Macao Station

Chapter Forty-Nine

‘Down there,’ said Alphe a little uncertainly, indicating the short flight of steps at the end of the passage. ‘The bridge.’ Above the steps down was a metal ladder leading up through a hatch in the ceiling.

‘What’s upwards?’ asked Halman. The noise of machinery was louder here and he had to shout to be heard, which seemed somewhat at odds with the intended theme of stealth. His dark eyes were darting like flies in a jar.

‘The passage to the machine rooms,’ Alphe shouted back, ‘and the boarding tube.’

‘Is the noise coming from the machine rooms?’ asked Niya.

Alphe shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But I suspect not. The machine rooms are for stuff like scrubbers, filtration and hydration systems, auxiliary drive systems. . . None of it’s really that loud.’

‘It’s coming from the asteroid,’ Lina shouted. ‘The sound’s echoing back down the boarding and rescue tube.’ She looked around at the faces of her companions. ‘They’re mining,’ she added darkly.

‘For what?’ asked Hobbes, hovering at Lina’s shoulder, holding fast to a handline on the ceiling.

‘Come on!’ ordered Halman from the front of the group before anyone could reply. He waved them onwards, but as he moved off he shot a meaningful look back at Lina. He knew, she thought. He might not be in danger of winning any chess tournaments, but she thought he knew. Ilse shoved her on the shoulder from behind, setting her moving.

They squeezed into the shuttle’s bridge one by one, guns probing the multicoloured cavern of overhanging control panels and angular metal surfaces. Two chairs — pilot and co-pilot — were bolted to the floor before the console, conspicuously empty. The sliding covers that would rise and seal around them to make sus-an casks were retracted into the floor like drawn-back lips. Rocks tumbled outside, tagged on the main screen with distance and direction indicators. The ship’s computer was silently working away, alone, the ever-watchful idiot-guardian.

Lina floated past Halman, feeling claustrophobic in her space suit. Bunches of cable hung from the ceiling like tendons, linking one mute hunk of equipment with another. Red and yellow telltales marbled the shadows. She braked herself against the main screen, momentarily face-to-face with the asteroid belt outside, then turned to survey the room. The others squeezed in behind her, fanning out. The grinding, hammering noise was very loud in here, the rattling growl of a machine-monster in a frenzy.

There was another seat at the opposite side to the view-screen, turned away towards a complex-looking navigational panel. Blood had spattered in great sprays around it, darkening the lights of the panel, crusted and brown where it had pooled. Lina wondered if it was Eli’s. She decided that she didn’t really care, and was vaguely surprised at the coldness within herself. A large spanner lay on the navigational console’s dashboard: the murder weapon.

‘Lina!’ called Halman. She turned to see him regarding her impatiently, holding onto the pilot’s chair. ‘Don’t worry about that now.’

‘Sure,’ she said. Someone had died here. So what? A lot of people had died. He was right — they had to focus on the task at hand. ‘Let’s release that clamp and then get the hell out of here,’ she said.

‘How do you do it?’ asked Halman, forcing his body into the pilot’s chair.

‘You see the row of injector switches?’ she asked him, floating closer.

He peered at the panel closely. ‘These?’ he asked.

‘Below those, in the middle — the switch with the cowling over it.’ Lina’s companions floated, silent and spectral around her.

‘Oh yeah,’ Halman said absently, flicking the cowling up to expose the actual control beneath it. ‘Here goes. . .’

He flicked the switch. There was a muted bang, surprisingly understated. Halman uttered a partially-formed curse as his legs and feet were suddenly swallowed by an explosion of yellow foam. It swelled out from beneath his seat with a whispering, hissing noise, trapping and enveloping him. He half-turned, his eyes full of horror as the foam bloomed around him. His face contorted in agony as the power of the expanding instawall simply tore his arms from his body and sucked them in. Lina stared helplessly as Halman’s mouth filled with foam, choking off his cry before it could even be voiced. People were yelling, clawing to escape, and still the foam was growing. It completely covered Halman’s face and he was swallowed, thrashing weakly, then was suddenly and simply gone.

Lina seized one of the bunches of cable on the ceiling and pulled as hard as she could towards the doorway of the bridge. Someone was screaming, ‘It’s a fucking booby-trap!’ but she couldn’t tell who. They shot from the bridge in a single, struggling mass. Lina’s leg caught on one of Si’s arms and they entangled, struggling against each other. She turned, with Si’s hand grabbing for purchase on her suit, and saw that Niya had not been fast enough.

The still-growing foam snared Niya by the foot as she made for the doorway, stopping her dead. She extended a desperate, questing hand towards Lina. Lina tried to scrabble free, somehow get to Niya, reach the hand, the hand, maybe she could save her if she could just reach that hand. . . But no — she was too clumsy, devoid of purchase on any surface, almost suffocated by the struggling Si. Niya’s eyes opened wide, her face a caricature of terror, and then the instawall’s terminator overtook her and she was enveloped.

