Angel Stations

by Gary Gibson

  Keeping one gun trained on the hatch, he quickly smoothed out the smartsheet with his other hand. He glanced at it. Wasn’t there something . . .? Ah, there. The smartsheet displayed a row of buttons next to a schematic of the cargo ship. He flicked through a series of options until he found what he was looking for.

  What Elias had briefly forgotten was that he could view information about the Jager in realtime. Of course – like any standard smartsheet, it could hook into the local Grid and update automatically.

  He hit up what he needed, and watched as the schematic updated. He tapped rapidly through the decks until he got an external schematic. It showed tiny dots moving in realtime around the body of the ship.

  Bingo.

  He located the ID code for the Goblin he’d come in on and noted its coordinates, relative to the Jager, from the information running in columns next to the schematic. He next found the remote-control panel on his suit and started tapping information into it. He watched as the Goblin’s icon shifted position on the smartsheet, now moving rapidly from one side of the cargo ship to the other.

  He had not failed to notice that the cryogenics chamber in which he was trapped sat next to the hull. The realtime display – as Eduardez had cheerfully pointed out – showed where the repair work was being carried out; the hull’s outer layers stripped back, leaving inner walls exposed. Accordingly, it was clear to Elias that the section of inner hull directly over the cargo bay was remarkably vulnerable at present.

  The tiny dot of the Goblin was now directly above the cryogenics chamber. He tapped further commands into his control unit and watched as the Goblin shifted position again, this time moving further away from the cargo ship while its nose remained pointing towards it.

  Another head hovered cautiously by the service hatch. Elias aimed a shot at it and the face disappeared. Elias swore; he was now out of ammunition. Each gun had been a one-shot disposable, the best Eduardez had been able to get him at short notice. It sounded like there were several men out there, and he knew they could wait him out, or just drain the atmosphere out of the cargo bay.

  Unless.

  He halted the Goblin once it was half a klick from the hull of the cargo ship. Once he figured the Goblin was at a good ramming distance, he set its engines to maximum burn, watching as the blip indicating the Goblin on his smartsheet hurtled forward, directly towards the exposed inner hull over the cryogenics chamber.

  He waited anxiously, long, long seconds.

  ‘Murray, you’re—’ boomed a voice from the service hatch.

  It sounded first like paper tearing, then like a tornado let loose within the body of the Jager. There were sudden screams from beyond the hatch, which suddenly became faint and distant. As Elias heard his helmet snick into place, he thought about the men he’d just killed, trying not to feel remorse. It was you or them, he reminded himself. These weren’t just normal security personnel; they were something else, and they’d been waiting for him.

  He let himself slide forward into the cryogenics room and found the men were all gone, along with all the air. An emergency door had slammed down, sealing off the chamber from the rest of the Jager.

  Some of the body pods, tugged loose by the instant hurricane, were now caroming slowly around the vast interior space. Above him, part of the roof had been rent open to the endless night. He could see stars beyond. The whole bay had depressurized in maybe fifteen seconds.

  He remembered Trencher, and realized there wasn’t time to get him out, not this time. Right now, he had to get himself the hell out of there, before the emergency crews came looking for him. Elias hit the Goblin’s homing button and, a couple of seconds later, saw it descending towards him through the huge bay’s airless interior. It looked like it had had the shit battered out of it.

  He pulled himself into the pilot’s seat, surveying the damage. Looked bad, but the little Goblin was tougher than he’d thought. He guided it carefully upwards, past jagged spears of steel jutting into the hole it had torn in the side of the Jager. As Elias rocketed past the jagged edges of the Jager’s wound, he thought he caught a glimpse of something and frowned behind his visor.

  He could have sworn he’d seen bugs swarming around the breach in the hull.

  Little silver bugs?

  ‘I didn’t tell them a thing! I swear, man! For Christ’s sake, let me the fuck out of here!’

