by Майк Берри
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, we take care of this first. Eli could still be out there, or the pilot. We deal with this first, then you and Ella go together as planned.’ Lina started to object but he stopped her with a single shake of his head. ‘Don’t fucking argue with me now, Lina,’ he said with soft menace. ‘Not now.’
Lina huffed, annoyed, and turned away. She let her light play across the ships, caress their battered hulls. ‘Fine,’ she said.
‘Lina and Waine, wait here and guard the door,’ commanded Halman softly. ‘Keep your wits about you. Anything happens, shout — I won’t be far. Actually, if you see Carver, shoot first and then shout.’ He beckoned Theo with his laser pistol. ‘Theo — with me. We’ll sweep down to the other end, check the control room, then come back.’
He waved Theo over to the other side of the hangar, and they moved off down the rows of Kays with their weapons cocked at the ready. Lina tried to take some comfort in the fact that Halman had once been a low-ranking officer in the Farsight army at Platini Alpha, but she couldn’t do it. He was still a large man, but he looked too old now, too hunched, too drawn, and although she knew the shadow of a fighter still dwelt within him somewhere, it was at best well-hidden.
Halman could be seen in silhouette, gun outstretched, skirting the central control desk and Ilse’s broken and upturned Kay while Theo moved away down the far side of the hangar. Halman approached the dead-lifter, which was parked in the middle of the flight deck, overshadowed by the loader that had pulled up on the far side, almost touching it. Suddenly, his suit-light flashed as he turned to look back towards Lina and Waine.
‘Oh shit,’ said Halman’s voice over the radio. ‘Oh shit. Oh no.’
‘What?’ demanded Lina. ‘What is it?’
‘The bastard. . .’ muttered Halman. He had stopped before the dead-lifter and was seemingly frozen in place staring at it. It looked like something was on the lifter’s forks, something torn and tattered that Lina couldn’t distinguish from her distant vantage point.
‘Come on!’ she called to Waine, already setting off at a run. Theo was also heading towards Halman, calling out to him, unanswered.
Before she actually reached him, Lina saw what Halman had found. Halman himself hadn’t seen it until he’d been right upon it, but with the benefit of his light, which was now firmly planted on the object in question, Lina could make it out quite clearly. She stopped, skidding to a halt, transfixed by what she saw hanging from the lifter’s forks. She willed her feet to continue moving, but they seemed to be stuck to the floor. Maybe she had inadvertently activated the magnets on her boots.
Whatever else Ronnie Carver might be, he was certainly creative. He seemed to have made a sculpture in human remains. The body hanging from the lifter’s forks had been not just butchered but almost entirely reworked, cut right open and somehow peeled, reshaped into something inhuman and monstrous. Ribs had been splayed open like wings, limbs had been broken and re-jointed, hands twisted into talons, flaps of meat carved crudely but enthusiastically into new forms. Scraps of space suit hung here and there like streamers. Pieces of skin and intestine, cauterised by the plasma cutter, lay strewn around the floor like bits of rubbish.
Lina knew instantly what it was: a dragon. A dragon made from a sacrificed human body, strung up with wire that had clearly come from the large spool on the floor by the central desk. A message, an omen, a harbinger of disaster cast in human flesh and blood.
‘Dragon!’ she gasped, her mind reeling in horror, flailing, grasping for something to latch onto before sanity slipped and fell away, possibly to be lost forever. It’ll eat you up! She was falling, falling into darkness that loomed beneath her like the mouth of a waiting monster. I’m going to take my son to Platini Alpha, and one day all this will seem like a bad dream, something that never really happened at all. . . And although she didn’t really believe it herself any more, that was enough — just enough — to hang onto. She stood reeling, hands to the sides of her helmet, her muscles suddenly as limp as rags, holding her up out of mere habit.
‘Oh shit,’ sighed Theo, approaching the lifter with his hand out as if to touch that hideous creation of murdered meat.
‘Don’t!’ cried Lina without thinking, as if the thing might suddenly come to life and eat Theo whole like a wolf in a children’s fairy story. She reached out one unsteady hand, meaning somehow to stop him, but it was all right — Theo stayed his hand and simply stood staring in awestruck revulsion.
