Macao Station

Chapter Forty-Five

They soon received word from Ella that she was on her way, having sent Si back to base to retrieve the two techs and as many air cartridges as they could find. Lina checked her own air reserve. It showed just over sixty-percent. Halman’s, he being somewhat larger, was down to just over half.

‘Dan?’ said Lina, turning to him. They were sitting next to each other on the floor of the corridor, facing the darkened doorways of the refinery team’s living quarters, their suit-lights making two bright circles on the opposite wall like eyes.

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ve been thinking. . .’ she began slowly. ‘About this dragon thing. . .’

‘Yeah,’ said Halman unenthusiastically. ‘So what’s up with that?’

‘I’ve been wondering if it’s a real thing.’ She scanned his face, trying to gauge his reaction. Perhaps he’d think she’d finally gone nuts. Perhaps she had. ‘You know — if maybe there is really something out there.’ She indicated the vastness of space with a vague sweep of one arm. ‘In the belt.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Well. . .’ She shuffled her backside closer to the wall, trying to make herself comfortable. Halman was holding the pistol in his hand again, toying with it. ‘When it was just Eli, I thought he’d simply gone crazy. That the whole dragon thing was something out of his drug-riddled head. But now this Carver. . . you know, that fucking monstrosity he made in the hangar.’

‘Mmm. . .’ grunted Halman. ‘A dragon, yeah.’ He was silent for a moment, then he turned to Lina. His primitive face was lined in thought. ‘Maybe he passed the delusion on to Carver in some way. Carver sounds like a pretty messed-up individual — the sort of freak who might believe any old shit. Maybe he’s on the same drugs. I can just imagine the two of them sitting in that damned asteroid, smashed out of their tiny brains, talking about dragons and emissaries.’ He paused, then added, ‘Bastards!’ in a vicious snarl, so heartfelt that Lina almost laughed.

‘Yeah, I thought that. Everyone knows that fader causes mass hallucinations. Or maybe just Eli suggesting it was enough to make Carver believe in this dragon, too.’

‘You don’t sound sure, though,’ said Halman, looking at her with his brows raised in question.

Lina sighed, rubbing at her knee. She couldn’t remember hurting it, but it ached deep inside the bone nonetheless. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, looking away uncertainly. She could make out the spindly silhouette of a dining chair through one of the doorways opposite. It had been upset in the evacuation and now lay with its legs in the air like a dead thing, shiny with ice. ‘I know it sounds pretty tenuous, but I’ve been feeling as if there is something out there. Something. . .’ She searched for the right word at some length, then settled for, ‘. . . else.’

‘Something else?’ repeated Halman. ‘A dragon?’ He laughed, but it sounded a rather bitter laugh. ‘As in here there be dragons?’

Lina was struck by a sudden pang of sadness, so sour that it burned inside her like acid. She remembered Sal joking about that, out in the belt, what seemed like a million years ago. Here there be dragons, right? That’s what they used to write on the uncharted parts of the map in times of old. It seemed like ancient history, but Lina remembered the words exactly. Sal. Sal Newman. The woman who had almost stolen her husband, long after he’d been worth keeping. The woman who had earned Lina’s trust and friendship over the years since, and who had then died in a cloud of shredded guts. She remembered that tooth hitting the glasspex canopy of her Kay and shivered.

‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Something like that.’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Halman in a slow and measured voice. ‘I don’t know. There could be any number of things out there that we aren’t aware of. But I do know that if this dragon is a real thing — be it some Predecessor relic, or an evil spirit from another dimension, or some fucking military experiment gone wrong — then it has our shuttle. Without those parts and those supplies, we die. So we’re gonna go out there, and if it is real. . . well. . .’ He made a noise that was probably supposed to be a laugh. ‘. . . Then I guess we’ll find out.’

‘Maybe we can kill it,’ said Lina. ‘If it is real.’

Halman shrugged. A reply formed on his lips, but was forestalled by a voice from the radio — Ella’s voice.

‘You still there, guys?’

Halman sat up straighter, looking around himself. ‘Yeah, still here.’

‘Si’s team have headed back. We’re on our way to you. Everything all right there?’

‘Yeah, fine here,’ answered Halman. ‘You know Tryka? We’re right outside his place.’

