Macao Station

by Майк Берри

  ‘Lina!’ Halman almost shouted. ‘Think about it. Not his ex-wife’s hair, not a lock of hair from some cherished grandchild. Yours.’

  The words began to sink into her brain like heavy rocks sinking into mud. ‘Holy shit. . .’ she breathed, finally wringing the meaning from what he had said. ‘You don’t mean he was in love with me, do you?’ Suddenly, she felt almost overpoweringly sick. She clenched her jaw, trying not to actually puke inside her suit. That would not be a good development in this little adventure.

  ‘That is one interpretation of the facts,’ said Halman guardedly. ‘Maybe that’s why he started the fader in the first place. He had to work with you every day, saw you all the time. He knew you wouldn’t have been interested in him, knew you were all about your son. He. . .’

  ‘Stop, Dan! Please just stop!’ she cried. She struggled against the now almost-ubiquitous tears. This was too much. She couldn’t think about it. This was too much. If true, then this was all her fault. She was the root from which this great tree of misery had grown. ‘No!’ she wailed. ‘No. . .’

  ‘Lina. . .’ Halman started. She waved him to silence, and they sat that way for some time. Lina tried to let her mind go blank, but her mind seemed to have other ideas. It kept re-writing events as she remembered them, this time inserting little tags all the way through: that was my fault. . . and that was my fault, too. . . that was because of me. . . and that one. . .

  And then she was mercifully jerked from this dark reverie by Ella’s voice. Ella sounded clearer this time: ‘We’re just around the corner now.’

  After another minute or so, Ella appeared, moving cautiously at the head of her little group. Lina was encouraged to see that Ella was still on high-alert and she walked with her laser pistol held at the ready.

  ‘You going to actually shoot me this time?’ asked Lina as Ella came towards them. She already felt better. Ella generally made her feel better. That was one of Ella’s redeeming qualities as far as Lina was concerned. She’d have to put the Eli-having-her-hair matter on the back-burner for now. Hopefully, she could leave it there for ever, although she suspected not.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ella, lowering the gun all the same. ‘If you give me any shit.’

  ‘Well,’ said Halman, getting to his feet a little laboriously. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Good to see you guys.’ And he went to Ella and, amazingly, crushed her in a clumsy embrace. He turned to Hobbes, who took a cautious step back and held out his hand for Halman to shake. Petra he simply slapped on the back. Her handsome, angular face was arranged in a tolerant smile, but she didn’t look particularly receptive to hugging.

  ‘They won’t be far behind, all being well,’ said Hobbes. Clearly he meant Si’s team. Hobbes had found himself the neatest and cleanest space suit that Lina had ever seen. The face behind the visor was as immaculately shaved as ever. She wondered how he did it. She had caught sight of her own reflection in one of the windows they had passed earlier, and she had been alarmed to see the deep shadows of exhaustion beneath the surface of her features. She felt dirty, dishevelled and ill-used.

  ‘Good,’ said Halman. ‘I hope Alphe and Fionne will be all right to finish the work on the Kays.’

  ‘Have the escaped prisoners left the station?’ asked Petra, her face intent. She had not just one, but two laser pistols in the belt of her suit. Lina looked to Hobbes and saw that he, however, carried only a small medical kit.

  ‘Well I fucking hope so,’ answered Halman. ‘The plan now, my fine friends, is to take as many ships as we have out to that asteroid, where we will take the shuttle back as originally intended. All that has changed is that there are now more of them, and that we will have to take more of us. This is gonna be our last roll of the dice. We’ll take the best pilots and the best fighters we can. And we will succeed. Because we must.’

  ‘Right,’ said Petra curtly. ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘Well, I see no other choice, either,’ said Ella. She sounded almost alarmingly upbeat about it. ‘We do have more lasers than them. That bastard stole one weapon from the back-door security desk, but luckily he never found the main locker in the prison armoury.’

  ‘Yeah, one of those shit-bags shot Waine with it,’ said Halman.

  Ella took a deep breath and held it for a moment. She let it out in a long sigh, grim-faced. ‘I was sorry to hear about Waine and Theo,’ she said. ‘We all were. There’s been too much of this, now. Too much. I want to force it to an end.’

