Майк Берри - Macao Station

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.