Macao Station

Chapter Forty-Two

‘Quiet!’ commanded Halman, holding up one finger. He looked ungainly in his space suit, huge and awkward.

Lina held him in her light, breathing in heavy, ragged chunks. ‘What?’ she whispered, head cocked. Whatever he had heard must have come through the comm-channel, because they were moving through a vacuum and there was nothing else to hear.

‘I thought I heard voices on the radio,’ he said at length, shaking his head. ‘Several of them. Faint, but. . .’

‘Ella’s team?’ suggested Lina uncertainly. ‘Or Si’s?’

‘I guess,’ he replied. ‘Almost too faint for them, I thought. Anyway, it’s gone now.’ They stood silently for a moment, oppressed by the darkness of the passage. Open, deserted doorways lined the walls around them and the metal panels of the corridor were crusted with ice. Lina, Halman, Waine and Theo stood for a moment, exchanging warning looks, their suit-lights turning the world around them to black and white, like some terrible dream sequence. The passage shuddered suddenly, dislodging powdered ice from the ceiling. It fell around them like snow.

Lina wiped her visor with one sleeve, clearing it. ‘Mass driver,’ she whispered, unsure of why she was whispering.

Halman nodded, towering over her. ‘Do you hear me, Ella?’ he asked into his mic. ‘Si?’

Their replies were clearly audible, if muddied somewhat by the radio.

‘Did you hear anyone else on this channel?’ Halman asked.

Ella’s voice said, quite understandably through the static, ‘No, Boss.’

‘Nope,’ said Si.

‘Are you at the prison yet, Ella?’ asked Halman.

‘Not yet. Something wrong?’

‘No,’ said Halman. ‘Don’t worry about it. But keep your ears open. I could have sworn somebody else was on this channel for a moment there.’

‘Okay, sure, I’ll. . .’ replied Ella, the tail-end of her answer tattered by interference.

‘Will do,’ said Si, slightly more clearly.

Halman visibly steeled himself. ‘Let’s continue,’ he said to Lina and the others, his jaw set determinedly.

Onwards through that surreal cavern of white ice, grey metal and thick black shadow. Lina felt the blood rushing in her ears, swarming through her veins, throbbing within her hammering heart. Where had the invader — Ronnie Carver — gone? Was he around the next corner? Within one of the rooms that led off this corridor, maybe lying in wait for them, cradling the plasma cutter? Even worse, maybe he had doubled back, got behind the teams somehow as they fanned out, made his way back to the offices where Marco waited for her to return. She didn’t think that last was likely — and he’d have quite a fight on his hands if he tried to breach the dorms — but her mind kept suggesting it as a possibility all the same. She was glad that someone was on guard inside the makeshift airlock. Marco, she swore to herself, I am coming back from this. But it didn’t sound that convincing, even to her. Death had proven itself to be easily obtainable of late. It seemed to be everywhere she went.

They rounded a corner where somebody had deserted a huge pile of rubberised pipework, presumably in the scramble to vacate the main body of the station. They stepped over its snakelike coils carefully, concerned that they might slip and damage their suits. Such an accident could easily prove fatal in this environment. A tiny rip in the fabric, or a knock to the famously unreliable control units could result in a rapid, unpleasant demise. Lina stepped cautiously through the pile, her boots feeling uncomfortably heavy on her feet, her calf muscles aching from walking in them. The laser pistol felt flimsy and inadequate in her hand. She had never even held a gun before. She’d never even struck anybody in anger before this nightmare, let alone shot them.

They continued to the end of the corridor, following those jinks and jags that the designers of Macao had felt necessary to incorporate into its construction, checking into the deserted living quarters that they passed. Each of these showed them a little sneak preview of somebody else’s life: a half-eaten apple left on a table, now frozen solid; two pairs of slippers arranged beside a door — his and hers; an unmade bed; a framed photograph of Aitama’s yellowed plains, its glass crusted with frost; a thousand relics of a time, not so long ago, when this frozen, empty space had been their home. A little twinge of sadness went through her, but it was only the merest spark beside the fear and trepidation that dominated her thoughts.

The notion of actually taking a Kay and returning to that dark and hulking rock where Eli had secreted their shuttle filled her with a chilling dread that increased in magnitude with every step she took towards the hangar. She wondered if she had been insane to volunteer. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever arrived at that decision. She felt as if the intrinsic, inherent bond that joined mother to son like an unseen umbilical, was stretching, weakening, fading, as she picked her way deeper into the bowels of the station’s corpse.