Lina pushed Si off her with a titanic effort that sent fresh agony crackling down her spine and launched herself away from the bridge. But when she turned to look behind her the instawall had stopped expanding. Its colour was darkening rapidly as it set hard, cocooning her crewmates like flies in amber. The bridge was sealed off. And her friends were gone. A yawning, dizzying blackness swirled inside her like vertigo. The rusted metal of the passageway swayed and swung around her. She put a hand to her head, her vision darkening. Don’t pass out, don’t pass out, she chanted in her mind. She bit her lip, drawing blood, and the pain served to sharpen her senses, bringing her back from the brink of that dark abyss. Somebody was crying, an inhuman sound of shock and misery. Ella? Surely not Ella.

Si landed beside her, shoulder-first, breathing hard. ‘Halman,’ he said. ‘Oh shit, Halman. What the fuck was that?’ He looked into Lina’s face, his wide mouth hanging open. ‘What was that?’

Lina heard her own voice say, ‘Instawall,’ but it sounded very distant, disembodied. She pressed her nose to the floor of the passage and shut her eyes, feeling the jagged little edges of rust flakes against her skin. ‘Oh shit,’ she muttered. ‘What now?’ She didn’t expect an answer. Surely there was none. Death had played an unbeatable hand. Full house.

She felt somebody land gently beside her and looked up to see Petra towering over her. Petra’s dark hair had escaped her helmet to float around her face like an anti-halo. Hobbes appeared, too, extending a hand to help her up. She took it and heaved herself upright, utterly numb. The clattering of nearby machinery had ceased, but nobody noticed.

Rocko was dragging himself along the ceiling towards her like a great human spider, laser pistol still clasped in one hand. When he was almost above her, he pushed off, twisting gracefully in mid-air, and landed beside her. His dark skin was shiny with sweat. ‘Well, fuck,’ he said simply.

‘Where’s Alphe?’ demanded Ella sharply, casting around herself. ‘Oh shit!’ she screamed. ‘Where’s Alphe?’

They looked around themselves stupidly, calling his name, but it was clear that he was gone. As he wasn’t in the passage that left only one place. He hadn’t made it out of the shuttle’s bridge.

‘Oh no,’ said Ella, more quietly now. Those two little words bore a vast weight of resignation.

Lina forced herself to stand, wincing at the new pain in her back. She supposed it would hurt much worse if she ever made it out of this micro-gee environment and it had to bear her weight again. She looked around at the faces of her companions, but they were all downcast, staring at the floor. Nobody spoke for a while as they gave silent homage to their fallen comrades. Three more. Three more. It had happened in the blink of an eye. One by one, the members of Lina’s little family were being taken, snuffed out, scrubbed from her world. She wondered if she would ever see her son again. She wished that she’d stayed behind. That way, at least they could have died together. She felt tears begin to seep from her eyes, which was odd, because she felt only a washed-out, empty shadow of resignation. This was it. This was the conclusion she had sought. Be careful what you wish for, she told herself.

‘What the fuck do we do now?’ asked Rocko after a while. ‘Just what the fuck do we do now?’ He looked around at the faces of his comrades. Petra was slowly shaking her head. Hobbes was silently weeping, his tears dispersing into the air like liquid crystal.

‘Seal off the asteroid,’ said Ella decisively. ‘Assuming Carver’s gang are all inside it. Then burn the jets from the engine rooms.’

At first, lost in her own bottomless reverie, Lina didn’t hear her. Gradually, the words filtered into her mind. And made sense. ‘She’s right!’ said Lina, knowing that she should have thought of it herself. ‘She’s right. Trap the bastards and burn the jets manually. But we’d have to cut through the boarding tube. I don’t think it’s safe to fly with the rock joined on. The altered C-of-G would make it impossible to steer without computer. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be easy anyway. But I think it can be done.’

‘They all have to be in the rock, though,’ said Ella. ‘Or we just arrive home with a shuttle full of maniacs. But if we can cut them free, we can just leave the fuckers here to freeze.’

A slow smile spread across Rocko’s face like the shadow of a storm cloud. ‘Yeah. . .’ he said. ‘Let’s do it. Let’s kill those fucking murderers.’ He seemed totally unaware of the hypocritical nature of this statement.

‘Which way?’ asked Lina. Shaken heads all round. Alphe had had the schematic. ‘I guess it must be up,’ she suggested. She wished she could remember for sure.

They crawled and bounced and swam their way back to the ladder that led up into the ceiling outside the bridge. The ugly instawall flower hadn’t extended far enough to block the ladder, but it had come close. Lina was pretty sure the stuff had become inert now, but they all avoided touching it as they cautiously stepped onto the ladder one by one.

