Macao Station

by Майк Берри

  They came to a ladder and Lina flew up it, propelling herself easily with little touches from her hands. She called Marco after her.

  The hub of Macao Station, at its core, was basically a metal cylinder about five metres across and almost fifty metres long. There were two ropes strung between sturdy hooks embedded in the curved wall, crossing each other in the centre of the space. The flat ends of the cylinder, far to Lina’s left and right, were large circular windows framed by concentric steel bands — real windows, not the electronic viewscreens that the rest of the station was equipped with. The belt shimmered and shuffled on one side, dark jewels on black velvet. On the other, a host of far-away stars.

  Marco emerged carefully from the hatch to float next to her, the very tip of one shoe just touching the curved floor.

  ‘Mum. . .’ he said quietly. ‘It’s awesome. . .’

  ‘Regard!’ said Lina grandly. She spread her arms to the sides like a woman about to dive into water, and jumped. She floated slowly into the centre of the cylinder, poised equidistant between those two round windows. For a moment, she hung there impossibly above Marco’s head, arms and legs swimming, feeling light-headed and unreal, caught in perfect equilibrium at the centre of Macao’s great wheel, effectively weightless. Marco uttered a wordless cry of surprise and amazement, then Lina grabbed onto one of the ropes and pulled. She fell, upwards and away from Marco, twisting her body and laughing aloud. She landed with a grace that surprised even her, knees bent and looking upwards at him, grinning foolishly and still gripping the rope in one hand.

  Her hair was floating around her head as if caught by a strong wind and she tried to smooth it back into place, then said with a casual sniff, ‘And that’s how it’s done.’ She jumped into the air and turned a perfect slow-motion somersault.

  ‘Whoa!’ cried Marco. ‘Let me try!’

  He launched himself, but too hard, and flew right across the cylinder to land beside Lina, bounce, then ricochet off again to land clockwise from her, a few metres away. The surface of the floor gripped him and applied the requisite dab of rotational velocity, pinning him very gently in place. He lay there laughing and barely daring to move, clearly aware that the slightest touch would send him flying again.

  ‘Gently!’ said Lina. ‘More gently than you think, even. You need to give a little push counter-spinwards and up, shedding the last bit of rotation as you fly. It’s a knack. On the floor of this room you have an effective weight of less than one-hundredth what you’re used to. In your case I guess that means maybe four hundred grams.’

  ‘Wow,’ he gasped again, looking down at her. Outside the windows, the view rotated slowly, asteroid belt on one side, star-speckled space on the other. ‘It feels weird. How come we never came here before?’

  ‘I guess I just forgot about it,’ Lina admitted with a shrug. She pushed off again, into the centre of the drum, where she grabbed onto the rope and allowed herself to turn with it. Marco, just above her, was attempting to right himself. ‘I used to come here when I was sad, I suppose. I always found it a good place to think. Most people seem to have forgotten that it’s here, or they never knew. Occasionally someone goes up the other spoke to service the mass drivers or the receiver, but I don’t think anyone comes this far. I always kept it to myself.’

  Marco pushed off and drifted into the air, snaring the rope next to her and holding on. ‘Are you sad now?’ he asked her frankly, face to face with her. His T-shirt billowed around his body, too big for him, really. He’d inherited it off Ella’s son Clay, who was slightly larger-built than Marco. ‘Is that why you remembered about it?’

  Lina looked into his eyes — her eyes, really, that same living green as hers, and answered honestly: ‘I suppose so, honey.’ She’d never told Marco about Sal’s brief affair with his father, which made it probably the only thing she had ever kept from him. ‘Sal was a good friend. I’d known her a long time,’ she explained. And at least that was true.

  Marco embraced her briefly with one arm, keeping hold of the rope with the other. ‘Show me that somersault again,’ he said, grinning at her.

  ‘Okay,’ Lina agreed. She pushed off from the rope, flew backwards away from Marco and hit the floor feet-first. Using the rebound, she bounced away and executed another somersault, this one even more graceful than the first. She realised as she landed again that she was laughing aloud.

