Macao Station

by Майк Берри

  The pitter-patter of teeth against the window of her ship grew gradually louder and louder as she neared the area where Sal’s Kay had been, until it became a virtual fusillade: Bang! Bang! Bang! She wanted to flee, to escape before the shadow caught her, like it had caught Sal, and scatter her own insides across the rubble-strewn vacuum of the belt, but the noise was now so loud that she couldn’t even think.

  It was catching up to her, she knew. It was right behind her. Panic-stricken, she forgot all about Sal and turned her Kay around, maxing the gas. She thought she was screaming aloud, but the noise was distant, so distant. The ship struggled, drive system howling, wallowing in space as if caught in thick mud. . . slowing, slowing, failing. . .

  The lights of the dashboard suddenly went off, dousing Lina in darkness as thick as tar. A charnel stink — a stench of rotten and putrefying meat, hideously ripe and sweet — filled her head, making her gag. And then, somehow, impossibly, the shadow reached right through the hull of the ship and touched her. . .

  She woke, screaming, bolt upright in bed. Somebody was hammering on the door of her quarters: Bang! Bang! Bang! She wiped one hand across her face and it came away slicked with sweat. The covers clung to her naked body like a pallid second skin. She breathed deeply, trying to calm her rattling heart, letting the knocking continue. Her head was pounding. Her tongue felt like something had died on it. The lighting was too bright.

  ‘Mum?’ said Marco’s sleep-blurry voice from the doorway.

  Lina jumped, a little sound of shock escaping her throat, pulling the covers tight around herself as if they might armour her against harm.

  ‘Marco,’ she breathed.

  ‘There’s somebody at the door,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with the back of one hand. ‘Shall I let them in?’

  Lina nodded, making her sweaty hair fall over her face. She brushed it behind her ear and saw that he was studying her intently. ‘Yeah,’ she managed to say. The insistent knocking continued.

  Marco made no move towards the door, though. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, his young face suddenly aged by concern.

  She shook her head, wanting to lie but unable to do so. ‘I’ve been better.’ She could feel tears beginning to well in her eyes. She looked away from him and said ‘Get the door. I’ll be out in a minute.’ She managed to control her treacherous face and dried her eyes on the sheet as subtly as she could. She turned back to Marco, who hadn’t budged, and attempted an encouraging smile. It didn’t seem to have the desired effect. He nodded obediently, but his look of concern condensed into one of outright worry. He paused for a moment longer, unsure, then turned and went to answer the door.

  Lina jumped up to close the door of her room, but the blanket fell away and she stumbled, trying to gather it round her and right herself as she went. She realised that she felt like absolute crap and wondered how much she had had to drink last night. Marco was speaking to somebody in the other room now, but she couldn’t discern the words. What had happened to Eli? She supposed he must have let himself out when she’d got back, whenever that had been.

  She managed to push her own door closed and crammed herself gracelessly into yesterday’s rumpled flight suit that she had apparently left lying in the middle of the floor. Her head reeled unpleasantly as she did this, making her want to throw up. The suit didn’t smell too great, truth be told, which didn’t help either.

  Somebody knocked on the door of her room just as she was reaching for it, and when she opened it Marco was there again, in his plain grey, oversized pyjamas.

  ‘It was Rachelle, from the security team,’ said Marco, his expression a little puzzled. ‘She says there’s a meeting in the plaza today, outside The Miner’s. You’re supposed to be there.’

  Lina struggled to process this information. For a moment, she couldn’t remember what The Miner’s was, but then she recalled that she had in fact spent most of the previous night there. She thought maybe Halman had been with her, but she wasn’t certain.

  ‘A meeting?’ she repeated. Marco nodded. ‘What time?’

  ‘Half-nine,’ he said. ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘You’ve got school,’ she replied automatically, distracted.

  Marco looked offended. ‘No, I haven’t,’ he said with a touch of irritation. ‘Not today.’

  Lina nodded, trying to focus. ‘Er, okay then, I guess. Is Rachelle still here?’

  ‘No. She didn’t actually come in. Should I have asked her?’

