Macao Station

by Майк Берри

  Macao was a dying body, a failing flywheel that spun in darkness, hope diminishing with every turn. Nobody had admitted it to him, not openly, but he knew this to be true. It wasn’t that he had no faith in his mother. He practically revered her. She was the only one who had never left his side. At least, never before. He no longer even cared to know his father. With time and distance had come, inevitably, detachment. His mother, however, had always cared, always protected him. But despite his faith in her, he was angry with her for taking such a risk. He also had faith in disaster, a faith acquired across the bloody days he had endured of late. Disaster was a voracious, living thing, and he felt that it had stolen into Macao from the belt outside and taken up residence. He could not have expressed this feeling in as many words, of course, but it was no less tangible for that. Disaster had moved upon them under cover of the endless night, stealthy and scheming and fatal.

  For a while, his teacher had attempted to lead a class, there amongst the squalor of the dorm. She had bumbled along, fudging her words, confusing the subject. Triangles, he remembered. Something about triangles. As if triangles mattered right now. It wasn’t as if the key to finding the relative lengths of their sides was the same key that would restore the power, return the shuttle, bring his mother back alive. And his teacher had seemed to agree, because she had faltered, stopped, then put her hands to her face. She had been weeping silently behind those hands when she dismissed the class. Her only accomplishment had been to scare her charges. Triangles remained a mystery to them. Nobody cared.

  And so he sat. And waited. And wondered why Clay didn’t seem as concerned as he was. Ella was out there, too. Did Clay not care? Or was this just his way of coping? Whatever the case, after a while, Marco began to resent it. He would have left Clay alone and returned to his own bed, but this one had a better view of the window.

  Personal possessions still lay everywhere, scattered across the dorm like fallen soldiers, but now there were almost no clothes amongst them. It was getting cold — really cold — and people had put all their clothing to use. And the air didn’t just taste bad, now — it actually seemed to sting the nose and throat. Marco wondered if it might be connected with his growing headache. Looking around him, he saw an alarming number of people rubbing their foreheads or massaging their temples.

  Time, he knew, was running out. And almost everyone who mattered to the operation of the station had gone out there into the belt. He wondered if that was wise. Previously, he would have trusted the adults implicitly, especially Halman. He knew his mother trusted Halman, and that was as good a recommendation as Marco could have wished for. But now. . . now he was no longer sure.

  They had taken their collective eye off the ball and Eli had let madness grow inside him like rot, unseen and unsuspected. Amy Stone was now in charge at base, but barely. Marco had seen two fist-fights already since Halman and Ella had left. People talked in tight, secretive groups, in hushed and desperate tones, shooting suspicious glances at those around them. The extended family of Macao had become a gaggle of disparate, sullen little groups.

  One of the refinery guys began to play the guitar — something slow and sad and beautiful — but his attempt lasted only a minute or so before he was harangued to stop. They were in no mood for entertainment. Others watched the windows, too, waiting for salvation to emerge from that endless abyss. Maybe it still would. Maybe. The darkness shifted and swelled out there, chaos and pattern intermixed, shards of black and grey scattered like broken glass across the floor of the universe.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  ‘Down there,’ said Alphe a little uncertainly, indicating the short flight of steps at the end of the passage. ‘The bridge.’ Above the steps down was a metal ladder leading up through a hatch in the ceiling.

  ‘What’s upwards?’ asked Halman. The noise of machinery was louder here and he had to shout to be heard, which seemed somewhat at odds with the intended theme of stealth. His dark eyes were darting like flies in a jar.

  ‘The passage to the machine rooms,’ Alphe shouted back, ‘and the boarding tube.’

  ‘Is the noise coming from the machine rooms?’ asked Niya.

  Alphe shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But I suspect not. The machine rooms are for stuff like scrubbers, filtration and hydration systems, auxiliary drive systems. . . None of it’s really that loud.’

  ‘It’s coming from the asteroid,’ Lina shouted. ‘The sound’s echoing back down the boarding and rescue tube.’ She looked around at the faces of her companions. ‘They’re mining,’ she added darkly.

