Майк Берри: Macao Station

Murkhoff adjusted the grimy bandage that covered his ruined eye. There was nothing he could do to make it comfortable. He thought it was becoming infected. He hadn’t dared look for a day now. Nobody seemed to care. They were all too busy with their precious shuttle.

His skull burned and ached inside, a vortex of perpetual agony which poured from his eye into the back of his head like sunlight focused through a lens. He was grinding his teeth. He’d found that he couldn’t stop it any more — the pain in his jaw almost served to distract from the pain in his head. But not quite. In fact, even the fader had ceased to really touch it. And, joy of joys, he didn’t have much left. There would be more on the shuttle. But the pilot had been his contact, and without the pilot he’d never find it. And they’d hardly allow him to search for it anyway, would they?

He glanced around at the dorm, pulling his fleece jacket tighter around his shoulders. Look at them , he thought sullenly. Scurrying about like their asses were on fire, trying to save themselves. Nobody gives a shit about me, though, do they? Well, I’ve some news for you, people: I don’t give a shit about you, either.

It was true. Nobody cared. He had been forgotten. Maybe he should have gone with Halman’s shuttle mission after all. Perhaps he could have found the bastard prisoner who’d stabbed him with the pen, maybe throttled the fucker before he died himself. What revenge was he ever going to get now?

He knew he’d have to go with the others to Platini. He supposed they’d fix his eye if he ever made it there. But the possibility seemed so distant, so hypothetical, that it offered little hope.

‘Bastards,’ he muttered through his clenched teeth. He wasn’t sure exactly who he meant. All of them, he supposed.

Outside the window, the belt hung suspended in silence. Yuwan, on a slightly lopsided orbit, had faded below the rotational plane and hence from sight, taking its Predecessor moon with it. Vagar was in ascendance instead — a bright, tiny pinprick of light. Darkness lay in wait out there, squeezed into every rocky crevice, spread as far as the eye could see, barely restrained by Soros’ distant glimmer. Eli’s rock had been smashed to dust, and that dust had clumped, forming a cloud that hung before the station like a veil. They’d been so busy with their shuttle that he didn’t think anyone else had noticed it.

Fionne was attempting to fix the scrubbers, he knew. But she was hamstrung by a team of bumbling amateurs and they were having problems. It wouldn’t work. He knew that, too. They’d see. They’d fucking see. The air was now so thin that he was short of breath even standing still. His head swam and ached and pulsed. His teeth squeaked as they ground together.

It was fascinating, really. Even with only one good eye, he could see the patterns out there. It wasn’t truly random, was it? There was order within the chaos. He moved closer, placing the palm of one hand on the window. The belt was thrumming gently: alive. He could feel it through his skin. Order. Chaos. Darkness, frozen in a wave of pent-up energy. A force in its own right.

That dust cloud. . . It was moving. Something was moving inside it — little eddies, little currents. . . order within the chaos. Patterns .

And then it spoke to him.

‘My emissary. You have come to me. . . Listen. . .’

‘Yes. . .’ he breathed, pressing his face to the cold glasspex. ‘I’m listening.’

XENOFORM

City Six is a dark and brutal place, mired in crime and corruption. Gangs rule the streets of the Undercity and every private police force is for sale. The rich live in secure enclaves, oblivious to the suffering and violence that plague the city's poor. Sinister and powerful corporations trade stolen bodymods, fearless of the law, and human life itself is just another saleable commodity.

In this harsh environment an unprecedented threat is emerging. Whistler and her team of professional abductors start to see a new parasitic organ in the bodies of their victims. Debian, a young cyber-criminal turned commercial hacker, finds a terrifying computer virus in the databanks of an AI-research company.

An unknown enemy is attacking the city, altering the populace into nightmarish creatures and decimating computer systems. It seems unstoppable.

Can these unlikely heroes find a way to fight it? Or will City Six fall prey to an environmental and technological catastrophe on an unimaginable scale?

Xenoform: A near-future nightmare for the networked generation!