They had long-since lost radio contact with Amy Stone, who had been left in charge back at the dorms. The construction of Macao virtually denied the use of internal radio altogether, and it hadn’t taken long for Amy to become inaudible as they ventured out, barring the occasional freak burst of signal here and there, which offered barely coherent snatches of speech and fizzing static that hurt the ears. Marco might as well have been on another planet. Lina felt a wetness developing in her eyes, and she blinked it away, unable to put a hand to her helmeted face, trying to clear her mind of all but the job at hand. Focus, she told herself. Focus, and come back from this. You cannot afford the luxury of screwing up and getting killed. Nor the luxury of crying like a little girl.

‘Lina, you want to go back?’ asked Theo, appearing at her elbow as they neared the steps down to the hangar level. He was smiling a small, concerned smile.

‘No,’ she said, a little offended. She affected looking into one of the rooms they passed in order to avoid his scrutiny.

‘It’s going to be okay, Lina,’ Theo said. Waine shouldered his way past them and stood at the top of the steps, peering down into the darkness below.

‘Sure,’ said Lina, blinking her eyes to clear them and treating Theo to what she hoped was an encouraging smile. Judging from his expression, it missed the mark somewhat. ‘I’m just a bit jumpy.’

‘Come on,’ called Halman softly, beckoning them onwards.

They descended the steps carefully, mindful of the slipperiness of the surface, gripping the hand-rail as they went, half expecting Ronnie Carver to peel away from the shadows and fall on them at any moment. Had he really killed Eli, as suggested by the fingers around his neck? Oddly, Lina didn’t seem to feel anything at all about that possibility. She supposed that she had already mourned Eli — the Eli whom she had known for so long — once it had become clear that the old Eli was gone, replaced by some drug-addicted psychopath. And now, if that new Eli really was dead, then what concern was it of hers? He hadn’t been her Eli any more by that point — he had been some sort of monster. It’ll eat you up, Lina! her mind sang. It had eaten him up in the end, she supposed, thinking of the shadow in the belt.

And what was that shadow? She thought she had almost seen it in the belt when she had been in pursuit of the ISL. But had she? She had seen it first in a dream, after Sal’s death. Maybe she had just imagined it in the belt. She suspected that it was simply an embodiment of her own fear. But a nagging, doubting little corner of her mind kept wanting to tell her that it was something real, tangible, maybe even evil. Who knew for sure? She hadn’t mentioned the shadow to Halman or the others, maybe for fear that acknowledging it would cement its reality, somehow give it substance. Whatever it was, she had agreed to go out there again. She shook her head, wondering at her own recklessness.

At the bottom of the steps, the passage continued straight for some fifteen metres, flanked by storage cupboards and tiny utility rooms, before angling to the left into the main part of the warehouse. They moved along in a fearful huddle, treading carefully. The airless space was eerily silent, a collage of grey and black. A water leak in the ceiling had formed stalactites of ice that stretched down to the floor like giant fangs, and the group unconsciously stepped around them as if afraid of being bitten. Lina’s boots slipped in the puddle of ice and she went painfully to one knee, cursing under her breath. Theo helped her to her feet again, lifting her by the arm as if she were of no weight at all. His compact body was obviously stronger than it looked. She thanked him and they continued.

Every nook and cranny of the warehouse was a hiding place from which the dreaded Carver might spring. Every outcropping piece of machinery, every tarpaulin-covered pallet, every massive spool of cable, was a skulking human form. Lina’s breathing seemed to fill the entire world. She held the pistol in front of her like a ward. Frost glittered everywhere like fairy dust, making the place into a sinister wonderland. There was only silence from the comm. Ella and Si were too far away to talk to now. Lina wondered if they were all okay, and who, if anyone, would find the escaped prisoner first. She hoped, for all her most altruistic desires, that it would not be her own group.

The hangar door was standing open, dangerously inviting. The lights were on inside, showing rows of gunmetal ship’s hulls and reflective cockpit glass. They crept inside, explorers in their own lost world.

The in-system loader loomed in the centre of the hangar like a vast beetle that had landed there, surrounded by its cowed harem of battered Kays, almost blocking the flight deck completely. The space door hung open at the far end like an unravelled tongue. It was disturbing to see it left like that, just hanging open, almost inviting the void to spill into the station, living shadows and all, to drown the remaining survivors like flood water.

