Майк Берри - Macao Station

‘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.