They reached the top without incident and found themselves in another corridor — lower, darker, more jumbled with machinery. Great pipes stretched away into darkness, visible inside the meshwork walls. Blueish LEDs shone from the ceiling like cold stars. Missing wall-panels showed battered junction-boxes and badly-soldered wiring.

‘Come on!’ called Lina, moving off down the passage. The others followed behind her, frightened but infused with fresh purpose.

Rocko sped past her, snagging a cable to stop himself. ‘You know how to fire the jets manually?’ he asked. ‘Cos I don’t think I do. I mean, I could do it on a Kay, but this thing must have loads of them.’

‘I think so,’ she replied. In truth, she had no idea — not specifically — but she was confident that she could work it out. She thought about Carver’s gang finding themselves suddenly trapped within their new prison of rock, desperate with fear and disbelief, and that renewed her energy and determination. She wondered how they could be certain that all the prisoners were actually stuck inside the rock and not wandering free somewhere in the shuttle. For all they knew, the enemy might be in the engine rooms waiting for them. She gripped her gun tightly and dragged herself onwards.

They emerged into a wide space filled with battered industrial equipment: air scrubbers; water purifiers; a row of sus-an casks intended for passengers; racks of hand-tools; magnetic-bed trolleys; other things that Lina couldn’t even identify. The ceiling soared above them, three times the height of the corridor’s, criss-crossed with suspended walkways and hung with winches and brackets.

‘The machine rooms,’ said Rocko. ‘It’s not far from here.’

Petra slid silently past Lina, her gun cocked at her shoulder. Ella followed behind her, checking between computer cabinets that towered on either side like standing stones. Lina trailed along, falling further behind until she brought up the rear with Si, who drifted beside her silently, a strong and reassuring presence on her mental radar.

There was a sudden bang — a little exclamation of noise, nothing really — and Petra flew backwards, crashing into Ella and sending her somersaulting into a pile of canvas drive belts where she landed on her back. Petra’s flight continued, past Hobbes, who just managed to dodge out of the way in time. She smashed into an empty shelving unit to Lina’s left, thrashing and jerking. Lina recoiled, gasping for breath that suddenly wouldn’t come. Blood was spraying from Petra’s head in a thick, beautiful fountain of escaping life essence. A rock pin — a twenty-centimetre steel spike — had been fired into her skull, right in the centre of her forehead, where it protruded like a unicorn’s horn. Petra arched her back, throwing her limbs out, rolling up the shelving unit and onto the ceiling, globules of blood spreading around her in a ruby-red constellation.

‘Ambush!’ Ella screamed, diving for cover behind a cabinet.

Si raised his pistol, firing as it came up into position, almost hitting Hobbes in his urgency. He kicked off, flying backwards towards cover, shooting as he went. Lina was firing too, aiming into the mass of white-clad, swarming shapes that was flooding into the room from the far door. At the forefront of the oncoming group was a massive giant of a man, wielding what was unmistakeably a plasma cutter. Carver.

Lina hooked one foot around a lever that jutted from some nearby machine, pulling herself down into its protective shade as she loosed shot after shot at the giant who ran towards her, dodging and ducking low, his magnetic boots clanking and banging on the deck as they released and reattached with each step. None of her shots hit him, though. One of them actually bounced off the shiny barrel of the plasma cutter itself and hit the shoulder of another prisoner. Although the beam had diffused as it rebounded, it still had energy enough to do its job. The prisoner lost control and hit the ceiling, slapping and clawing at his shoulder. Someone shot him again and he jerked once, then fell still. A pistol drifted out of his hand and floated gently away.

Lina hit the deck behind the machine, a large square thing with a plastic hood and a startling array of switches. The breath went out of her in a painful rush. Laser beams zig-zagged across the floor beside her, making her pull her knees up close to her chest. There was a loud, concussive bong! sound as something — probably another rock pin — hit the other side of the machine like a sledge hammer.

Si appeared beside her, firing as he came, ducking into cover, yelling something that Lina couldn’t hear. Shouting voices; the deafening noise of the plasma cutter; bouncing lights whose touch meant death, stitching the darkness with brilliant lethality.

She caught a glimpse of Ilse Reno, a petite figure with a red-glowing eye, clawing her way behind a large fuel tank. Lasers danced across the tank and it erupted into sudden flame, splashing Ilse with gobbets of blazing liquid as she scrabbled around it, immolating her instantly. She screamed, the pitch so high that Lina could barely hear it, and turned over, writhing as she tried to put herself out. She dragged herself around the shattered, flaming tank, as if it might still offer safety. Then, blazing and dying, she collapsed with just one burning foot protruding.

