by John Ayliff
‘Might not be worth the fuel,’ came Vazoya’s voice from the cockpit.
Keldra scowled, stood up, and clipped her suit to the wobbling grapnel line. She swung out into the gap and climbed hand-over-hand to the personnel airlock, moving confidently now that she had started. She reached the ledge beneath the airlock door and began fumbling with the door control.
‘It’s not going to open,’ she said after a minute.
‘What’s the matter with it?’ Olzan asked.
‘The lock’s physically jammed. We might be able to open it from the inside.’
‘We can blast it,’ Vazoya said. ‘Get the charges. The decompression might even push the thing out for us; problem solved.’
‘No!’ Keldra snapped. ‘It could be damaged.’
‘Then we can give Mr Glass the damn pieces and tell him that’s how we found it. Olzan, let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘Mr Glass won’t be pleased,’ Olzan said. The approach of the Worldbreaker was a nagging presence in the back of his mind, but every time he thought about cutting corners or doing a less than perfect job, he thought back to Emily’s last message. Do a good job here and he could marry her, get sterility reversal treatment, live like a true-born…‘Vaz, find another airlock. We’ll work our way round the inside. Keldra, get back here.’
They found another airlock a few levels up. Once again Vazoya brought them alongside and fired the grapnel, and this time Keldra climbed across without hesitation. Olzan watched her tinker with the lock for a moment and then the outer door hinged open.
‘Vaz, hold the shuttle here,’ Olzan said as he clipped himself to the line. ‘We might need to come back out this way. I’ll let you know when we reach the hangar.’
‘Take your time. If you’re not back, it’s my ship.’
‘We’ll be back.’
‘I’m serious, Olzan. I’m not waiting for the Worldbreaker to—’
‘Neither am I. We’ll be back.’
Olzan strapped the explosive charges to his suit’s backpack and then pulled himself along the grapnel line, carefully avoiding looking down. Keldra had already dealt with what little was left of the security system, and she cycled them through using the airlock’s emergency power.
The interior of the starscraper was dark, lit only by sporadic emergency lighting and the bobbing circles cast by their helmet lamps. A sound of dripping water echoed to them from somewhere deeper in the maze of metal corridors. Olzan called up a floor plan from his implant and laid it over his vision. The elevators wouldn’t be working, but there should be stairs in the central atrium. With the city’s datanet offline the implant couldn’t plot a route for him, but it wasn’t hard to see which way to go.
The atrium was a towering void that ran the entire height of the starscraper. There were arcs of piping hanging in the space, suspended by invisible cables. It took Olzan a moment to realize he’d seen something similar in the Glass family starscraper back in Santesteban, but that one had been filled with water. It was a water-sculpture: if the pumps had still been powered, a thin stream of water would have poured down the atrium, twisting towards one wall due to the Coriolis effect, and redirected by the arcs of piping into graceful curves and helices. He looked down over the railing and could see his helmet lamp’s beam reflecting off a murky surface. It looked as though the water had kept flowing for a while after the pumps had failed.
There was what looked like a stairwell on the far side of the atrium. Olzan led Keldra around the walkway towards it. Halfway to the staircase, Keldra suddenly stopped. ‘We’ve got company,’ she hissed.
Olzan followed her finger. High above the spouts of the empty water-sculpture was another cluster of bobbing lights.
Olzan did a frantic mental calculation. They could go back, but that would mean going back to Mr Glass empty-handed. ‘It’ll take them a while to go down those stairs. They don’t know where we’re going. We can lose them.’
Keldra didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t say anything.
‘Keep your head down,’ he said. It was still possible the others hadn’t spotted them. He dimmed his helmet lamp, angled it at the floor, and jogged for the stairs.
He counted the loops of the spiral staircase until they were on the correct level, then found the radial corridor that would lead to the hangar. He risked a glance upwards. The others were still above them, their lamp-beams bobbing around agitatedly. Olzan couldn’t tell what they were doing.
