Macao Station

by Майк Берри

  They returned to the machine rooms of the shuttle, which led to the bridge and the boarding tube into the asteroid. Carver gave what he considered a rather rousing speech about the task at hand, the reason for their freedom. Most of the prisoners gaped in awe, as convinced as Welby was that Carver’s dragon was indeed one of their venerated Old Ones, and that he himself was a prophet sent to gather disciples to its cause. Maybe they were right — he really didn’t care. His only interest was in using these people for his own ends, which meant for the dragon’s own ends. It wanted to be freed, so who better than a gang of prisoners to do the job? There was a certain poetic justice to it.

  There were a few ex-convicts, however — a tall black man named Marcus, a heavy-set and tattooed simpleton named Josh, an ill-looking little scarecrow of a man named Ballic or Ballich or some shit — whose faces bore sullen looks of suspicion when he spoke to them. Carver marked these faces in his memory, his fingers itching on the handle of the cutter, which he hadn’t put down for hours now.

  ‘Unbelievers,’ the dragon whispered. ‘Beware.’ And it told him of its plan for them.

  In an uncharacteristic bout of generosity Carver distributed rations from the hold, then watched over his flock as they ate with apparent gusto, stuffing the food into their mouths like animals at trough and washing the starchy powders down with canteens of water. I am Carver, he thought, emissary of the dragon and leader of men. He knew it was a last meal for some of them. That was okay. This was a time of finality — he could taste it in the air. Things were coming to a head, the future racing away towards a conclusion that he could, as yet, not see. He felt no fear, only a slowly-culminating sense of elation.

  He didn’t let them rest for long. He led them out into the ice-slimed cavern of the asteroid’s interior. The debris had completely filled the space without anybody there to keep it under control, and they set to work clearing it, manhandling pieces back through the tube and stowing them in a large, empty hold just off the shuttle’s machine rooms. Even in the micro-gee this was a fairly laborious task. Already the debris half-filled the new dumping ground, and there was much more to follow. They’d find another place to store it when it came to that. Maybe they could eject it out of the airlock.

  Then Carver showed them where to dig and detailed a group to remove the waste as they went. He asked Welby to choose another whom he trusted to be left temporarily in charge at the dig site. Welby picked out a large, greasy-looking man with a heavily-scarred face, and Carver gave him the second plasma cutter. He looked more than strong enough to manipulate the tool and his expression suggested that he took Welby’s trust in him seriously.

  Then Carver picked out those people who had looked at him so scornfully during his earlier speech and led them away into the shuttle. Welby accompanied him, staying behind the unbelievers with one of the laser pistols in his belt. The unbelievers, though, were armed only with stun-batons. Carver wondered if they had noticed anything amiss in this fact yet, or if they would do before it was too late.

  ‘It is already too late,’ said the dragon. Carver smiled as he led the group towards the shuttle’s machine rooms.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I guess it is.’

  ‘Is what?’ asked Marcus suspiciously, his voice an incredibly deep and sonorous bass. He was following behind Carver with some difficulty, pulling himself along the handline with irritating slowness.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Carver, turning his face away to hide his grin. The pulsing of his head had become so fierce that even his ears were ringing now. He’d have another hit of fader when this task was through. ‘Nothing you need concern yourselves with,’ he elaborated. He stopped before the doorway that connected the shuttle to the parasitic ISL and turned to face the others. ‘Welby,’ he said. ‘Shoot them.’

  Welby proved his worth again. He didn’t pause for consideration; he didn’t ask Carver to repeat himself; he didn’t go What? or even Right! He just shot them — one, two, three — each in the chest. Two of the men convulsed and died quickly, gurgling their last like little babies. But Marcus writhed, spinning away and clutching at the burn in his suit. He pushed back towards Welby, attempting to swing his baton, teeth clenched in an animal snarl.

  Welby, unfazed, shot him again, this time in the face. The laser burned cleanly through the front of Marcus’s skull. His eyes glazed instantly, as if net curtains had fallen behind them, then rolled up into his head. The baton drifted away from his hand and Carver caught it smoothly, laughing softly to himself. It couldn’t have been choreographed better if he’d tried.

