Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Belt Three

First published in Great Britain in ebook format by HarperVoyager, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2015. Copyright © John Ayliff 2015

The Worldbreaker was hours away, but Konrad’s Hope was already coming apart. Most of the starscrapers were dark, and the surface bore scars where solar panels and heat sinks had been stripped away. The end of the docking spindle was a twisted, molten ruin, no doubt damaged during the evacuation riots. The true-borns and their favoured servants would have gone first, followed by any tank-borns who could scare up the cost of an evac ship berth. With the last evac ships gone, maybe fifty thousand tank-borns would be in the city, with nothing to do but wait for the end.

The space around the city was clear of the normal controlled traffic chaos. The industrial orbitals would have been nudged into orbits towards other cities, and even the smallest tugs and shuttles would be carrying refugees in desperate escape attempts. The only bodies orbiting the city now were smaller rocks and the debris from the shattered spindle.

‘Thousand Names, this is the Konrad’s Hope evacuation committee. We’ve gathered the high-priority evacuation cases in one location. Send your shuttle to these coordinates…’

‘Thousand Names, my name is Jananna Smith. I’m the only true-born left. I’ve got a lot of wealth tied up in other cities—take me away from here and I’ll see that you’re rewarded—’

‘Thousand Names, please, there’s a birthing village full of children still here. They don’t even know what’s happening. For God’s sake, you’ll have room for them, please—’

The breathless voices sounded in the background of the Thousand Names’s bridge, coming across what had once been the city’s traffic control channels. Everyone with the means to detect them would hope that they were a late-coming evac ship, and everyone with access to a transmitter was bargaining for passage.

‘Thousand Names, this is Sister Greyda of the Konrad’s Hope Scriber chapel. We’re delighted you’ve chosen to join us—’

‘Brenn, turn that shit off.’ Olzan’s voice came out more strained than he had expected.

Brenn looked a little startled, but the voices shut off. Vazoya squeezed his hand and muttered something reassuring, but Olzan knew whom she was really trying to reassure.

Without the chatter, the silence was oppressive. Olzan replaced the live view on the screen with a city map, and began running through the plan again, to take his mind off the approach as much as anything else. ‘The collection is housed in a hangar near the bottom of that starscraper,’ he said, pointing. ‘We’ll take a shuttle in. Docking with a rotating ’scraper will be tricky but Vaz can do it.’

‘Of course, I can do it.’ Vazoya’s normal arrogance seemed forced now.

‘The power’s out in that ’scraper so it should be empty, but we might get company when folks see the shuttle docking. Most likely the elevators will be down so they won’t reach us too quickly.

‘There’s one exhibit in particular that Mr Glass wants. It’s called the Seagull, and it’s the centrepiece of Zhu’s collection. I don’t know what it is, but Mr Glass said we’ll know it when we see it. It’s vacuum-safe, so we can just open the hangar doors and push it out, then the Names can pick it up. We get in and out as quick as we can. I don’t want any encounters with the inhabitants.’ He didn’t want the crew to see them: it would make them real, make it harder to leave them to die. He didn’t want to see them himself, for the same reason.

‘Understood,’ said Keldra from the back of the room. Olzan shot her a look. No one had asked her.

The city spun above Olzan’s head, the shadows of the starscrapers processing like raking fingers across the grey surface. He could feel the gravity change as Vazoya teased the shuttle into a powered orbit that matched the city’s spin. There was a shift in perception, and then he was sitting in a steady one gravity, with the city stationary above him, both of them in the middle of a rotating sphere of stars. Vazoya was gently manoeuvring the shuttle up, towards the hanging mass of Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper.

Olzan was crammed next to Keldra in the shuttle’s tiny cargo section, both of them dressed in stuffy vacuum suits. If she had such an interest in Planetary Age artefacts, Olzan had decided, then they might as well put that to use. Brenn and Tarraso were still on board the Thousand Names, keeping it in a wide orbit of the city, ready to pick up the artefact and then make a rapid escape once the shuttle was back on board.

Vazoya moved the shuttle up to the side of the starscraper. Olzan could see the blue-white reflections of their thruster flames in the windows. One wide gap between the windows resolved into the door to the hangar housing Anastasia Zhu’s collection.

Vazoya stabilized the shuttle next to the small personnel airlock at the edge of the hangar door. A magnetic grapnel line shot across the gap and latched onto the starscraper’s metal wall, and then the shuttle’s hatch swung open. The external airlock wasn’t built to take this type of shuttle, and hovering too close to the wall would be dangerous. They would have to cross the gap in vacuum suits.

Keldra’s face was pale behind her visor. She hadn’t said much on the shuttle flight, despite her constant talk of the Earth artefact while they were still on the Names. It was vertigo, Olzan realized with amusement. With the rotational pseudogravity in place, they were suspended over an infinite drop filled with shooting stars. Keldra had been a habitat engineer, working in her city’s spine, well away from the outer skin. For someone not used to these manoeuvres the experience could be terrifying.

