Macao Station

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘What now?!’ bellowed Halman in response to the latest knock on his door. He threw his datasheet aside, grimly satisfied by the way it skipped off his desk, breaking one corner of its plastic case, and landed on the floor.

The door opened, slowly and haltingly, as the person outside turned the crank-handle in the access panel, the system that had replaced the now-defunct electrical one. Ella Kown was standing there, her posture somewhat defensive.

‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked, stepping cautiously inside anyway.

Halman squeezed his head in his large hands, exhaling heavily. ‘Of course it fucking is, Ella!’ he spat. ‘When have we ever had a worse time than this?’

Ella nodded diplomatically and approached his desk. ‘Can I sit down? I’m kinda beat.’

Halman indicated the chair opposite his. ‘Why not,’ he said.

Ella collapsed into the seat with a sigh. ‘So what’s the news?’ she asked.

‘Alphe and Fionne are working on the relay,’ he told her. When he’d left them, they’d had the entire floor up in the gennie room, and had both been crawling around within the bowels of the machinery, conversing heatedly in a technical language that was, to Halman, completely unfathomable. What was clear, even to him, was that the relay wasn’t the only thing to have been damaged. The turbines, which used steam from the reactor to actually generate electricity, had also been attacked. Halman wondered why Nik hadn’t sabotaged the reactor itself, if devastation had been his priority, but he was relieved that this hadn’t happened. Things could always — always — be worse. Although, when you thought about it, that wasn’t a whole lot of consolation.

Alphe had burned himself quite badly on some overheated conduit, but had refused to leave his work, dignifying Halman’s suggestion that he be replaced with the merest of grunted responses. Halman had decided that the most helpful thing he could do would be to leave, and this was what he’d done. He had returned to his office in a daze, walking through the newly-darkened interior of his station like a ghost, heated conversation, accusations and demands all around him, panic thrumming in the foul-tasting air itself. He had passed several rooms where helpful passers-by had stopped to release the occupants who had been trapped within by the failure of their automatic doors, and had somehow failed to understand or actually use the manual backup systems. Possibly, some of them had seized up, having never been required before. He was glad that the station’s builders had, for whatever reason, never got around to automating all of the doors on board, or just opening all the rooms could have turned into a major task.

‘Are they making any progress?’ Ella asked, managing a surprisingly casual tone.

‘I don’t know, Ella. Why don’t you ask them?’

‘You know who we could use right now?’

‘Yeah. Nik,’ he replied gruffly. Ella nodded in agreement. ‘The same son-of-a-bitch who apparently caused all this.’

‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ They sat for a moment, considering this. ‘What if they can’t fix it?’

Halman looked to the window of his office. A blizzard of stone hung suspended in the night out there. He wondered briefly how the pane was still powered, but then he remembered that the windows acted also as solar panels, generating enough electricity to run themselves. He reached out and turned it off. ‘They have to fix it,’ he said.

‘But what if they can’t?’

‘Well, then, the patched-up air system goes off when the battery dies, the Kays can’t fly, aeroponics stops, the water doesn’t run, or clean, the positioning jets stop, we lose gravity-effect, the heating goes off, and we die. As for how long we have. . .’ He spread his hands, and offered a single, humourless bark of laughter. ‘Ask Nik.’

‘Oh crap. . .’ Ella groaned.

‘How’s Eli?’ asked Halman abruptly, changing the subject.

‘He’s in medical, with one of my guys watching him. In shock, naturally. Devastated, from what Hobbes says. He’s sedated for the moment, so some small mercy there.’

‘What was he doing around the machine rooms anyway?’

‘He wasn’t really able to explain it to me earlier, and as I say, he’s out cold at the moment. He does, of course, have clearance to be down there if he wants. Going for a walk? Maybe he saw Nik and followed him up there.’

Halman huffed inconclusively, his moustache bristling. ‘I suppose so,’ he said at last.

‘You don’t suspect him of any wrongdoing, do you?’ asked Ella.

Halman looked at her from beneath knitted brows. ‘Don’t you?’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that your job? To be suspicious?’

Ella pursed her lips, considering this. At length, she said, ‘Dan, this is Eli. I don’t believe this went down in any way other than how he has described already. Nik’s prints were smudged together with Eli’s on the knife, suggesting that Eli did take the knife off him.’

‘Okay, so it’s inconceivable that Eli would blow up the relay then murder Nik. That’s a given.’ Ella nodded, attentive. ‘But. . .’ Halman raised a finger to emphasise his point. ‘It’s also inconceivable that Nik would blow the relay then try to kill Eli. I guess the whole fucking thing’s inconceivable. Yet here we are.’