‘Okay,’ said Ella. ‘Ten minutes max.’

‘Fine. We ain’t going anywhere.’

‘Out,’ concluded Ella simply.

‘Maybe it’s a bit of both. . .’ said Lina, mainly to herself.

‘What is?’ asked Halman, turning a bemused expression on her.

‘The dragon,’ she explained. ‘Maybe it’s both real and a product of the fader.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Maybe it is something real, something left by the Predecessors. And fader acts as a sort of tuning device, that allows the user to listen on its frequency. Nobody ever noticed before because this thing exists only here, in the belt. Or this is the only one people have ever found. Maybe the Predecessors left fader for us to find, for just this purpose. Everyone knows the urban myth about it coming from one of their worlds. You and I can’t hear this dragon’s voice, or see it, because we haven’t taken the necessary drug.’ Halman’s puzzled expression exaggerated into a caricature. ‘Unless you want to confess something to Doctor McLough, that is?’

‘Me?’ he asked, his eyes widening. ‘I never so much as smoked a joint, Lina. I’m still a military man at heart, I guess.’

‘Well, maybe something really is out there in the belt, maybe physically inside that rock. I’ve had a bad feeling in the belt recently. Even looking at it. I know that’s hardly submissible evidence, but still. . .’ She realised just how painfully stupid and unlikely this all sounded, but she needed to say it. ‘And Carver has also been taking fader, hence that horrendous sculpture he made for us. Maybe Eli started him on the drug, or maybe he already had an addiction. I don’t know — I haven’t seen his record.’

‘Hmm,’ grunted Halman, who had seen his record but couldn’t remember if Carver had a drug addiction or not, truth be told. ‘Maybe. But I have to say, Lina, I don’t like where all this is going.’

Lina realised that he had essentially shut the question out of his mind. He didn’t really have the right sort of brain for such abstract considerations, she knew. She didn’t think he cared, really. He was concerned with the practical problems of getting the shuttle back and repairing the station before it was too late. Fair enough, she thought. That does seem like a reasonable prioritisation.

They waited in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts. Suddenly, something glimmered in Lina’s mind — something she had shelved for later consideration. She brought the thought forwards and examined it. She had to ask. She took a deep breath and said, ‘What was it that Ella didn’t want to tell you in front of me?’

Halman gave her a sideways look. She could see that he was debating whether he should tell her or not. And that was enough to confirm that she was right. It was something about her. Halman sighed, the expelled air boiling around him, cloaking him.

‘Shit, Lina,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you this. But I almost did anyway. . .’

‘Dan,’ she said, turning what she hoped was an imploring expression on him, ‘we might not have long to live. I don’t know if you’ve done the maths but I have. We still have to get that shuttle. And now there are sixteen nut-cases out there, assuming they are going back to the shuttle. Maybe eighteen if Eli and the pilot are still alive, although I honestly doubt that very much. Carver trashed four of the Kays when he came in. That means we can, at most, get ten people out there. Those aren’t great odds in my mind. I’d never accuse you of genius, Dan,’ she continued, offering him a smile, ‘but I reckon you’ve done that sum yourself by now. If we’re gonna die, I think you might as well tell me. I know it’s something that concerns me, so. . .’ She spread her hands and let this filter through to him for a moment.

After what seemed like a long pause Halman said, ‘Ella went to Eli’s quarters after he was supposedly confined in medical. Before he killed Jayce and Tamzin.’ Halman was staring intently at the corridor floor now. His voice was flat and robotic. ‘She found a lock of hair in Eli’s bedside drawer.’

‘What?’ asked Lina, genuinely puzzled. ‘Is that what she told you?’

‘It was your hair,’ said Halman. And then he forced himself to look at her. His eyes looked hollow and incredibly sad. ‘She was sure that it was yours.’

‘What?’ asked Lina again, utterly failing to decipher the intention behind these words. ‘He had my hair? Is that it? Is that your big secret? Well I can die happy now. Thanks, Dan!’

‘Lina!’ Halman almost shouted. ‘Think about it. Not his ex-wife’s hair, not a lock of hair from some cherished grandchild. Yours.’