Waine walked slowly past her, gliding silently as if on rails, to stand shoulder to shoulder with Halman. But Lina saw his eyes as he passed, and they looked dull and glazed in his wrinkled face.
‘That fucking bastard,’ snarled Halman, moving closer to Liu’s destroyed corpse. He turned around, his face full of horror and slowly-growing anger. ‘Poor fucking Liu,’ he said.
Lina regained control of her muscles, and she forced her feet to carry her forwards. Her throat was hitching and constricting, making her breathing heavy and hard. The thought of going out there again, into the belt, now seemed utterly unthinkable. For all her earlier determination, all her speeches to her son, she simply didn’t think she could do it now.
In her earpiece, she heard Waine begin to cry. This seemed significant to her — another bad omen.
‘This changes nothing,’ said Halman, still staring at the abomination that hung from the dead-lifter’s forks. ‘We’ll secure this area, lock the space door with my personal code, then move back towards the plaza and meet up with the other teams. Then, if we haven’t seen Carver, we’ll spread out again from there.’
Waine began to say something, his voice still unsteady, but his words were drowned by a sudden burst of noise from the radio. It sounded like massed human voices, screaming, shouting. . .
For a second Lina couldn’t work out what was happening. She scrunched her eyes shut, as if by doing so she could lessen the volume in her ears, and a question began to form on her lips. She looked at Waine, and was alarmed to see the expression on his face.
Waine’s eyes fell wide open and he said something to Lina which was inaudible against the background noise. He pointed to the hangar door behind her. Halman stared in shock. As Lina turned to look, it dawned on her what that noise was.
A veritable mob of people were storming into the hangar, the massive figure of Ronnie Carver at their fore, taller than Halman and at least as heavy as Si Davis.
As she watched, the plasma cutter came alive in Carver’s hands, making her visor darken protectively. She clutched the pistol, completely forgotten, in one fist and stared dumbly as the mob rushed towards them.
Theo was quicker to react. He ran to meet the giant, levelling the pistol at him. He fired once and the beam briefly danced around the feet of the onrushing Carver. Theo steadied himself to fire again. Nothing happened. He held the gun up, looking at it in confusion. Lina saw a red warning light glowing on its body. And then Carver was on him.
Carver brought the cutter down in a mighty overhand swipe. Theo made to block the strike with his dead pistol, but the beam of the cutter went right through the gun, sending its end twirling away into the shadows like a propeller. Then the beam went through Theo, as if he was no more substantial than a cloud of smoke, dividing him roughly about the waist in a great rush of vapour. The two halves fell away, gas rupturing from his suit. Carver’s mob of followers spread out into the hangar, whooping and jeering, leaping into cover.
Lina stood stupefied and watched as Theo died. Who the hell were all these people? Where had he found all these people?
Halman was running already, under cover of the Kays, firing his laser pistol on the fly, without pause to aim. The roaring of the attackers still filled the comm, making communication impossible. Lina looked to Waine, totally lost, knowing that her life — all of their lives — hung in the balance.
Somebody in the attacking group was firing a laser, too, as they ran along the furthest row of Kays. The shots went wild, most of them zi
pping away into the cable-festooned darkness of the ceiling. One bounced off the mirrored cockpit glass of K6-4 and hit the dead-lifter, where it left a small and understated burn in its paintwork. It was clear, however, even to Lina’s stunned mind, that the shooter was aiming for her and Waine.
‘Quick!’ she yelled, unaware that her voice was inaudible beneath the continuous war-cry of the attacking group. She darted across the open deck, feeling horribly exposed, and under the nose of the nearest ship, her boot skidding on the ice, almost slipping out from under her. She hit the deck and looked back over her shoulder.
Waine was behind her, but he was not so fast. He took a hit from the laser pistol, high on one shoulder, and his suit shredded itself like a burst balloon. He collapsed, writhing and clutching at his throat, grabbing instinctively for Lina’s leg as she scrambled further into cover. She peeked out and saw him thrashing on the floor, twisting and arching like a fish out of water. Shots from the laser stroked the deck in front of her, probing, making her duck back again, powerless to help the man who now lay dying only feet away.