The sprinklers in the ceiling gushed to sudden life, spouting water that rebounded from every surface, clumping into crystal balls that drifted like bubbles through the air and burst afresh where they landed. The flaming fuel tank guttered but did not extinguish.

Hobbes was pinned down on the other side of the main aisle, behind a crate that was barely as big as his body, one hand over his head and the other trying to hold him still. Lina peeped out of cover and saw Rocko bouncing from behind a computer terminal, clutching his shoulder, trying to back-track towards her and Si. A prisoner flew out of the shadows to his left, and she tried to cry out, to warn him of the flanking attack, but she could not. Her voice simply died inside her throat.

Rocko spun with amazing speed and shot the man twice in the face, hitting him a third time as he fell. But Carver was almost upon him. He had the plasma cutter raised above his head, slicing into the ceiling, sending out gobbets of white-hot metal.

Lina fired at him again, but either he was somehow charmed or she was just a terrible shot, because she missed him by several metres. Ella darted out from between two tall shelves, moving like a striking shark, coming from Carver’s blind-side and hitting him bodily, knocking him back. But his magnetic boots retained contact with the floor and he immediately rebounded, swinging the cutter at her head, Rocko forgotten.

Rocko came instantly to Ella’s aid, kicking out, knocking Carver’s aim off and bringing his gun to bear on the giant. Another prisoner — a hugely fat man with a heavily-scarred face — came from behind Carver and struck Rocko on the side of his neck with what looked like a metal bar, sending him flying backwards into a rack of equipment. Ella stepped in close to Carver, kicking out at his groin. Although she connected, sending herself shooting backwards, it only seemed to anger him, and his back-swing grazed across the belly of her suit, coming within inches of her flesh.

Lina, unable to even get a clear shot at Carver, fired instead at the huge man who was floating in the air above Rocko’s prone and struggling form, hefting the metal bar in his gloved hands. Amazingly, she hit him right between his shoulder blades. The man released the bar and drifted up towards the ceiling, hands going to the burn and pawing at it in disbelief. Rocko recovered and shot him again.

Carver kicked out, doubling Ella over and launching her like a missile through the air. Instantly, he charged after her, running through a blizzard of water, the cutter flaming and blazing in his hands. Lina saw the picture of insane, murderous rage on his pinkish idiot’s face as he slashed through a power-press with the tool, sending up thick blasts of mineral steam.

Ella landed just behind Lina, crashing into a tool-rack, stunned. The pistol came out of her hand and flew away into the shadows behind them. Lina noticed a sneaky-looking, rat-faced little man with a pointed chin trying to creep up on her left, and she sent him scurrying for cover with a shot from her pistol. A red light illuminated on the weapon’s side. It had overheated.

Hobbes launched himself out from behind his box, hands still covering his neck and head, into the more substantial cover of a large waste compacter. He dragged himself over it to the other side, but Lina saw a laser beam hit him in the sole of one foot as he disappeared.

Carver was almost upon her now, but he was utterly intent on Ella, who still lay stunned and motionless. Lina popped up, aiming the laser at him. Of course, it didn’t fire. Oh shit, she thought as he turned his murderous face on her. I forgot about that. She saw Eli’s fingers strung around his neck and wondered fleetingly if her own would join them soon. Maybe he’d make a bracelet from them instead. Why not? He could start a whole fucking accessory line. In a few seconds she’d be dead, so it hardly mattered to her.

‘Aaaaarrgghhh!’ screamed Carver, flexing his huge arms at her. She could see the cords of muscle standing out above the neckline of his suit, the beads of sweat on his skin. And there was nothing in his eyes. Nothing.

Suddenly, Rocko popped up next to Carver and shot him in the side. Carver didn’t fold over in pain and he certainly didn’t die, although the hit was clearly a clean one. He did, however, spin to face Rocko, bringing the cutter around in a flickering backhand swipe. Rocko fired a burst of thrust from his suit’s arm-jet, flying back out of range. The cutter passed through some indiscernible snarl of machinery without slowing at all, sending electrical components and shorn wires flying. Smoke from the blazing fuel tank spread and drifted around the combatants. Lina smelled the repulsive savoury odour of burning meat.

‘Lina!’ Si screamed next to her. She turned to face him, feeling dreamy and slow. ‘Get out there and cut the tube! Go! Take Ella with you! We’ll push them back. There aren’t that many of them — we can do it! In thirty minutes, we’re gonna fire the jets. It’s our only chance. Now move!’

And then he rose up next to her — fearless, towering — and pushed up towards the ceiling. He passed right over Carver’s head, bounced back down to the floor and landed behind him. Carver spun, trying to bisect Si with the cutter, but Si checked his elbow, stopping the swing. For a split-second, Lina saw the two giants locked together, each straining to overpower the other, and then, with an immense effort of will, she leapt from cover.

