Macao Station

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lina woke up early, her internal clock scrambled by the unexpected change from late-shifts to no-shifts. Even on non-work days, such as this was, she usually stayed as close as possible to her work-day schedule. But she had crashed out on the night of Sal’s accident some three or four hours earlier than usual, and now she felt both tired and restless at the same time, completely unfulfilled by her sleep.

She tried to remain in bed, reading an ebook on one of her datasheets, but it was a particularly dreary tale about abused children in the slums of Old Earth, and it only served to depress her. She cast the datasheet aside around seven in the morning and got up, trying to make as little noise as possible.

She dressed, in a full set of clean, non-work clothes, and made a fair effort at dragging a brush through her hair. One minute she was looking at herself in the mirror, feeling dreamy with tiredness, disassociated from the reflection of her own face, and the next minute she found that she was standing in front of the window and staring instead into that.

Had she really seen a ship heading out into the belt last night? No, surely that was impossible. All the ships were grounded, right? And somebody must be keeping an eye on them, to make sure they stayed that way. Right?

She gazed out at the asteroid field: an ugly mass of matter; rocks that wore bright patches of ore like skin infections; trailing away, as always, to the very edge of sight. ‘Maybe,’ she said to herself in a whisper. ‘Maybe not.’ She thought of the shadow from her dream, chasing her implacably through the airless dark — a streamer of nightmarish, hungry intent. She thought of Sal, whose remains had had to be vacuumed up. She remembered the sound of Sal’s tooth ricocheting off the front of her Kay and she shivered, shaking her head to dispel the image, and turned the window off again.

By the time Marco woke up, Lina had washed herself, brushed her teeth, and begun to feel a bit more sprightly. The bad taste of the air was more pronounced than ever, though, and somehow the added flavour of the toothpaste made it even worse. She wondered when Marco would notice it. And when everybody else would notice it, for that matter.

She was re-organising her wardrobe when Marco appeared, blinking, at her door. His opening line was a casual, ‘What’s that smell?’

Lina looked up from the pile of clothes that surrounded her on the floor, feeling absurdly guilty, as if it was her fault. ‘Nasty, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Is it the air system?’ he asked bluntly, drawing his dressing gown tighter around himself.

‘I suppose so,’ she said quietly, half expecting this to have a terrifying effect on the boy. She felt her own pulse quicken, as if on his behalf.

‘Mmm,’ he grunted, the matter seemingly settled, then wandered off to the small bathroom.

Lina breathed a sigh of relief and began to replace items into the metal wardrobe in almost exactly the same order they had originally been in. She knew she was just finding herself a distraction, but she didn’t care — it seemed like what she needed. When she finished this task she went to find Marco in his room.

He was lying on his bed with earphones in and eyes shut. Lina didn’t know what he was listening to. Marco seemed to procure a surprisingly large volume of new music from his school friends. His tastes seemed to favour no particular genre, and Lina tried hard not to influence him, although some of the sub-scream and hexno artists from Platini were, honestly, terrible.

She tapped him on the knee and he looked up, removing one of the earphones. ‘Yeah?’ he asked.

‘I’m gonna go to the canteen and grab us some breakfast, okay?’

‘Yeah, cool,’ he said, replacing the earphone and shutting her out again.

It occurred to Lina how like a teenager he was already becoming, and a pang of nostalgia went through her as she gazed at his uncommunicative form. His amazement in the micro gravity of the station’s hub had made him briefly childlike again last night, but now the effect seemed to have worn off. The two of them had always been good friends, and she dreaded the possibility that he might become a surly teen in the near future. Who, she thought, will I have then? She wondered about Platini, and the life they might be able to make for themselves if they could ever get there. She let herself out, and headed to the canteen in a strange mood of contented sadness.

When she got there she found that she had missed the worst of the rush, and she didn’t have long to stand in line. She chatted idly to Si Davis as she waited, exchanging small talk, deliberately skirting the big issues. Si was as rude and ebullient as ever, and he fell into a general and obscenity-littered rant about The Company — a favourite subject of his. Lina let him run, smiling and nodding at sympathetic intervals, until he reached the front of the queue.

Amy Stone, sitting behind one of the grimy canteen tables with a datasheet in front of her, smiled a thin, efficient little smile that was virtually devoid of actual warmth, and said, ‘Good morning, Simon.’

‘Hey, er, Amy,’ replied Si in his usual, inappropriately booming voice. ‘What’s for brekkie?’ Lina knew as well as he did what was for breakfast, having waited while a small stream of hungry prospectors all received identical rations from the glum-looking Jayce, who stood behind Amy’s left shoulder.