‘My ship,’ said Lina, pointing towards K6-12 with her gun. It sat over on the right-hand side of the hangar, in the shadow of the loader, with just enough of an angle to be able to move it without moving the loader first. She was sentimentally glad that the incoming vessel had not damaged it. ‘I could just take it now and go out there. If Carver’s here, maybe there’s nobody alive on the shuttle at all.’ She looked at Halman, who froze in place, his face scrunched in thought. ‘I could just go, Dan.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, we take care of this first. Eli could still be out there, or the pilot. We deal with this first, then you and Ella go together as planned.’ Lina started to object but he stopped her with a single shake of his head. ‘Don’t fucking argue with me now, Lina,’ he said with soft menace. ‘Not now.’

Lina huffed, annoyed, and turned away. She let her light play across the ships, caress their battered hulls. ‘Fine,’ she said.

‘Lina and Waine, wait here and guard the door,’ commanded Halman softly. ‘Keep your wits about you. Anything happens, shout — I won’t be far. Actually, if you see Carver, shoot first and then shout.’ He beckoned Theo with his laser pistol. ‘Theo — with me. We’ll sweep down to the other end, check the control room, then come back.’

He waved Theo over to the other side of the hangar, and they moved off down the rows of Kays with their weapons cocked at the ready. Lina tried to take some comfort in the fact that Halman had once been a low-ranking officer in the Farsight army at Platini Alpha, but she couldn’t do it. He was still a large man, but he looked too old now, too hunched, too drawn, and although she knew the shadow of a fighter still dwelt within him somewhere, it was at best well-hidden.

Halman could be seen in silhouette, gun outstretched, skirting the central control desk and Ilse’s broken and upturned Kay while Theo moved away down the far side of the hangar. Halman approached the dead-lifter, which was parked in the middle of the flight deck, overshadowed by the loader that had pulled up on the far side, almost touching it. Suddenly, his suit-light flashed as he turned to look back towards Lina and Waine.

‘Oh shit,’ said Halman’s voice over the radio. ‘Oh shit. Oh no.’

‘What?’ demanded Lina. ‘What is it?’

‘The bastard. . .’ muttered Halman. He had stopped before the dead-lifter and was seemingly frozen in place staring at it. It looked like something was on the lifter’s forks, something torn and tattered that Lina couldn’t distinguish from her distant vantage point.

‘Come on!’ she called to Waine, already setting off at a run. Theo was also heading towards Halman, calling out to him, unanswered.

Before she actually reached him, Lina saw what Halman had found. Halman himself hadn’t seen it until he’d been right upon it, but with the benefit of his light, which was now firmly planted on the object in question, Lina could make it out quite clearly. She stopped, skidding to a halt, transfixed by what she saw hanging from the lifter’s forks. She willed her feet to continue moving, but they seemed to be stuck to the floor. Maybe she had inadvertently activated the magnets on her boots.

Whatever else Ronnie Carver might be, he was certainly creative. He seemed to have made a sculpture in human remains. The body hanging from the lifter’s forks had been not just butchered but almost entirely reworked, cut right open and somehow peeled, reshaped into something inhuman and monstrous. Ribs had been splayed open like wings, limbs had been broken and re-jointed, hands twisted into talons, flaps of meat carved crudely but enthusiastically into new forms. Scraps of space suit hung here and there like streamers. Pieces of skin and intestine, cauterised by the plasma cutter, lay strewn around the floor like bits of rubbish.

Lina knew instantly what it was: a dragon. A dragon made from a sacrificed human body, strung up with wire that had clearly come from the large spool on the floor by the central desk. A message, an omen, a harbinger of disaster cast in human flesh and blood.

‘Dragon!’ she gasped, her mind reeling in horror, flailing, grasping for something to latch onto before sanity slipped and fell away, possibly to be lost forever. It’ll eat you up! She was falling, falling into darkness that loomed beneath her like the mouth of a waiting monster. I’m going to take my son to Platini Alpha, and one day all this will seem like a bad dream, something that never really happened at all. . . And although she didn’t really believe it herself any more, that was enough — just enough — to hang onto. She stood reeling, hands to the sides of her helmet, her muscles suddenly as limp as rags, holding her up out of mere habit.

‘Oh shit,’ sighed Theo, approaching the lifter with his hand out as if to touch that hideous creation of murdered meat.

‘Don’t!’ cried Lina without thinking, as if the thing might suddenly come to life and eat Theo whole like a wolf in a children’s fairy story. She reached out one unsteady hand, meaning somehow to stop him, but it was all right — Theo stayed his hand and simply stood staring in awestruck revulsion.

Waine walked slowly past her, gliding silently as if on rails, to stand shoulder to shoulder with Halman. But Lina saw his eyes as he passed, and they looked dull and glazed in his wrinkled face.

