by Майк Берри
They passed aeroponics, shining their lights onto rows of wilting plants that hung suspended like rotting piñatas. Stainless steel surfaces and shiny glassware broke the beams into shards and reflected them back, speckling the corridor they stood in. The frost was heavier in aero, where a nutrient-rich mist had circulated amongst the roots of the plants, and had now condensed like fallen snow onto every surface. They moved onwards, as if through a ghost ship, awed and frightened, hardly breathing.
When they reached the stairs that led down towards the rimwards hangar-level, they stopped, as if by silent consensus. Their suits blasted jets of expelled vapour into the sterile space. They stared into that well of shadows and exchanged nervous glances. Lina was honestly scared. This had been their home ground just a day ago. And to see it like this — an alien world of ice and ruin — was just too much. She knew from the stunned, fearful faces behind their visors that the others felt it too. She heard only the sighing sound of her own powered respiration.
Fionne tried to say something, but her suit had an intermittent mic fault and her voice cut in and out rapidly, making her words utterly unintelligible. She shook her head, vexed, and tweaked the dials on the front of her chest unit while Alphe, Lina and Liu watched her mutely. She banged the unit with the flat of one hand, making a brief whine of feedback in everyone’s ears. They winced, as one body.
‘Sorry,’ said Fionne. ‘It’s — shhh — bloody stupid — shhh — can’t — shhh –’ She actually stamped a foot in anger, clearly cursing behind her faceplate, and banged the chest unit again.
Liu turned to Alphe, splashing his light into Alphe’s face, making him screw his eyes up and look away, briefly spotlit in spectral monochrome. ‘Are we waiting for anything in particular?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Alphe. ‘Just having a breather.’
Lina looked down into the stairwell, where black was layered on black in endless, impenetrable strata like seams of coal. ‘Come on,’ she said, and led the way.
They moved through the warehouse like ants through the depths of some vast machine, craning their necks to stare up into the soaring darkness. Icicles hung from metal beams like crystal tears, frozen in time.
They stopped before the hangar door and Alphe hefted the toolbox. He smiled thinly at the others and moved to an armoured junction-box between the hangar door and Charlie Stenning’s office. He prised the cover off and began to closely inspect the electrical switching gear inside. He did something unseen with a small screwdriver while the others stood kicking their heels impatiently. Briefly, the whole of the warehouse flickered into brilliant, flood-lit visibility. The waiting group inhaled sharply. Then, the lights flickered off again and a small red warning sign lit up above the hangar door. The word VACUUM glowed there like a threat.
Alphe straightened and returned to the group, skidding on the ice. ‘There,’ he said simply. Lina saw that, in keeping with his usual theme, he had already managed to smear one glove with machine oil. ‘Power.’
‘Halman could’ve let us have air, too,’ said Lina a little bitterly. ‘This’d be easier without these damn suits.’
Alphe just laughed and said, ‘Shall we, ladies and gentlemen?’ He made a sweeping after you gesture with one arm, like a butler.
Fionne stepped forwards and entered an override code into the door’s control panel. She stood back, taking a deep breath, then reached out and hit the pad. The door began to scrape laboriously open, crushed ice falling from its track in a fine powder. Inside, the hangar was lit in its customary sterile white — LED-white with a faint hint of blue in it — which served only to increase the feeling of cold.
‘Will the heating come on?’ asked Liu. ‘I’m getting a chill, even in this suit.’
‘Yeah, should do,’ said Alphe. ‘But it might take a while.’
He led the way into the hangar itself, his boots crunching unheard through the frost. ‘Remind me which one is yours, Li,’ he said. Lina pointed to K6-12. ‘Good. Let’s get to work then.’
Liu had already got one of his ground crew to pull out the larger cutting discs from the warehouse, and he retrieved these from where they had been left on the central desk and passed them to Fionne. Each was about half a metre across. ‘They look a little worn,’ he said apologetically. ‘I hope they’re okay — the heat can make them brittle over time. But these are the only two that Charlie could find.’
