Macao Station

Chapter Twenty-Four

Lina awoke suddenly to the unmistakeable sound of an explosion, scrabbling upright in shock. The holo was off and as she sat there, eyes darting in fear, the lights slowly dimmed away to nothing and darkness grew out of the air itself, gradually filling the room. She sat, breathing heavily, trying to still her jittering heart. Then suddenly the emergency lights came on, a weak and bloody haze of red.

She stood slowly, unsure of what she intended to do, still confused by sleep. She cocked her head, listening intently. The station was ominously quiet. The refinery had been shut down since the Kays had ceased operation, but now she heard nothing. The silence was almost a tangible thing, an anti-sound. The sound of a thousand machines not working. Far off, somebody began shouting in a voice that warbled close to panic.

What blew up? Something blew up. . . The powerplant? Whatever it was, it had sounded big, and therefore serious. It must have been the powerplant, she thought fearfully, glancing up at the emergency lights. Macao was powered primarily by a low-cost fission reactor. If something had gone wrong there then they could all be dead in minutes. Marco! she thought frantically, and made for his room on legs that shook and jerked at the knees, threatening to betray her and spill her onto her face. She practically fell through his door, scrabbling at the frame to retain her balance.

Marco was stirring in his sleep, on the brink of waking. Lina dashed to his side and put her arms round him, making him jump and mumble something incoherent. His eyes opened and he looked up at her.

‘Mum. . .’

‘Honey, something’s wrong with the power,’ she said, smoothing his hair and looking into his young face, which had a spectral appearance in the red light. ‘I’m gonna go and try to find out what’s happening.’ She hoped she didn’t sound as terrified as she felt. The little voice far back in her head was chanting What’s wrong now? What’s wrong now? What’s wrong now?

‘Eh?’ he asked, trying to sit up and failing. He looked around himself blearily, noticing the emergency lighting. ‘Oh,’ he said in summary.

‘I want you to stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ She peered into his face, gauging his comprehension. ‘Yes?’ she prompted, shaking him smartly, once, by the shoulders.

‘Yeah,’ he replied uncertainly, his gaze somewhat unfocused. ‘Sure.’ And with that, amazing and gladdening Lina in equal measure, he actually lay back down and returned immediately to sleep.

She backed away, reluctant to let him out of her sight, as if he might simply disappear, dissolve into the red haze. Finally, she managed to force herself to turn. She ran from his room and out of the front door, banging her elbow on the table as she went.

The corridor outside was a blood-lit gullet stretching into darkness. Somebody was yelling, closer now. Another voice, answering shrilly. Lina thought she tasted an animal tang of fear in the air itself, like bitter acid, but maybe it was just the permeating foulness made by the apparently-failing scrubbers. She looked both ways down the passage, eyes wide, heart hammering, head spinning as if she could feel the turning of the station — dizzying, disorienting, sickening.

Somebody laid a hand on her shoulder and she cried aloud, a wordless shriek of shock, just about managing to hold onto her bladder as she whirled around. Petra was there, a scarecrow figure wrapped in shadows, dark hair plastered to her face, dressed in a light shift and pyjama trousers. She looked as frightened as Lina felt, which wasn’t a good sign. Lina had never known Petra to worry about anything before. Petra had the figure and the face of a ballet dancer, but underneath it she was actually as hard as nails.

‘Petra,’ Lina whispered, her throat clamping on the word. ‘You scared me.’

‘What happened, Lina?’ Petra asked. Her fingers were combing again and again through her straight, dark hair — clawing it, really — and she was clearly shivering in her thin clothing. ‘What happened?’ she repeated, her voice becoming demanding, as if she could simply insist that Lina explain. ‘It sounded like it came from above, from the machine rooms. Was it the generators?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lina, turning to go and beckoning Petra to follow. ‘Let’s find out.’

They dashed down the corridor, heading counter-spinwards towards the nearest stairs. Lina felt totally blank-minded, detached from her running body.

A thin stream of confused and frightened people joined them, becoming a substantial tide as they neared the stairs up to the machine rooms, where the generators and power relays were. Si Davis jogged past Lina without bothering to speak, his wide form forging a pathway through the developing crowd like an ice-breaker. He took the stairs two at a time, making them ring loudly beneath him, and disappeared from view.

Lina stumbled onto the floor of the upper deck, put one hand down to right herself, and scrambled back to her feet, hotly pursued by Petra. Voices were calling up ahead, mingling into an aural blur that conveyed only fear and surprise, no real meaning. Somebody screamed, shrill and grating, chilling Lina’s blood.

The crowd thickened as they entered the machine rooms, forcing Lina to walk, pushing her way through. It seemed that everybody on the station was here, milling around, trying to see whatever was happening just outside the main generator room. The station burned with that awful red light, as if it had become a furnace.

Lina elbowed her way past Alphe, who made no effort to resist her, and stopped, stunned and open-mouthed at what she saw. An involuntary gasp escaped her throat.

Eli was leaning against the wall, hands over his face and head bowed, wrapped in the smoke that streamed from the doorway of the gennie room. A crumpled human form lay spread-eagled on the floor in front of him. A knife lay between them in a pool of glossy black liquid. But of course, it wasn’t black, Lina knew. It just looked black in the emergency lighting. It was red, wasn’t it? It was blood.

‘Nik!’ somebody screamed. ‘THAT’S NIK!’

Eli raised his face, which hung slackly from his skull like an ill-fitting mask. A thin string of saliva depended from his lower lip. ‘I didn’t mean to. . .’ he croaked, his eyes wandering to the sprawled body of Nik Sudowski. ‘I didn’t mean to. . .’

Ella Kown burst from the crowd like a cork from a bottle, her stun-baton crackling in her hand. She stopped in front of Eli, poised in momentary indecision.