  ‘For what?’ asked Hobbes, hovering at Lina’s shoulder, holding fast to a handline on the ceiling.

  ‘Come on!’ ordered Halman from the front of the group before anyone could reply. He waved them onwards, but as he moved off he shot a meaningful look back at Lina. He knew, she thought. He might not be in danger of winning any chess tournaments, but she thought he knew. Ilse shoved her on the shoulder from behind, setting her moving.

  They squeezed into the shuttle’s bridge one by one, guns probing the multicoloured cavern of overhanging control panels and angular metal surfaces. Two chairs — pilot and co-pilot — were bolted to the floor before the console, conspicuously empty. The sliding covers that would rise and seal around them to make sus-an casks were retracted into the floor like drawn-back lips. Rocks tumbled outside, tagged on the main screen with distance and direction indicators. The ship’s computer was silently working away, alone, the ever-watchful idiot-guardian.

  Lina floated past Halman, feeling claustrophobic in her space suit. Bunches of cable hung from the ceiling like tendons, linking one mute hunk of equipment with another. Red and yellow telltales marbled the shadows. She braked herself against the main screen, momentarily face-to-face with the asteroid belt outside, then turned to survey the room. The others squeezed in behind her, fanning out. The grinding, hammering noise was very loud in here, the rattling growl of a machine-monster in a frenzy.

  There was another seat at the opposite side to the view-screen, turned away towards a complex-looking navigational panel. Blood had spattered in great sprays around it, darkening the lights of the panel, crusted and brown where it had pooled. Lina wondered if it was Eli’s. She decided that she didn’t really care, and was vaguely surprised at the coldness within herself. A large spanner lay on the navigational console’s dashboard: the murder weapon.

  ‘Lina!’ called Halman. She turned to see him regarding her impatiently, holding onto the pilot’s chair. ‘Don’t worry about that now.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. Someone had died here. So what? A lot of people had died. He was right — they had to focus on the task at hand. ‘Let’s release that clamp and then get the hell out of here,’ she said.

  ‘How do you do it?’ asked Halman, forcing his body into the pilot’s chair.

  ‘You see the row of injector switches?’ she asked him, floating closer.

  He peered at the panel closely. ‘These?’ he asked.

  ‘Below those, in the middle — the switch with the cowling over it.’ Lina’s companions floated, silent and spectral around her.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Halman said absently, flicking the cowling up to expose the actual control beneath it. ‘Here goes. . .’

  He flicked the switch. There was a muted bang, surprisingly understated. Halman uttered a partially-formed curse as his legs and feet were suddenly swallowed by an explosion of yellow foam. It swelled out from beneath his seat with a whispering, hissing noise, trapping and enveloping him. He half-turned, his eyes full of horror as the foam bloomed around him. His face contorted in agony as the power of the expanding instawall simply tore his arms from his body and sucked them in. Lina stared helplessly as Halman’s mouth filled with foam, choking off his cry before it could even be voiced. People were yelling, clawing to escape, and still the foam was growing. It completely covered Halman’s face and he was swallowed, thrashing weakly, then was suddenly and simply gone.

  Lina
seized one of the bunches of cable on the ceiling and pulled as hard as she could towards the doorway of the bridge. Someone was screaming, ‘It’s a fucking booby-trap!’ but she couldn’t tell who. They shot from the bridge in a single, struggling mass. Lina’s leg caught on one of Si’s arms and they entangled, struggling against each other. She turned, with Si’s hand grabbing for purchase on her suit, and saw that Niya had not been fast enough.

  The still-growing foam snared Niya by the foot as she made for the doorway, stopping her dead. She extended a desperate, questing hand towards Lina. Lina tried to scrabble free, somehow get to Niya, reach the hand, the hand, maybe she could save her if she could just reach that hand. . . But no — she was too clumsy, devoid of purchase on any surface, almost suffocated by the struggling Si. Niya’s eyes opened wide, her face a caricature of terror, and then the instawall’s terminator overtook her and she was enveloped.

