Macao Station

Chapter Twelve

Lina took her coffee from the machine and weaved through the randomly scattered chairs of the canteen. She nodded and smiled knowingly at Rocko, who sat discretely in a corner with Fionne Sinclair, their heads bowed together and conversation quiet. Rocko scowled at her in response, but his face immediately resumed its expression of boyish happiness, his white teeth gleaming in contrast to his dark skin. Fionne laughed prettily at some remark of his, her face dimpling. Lina resisted the urge to wink and went to Eli’s table at the far side of the room, ducking under a loop of armoured cable that hung from a hole in the ceiling.

‘And what, may I ask, are you smiling about?’ asked Eli, eyebrows arched.

‘Young love,’ replied Lina, feeling her smile grow. She liked Rocko, and Fionne.

‘And much good may it do us,’ said Eli. Outside the window, the trails of the last shift’s Kays could be seen returning to base on schedule. One of them was out of formation, though, lagging somewhat behind the others. This was almost certainly K6-3, a problem vessel that seemed to suffer from an unfixable irregularity with its gas injectors.

‘Bit cynical, Eli,’ she said, lifting the cup to her lips. The liquid smelled faintly of some plasticky chemical. Lina, who was not good at eating breakfast however much she insisted her son did so, felt her stomach clench in response. She lowered the cup of noxious fluid, crestfallen.

Eli chuckled at her disgust. ‘Just realistic, Li,’ he corrected.

‘So what is it now?’ she asked resignedly. ‘Besides the fact that we’re about to go on shift.’

The lights in the canteen flashed off briefly, then on again. This was not an uncommon occurrence on the station and nobody really paid the phenomenon any heed.

‘Didn’t you hear?’ asked Eli. ‘Sudowksi’s boys are having to junk the comms array to fix the scrubbers.’

Lina couldn’t believe she’d heard this right for a moment. ‘What?’ she demanded.

‘They’re junking the comms array,’ he repeated more slowly, ‘to fix the scrubbers.’ He sat back, satisfied with the stunning effect that this had on his friend, and took a swig from his own revolting coffee with apparent impunity. The grimy window behind him showed the impassive vista of deep, cold space, speckled with glinting asteroids. The Kays were out of sight now, on their final approach to the hangar.

‘No way,’ Lina breathed. Eli nodded his grizzled head. That look of near-amusement was still on his face, she noticed with mild irritation. Didn’t anything bother him? ‘Where’s the shuttle?’ she demanded, looking around as if she might locate it within the confines of the canteen itself.

Eli leant in close, secretive. ‘That,’ he confided, ‘is very much the phrase of the week.’

‘Oh hell,’ she said in a small, hollow voice. ‘But what if. . .’

‘I saw Sudowski running about like a headless chicken near the admin offices. He looked half dead, to be honest. Poor guy. He hasn’t been looking too good all week. However much our jobs may suck at times, it does inspire some joy in me to know that at least I’m not him. He told me about the array.’

‘But Eli, this could be really serious,’ Lina hissed. She leant on the table, which wobbled, spilling her coffee. She didn’t notice. ‘So we can’t talk to Platini? And if the shuttle buzzes us with a problem, we can’t even hear it?’

Eli sighed, and she could see that he was worried, too, underneath his implacable exterior. She was kind of glad, to be honest. ‘Well, I think the radio’ll still work. But no laser, so no Platini, no.’

‘Where’s the fucking shuttle?’ she cried in an unintentionally loud voice. Fionne glanced up briefly from her hushed conversation with Rocko, her pretty face inquiring, and shot Lina a puzzled look.

‘Beats me,’ admitted Eli, waving her to keep her voice down. ‘I don’t think they really want this getting to the drones, okay, Li? Privileged information, etcetera. And mind the potty-mouth — it’s unbecoming in a lady.’

‘Well. . . what if. . .’ Lina trailed off, her brow furrowed. Had he just made a joke? ‘I mean. . .’

‘Come on, we’d better get a wiggle on.’ Eli drained his cup and stood. He zipped his flight suit all the way to the top — it was unusually cold in the canteen — and indicated the door. ‘We’re on shift, remember?’