‘What the hell happened here?!’ demanded Ella. Another of her team emerged to stand beside her, and Lina saw with a little dismay that it was Jayce, fully armoured-up. If you could ever count on a person to make a situation worse, Jayce was the man.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ Eli said again, a note of pleading entering into his voice. ‘He. . . Nik. . .’

‘I think you’d better can it, Eli. I want you to come with me, okay? Right now,’ said Ella, clearly trying to sound reasonable — a tone that was somewhat at odds with the sight of the baton that still crackled away in her hand. ‘Just be cool, all right? We’ll work this out. But this is not the place.’ She killed the stunner, forcing her body to relax. The crowd waited in breathless silence.

‘He sabotaged the power relay,’ said Eli, seemingly to himself, his gaze creeping to the body that lay before him in a rapidly-spreading puddle of gore. ‘I confronted him.’ He looked around the assembled watchers, his eyes pleading for understanding. ‘I tried to stop him.’ Lina could see none of the Eli she knew in that shell-shocked face. ‘He had a knife. He. . .’

Just then, the towering figure of Halman emerged from the throng, to stand between Eli and Ella, dwarfing both of them. He looked titanic and strong, and Lina instantly felt a little better.

‘Eli, I want you to go with Ella,’ he said in a voice that, although quiet for him, was still clearly audible from Lina’s vantage point.

‘Hey, Halman,’ said Eli’s voice flatly, while Eli’s eyes looked about a million miles away. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Now, Eli!’ snarled Halman, seizing him by the scruff of the neck and propelling him into Ella’s arms. Ella, despite her strength, staggered and struggled to prevent Eli from falling. She was lucky, in Lina’s opinion, not to discharge the stunner into him. Jayce came to her aid, in an uncharacteristic show of clear thinking, and between them they manhandled Eli away.

‘Where’s my fucking sec-team?!’ bellowed Halman into the assembled crowd. They actually fell back, as one body, by a pace or two, revealing the nervous-looking Theo, still in the T-shirt and sweat-pants he had slept in, his chubby face devoid of its usual friendly glow. He stepped forwards, nodding curtly to Halman.

‘Yes, Sir,’ Theo said, in a voice that was little more than a croak.

‘Find the rest of the team, shut this area off.’ Halman turned to address the crowd as a whole: ‘I want everyone except for security and maintenance to go back to their quarters!’ he boomed. Nobody moved. ‘NOW!’ he screamed. ‘GO!’ The crowd faltered, losing cohesion, and began to disperse. Lina found her feet rooted to the spot. She felt as if she had woken up in another world. None of this could be happening. ‘Theo — find the rest of the sec team and lock this area down. Nobody else except maintenance is to go within fifty metres of this door.’ Theo nodded and sprinted off through the dispersing crowd, weaving around people with surprising agility for someone of his size.

Suddenly, the small but reassuringly-efficient figure of Doctor Hobbes appeared, as if he had simply materialised in place. He stepped past Lina with his medical holdall in one hand and a grim expression on his narrow face. He glanced at Halman without speaking, and knelt down beside Sudowski’s body, opening the bag as he did so. He looked as if he had already decided it was hopeless, and Lina had to concur with that opinion judging by the amount of blood that had escaped Nik’s body. Sabotage? Her mind stumbled over the word, trying to connect it with a meaning. Surely not. She had suspected someone. . . but never Nik Sudowksi. And he’d attacked Eli with a knife? Nik? No wonder he hadn’t looked too good of late — he’d clearly been losing his mind! This was an affliction that Lina felt she could sympathise with at that moment. Something in the superstructure of the station groaned faintly, but vastly, bringing her back to her senses.

‘Maintenance!’ bellowed Halman, who had always been of the school of thought that loud enough shouting could resolve any problem. His bushy moustache bristled as his jaw clenched and unclenched fiercely.

Alphe and Fionne scampered into the smoking generator room under the glowering stare of the station controller, each with a large toolbox in hand. They both made the effort not to look at the haemorrhaging body of their superior as they passed it. Fionne actually left a dainty footprint in his blood. Lina shuddered and her stomach did a single, washing-machine-like revolution at the sight, almost dumping her dinner onto the corridor floor.

‘Lina?’ said Halman, startling her back to reality. She looked up, eyebrows raised. ‘Piss off, okay? Give us some space.’

She nodded dumbly, and turned away, finding it hard to detach her gaze from the human wreckage sprawled on the metal tiles. Hobbes had Sudowski’s saturated work-shirt open to the waist and a monitoring device planted on his chest. Lina could see a long, bloody gash in the flesh there. It looked like a leering mouth. She could not believe that, even by accident, even when attacked, Eli could have done that. She caught a glimpse of bone through the wound as Halman shoved her on the back — not too roughly, just hard enough — and she finally managed to get her feet moving.

She wandered back to her quarters on autopilot, her body finding its own way there while her mind spun futilely far back in her skull, generating nothing but white noise and fragmented questions. She felt as if the station’s floor was pitching beneath her like the deck of a ship at sea. The red light began to permeate her skull, eating into her sanity like acid. When she got home she found her son standing in the middle of the floor, frightened, waiting for her.

‘Mum!’ he yelled, as soon as the door opened, rushing into her arms. ‘What’s happening? I heard shouting outside. Why are the lights off?’

Lina squeezed him in her arms, held him tightly, as if the spinning of the station might snatch him from her, whirling him away into space if she let go. He was still questioning her, repeating himself over and over, but she didn’t even hear him. All she knew was that he was here, he was okay. And in her imagination, pictures of Platini Alpha, culled from the documentary she had watched, scrolled like teasing glimpses of some alternate reality.