Macao Station

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Carver cycled the main hatch of the loader, as the dragon had told him to do, then rushed down into the vessel’s small cargo hold with the cutter gripped in both hands. One of those hands wore an incongruous bright red glove from the ISL, a replacement for the one he had torn. It looked right, that red hand. The red hand of vengeance, he thought.

His head was thrumming and throbbing, beating like a drum, but he felt good. He felt charged. The power of the finger-necklace infused him and enfolded him. The dragon wound around his body like a shawl of dark feathers. Its voice was quieter here, further from its den, but he felt its presence nonetheless.

He emerged from the loader’s cargo hold as quietly as he could, forgetting that they wouldn’t hear his footsteps in the vacuum. He could hear their voices, though, over the radio. They were shrill and breathy, full of fear.

He ran along the body of the loader, crouched low and grinning ecstatically to himself. The cutter was heavy in his hands, solid and reassuring. As he crept past the loader’s landing gear he saw his intended victims crowded round the ladder that led up to the ship’s main hatch. They had fallen for his trick. Idiots. Let the hand of vengeance strike them down.

The cutter came alive, spluttering out globules of plasma which solidified into a continuous stream. He burst from the shadows at a run. Was that him laughing or the dragon?

Someone was slowly ascending the rungs of the ladder while the rest of the cowards hung back watching them. They looked like they were holding hammers and spanners, the hopeful fools.

Carver broke cover, accelerating to the fastest pace that he could manage in the suit, with the cutter poised above his head.

‘Where is he?’ asked a woman’s voice over the radio.

And then, just as he was about to swing the cutter, which should have neatly cut through all three of the idiots standing on the deck like a sheathe of wheat, slicing them in half at their waists, one of them — a little Asian-looking fucker — turned round and screamed.

‘LOOK OUT BEHIND!’

Clearly wired to the max, they turned as one, flinching away from him as the cutter went shimmering through the air. Its beam sliced neatly through one of the loader’s radio antennae, then passed close enough to the belly of one of the men — some inbred who looked like a fucking farmer — to singe the material of his suit. Carver actually saw the white fabric blacken as the cutter swung in its wide arc, possessed of its own unstoppable momentum.

He brought it back round in another swipe, angling down in a diagonal line, stepping in. But his feet slipped on the deck, which seemed to be covered in ice, and he fell to one knee, the cutter sizzling through one of the loader’s tyres, making the whole ship slump slightly as if threatening to simply fall on him.

Carver screamed in rage, scrabbling up, the cutter flailing in one hand, out of control. The dragon twined around him, faster and faster, hissing like a steam engine, utterly enraged.

‘Kill them! Kill them!’ it screamed distantly. ‘Don’t let them get away!’

But they were quick — quicker than he was, at least. The person on the ladder spun and leapt down onto the deck. Carver caught a brief glimpse of her face as she went. She looked like the sort who might enjoy some quality time alone with him: older than him, perhaps, but kind of handsome, with tangled blonde hair that hung across one side of her face. I’ll fucking get you! he inwardly vowed. But she was already off — they all were — and running towards the large door that gaped at the end of the room like a portal into purest darkness. He felt the dreaded miasma of failure closing in around him like poison gas.

He regained his feet, slipping and sliding maddeningly, the cutter gouging deep lines into the deck, sending up gouts of steam that blinded him. He staggered after the fleeing cowards, waving the steam away from his face, and lifted the cutter high again. One of the running figures threw a hammer back over their shoulder as they went, but Carver dodged it easily, gaining his stride, his legs pounding like great engines.

They burst out of the door and away into the station, but Carver was closing on them already. Their suits flashed whitely in his light — flapping spectres that he followed through the gloom, gaining on them, gaining on them. . . The cutter trembled keenly in his hands, spitting and gouting.

They seemed to be inside some massive warehouse where shelves like skyscrapers arced away into darkness above him. The fleeing cowards dodged around pallets of sheet metal, jumped over coils of hose, almost falling over each other as they went. He was almost close enough, now. . . almost. . .

And then his prey reached a T-junction and scattered — three left, two right. Carver skidded to a momentary halt, torn by indecision, his head bursting with pressure.

‘The woman!’ hissed the dragon. ‘Go after the woman, you fool. She and I have business still to finish. Go! Right!’

Carver took off rightwards, bellowing his rage, the cutter taking little nips out of either wall as he ran. He saw the heel of a boot disappear around the next corner and he drove himself onwards, leaving long streamers of expelled vapour behind him like contrails.