  ‘Good,’ said the dragon.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Carver. ‘Easy.’

  ‘I’m hungry. . .’ crooned the dragon. ‘So hungry. . .’

  ‘How will you eat?’ asked Carver. Welby looked up into his face indulgently. ‘Should I take them to the rock face?’ Maybe the dragon would want the prisoners ground up and poured into a fissure in the stone.

  ‘Until I am free,’ explained the dragon wistfully, ‘I must live my life through you.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Carver, but he thought perhaps he did.

  ‘You, Emissary, must be my eyes, my ears, my claws. . . my teeth. . .’

  ‘Of course,’ breathed Carver, staring at those three drifting corpses. He was suddenly and ravenously hungry.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  They flew through the belt in loose formation. Lina steered mainly by Halman’s and Alphe’s Kays, which stayed ahead of her and to either side. Her ship’s safety systems were running, but her trust in the safety of anything that came from Macao had long since dwindled. She half expected, at any moment, to be smashed to smithereens by an errant belt object, but even this was not enough to really frighten her. The conclusion was coming. Let it come. All she felt was a distant sense of relief.

  Halman had ordered a change of radio channel, concerned that the prisoners might hear them on the default frequency. Nobody felt conversational anyway. They flew in silence.

  As the belt thickened, a virtual infinity of potential ambush-points and hiding places flourished about them. The loader might spring out at them, even try to ram one of the Kays, but still Lina was unable to feel afraid. She wondered if Carver’s gang had seen them coming yet. Hadn’t she herself once joked to Eli about Macao’s prisoners escaping and establishing a pirate base out here? Another joke that had proven to be prophetic. Perhaps, in some impossible way, they’d seen it coming.

  When Eli’s rock came into sight, she regarded it with disappointment. It was just a rock — large, but not so unlike a million other rocks out here. Except that this one had the ugly grey shuttle attached to it like a leech and the loader attached in turn to that. The whole thing looked lifeless, unthreatening, kind of sad. But the enemy was there, and in greater numbers now. She wondered what they hoped to achieve on that isolated boulder beyond starvation and an eventual, lonely death. She wondered if the dragon was real, if it was in there, sitting at the centre of its monstrous web, pulling the strings and watching its puppets dance to its bloody, savage tune. If it was real, would it somehow try to stop them? Could it somehow try to stop them?

  Although the belt was eerie enough, the shadow that Lina had sensed there before was not in evidence now. She supposed it probably never had been and she regretted mentioning it to Halman. If, as she suspected, it had merely been an externalisation of her own fears, those fears seemed much diminished now. Perhaps the continual fright and horror of recent days had dehumanised her, burned away all of her capacity for real emotion. Even her love for her son seemed a distant concept, something she knew was genuine and solid, but that she couldn’t tangibly feel at that moment. Now she was just glad that an end was coming. That was enough.

  Soros glinted through chinks in the asteroid field, pale and watery and distant, fading in and out of sight like a thief flitting between patches of shadow. She thought wonderingly about how far away Platini system was, and tried to gauge the possibilities of ever cro
ssing that vast, desolate emptiness with her son, fleeing this merciless outpost at the end of the universe, desperately seeking something better.

  She wanted the shuttle that Eli had stolen. Not just for Macao, not just for the desperately-needed supplies and parts that it held, but for her own selfish reasons too. The shuttle was her and Marco’s only ticket out of here, unless they were somehow to survive the wait for the next one. She had to have it. She would risk her life on this one throw of the dice. And she would earn the right to take the vessel to Platini. Damn it, she’d demand the right if she survived this. And she’d take anyone else who wanted to go with her. To hell with Macao Station. It had been the grave of too many of her friends.

  Their Kays converged on the unwelcoming mass of rock and machinery, the tiny threads of their gas trails wavering through the belt like spider silk. The shuttle was unlit, deserted, the loader just as dark and silent. The asteroid loomed large against a backdrop of endless grey and black, its facing side in shadow. It looked like a hole in space, a vortex into which a person might fall upwards and away into the archives of the universe and disappear forever. Slowly, they approached.

