As the man flailed despairingly, trying to stem the venting gas, one of his lights shone back on his own face cover. The sun filters were at their minimum now and Nathan saw him clearly. He expected him to be a stranger, and he was a stranger. What he did not expect was the feeling it gave him to see, to really see, that it was a stranger who had come to end his life. To kill someone known to you was ugly and savage enough, but somewhere in the shameful dark, it was human. This, though, this had no link with people. This was outside. This was horror. He shivered.
The dying stranger, driven by the hole in his chest, began to move away from him into the black. Before he was completely out of reach, Nathan stabbed at him again and missed and then again and again until finally the blade burned a hole through the leg of the man’s spacesuit. This second vent pushed him into a tumbling cartwheel. His wrist-lights made symmetrical patterns in the darkness. Nathan watched them, fascinated. He was aware of a vague disappointment that the fight seemed to be over. He was holding the knife out in front of him and there was an odd sound echoing in his helmet. He found he had an erection. Then he recognized the sound as giggling. He was giggling.
A ripple of nausea trembled over him. He swallowed the wash of saliva in his mouth, and tasted bile at the back of his throat. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and concentrated on getting control of himself. He must not throw up. He definitely must not throw up. There were two things you didn’t do in a spacesuit, his trainer had told him. One was vomit, and so was the other one.
Disgust took the place of nausea, and he flung the knife away from him. Almost at once, it vanished from his sight. The small action produced a small reaction and arrested the last of the slow somersaulting which the fight had been gradually eliminating.
The effect was too minor to change his line of drift, and he was anyway unsure of what that might be. Then he saw the turning lights jolt and swing as the second of the men he had killed struck the plating some distance away on the far side of the module. The lights bounced and twisted and rolled onwards into the dark.
For a moment, he had an impression of perspective and position. It was probably an illusion, but it brought him back out of the limbo in which he had lost himself. He focused on where he thought he had seen the wall and dragged his eyes across the imagined curve of it in a long, unblinking stare.
He peered for the slightest change in the darkness which would indicate the gap he had first come to. Without a reflective surface floating directly above it – as he himself had done, gathering light and shining like a target beacon – his only hope was that the sun filters of his face cover were now clear enough to let him see the difference between darkness and deep space. He stretched the look as far as his eyes would reach.
Nothing. The blackness was uniform.
Perhaps the exit was behind him. Except that he wasn’t absolutely sure whether or not he was rotating – so how could he be sure where ‘behind him’ was?
A long way off now, the lights of the dead man flickered intermittently. It looked as though he was spinning, but that did not help Nathan to decide if he was too. He nudged the heads-up display back on. The readings looked okay. If the spacesuit had been damaged, it wasn’t showing on any of the telltales. Everything was functioning normally. Apart from the RT. That was clearly buggered. He wondered if that was part of the plan, and decided that it must have been. “Unless you’re a lover of coincidence,” he said aloud, and was glad to hear his voice sounding more or less normal again.
Time-elapsed was the only immediate worry. It had run into deficit. He was past the outward maximum by several minutes. He should have started back by now. But even that was not critical. There was plenty of margin for error.
He was surprised at how quickly it had all happened. Killing two men should have taken longer.
He released the jet pack control. He would have to risk a delicate boost, a very delicate boost, to take him to the module wall so that he could really orientate himself. He touched the control and discovered to his horror that the system was registering nothing. The jet pack was dead.
“Dead? What do you mean, dead?” asked Theroux, when the general panic had subsided enough to make communication with Butler possible.
Lancine looked up from her desk terminal where she was trying to override the automatic safety lockouts, and waited to hear the reply.
“I mean there’s nothing from his suit telemetry, no voice response, and I can’t find any sign of him on anything else.” There was no trace of emotion in Butler’s voice. “I can only assume therefore that he’s dead.”
Lancine shook her head and said, “’ow many people can he lose, this base control?”
Theroux ignored her. “What the fuck sort of an assumption is that?” he demanded.
Butler’s voice retained its professional calm. “He went into the construction zone. I gave him a direct instruction not to do that.”
Professional calm was not what Theroux wanted. “He didn’t do as you told him, so you write him off? For Chrissakes, Simon!”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Send out a team,” Theroux said.
“Stop wasting my time, David. We’ve got enough problems thanks to you and the climb…” he stopped, obviously he had remembered where Theroux was calling from, and then he went on without any change of tone, “thanks to you and Madame la directrice.”
“What about Nathan’s problems, you asshole?”
“Before anyone got to him, he’d certainly be dead.”
“But you don’t know where he is, do you?”
“I know where he isn’t. He isn’t close enough to be pulled back in the time available.”
Theroux glared at Lancine. “How long before you crack the hatches?”
“Not long,” she said.
Butler’s voice cut across them. “The question of rescue is academic since we’re all stuck, yes? You in your small corner, and me in mine. Call me back when that changes.”