‘Yeah, I have to agree with you there,’ said Ella, nodding her head grimly. ‘But in one respect, it makes a kind of sense. Nik certainly had the expertise to destroy the relay, sabotage Sal’s Kay, burn out the scrubbers, making it seem like regular wear-and-tear. . . and he knew how to fly a Kay.’ She sat back in her seat as if that explained everything.

Halman let this wash over him, trying to make sense of it. Inconceivable. That certainly did seem like the right term for it. ‘Shit, Ella, you really think he did all those things?’

‘I’m starting to. A lot of people have said he didn’t seem himself of late. They were saying that even before. You must have noticed.’

‘I thought he was just stressed. You know his head used to hurt him sometimes. Those Farsight shit-bags filled his skull with DNI rubbish at Platini. And remember, Nik fixed the scrubbers. Why would he do that if he broke them? And what do you mean, fly a Kay? What the hell has that got to do with it?’

‘Well, if we’ve had a saboteur on board, then I’m inclined to suspect foul play in the failure of our prodigal shuttle to show up.’

Halman started, sitting up straighter. ‘If somebody from here had intercepted it, then it’d be nearby somewhere, right? In the belt.’

‘Right. Somewhere on the flightpath from Platini to here, within range of our ships.’

‘I wish we could launch the damn Kays now, then we could look for it. That might just solve a lot of our problems in one stroke. I want to talk to the tech guys about diverting battery power to the hangar.’

‘Bit of a gamble, isn’t it, when we’ll have to choose between launching Kays and breathing air?’

Halman suddenly slammed one huge fist onto his desk, making Ella jump in her seat. ‘Shit!’ he cried — a word which seemed to fit the situation well.

‘One other thing. . .’ Ella said reluctantly.

Halman glowered at her. ‘What?’ he asked through clenched teeth.

‘Lina thought she saw somebody flying a ship into the belt, just after the clean-up of Sal’s. . . well, you know. . .’

‘And do you think she was right?’

Ella shrugged. ‘I asked the ground crew to check it out, but all the Kays were cool by then, and they said that honestly there’s no way they could be sure. It’s not hard to fake the launch logs if you know what you’re doing. The system was never designed to be secure, because nobody ever thought it necessary, I guess.’

‘Nik would have known how to do it,’ said Halman quietly. He felt about seventy-seven, rather than fifty-seven, all of a sudden. He passed a hand across his face, feeling the stubble where he hadn’t shaved, alarmed at how sunken and hollow his cheeks felt.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Ella.

‘For what it’s worth, Ella, I’m inclined to agree with you. I can’t imagine Eli being involved in all this. However, I still want him to remain in medical. And I want him properly tested under lie-detector, when you think he’s up to it. Just for the records, if nothing else. And keep him secure, of course.’

‘I think we need to be careful how we deal with Eli. He’s a much-loved figure here, especially with the mining staff. They’re already protesting his detainment, even in medical. People are pretty frightened, Dan. We’re sitting on a powder keg, essentially.’

‘Hmmm. . .’ said Halman, lost in his own thoughts again. ‘Anyway, we’ve bigger problems right now, haven’t we? Like how to eat, breathe and stay warm. Not to mention keeping the kinetic defence system going.’

Ella laughed, startling Halman, who gave her a confused look. ‘Sorry,’ she said, sobering. ‘It’s just all so unreal.’

‘Yeah, well it is bloody real, I’m afraid.’

‘Is there any way I or my team can help?’

‘You can try to prevent an outright mutiny, Officer — how about that?’

‘We’ll try, but no promises.’

‘How’re things in the prison?’

Ella shrugged again, as if this was the most minor of concerns. Halman supposed that, at the moment, it almost was. ‘Secure. But they’re pissed, of course. And frightened, like everyone else. This was never supposed to be a death sentence for any of them. But they’re locked down tight, and we intend to keep it that way.’

‘Good. Has the mess been cleared up properly? Nik, I mean.’

‘Yeah, medical dealt with it, under my direct supervision. The body’s on ice, but of course the freezer is now unpowered, so Hobbes’s team will have to examine it pretty quickly. I’d imagine he intends to do just that, but don’t hold out hopes of learning too much from it.’

‘No,’ agreed Halman darkly.

‘Anything else?’

‘Apart from keeping the drones away from the gennie rooms, I don’t think we can do anything else. Now, we wait and hope that maintenance can fix the power. Then we get out there and see if we can find that damn shuttle. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll live long enough for us both to take a day off, sometime in the distant future.’

Ella took a deep breath, sweeping a hand through her crew-cut hair. ‘Sounds like a plan,’ she said, rising from her seat.

‘Take care, Ella,’ he said as she turned to go.

She smiled. ‘You, too, Dan,’ she replied, and then she strode out through the still-open door and away into the crimson-hued twilight of the corridor outside.