by Майк Берри
Lina hit the deck behind the machine, a large square thing with a plastic hood and a startling array of switches. The breath went out of her in a painful rush. Laser beams zig-zagged across the floor beside her, making her pull her knees up close to her chest. There was a loud, concussive bong! sound as something — probably another rock pin — hit the other side of the machine like a sledge hammer.
Si appeared beside her, firing as he came, ducking into cover, yelling something that Lina couldn’t hear. Shouting voices; the deafening noise of the plasma cutter; bouncing lights whose touch meant death, stitching the darkness with brilliant lethality.
She caught a glimpse of Ilse Reno, a petite figure with a red-glowing eye, clawing her way behind a large fuel tank. Lasers danced across the tank and it erupted into sudden flame, splashing Ilse with gobbets of blazing liquid as she scrabbled around it, immolating her instantly. She screamed, the pitch so high that Lina could barely hear it, and turned over, writhing as she tried to put herself out. She dragged herself around the shattered, flaming tank, as if it might still offer safety. Then, blazing and dying, she collapsed with just one burning foot protruding.
The sprinklers in the ceiling gushed to sudden life, spouting water that rebounded from every surface, clumping into crystal balls that drifted like bubbles through the air and burst afresh where they landed. The flaming fuel tank guttered but did not extinguish.
Hobbes was pinned down on the other side of the main aisle, behind a crate that was barely as big as his body, one hand over his head and the other trying to hold him still. Lina peeped out of cover and saw Rocko bouncing from behind a computer terminal, clutching his shoulder, trying to back-track towards her and Si. A prisoner flew out of the shadows to his left, and she tried to cry out, to warn him of the flanking attack, but she could not. Her voice simply died inside her throat.
Rocko spun with amazing speed and shot the man twice in the face, hitting him a third time as he fell. But Carver was almost upon him. He had the plasma cutter raised above his head, slicing into the ceiling, sending out gobbets of white-hot metal.
Lina fired at him again, but either he was somehow charmed or she was just a terrible shot, because she missed him by several metres. Ella darted out from between two tall shelves, moving like a striking shark, coming from Carver’s blind-side and hitting him bodily, knocking him back. But his magnetic boots retained contact with the floor and he immediately rebounded, swinging the cutter at her head, Rocko forgotten.
Rocko came instantly to Ella’s aid, kicking out, knocking Carver’s aim off and bringing his gun to bear on the giant. Another prisoner — a hugely fat man with a heavily-scarred face — came from behind Carver and struck Rocko on the side of his neck with what looked like a metal bar, sending him flying backwards into a rack of equipment. Ella stepped in close to Carver, kicking out at his groin. Although she connected, sending herself shooting backwards, it only seemed to anger him, and his back-swing grazed across the belly of her suit, coming within inches of her flesh.
Lina, unable to even get a clear shot at Carver, fired instead at the huge man who was floating in the air above Rocko’s prone and struggling form, hefting the metal bar in his gloved hands. Amazingly, she hit him right between his shoulder blades. The man released the bar and drifted up towards the ceiling, hands going to the burn and pawing at it in disbelief. Rocko recovered and shot him again.
Carver kicked out, doubling Ella over and launching her like a missile through the air. Instantly, he charged after her, running through a blizzard of water, the cutter flaming and blazing in his hands. Lina saw the picture of insane, murderous rage on his pinkish idiot’s face as he slashed through a power-press with the tool, sending up thick blasts of mineral steam.
Ella landed just behind Lina, crashing into a tool-rack, stunned. The pistol came out of her hand and flew away into the shadows behind them. Lina noticed a sneaky-looking, rat-faced little man with a pointed chin trying to creep up on her left, and she sent him scurrying for cover with a shot from her pistol. A red light illuminated on the weapon’s side. It had overheated.
Hobbes launched himself out from behind his box, hands still covering his neck and head, into the more substantial cover of a large waste compacter. He dragged himself over it to the other side, but Lina saw a laser beam hit him in the sole of one foot as he disappeared.
Carver was almost upon her now, but he was utterly intent on Ella, who still lay stunned and motionless. Lina popped up, aiming the laser at him. Of course, it didn’t fire. Oh shit, she thought as he turned his murderous face on her. I forgot about that. She saw Eli’s fingers strung around his neck and wondered fleetingly if her own would join them soon. Maybe he’d make a bracelet from them instead. Why not? He could start a whole fucking accessory line. In a few seconds she’d be dead, so it hardly mattered to her.
