said.
‘Oh yeah,’ he agreed, a little perturbed. He hated synthi. ‘No shuttle,’ he added quietly. Lina just nodded.
Gregor plonked the two glasses down in front of them and hit the relevant key on his bar-side computer terminal, automatically charging Lina’s station account, then whirling away to serve the next customer. Nobody bothered to insist on verification at The Miner’s — they all trusted Gregor implicitly. After all, he wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Eli’s looking after him,’ Lina said, as if Halman had asked her a question. ‘Marco. Eli’s looking after him.’
‘Good,’ replied Halman, sipping his beer. It tasted artificially-yeasty, slightly disgusting, really. ‘How is he? Eli, that is.’
Lina shrugged and drained her glass. Halman noticed the unsteady way she replaced the vessel on the bar, and that she was actually quite drunk. ‘He’s okay,’ she said, brushing an errant lock of hair back behind her ear. She seemed to be studying some tiny detail on the surface of the bar itself, tracing with one finger in a pool of spilled liquid.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Halman, and immediately wished he hadn’t. ‘About Sal,’ he added stupidly, unable to stop himself.
Lina breathed deeply for a moment, not looking at him. ‘Yeah,’ she said at last. ‘Me, too.’ Then she lifted her head and offered him a smile so sad and empty that something melted inside him.