She threw herself towards Ella, feeling something buzz angrily past her cheek, millimetres away from her skin — probably another rock pin. A laser beam, scintillating green, stroked the metal next to her, probing for flesh. She landed beside Ella, dropping her own gun and seizing her friend by the shoulders. She managed, somehow, to drag Ella round to the other side of the tool-rack. Her handhold on the rack slipped and she almost sent them both drifting into the open air, where they would have been easy prey. But she made it by sheer effort of will. The rack didn’t offer much cover, though. As if to prove this point, a laser beam passed right through one of the gaps in it, hitting the floor between Ella’s splayed legs and making a neat little burn there.

Lina slapped Ella round the face. ‘Ella!’ she screamed, spluttering out water. Rocko was shouting behind her. Hobbes too. He sounded like he was in pain. ‘Ella! Come on!’ There was a loud crash. She saw a tower of crates come apart and float away from each other, off to her right.

Ella jerked, her eyes flickering, and stiffened in Lina’s arms.

‘Wh. . .’ she managed to croak.

‘Ella! Come on!’ Lina repeated, shaking her friend by the scruff of her suit. Ella flopped uselessly, scratching Lina’s face with the zip of one glove. ‘You have to help me! Move, damn you!’

‘Lina. . .’ said Ella, fixing her with a glassy eye.

Another projectile hit something nearby, making a sound like a struck gong. Someone was moving along the racks to their left, closing in through the smoke and water vapour. The sound of Carver’s plasma cutter filled the world.

‘Move!’ Lina screamed into Ella’s face, and this time Ella moved.

They launched themselves back towards the door they had come in by, Lina grabbing for whatever handholds she could reach. Ella became less and less of a burden as she fully returned to her senses. They dragged themselves along handlines, clawed their way along pitted walls and metal-tiled floors. Lasers probed the space behind them. Rocko was shouting, but Lina couldn’t hear the actual words. Neither did it matter any more. They had a plan. One last plan. For it to work, though, they had first to get away. Even as long shots went, she thought this was a pretty unlikely one. Would the others be able to actually beat the prisoners back to the asteroid? Maybe, if Si could defeat Carver. . . then maybe. Thirty minutes. That tube had to be severed. Their last chance.

Lina fled, rat’s teeth of panic nibbling at the edges of her mind. She tried to concentrate only on the task at hand — where the handlines were, which way to go, how much time they had. When she finally dared to look behind her there was nobody in pursuit. She had left her friends, and she felt a twinge of guilt that she thought might become an unbearable sense of remorse if she survived this and they did not. But this was how it had to be. Whatever had befallen her comrades, they had clearly slowed their attackers down enough to allow Lina’s escape. As for pushing the enemy back to the asteroid. . . who knew? Thirty minutes thirty minutes, her mind chanted. How many left?

She imagined Marco, waiting in the freezing dorm, maybe looking out at the belt, wondering whether she would return. Clay would be waiting with him. Maybe that was why Si had suggested she take Ella with her. How exactly she had ended up subordinate to Si in this matter, she didn’t know.

They flew down the ladder to the bridge level, not even bothering to touch the rungs. The vile instawall bloom protruded from the bridge like a massive fungus.

Lina was achingly aware that neither of them was armed any more. The noise of Carver’s cutter had become inaudible, but still they didn’t slow. Perhaps he had simply switched it off to mask his pursuit. Perhaps her friends were dead. Or perhaps Carver was himself dead, his posse forced back to the asteroid. Who knew? From the radio, silence punctuated by bursts of static and the occasional indecipherable yell.

She wondered if they might somehow trigger another trap, but what could they really do except attempt to touch nothing and hope that it wouldn’t happen? They hurried onwards, back towards the cargo hold, deep in the haunted bowels of the vessel.

‘What do you have in mind?’ Ella asked after a while. She was dragging herself along the line on one of the walls, giving a hard yank and then letting it run through her hand until she slowed, whereupon she would repeat the process. Lina was using a rather less elegant frantic scrabbling technique. ‘What are we going to do? You have a plan, right? Surely we aren’t just running away.’

‘I want to get back to the Kays,’ she answered, forcing the words out through the gaps in her laboured breathing.

‘What for?’

‘I’m going to cut through the boarding tube. If I can.’

Ella coasted along silently beside her for a moment. ‘Won’t that cause the dreaded blow-out?’ she asked after a while. ‘Maybe we should let it blow out?’ She turned to look at Lina, her expression cautious, clearly aware that she was suggesting the condemnation of anybody left aboard, including their friends.

‘The tube will seal itself at both ends,’ Lina replied. ‘It senses vacuum, in case you try to board a damaged ship and the ship suffers a hull breach or whatever. They used them in the Corp Wars for battlefield recovery.’

‘Then why the hell didn’t we just cut it to begin with?’ Ella demanded.