He rounded the corner and saw one of the fleeing cowards sprawled on the floor, scrabbling to regain their feet. Was it the woman? Let it be the woman! he prayed to himself as he leapt forwards and kicked the figure’s head like a football, making their helmet bounce against the floor. He dropped onto the figure’s back, seizing the fabric of their suit in one huge hand, and pulled their head up off the floor to look into the face.

‘You,’ he snarled to the little Asian-looking fucker, ‘are the wrong fucking one!’ The rage bubbled up inside him, so hot that he thought it might emerge as fire from his mouth. The face behind the visor gibbered with fear. ‘But you’ll do,’ he added, smiling with anticipation.

He knocked the little scaredy cat out by smashing his helmet on the floor a few more times, then dragged him back to the hangar and got busy. It was art, really — certainly his best work. And the dragon seemed to demand it. It hovered at the periphery of his mind, cajoling him, encouraging him, massaging that streak of darkness that pulsated in his brain like cancer. It had to be appeased. He should have caught them all, he knew.

But he didn’t allow himself to get too carried away, because those other couple of fucks had escaped, hadn’t they? Yes, and they would be back. Probably with some asshole friends, he suspected. Those sorts of people always had loads of asshole friends.

So he finished his work with the little scaredy cat and headed back out of the hangar again. He observed the small in-system ships as he passed, counting them. Fifteen in all, but one of them was in pieces, and those pieces were heaped with dust and metal shavings as if they hadn’t been touched in months. Someone had taped a handwritten sign across the ship’s partial hull, but the words on it were long-faded. And he had hit four more vessels on the way in, partly by accident and partly to appease his own childish desire for destruction. Three of these lay on their sides forlornly, clearly broken. The fourth one looked to have suffered only minor damage. Ten undamaged, then. And the loader, which he would take again.

Flying the loader had been easy, having run through a few hours of simulation. It mainly involved telling the computer where you wanted to go, and how fast, then employing whichever guidance routine was most appropriate. It hadn’t been necessary to resort to manual controls at all, in fact.

He stood just outside the hangar doorway, staring into the cavernous vastness of the warehouse, marvelling at the massive machine-parts that nested in the racking, reflecting his light dully from their oily skins. He realised then, as he imagined one of those vast pieces of metal tumbling down and crushing him to death, that the station was making artificial gravity. It hadn’t even occurred to him before. Of course, he’d known that the station would be a spinner, and even kind-of understood how that created the impression of gravity, but he hadn’t realised how easily, how thoughtlessly, he’d slip back into the one-gee lifestyle. He honestly hadn’t noticed until now, but now that he did, the sensation was an enjoyable one. He felt powerful, heavy, brutish, like a lump of malleable iron. But he still felt a little vulnerable beneath those infinite tiers of machinery. He cautiously moved along the gangway and took a left at the end.

One thing he had managed to extract from the little scaredy cat, besides some blood and teeth, was the route to the station’s prison. He had no way of knowing, of course, if the man had been lying to him, but he suspected not.

The plasma cutter swung jauntily at his side, switched off, its ceramicarbide barrel pointing towards the floor. It had become like an old friend, now. Carver was considering giving it a name, but he’d never been good at names. Fury, maybe, for the job it had done on the little scaredy cat. Or Dragonkey, for the work it had yet to do, that most important job of freeing the dragon from its prison of ice and rock. He didn’t really like either, though.

He climbed the stairs carefully, aware of the slipperiness of the steps — two floors, like he had been told. He passed a sign reading MACHINE ROOMS and moved down a narrow passage with glass-fronted workshops on either side. He turned into an even narrower, windowless corridor that continued straight until it faded into blackness.

Suddenly, something moved at the end of the passage — a flash of white — and Fury-slash-Dragonkey was in the firing position before Carver even knew what was happening. The fingers round his neck jiggled and jumped like the fingers of a gifted pianist. He stood, cutter poised, eyes squinted half shut, staring into the darkness, washing his light from side to side, seeing nothing but textured metal and rusty meshwork. Something had moved, though. Attack of the asshole friends, his mind warned him.

‘Go and check,’ said the dragon, but its voice was far away, like the voice of the sea on distant shores. ‘It’s nothing, but go and see for yourself.’

Cautiously, Carver worked his way down the corridor to the spot where he had seen the movement, trying to check both ways at once. His heart was large and slippery in his chest and his head was pulsing as if it was trying to breathe. It felt like it had swelled up tight inside his helmet. He was, for all his violent nature, something of a coward when it came down to it. Of course, he would never have admitted this, even to himself.