  It took Elias a minute to find the intercom button on Eduardez’s home-made airlock’s control panel. All the buttons were marked by strips of tape with Eduardez’s illegible scrawl on them, and it took a while to decipher each. In the meantime, he’d shot an occasional glance at the two-way screen that let him see Eduardez cowering inside the airlock, and let Eduardez see Elias standing menacingly outside of it.

  ‘So what does this button do?’ Elias probed a little flick switch, making sure Eduardez could see what he was doing.

  Eduardez screamed over the intercom, high-pitched like a woman, ‘No! No! Don’t touch that one! I didn’t tell anyone anything! Please—’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to do anything much,’ said Elias, keeping his voice matter-of-fact. ‘What about this one here, then? Here at the bottom? It doesn’t say anything on it.’

  There was a thud, and Elias looked up from the switch to see Eduardez’s face pushed up against the screen’s camera lens. His fingertips pressing hard against the glass were turning almost as white as Eduardez’s face.

  ‘Listen,’ said Eduardez, his voice sounding hollow over the intercom. ‘Listen, I mean it, I don’t wanna die. That’s why I’m telling you the truth, okay? I don’t know what the fuck happened to you out there, but it didn’t have anything to do with me.’ Elias made sure Eduardez could see him reaching down for the unmarked switch with a look of concentration on his face. ‘Man, that’s the override switch! In the name of Jesus, don’t touch that!’

  ‘Override switch?’

  ‘Opens the outer door! Don’t – please don’t touch it!’

  ‘Right, I’d forgotten about that,’ Elias lied. ‘But I can’t help wondering why you would want to open the outer door from way back here,’ he said. ‘You’ve already got an internal switch for opening the outer airlock door, so why would you need two?’

  ‘That’s an override you’ve got your goddamn hand on! Be really, really careful, okay? Please!’

  ‘Override, huh?’ Elias pondered for a couple of moments. ‘So let’s see. If somebody’s in there and, say, you want to help them get into vacuum quicker, then that’s the button you hit?’

  Eduardez nodded furiously. There were now tears in his eyes.

  He’s such a lizard I think I’m actually going to enjoy this, thought Elias. Some of the epoxy he had recently been using had stuck to his hands, and the skin had peeled away when he’d tried to remove it. The sore patches were now itching furiously.

  ‘I’ll just bet that’s what it’s for,’ he snarled. ‘Maybe you just thought you’d set me up, sit back and see what happened, right?’

  ‘Murray . . . Elias, please, I swear to God I said nothing.’

  Elias thought there was at least a reasonable chance Eduardez was telling the truth here. But he couldn’t be sure, so he hit the switch.

  Eduardez screamed loudly as the outer door opened. Elias watched with satisfaction as the pressure drop sucked him out of the door.

  Still screaming, he bounced around inside the large bag Elias had epoxied over the airlock exit an hour earlier. It had taken quite a while to glue it into place.

  But it now seemed worth it.

  ‘You can stop your screaming now,’ Elias growled over the intercom, ‘and stop thrashing around. The glue holding that thing on is pretty strong, but I wouldn’t take any chances with it.’

  It was a modified escape bag, a last-measure pressure balloon you could throw yourself into in the hope of rescue arriving before the bottle of air attached ran out.

  Eduardez was still thrashing around like a madman. He was not good in a panic situat
ion.

  ‘Listen, Eduardez, here’s the deal. Tell me the whole truth and I won’t leave you in this thing until the glue gives way.’

  Eduardez had pulled himself back into the airlock compartment. ‘I can hear air escaping! I ain’t kidding!’

  ‘Tell me, Eduardez.’

  ‘I didn’t do it, fuck you!’ Eduardez screamed at the top of his voice. Elias finally decided he was telling the truth. Shit.

  He’d thought maybe Eduardez had some kind of link to the Primalists, but that was starting to look unlikely, which meant Elias was running out of leads. Vaughn was in there somewhere, for sure; it was clear he’d known in advance Elias would be coming here, even back in London. And Trencher was still out there, on board the Jager. The whole situation was making some kind of impact on the Station’s news feeds but, from what Elias had seen, the owners of the Jager weren’t talking much. It looked like the whole thing might get written off as some kind of accident. And then Elias was right back where he started.

