Macao Station

Chapter Twenty-Five

Why hadn’t the crazy dragon-man come back? Would he even come back? Who knew what the bastard was doing on that station? Perhaps he had been caught, jailed, even killed. What would happen to Carver then? He’d be stuck here — here in this blighted hole of ice and rock — until he died. And how long could he survive here for? He didn’t have the obvious technical knowledge of the crazy dragon-man, and he had no idea how the air system of the conjoined shuttle actually worked, or how long it would continue to do so. And anyway, the restraining device was nearby, fixed to a rock pin in one jagged surface which Carver had come to think of as a wall, despite the lack of real meaning to directions such as up, down, left and right. He wouldn’t be able to go far enough from it to get himself food if the crazy dragon-man didn’t return from whatever demented mischief he had set off upon. The man had left him an insulated flask of water, which hung, half-full, from his belt, but no food at all.

And so he worked. What else was there to do? He clung to the fading hope that the crazy dragon-man would return, that he would be pleased with Carver’s progress and would release him from the hated restraining device. He knew that this was an unlikely sequence of events, though, and as time progressed it seemed ever more so. He wondered if he might actually dig right through this damned rock and out into space. The explosion of released pressure would propel him out into the asteroid belt, where he could enjoy the twin thrills of asphyxiation and irradiation at the same time. He couldn’t even go and get a helmet, because, once again, he couldn’t leave the radius of that fucking restraining device. After considering this for some time, he decided he didn’t really care.

He sustained himself through this difficult time by daydreaming about murdering the crazy dragon-man, maybe bashing his crazy head in or strangling him until his crazy eyes popped out. He thought about what he’d do to the body, how he’d destroy it, humiliate it, reduce it to its component molecules. The cutter blared and screamed in his hands, sending out gouts of steam, filling the world with its enraged bellow. After a while, it even began to heat the air to an almost-bearable temperature.

He was beginning to build up a fair cache of extracted cones of rock now, which floated, jostling and knocking together in the pitch-dark volume of space behind him. Now and then, one would bump into him, and several times he came close to cutting his own leg off when this happened. He launched the chunks away again, but not too hard, having learnt that excessive force would only cause further ricochets and disorder. When he turned and aimed his suit-light into the mass, he was alarmed at how many pieces there were. He’d made his own, mini asteroid belt, but one that was trapped in this awful cavern with him. The rocky cone-shapes twisted and tumbled, looking to Carver like gnashing fangs.

Once, while he stared into this debris-filled space, he imagined that he saw shapes within the chaos, patterns congealing out of the surface disorder, concentrations of shape that came and went, real then unreal again, almost teasing. He screwed his eyes shut, the cutter wedged against the rock-face, willing reality to resume its course. When he opened them again, the patterns had gone, if they had ever been there at all. Shards of stone spun, glittering in the crystalline beam of his light, dangerous but entirely material.

He returned to work, moving his harness point further into the face and yanking on the line to test it before restarting the plasma cutter. His whole body ached, everything from his skin right down to his bones. He considered taking a break — after all, who would ever know? But he decided against it, knowing that he’d never be able to make himself begin again. He wondered what the crazy dragon-man would do when they failed to find anything within the asteroid. Would he fry Carver’s brain until it killed him, just out of spite? Why not? How much time that gave him, he couldn’t guess, but he was aware that he was probably just accelerating the eventuality by his relentless pace of work. Still, what else could he do?

And so he cut, launched the chunks into the mass behind him, moved his rock-pin, cut again. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, his body aching all the time, wreathed in the steam of the cutter, possibly the single furthest human being from civilisation, alone at the frozen frontier of space, waiting for a crazy man who might never return.