They left the atrium behind them and struck out towards the hangar at the edge of the starscraper. Even the emergency lights were dead on this level. The entrance to the hangar was an airlock, with a simple mechanical fail-safe to keep it shut; after they levered it open it closed automatically behind them.
They emerged onto a gallery overlooking Anastasia Zhu’s collection hall. The darkness made the space seem vast, the far wall only dimly visible in the light of their helmet lamps. What they could see of the room was in disarray. It looked like most of the smaller exhibits had been removed hurriedly, leaving toppled plinths, and the decorative hangings that had covered the bare walls were now scattered across the floor.
One large object dominated the centre of the room, something with a curved white surface, spotlessly clean. Olzan’s beam caught a name inscribed on the surface: EAS-S4 Seagull. He felt some of his worry disappear. At least finding it hadn’t been hard.
They ran their torch beams across the Seagull, trying to get an impression of its shape. It looked like a shuttle, but not like any Olzan could imagine being built in his time. It had a cylindrical body and a rounded nose, with the sleek curves that characterized Planetary Age technology. There were two odd fins stretched out from either side of the fuselage, far larger than most shuttle heat radiators. ‘What are those?’ he asked, half to himself.
‘Wings.’ Keldra’s voice was hushed, like a devout believer inside a chapel. ‘It’s a spaceplane. The wings are for flying in atmosphere. That craft, the Seagull…it would have landed on Earth.’ She held one arm out straight as if it were a wing, and moved the other hand above and below it, demonstrating something. ‘The top surface of the wing is curved, so the air pressure—’
‘Save the lecture. We need to get it out the doors so the Names can pick it up.’
He descended the metal steps to the hangar floor and scanned the far side of the room with his lamp-beams. The hangar doors and the personnel airlock were both hidden behind a set of floor-to-ceiling display cases. Hopefully there would be some way to remove them without using the explosives, so they wouldn’t have to risk damaging the spaceplane. He trudged over to them, stepping around the debris from the hasty evacuation, his boots splashing in the thin layer of oily water that covered the floor.
The display cases were airtight, climate-controlled modules designed for storing delicate artefacts. They were empty, save from some grit and curled brownish things that might have been leaves from a preserved plant. Olzan worked at the crack between two cases with his suit knife, trying to see if the cases were free-standing or attached to the wall. ‘Keldra! Give me a hand with this.’
Olzan looked around for her. She had climbed a metal stepladder that was set up next to the Seagull’s nose, and was now peering through its cockpit windows, her gloved hands almost but not quite touching the hull. ‘It’s a shell,’ she said, resentfully. ‘All the workings have been removed.’
‘Of course, they have. Taking it apart means more artefacts to put on display. What, did you think we’d be able to fly it out? Get the hell over here.’
Keldra tore herself away from the spaceplane and joined Olzan by the hangar door. She examined the display cases, crouching down to look at them from every angle. ‘They’re wired into the city’s power and hab systems. It looks like the airlock has been dismantled and its power and support lines are feeding these cases instead. Removing them will be tricky.’
‘Then we’ll have to blast them.’ Olzan unclipped the bag of explosives from his suit a
nd dropped it on the floor in front of the cases.
‘It’s tricky, but I can do it.’
He hesitated. ‘Brenn! Time check.’
‘One hour twenty-two minutes to Black Line.’ Even Brenn’s voice was starting to show some worry.
‘I can do it in half an hour,’ Keldra said.
‘All right, but I’m planting the charges now. If you’re not done in half an hour we blow it.’
‘All right.’ She opened her tool bag and set to work.
Olzan walked up the row of display cases, fixing the explosive charges between them and wiring in remote detonators he could control from his suit. With more time he would have been able to blow the hangar door open with fewer, carefully placed charges, but for now overkill would have to do, even if the shuttle took damage. Meanwhile, Keldra had managed to get one of the display cases away from the wall and was tinkering with what remained of the hangar mechanism.