  ‘Well the good news is,’ offered Hobbes, ‘that the station’s now so damn cold outside our dorms that the lack of power to the freezer isn’t really an issue any more. We can set up a makeshift morgue just about anywhere we choose.’

  Halman turned on the much smaller man, his face incredulous. ‘Well fuck me, Hobbes,’ he cried, ‘if you don’t know how exactly to cheer a man up!’

  ‘What?’ asked Hobbes, unaware of having said anything wrong.

  Halman shook his head wonderingly and walked away down the passage, hands clasped behind his back. But he didn’t go far. He turned and came back, setting up a repetitive cycle of pacing that Lina found rather tense. She tried not to watch him, and instead chatted with Ella and Hobbes.

  Hobbes was poor conversation at best, so Lina and Ella soon fell into an essentially private discussion about Platini Alpha and, more specifically, Lina’s intention to take Marco there. Neither of them mentioned the fact that simply surviving the next twenty-four hours had become something of an uncertainty. Petra sat alone on the floor at the far end of the corridor, scrunched into a ball with her elbows over her knees. Her two pistols lay in front of her like a yin-yang.

  After a while, they heard Si’s voice from the radio. He was close, just checking in to confirm that they hadn’t gone anywhere since he’d last spoken to Ella.

  ‘I wish,’ said Halman. ‘I’m getting fucking sick of waiting here.’

  A few minutes later, Si’s massive figure appeared at the end of the corridor, spotlit in Hobbes’s suit-light, virtually filling the passage from side to side. Lina could see that he was grinning widely, his squarish, lantern-jawed face showing no sign of the worry that she herself felt. Rocko, Niya Onh, Ilse Reno, Alphe and Fionne were with him. They tramped down the passage towards the others, moving slowly in their heavy suits.

  The group assembled there in the deserted living area, milling about and exchanging greetings. It occurred to Lina what an odd little family they made — a much reduced family now, she supposed. She wondered how many of them would return from their next mission. The odds had not been kind to them so far.

  They made their way back to the hangar, moving in formation as directed by Halman. He sent scouts down every side-corridor, into every doorway, to check for lurking enemies. The station was a frozen relic of the home they knew so well, and they passed through it in dreamy silence for the most part. Lina felt as if their lives hung in a delicate equilibrium, a state that could be upset at any moment by a laser beam, or an escaped murderer rushing from a shadowy alcove, or maybe a booby trap left by Carver’s gang. They processed through the warehouse to stand in a nervous group before the open hangar door. Relatively bright light still spilled from it into the warehouse, staining the floor like whitewash.

  Lina peered round the edge of the door into the hangar, scanning the shadows for human shapes. She saw nobody living, but Theo’s body lay in two twisted halves not far inside, the stump of his pistol next to him. She couldn’t see Waine’s remains — he had fallen behind her Kay, and was out of sight from her vantage point. The loader was gone, but the space door still yawned open at the far end of the flight deck.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Halman. ‘Carefully, now. Ella, Si — I want you to go round the back and check the control room. Rocko, Lina — down the far side. I’ll go down the right with Petra. Everyone else stay put and eyes open.’

  The hangar proved to be empty except for the corpses of their friends. The toppled Kays lay around the deck forlor
nly. Lina was almost personally offended by this, and she realised with a glint of dark amusement that she considered the ships — all of them — to be hers.

  Si found a pair of dirty and ancient-looking tarpaulins and he threw one over Liu’s desecrated remains and another over Theo and Waine, whose corpses he dragged together to lay beside each other in death. He said nothing while he did this. As he finished and turned to walk away, Lina caught a glimpse of his face. It was utterly blank but for two patches of angry red high on his cheeks.

  They closed the space door — it looked too easy for someone too stray to close, slip on the ice and fall into space. They parked a Kay right on the lip of the ramp, anchoring onto the deck itself, to obstruct any further unwanted attempts to land. Halman stationed Petra and Si at the hangar door to guard against any attack from that direction, even though they were all agreed that Carver’s mob had surely left Macao.

  Alphe and Fionne, quiet and shell-shocked, returned to work on the Kays, trying not to look at the tarpaulin-covered humps that represented the butchered bodies of their friends. The others formed a rough perimeter around the two techs, facing outwards with their guns drawn. It seemed to Lina like a classic case of too little, too late.

