by Майк Берри
They swam through a silent treetop village of steel mesh and flaking paint. They passed occasional small rooms — little more than sheet-metal huts — dotted here and there amongst the walkways. At one point they found their way barred by a thick forest of chains that stretched away into the great pit of shadows below them and snaked alarmingly when Lina tried to squeeze through.
‘Let’s find another way,’ she said, backing off. Her companions floated behind her, holding onto the railings.
‘How about we jump to the next walkway?’ suggested Ilse. Her eye glowed demonically red in her face and her straggly grey hair, not tied back, had fallen across her forehead beneath her visor. She looked small and mean and dangerous.
‘Yeah, no problem,’ said Si.
‘Don’t use your jets,’ said Halman. ‘Not unless you have to.’ He was leaning over the edge, casting his light onto the next walkway. It looked a very long way off and quite far below them. Lina knew that she was just constrained by her usual one-gee way of thinking, but she remembered Halman’s words about momentum. ‘Go slowly and accurately. If anyone ends up spinning out of control it might take them ages to get back to the group.’
‘I don’t think I can do it,’ said Hobbes.
Halman turned a glowering look on him. ‘Well, Doctor,’ he said, ‘at least if you crash and die, we won’t have to take you back to the morgue to freeze you.’
‘That,’ said Hobbes a little haughtily, ‘is not funny.’
They clambered over the railing and hung from the outside of the walkway, suspended above that bottomless well. Lina looked to her left, where Ella was poised with her hands behind her on the bar and her feet braced against the walkway, ready to push off.
‘Let’s fly!’ cried Ella, and she sprung away from the ledge. Lina watched her go, her heart pulsing high in her throat. Ella’s white-suited body went sailing through space, spotted in half a dozen lights, her legs pulled up beneath her and her arms out to either side like wings.
‘She’s going too fast!’ yelled Niya, her voice cracking with panic.
‘Shit!’ cried Rocko.
But Ella soared gently over the nearest handrail of the lower walkway, grabbing onto the furthest rail with one hand and managing to arrest herself. Lina heard her grunt of exertion over the comm. Ella floundered, legs flailing, then managed to pull herself over and down onto the walkway’s floor. She righted herself, hovering just above the steel mesh, and waved.
‘Come on!’ she called. ‘What’re you all waiting for?’
Rocko laughed nervously. ‘I knew she’d make it,’ he said.
Someone else laughed — Lina wasn’t sure who — and then Si pushed off, more slowly than Ella had done. Then Rocko, Alphe, Halman, Hobbes. . .
Lina took a deep breath and jumped. Remembering her recent time in the hub with Marco, she pushed off gently and drifted, slower than anybody else, across the yawning chasm of the shuttle’s main hold. She hit the nearside railing of the new walkway squarely, cushioning herself easily with her hands, using them as buffers. Petra landed next to her, whooping with exhilaration. Several of them laughed, but it was a sound filled with tension and dangerously close to the edge of sanity. They dragged themselves onto the walkway and continued their journey.
The various walkways began to angle downwards and together. Soon they could see the main door to the hold — a large airlock door, wide enough to admit a dead-lifter easily. The floor ramped more sharply downwards and, although they could have simply drifted through space, they followed it, conditioned to obey the laws of up and down.
Suddenly, Halman’s vice-like hand gripped Lina’s shoulder from behind. She turned and looked up into his face. He pulled her to a stop and the rest of the group halted behind them. He pointed, down and to their left.
Lina followed the direction of his pointing finger and her chest seized tight. She saw it: a flash of white, down at floor level, moving between the cargo racks, a light briefly flashing ahead of it, then gone again.
‘Somebody in a space suit?’ she whispered, before remembering that there was no need to keep her voice down. Either the enemy was on their channel and would hear her, or not.
‘Yeah,’ said Halman. ‘I think so.’