He reached the spot and shone his light around, immediately revealing the source of the motion: icicles had fallen from a hanging pipe and shattered on the floor here, leaving a crystalline spatter of fairy dust that Carver ground vengefully beneath his boot. He grinned to himself, shaking his head at his own foolishness. Had he really been frightened just then? There was nothing worse than him on this station, he was sure of that. Well, he thought, maybe just the dragon. Maybe.

Still grinning, he continued round the corner into a slightly wider area. Another doorway led away to the right, but Carver angled leftwards, beneath a sign reading REFINERY, creeping up the few steps and into a haunted house of leaning shadows and black metal. Immense crucibles and muscular crane-arms soared above him, cables and chains as thick as his waist drooping to the floor in places. He slunk past a control desk that overlooked some huge machine, a contraption that looked like a sewage treatment plant and stretched away into solid darkness. The place was utterly dead and still, veiled in frost and rock dust.

He picked his way through this industrial wasteland at a steady pace, trying not to linger, knowing that the asshole friends would be coming soon, looking for him, probably hoping to hinder his escape. Hopefully the sight of the little scaredy cat would slow them down a little, but he supposed it was also likely to make them angrier. And so he kept moving, not so quickly that he would miss something, get lost or even have an accident, but quickly enough.

His suit’s limited HUD continued to show vacuum outside its own protective confines, and a temperature so low that Carver wondered if it was even right. The station was obviously damaged, even crippled, and he wondered if it was the doing of the old, failed emissary. He suspected it probably was, and he grudgingly acknowledged to himself that the crazy bastard had apparently been good for something after all.

Through the refinery, out into another corridor so alike the last one that he felt a brief but powerful sense of disorientation, as if reality had skipped a beat.

‘Carry on,’ said the dragon, its voice a faint but fervent whisper. ‘Hurry.’

‘Hurry,’ repeated Carver, not even hearing himself. He moved onwards, passing a sign that read CLEARED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

He emerged into a small chamber that was divided in two down its length by a screen of icy armoured glasspex. He reached out, swiped away an arc of frost and peered through the screen. There was a desk in there and a trio of monitors hanging from the ceiling. Some kind of security checkpoint, he thought. On the wall below the monitors was a shiny steel cabinet of a type that Carver thought he recognised. It was a weapon locker.

He laughed out loud, hefting the cutter. He fired a brief burst of plasma at the sheet of glass, expecting to inscribe a neat doorway through which he could pass. The glass, however, shattered explosively at the first touch of plasma, exposing Carver to a brief gale of shards. He flinched instinctively, turning his head away, praying that none of the pieces had cut his suit. He waited, hardly daring to breathe, until he was sure that he was actually all right.

‘Lucky,’ said the dragon. ‘Now hurry up!’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Carver. ‘I guess that was stupid.’

The dragon said nothing, which Carver took to be a sign of agreement. He stepped into the small room that had been closed off behind the glasspex. He approached the weapon locker and tried its doors. It was, of course, locked. No problem for me, he thought to himself. I have a universal key.

He carefully positioned the muzzle of the cutter on the side of the cabinet, fired it up, and neatly sliced the entire front off it. The piece fell away, revealing what was inside: a gun. A smallish laser pistol, simple and cheap-looking, as were often used on ships or habitats where a projectile weapon might pierce the hull. Not powerful enough to fire through armour, but probably good enough to burn through a space suit — certainly not something you’d want to be hit on exposed flesh with. Carver lifted the weapon down, surprised at how light it was. It had a plastic security tag through the trigger-guard to indicate that it was unused. He ripped the tag out and threw it away, then stepped cautiously back though the frame that had held the armoured glasspex, and continued.

The door out of the security room had a warning hand-painted onto it in large red letters: TEMPORARY AIRLOCK. SECURITY ONLY.

‘That’s it,’ hissed the dragon faintly. ‘The prison.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Carver, stuffing the laser pistol into his belt and hefting the cutter in both hands. Despite the new addition of the laser, he still preferred the cutter. It was so much more personal than any gun. He squeezed the trigger and it came alive in his hands, fizzing and spitting, making the glass of his visor darken to protect his eyesight. ‘This is it. The prison.’ Reluctantly, he let the cutter fizzle out again. He might need to be stealthy at first.

He stepped forwards and hit the pad beside the door. As it cracked and juddered open there was a rush of gas from the darkness on the other side, a whitish stream that rolled and twisted, then rapidly dissipated. Carver waited until the door was high enough and then he stepped inside.