Theroux floated across and watched Lancine punching in the operating codes. She did not react to the lack of etiquette or to the breach of security. He said, “My question was, how long?”
Lancine continued to work, and said without looking up, “My answer was, not long.”
Theroux thought, fuck you, bitch, and said, “We don’t have time left.”
“You stand ready to discharge your responsibility when I ’ave completed this?” Lancine asked.
Theroux grunted, “Yeah.”
“Perhaps there is a contingency plan for such an emergency as this?”
Theroux said, “Of course there is. You know there is.”
Lancine gave a Gallic shrug of denial which was small and very dismissive. “I am only surprised the Star Cops are so well prepared.”
Theroux’s confusion showed. “Pardon me?”
The reaction was not lost on Lancine, whose supplementary academic specialization had been Inter-Personal Psychology in Management Structures. “I assume you ’ave not forgotten,” she said, “that there is a murderer running loose on the station. And you are the only remaining policeman.”
The crack rattled through Nathan’s head and made his ears ring, and he knew that some part of the spacesuit had failed catastrophically. It took a minute or two for him to accept that everything was functioning and he was still in one piece, and it was several seconds more before he realized that his helmet had struck the metal skin of the module, filling the suit with vibration and his ears with noise.
He put his hands up and touched the panels. He tried to do it lightly; the last thing he needed was to push himself off again, back into the void. The suit’s armoured gauntlets were not exactly sensitive, but as far as he could tell, he had stopped drifting. He badly wanted to hold on, but there was nothing to grip, and he had to fight the drowning man
’s impulse to clutch and thrash, and he had to force his body to relax and float. For reassurance he permitted himself an occasional numb, silent tap with a single finger but he couldn’t risk anything more.
So. He was located. Somewhere. If he could pick up a reference point, any reference point, then there was a chance he could navigate his way out of this. This trap he had fallen into like a mouse into a bottle. Only there weren’t any bloody reference points. Like a blind mouse into a bottle.
He was sorry now that he had stopped Theroux from coming outside by exaggerating the threat from Brownly and Goff. He could probably have trusted Theroux. He wasn’t a professional copper, but he could probably have trusted him. He looked at the displays again. Everything functioning as it should. Everything optimal. Except time. He was in trouble with time. Time was getting critical. Error was claiming its margin. Everything critical then. Nothing optimal. He should be back inside the airlock in…in two minutes twenty-five…he hadn’t even started the return. He cancelled the display. Maybe conserving power would help. Help what though? And how the hell was he supposed to get back anyway? Walk?
He looked down towards his feet. He could see them faintly. It did not immediately strike him that this was in any way remarkable. They were very faint. An almost indistinguishable silhouette, against an infinitesimally paler patch of darkness.
Service engineer Carl Saliero had recognized Brownly’s corpse at once, even though it had been mutilated by the abortive attempts of the mess’s main disposal unit to add it to one of the waste containers.
Carl had been stripping down the system, looking for whatever was jamming things up, when he uncovered the mangled remains. Before he could report the find, there were alarms and warnings and general hysteria. He was one of the few people to remain unmoved. He did not like what he had found; it disgusted him, but he knew there was nothing to be frightened of. A homicidal madman was no threat if he was dead. Brownly was not going to get much deader.
Carl was not a stupid man, but murder was outside his experience. Thinking about it did not come easily to him. In truth, he preferred not to think about it. What he preferred to do was wait calmly and patiently for the hatches to be unlocked and the communications channels to be unjammed, so that he could pass on the fact that there was no more cause for alarm.
Only when he was doing this did it occur to him to wonder how Brownly, a tall man, could have fed himself into the disposal unit. He would have to have been superhuman to stay conscious long enough to push his way through machine so that his feet reached the second-stage compactor. But who knew what a madman was capable of? Even when it was clear that Brownly must have been killed first and shoved into the unit, it did not occur to Carl to wonder why the murderer would try to dispose of the body using a machine which could not possibly do the job, as anyone on the station would have known.
But then it was not Carl Saliero’s job to think of such things, and those whose job it was were not quick to think of it either.
Nathan pushed himself, feet first, towards the opening. How could he have missed it? It was vast and bright. How could it have taken him so long? Once you saw, it you couldn’t not see it. He floated out of the module, laughing with relief. He could see again. He was out of the blind, bloody bottle. He stared around eagerly. Beyond his feet, the vastnesses of space opened up. Below him, the construction framework was vivid in the light.
Below him?