The charges in place, Olzan took a look around the room, breathing deeply to try to control his nerves. Abandoned display plinths seemed to stare at him, some of them lying broken in the shallow water. The Seagull loomed over them, shining like a statue of a benevolent god, wings outstretched, the slow motion of the water casting a subtly shifting reflection of his torchlight on its polished surface. Maybe there was something to Keldra’s obsession, he thought. That artefact had survived unscathed through the Worldbreaker disaster and the early city resource wars that had wiped out all the achievements of Planetary Age civilization and reduced the human race to a tiny remnant. It would be a pity to let it be damaged now.
Another movement of light caught his eye. Up on the gallery, the door they had come in by was opening again. A wobbling torch beam shone down on them.
Olzan froze. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Keldra still tinkering with the hangar mechanism; it looked as though she hadn’t noticed the others. ‘Keldra, stop,’ he whispered over the helmet connection.
More torchlights appeared on the gallery, and Olzan could just make out the figures that carried them. There were three of them. They weren’t wearing vacuum suits, only tattered and stained city issue worker overalls. They were squat, muscular men, looking as if they were from a high-grav part of the city and used to tough manual work. Each of them carried a torch in one hand and a gun in the other, slug-thrower pistols rather than nerve guns. Olzan and Keldra’s vacuum suits were not armoured: bullets would go through them like paper. Olzan had a nerve gun at his hip but he didn’t dare go for it.
The first man’s voice rang out across the hangar. ‘Stop that. Get away from that, whatever it is. Put your hands where I can see them.’ He was pointing his gun at Keldra. The two others had their guns trained on Olzan.
Keldra didn’t move from the display case. She removed a panel and was in the middle of a tangle of wiring.
‘I said move!’
Olzan tapped Keldra’s arm. ‘Do as he says.’
She turned around, slowly. Olzan was glad the men with guns wouldn’t be able to see her expression clearly through her visor. She was fuming, as if she might erupt into violence at any moment.
‘Stay where you are.’
The three men made their way down the stairs, keeping their guns trained on Olzan and Keldra. Olzan noticed they were wearing abseiling harnesses over their clothes. He kicked himself for not thinking of it.
The leader walked around the spaceplane and shone his torch into Olzan’s face, then Keldra’s. ‘Good of you to come and get us. Don’t know what you’re doing down here, though. You must have taken a wrong turn!’
Another of the thugs sniggered. His overalls were bloodstained, and he had half a dozen human ears hanging from a string around his neck. The third thug was shifting on his feet and twitching nervously, his gun tracing a figure-of-eight path as he trained it alternately on Keldra and Olzan.
‘You’ve got a ship out there, and we want off this rock,’ the first man said.
They were close enough now that Olzan could read the name tags on their uniforms. The leader was Poldak 2484-Konradshope-023382. He had the red-eyed look of someone who had been blind drunk until taking a sobriety shot an hour or so ago, but right now the hand with which he held his gun was rock steady.
Olzan spread his hands out in a non-threatening gesture. The Thousand Names could afford to take a few passengers on to Santesteban. ‘We’ll get you all out of here. There’s no need for violence.’
‘Glad you see it that way.’ The man smiled, coldly, but didn’t lower his gun, which was now pointed at Olzan’s chest. ‘Has your shuttle got three spare suits?’
Olzan searched his memory. ‘Including the pilot’s, yes.’
‘Have him send them across. We’ll meet the shuttle at the lock where you came in.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Come on.’
‘I’ll have this lock working soon,’ Keldra said.
‘No. The lock you came in by is working now.’
‘We’re here on a job of our own,’ Olzan said. ‘We’ll give you a lift to Santesteban, but let us finish. We’ll all get out.’
Poldak glanced at the Seagull. ‘You’re here for that? Forget about it. We go now.’
‘It’s a Planetary Age spaceplane,’ Keldra explained.
‘Yeah, whatever. I’m the King of Belt Four. We go now.’
The man with the string of ears – Mardok, by his name tag – laughed again. It looked as though he could see Keldra’s discomfort and was enjoying it. ‘It’s ’Breaker dust now,’ he said.