  ‘No,’ Lina said, sitting back on the bed with an unintentional sigh. ‘No, that’s fine.’ She put her head in her hands, trying to massage her brain into some sort of working order. She sat this way for a while, forgetting that Marco was there, but when she looked up he was studying her analytically.

  ‘What’s going on, Mum?’ he asked. He was holding out a battered datasheet in one hand. ‘Why was Eli here last night?’

  ‘Cos I was out,’ she admitted, with a touch of guilt that the more logical part of her mind assured her was undeserved. ‘What is that?’

  ‘A note,’ said Marco, handing it over. ‘From Eli. He says you had a hard night,’ he added, and Lina thought she heard a little judgemental note in that voice, although it could have been inferred. ‘At The Miner’s, were you, Mum?’

  She felt the tears creeping up on her again, and fought to suppress them. She guessed that sooner or later they would have to come. But now, with her boy here, was not the time. ‘Yeah, I guess I was,’ she admitted. She patted the bed next to her and Marco sat there. He looked up into her face, his eyes innocently questioning. His hair was appealingly sleep-tangled. Lina put an arm around his small shoulders and pulled him close to her, aware that she stank of stale sweat and synthihol. She put her head against his and sat there in silence for a minute. Marco allowed this familiarity, but she could sense that he still wanted an explanation.

  Eventually, he broke the silence: ‘Why weren’t you at work? Did you go after?’

  ‘Work finished early,’ she said wearily. ‘There was an accident in the belt last night, near the start of my shift.’

  Marco’s eyes widened. ‘What?’ he gasped. ‘What? I mean who? Who?’

  ‘Sal,’ said Lina, a sudden lump in her throat. She gritted her teeth, trying to control herself. ‘She’s dead,’ she managed to add at last. ‘She bumped a rock, and her Kay decompressed.’

  ‘Mum. . .’ said Marco, and this time he embraced her. His body felt frail and bony against her own. Jaydenne had been tall and athletic, and Lina supposed that his son would one day assume a similar shape. But as yet, he was still a child.

  Lina sighed deeply, not even noticing that tears were beginning to seep from her eyes and down her face, to drip onto Marco’s shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, but she didn’t know if she was talking to Marco or herself. ‘It’s okay, it was just an accident. We all know the dangers. Something just went wrong. It was just an accident.’

  Marco was crying too, she realised. He released her and stood up angrily, startling her. His face was red and streaked with his own tears, now. ‘It could have been you!’ he shouted accusingly, his hands balled into fists. ‘It could have been you!’

  And there it was again — that wave of love, but tinged with guilt this time. ‘Honey. . .’ she said, grasping for something. ‘Honey, no. . . It’s never going to be me.’ Marco shook his head, eyes streaming, but she stood and went to him, enfolding his reluctant body in her arms and pulling him close again. She stroked his hair and whispered, ‘I’m still here, Marco, I’m still here,’ until eventually he relaxed.

  He stepped away from her and she saw by the new gleam of hardness in his eyes — a very adult look — that he was going to be all right. ‘Mum,’ he said with deliberate calm, drawing a deep breath. ‘I’ve been thinking lately, and, I mean this. . . this just makes me more sure. . . I. . .’ He visibly steeled himself and said, ‘I want to go to Platini Alpha. Or even Aitama.’ He spread his hands, as if to say There it is, and smiled thinly.r />
  Lina shook her head. ‘Marco, is this about your father?’

  Marco’s brows drew together for just the briefest instant, but when he answered his voice was steady and rational. ‘No. I don’t need him. I just want to go somewhere safer. Somewhere better. We shouldn’t be here, Mum. People shouldn’t live here. You could get another job. You said yourself that Farsight would take you at Platini Dockyard, and it has to be better than this.’ He smiled encouragingly, cajolingly, his eyes still shiny with tears. ‘Right?’

  ‘It was just an accident, honey. A one-off.’ But as she spoke, she suddenly recalled an image from her dream: alone in the belt, alone but for the hungry, greedy shadow that seemed to permeate the void with its reeking wolf-breath, its infinite tendrils of grasping darkness. ‘A one-off,’ she repeated, but this time it was just a whisper.

  ‘Mum?’ prompted Marco, making Lina snap back to reality.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hadn’t we better get ready?’

  ‘What?’ she asked, her brain slow and muddy. ‘What for?’