‘We were going to release it from the bridge, remember? When there was a usable bridge. Also, I guess Halman wanted to know the shuttle was clear of hostiles first. Si said he’d try to push them back to the asteroid. He gave us thirty minutes before they try a manual burn, if they can. But when we cut into the tube, any prisoners left aboard the shuttle will be stuck there with Si.’

‘Poor them,’ said Ella. It took Lina a moment to realise that this was supposed to be a joke.

They were almost at the airlock of the cargo hold now. Just a few more corners to go. They passed a large room where huge tanks stood on thick metal legs, interconnected by a complex weave of pipework. Lina didn’t know if the tanks contained water, fuel, or what. She thought about Ilse Reno, burning. The smell of roasting meat. She wondered how it felt to be burned alive. Or to drown in instawall. Or to be shot in the head with a rock pin. Maybe they were all better than freezing slowly to death in an unpowered space station.

‘Shit, Lina, this sounds like a long-shot to me,’ said Ella as they rounded the corner into the last corridor, seeing the airlock door at the far end ahead of them.

‘I suppose it is,’ Lina admitted.

‘I don’t understand why I’m here,’ said Ella. ‘What use can I be?’

‘Si told me to take you,’ said Lina. ‘So I did. He probably wanted you to act as my bodyguard.’

‘Bodyguard?’ asked Ella, frowning deeply. ‘I don’t even seem to have a gun. I was out of it for a while, there. I think that bastard knocked me out cold. So that was the dreaded Carver, eh?’

‘Yeah,’ said Lina. ‘That was him.’

They stopped before the airlock door. ‘Check my suit over,’ said Ella. ‘Then I’ll check yours.’

Lina did as instructed. Ella’s suit was clearly scuffed and marked in places, scorched across the belly, but none of the grazes looked like they had gone all the way through.

‘Looks okay, Ella,’ said Lina. ‘Is there anything on the HUD?’

Ella closed the visor of her helmet and checked, her eyes reading left to right, left to right. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you know what the computers are like in these things. Cheap plastic-printed crap.’

‘Check me,’ said Lina, holding her arms out to facilitate the process. Ella floated round her, examining her closely.

‘Looks fine. Let’s go.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Lina, closing her own visor. Glowing text overlayed her vision. ‘Let’s.’

Lina hit the cycle control and they swam inside. The door silently sealed itself behind them. They waited while the rumble of expelled air died away to nothing, leaving VACUUM warnings glowing in small text before their eyes. They headed out, back into that disturbing cavern of congealed shadow and soaring walkways. Lina’s light flashed over the still-spinning body of the man whom Rocko had shot. She looked up, where another corpse floated somewhere in the vaulted darkness, invisible.

They launched themselves through open space as quickly as they dared, using their arm jets, terrified of hitting some unseen balustrade or railing and injuring themselves or damaging their suits. But they landed intact on the wall near to Lina’s makeshift doorway, braking themselves with careful dabs of reverse thrust. Lina dragged herself along the wall and curled her fingers round the lip of the doorway.

She looked round at Ella. Her friend looked frightened and possibly in pain. ‘Here goes then,’ said Lina with forced levity.

She pulled herself out of the shuttle and emerged into the belt. Rock and ice and dark oblivion. She floated towards her ship, the nearest one to the doorway. It looked somehow small and sad, like a lost child, drifting in that vastness. At least it hadn’t been smashed by a belt object while its computer had been off. Ella emerged behind her and drifted past, tumbling and cursing. She fired her jet — the tiniest burst — and managed to regain control. She looked clumsy and ridiculous, floating there in her cheap space suit.

They looked at each other uncertainly for a moment. Then Lina nodded and fired her sleeve jet. She flew towards her Kay, her course and speed almost perfect. She reached out to grab hold of one of its tool arms. Then she worked her way through the gaping crocodile-mouth of the cockpit lid and into her seat. Checking back over her shoulder, she saw that Ella had overshot her own ship and was coming back towards it, arms outstretched to catch hold.

She closed the cockpit and fired up the console. It rebuked her for her failure to shut down correctly last time, and she cancelled its requests to run self-diagnostics. She let the cockpit flood from the onboard air tanks. The ship felt snug and comforting around her, like a second skin. She wondered how the others were doing back on the shuttle, if they were still alive. Maybe they had been captured, tortured, sculpted like Liu. You left them, said the voice inside her. Yes, she answered it. I know.

She let the gas run straight into the jets without bothering to warm them up, then brought the ship about. The shuttle looked dead, deserted from here. Surely it could conceal no danger, contain no life. It was simply a sprawling slab of metal, utterly inert.

Ella’s ship was coming around, too. Several of its tool arms began to move randomly as she hit an incorrect control, then the vessel’s main headlight flickered on, off, then on again. The tool arms stilled and the ship turned towards Lina’s.