  It didn’t take long for Marco to become a pro. His second somersault was as good as hers, his next one even better. Before long they were flying across the hub together, criss-crossing, hitting the floor and spinning away again, laughing and grinning and enjoying their time together. Lina had always found that the journey to the hub, through the awesome heights of the station, had given her clear perspective on events within her own life. And the weightless effect at the station’s very centre had a way of freeing the mind, as it freed the body from its usual stresses and strains. And now, with Marco here as well, she was having the most fun she’d had in years.

  They threw each other into the air, jumped and flipped and twirled like ballet dancers, pushed each other, bounced from wall to wall and eventually came to rest dead-centre again, clutching the rope and breathing hard despite the micro-gee.

  Lina’s gaze happened to settle on one of the windows. The belt hung silent outside, like something lying in wait. Her good mood drained away, like water through her fingers, into that endless space, leaving her feeling suddenly hollow and sick. Marco was saying something beside her, but she didn’t hear him. There was only the belt, rotating just before her face, just beyond that circle of glasspex. . . hypnotic, almost. . . an icy, endless swathe of textured space. She stared at it for some time, and as she did so a thought came to her, revelatory in its undeniable truth: she hated it. She hated this wasteland, this soulless desert. It had killed her friend — minced her — and yet it carried relentlessly on as if nothing had ever happened. Humans had no place in this cosmic milling-machine. Marco was right. They should go to Platini. Yeah, she thought. And maybe, if a shuttle ever comes, we will do.

  Something was out there. . . Lina craned her neck, squinting at the window. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw the gas-plume of a lone ship, slipping out of sight and away into the belt.

  ‘But all the ships are grounded,’ she whispered, feeling her eyebrows tighten in a frown.

  ‘Mum?’ cried Marco’s voice. ‘Mum!’ Lina realised that he was shaking her by the elbow.

  She turned to face him, feeling strange and disjointed. ‘Eh?’ she managed to gasp.

  ‘Mum, what is it?’ asked Marco, clearly concerned. He floated in front of her, small and perfect and vital in his oversized shirt.

  Lina grabbed him and embraced him and they floated away from the rope and down towards the curved metal of the floor. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry.’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘You’ve exceeded my expectations,’ said the crazy dragon-man. He was floating just inside the mouth of the boarding tube that clamped the asteroid to the shuttle. The restraining device had been magnetted onto the rim of the tube, tauntingly reminding Carver as he worked that he was Prisoner Carver — Prisoner Carver, and not Freeman Carver any more. It didn’t occur to him once that this was maybe his own fault, the ultimate outcome of the crimes he had committed back on Aitama. No — he blamed the crazy dragon-loving son-of-a-bitch who had now returned to make his life, he supposed, that little bit worse again.

  Carver shot a hate-filled glare at both the device and the man floated next to it, then fired up the cutter again to exclude the possibility of the bastard talking to him any more. The cutter actually created a fair amount of heat and humidity when it was in operation, but as soon as it stopped the cold began to creep back and the cave rapidly became unbearably cold again.

  Before the man had left to return to the station he had shown Carver how to bore the rock pin into the face and attach his harness to it. This prevented him from simply floating
backwards away from the face as he applied the plasma cutter — a massive and ungainly piece of equipment that filled the cavern with ringing, echoing peals of sound that overlayed each other into one deafening collage. The noise didn’t seem to be a product of the actual cutting, the melting of plasma through rock, but rather was generated inside the machine itself, which seemed a bit fucking unnecessary to Carver, but there you were. He was almost getting used to it.

  He agreed with the crazy dragon-man on one point though: he had made good progress into the face, especially considering how laborious the process was. First, holding the cutter’s muzzle some few inches from the rock, he had to inscribe a circle for each cut, angling the beam inwards to create a cone-shape. This was not always altogether simple, though. Sometimes, the cut didn’t meet up properly and he had to repeat it, sometimes more than once. Or the cut piece wouldn’t release easily from the face and he had to insert another rock pin, then use this as a handle to yank the chunk out.

