Macao Station

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.’

‘Hey. . .’ said Carver, intending to strongly defend his position, even make an impassioned plea for his life. It came out as the merest breath, and trailed away into nothing.

‘Come,’ said the man. ‘And we’ll find some digging equipment before I go. This shuttle will be rammed with mining kit.’ He sounded calmer, more reasonable again, and Carver tried to convince himself that he hadn’t been scared just then, that this was just some poor crazy fucker living out his schizoid fantasy on a blighted rock. But something had chilled him to his core. That frozen kernel still remained as he followed the man back through the tube and into the booming depths of the inter-system shuttle.