Майк Берри - Macao Station

Eli rolled his eyes and groaned, but he didn’t allow Halman to bait him. ‘Come on, Lina,’ he said. They filed out of the canteen, gathering the other members of their shift along the way. Lina glanced back at Halman. He was staring out of the window, watching the belt, lost in his own thoughts, his large fingers drumming on the grimy table-top.

Lina snapped her four-point harness into place, yanking the straps tight from where the much-larger Bickes had been using it. She didn’t really like how her vessel had become the unofficial stop-gap in the fleet lately — she liked to keep it set up to her own specifications. Still, complaining wouldn’t change anything. Having tried it at length, she knew this for a fact.

She woke the computer, which reconfigured the readouts to her preferred settings and began to pre-flight all the systems. The reactor-cells were starting to show several developing hotspots — problems in the making, effectively. The more use K6-12 got, the sooner it would end up in maintenance itself — a fact which the ground crew seemed oddly oblivious to.

Never mind. She began to leech gas into the nozzles — not enough to move the craft yet, just enough to diagnose the injection and thrust characteristics. Everything looked fine.

‘Okay then,’ said Eli’s voice through the speaker. ‘Everyone green?’ There was a chorus of affirmatives, some a little uncertain. ‘Then let’s roll. By the numbers, now.’ The channel clicked off, making the slightly-blown speaker in Lina’s cockpit pop quietly.

The Kay-pilots dialled up the gas and the machines converged on the central runway in perfect synchronisation. Lina trundled past the much larger in-system loader, the heavy grey vessel used for loading and unloading supply shuttles. HUD-markers on the cockpit canopy illuminated and tracked her companion vessels, tagging them with pilot names and bearings.

The huge hatch in the floor began to open, making a ramp, disgorging a condensing rush of air into space. Supposedly, the air in the hangar was vacuumed out before the space-door opened, but like everything else on the station, the pumps were gradually failing.

Eli was first out, his Kay weaving slightly as its little wheels left the deck, adding thin new strata of rubber to the many layers already plastered there. The craft veered, exposing the imbalance of its gas-jets. Eli corrected quickly, though, used to the vagaries of the ship, and headed off towards the belt. One by one, the others followed him, making a total of seven vessels.

The spinning station spread the emerging Kays into a regular fan, and they maintained this formation as they headed towards the belt, which lay below and before them like a rocky shoreline. Lina noticed that K6-8’s navigational lights were out. She told the pilot — Sal Newman — as much. Sal just tutted, unsurprised.

Eli’s voice crackled over the comm, somehow intrusive and over-loud in the eerie silence: ‘One, two and four — head to sector Blue-Nine. Eight, nine and twelve — sector Blue-Eight.’

The various pilots responded in the affirmative. Lina, though, was the only one to voice the common thought: ‘And how about you, Eli? Are you going to be shirking the work again?’

There was a slight pause during which Lina wondered if she had been a little too disrespectful. She forgot sometimes that Eli was actually her superior. He generally bore the teasing well enough, but that pause suggested to Lina that this might be one barb too many.

‘I’m going to prospect the unnamed sector counter-spinwards from Blue-Ten, maybe map it for mining next. That okay with you?’

‘Sure,’ she responded, turning smoothly towards Blue-Eight, flanked by her companions. ‘Make us rich, Eli,’ she added, trying to inject a lighter note into her voice.

He laughed in response, making it all right again. ‘I’ll certainly try, Lina, but no promises.’ His own Kay headed off alone towards the distant haze of the uncharted sector. The comm went dead again. Lina watched his gas-trail dissipate into space.

They reached their assigned sector and the Kays settled into their positions, matching the average rotational velocity of the belt objects. Rock and ice loomed coldly all around them — a jagged, three-dimensional stew of tiny shards and vast, house-sized boulders. Lina nudged K6-12 close enough to one of the larger chunks. An arm extended from the vessel, thin and angular like an insect-limb, with a drill-headed probe at its tip, and began to feel blindly for the rock. The probe pushed forwards, boring quickly, extracting a tiny sample of matter. The analysis came back good — double-M, like so many of the rocks here — and the vessel unfolded its tool arms and got to work. Shiny disc-cutters flashed in the pallid light of Soros. A plasma beam flared whitely, making the canopy darken protectively. The cutting sent a steady vibration through the hull — a quiet, soporific hum. Rock was flayed away, gripped by claws, shaved and diced and trimmed, passed back to the mass driver.

‘So how’s the kid, Lina?’ asked Rocko.

Kay 6-12 jolted violently as its mass-driver launched the first bolt of rock towards the distant station’s hopper and the jets rapidly compensated to prevent the craft from crashing. The first bolt hit a rock, spun away and was lost. Sometimes it could take a lot of bolts to forge a path through the belt to the station’s receiver. Lina had often wondered if it was really the most efficient method, but she supposed that brighter minds than hers had come up with it. Already, the tool arms had made the next cut.

‘Kid has a name, Rocko. I’d have thought you’d know that after the twelve years he’s been around.’ She craned to see his ship — above and to her left, picturing Rocko’s face — his dark skin, handsome features, clean-shaven head and the star tattoo on his cheek that showed him to be an ex-member of Platini’s Democratic Workers Union, essentially a now-dissolved insurgent group. Halman, in Platini Alpha’s Farsight militia, had fought urban battles against the DWU in his younger days. Here, though, all things were forgiven. Rocko was family now. His Kay launched a bolt towards the station. This one got quite a bit further than Lina’s had done. Below them and to the right, far off, a shuttle-sized iceberg was ploughing through the field like a juggernaut, silent and inexorable, bulldozing smaller objects out of its path.

‘Sorry. How’s Marco then?’

‘Not too bad, thanks. Doing pretty well at school. I guess he couldn’t help but pick up a little touch of genius from his mother, right?’

Sal laughed, a bright and tinkling sound. ‘Genius, is it? Is that why you’re out here in the middle of nowhere crunching rocks for some faceless corporation?’

‘Hey, remember who has rank right now, Sal. And consider how easy it would be to have an accident out here.’

Sal laughed again. ‘I don’t think you’d have to engineer one, Lina. Have you seen the reactor diags on this piece of crap?’

‘Can’t be much worse than mine,’ she answered.

‘Or mine,’ Rocko chipped in.

They were silent for a minute or so as the Kays continued their work, vacuuming up any errant dust from the cutting, which otherwise would only add to the communication barrier already presented by the belt. A hydraulic-pressure warning lit up on Lina’s dashboard. She set the computer to run a deeper diagnostic on it, but the system seemed to be working for the moment.

‘He’s a good kid, anyway — say hello from me, would you?’ said Rocko after a while.

‘Sure, I will do. Though you can come say it yourself any time, you know.’

‘He’s too busy for the likes of us these days,’ commented Sal in a voice that barely contained her amusement.