  ‘The meeting, remember?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lina, filled with fresh dread, her hangover swelling to new proportions.

  Despite her pounding head, she managed to make cheese on toast for breakfast. She supplemented this with recon-juice from a can, rejecting the awful coffee she usually had in the morning as unlikely to actually improve her delicate condition. They talked about little, safe things: Marco’s school-work; films; station gossip. Once he’d finished, Marco excused himself to go to the toilet, and Lina sat sipping her juice alone.

  She lifted the glass and looked into the liquid suspiciously. Something tasted a little off. Okay, she was quite hungover, and it could just be that. And the Farsight-branded recon-juice never tasted that great, but she had an inkling that it was neither of those things. She put the glass down amongst the crumbs of toast and sniffed the air, frowning.

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Marco, reappearing in the room.

  ‘Er, almost time to go, I reckon,’ said Lina, starting guiltily and turning in her seat to face him.

  ‘I wonder what they want,’ he said. She could see that he had washed and attempted to assert some sort of control over his hair. She guessed she should probably do the same.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. But she was sure of one thing: it wasn’t likely to be good news.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Take your helmet off,’ said the man. He was holding the restraining device in one gloved hand.

  ‘Hey, hey. . .’ Carver began to protest weakly. ‘Look, I don’t know about that, man. Won’t it take a while to pressurise in here?’

  The man’s voice was tinny and inhuman in Carver’s helmet speaker. ‘I guess we’ll see,’ he said. ‘And anyway, it’s been a while. Take your helmet off.’ And he waggled the restraining device meaningfully. ‘Now,’ he added.

  They had worked quickly, under the crazy dragon-man’s direction, and Carver was almost impressed by how much progress they had made, albeit in a ridiculous madman’s scheme. They had backed the shuttle carefully up to a particularly huge asteroid that the man had evidently moored it alongside while Carver still slept in sus-an. The shuttle was a big ship — the biggest Carver had ever been inside at any rate — but the asteroid dwarfed it.

  Carver knew that the shuttle crossed the great distances of space, accelerating steadily for years at a time, with a shield of small particles driven ahead of it as defence against collisions. Now, the shield was dispelled, the magnetic field turned off, and to Carver this was conclusive evidence that the shuttle wasn’t going anywhere soon. He didn’t know if this was good or bad.

  The shuttle was equipped, as all such vessels were, with an emergency boarding and rescue system. This consisted basically of an extensible tube, just wide enough to crawl through, with a rotating cutter at its business end. The cutting head had forced its way into the rock like a mosquito’s proboscis, setting the whole of the shuttle’s superstructure shuddering and ringing. The man had explained that this was tricky work, as they couldn’t push too hard without breaking their tethering line and sending the rock flying uncontrollably away from them. But after half an hour of this they had broken through into some sort of cavity just inside the asteroid. The boarding tube had clamped itself firmly into the hole and sprayed sealing-resin around the join.

  They had crawled through the narrow tube, Carver complaining fiercely the whole time and the crazy dragon-man in an annoyingly buoyant mood, with instawall cannisters raided from the shuttle’s cathedralesque hold. These grapefruit-sized, bright yellow devices, when primed, would wait for a pre-set period of time and then explode in hideous, ballooning flowers of chemical foam that solidified within seconds into a rock-hard mass. The cannisters, despite their size, were incredibly dense, their contents heavily compressed, and the two men could only just manoeuvre them one-by-one in the awkward micro-gravity. Under the crazy dragon-man’s instruction, they had sealed four holes in the skin of the asteroid. One of these had been large enough to drive a gravpod into, but the rest had been comparatively small. The instawall had bloomed to fill the gaps then dried rapidly to a dusky, diseased-looking yellow.

  Then they had turned the scrubbers to max, raised the temperature of the air to allow for its cooling as it flowed into the asteroid, and waited for the rock to pressurise. After a while, the man had equipped Carver with an airflow sensor, taking one himself, and they had crawled back into the rock and checked for leaks around the instawall seals.