  Lina pushed Si off her with a titanic effort that sent fresh agony crackling down her spine and launched herself away from the bridge. But when she turned to look behind her the instawall had stopped expanding. Its colour was darkening rapidly as it set hard, cocooning her crewmates like flies in amber. The bridge was sealed off. And her friends were gone. A yawning, dizzying blackness swirled inside her like vertigo. The rusted metal of the passageway swayed and swung around her. She put a hand to her head, her vision darkening. Don’t pass out, don’t pass out, she chanted in her mind. She bit her lip, drawing blood, and the pain served to sharpen her senses, bringing her back from the brink of that dark abyss. Somebody was crying, an inhuman sound of shock and misery. Ella? Surely not Ella.

  Si landed beside her, shoulder-first, breathing hard. ‘Halman,’ he said. ‘Oh shit, Halman. What the fuck was that?’ He looked into Lina’s face, his wide mouth hanging open. ‘What was that?’

  Lina heard her own voice say, ‘Instawall,’ but it sounded very distant, disembodied. She pressed her nose to the floor of the passage and shut her eyes, feeling the jagged little edges of rust flakes against her skin. ‘Oh shit,’ she muttered. ‘What now?’ She didn’t expect an answer. Surely there was none. Death had played an unbeatable hand. Full house.

  She felt somebody land gently beside her and looked up to see Petra towering over her. Petra’s dark hair had escaped her helmet to float around her face like an anti-halo. Hobbes appeared, too, extending a hand to help her up. She took it and heaved herself upright, utterly numb. The clattering of nearby machinery had ceased, but nobody noticed.

  Rocko was dragging himself along the ceiling towards her like a great human spider, laser pistol still clasped in one hand. When he was almost above her, he pushed off, twisting gracefully in mid-air, and landed beside her. His dark skin was shiny with sweat. ‘Well, fuck,’ he said simply.

  ‘Where’s Alphe?’ demanded Ella sharply, casting around herself. ‘Oh shit!’ she screamed. ‘Where’s Alphe?’

  They looked around themselves stupidly, calling his name, but it was clear that he was gone. As he wasn’t in the passage that left only one place. He hadn’t made it out of the shuttle’s bridge.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Ella, more quietly now. Those two little words bore a vast weight of resignation.

  Lina forced herself to stand, wincing at the new pain in her back. She supposed it would hurt much worse if she ever made it out of this micro-gee environment and it had to bear her weight again. She looked around at the faces of her companions, but they were all downcast, staring at the floor. Nobody spoke for a while as they gave silent homage to their fallen comrades. Three more. Three more. It had happened in the blink of an eye. One by one, the members of Lina’s little family were being taken, snuffed out, scrubbed from her world. She wondered if she would ever see her son again. She wished that she’d stayed behind. That way, at least they could have died together. She felt tears begin to seep from her eyes, which was odd, because she felt only a washed-out, empty shadow of resignation. This was it. This was the conclusion she had sought. Be careful what you wish for, she told herself.

  ‘What the fuck do we do now?’ asked Rocko after a while. ‘Just what the fuck do we do now?’ He looked around at the faces of his comrades. Petra was slowly shaking her head. Hobbes was silently weeping, his tears dispersing into the air like liquid crystal.

  ‘Seal off the asteroid,’ said Ella decisively. ‘Assuming Carver’s gang are all inside it. Then burn the jets from the engine rooms.’

  At first, lost in her own bottomless reverie, Lina didn’t hear her. Gradually, the words filtered into her mind. And made sense. ‘She’s right!’ said Lina, knowing that she should have thought of it herself. ‘She’s right. Trap the bastards and burn the jets manually. But we’d have to cut through the boarding tube. I don’t think it’s safe to fly with the rock joined on. The altered C-of-G would make it impossible to steer without computer. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be easy anyway. But I think it can be done.’

  ‘They all have to be in the rock, though,’ said Ella. ‘Or we just arrive home with a shuttle full of maniacs. But if we can cut them free, we can just leave the fuckers here to freeze.’

  A slow smile spread across Rocko’s face like the shadow of a storm cloud. ‘Yeah. . .’ he said. ‘Let’s do it. Let’s kill those fucking murderers.’ He seemed totally unaware of the hypocritical nature of this statement.