‘Aaaaarrgghhh!’ screamed Carver, flexing his huge arms at her. She could see the cords of muscle standing out above the neckline of his suit, the beads of sweat on his skin. And there was nothing in his eyes. Nothing.
Suddenly, Rocko popped up next to Carver and shot him in the side. Carver didn’t fold over in pain and he certainly didn’t die, although the hit was clearly a clean one. He did, however, spin to face Rocko, bringing the cutter around in a flickering backhand swipe. Rocko fired a burst of thrust from his suit’s arm-jet, flying back out of range. The cutter passed through some indiscernible snarl of machinery without slowing at all, sending electrical components and shorn wires flying. Smoke from the blazing fuel tank spread and drifted around the combatants. Lina smelled the repulsive savoury odour of burning meat.
‘Lina!’ Si screamed next to her. She turned to face him, feeling dreamy and slow. ‘Get out there and cut the tube! Go! Take Ella with you! We’ll push them back. There aren’t that many of them — we can do it! In thirty minutes, we’re gonna fire the jets. It’s our only chance. Now move!’
And then he rose up next to her — fearless, towering — and pushed up towards the ceiling. He passed right over Carver’s head, bounced back down to the floor and landed behind him. Carver spun, trying to bisect Si with the cutter, but Si checked his elbow, stopping the swing. For a split-second, Lina saw the two giants locked together, each straining to overpower the other, and then, with an immense effort of will, she leapt from cover.
She threw herself towards Ella, feeling something buzz angrily past her cheek, millimetres away from her skin — probably another rock pin. A laser beam, scintillating green, stroked the metal next to her, probing for flesh. She landed beside Ella, dropping her own gun and seizing her friend by the shoulders. She managed, somehow, to drag Ella round to the other side of the tool-rack. Her handhold on the rack slipped and she almost sent them both drifting into the open air, where they would have been easy prey. But she made it by sheer effort of will. The rack didn’t offer much cover, though. As if to prove this point, a laser beam passed right through one of the gaps in it, hitting the floor between Ella’s splayed legs and making a neat little burn there.
Lina slapped Ella round the face. ‘Ella!’ she screamed, spluttering out water. Rocko was shouting behind her. Hobbes too. He sounded like he was in pain. ‘Ella! Come on!’ There was a loud crash. She saw a tower of crates come apart and float away from each other, off to her right.
Ella jerked, her eyes flickering, and stiffened in Lina’s arms.
‘Wh. . .’ she managed to croak.
‘Ella! Come on!’ Lina repeated, shaking her friend by the scruff of her suit. Ella flopped uselessly, scratching Lina’s face with the zip of one glove. ‘You have to help me! Move, damn you!’
‘Lina. . .’ said Ella, fixing her with a glassy eye.
Another projectile hit something nearby, making a sound like a struck gong. Someone was moving along the racks to their left, closing in through the smoke and water vapour. The sound of Carver’s plasma cutter filled the world.
‘Move!’ Lina screamed into Ella’s face, and this time Ella move
d.
They launched themselves back towards the door they had come in by, Lina grabbing for whatever handholds she could reach. Ella became less and less of a burden as she fully returned to her senses. They dragged themselves along handlines, clawed their way along pitted walls and metal-tiled floors. Lasers probed the space behind them. Rocko was shouting, but Lina couldn’t hear the actual words. Neither did it matter any more. They had a plan. One last plan. For it to work, though, they had first to get away. Even as long shots went, she thought this was a pretty unlikely one. Would the others be able to actually beat the prisoners back to the asteroid? Maybe, if Si could defeat Carver. . . then maybe. Thirty minutes. That tube had to be severed. Their last chance.
Lina fled, rat’s teeth of panic nibbling at the edges of her mind. She tried to concentrate only on the task at hand — where the handlines were, which way to go, how much time they had. When she finally dared to look behind her there was nobody in pursuit. She had left her friends, and she felt a twinge of guilt that she thought might become an unbearable sense of remorse if she survived this and they did not. But this was how it had to be. Whatever had befallen her comrades, they had clearly slowed their attackers down enough to allow Lina’s escape. As for pushing the enemy back to the asteroid. . . who knew? Thirty minutes thirty minutes, her mind chanted. How many left?