While Alphe and Fionne worked on her Kay, overseen by Liu, Lina took Ella to have a look at one of the other ships — K6-7, which she knew to be a relatively reliable vessel. She explained the differences between the Kays and the M-classes that Ella had flown in Platini system. Ella listened respectfully, even when Lina realised that she was patronising her a little.
‘Sounds fine,’ said Ella when she had finished.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Lina. ‘I guess it’ll have to be, won’t it?’ Suddenly, she felt the burden of her responsibility weighing down on her, physically crushing. She slumped back against the Kay and slid to the floor, her stomach clenching and knotting, her head still aching from her last meeting with Eli.
‘You don’t sound so sure,’ said Ella quietly, kneeling down beside her.
Lina wondered if she had forgotten that, no matter how quietly she spoke, she was talking on the communal radio channel. ‘Why are we here, Ella?’
‘What d’you mean?’ Ella asked, puzzled-looking. ‘You mean here?’
‘I mean why you and me? We both have kids back there. If we screw this up, they’ll have to raise each other.’
Ella sucked her lip, giving this due consideration. Then she said, deadpan, ‘They’ll get bloody good at video games, then, won’t they?’
Lina thought that was a pretty weak joke, but she appreciated the attempt. ‘Yeah,’ she said, even managing a little laugh. ‘I guess they will. Come on — let’s go and see how they’re doing. They must be almost ready for this one.’ She held out a hand so that Ella could help her up. Ella was just beginning to say something else when a red light began to pulse in the ceiling of the hangar. They stopped dead, lifting their faces as one to look at it.
‘What on Earth is that?’ asked Liu’s voice over the radio.
‘Come on!’ cried Lina, terror sparking inside her. She leapt up and sprinted off back towards where the others stood around her ship, gawping up at that incongruous, unexpected red light.
Alphe turned to her, his mouth hanging agape. ‘I think a ship is coming in,’ he said. His eyes were wide and full of animal fear.
‘A ship?’ Fionne repeated.
‘Eli,’ said Ella coldly. ‘It must be Eli.’
‘What. . .’ began Alphe, trailing off into nothing. The team stood rooted in place, dumbfounded.
And then the space door began to open in the floor, sheets of ice sloughing off it and tumbling away into space, forming a ramp that protruded like a tongue.
‘The safeties are still off!’ cried Liu. ‘We can’t stop it!’ Lina looked across at him and saw, to her dismay, that even he had now stopped smiling.
‘Weapons!’ yelled Alphe, lunging for one of the tool-boxes.
‘Weapons?’ parroted Fionne. ‘What for?’ She tried to say something else but her suit’s faulty comm shredded it into random noise.
‘If that’s Eli in that ship,’ said Lina, reaching for a large wrench that lay beside K6-12 on the floor, ‘we have to bring him in.’ She didn’t think she managed to sound any more excited by this prospect than she felt.
‘Us?!’ yelled Fionne, horrified. ‘But I. . . I can’t. . . I. . .’
‘Look!’ cried Alphe, straightening up with a hammer in his hand.
A ship was coming into sight, weaving carefully around the few errant asteroids that had come almost within mass-driver range of the station. It was a large and squarish vessel with manoeuvring jets jutting from its hide like porcupine quills and a small cockpit stuck onto the front like an afterthought: the in-system loader. It came about on a swooping arc, twisting about its
lengthwise axis to approach the station with its wheels to the ramp. They could now make out the figure of a space-suited pilot behind the console.
‘Oh shit. . .’ breathed Liu — the first time Lina had ever heard him swear. He had found himself a handheld gas-torch, which looked virtually useless as a weapon. She thought he might be able to lightly toast Eli with it, but that was about all. Eli. She remembered what the crazy bastard had done to Sal, Nik, Jayce and Tamzin, and a lump began to swell inside her throat, making it hard to breathe.
The team shuffled nervously, their faces frightened behind their visors, bristling, trying to ready themselves. They stood poised, fearful, weapons outstretched. Even Fionne had found some sharp-looking implement to arm herself with, and it looked horribly unnatural in her hand.