  ‘Which way?’ asked Lina. Shaken heads all round. Alphe had had the schematic. ‘I guess it must be up,’ she suggested. She wished she could remember for sure.

  They crawled and bounced and swam their way back to the ladder that led up into the ceiling outside the bridge. The ugly instawall flower hadn’t extended far enough to block the ladder, but it had come close. Lina was pretty sure the stuff had become inert now, but they all avoided touching it as they cautiously stepped onto the ladder one by one.

  They reached the top without incident and found themselves in another corridor — lower, darker, more jumbled with machinery. Great pipes stretched away into darkness, visible inside the meshwork walls. Blueish LEDs shone from the ceiling like cold stars. Missing wall-panels showed battered junction-boxes and badly-soldered wiring.

  ‘Come on!’ called Lina, moving off down the passage. The others followed behind her, frightened but infused with fresh purpose.

  Rocko sped past her, snagging a cable to stop himself. ‘You know how to fire the jets manually?’ he asked. ‘Cos I don’t think I do. I mean, I could do it on a Kay, but this thing must have loads of them.’

  ‘I think so,’ she replied. In truth, she had no idea — not specifically — but she was confident that she could work it out. She thought about Carver’s gang finding themselves suddenly trapped within their new prison of rock, desperate with fear and disbelief, and that renewed her energy and determination. She wondered how they could be certain that all the prisoners were actually stuck inside the rock and not wandering free somewhere in the shuttle. For all they knew, the enemy might be in the engine rooms waiting for them. She gripped her gun tightly and dragged herself onwards.

  They emerged into a wide space filled with battered industrial equipment: air scrubbers; water purifiers; a row of sus-an casks intended for passengers; racks of hand-tools; magnetic-bed trolleys; other things that Lina couldn’t even identify. The ceiling soared above them, three times the height of the corridor’s, criss-crossed with suspended walkways and hung with winches and brackets.

  ‘The machine rooms,’ said Rocko. ‘It’s not far from here.’

  Petra slid silently past Lina, her gun cocked at her shoulder. Ella followed behind her, checking between computer cabinets that towered on either side like standing stones. Lina trailed along, falling further behind until she brought up the rear with Si, who drifted beside her silently, a strong and reassuring presence on her mental radar.

  There was a sudden bang — a little exclamation of noise, nothing really — and Petra flew backwards, crashing into Ella and sending her somersaulting into a pile of canvas drive belts where she land
ed on her back. Petra’s flight continued, past Hobbes, who just managed to dodge out of the way in time. She smashed into an empty shelving unit to Lina’s left, thrashing and jerking. Lina recoiled, gasping for breath that suddenly wouldn’t come. Blood was spraying from Petra’s head in a thick, beautiful fountain of escaping life essence. A rock pin — a twenty-centimetre steel spike — had been fired into her skull, right in the centre of her forehead, where it protruded like a unicorn’s horn. Petra arched her back, throwing her limbs out, rolling up the shelving unit and onto the ceiling, globules of blood spreading around her in a ruby-red constellation.

  ‘Ambush!’ Ella screamed, diving for cover behind a cabinet.

  Si raised his pistol, firing as it came up into position, almost hitting Hobbes in his urgency. He kicked off, flying backwards towards cover, shooting as he went. Lina was firing too, aiming into the mass of white-clad, swarming shapes that was flooding into the room from the far door. At the forefront of the oncoming group was a massive giant of a man, wielding what was unmistakeably a plasma cutter. Carver.

  Lina hooked one foot around a lever that jutted from some nearby machine, pulling herself down into its protective shade as she loosed shot after shot at the giant who ran towards her, dodging and ducking low, his magnetic boots clanking and banging on the deck as they released and reattached with each step. None of her shots hit him, though. One of them actually bounced off the shiny barrel of the plasma cutter itself and hit the shoulder of another prisoner. Although the beam had diffused as it rebounded, it still had energy enough to do its job. The prisoner lost control and hit the ceiling, slapping and clawing at his shoulder. Someone shot him again and he jerked once, then fell still. A pistol drifted out of his hand and floated gently away.