Everyone was craning to see, leaning over the railing. Several people were pointing pistols. Lina stared, seeing only strapped-down piles of crates and boxes down there, magnetised together in tall, improbable-looking columns. That flash again — white — someone in a space suit, for sure.
Somebody fired — a silent stitch of green in the darkness. The person below them turned with panicky speed and their light glinted briefly in Lina’s eyes. And then a laser beam passed above her shoulder, harmlessly into the depths of the hold.
‘Shoot!’ cried Halman.
The figure below was swimming quickly just above the floor, firing on the fly, missing them all again. Several people from Lina’s team responded, although Lina herself stood uselessly holding her pistol at her waist, pointing down at her own feet. The figure flew from one stack of crates to another, crashed into something and went cartwheeling out into the open. Several shots from the walkway hit the unfortunate enemy at once. One shot put out their suit-light, another caught them high on the chest and a third hit them squarely in the head. The figure’s suit burst, leaving the victim twisting and thrashing in the vacuum, their laser discharging hopelessly into empty space.
‘I got him!’ cried Rocko fiercely.
Lina had to look away — she couldn’t stand to watch that struggling, asphyxiating death. It reminded her too much of Waine. She felt no joy at this small revenge, no sorrow for the murdered man, only a faded kind of revulsion at the spectacle.
‘Another one!’ somebody screamed — Petra? Ilse? — and panic gripped the group as they spun around, trying to look in all directions. Si lost his grip on the rail and drifted slowly out into open space, suspended magically above the drop.
‘Up there!’ yelled the voice again, and Lina knew this time that it was Ilse Reno. ‘Look!’
Lina turned and saw Ilse pointing up towards another walkway that was almost invisible in the darkness above them. A flash of white — someone dragging themselves along the rail up there, legs kicking behind them.
This time Lina managed to aim her own weapon. She fired, but her laser beam flashed away into the shadows of the ceiling. Other people were firing, too, their shots making a brief but dazzling cat’s-cradle of light. The figure dived down a set of steps, rolling over in their haste, and Lina fired again. She missed again, too, although she was closer this time. She suspected that the cheap laser was pretty inaccurate and that the fault wasn’t all hers.
The figure gained the next walkway down, slightly closer to them, and it paused to return fire. The laser winked green. Halman reeled back, hitting the rail behind him and bouncing off to crash into Hobbes, with whom he entangled. They both fell, spinning away together along the walkway. Another shot from above barely missed Si where he floated, exposed, on his back. He returned fire, his broad face locked in a savage rictus.
Lina tried to fix the figure in her suit-light, but it was moving again, pushing off to fly along the walkway. She saw Ilse and Rocko sighting along their weapons. One of them missed by an even longer margin than Lina herself had. But one of them hit the figure. Lina didn’t see where the shot had landed exactly, but she saw a flurry of white shreds as the enemy’s suit exploded. The figure shot up into the darkness, convulsing, scraps of suit fabric shimmering in the team’s torch beams, then rolled away into the cavernous depths of the cargo bay. The dying man faded from the range of their suit-lights, swallowed by the darkness. Gone.
They waited in silence, stabbing the barrels of their pistols in all directions, full of adrenalin, expecting more company. Gradually, they began to relax, lowering their guns. Hobbes extended a hand to Si, pulling him back to the walkway.
‘You okay, Hobbes?’ Halman asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Hobbes. ‘But
you hit me pretty hard there. You?’
‘Fine,’ said Halman. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Do you think that’s it?’ asked Petra.
‘For now,’ said Rocko ominously.
‘Let’s go on,’ said Halman. ‘But expect more. Weapons ready.’
‘Poor bastards,’ said Hobbes. Nobody ventured so far as to agree with him.
As they continued down the incline of the walkway, nearing the airlock door that led to the pressurised part of the shuttle, Lina accidentally glanced down towards the dead man near the floor. His body floated, still rolling gently in the micro-gee, arms and legs spread, suit hanging in shreds. One less to fight later, she thought. She supposed that was a good thing. At least her team had all survived. That had to be a good thing, right? We’re winning, she told herself. So far, we’re winning.