She imagined Marco, waiting in the freezing dorm, maybe looking out at the belt, wondering whether she would return. Clay would be waiting with him. Maybe that was why Si had suggested she take Ella with her. How exactly she had ended up subordinate to Si in this matter, she didn’t know.
They flew down the ladder to the bridge level, not even bothering to touch the rungs. The vile instawall bloom protruded from the bridge like a massive fungus.
Lina was achingly aware that neither of them was armed any more. The noise of Carver’s cutter had become inaudible, but still they didn’t slow. Perhaps he had simply switched it off to mask his pursuit. Perhaps her friends were dead. Or perhaps Carver was himself dead, his posse forced back to the asteroid. Who knew? From the radio, silence punctuated by bursts of static and the occasional indecipherable yell.
She wondered if they might somehow trigger another trap, but what could they really do except attempt to touch nothing and hope that it wouldn’t happen? They hurried onwards, back towards the cargo hold, deep in the haunted bowels of the vessel.
‘What do you have in mind?’ Ella asked after a while. She was dragging herself along the line on one of the walls, giving a hard yank and then letting it run through her hand until she slowed, whereupon she would repeat the process. Lina was using a rather less elegant frantic scrabbling technique. ‘What are we going to do? You have a plan, right? Surely we aren’t just running away.’
‘I want to get back to the Kays,’ she answered, forcing the words out through the gaps in her laboured breathing.
‘What for?’
‘I’m going to cut through the boarding tube. If I can.’
Ella coasted along silently beside her for a moment. ‘Won’t that cause the dreaded blow-out?’ she asked after a while. ‘Maybe we should let it blow out?’ She turned to look at Lina, her expression cautious, clearly aware that she was suggesting the condemnation of anybody left aboard, including their friends.
‘The tube will seal itself at both ends,’ Lina replied. ‘It senses vacuum, in case you try to board a damaged ship and the ship suffers a hull breach or whatever. They used them in the Corp Wars for battlefield recovery.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t we just cut it to begin with?’ Ella demanded.
‘We were going to release it from the bridge, remember? When there was a usable bridge. Also, I guess Halman wanted to know the shuttle was clear of hostiles first. Si said he’d try to push them back to the asteroid. He gave us thirty minutes before they try a manual burn, if they can. But when we cut into the tube, any prisoners left aboard the shuttle will be stuck there with Si.’
‘Poor them,’ said Ella. It took Lina a moment to realise that this was supposed to be a joke.
They were almost at the airlock of the cargo hold now. Just a few more corners to go. They passed a large room where huge tanks stood on thick metal legs, interconnected by a complex weave of pipework. Lina didn’t know if the tanks contained water, fuel, or what. She thought about Ilse Reno, burning. The smell of roasting meat. She wondered how it felt to be burned alive. Or to drown in instawall. Or to be shot in the head with a rock pin. Maybe they were all better than freezing slowly to death in an unpowered space station.
‘Shit, Lina, this sounds like a long-shot to me,’ said Ella as they rounded the corner into the last corridor, seeing the airlock door at the far end ahead of them.
‘I suppose it is,’ Lina admitted.
‘I don’t understand why I’m here,’ said Ella. ‘What use can I be?’
‘Si told me to take you,’ said Lina. ‘So I did. He probably wanted you to act as my bodyguard.’
‘Bodyguard?’ asked Ella, frowning deeply. ‘I don’t even seem to have a gun. I was out of it for a while, there. I think that bastard knocked me out cold. So that was the dreaded Carver, eh?’
‘Yeah,’ said Lina. ‘That was him.’
They stopped before the airlock door. ‘Check my suit over,’ said Ella. ‘Then I’ll check yours.’
Lina did as instructed. Ella’s suit was clearly scuffed and marked in places, scorched across the belly, but none of the grazes looked like they had gone all the way through.
‘Looks okay, Ella,’ said Lina. ‘Is there anything on the HUD?’
Ella closed the visor of her helmet and checked, her eyes reading left to right, left to right. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you know what the computers are like in these things. Cheap plastic-printed crap.’
‘Check me,’ said Lina, holding her arms out to facilitate the process. Ella floated round her, examining her closely.