The ship was rolling up the ramp onto the deck of the hangar now, gas jets erupting from its hull, landing lights winking red and green. Lina could feel the tension in the bodies of her companions — those minute muscular twitches as they fought the urge to turn tail and flee.
‘We have to do this, guys,’ said Alphe, sounding a little too uncertain himself to inspire much confidence. ‘He has to be stopped here. It’s okay — there’s one of him and five of us.’
The loader was approaching, slowing, moving down the ranks of Kays towards them. They could see the pilot looking at them, now, and Lina had the sudden impression that it wasn’t Eli after all. She had sat in the pilot’s seat of the loader herself, and she was about the same height as Eli. There had been space above her head, she was sure of it. But this person looked as if they’d been crammed into the cockpit, and if so they must be absolutely huge.
Fionne was chanting, ‘Come on come on come on come on. . .’ in an endless mantra, her eyes stretched so wide open that they looked as if they might just pop from her head.
The ship turned sharply about its axis, sideways across the width of the hangar, blocking the flight deck and side-swiping Petra’s Kay. The smaller vessel rolled silently onto its side, crunching into another of its fellows, shearing off tool arms and crumpling hulls. The loader ploughed on, wrecking a third ship as it finally came to rest with injured Kays littered around it like toys that it had tired of and discarded. The pilot was hidden from sight again.
The loader settled jerkily onto its suspension, lowering slightly, its jets sputtering to a stop. The hangar was deceptively still and silent. The last wisps of condensed gas trailed away, fading into nothing. The loader’s landing lights filled the space with pulses of sick colour — putrescent green and bloody red.
At the top of the loader’s short ladder, the hatch began to open.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Carver cycled the main hatch of the loader, as the dragon had told him to do, then rushed down into the vessel’s small cargo hold with the cutter gripped in both hands. One of those hands wore an incongruous bright red glove from the ISL, a replacement for the one he had torn. It looked right, that red hand. The red hand of vengeance, he thought.
His head was thrumming and throbbing, beating like a drum, but he felt good. He felt charged. The power of the finger-necklace infused him and enfolded him. The dragon wound around his body like a shawl of dark feathers. Its voice was quieter here, further from its den, but he felt its presence nonetheless.
He emerged from the loader’s cargo hold as quietly as he could, forgetting that they wouldn’t hear his footsteps in the vacuum. He could hear their voices, though, over the radio. They were shrill and breathy, full of fear.
He ran along the body of the loader, crouched low and grinning ecstatically to himself. The cutter was heavy in his hands, solid and reassuring. As he crept past the loader’s landing gear he saw his intended victims crowded round the ladder that led up to the ship’s main hatch. They had fallen for his trick. Idiots. Let the hand of vengeance strike them down.
The cutter came alive, spluttering out globules of plasma which solidified into a continuous stream. He burst from the shadows at a run. Was that him laughing or the dragon?
Someone was slowly ascending the rungs of the ladder while the rest of the cowards hung back watching them. They looked like they were holding hammers and spanners, the hopeful fools.
Carver broke cover, accelerating to the fastest pace that he could manage in the suit, with the cutter poised above his head.
‘Where is he?’ asked a woman’s voice over the radio.
And then, just as he was about to swing the cutter, which should have neatly cut through all three of the idiots standing on the deck like a sheathe of wheat, slicing them in half at their waists, one of them — a little Asian-looking fucker — turned round and screamed.
‘LOOK OUT BEHIND!’
Clearly wired to the max, they turned as one, flinching away from him as the cutter went shimmering through the air. Its beam sliced neatly through one of the loader’s radio antennae, then passed close enough to the belly of one of the men — some inbred who looked like a fucking farmer — to singe the material of his suit. Carver actually saw the white fabric blacken as the cutter swung in its wide arc, possessed of its own unstoppable momentum.
He brought it back round in another swipe, angling down in a diagonal line, stepping in. But his feet slipped on the deck, which seemed to be covered in ice, and he fell to one knee, the cutter sizzling through one of the loader’s tyres, making the whole ship slump slightly as if threatening to simply fall on him.