‘Bread, de-hy eggs, coffee, powdered milk,’ recited Amy robotically.

‘Mmm!’ enthused Si falsely, rubbing his stomach. ‘Thanks, Farsight!’

Amy stared at him levelly. It was a stare that Lina thought could probably have wilted a flower, and indeed it had this effect on Si, whose grin faltered and then slid clean off his face. ‘My name is Amy,’ she said. ‘Not Farsight. And we’re all in this together, Simon.’

‘Er, sure. . .’ he answered, trying to avoid her eye. Lina suppressed the urge to giggle. Amy was pure battleaxe, but Lina rather liked that about her. She took no prisoners.

‘Jayce,’ Amy said over her shoulder, and Jayce stepped forwards, looking apologetic, holding Si’s meagre breakfast rations in a single shrink-wrapped bundle. Si took the parcel without further comment then squeezed past Lina and out of the canteen, looking somewhat crestfallen.

Lina received her own parcel and took it back to her quarters, finding Marco in exactly the posture and position she had left him. She busied herself reconstituting eggs and toasting bread (burning bread, in the case of the first slice) then called Marco through to the table. Surprisingly, he heard her and came happily enough, presumably propelled by his stomach despite the unexciting promise of the new rationing regime. He seemed to be in fair spirits as he ate, wolfing his own food and then finishing Lina’s, which she pretended not to want so that he wouldn’t feel bad about it. She wondered how long the station’s supplies were going to last, dished out in these conservative increments. Presumably someone had calculated that they would be okay until the next shuttle. Her mind kept trying to ask her what if that one didn’t come, but she drowned out thought with small talk.

As soon as Marco had put his fork down and wiped his chin with his sleeve — a gesture that, as a mother, Lina found it hard to approve of — there was a knock on the door.

‘I’ll get it,’ Lina said, already rising.

She opened the door, half expecting bad news of some sort, and was thus pleasantly surprised to find a grinning Eli standing there, hands deep in the pockets of his traditional flight suit.

‘Hey,’ he said simply, walking past her with the unquestioning confidence of a long-time friend. Lina shut the door and followed him back inside.

‘Eli!’ cried Marco with undisguised pleasure. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said Eli, twisting one of the dining chairs around and sitting on it backwards, elbows resting on the backrest. ‘Functioning as normal, pretty much, despite the company’s attempts to inflict malnutrition on me. And you guys?’

‘Oh, you know, bearing up,’ answered Lina for the both of them. Eli shot her a look, which although brief, said it all. They were all bearing up because they had to. Death in the family, missing shuttle, emergency rations. . . What could they do but just carry on?

‘Is the game still on?’ Marco asked, missing the significance of the moment, or else choosing to ignore it. He looked innocently up into Eli’s weathered face.

‘Er, no, champ, it’s cancelled actually,’ answered Eli apologetically.

Lina glanced back at the window behind her, where asteroids drifted like ghost ships. There, she thought. That’s where all the trouble has come from. That damn belt. First you kill Sal, then you take our shuttle — I don’t know how I know that, but I do — and now you’ve taken my son’s football game away. I hate you. And we’re going to leave you before you hurt us any more.

‘Ohhh. . .’ groaned Marco, childish disappointment creasing his face. A few years ago that expression would have been the prelude to tears, but now he simply sighed and shook his head, suppressing his disappointment.

‘I thought maybe you and I could go down into Bay Seven and have a kick-around, just the two of us, instead.’

Lina’s heart bloomed with warmth at that — Eli was, as she had said herself, one of the good guys.

‘Yeah!’ exclaimed Marco, coming alive again instantly. But his expression became suspicious quickly. ‘Is that allowed, though? Nobody’s supposed to go in there, I thought. Only specially authorised games, right?’

‘Well that’s right, buddy,’ agreed Eli, helping himself to the coffee that Lina had left on the table — cold, now, as well as disgusting — and draining it in one gulp. ‘But we have special authorisation, you and I.’ He puffed his chest out importantly. ‘I have friends,’ he said grandly, ‘in high places.’

‘Cool! Nice one, Eli! Can we go now?’ Marco was already up out of his seat.

Eli arched an eyebrow at Lina, who felt herself beaming back at him. ‘Sure, go on,’ she said. ‘You kids have fun.’

‘Thanks, Mum!’

‘Yeah, thanks, Mum!’ Eli imitated. ‘Got your ball handy, Marco?’

Marco dashed out of the room to get it.

Eli turned to Lina, his battered face concerned. ‘So how you really doing?’ he asked, sotto voce.