  They spread around the asteroid in a wide fan, encircling it and checking for danger. Finding nothing, they edged closer, tightening the net.

  Si stopped his ship at the wide end of the rock and shone his headlight onto it. ‘It’s just an asteroid,’ he said, echoing Lina’s own disappointment. She wondered what they had expected to see.

  She looked to her side, and there was K6-3, tagged with Ella’s name, hanging in space, appearing to regard the asteroid with the cyclopean eye of its cockpit glass. Ella’s ship rotated slightly to face Lina’s, and beckoned with one of its tool arms. Lina thought she caught the meaning of the gesture: Let’s get on with it. She waved an arm in return and brought her Kay around in a careful arc, moving down the length of the asteroid back towards the shuttle. The asteroid’s scaled surface slid along below her, gaudy with bright instawall patches.

  She stopped halfway along the shuttle’s hold — the vast, curved belly that formed the greater part of its bulk — and unfolded her tool arms. The new cutting disc looked fragile and unwieldy. She flexed the arms, checking the diagnostics one last time.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said.

  ‘Go to it,’ answered Halman. His Kay coasted across her field of vision, left to right, just above her.

  She approached the shuttle warily, as if it might bite, and applied a magnetic anchor. She also spun up a screw anchor, pressed it gently to the skin of the shuttle and let it wind itself in tightly. She applied a little burst of reverse thrust, testing the strength of her grip on the larger vessel. Her Kay didn’t budge at all.

  ‘Right. . .’ she said under her breath.

  She fired up the cutting disc and touched it to the shuttle’s hull. The vibration reverberated through the body of her Kay, making her teeth chatter together. Glittering jets of dust arced away from the cut, dissipating into space. The disc sank into the metal. She worked it carefully down in a vertical line, then withdrew it, turned it ninety degrees, and cut a horizontal. When she had inscribed a neat door-shape, she drew the cutter back. She looked to her right and saw Ilse Reno’s ship hovering next to her.

  ‘Nice work,’ said Ilse.

  Was that the first compliment Ilse had ever given her? Lina thought perhaps it was. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  Lina put out a claw and pushed against the vertical rectangle she had cut. Silently, it gave way and popped neatly out of the hole. The door-shaped chunk floated away into the ship and was lost from sight in darkness. The lights were off in there.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lina with mock grandiosity. ‘Please step inside.’

  ‘Is everyone ready?’ Halman asked.

  The ships drifted, equidistant, their computers keeping them safely separated. The hull of the shuttle soared away above them like a cliff face. There was a general chorus of affirmation. Lina heard real fear in many of their voices. Niya Onh sounded as if she might be crying.

  Lina released the clamps that held her Kay to the shuttle and burned briefly away from it, then stopped and floated stationary just behind Ilse. ‘I’ll go first,’ she suggested, deciding that recklessness might be the better part of valour.

  She closed her visor and called up her suit’s HUD. She scanned the figures that floated before her eyes. All within ideal parameters. Plenty of air. She killed the main console of her ship without bothering to shut it down properly, then braced herself in the seat. The soft darkness of space rolled away into the distance, monotonous and eternal. A brief stab of longing — for bright sunlight, solid ground underfoot, trees and seas and houses, things she hadn’t seen since childhood — struck her somewhere deep inside. She was going out there, into that, with nothing more than the space suit she wore now. It didn’t look like a place where any human being belonged. And worse than that, she had to go into the shuttle. Into the dragon’s lair, she thought darkly. It’ll eat you up! But would it? Could it?

  She reached up and turned the twin cockpit release handles. The canopy popped open a hand’s breadth with a vomited expulsion of air. She reached out her hand, pushing it all the way up, then paused in wonder, trailing her fingers through the vacuum. Curious that this medium, anathema to human life, was itself completely invisible — just nothing. A vast, fatal nothing. This was the stuff of which the universe was made. It was a wonder life existed anywhere.

  She undid her harness and pushed away from her seat, a little too hard, flying between the rim of the cockpit and the open canopy, sending herself floating away towards another Kay. She saw Rocko ejecting from this other vessel, clumsily pinwheeling into space.