‘Looks fine. Let’s go.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Lina, closing her own visor. Glowing text overlayed her vision. ‘Let’s.’
Lina hit the cycle control and they swam inside. The door silently sealed itself behind them. They waited while the rumble of expelled air died away to nothing, leaving VACUUM warnings glowing in small text before their eyes. They headed out, back into that disturbing cavern of congealed shadow and soaring walkways. Lina’s light flashed over the still-spinning body of the man whom Rocko had shot. She looked up, where another corpse floated somewhere in the vaulted darkness, invisible.
They launched themselves through open space as quickly as they dared, using their arm jets, terrified of hitting some unseen balustrade or railing and injuring themselves or damaging their suits. But they landed intact on the wall near to Lina’s makeshift doorway, braking themselves with careful dabs of reverse thrust. Lina dragged herself along the wall and curled her fingers round the lip of the doorway.
She looked round at Ella. Her friend looked frightened and possibly in pain. ‘Here goes then,’ said Lina with forced levity.
She pulled herself out of the shuttle and emerged into the belt. Rock and ice and dark oblivion. She floated towards her ship, the nearest one to the doorway. It looked somehow small and sad, like a lost child, drifting in that vastness. At least it hadn’t been smashed by a belt object while its computer had been off. Ella emerged behind her and drifted past, tumbling and cursing. She fired her jet — the tiniest burst — and managed to regain control. She looked clumsy and ridiculous, floating there in her cheap space suit.
They looked at each other uncertainly for a moment. Then Lina nodded and fired her sleeve jet. She flew towards her Kay, her course and speed almost perfect. She reached out to grab hold of one of its tool arms. Then she worked her way through the gaping crocodile-mouth of the cockpit lid and into her seat. Checking back over her shoulder, she saw that Ella had overshot her own ship and was coming back towards it, arms outstretched to catch hold.
She closed the cockpit and fired up the c
onsole. It rebuked her for her failure to shut down correctly last time, and she cancelled its requests to run self-diagnostics. She let the cockpit flood from the onboard air tanks. The ship felt snug and comforting around her, like a second skin. She wondered how the others were doing back on the shuttle, if they were still alive. Maybe they had been captured, tortured, sculpted like Liu. You left them, said the voice inside her. Yes, she answered it. I know.
She let the gas run straight into the jets without bothering to warm them up, then brought the ship about. The shuttle looked dead, deserted from here. Surely it could conceal no danger, contain no life. It was simply a sprawling slab of metal, utterly inert.
Ella’s ship was coming around, too. Several of its tool arms began to move randomly as she hit an incorrect control, then the vessel’s main headlight flickered on, off, then on again. The tool arms stilled and the ship turned towards Lina’s.
‘Ella, stay here and listen for the radio. Your ship will relay anything it hears to mine,’ suggested Lina.
‘Sure,’ replied Ella. Her Kay fired retros and was quickly left behind. ‘Maybe I can even be some use, eh?’
The lumpen hull of the shuttle paid out beneath her as Lina dialled up the gas, heading towards the point where the shuttle’s belly was nestled against the asteroid, leaving a gap just large enough to fly through. She pushed the yoke gently forwards, bringing the nose down to point into that crevasse, dark shiny stone forming one wall and impact-scarred metal the other. Her headlight sliced through the darkness, making the asteroid sparkle as if its jagged skin concealed a wealth of tiny stars, condensed into solid matter.
Soon she was deep in the trench and could see the curved outer skin of the boarding tube where it joined the two walls together. She was bringing the cutting arms online as she went, flexing them, testing their responsiveness. The gas torch flared pitifully in that canyon of darkness. The cutting disc spun silently at the end of its arm.
She approached the tube and anchored onto it with the Kay’s magnetic clamp. A little jolt went through the ship as the clamp banged into place. She applied the gas torch to the ribbed skin of the boarding tube. Metal began to melt at once, forming little globules that drifted away into space. A brief burst of air rushed from the cut, brightening the torch’s jet. But then it stopped. The tube had sealed itself. That was good. She began to work the torch around the wide cylinder, but it was slow, painfully slow. Thirty minutes, she thought again. How many left? Rock and steel stood around her like frozen waves of impossible mass and density, looming, threatening, filling the universe.