The words began to sink into her brain like heavy rocks sinking into mud. ‘Holy shit. . .’ she breathed, finally wringing the meaning from what he had said. ‘You don’t mean he was in love with me, do you?’ Suddenly, she felt almost overpoweringly sick. She clenched her jaw, trying not to actually puke inside her suit. That would not be a good development in this little adventure.

‘That is one interpretation of the facts,’ said Halman guardedly. ‘Maybe that’s why he started the fader in the first place. He had to work with you every day, saw you all the time. He knew you wouldn’t have been interested in him, knew you were all about your son. He. . .’

‘Stop, Dan! Please just stop!’ she cried. She struggled against the now almost-ubiquitous tears. This was too much. She couldn’t think about it. This was too much. If true, then this was all her fault. She was the root from which this great tree of misery had grown. ‘No!’ she wailed. ‘No. . .’

‘Lina. . .’ Halman started. She waved him to silence, and they sat that way for some time. Lina tried to let her mind go blank, but her mind seemed to have other ideas. It kept re-writing events as she remembered them, this time inserting little tags all the way through: that was my fault. . . and that was my fault, too. . . that was because of me. . . and that one. . .

And then she was mercifully jerked from this dark reverie by Ella’s voice. Ella sounded clearer this time: ‘We’re just around the corner now.’

After another minute or so, Ella appeared, moving cautiously at the head of her little group. Lina was encouraged to see that Ella was still on high-alert and she walked with her laser pistol held at the ready.

‘You going to actually shoot me this time?’ asked Lina as Ella came towards them. She already felt better. Ella generally made her feel better. That was one of Ella’s redeeming qualities as far as Lina was concerned. She’d have to put the Eli-having-her-hair matter on the back-burner for now. Hopefully, she could leave it there for ever, although she suspected not.

‘Maybe,’ said Ella, lowering the gun all the same. ‘If you give me any shit.’

‘Well,’ said Halman, getting to his feet a little laboriously. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Good to see you guys.’ And he went to Ella and, amazingly, crushed her in a clumsy embrace. He turned to Hobbes, who took a cautious step back and held out his hand for Halman to shake. Petra he simply slapped on the back. Her handsome, angular face was arranged in a tolerant smile, but she didn’t look particularly receptive to hugging.

‘They won’t be far behind, all being well,’ said Hobbes. Clearly he meant Si’s team. Hobbes had found himself the neatest and cleanest space suit that Lina had ever seen. The face behind the visor was as immaculately shaved as ever. She wondered how he did it. She had caught sight of her own reflection in one of the windows they had passed earlier, and she had been alarmed to see the deep shadows of exhaustion beneath the surface of her features. She felt dirty, dishevelled and ill-used.

‘Good,’ said Halman. ‘I hope Alphe and Fionne will be all right to finish the work on the Kays.’

‘Have the escaped prisoners left the station?’ asked Petra, her face intent. She had not just one, but two laser pistols in the belt of her suit. Lina looked to Hobbes and saw that he, however, carried only a small medical kit.

‘Well I fucking hope so,’ answered Halman. ‘The plan now, my fine friends, is to take as many ships as we have out to that asteroid, where we will take the shuttle back as originally intended. All that has changed is that there are now more of them, and that we will have to take more of us. This is gonna be our last roll of the dice. We’ll take the best pilots and the best fighters we can. And we will succeed. Because we must.’

‘Right,’ said Petra curtly. ‘I’m coming.’

‘Well, I see no other choice, either,’ said Ella. She sounded almost alarmingly upbeat about it. ‘We do have more lasers than them. That bastard stole one weapon from the back-door security desk, but luckily he never found the main locker in the prison armoury.’

‘Yeah, one of those shit-bags shot Waine with it,’ said Halman.

Ella took a deep breath and held it for a moment. She let it out in a long sigh, grim-faced. ‘I was sorry to hear about Waine and Theo,’ she said. ‘We all were. There’s been too much of this, now. Too much. I want to force it to an end.’

‘Well the good news is,’ offered Hobbes, ‘that the station’s now so damn cold outside our dorms that the lack of power to the freezer isn’t really an issue any more. We can set up a makeshift morgue just about anywhere we choose.’

Halman turned on the much smaller man, his face incredulous. ‘Well fuck me, Hobbes,’ he cried, ‘if you don’t know how exactly to cheer a man up!’