  After a while, Ella distributed spare air cartridges to those who needed them. The suits were clever enough to allow hot-swapping of these, as long as it was done relatively quickly. It was still a dangerous procedure, though, as any delay with the installation of the new cartridge could leave the recipient airless and in serious trouble. Luckily, all the replacements went well enough, and Lina chided herself for being a little surprised at that. She was getting too accustomed to disaster. She wished that she had gone back to the dorm with Si’s team. It might have been her last chance to speak to Marco. But it was too late now, so she supposed she would simply have to survive the coming assault.

  Alphe and Fionne progressed in silence, sharing the telepathic link common to long-time work partners everywhere. They finished the installation of the enlarged cutting discs and then checked all of the Kays for obvious defects. It had been agreed that they wouldn’t fly any of the ships that had been bumped by the ISL. Several of them looked superficially all right, but Alphe and Fionne admitted that they needed Liu to confirm that. Without him, they said, it might take them some hours to be sure. They had done what they could.

  The others came and stood beside Alphe, regarding the modified Kays in critical silence. Eventually, Halman turned to Alphe and asked, ‘Are you happy with them?’

  Alphe sucked his lips thoughtfully. ‘Yeah,’ he said at last. ‘Happy as I can be.’

  ‘Good,’ said Halman, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Listen up, you lot!’ he began, turning to address the group as a whole. Lina felt numb and detached, as if this was all happening inside a holo and she was merely watching from her sofa. ‘We have ten operational Kays. The following will go to the shuttle: Myself, Lina, Ella, Hobbes, Si, Rocko, Petra, Ilse, Niya and Alphe. Fionne, as the only non-pilot here, you are excused, and hereby ordered to return to the dorm. Report to Amy Stone and tell her what’s happening. She is, of course, in charge ’til I return.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Fionne in a quiet little voice. Lina wondered how she felt about Rocko going without her. Not too good, she suspected.

  ‘Lina will cut into the shuttle’s hold. Ilse will fly the other modified ship, in case something goes wrong with Lina’s. We will enter the shuttle as quickly as we can, flying across in suits. Anyone who wants to play fuckaround with us, we shoot them. You all up for that?’ He cast around for agreement, his expression deadpan. Nobody answered verbally, but their faces were set and hawkish. ‘Good. Once inside, we head for the bridge, where we will release the clamp on the boarding tube that joins the shuttle to that damned rock, and. . . away we go.’

  ‘Piece of piss,’ said Si, with some small trace of his habitual ebullience.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Halman.

  ‘Well,’ said Ella decisively. ‘No time like the present, eh?’

  ‘Fionne,’ said Halman. ‘Go home, okay?’ She nodded sadly, then ran to Rocko. She embraced him, their suits briefly making one amorphous whole. ‘I love you,’ she whispered, the words clear in everyone’s earpieces. They pointedly looked away, trying not to listen. ‘Yeah,’ said Rocko. ‘I love you, too.’ Then she released him, turned around and simply walked away.

  They went to their respective ships, climbed the steps, and strapped themselves in. Ella took the one they had parked across the ramp, and she moved it out of the way with apparent ease, even skill. Lina watched in her HUD as a field of identifier-tags came to life. The enlarged cutting disc looked obvious and somehow wrong.

  As she let the cockpit pressurise so that she could remove her helmet for a while, she considered the trial that lay ahead of her. Out there in the belt, a strange and bloodthirsty enemy awaited them. Eli was almost certainly dead, but still a reckoning was at hand. She realised that she was no longer afraid, though. A conclusion was approaching, most likely a bloody one, maybe a personally fatal one. But nonetheless, she welcomed it.

  ‘Come on,’ she whispered, looking to the left, where Halman was bringing his Kay round with the halting uncertainty of someone who hadn’t flown for years. Ice dusted down from its landing gear and shivering hull. Was it significant that he was in Eli’s old ship? She wasn’t sure, but she no longer cared about the omens. She just wanted it to end, one way or the other. ‘Come on,’ she whispered again. ‘Let’s go.’