‘Is it far?’ asked Petra, swimming past Lina with surprising agility. She held her pistol at arm’s length, pointing to her side, as if trying to distance herself from it.
‘Not that far,’ said Alphe meaninglessly.
They descended to the floor level, following the handlines that stretched between steel poles bolted into the floor. Those towers of crates leant over them. They passed a dead-lifter, secured against low-gee inside a cradle in the wall.
‘It’s quiet,’ said Ella in a whisper, scanning around herself. ‘Too quiet.’ She laughed nervously. ‘That’s a bit clichéd, isn’t it?’ she asked, a little quiver in her voice.
Lina looked around. The dead man in the shredded suit was behind them now, gently pirouetting in a perpetual dance of death. Halman pushed to the front of the group and hit the pad beside the airlock.
Rocko and Ella hung back, acting as rearguard. Lina cast her light up into that night sky of soaring cranes and vaulted metal, seeing only a collage of black layers, watching for the incongruous flash of white that would mean more danger.
The airlock door opened silently and they followed Halman inside. The airlock looked old and well-used, its walls heavily scarred by collisions. Lina noticed a dangling bundle of plastic relays held together with insulating tape, which did little to reassure her.
Halman pushed through to the far end and cycled the airlock. The door by which they had entered dropped suddenly into place, trapping them. There came the building rush of pressurising air and then the opposite door slid open.
They emerged into a wide corridor lit by LED lights. Pistons moved beneath the grated floor like ligaments stretching and contracting. The airlock closed behind them with finality. They raised their visors and pulled themselves along the handline in a rag-tag procession.
‘Shhh!’ hissed Ella suddenly.
Lina turned to see Ella behind her, frozen in place with her head cocked to the side and one index finger raised for quiet.
‘What?’ Lina whispered.
‘I thought I heard something,’ said Ella.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Halman. ‘You think it was trouble?’
Ella shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Sounded like some sort of machine noise. I want to scout ahead for a minute before we rush in en masse.’
Halman floated past her, towards the opposite wall. He dragged himself along it, clawing with his gloves, trying to see round the corner at the end of the corridor. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Si — you too. Everyone else sit tight and make sure nothing comes out of that airlock behind us.’
Halman swam off down the corridor, followed by Ella and then Si, who ricocheted clumsily from floor to ceiling as he went, cursing quietly.
Lina placed the palm of one hand against the wall, trying to temper the feeling of instability that she was suffering from. Through the padded skin of her glove she could feel a distant, low thrumming in the shuttle’s structure, as if something was vibrating in the bowels of the ship, some kernel of life-force trembling inside it. She felt a frown crease her face. Ella had thought she’d heard machine noise. What were Carver’s escaped psychos doing in there?
Of course, the answer that presented itself to her miner’s mind was: Digging. Mining. But mining for what? Metals? Surely not. What, then?
‘They’re digging for it,’ she breathed, making Alphe glance up at her, his honest face open in enquiry.
‘Eh?’
‘Nothing,’ she answered, unwilling to explain herself. She had already tried that with Halman and she was pretty sure that he thought she was crazy. She shut the thought from her mind and looked away. ‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated. How would spouting mystic bullshit about buried dragons actually help at this stage? It wouldn’t change the fact that, whatever happened, they had to get this shuttle back to the station.
‘Nothing?’ he pushed, alerted by the tone of her voice. ‘Sure?’
Petra dragged herself over, Hobbes close behind her. Niya floated just before the corner of the passage, watching Si’s back as he disappeared off into the ship’s innards.
Lina glanced around, aware that she had drawn a crowd. ‘It’s just that Ella thought she heard machine noise. If you put your hand on the wall, you can feel a vibration through it.’ The others did as she suggested. ‘You see? I wonder if they’re mining for something.’