Lina stayed in her seat, struggling to get her mind around what he had told her. Was this really such a serious development? Surely the shuttle would arrive any time now, with its usual hold full of spares. The scrubbers were due for a service, so Platini Dockyard would have sent the parts. A shuttle had never failed to arrive before — surely that wouldn’t happen now. But why, then, did she feel as if something was wrong? Maybe badly wrong?

‘We’re just carrying on as if nothing’s happened, then?’ she asked. Her fingers were drumming nervously on the dirty surface of the table and she had to actually concentrate to stop them.

‘Yeah, of course. If anything, we need to go up a gear now. If something has happened to the shuttle then Farsight are gonna throw a fit about the loss.’ He stared deeply into her face, a look of concern on his features. Lina guessed she looked as pale as she felt. ‘You okay, Li?’ he asked, putting one large, gnarled hand on her shoulder. It was a comforting hand — a worker’s hand — something real and reassuring.

‘I guess. I just don’t like it, Eli, that’s all.’

‘Don’t sweat it — it’s going to be all right. You need a nice back-rub or something?’

Lina shoved him away. Eli staggered, laughing. ‘Dream on,’ she said seriously, getting to her feet. ‘Actually, don’t even dream about it.’ She felt herself smiling again. Somehow Eli always made it okay. She guessed that was why he was so popular on board.

They filed out of the canteen and into the corridor, which was dimly lit by small LED-strips, its walls studded with rivets that had bled rust. The ceiling was low and patched. Little jags and corners had been built into the passages of Macao to limit line of sight and prevent people from noticing the curve of the floor, which apparently unnerved some folks. They headed through this deliberate snarl of passageways, past the kitchens and admin offices. Halman’s door was closed and raised voices could be heard from behind it. They exchanged warning looks and hastily continued towards the crew quarters and the stairs to the rimwards floor.

They rounded a corner and bumped into Sal Newman, who was coming out of the shower block looking tousled and clean, towelling her long red hair. She was dressed, however, in the typical threadbare miner’s flight suit, and looked essentially ready to go. Her face was bright and cheery, although deeply scarred across one cheek from an accident years ago, and the sight of her made Lina’s mood go back up another notch. Sal, who had nearly stolen her husband, whom Lina hadn’t even wanted any more. Forgiven, but never to be forgotten. Sal, who was now a friend.

‘Hey Sal,’ Lina said.

‘Hey, fancy bumping into you here,’ Sal replied.

They headed down the stairs and emerged into the warehouse, which led to the hangar itself. The yawning space was piled with pallet racks loaded with what the techs generously referred to as ‘spares,’ but were in fact mostly used and broken K6 parts under plastic sheets. A wire-floored mezzanine was suspended from the ceiling on long rusty poles, and one of the ground crew was standing up there examining some huge and oily item on one of the rack’s upper shelves. Lina couldn’t tell who it was, and the figure didn’t look at them as they passed below.

Eli didn’t mention anything about the scrubbers to Sal and Lina followed his lead. She felt a little bad keeping the information from Sal, but she didn’t want to get Sudowski, Eli, or — even worse — herself, into trouble.

When they reached the hangar door, the light was on above it, indicating that the hangar was pressurising. As they waited, making good-natured small talk, Rocko Hoppler sidled up to them, looking as casual as he could.

‘Hey Rocko,’ crooned Lina. ‘How’s Fionne?’

Rocko nodded non-committally. ‘Well, thank you,’ he said, and then wandered off to lean against a wall. He looked lost in his own thoughts, but happy. Eli arched his eyebrows. Sal grinned.

From inside the hangar they heard a series of loud crashes and thumps. Something impacted against the massive bulk of the door itself, causing a shockwave of reverberation that they felt through the floor.

‘Bloody hell!’ cried Sal, wide-eyed.

Eli laughed. ‘I guess Waine is driving again,’ he chuckled. Waine was one of the ground-crew, a man famed, and teased, for his continual crashing of the dead-lifter. Many of the Kays bore the scars of his well-intended ministrations.