Carver screamed in rage, scrabbling up, the cutter flailing in one hand, out of control. The dragon twined around him, faster and faster, hissing like a steam engine, utterly enraged.
‘Kill them! Kill them!’ it screamed distantly. ‘Don’t let them get away!’
But they were quick — quicker than he was, at least. The person on the ladder spun and leapt down onto the deck. Carver caught a brief glimpse of her face as she went. She looked like the sort who might enjoy some quality time alone with him: older than him, perhaps, but kind of handsome, with tangled blonde hair that hung across one side of her face. I’ll fucking get you! he inwardly vowed. But she was already off — they all were — and running towards the large door that gaped at the end of the room like a portal into purest darkness. He felt the dreaded miasma of failure closing in around him like poison gas.
He regained his feet, slipping and sliding maddeningly, the cutter gouging deep lines into the deck, sending up gouts of steam that blinded him. He staggered after the fleeing cowards, waving the steam away from his face, and lifted the cutter high again. One of the running figures threw a hammer back over their shoulder as they went, but Carver dodged it easily, gaining his stride, his legs pounding like great engines.
They burst out of the door and away into the station, but Carver was closing on them already. Their suits flashed whitely in his light — flapping spectres that he followed through the gloom, gaining on them, gaining on them. . . The cutter trembled keenly in his hands, spitting and gouting.
They seemed to be inside some massive warehouse where shelves like skyscrapers arced away into darkness above him. The fleeing cowards dodged around pallets of sheet metal, jumped over coils of hose, almost falling over each other as they went. He was almost close enough, now. . . almost. . .
And then his prey reached a T-junction and scattered — three left, two right. Carver skidded to a momentary halt, torn by indecision, his head bursting with pressure.
‘The woman!’ hissed the dragon. ‘Go after the woman, you fool. She and I have business still to finish. Go! Right!’
Carver took off rightwards, bellowing his rage, the cutter taking little nips out of either wall as he ran. He saw the heel of a boot disappear around the next corner and he drove himself onwards, leaving long streamers of expelled vapour behind him like contrails.
He rounded the corner and saw one of the fleeing cowards sprawled on the floor, scrabbling to regain their feet. Was it the woman? Let it be the woman! he prayed to himself as he leapt forwards and kicked the figure’s head like a foot
ball, making their helmet bounce against the floor. He dropped onto the figure’s back, seizing the fabric of their suit in one huge hand, and pulled their head up off the floor to look into the face.
‘You,’ he snarled to the little Asian-looking fucker, ‘are the wrong fucking one!’ The rage bubbled up inside him, so hot that he thought it might emerge as fire from his mouth. The face behind the visor gibbered with fear. ‘But you’ll do,’ he added, smiling with anticipation.
He knocked the little scaredy cat out by smashing his helmet on the floor a few more times, then dragged him back to the hangar and got busy. It was art, really — certainly his best work. And the dragon seemed to demand it. It hovered at the periphery of his mind, cajoling him, encouraging him, massaging that streak of darkness that pulsated in his brain like cancer. It had to be appeased. He should have caught them all, he knew.
But he didn’t allow himself to get too carried away, because those other couple of fucks had escaped, hadn’t they? Yes, and they would be back. Probably with some asshole friends, he suspected. Those sorts of people always had loads of asshole friends.
So he finished his work with the little scaredy cat and headed back out of the hangar again. He observed the small in-system ships as he passed, counting them. Fifteen in all, but one of them was in pieces, and those pieces were heaped with dust and metal shavings as if they hadn’t been touched in months. Someone had taped a handwritten sign across the ship’s partial hull, but the words on it were long-faded. And he had hit four more vessels on the way in, partly by accident and partly to appease his own childish desire for destruction. Three of these lay on their sides forlornly, clearly broken. The fourth one looked to have suffered only minor damage. Ten undamaged, then. And the loader, which he would take again.
Flying the loader had been easy, having run through a few hours of simulation. It mainly involved telling the computer where you wanted to go, and how fast, then employing whichever guidance routine was most appropriate. It hadn’t been necessary to resort to manual controls at all, in fact.