‘What?’ asked Hobbes, unaware of having said anything wrong.

Halman shook his head wonderingly and walked away down the passage, hands clasped behind his back. But he didn’t go far. He turned and came back, setting up a repetitive cycle of pacing that Lina found rather tense. She tried not to watch him, and instead chatted with Ella and Hobbes.

Hobbes was poor conversation at best, so Lina and Ella soon fell into an essentially private discussion about Platini Alpha and, more specifically, Lina’s intention to take Marco there. Neither of them mentioned the fact that simply surviving the next twenty-four hours had become something of an uncertainty. Petra sat alone on the floor at the far end of the corridor, scrunched into a ball with her elbows over her knees. Her two pistols lay in front of her like a yin-yang.

After a while, they heard Si’s voice from the radio. He was close, just checking in to confirm that they hadn’t gone anywhere since he’d last spoken to Ella.

‘I wish,’ said Halman. ‘I’m getting fucking sick of waiting here.’

A few minutes later, Si’s massive figure appeared at the end of the corridor, spotlit in Hobbes’s suit-light, virtually filling the passage from side to side. Lina could see that he was grinning widely, his squarish, lantern-jawed face showing no sign of the worry that she herself felt. Rocko, Niya Onh, Ilse Reno, Alphe and Fionne were with him. They tramped down the passage towards the others, moving slowly in their heavy suits.

The group assembled there in the deserted living area, milling about and exchanging greetings. It occurred to Lina what an odd little family they made — a much reduced family now, she supposed. She wondered how many of them would return from their next mission. The odds had not been kind to them so far.

They made their way back to the hangar, moving in formation as directed by Halman. He sent scouts down every side-corridor, into every doorway, to check for lurking enemies. The station was a frozen relic of the home they knew so well, and they passed through it in dreamy silence for the most part. Lina felt as if their lives hung in a delicate equilibrium, a state that could be upset at any moment by a laser beam, or an escaped murderer rushing from a shadowy alcove, or maybe a booby trap left by Carver’s gang. They processed through the warehouse to stand in a nervous group before the open hangar door. Relatively bright light still spilled from it into the warehouse, staining the floor like whitewash.

Lina peered round the edge of the door into the hangar, scanning the shadows for human shapes. She saw nobody living, but Theo’s body lay in two twisted halves not far inside, the stump of his pistol next to him. She couldn’t see Waine’s remains — he had fallen behind her Kay, and was out of sight from her vantage point. The loader was gone, but the space door still yawned open at the far end of the flight deck.

‘Let’s go,’ said Halman. ‘Carefully, now. Ella, Si — I want you to go round the back and check the control room. Rocko, Lina — down the far side. I’ll go down the right with Petra. Everyone else stay put and eyes open.’

The hangar proved to be empty except for the corpses of their friends. The toppled Kays lay around the deck forlornly. Lina was almost personally offended by this, and she realised with a glint of dark amusement that she considered the ships — all of them — to be hers.

Si found a pair of dirty and ancient-looking tarpaulins and he threw one over Liu’s desecrated remains and another over Theo and Waine, whose corpses he dragged together to lay beside each other in death. He said nothing while he did this. As he finished and turned to walk away, Lina caught a glimpse of his face. It was utterly blank but for two patches of angry red high on his cheeks.

They closed the space door — it looked too easy for someone too stray to close, slip on the ice and fall into space. They parked a Kay right on the lip of the ramp, anchoring onto the deck itself, to obstruct any further unwanted attempts to land. Halman stationed Petra and Si at the hangar door to guard against any attack from that direction, even though they were all agreed that Carver’s mob had surely left Macao.

Alphe and Fionne, quiet and shell-shocked, returned to work on the Kays, trying not to look at the tarpaulin-covered humps that represented the butchered bodies of their friends. The others formed a rough perimeter around the two techs, facing outwards with their guns drawn. It seemed to Lina like a classic case of too little, too late.

After a while, Ella distributed spare air cartridges to those who needed them. The suits were clever enough to allow hot-swapping of these, as long as it was done relatively quickly. It was still a dangerous procedure, though, as any delay with the installation of the new cartridge could leave the recipient airless and in serious trouble. Luckily, all the replacements went well enough, and Lina chided herself for being a little surprised at that. She was getting too accustomed to disaster. She wished that she had gone back to the dorm with Si’s team. It might have been her last chance to speak to Marco. But it was too late now, so she supposed she would simply have to survive the coming assault.