As they waited (it seemed to be taking a particularly long time to flood the hangar, in Lina’s opinion) the other members of the shift joined them one by one: Si Davis, Niya Onh and Petra Kalistov. Niya looked as if she might be a little hung-over. She kept rubbing her temples, and her delicately-slanted eyes were squeezed almost shut against the bright light.

They waited in increasing boredom until eventually Si boomed ‘Right! That’s it!’ He strode up to the huge hangar door, his head almost level with the top of it, and hammered on it with one massive fist. ‘Open up, you lazy bastards!’ he bellowed.

Several of the miners chuckled, including Eli, who had always been the laissez-faire kind of leader, and Si repeated the procedure for emphasis. He pressed his ear to the door.

‘Well, I don’t know how they could miss your deafening voice,’ Petra said coldly.

The light above the door went off suddenly. Si stood back, palms spread and grinning. ‘See?’ he asked. ‘They didn’t.’

The massive door groaned, shuddered and reluctantly began to rise with a protracted shriek of grinding metal. The hangar had a tendency to over-pressurise slightly, and there was a muted whistle as air rushed out from under the door.

‘Good job, that man,’ said Eli. ‘Top of the class.’

The rising door revealed the booted feet of the finishing shift, then their legs. Without further waiting, they ducked under and squeezed past Eli’s shift into the warehouse. Ilse Reno, the leader of the opposite shift and second only to Eli himself amongst the miners, paused. She was a shortish, petite woman, but was nonetheless imposing for it. This was possibly because her straggly grey hair and glowing red eye-implant lent her something of the appearance of a pirate. ‘We left a couple of rocks for you, Eli,’ she said in her gravelly voice, deadpan, then followed the rest of her retreating team.

‘You didn’t have to do that!’ he called after her, but she was gone into the maze of towering racks, swallowed by shadow. ‘Strange woman,’ he muttered to himself. Then, to his team: ‘Shall we?’ He turned and led the way into the hangar.

The hangar was vast, its ceiling a jungle of cabling, the mining ships squatting in the gloom like gargoyles in their alcoves. A couple of ground crew were struggling with the infamous K6-3, trying to free a seized nut on one of the jets using a gas-driver. The dead-lifter was limping across the floor, one of the Kays dangling from its mandibles, followed by the bald-headed Waine, his wrinkled face contorted in concentration as he struggled with the controls of an auxiliary terminal. The lifter’s huge solid-rubber tyres crunched slowly and deliberately through the mush of oil and dust. There was a gaping hole like a tooth socket where its main console should have been. It narrowly squeezed between a stack of oil drums and a thick metal pillar, then disappeared round a corner.

‘All set!’ yelled Liu Xiao, the leader of the ground crew, popping his head up from behind the computer screen that stood on a lone desk incongruously placed right in the middle of the space. ‘Two minutes!’

‘No sweat,’ responded Eli, giving him a wave. ‘To your chariots, soldiers!’ he cried enthusiastically, ushering his team towards their vessels. They moved with the traditional reluctance of the overworked.

The miners found their respective Kays and climbed into the cockpits. Some of the ships bore fresh scars, presumably from Waine’s efforts with the troublesome dead-lifter, but most of them were already so battered that it was hard to tell.

Lina seated herself in the familiar pilot’s seat and booted up the computer. Clearly, the other shift hadn’t used her ship today, although that was probably set to change again if K6-3 continued to malfunction. Still, it was good to find everything set up the way she had left it for once. She dutifully checked the diags. As usual, they showed reactor patterns that would have made the vessel unusable in most places, but that were well within the tolerated limits on Macao. The ground crew had repaired the hydraulic leak, as promised, though, and the gas was full. She wriggled in her seat, trying to embed herself in some manner that would prove at least bearably comfortable, gave up, and closed the hatch. It snicked smoothly into place, tinting the shadows of the hangar orange and overlaying the scene with a HUD readout that tagged the other Kays with their ID-codes and pilot names.

The ground crew were leaving the flight deck now, heading towards the control room. A klaxon, accompanied by a brief strobe of red light signalled that the deck was clear. As the last Kay sealed itself around its pilot there was another klaxon, and this time an orange light. There was a pregnant pause, during which the Kays sat poised and humming gently in their alcoves, steaming with exhaust gas, waiting for the air to flush. There was a subdued rushing noise as the air was cycled out of the hangar and then a pulse of green before the door in the hangar’s deck began to open, forming a ramp that dropped away into space — a yawning mouth of darkness with glittering rock and ice caught in its throat.