  He had started off with big pieces, figuring this the least work, propelling them overhand into a distant corner of the cavern. However, when one of these, launched a little too hard, came bouncing back towards him as he worked and almost took his head off, he began to cut smaller pieces, of about a hand’s breadth at the wide end. And as the face gradually shifted and retreated, he had to adjust his harness-point, which could take several minutes each time.

  Once or twice, he had stopped, floating dazedly in the darkness. It was all just too surreal. Was he really doing this? Really? He’d considered just turning the cutter on the crazy dragon-man when — if — he returned, imagining the thrill he would feel as the bright plasma scythed through his body, vapourising blood and tissue as it went. He’d imagined the way the crazy dragon-man would scream, and how satisfying that would be to hear. But then he had imagined starving to death in this nightmarish tomb of cold stone, his fingers burning with frostbite, the shadows that danced in his suit-light his only companions as he slowly succumbed to madness and death, and had thought better of it. He’d wondered if he could torture the code out of the man, but somehow he knew the man would die before giving it to him. He’s insane, after all, Carver had reminded himself glumly. And anyway, the crazy dragon-man usually held onto the restraining device when he was around, making it impossible to actually approach him.

  So he’d worked. And he’d hoped that the crazy dragon-man would return, after whatever business he had to attend to on the station was completed. And the bastard might as well be pleased with what I’ve done when he gets back, he’d thought. So Carver hadn’t just worked; for the first time in his life of crime he’d actually worked hard, worked until he’d thought he might pass out, then continued anyway, pushing through the barrier of darkness that threatened to descend across his vision.

  And now the crazy dragon-man was back. Well, whoopee. Be careful what you wish for, he warned himself.

  The man landed near to Carver, braking his flight against the surface of the rock with one hand. He waited patiently, clinging to the rock like a white bat, staring at the side of Carver’s head.

  With a sigh, Carver released the trigger turned towards the crazy dragon-man, his pinkish face contorted with barely-restrained anger. ‘What?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘You should eat something,’ said the man. ‘And sleep. I can dig for a bit.’

  Carver wanted to bite him, maybe headbutt him in his smug, happily insane face, but of course he didn’t. ‘Okay,’ he said, holding out the cutter to the man.

  The man shook his head. ‘Bring it with you,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you into the shuttle, with the restraining device. We’ll find you some food, then I’ll leave the device by the co-pilot’s seat and you can get some sleep there.’

  Carver was instinctively reluctant to agree to anything this man had to say, but he had to admit that food and sleep sounded better than more interminable hours of cutting through rock in this icy hole. He nodded, not dignifying the man with a verbal response.

  The man pushed off from the rock-face towards the tube that led back into the service deck of the shuttle, fishlike and surprisingly agile in the micro-gee. He unclipped the restraining device from the tube and checked its little screen as he went. Carver followed a little more clumsily, encumbered by the cutter, which he had made sure was in safe mode. He missed the tube and had to grope, one-handed, across the rock, dragging himself into it while holding the cutter in the other hand. He spilled through in a disorderly landslide of limbs.

  The man was already at the other end of the tube, silhouetted against the light from the shuttle, his breath pluming in the cold, waiting for Carver to catch up. They made their way into the machine rooms, where ribbed tanks of compressed gases lined the walls. The man led the way down a long ladder to the bridge, dragging himself along on handlines attached to the walls for that purpose. It was almost unbearably hot in here, especially after the the freezing cold of the asteroid.

  Although the man was quiet for the moment, Carver could sense that irritating contentedness exuding from him in waves. He was humming gently under his breath, like a man happy in his work, content that he was doing his best in a tough job.

  They entered the shuttle’s bridge, squeezing themselves through the narrow doorway, and the man bade Carver magnet the cutter onto an equipment rack that held an assortment of battered hand-tools.