‘That fucking bastard,’ snarled Halman, moving closer to Liu’s destroyed corpse. He turned around, his face full of horror and slowly-growing anger. ‘Poor fucking Liu,’ he said.

Lina regained control of her muscles, and she forced her feet to carry her forwards. Her throat was hitching and constricting, making her breathing heavy and hard. The thought of going out there again, into the belt, now seemed utterly unthinkable. For all her earlier determination, all her speeches to her son, she simply didn’t think she could do it now.

In her earpiece, she heard Waine begin to cry. This seemed significant to her — another bad omen.

‘This changes nothing,’ said Halman, still staring at the abomination that hung from the dead-lifter’s forks. ‘We’ll secure this area, lock the space door with my personal code, then move back towards the plaza and meet up with the other teams. Then, if we haven’t seen Carver, we’ll spread out again from there.’

Waine began to say something, his voice still unsteady, but his words were drowned by a sudden burst of noise from the radio. It sounded like massed human voices, screaming, shouting. . .

For a second Lina couldn’t work out what was happening. She scrunched her eyes shut, as if by doing so she could lessen the volume in her ears, and a question began to form on her lips. She looked at Waine, and was alarmed to see the expression on his face.

Waine’s eyes fell wide open and he said something to Lina which was inaudible against the background noise. He pointed to the hangar door behind her. Halman stared in shock. As Lina turned to look, it dawned on her what that noise was.

A veritable mob of people were storming into the hangar, the massive figure of Ronnie Carver at their fore, taller than Halman and at least as heavy as Si Davis.

As she watched, the plasma cutter came alive in Carver’s hands, making her visor darken protectively. She clutched the pistol, completely forgotten, in one fist and stared dumbly as the mob rushed towards them.

Theo was quicker to react. He ran to meet the giant, levelling the pistol at him. He fired once and the beam briefly danced around the feet of the onrushing Carver. Theo steadied himself to fire again. Nothing happened. He held the gun up, looking at it in confusion. Lina saw a red warning light glowing on its body. And then Carver was on him.

Carver brought the cutter down in a mighty overhand swipe. Theo made to block the strike with his dead pistol, but the beam of the cutter went right through the gun, sending its end twirling away into the shadows like a propeller. Then the beam went through Theo, as if he was no more substantial than a cloud of smoke, dividing him roughly about the waist in a great rush of vapour. The two halves fell away, gas rupturing from his suit. Carver’s mob of followers spread out into the hangar, whooping and jeering, leaping into cover.

Lina stood stupefied and watched as Theo died. Who the hell were all these people? Where had he found all these people?

Halman was running already, under cover of the Kays, firing his laser pistol on the fly, without pause to aim. The roaring of the attackers still filled the comm, making communication impossible. Lina looked to Waine, totally lost, knowing that her life — all of their lives — hung in the balance.

Somebody in the attacking group was firing a laser, too, as they ran along the furthest row of Kays. The shots went wild, most of them zipping away into the cable-festooned darkness of the ceiling. One bounced off the mirrored cockpit glass of K6-4 and hit the dead-lifter, where it left a small and understated burn in its paintwork. It was clear, however, even to Lina’s stunned mind, that the shooter was aiming for her and Waine.

‘Quick!’ she yelled, unaware that her voice was inaudible beneath the continuous war-cry of the attacking group. She darted across the open deck, feeling horribly exposed, and under the nose of the nearest ship, her boot skidding on the ice, almost slipping out from under her. She hit the deck and looked back over her shoulder.

Waine was behind her, but he was not so fast. He took a hit from the laser pistol, high on one shoulder, and his suit shredded itself like a burst balloon. He collapsed, writhing and clutching at his throat, grabbing instinctively for Lina’s leg as she scrambled further into cover. She peeked out and saw him thrashing on the floor, twisting and arching like a fish out of water. Shots from the laser stroked the deck in front of her, probing, making her duck back again, powerless to help the man who now lay dying only feet away.

The roaring was subsiding now, and Lina heard Halman’s voice over the radio. ‘The prisoners!’ he shouted. ‘The prisoners!’ Other voices came from the radio, too — desperate, aggressive exclamations and screams of rage.

Halman was right, of course — it made perfect sense. Carver had freed the prisoners and brought them here to escape on the ISL. Not just one homicidal maniac any more, but sixteen of them. How could things get any worse?