The Kays trundled across the concave flight deck and assumed launch formation. One by one, they accelerated down the short ramp and out into space, fanned by the station’s spin into a broad front. They converged, rotating, into their two usual wings, with Eli in the centre, and headed towards the belt.

‘I’m with you today, Lina,’ said Eli’s voice over the comm, peppered with static.

She glanced to the left, where his ship coasted along beside her, thirty metres away, keeping lockstep.

‘Oh really?’ she asked. Usually, it was Eli’s job as flight leader to prospect for high concentrations of double-Ms in the unexploited sectors. She realised that he was probably hoping to increase production, fearing that Farsight might demand reparations for their lost shuttle. This hardly seemed fair to Lina, but it certainly seemed feasible.

‘Yeah, eight, nine and twelve — Blue Eight. One, two and four — Red One.’

The pilots confirmed their instructions and the shift split into its two wings, Eli taking point in Lina’s wing and Petra leading hers. They diverged gracefully, dialling up the gas as they went.

Lina remained unable to shake her concerns about the air scrubbers, despite the job at hand. She found herself flying by instinct, her mind repeatedly wandering from the task. Luckily, the ship’s computer had the matter safely in hand.

She checked the rear-view, half expecting to see the prodigal shuttle coasting up to the station. But she didn’t. Rocko and Sal kept up a stream of chatter over the comm, but it was distant and muted to Lina, far-off static.

She realised that she was starting to get the fear that she had felt last time in the belt, and hopelessly tried to tell herself to stay calm. They were so cut off out here. She could almost see that fragile silver thread — the intangible, essential lifeline that stretched away through space, joining them to the way stations, then Platini, and beyond that the inhabited universe Sol-wards. That thread was nothing, really. They were alone. But then, they always had been. So why did it suddenly bother her so much? This thing with the laser array — did that really make any difference? It took years to talk to Platini, anyway. So did it really matter? They had always depended on the shuttles to survive, and the loss of communications didn’t change that. But that thought only led her to the real problem: Where was the shuttle? Phrase of the week, she thought and smiled humourlessly to herself.

Lina realised that they were in the outskirts of the belt when the vessel’s manoeuvring jets began to give their customary little nudges here and there, trying to adhere the Kay to its planned trajectory while at the same time avoiding the sometimes-erratic asteroids as they rolled and drifted through space, occasionally bumping into each other.

‘Are you listening to me, Li?’ asked Eli’s voice, making her jump.

‘Huh? Sorry?’

‘Oh, you are alive in there, then. I called you three times.’

‘Sorry, I guess I was gathering space-dust for a minute.’

‘I don’t wanna go too far in, okay? This is almost dense enough, now.’

‘Yeah, sure, just say when.’

They flew onwards for another thirty seconds or so before Eli gave the word to decelerate and set up shop.

‘The only problem with having you along, Eli,’ said Rocko as the Kays slowed to a near standstill and began to choose their rocks, ‘is that we’ll have to actually do some work today.’

‘Not that you aren’t welcome, or anything,’ added Sal with a hint of mischief in her voice.

Eli’s Kay coasted smoothly in between Lina’s and Rocko’s, its tool arms flexing like the fingers of a metal hand, reaching for a large asteroid that shimmered in its spotlight.

‘Too right,’ said Eli. ‘Have to keep an eye on you slackers, don’t I?’

‘We have to keep an eye on you more like,’ suggested Sal as her Kay coasted away from the others towards the far left of the group. It anchored onto a rock and began its work.

As they mined, Lina and Rocko drifted gradually away from the others, leapfrogging from one likely-looking asteroid to another. Typically, their samples showed almost entirely good double-M-types. The pilots were all well-experienced, adept at identifying the best targets by sight. That was one of the few things the Kays actually needed a human pilot for. The confusingly-similar albedo ratings of silicate-heavy non-double-M asteroids in the belt made radar scanning worthless. The ships rapidly analysed samples to confirm or deny the humans’ judgement. They usually confirmed it.