‘Ella, stay here and listen for the radio. Your ship will relay anything it hears to mine,’ suggested Lina.

‘Sure,’ replied Ella. Her Kay fired retros and was quickly left behind. ‘Maybe I can even be some use, eh?’

The lumpen hull of the shuttle paid out beneath her as Lina dialled up the gas, heading towards the point where the shuttle’s belly was nestled against the asteroid, leaving a gap just large enough to fly through. She pushed the yoke gently forwards, bringing the nose down to point into that crevasse, dark shiny stone forming one wall and impact-scarred metal the other. Her headlight sliced through the darkness, making the asteroid sparkle as if its jagged skin concealed a wealth of tiny stars, condensed into solid matter.

Soon she was deep in the trench and could see the curved outer skin of the boarding tube where it joined the two walls together. She was bringing the cutting arms online as she went, flexing them, testing their responsiveness. The gas torch flared pitifully in that canyon of darkness. The cutting disc spun silently at the end of its arm.

She approached the tube and anchored onto it with the Kay’s magnetic clamp. A little jolt went through the ship as the clamp banged into place. She applied the gas torch to the ribbed skin of the boarding tube. Metal began to melt at once, forming little globules that drifted away into space. A brief burst of air rushed from the cut, brightening the torch’s jet. But then it stopped. The tube had sealed itself. That was good. She began to work the torch around the wide cylinder, but it was slow, painfully slow. Thirty minutes, she thought again. How many left? Rock and steel stood around her like frozen waves of impossible mass and density, looming, threatening, filling the universe.

Suddenly, there came a deafening blast of noise from the radio. Lina jumped, jerking the small stick that controlled the gas torch, making it come away from the metal. The noise was gone again. It had sounded almost random, like white noise, but Lina didn’t think it had been. There had been something in there, below the hissing and crackling of the muddied radio signal. She thought it had been screaming.

‘Ella! What was that?’

‘Somebody’s trying to contact us!’ cried Ella. ‘Hurry, Lina!’

‘I’m trying, I’m trying!’ Lina called back, re-applying the torch. She was aware of what that noise had meant. They weren’t all dead inside, not yet. But they were in trouble. Was it already too late to save them? Would she, at best, manage merely to cut loose a tin can full of insane murderers and slaughtered personnel? How would they ever get Carver’s gang out of there if Si had failed to push them back? Maybe Fionne really would have to create some sort of poison gas. Lina just couldn’t imagine her being prepared to do that.

She realised that she had cut as far as she could without moving the ship itself, so she withdrew the gas torch and detached the clamp. She backed carefully away to survey the boarding tube better.

Another burst from the radio. This time the screaming was clearer, and there was another voice, too. Somebody must have worked their way close to the shuttle’s hull, and was trying to talk to them. Friend or foe? She couldn’t guess.

‘Lina!’ said Ella in a small, high voice. ‘You hear that?’

‘Yeah,’ said Lina distractedly, gently turning her ship to present the gas torch to a new section. Maybe she should try the rotary cutter — it might be faster after all.

‘I couldn’t make out the words!’ Ella shouted.

‘I know,’ Lina replied. ‘Just stay there and listen.’

She slowly drew the gas torch along the boarding tube’s armoured skin, inscribing a neat incision through which a milky glow emanated, as if it was bleeding light. Again she hit the limit of the tool arm’s reach and released the magnetic clamp. She drew a hand across her forehead and it came away slicked with sweat. Her heart was practically buzzing, its rhythm had become so fast.

‘Come on,’ she whispered to herself, backing away for a better view. She saw that the asteroid was blocking the way to where she needed to go next. A great, jagged protrusion of rock jutted above her, preventing her from continuing the cut from here. She would have to fly out of the canyon then return from the other side. More time. ‘Shit!’ she cursed, damning herself for her inability to go any faster.

She backed the ship up until she reached a point that was wide enough to turn in, then brought it about and dialled up the gas. She emerged from beneath the belly of the shuttle, seeing Ella’s vessel hanging in front of her. The other Kays were clustered roughly in the distance. Some of them still had their headlights showing, as if their pilots had just popped out for a minute. In reality, she knew that most, if not all of them, would never sit in those ships again.

‘Lina?’ asked Ella’s voice. ‘You done?’

‘No, I just have to hit it from the other side,’ Lina answered, already turning to fly across the top of the shuttle.

‘Well, when you–’ But Ella’s voice was cut off by a gasp. Lina’s nerves jangled like wind chimes. ‘Lina! Look!’ cried Ella, her voice shrill with excitement.

Lina spun her Kay around, expecting the worst, honestly terrified. The shuttle’s huge manoeuvring jets were sputtering to life. Serpent-tongues of incandescent gas licked the vacuum, stuttering then steadying. The shuttle wallowed, shivered, and began to move.