  Elias cracked open the airlock door and looked inside. Eduardez stared back at him warily. ‘I told you the truth,’ he stammered.

  ‘I don’t like the look of that unmarked button, Eduardez,’ Elias replied. ‘Can’t begin to imagine what kind of nasty things a man could get up to with a device like that.’

  Eduardez stepped out of the airlock, stared at him evenly. ‘Shouldn’t treat a man like that.’

  Elias smiled. ‘I could care less. Oh yeah, see this?’ He held up one of the airpunch syringes Eduardez had used on himself. ‘You think of doing anything bad where I’m concerned, I’ll make sure to find a way to let whoever’s in charge of the Station know that you keep a big pile of these for sale.’

  Pasquale

  Sixty thousand klicks out from the Station, and slowly building up velocity, Pasquale guided his Goblin in the direction of the inner asteroid belt. A message blinked on the screen, a legal notice reminding him not to allow the ship within a certain distance of Kasper.

  ‘Goddamn big-eared flea-infested shitheads,’ Pasquale muttered to himself. All this trouble just for a bunch of furry cavemen. All that shit back home, and here was a planet just ripe for the taking. Pasquale had Mayan ancestors, and his maternal grandmother had sworn blind that the family could be traced back to the ancient Mayan kings. He fingered the cross at his neck. Well, that was so much horseshit as far as he was concerned. Maybe those conquistadors had been pretty rough, but life all round was a lot better for progress and real civilization.

  Something glinted in the corner of his eye.

  He looked round, unsettled. Imagining things now, he thought. He’d felt worried ever since he’d left the Station only a few hours before. What if things got really bad there and there was no Station to return to?

  You’re such a worrier, he thought to himself, but it was easy to get paranoid out here. Maybe he should get on the Kasper Grid and talk to some of the other Goblins.

  There it is again, he thought, jumping up from the pilot’s seat. He put one hand on a ceiling rung and peered behind him. He leaned over the console and turned the lights up more – he preferred a kind of cosy semi-light when he decided it was evening – and moved into the rear of the ship.

  A bug.

  One of those little silver bugs, he thought, feeling sweat form on his brow. Just the one, though. Stick it in the airlock, cycle it through. Run it through the recycler, see if it likes that. Just the one. Over . . . there. He moved back, saw it disappear through a grating that led to one of the manual-override fuel-control panels.

  When he lifted the grating up, a thousand pairs of shiny metal eyes looked up at him. The Goblin shook, almost as if something inside it had come loose.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ groaned Pasquale.

  Eleven

  Pierce

  ‘Sir, they’re everywhere.’

  Pierce had just stepped into Commander Holmes’s office, to be greeted by a wall of military. In the confined space they were standing almost shoulder to shoulder, at least a dozen of them.

  ‘That’s not the news I want to hear,’ said Holmes, looking grey. ‘What about the escorts? The military ships?’

  ‘A couple of the cargo ships look to have been infected, sir. The military escort Pyongyang is definitely infected.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Pierce, pushing gently against some of the uniformed shoulders in front of him. ‘Excuse me.’

  Someone wearing the stars of a military commander turned round and glared at him. ‘Who is this man?’ he demanded, looking back to Holmes.

  ‘He’s Mayor Pierce, Commander Johoba. I’m sure you’re familiar with his role in life on the Station.’

  ‘What we’re discussing here,’ said Johoba to Holmes, ‘is not a civilian matter.’

  Pierce finally pushed his way past Johoba and saw two people he recognized: Rachel Tomason and Lindsey Mansell, both science types. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he said loudly. ‘I’ve been talking to people, too, and there’s sightings all over the place. I’d say this is very much a civilian matter now.’

  Johoba was mentally hurling daggers at him, Pierce could sense. ‘I’m hoping the Commander is considering an evacuation order,’ Pierce continued politely.

  There was a burst of angry conversation amongst the men squeezed into the small room and, if anything, Holmes looked a little greyer. ‘This situation is containable!’ somebody shouted. ‘We don’t need to evacuate anyone.’ Pierce traced the voice to an Asian man in uniform. Holmes must have every Escort Commander in the Kaspian system in here, he thought.