  Throughout most of this procedure, the man hadn’t spoken to Carver except to give him simple orders. But worryingly, he had spoken to someone else from time to time, in a hushed and secretive voice. Carver hadn’t caught any of the words, and he hadn’t wanted to, truth be told. Here I am, he’d thought, pressurising an asteroid in the middle of fucking nowhere, my only companion the psycho with the dragon in his head. He wished he’d gone to jail after all and wondered what else the bastard had in store for him.

  Gradually, the rock had filled with air, as measured on the man’s little device. The whole process, with Carver’s reluctant assistance, had taken only two-and-a-half hours. And now here they were.

  ‘But what if it ain’t breathable yet?’ objected Carver, knowing it was futile to resist.

  ‘The meter says it is,’ the man told him factually.

  ‘Then why don’t you try it?’ suggested Carver.

  The man pushed off from one of the rocky walls, his suit-light dazzlingly bright in Carver’s eyes, and floated down towards him like a descending angel. ‘Because,’ he explained reasonably, ‘I’m too valuable.’

  Carver nodded sarcastically, scowling. The crazy dragon-man was almost close enough to throttle now, but he didn’t dare try. Not yet, he promised himself, but as soon as I find a way. . . ‘Right,’ he mocked. ‘You’re one important guy.’

  The man nodded agreeably. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Now take it off before I fry your evil little brain into a paste. Okay?’

  Carver took a deep breath, clenched his jaw, and without another word unfastened the clasps and lifted his helmet clear. For a terrifying moment his chest hitched, paralysed by the expected vacuum. But then he realised that he was breathing after all. The air tasted a bit shitty — worse even than it had on the shuttle — but he was breathing nonetheless. ‘Fuck you, man,’ he declared. ‘I live to fight again.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said the man, adding, unbelievably, ‘Well done.’ He unclipped his own helmet and removed it, hanging before Carver in the stillness of the asteroid’s cavernous interior.

  ‘What next?’ asked Carver, starting to shiver quite violently, despite the fact that the air pumped from the shuttle was heated to a temperature that was almost unbearably hot at the source. His breath steamed, rolling, in the combined beams of their suit-lights. ‘What does your dragon want?’

  ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘we’re going to dig it out of the rock. But it wants a few
other things, too. Little things.’

  ‘And if it gets them?’ asked Carver, trying to sound reasonable, like a man who could be fairly bargained with. ‘Can I go then?’

  The man’s grin broadened, and Carver could see the vacancy behind his eyes. They were like windows of mirrored glass, revealing nothing, one-way only. And his smile, for all its breadth, lacked any warmth or humanity — it might as well have been spray-painted onto a skull. ‘It hasn’t told me yet,’ he replied. ‘And I haven’t asked.’

  Carver turned slowly around, letting his suit-light play across the ragged walls of glinting stone, somehow too smooth to be artificial and too rough to have been hewn at the same time, wondering if this freezing rock would be his grave. He turned back to face the crazy dragon-man. ‘Do you think,’ he suggested in a voice laced with cold undertones like hidden riptides, ‘that you could ask?’

  ‘We’ll see how good you are,’ said the man. ‘You see, the dragon says I need to head back to Macao. I have a few more errands to run.’

  ‘Errands,’ parroted Carver. ‘Right.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the man, failing to catch the mocking tone to Carver’s voice, or maybe just ignoring it. ‘It was pleased with last night’s events, but it needs a few more little things before it can really help us.’

  ‘Did I mention that you are one crazy dragon-loving bastard?’ asked Carver, sure now that he was not going to get the answer he wanted and starting to get angry again. He didn’t care if the man zapped him some more. He was beyond giving a shit by this point.

  The man’s distant stare intensified, his eyes narrowing and his gaze boring into Carver’s face, such that Carver quickly regretted baiting him and wished that he could take it back. ‘I know what you think of me,’ said the man in a voice as slow and cold as a glacier grinding across the aural landscape. ‘And I know you would kill me if you could. But this will not happen. I’m going back to the station soon, and you — you — will dig. And if you make good enough work of it then maybe I will ask the dragon for your life.’ Carver was transfixed by the man’s stare now, speared like a bug on a pin. ‘But I warn you,’ said the man, his smile slipping and then melting away altogether, ‘that the dragon is hungry, and it is not necessarily inclined to mercy, especially for the likes of you.’