Sal and Eli were soon left some distance behind and to their left. Lina tried hassling Rocko about Fionne for a while, but in truth her heart wasn’t in it. He responded with steadfast patience: no, she wasn’t sick of him yet; yes, she had been keeping him up at night, thank-you-very-much; no, Rocko wasn’t suspicious of the amount of time she spent with Alphe when Rocko was on shift. Lina soon gave up this line of enquiry, defeated by his relentless good spirits. They worked in silence for a while.

Macao sat far above them, locked into its infinitely-repeating spin-cycle, a monolithic wheel in space. Even from this close, she could hardly see it at all. It looked to her like it could easily just slip below those waves of stone and sink forever, unnoticed.

The vibration from the Kay’s cutting equipment became soporific, and Lina had to literally pinch herself to stay awake. She tried to engage herself by running a full batch of system scans, but they didn’t tell her anything new and the process was an inherently tedious one. She glanced up at the HUD-marker showing Rocko’s K6-9, which was partially hidden by a huge, gnarled asteroid that looked strangely like a clenched human fist.

‘Hey, Rocko,’ she said, bored of silence now.

‘What?’ he asked, clearly suspicious of another Fionne-related enquiry.

‘Talk to me,’ she said.

‘About what?’ he asked. His Kay looked spectral in the milk-light of Lina’s ship, only half-real, an alien avatar of the man.

And then Sal spoke, her voice small and tinny, distorted even over this short distance by the belt debris. She said one word: ‘Eli!’

Lina was alert at once. There was something in the tone of that voice, a note of shrillness, even fear. That one word echoed again in her mind, portentous. She tried to quell the sudden racing of her own heart. It was probably nothing, just her own unfounded fears.

‘What is it, Sal?’ she asked, trying to inject her voice with calm, but her words were suddenly drowned by a harsh rush of noise from the cockpit speaker. Sal screamed, once, high and wavering, the top-notes clipping over the comm, then the rush erupted into a roar, devouring her voice. And then, before Lina could react in any way, there was silence.

Silence. . .

‘What the hell was that?’ asked Rocko’s voice, trembling and breathy. His Kay was still at work, its tool arms efficiently cutting and vacuuming, its thrusters giving little kicks of gas here and there, machine and mineral caught in a mindless dance.

Nobody answered. Rocko’s Kay detached from its asteroid and came about slowly. Lina also commanded her own ship to raise anchor and turn around, but her hands were shaking and it took several tries to hit the Manual Resume control and initiate the manoeuvring jets. She was struggling to breathe, her mind completely blank and paralysed, her hands reacting of their own accord, her eyes frozen so wide open that they hurt. Her heart was a wild, jittering thing that shook her whole body. A cold sweat was on her brow. She didn’t feel real. It couldn’t really be happening. . .

‘Sal. . .’ said Eli’s voice over the comm, but it didn’t really sound like Eli at all. That voice sounded thin and scared and childlike.

‘What the hell happened!?’ demanded Rocko again, almost screaming now. ‘Eli! What happened!?’

His Kay was close behind Lina’s own — too close, really — but for all she knew she could have been in the belt completely alone. Time spun out; empty space became a viscous fluid that her ship struggled to force its way through, desperately slow, and the blackness around her gathered in like drawing curtains, threatening to close on her. Not real it’s not real it’s not real it’s–

Spat!

Spat!

Spat-spat-spat!

Blood was raining across the cockpit window of Lina’s Kay. She recoiled in horror, releasing the ship’s controls, and the autopilot smoothly took over, correcting her flightpath to avoid a large and twisted hunk of metal that came whickering towards her from between two rocks. As it flew past, narrowly missing Rocko, too, Lina managed to read the legend K6-8 stamped onto its twisted surface. More debris flowed around her ship, twisted bolts and splinters of metal that bounced off the cockpit window and away into her wake. And the blood. . .

But it wasn’t just blood, now. There were specks and flecks of gristly, fibrous matter in there, too. Then when something that looked horribly like a human tooth ricocheted off the front of Lina’s ship with an audible ping, she put her head between her knees and vomited onto her boots.