Alphe and Fionne progressed in silence, sharing the telepathic link common to long-time work partners everywhere. They finished the installation of the enlarged cutting discs and then checked all of the Kays for obvious defects. It had been agreed that they wouldn’t fly any of the ships that had been bumped by the ISL. Several of them looked superficially all right, but Alphe and Fionne admitted that they needed Liu to confirm that. Without him, they said, it might take them some hours to be sure. They had done what they could.

The others came and stood beside Alphe, regarding the modified Kays in critical silence. Eventually, Halman turned to Alphe and asked, ‘Are you happy with them?’

Alphe sucked his lips thoughtfully. ‘Yeah,’ he said at last. ‘Happy as I can be.’

‘Good,’ said Halman, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Listen up, you lot!’ he began, turning to address the group as a whole. Lina felt numb and detached, as if this was all happening inside a holo and she was merely watching from her sofa. ‘We have ten operational Kays. The following will go to the shuttle: Myself, Lina, Ella, Hobbes, Si, Rocko, Petra, Ilse, Niya and Alphe. Fionne, as the only non-pilot here, you are excused, and hereby ordered to return to the dorm. Report to Amy Stone and tell her what’s happening. She is, of course, in charge ’til I return.’

‘Okay,’ said Fionne in a quiet little voice. Lina wondered how she felt about Rocko going without her. Not too good, she suspected.

‘Lina will cut into the shuttle’s hold. Ilse will fly the other modified ship, in case something goes wrong with Lina’s. We will enter the shuttle as quickly as we can, flying across in suits. Anyone who wants to play fuckaround with us, we shoot them. You all up for that?’ He cast around for agreement, his expression deadpan. Nobody answered verbally, but their faces were set and hawkish. ‘Good. Once inside, we head for the bridge, where we will release the clamp on the boarding tube that joins the shuttle to that damned rock, and. . . away we go.’

‘Piece of piss,’ said Si, with some small trace of his habitual ebullience.

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Halman.

‘Well,’ said Ella decisively. ‘No time like the present, eh?’

‘Fionne,’ said Halman. ‘Go home, okay?’ She nodded sadly, then ran to Rocko. She embraced him, their suits briefly making one amorphous whole. ‘I love you,’ she whispered, the words clear in everyone’s earpieces. They pointedly looked away, trying not to listen. ‘Yeah,’ said Rocko. ‘I love you, too.’ Then she released him, turned around and simply walked away.

They went to their respective ships, climbed the steps, and strapped themselves in. Ella took the one they had parked across the ramp, and she moved it out of the way with apparent ease, even skill. Lina watched in her HUD as a field of identifier-tags came to life. The enlarged cutting disc looked obvious and somehow wrong.

As she let the cockpit pressurise so that she could remove her helmet for a while, she considered the trial that lay ahead of her. Out there in the belt, a strange and bloodthirsty enemy awaited them. Eli was almost certainly dead, but still a reckoning was at hand. She realised that she was no longer afraid, though. A conclusion was approaching, most likely a bloody one, maybe a personally fatal one. But nonetheless, she welcomed it.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, looking to the left, where Halman was bringing his Kay round with the halting uncertainty of someone who hadn’t flown for years. Ice dusted down from its landing gear and shivering hull. Was it significant that he was in Eli’s old ship? She wasn’t sure, but she no longer cared about the omens. She just wanted it to end, one way or the other. ‘Come on,’ she whispered again. ‘Let’s go.’

The Kays converged on the runway behind her, manoeuvring around their injured fellows. She waited for their icons to align, then hit the pad to open the space door. The ramp dropped away, angling out of sight. Lina caught glimpses of dark rock and endless night as she dialled up the gas, aware of the slipperiness of the deck. As the vessel accelerated off the end of the ramp, she risked a backward glance at the station. It was rising away behind her already, dark and vast and silent, like a gravestone in space. It disgorged the following Kays in a regular arc.

‘I’m coming back,’ she whispered, wondering who she was speaking to. Her hand was sweating on the yoke, making it slippery. She angled it down, heading towards the belt.