‘I just want to get to the bridge, release the clamp and get the hell out of here,’ said Petra. She looked around herself. Peeling walls loomed at unnatural angles, a world devoid of true directional reference points. They had oriented themselves with the floor as best they could, but the impression of order felt tenuous at best. Petra shivered, hugging herself. ‘It’s creepy.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Hobbes in a flat tone that was a long way from his reassuring doctor-voice. Lina wished that he had agreed to carry a gun, but she supposed it probably breached the Hippocratic Oath or something.
‘They’re coming back,’ said Niya quietly. Her voice was almost too cutesy to belong to a real person — she always sounded like a cartoon character to Lina, an effect enhanced by her tiny figure and angelic face. They dragged and swam their way towards the corner. Si returned first, followed by Ella and then Halman.
‘Well?’ asked Lina. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘We think we know the way to the bridge,’ said Si. ‘The shuttle’s interior seems to have been changed a little from the schematic that Alphe has.’
‘Changed?’ asked Petra. ‘How so?’
‘It’s old,’ Halman said. ‘The architecture of these things often gets altered a little over the years. But we know which way to go. We think.’
‘Any sign of life?’ Lina asked. Hobbes floated at her elbow, struggling to stay still despite having hold of a handline. He steadied himself on Lina’s shoulder with the other hand, almost making her lose control herself.
‘Nobody we could see,’ answered Ella. She absently scratched the side of her nose with the muzzle of her pistol. ‘That noise is louder down there though. But we can’t tell if it’s coming from the shuttle’s machine rooms or the asteroid. No more of those bastards,’ she said, indicating the hold behind them, where they had left two men floating dead in the vacuum, ‘so that’s the main thing.’
‘Come on,’ ordered Halman, beckoning them to follow him. ‘Let’s move out. Eyes and ears open, folks. Petra and Rocko take rearguard. I don’t want anyone popping out of some unseen hatch or some shit and getting the drop on us.’
Halman led them round the corner and into a longer, narrower passage. The tension was high, like a current that flowed through all of them. The noise grew steadily louder as they progressed, becoming a continuous murmur that none of them could deny. They turned right at the end of the long corridor, passing beneath a wide grate in the ceiling from which steam hissed in roiling bunches, ivory-white in their lights, blinding them. They dragged themselves through, fearful of being attacked in their temporarily vulnerable state.
They continued. Right, then left. Down, then right. Past looming doors through which strange machinery and angular ducting could be glimpsed. They let Alphe push t
o the front of the group and lead the way, reading from his schematic, which, although wrong, was still the best guide they had. The metal walls pressed in on them, tightening like jaws. Macao seemed to be another world, an impossibly distant base, hardly a sanctuary itself. They passed no windows — except for the bridge, the shuttle had none. They crawled and swam through a grey, self-contained world of growing, growling machine noise and rough metal walls marred by amateurish welds. Marco, Lina thought. Platini.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Marco sat on Clay’s bedroll staring out of the window at the soulless enormity of the belt. He, like his mother, had begun to hate it. He wondered if that vast blackness would eat her, render her dead, erase her from his life and from the universe itself. So many had died — adults all, those invulnerable giants who ruled his world with such confidence, but who had now become the victims of fate themselves, subjects in a new kingdom of horror.
The fear inside him had become so steady, so ubiquitous, that he hardly felt it any more. That was another thing he had in common with his mother, although he didn’t know this. It did, in fact, never occur to him that she could be afraid herself. Mothers weren’t afraid. End of.
Clay had given up trying to talk to Marco some while ago and was now immersed in his handheld games console, his stubbled head bent closely over the device. The game was Corp Wars — a good one — but Marco had lost all interest in it. He’d been winning effortlessly — he had played it a lot more than Clay — but the lack of challenge wasn’t the issue. Attempts to engage himself in the game had quickly begun to feel artificial, like lying to himself. All that mattered was what was happening out there. Murderers and thieves — people who seemed to want them all dead — roamed out there amongst the tumbling stones.