Lina looked into his soft grey eyes and saw her own worries mirrored there. ‘As I said — bearing up. Scared, sad. . . You know. . . the air, it’s. . . I. . . I want to take Marco to Platini,’ she stammered, unaware that she had intended to tell him this, and suddenly feeling an inexplicable pang of guilt, as if she was admitting some secret and perverse desire. Part of her wanted to scream, The tooth! I saw Sal’s tooth bounce off the screen of my ship! I saw her fucking tooth, Eli, and that was it for me, that was the end of the line! I simply cannot take it any more! She felt tears welling in her eyes and squeezed them shut until she knew it was safe to open them again.

Eli was nodding slowly, staring back at her, and she felt that she was seeing through a mask, seeing the real man behind the laughter lines. He was becoming an old man — even he was not invulnerable. This thought strengthened her resolve. Time had moved on, but it was still not too late for her to make a change. She hoped.

‘I think you should,’ Eli said, and Lina felt a genuine gratitude swell inside her.

Just then, Marco’s football flew into the room, rebounding off one of the wall-cupboards, making Lina jump. It was followed by Marco himself, who stopped it deftly with one foot. His face was grinning beneath his mass of golden curls, and he looked like any kid without a care in the world.

‘Come on then!’ Marco yelled, apparently surprised to see Eli still sitting at the table.

‘Right!’ Eli exclaimed, leaping up with a lightness that Lina knew was at least partly artificial. ‘Later, Lina.’ He cuffed her on the arm, kicked his chair back in, and went to the door.

Marco ran around the table and gave her a brief hug. ‘See you, Mum,’ he said.

‘Enjoy your game,’ she answered, releasing him.

And without further ado, the two of them dashed out, Marco dribbling the ball as he went. The door shut behind them, erasing them from reality and leaving her alone in the cool greyness of her quarters. She sat at the table, looking around herself and wishing she had gone with them.

Presently, she found that she was looking at the belt again, her gaze unconsciously and inevitably drawn to it. It made her feel cold inside. And uneasy.

Farsight claimed those rocks had value, but Lina knew the truth. The belt was worthless. In the grand scheme of things it mattered precisely jack shit. It wasn’t worth anybody’s life: not Sal’s; not hers; not anybody’s. She wondered if she would ever be prepared to fly through it again. Well, she thought, hopefully once more. When I’m on my way to Platini with my son.

Darkness reigned out there, cold and infinite. She wondered how many dispersed molecules of Sal Newman still drifted in that hostile void like so much dust on the solar wind.

She busied herself by cleaning the steel-tiled floor of the main living-slash-dining room, stacking the sofa, table and chairs in one corner. She didn’t even care that, despite her work, the floor still remained stubbornly stained and grimy, as if it was made of dirt and all she could do was abrade the layers. When she was done she put everything back and sat for a minute on the sofa, at something of a loss for what to do next. Lacking any better idea for the moment, she flicked the holo on.

For a while she watched a documentary about the new and ambitious engineering works commissioned on Platini Alpha — the Grand Chasm Bridge, the new spaceport terminal, the vast network of irrigation aqueducts — but the longing this induced in her, for solid ground and civilisation, soon became unbearable and she began to flick channels.

She was surprised to find that channel ninety-nine, reserved for in-station broadcasts, was actually running. It showed the dark and cavernous space of Bay Seven, where the game was supposed to have been held today. Clearly the channel had gone live in response to some automated routine, even though the actual game had been cancelled.

And there was Marco, chasing his brightly-coloured football across the bottom left corner of the screen. Devoid of a human operator, the camera wasn’t tracking the ball, and Marco quickly dashed out of shot again. This time Eli came into the picture, looking, to be honest, a little overworked trying to keep up with the boy. To his credit, though, he darted to one side swiftly enough to intercept the ball that Marco had long-bombed towards one of the goals, controlling it and moving off out of shot with it. Lina smiled to herself, ignoring the small twinge of guilt that drifted through her mind attached to the phrase You’re spying on them. She knew they wouldn’t mind.

The ball zoomed across the shot again, away into the shadowed depths of Bay Seven. The two figures — man and boy — chased after it, silent as ghosts, jostling, gone again. Back again. . . gone again. . . back again. . . gone again. . . Blades of darkness towered above them — angular flints of shadow. Two flitting figures in a holo cube. . . seeds of life caught in the dead matrix of this awful outpost at the end of the universe.

Lina reached out and killed the holo, realising as she did so that her hand was shaking. She lifted it to her face and stared at it, unable to believe that her body could betray her thus. Then she put both hands over her face and, her mind entirely blank and void of reason, began to cry.