  The air of her suit smelled sickly and somehow burnt, not unlike the noisome air of Macao itself. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so alone and vulnerable, floating in space with only a few layers of fabric between her and oblivion.

  Lina had never had occasion to use the in-built manoeuvring jet of a space suit before. She’d always flown pressurised vessels. In truth, she’d only ever worn a suit twice before this whole mess had started. She hoped it would be instinctive to use, because Alphe hadn’t allowed them to waste any fuel in practice. She pointed the sleeve-mounted jet away from the shuttle and fired a brief burst, sending herself drifting smoothly towards the doorway that she had cut. She hit the hull of the shuttle shoulder-first, hard enough to send a jarring shock through her body. Alphe had warned her that the jet only had about thirty seconds total burn time available, but so far she’d used less than one, so she thought that would be plenty.

  She imagined the psychotic Carver waiting for her in there, all bloodthirsty grins and human-finger-necklaces. She could almost see him crouching in the metal-smelling darkness of the ancient ship, grinning. Waiting. Madness was patient, after all. That was one thing that Eli’s deception of his friends had taught her: madness was patient.

  She clawed her way along the blistered surface of the shuttle. In some places the metal was so deeply pitted by impact marks that she could have put her whole hand into the dents. She gripped the edge of the rough doorway she had cut and looked back over her shoulder. Her companions were drifting towards her in a tentative-looking swarm.

  It occurred to Lina that if there was indeed a greeting party waiting for them then Carver’s people could just sit there and blast them one by one as they came through. It’d be little more than a turkey-shoot. It was possible that someone would be able to get a radio message off, but the radios in the suits were pretty weak, and the shuttle’s hull was pretty thick, so probably not.

  With this thought in her mind, Lina dragged herself round the lip of the doorway and fell into the blackness of the shuttle’s hold. She tumbled, suit-light flashing over and over, showing blurring snatches of metal railings and spidery walkways. She let out the smallest burst that she could from the suit’s arm-jet, hoping to right herself. She spun away, end over end, and hit one of the railings
back-first. She cried out in pain but gripped onto it, finally managing to still herself.

  When she cast her light back onto the doorway in the hull, she saw the unmistakable shape of Si Davis squeezing through, dragging himself down the metal wall with clawed hands. He looked up when her light fell on him and grinned his broad grin. ‘Hey, Lina. I saw you spinning out then. Thought you were an expert pilot.’ He gained one of the walkways above Lina and grabbed onto the railing, bracing his feet against the floor.

  ‘I’m still a better pilot than you,’ she retorted. But it was an automatic reply and the exchange seemed a pretty weak imitation of their usual banter. Si let it drop.

  Other suited figures were clambering into the shuttle now, one by one, like great white crabs, scampering in slow motion down the walls to mass on the walkways around Lina and Si. Halman stopped beside her, holding onto the rail with one hand while his legs trailed in empty space above what would, in a one-gee environment, have constituted a very dangerous drop. Lina leant over and shone her light into the depths. She couldn’t even see the floor down there. Above her, heavy crane arms were folded tight against their ceiling gimbals.

  ‘Hello, Dan,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, Lina,’ he said. The face behind his visor was shiny with sweat, swarthy and old-looking.

  Alphe dragged himself along the rail towards them, also trying to run along the walkway with his feet and mainly just managing to look ridiculous.

  ‘I know the way to the bridge,’ said Alphe without preamble. ‘And I have the printed schematic with me, just in case.’

  ‘Good,’ said Halman. He turned and looked around at his little army. ‘Are we all ready to move?’ Nobody said otherwise. ‘Then let’s go. And take it easy, now. Although you don’t have any weight to speak of, you do still have mass in this environment. That means you have momentum, and that means you can get hurt if you go crashing around the place like fuckwits. Alphe — lead on. To the bridge. And for fuck’s sake, keep your eyes peeled and your guns handy. My earlier speech about asking anyone we meet to surrender no longer applies. Now we’re outnumbered and we can’t afford such luxuries. Now we shoot first, ask questions later.’