‘We’ve still got time,’ Olzan insisted.
Poldak took a step closer to him. The gun was not quite touching his chest. ‘I don’t think you understand our arrangement,’ he said. ‘We’re not begging a lift from you. We’re stealing your ship.’
A bang made them both jump. Poldak took his eyes off Olzan to look for the source. Olzan felt his heart pound. It had been loud enough even inside the helmet. He thanked God Poldak’s finger hadn’t jumped on the trigger.
Mardok was standing beneath the Seagull, looking up at it, his gun raised and smoking. He’d placed a bullet hole dead in the centre of the circular blue logo under the spaceplane’s nose. As the echoes died away he looked round at Poldak, an inane grin on his face.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ screamed the third man. ‘We need to get out!’
Mardok shrugged. ‘Hey, lighten up. Just having some fun.’
‘Calm down, both of you,’ Poldak snapped. Then suddenly, ‘You! What do you think you’re doing?’
Keldra was back at the control panel, hiding it with her body while making some change to the wiring.
‘Get away from that!’ shouted Mardok, swinging his gun back to Keldra.
She moved away from the panel slowly, and it looked to Olzan as though she had made one final adjustment as she turned around. ‘I can still get it open in time,’ she said.
‘I said no,’ Poldak replied.
‘It’s valuable. Take it. I know of collectors who’d want to buy it to restore it.’
Mardok advanced on Keldra, grabbed her by the neck, his gun pressing into her abdomen. ‘The man said no.’ She didn’t move. Her face was locked in a snarl, angry rather than frightened; it looked as though she was deliberately restraining herself from pushing the man away.
‘We can come to an arrangement,’ Olzan said. ‘We’ll give you passage to Santesteban, and some money to get you on your feet. I can see if my employer can find space for you in his business there, good jobs. You don’t need to go to the trouble of taking over the ship.’
The third man – Soodok – was almost hopping from foot to foot. ‘Let’s go, already. They’ve offered us passage.’
‘We’re taking the ship,’ Poldak said. ‘Sorry, but I can’t trust you any other way. If you’re in control there’s nothing stopping you from slave-spiking us in our sleep.’
‘What’s stopping you from doing the same to us?’
‘My word as a gentleman.’ His smile
was mixed with a slightly confused look, which puzzled Olzan. He hadn’t said it with the conviction of his earlier joke.
‘We can come to a deal,’ Olzan said. ‘My implant can be set to a conditional trigger. We’ll set it so that if any of you are harmed, it’ll wipe me as well. That’s a guarantee of safe passage. Right?’
Poldak blinked, slowly, keeping his eyes closed for several seconds, as if it took him that long to process what Olzan had said. ‘Don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust you to set up the implant right.’
‘All right. How about this? My ship has two grav-rings. They’ve got separate hab systems, separate everything. We’ll give you one of them, all the way to Santesteban or wherever you’d like to go. You can decouple the life support systems from the rest of the ship; disable the transit hub. Short of dismantling our own ship there’s no way we could reach you.’
‘That sounds…sounds reasonable. I think we can deal.’ He nodded, and slowly lowered his gun. His hand, previously rock steady, was wobbling in little circles. He stared at it as if seeing it for the first time, then blinked and shook his head. ‘Sobriety shot. Damn side effects.’
Soodok was hopping from foot to foot. ‘Told you, you shouldn’t have drunk. Now let’s go. Gotta go gotta go gotta go.’
Another gunshot split the air. Poldak’s and Soodok’s reactions were noticeably slower than before as they turned to look at Mardok. He was laughing raucously, once again pointing the gun up at the Seagull. The bullet hole was a good metre from his target.
Poldak’s expression slowly turned to a look of astonished rage, the first time he had shown an emotion other than arrogance. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know!’ Olzan said.
Mardok fired again. This time the bullet went through the Seagull’s wing. Olzan saw Keldra wince, but she didn’t move.
Poldak noticed Olzan looking at Keldra. ‘You did this, didn’t you? What did you do?’