The roaring was subsiding now, and Lina heard Halman’s voice over the radio. ‘The prisoners!’ he shouted. ‘The prisoners!’ Other voices came from the radio, too — desperate, aggressive exclamations and screams of rage.
Halman was right, of course — it made perfect sense. Carver had freed the prisoners and brought them here to escape on the ISL. Not just one homicidal maniac any more, but sixteen of them. How could things get any worse?
Lina scampered round to the other side of her Kay and peeked out again. The prisoners were fanning out into the hangar, running in clumsy half-crouches, keeping to the shadows. Two of them dashed into the shade of the dead-lifter where she had been only moments before, peeping out at her with ugly, feral faces. They would flush her from her hiding place at any second, as soon as they had summoned up the courage to make the next dash.
‘Halman!’ she yelled, poised in indecision, feeling like an animal caught in a hunter’s sights.
‘Lina, follow me!’ he yelled back. ‘We have to get to the door!’ She couldn’t see him any more, but she knew he was right. They had to get away. There was no hope they could win this fight.
Without allowing herself to stop, think, and then possibly die in that moment of consideration, Lina launched herself out from behind the ship and onto the open floor of the flight deck. She caught another glimpse of Halman, pinned down behind a Kay to her right, exchanging fire with the laser-armed prisoner. She ran towards him, knowing that a beam of light could end her life at any second, leave her gasping and suffocating like Waine, or maybe just blinded and convulsing in agony on the floor. She thought about what might happen if Carver captured her, about what had happened to Liu. Dragon! she thought madly. It’ll eat you up!
She landed beside Halman with a jarring crash, laser beams playing on the deck behind her. He popped up from cover, but was forced to duck back again without even getting a shot off.
‘Shit!’ he cried.
Lina, staying low on her belly, edged round the landing gear of the ship and took a quick glance towards the door. The shooter was out of sight, hiding, and she couldn’t tell where he was. But Carver was running from cover to cover, closing in on them. She caught a glimpse of the face behind the visor, and it looked pink and stupid and horribly eager. And he was close. Her mind began to gibber in fear.
Halman popped up again, letting off another shot. An answering beam flashed silently past his helmet, missing him by perhaps a hand’s breadth. It seemed the enemy had got his eye in now. Halman ducked down again, cursing.
‘Come on!’ cried Lina, desperately seizing the initiative. She knew that if they stayed put, they would die for sure. Sadly, the odds didn’t look much better if they broke cover. But what other option was there?
She threw herself round the back of the Kay, squeezing between the ship and the hangar wall, safely out of the enemy’s line of sight, but also virtually blind to what was going on. Halman was right behind her. They ran, crouched, ducking under outcropping winches and brackets and ventilation units.
And then they came face-to-face with Carver.
They skidded, Halman falling over Lina, and the giant towered above them, the cutter held high for the killing blow. She saw the fingers jumping on their string around his neck and the face behind the visor, streaked with blood. Still crouched low, she tried to shy away into the wall itself, raising one hand in a pointless attempt to protect her head, knowing that she was about to die. Oddly, she felt only a drifting, timeless sense of calm now that it came down to it. Everything slowed down. Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears, like a war drum. The world flattened and spread like oil on water. This was the end.
But Halman rolled away, his training taking over, crashing into the wall, firing the pistol as he went. Either he had been something of a crack shot in his day, or he was lucky now. Whatever the case, the beam of the laser hit Carver right in the visor of his helmet. He staggered back, dropping the cutter, which sliced a neat segment from the radar dome of the nearest Kay before going out. He reeled away, into the open, almost hit by a shot from his comrade’s laser, hands to his helmet. He screamed into the comm — a sound of maniacal rage and frustration more than pain, groping blindly for the person who had shot him.
‘Go!’ screamed Halman, scrambling to his feet.