He swept a desperate arm back and managed to hook his hand over the edge of the hole and stop himself. Christ. He turned over and clamped both hands on the metalwork. It was unnecessary but it was comforting, his own personal wacsob, and he clung on until the fear subsided and he stopped feeling light-headed. Without a jet pack that worked, he’d better be bloody sure where he was pointing from now on if he didn’t want a straight flight into oblivion. He had to be more careful. He had to concentrate. And he had to do it quickly. Check the readouts? No point. What was he going to do, breathe less if he was running on empty? First thing was to get back in among the construction girders and spars, then he could work his way to a return launch point.
He swivelled so that his head was aimed at the nearest section, and pulled with his hands and pushed off with his knees. The thrust was clumsy, uncoordinated, with the pull and the push almost cancelling each other out, and though he moved in the right direction, his progress was agonizingly slow, the more so because there was nothing he could do to speed it up. His arms, at first held in front of him to fend off collision, were now stretched out, anxiously reaching for a chance to grab onto something and tug.
When he finally drifted onto his target he lost more time with ill-considered, snatching rushes, pulling himself into intricate dead ends among the networks of construction. He knew he was panicking; he knew panic was swallowing the air he had, using up the time; he knew he must stop and think about what he was doing; and every instinct in him howled for action, flight, movement; and he knew reason kept you alive not bloody instinct: reason.
He stopped where he was and tried to reason.
He called up the telltale display and looked at each readout reflected in the helmet’s face cover, reviewing them in turn, making sure they registered on his mind and meant something to him. He did it as though it was a routine, pre-EVA systems check and when he finished he had information on which to base rational behaviour.
The backpack gases readout said he had fourteen minutes breathing time left, though he had been taught never to rely on the last few minutes capacity in anything as crude as a suit system. The journey back to the airlock would take anything up to twenty minutes. “On the face of it the rational behaviour is panic,” he said but couldn’t manage the wry smile necessary to complete the heroic image.
Carefully, trying not to think about the time it took, he worked out a route through the construction zone and then picked his way along it meticulously. This time he avoided the fumbling haste and covered the distance quickly. He was only slightly out of breath when he reached the edge. But even slightly out of breath was trouble. He was using oxygen faster. Time was speeding up. He needed to be quicker to keep up with it. He had to be quicker.
The space between the construction zone and the station seemed wider than he remembered. It yawned hugely. He found he was breathing faster still. Stop it.
Stop it.
He looked around for something substantial enough to launch from. Everything within reach was tubular. There was nothing he could put both feet flat against to balance the push. He chose a crossbeam finally. It was the biggest surface available. He set his feet on it and began to draw his legs up into a crouch. This was precisely the reverse of how he had trained and practised for such a manoeuvre. The standard procedure was always to settle into your body posture, knees to your chest or whatever was required, and then position yourself relative to the fixed object. You needed above average muscle control to do it the other way round without an involuntary push floating you away.
Nathan did not have above average muscle control. Before he was ready to commit to the final thrust towards the station he found himself drifting forward, flapping and floundering like a helplessly water-logged bird. Reason pulled him back from the chasm.
Stop trying to balance. This isn’t balancing, you stupid bastard. And it isn’t flying for Christ’s sake. You’re not high up and this isn’t flying and you can’t balance.
He stopped flapping his arms, reached to the crossbeam with the toe of his boot and flipped himself into a somersault. It could have pushed him further off but he had developed some small skill by now so what it did was to turn him round an almost stationary axis. He was still just within glove-tip distance of a bracing spar as the half spin was completed, and he clawed himself back and tried again. This time he did everything right. When he was ready the readout said eight minutes of breathing time left. He knew it was hopeless: he was a
dead man.
He launched off from the crossbeam, pushing every ounce of power his legs could develop into the kick.
Theroux made a preliminary identification of Brownly’s corpse, left Lancine to deal, and made immediately for the traffic control and communications module. He got there to find it was empty.
“Simon?” he called.
There was nothing out of place. The screens were operating. Everything was normal except, unthinkably…
“Where the fuck are you?”
…the place was unmanned.
He peered round half-expecting to see Butler’s lifeless body jammed between the consoles or floating in a spreading cloud of gore, but there was no sign of him.
Theroux moved to the main console to see whether he had logged off when a movement on one of the small monitors caught his eye. In the field of the exterior cameras a spacesuited figure was drifting across the side of the station in the general direction of the secondary two-man airlock.
Theroux slapped the resuscitation team alarm and keyed the communications circuit. “Blue alert, blue alert, resuscitation team to secondary EVA lock B for Baker, RS to EVA two B for Baker. This is a code one.”
He glanced at Nathan’s suit telemetry. Shit. “We have a suit breathout, man down by minus ten. This is a code one suit breathout. Let’s go, guys, let’s go, let’s go!”
Telemetry said Nathan was unconscious by now, or dead. Either way someone had to go out and pull him in. Leaving communications without a duty traffic controller was out of the question so one of the RS team would have to do it. He was about to issue the instruction when Vanhalsen arrived looking tense and distinctly wary. “Have you got him?” he asked.
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