  ‘I thought it might help clarify the situation if Professor Tomason could say a word or two,’ said Holmes. ‘Mr Pierce,’ he glanced in his direction, ‘please remember that, until any official decisions are made through this office, everything you see or hear in this room is confidential.’ Pierce nodded acknowledgement.

  All eyes went to the two scientists. ‘As uh, some of you know,’ said Tomason, clearing her throat, ‘some artefacts, undoubtedly Angel in origin, were recovered a few months ago and have since been held in a secure facility on board the human-habitable portion of the Angel Station. The artefacts went missing three days ago, about the same time as the first sightings of these, uh, bugs.’

  Missing? Pierce stared at them. Tomason glanced in Mansell’s direction, as if seeking encouragement. Mansell nodded, and she continued.

  ‘Were they stolen?’ asked the Asian Escort Commander.

  ‘No, not stolen. In fact, we’re not too sure exactly what happened, but we can make some guesses. We had the artefacts under visual surveillance at all times. Commander Holmes?’

  Holmes nodded, and Lindsey Mansell stepped forward with a rigid smartsheet. She set it up on a little stand and tapped a small panel printed on it. An image of a room inside the secure containment facility sprang up, a date appearing in the top right corner. It showed various objects stacked neatly on shelves and on the floor, held in place in the low-g by adhesive pads. The date in the corner showed it had been recorded three days before.

  ‘This comes from our surveillance systems. What you’re seeing here is a laboratory where we stored the artefacts and made such tests as were possible within the limited resources available on the Station. The artefacts were due to be shipped soon to a better-equipped secure facility back in Sol System. However, something unexpected happened.’

  Understatement of the century, if this has anything to do with the bugs, thought Pierce. Mansell was fast-forwarding the display, then stopped it. ‘Watch that tube-like container over in the left corner. Just there.’ She pointed. ‘About now.’

  Pierce watched along with the others as the tube appeared to fracture, its smooth, metallic-blue surface rapidly developing a series of cracks. It looked like the cracked mud of a dried-out riverbed, except rendered in metal. ‘This is in realtime. The whole transformation took only a minute or so.’

  The cracks deepened, then suddenly the cylinder crumbled to pieces.

  Pi
erce stared in horror and he heard others around him gasping, or muttering under their breath. The pieces were moving. Moving like something living.

  Pierce realized he was looking at the metal bugs everyone had been hearing about – seen by somebody they knew, or by somebody who knew somebody they knew. Pierce had heard a hundred stories in the space of only a few days, but hadn’t seen anything himself. Until now.

  ‘We don’t know what triggered the change,’ said Mansell, shrugging. ‘But there are theoretical precedents for this kind of thing.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Holmes, an appalled expression on his face.

  ‘What I think we’re looking at are viral machines,’ said Tomason, stepping forward to stand next to Mansell. By now, on the screen, the bits of cylinder had scurried off out of sight into different parts of the laboratory, moving, it seemed, on tiny metal legs. ‘Self-reproducing cybernetic organisms.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ said one of the Escort Commanders, a heavy-set man who looked like he’d started to sweat a lot. These were professionals, used to commanding thousands, but they all seemed out of their depth on this one. Pierce noticed one or two others casting occasional worried glances at the floor or at the corners of the room. It took Pierce a second to realize why. They were looking for bugs, and the realization sent a thrill of fear down his spine. He even glanced down at his own feet, wondering if anything could have scurried by without his noticing.

  ‘Machines that replicate,’ said Tomason, looking weary. ‘The idea’s been around for centuries. There’s even the possibility that the Stations themselves are self-replicating, although of course nobody really knows – can know, yet. Mayor Pierce is right, people are seeing them everywhere. The footage you’ve just watched shows perhaps a dozen individual bugs at most. Everywhere you go now, people are talking about them, and from the way they talk there must be hundreds of them, if not thousands, by now. All happening in only three days.’