Lina ran, her feet skidding on the icy floor in excruciating slow-motion. It was like a dream she’d used to have quite regularly back in the days when her marriage had been failing but she hadn’t had the sense to overtly acknowledge it — a dream in which she’d always found herself running from some faceless aggressor, but running without moving, as if caught in treacle, frozen in a single, hellish slice of time.
Her flight from the cover of the ship to the door of the hangar seemed to take minutes, though in fact it must have been closer to two or three seconds. Laser lights played around them, deceptively harmless-looking, miraculously touching neither of them. Suited enemies moved towards them from every angle, but too slowly.
They were out, away into the warehouse and running as fast as their suits would allow. One slip now, one tiny pause, one stumble, would mean death. Lina felt her heart beating in her head, compressive waves that made her vision fade and swim. The exhausted breath from her suit stretched out behind her in a long silky plume.
Halman seemed to keep pace with her effortlessly, and he ran beside her although she knew he could have just stormed away, leaving her easily behind. The warehouse was utterly dark after the relative brightness of the hangar, and their suit-lights bobbed and weaved crazily as they ran, slashing and slicing through the darkness. They didn’t pause to look behind them, and there was only silence from the radio. They ran beneath the crushing shadows, over the frosted metal, through the airless void of their hostile home, leaving more friends dead behind them.
Chapter Forty-Three
When they reached the next floor, Halman slowed Lina with a hand outstretched in front of her. At first, she didn’t think she could slow down, but gradually she managed to control her aching, pumping legs. They decelerated to a walk, checking behind them. There was no sign of any pursuit and nothing from the comm.
‘I think we’re clear,’ Halman said between heaving breaths. They were passing those empty living quarters again, and the area was even more desolate to Lina’s mind than the industrial coldness of the hangar had been. People should have been living here, and instead there was only this lifeless metal warren, frozen in the moment of desertion.
‘I think you’re right,’ she said, trying not to look through the doorways that they passed, keeping her light fixed on the wall at the end of the passage, where it took a turn to the left.
‘You heard anyone recently?’ asked Halman. He was still holding his laser pistol, cocked at an angle against his shoulder.
‘No,’ said Lina. ‘You?’
‘Not for a while, I don’t think, but to be honest I’ve
had other things on my mind. I should have locked the hangar door. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Carver could just cut through it. If we’d paused we’d have been killed. Like Theo. And Waine.’ Two more. She couldn’t even remember how many that made now. And what had caused it all? How had her world degenerated into this? She couldn’t work it out. Something about dragons and psychoactive drugs and shuttles and prisoners. It was all a blur inside her mind.
‘Yeah,’ said Halman darkly. ‘I guess.’ He adjusted one of the dials on his suit’s chest unit. ‘Ella!’ he yelled into the comm, with such sudden volume that Lina physically jumped.
‘Damn it, Halman!’ she yelped, feeling her heart shudder inside her as adrenalin surged through her body. She only narrowly avoided peeing in her suit, a humiliation which, although private, she certainly didn’t need.
‘Sorry,’ he said more quietly. They reached the end of the passage and Halman peered round suspiciously, gun outstretched, before leading Lina round. ‘Ella!’ he yelled again. ‘Si! Somebody fucking copy me!’
Lina wondered how she would react if Carver copied, or maybe one of his escaped mental-case friends. She thought she might scream if that happened, but luckily it didn’t.
The next time Halman called Ella, she answered.
‘I’m here, Boss,’ said Ella’s voice. But it had lost its usual strong and confident tone. Ella sounded frightened and possibly out of breath.
‘Ella,’ said Halman with a sigh of relief. ‘Bad news.’
‘I know,’ she answered. Ella sounded as if she might be running. ‘We’re on our way towards the plaza. Carver’s freed the damn prisoners! And he murdered Rachelle. Where are you?’
‘We’re back on two now,’ Halman replied, coming to a halt. He turned in place, casting his light around. ‘In the refinery quarters corridor. Don’t go near the hangar, though, Ella. Carver’s circus of freaks just fucking rushed us there. They killed Theo and shot Waine — one of the bastards had a laser.’