Lina scampered round to the other side of her Kay and peeked out again. The prisoners were fanning out into the hangar, running in clumsy half-crouches, keeping to the shadows. Two of them dashed into the shade of the dead-lifter where she had been only moments before, peeping out at her with ugly, feral faces. They would flush her from her hiding place at any second, as soon as they had summoned up the courage to make the next dash.

‘Halman!’ she yelled, poised in indecision, feeling like an animal caught in a hunter’s sights.

‘Lina, follow me!’ he yelled back. ‘We have to get to the door!’ She couldn’t see him any more, but she knew he was right. They had to get away. There was no hope they could win this fight.

Without allowing herself to stop, think, and then possibly die in that moment of consideration, Lina launched herself out from behind the ship and onto the open floor of the flight deck. She caught another glimpse of Halman, pinned down behind a Kay to her right, exchanging fire with the laser-armed prisoner. She ran towards him, knowing that a beam of light could end her life at any second, leave her gasping and suffocating like Waine, or maybe just blinded and convulsing in agony on the floor. She thought about what might happen if Carver captured her, about what had happened to Liu. Dragon! she thought madly. It’ll eat you up!

She landed beside Halman with a jarring crash, laser beams playing on the deck behind her. He popped up from cover, but was forced to duck back again without even getting a shot off.

‘Shit!’ he cried.

Lina, staying low on her belly, edged round the landing gear of the ship and took a quick glance towards the door. The shooter was out of sight, hiding, and she couldn’t tell where he was. But Carver was running from cover to cover, closing in on them. She caught a glimpse of the face behind the visor, and it looked pink and stupid and horribly eager. And he was close. Her mind began to gibber in fear.

Halman popped up again, letting off another shot. An answering beam flashed silently past his helmet, missing him by perhaps a hand’s breadth. It seemed the enemy had got his eye in now. Halman ducked down again, cursing.

‘Come on!’ cried Lina, desperately seizing the initiative. She knew that if they stayed put, they would die for sure. Sadly, the odds didn’t look much better if they broke cover. But what other option was there?

She threw herself round the back of the Kay, squeezing between the ship and the hangar wall, safely out of the enemy’s line of sight, but also virtually blind to what was going on. Halman was right behind her. They ran, crouched, ducking under outcropping winches and brackets and ventilation units.

And then they came face-to-face with Carver.

They skidded, Halman falling over Lina, and the giant towered above them, the cutter held high for the killing blow. She saw the fingers jumping on their string around his neck and the face behind the visor, streaked with blood. Still crouched low, she tried to shy away into the wall itself, raising one hand in a pointless attempt to protect her head, knowing that she was about to die. Oddly, she felt only a drifting, timeless sense of calm now that it came down to it. Everything slowed down. Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears, like a war drum. The world flattened and spread like oil on water. This was the end.

But Halman rolled away, his training taking over, crashing into the wall, firing the pistol as he went. Either he had been something of a crack shot in his day, or he was lucky now. Whatever the case, the beam of the laser hit Carver right in the visor of his helmet. He staggered back, dropping the cutter, which sliced a neat segment from the radar dome of the nearest Kay before going out. He reeled away, into the open, almost hit by a shot from his comrade’s laser, hands to his helmet. He screamed into the comm — a sound of maniacal rage and frustration more than pain, groping blindly for the person who had shot him.

‘Go!’ screamed Halman, scrambling to his feet.

Lina ran, her feet skidding on the icy floor in excruciating slow-motion. It was like a dream she’d used to have quite regularly back in the days when her marriage had been failing but she hadn’t had the sense to overtly acknowledge it — a dream in which she’d always found herself running from some faceless aggressor, but running without moving, as if caught in treacle, frozen in a single, hellish slice of time.

Her flight from the cover of the ship to the door of the hangar seemed to take minutes, though in fact it must have been closer to two or three seconds. Laser lights played around them, deceptively harmless-looking, miraculously touching neither of them. Suited enemies moved towards them from every angle, but too slowly.

They were out, away into the warehouse and running as fast as their suits would allow. One slip now, one tiny pause, one stumble, would mean death. Lina felt her heart beating in her head, compressive waves that made her vision fade and swim. The exhausted breath from her suit stretched out behind her in a long silky plume.

Halman seemed to keep pace with her effortlessly, and he ran beside her although she knew he could have just stormed away, leaving her easily behind. The warehouse was utterly dark after the relative brightness of the hangar, and their suit-lights bobbed and weaved crazily as they ran, slashing and slicing through the darkness. They didn’t pause to look behind them, and there was only silence from the radio. They ran beneath the crushing shadows, over the frosted metal, through the airless void of their hostile home, leaving more friends dead behind them.