‘Lina, they’ve done it!’ cried Ella. ‘They’ve done it, Rocko’s done it!’

‘No. . .’ Lina shook her head, trying to deny that it was happening. ‘No, Ella, this could be bad. . .’

‘Bad?’ asked Ella. Lina could hear the joy drain from her voice. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m not done! I’m not done!’

‘But what’s–’

‘Get away!’ Lina yelled, realising what was about to happen. ‘GO!’

She slammed the gas all the way to the stop and her Kay took off with enough gees to pin her uncomfortably into her seat. Her vision began to cloud, grey monochrome bleeding in from the edges. She struggled to remain conscious, feeling her suit clench around her legs, driving the blood to her brain.

The shuttle and its massive asteroid moved slowly at first. The great symbiotic construct of rock and metal ploughed into the field of abandoned Kays, narrowly missing Lina and Ella as they accelerated out of the way. The Kays piled up against the hull of the shuttle, then were spilled off into the void, scattering like nine-pins, spinning away into the night, broken tool-arms shattering off them. Lina brought her ship to a stop, Ella drifting nearby. As one, they turned to look.

‘It’s fine, Lina!’ said Ella. ‘Look — the course is good.’

And sure enough, Rocko had somehow got the bearing right. The shuttle was heading in the direction of Macao. But it looked far from fine.

The half-cut boarding tube, instead of forming a rigid link between the two objects, was now something more akin to a hinge. As the awkward conjoined mass began to pick up speed, the nose of the shuttle came down to meet the asteroid. There was a silent collision that dented the shielded hull of the ship and sent chunks of rock shattering off in all directions. The shuttle rebounded, twisting on the severing link of the boarding tube, and this time its back end hit the rock. The manoeuvring jets exploded, scattering debris and illuminating the glistening asteroid in a flash that lasted just the briefest instant.

Lina watched in silent horror as the shuttle was blown clear of the rock. The asteroid flew on, its course almost unaltered by the loss of its man-made parasite. A host of smaller rocks, its swarm of progeny, flew with it now. Lina maxed the gas again, giving chase. Shadows twined through the belt around her — imagined, real, both or neither of those things — ink and oil swirling on the canvas of the night.

The shuttle hit a smaller asteroid and rebounded, crashing into Eli’s rock for a last time as the pair flew towards the station. This time the whole asteroid shattered, breaking in half in a hideous slow-motion dance of destruction — chaos from order, entropy in action. The shuttle flew off on a tangent, up and port-wards. Half of the asteroid deflected to the other side, hitting one jagged iceberg, then another, disintegrating as it went, spreading boulders and gravel in all directions.

The remains of the other half flew onwards, ever onwards, towards the station. It smashed a smaller rock out of its way, setting off a chain of collisions that almost killed Lina. The ship’s computer swerved the Kay around one spinning rock and then another, as she struggled to keep the large chunk in her sight. Her mind was reciting the names of the dead as she went: Sal, Nik, Jayce, Tamzin, Eli, Liu, Rachelle, Waine, Theo, Halman, Alphe, Niya. . .

The shuttle was slowing down, ploughing through asteroids that shattered into dust against its deuterium shield. It would miss the station. But the rock might not. . .

Macao came into sight, rising through the haze of asteroids like a sailing ship appearing through sea-mist. Marco was in there.

‘No,’ Lina breathed. ‘No. . .’ She flew on, tailing the spinning chunk of stone as the shuttle slowed to a halt, gently rotating, with the ISL still clinging to its back.

Although Macao was dying, its kinetic defence systems were still working. The station fired once from the mass drivers on its hub, once more from its rim. The half-asteroid burst apart. Some small chunks continued on, colliding again and again, being whittled down to dust and finally petering safely out. Lina brought her Kay to a halt before the towering edifice of the station, that great dirty wheel. Macao remained untouched, inviolate, turning. Eli’s rock had become a cloud of sand and gravel.

The shuttle, however, was mostly intact. Lina floated in her Kay, dumbstruck, fearing the worst. They had the shuttle. But people had died. More family gone. She could not imagine that Rocko, Hobbes and Si could be alive in there. Surely not. The jets had exploded. She realised that she had been conditioned to accept disaster, but she was unable to envisage any other outcome. The silken blackness of space pressed in on her — the raw material of loneliness, the base colour of defeat.

‘Oh no. . .’ she sighed. ‘No, no, no. . .’

‘Lina. . .’ began Ella. But she had nothing else to say.

Suddenly, the radio blared with static, a hissing jumble of electromagnetic interference. But within that jumble there were words:

‘Lina! Ella! Are. . . there? We. . . the shuttle! Repeat: we have the shuttle!’