  Carver looked around the bridge: it was dark and stark and oddly-angled; the surfaces and equipment well-worn; the pilot’s couch stained with what looked like coffee or chocolate. A second chair sat beside the pilot’s, clearly a subordinate position from the relative simplicity of the control desk in front of it — the co-pilot’s chair. Carver was pretty sure these shuttles usually flew with only a single pilot, though. A third seat was positioned on the other side of the room, this one turned away from them. The large cockpit windows, actually screens arrayed across the banded expanse of the shuttle’s deuterium-shielded hull, showed a grey and uninviting vista of endless, suspended rock. Soros looked impossibly distant and unreal — a dispassionate eye watching them from another dimension.

  The man told Carver to sit on the co-pilot’s seat, then went to a locker under the flight console and produced a handful of rustling plastic packets. He clambered back across a tangle of discarded clothing, presumably the pilot’s, that was rising snakelike from the floor in response to some disruption of the air. He became caught-up, briefly, and Carver thought what an excellent moment it would be to rush the bastard. His fingers clenched, as if already seizing on the crazy dragon-man’s throat. But his gaze fell unavoidably on the restraining device and he inwardly sighed, forcing himself to relax. Patience, he told himself. Wait for the moment. Just chill.

  ‘Ship’s rations, I’m afraid,’ said the man, floating in front of Carver, as if the poor menu choice was the worst injustice he was inflicting on his prisoner. ‘There’s water here somewhere, too.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Carver answered, trying to sound as disinterested as possible, even though his stomach betrayed him with a treacherously loud growl.

  The man threw Carver the packets, which felt like they were filled with sand and were stamped with such uninspiring legends as CHICKEN-STYLE DINNER and SWEET DESSERT, then dragged himself off to retrieve the water he had spoken of. He stuck the restraining device onto the console opposite Carver, where he had no choice but to look at the bloody thing. The legend ONE PRISONER — IN RANGE glowed on its little screen. When the man came back he was grinning sheepishly and holding a metal water bottle.

  ‘It’s a bit warm,’ he said apologetically, offering it to Carver.

  The bottle was, indeed, almost too hot to touch when Carver unscrewed it clumsily with his gloved hand and raised it to his mouth. ‘Shit!’ he cried, whipping it away from his face and rubbing at his lips. ‘Where’ve you been keeping this thing?’

  ‘See?’ said the man brightly, pushing over to the pilot’s chair, where he strapped himself down and sat watching Carve
r eat, the asteroid belt an eerie backdrop behind him.

  Carver was initially disturbed by that piercing, relentless stare, but he was so hungry that he soon forgot the man was even there. He ate CHICKEN-STYLE DINNER, followed it with MEAT AND POTATOES, then sat gulping warm water, trying to wash the lumps down his gullet and into his stomach. The contents were actually not as hot as the bottle itself, which was good because he was seriously thirsty. He drank deeply and sighed with satisfaction, leaning back against the head-rest of the co-pilot’s seat, eyes closed. He ached all over now that he had stopped moving. He arched his back and stretched, as far as the chair would allow him to. When he looked up, the crazy dragon-man was still staring at him, looking particularly pleased with himself.

  ‘Needed that, eh?’ he asked Carver with a grin.

  Carver thought he could actually see the madness, capering behind the man’s eyes like a dancing jester. Despite this, though, he couldn’t help but feel a little happier now that he had eaten. The endless hours of cutting in the asteroid seemed like a distant dream, something he could almost laugh about now. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, trying not to smile himself. ‘Guess so.’

  The man nodded agreeably, then turned to look out into the belt. He sat this way in silence for a while, and then he turned back to Carver and said suddenly, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

  Carver considered this while he opened SWEET DESSERT. It proved awkward, so he took his gloves off, just casting them aside to float dreamily away into a corner of the bridge. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘In a way I guess it is.’