  The Kays converged on the runway behind her, manoeuvring around their injured fellows. She waited for their icons to align, then hit the pad to open the space door. The ramp dropped away, angling out of sight. Lina caught glimpses of dark rock and endless night as she dialled up the gas, aware of the slipperiness of the deck. As the vessel accelerated off the end of the ramp, she risked a backward glance at the station. It was rising away behind her already, dark and vast and silent, like a gravestone in space. It disgorged the following Kays in a regular arc.

  ‘I’m coming back,’ she whispered, wondering who she was speaking to. Her hand was sweating on the yoke, making it slippery. She angled it down, heading towards the belt.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  By the time they made it to the shuttle, Carver’s eyes were stinging worse than ever. His sight, however, had almost returned to normal. Seriously, he hadn’t doubted that it would — would the dragon allow its emissary to stay blind? Hardly likely. Although he sat in the back looking down at his own knees, squinting and blinking in pain, he could tell that the prisoner was flying the loader with a fair degree of skill. The other prisoners sat around him in silence and he could feel their tension and excitement all around him. Everything was going to plan.

  ‘Is that it?’ Welby suddenly asked. Carver looked up and saw that he was pointing at the small screen affixed to the ceiling of the personnel compartment in which they sat together on steel benches, strapped in.

  The shuttle, adhered to its rock like a leech, was coming into view on the screen, looming up between the tumbling debris of the belt. Carver’s heart lifted. Home, he thought. I’m coming home.

  ‘That’s it, Welby,’ he said. ‘Where the dragon lives.’

  ‘Amazing. . .’ sighed Welby, his gaze fixed firmly on the screen.

  Cratered steel and jagged stone scrolled beneath them as the prisoner guided the loader in to dock with the shuttle, giving expert little kicks with the manoeuvring jets, flying without computer aid.

  Welby turned to Carver and said, ‘See? He’s a decent man, Fuller. One of my people.’

  Some of the other prisoners shuffled nervously in their seats. Unbelievers, thought Carver, looking sidelong at them through his burning, watering eyes.

  They congregated in the loader’s hold and Carver explained his plan for the prisoners to assist him with the digging. Thus, by their combined strength, they would finally extract the dragon from its rock. They would need more mining equipm
ent, and they mounted a space-suited expedition into the shuttle’s icy, airless hold to search for it. Welby, it transpired, had actually been a ship-fitter at Platini Dockyard in his former life, and he suggested that it might be possible to tweak the air scrubbers and flood the hold, but Carver didn’t see the point. This revelation from Welby did seem to confirm the man’s usefulness, though. But they had other fish to fry. Much bigger, hungrier fish. The dragon hadn’t spoken to him for a while, but Carver took this to be a sign of approval if anything. He felt certain it would tell him if he strayed from the path in any way.

  Deep in the forest of racking and huge magnetic crates, they found the perfect twin of Carver’s plasma cutter. He wondered briefly about the wisdom of putting such a thing into the hands of one of these men, who might eventually seek to betray him, even turn it against him, but he decided it was a risk he would have to take. Surely the dragon would warn him if he was in any danger of betrayal. It would know.

  They also found many smaller, less impressive tools, including a simple pneumatic drill and matching compressor. Welby showed Carver a crate filled with dull grey metal cylinders, which he identified as shaped explosive charges. Carver didn’t think he’d dare to use them on the rock face, but he took them anyway. Shaped explosive charges? It would have been ludicrous not to. The name itself had a certain power to it, a sound he liked when rolled off the tongue. Shaped explosive charges. He liked that a lot.

  They also found a fair cache of weapons in a solid-looking banded trunk that sat on its own at the foot of one tall shelving unit, deep in the shuttle’s hold. Helpfully, it was labelled SECURITY — STANDARD WEAPON SET 04. Carver opened it with his own, original plasma cutter, feeling an expression of childish delight spreading across his face. It was, as promised, full of the tools of murder. The most dangerous items therein were more of the cheap-looking laser pistols, but there was also a decent selection of other kit. Carver brushed aside his previous concerns about equipping the freed prisoners with weaponry, and armed the lot of them. He let Welby distribute the limited number of pistols, assuming that Welby would choose the people he himself trusted most, and hence the people least likely to cause any trouble.