Olzan wasn’t in much of a mood to spare Keldra’s feelings. ‘All right, Engineer, get that door open. Your precious artefact’s in there.’ Keldra hesitated. For a moment Olzan thought she wasn’t going to move. ‘Go on. We’ll retrieve you if you fall.’

‘Might not be worth the fuel,’ came Vazoya’s voice from the cockpit.

Keldra scowled, stood up, and clipped her suit to the wobbling grapnel line. She swung out into the gap and climbed hand-over-hand to the personnel airlock, moving confidently now that she had started. She reached the ledge beneath the airlock door and began fumbling with the door control.

‘It’s not going to open,’ she said after a minute.

‘What’s the matter with it?’ Olzan asked.

‘The lock’s physically jammed. We might be able to open it from the inside.’

‘We can blast it,’ Vazoya said. ‘Get the charges. The decompression might even push the thing out for us; problem solved.’

‘No!’ Keldra snapped. ‘It could be damaged.’

‘Then we can give Mr Glass the damn pieces and tell him that’s how we found it. Olzan, let’s get the hell out of here.’

‘Mr Glass won’t be pleased,’ Olzan said. The approach of the Worldbreaker was a nagging presence in the back of his mind, but every time he thought about cutting corners or doing a less than perfect job, he thought back to Emily’s last message. Do a good job here and he could marry her, get sterility reversal treatment, live like a true-born…‘Vaz, find another airlock. We’ll work our way round the inside. Keldra, get back here.’

They found another airlock a few levels up. Once again Vazoya brought them alongside and fired the grapnel, and this time Keldra climbed across without hesitation. Olzan watched her tinker with the lock for a moment and then the outer door hinged open.

‘Vaz, hold the shuttle here,’ Olzan said as he clipped himself to the line. ‘We might need to come back out this way. I’ll let you know when we reach the hangar.’

‘Take your time. If you’re not back, it’s my ship.’

‘We’ll be back.’

‘I’m serious, Olzan. I’m not waiting for the Worldbreaker to—’

‘Neither am I. We’ll be back.’

Olzan strapped the explosive charges to his suit’s backpack and then pulled himself along the grapnel line, carefully avoiding looking down. Keldra had already dealt with what little was left of the security system, and she cycled them through using the airlock’s emergency power.

The interior of the starscraper was dark, lit only by sporadic emergency lighting and the bobbing circles cast by their helmet lamps. A sound of dripping water echoed to them from somewhere deeper in the maze of metal corridors. Olzan called up a floor plan from his implant and laid it over his vision. The elevators wouldn’t be working, but there should be stairs in the central atrium. With the city’s datanet offline the implant couldn’t plot a route for him, but it wasn’t hard to see which way to go.

The atrium was a towering void that ran the entire height of the starscraper. There were arcs of piping hanging in the space, suspended by invisible cables. It took Olzan a moment to realize he’d seen something similar in the Glass family starscraper back in Santesteban, but that one had been filled with water. It was a water-sculpture: if the pumps had still been powered, a thin stream of water would have poured down the atrium, twisting towards one wall due to the Coriolis effect, and redirected by the arcs of piping into graceful curves and helices. He looked down over the railing and could see his helmet lamp’s beam reflecting off a murky surface. It looked as though the water had kept flowing for a while after the pumps had failed.

There was what looked like a stairwell on the far side of the atrium. Olzan led Keldra around the walkway towards it. Halfway to the staircase, Keldra suddenly stopped. ‘We’ve got company,’ she hissed.

Olzan followed her finger. High above the spouts of the empty water-sculpture was another cluster of bobbing lights.

Olzan did a frantic mental calculation. They could go back, but that would mean going back to Mr Glass empty-handed. ‘It’ll take them a while to go down those stairs. They don’t know where we’re going. We can lose them.’

Keldra didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t say anything.

‘Keep your head down,’ he said. It was still possible the others hadn’t spotted them. He dimmed his helmet lamp, angled it at the floor, and jogged for the stairs.

He counted the loops of the spiral staircase until they were on the correct level, then found the radial corridor that would lead to the hangar. He risked a glance upwards. The others were still above them, their lamp-beams bobbing around agitatedly. Olzan couldn’t tell what they were doing.

They left the atrium behind them and struck out towards the hangar at the edge of the starscraper. Even the emergency lights were dead on this level. The entrance to the hangar was an airlock, with a simple mechanical fail-safe to keep it shut; after they levered it open it closed automatically behind them.

They emerged onto a gallery overlooking Anastasia Zhu’s collection hall. The darkness made the space seem vast, the far wall only dimly visible in the light of their helmet lamps. What they could see of the room was in disarray. It looked like most of the smaller exhibits had been removed hurriedly, leaving toppled plinths, and the decorative hangings that had covered the bare walls were now scattered across the floor.

One large object dominated the centre of the room, something with a curved white surface, spotlessly clean. Olzan’s beam caught a name inscribed on the surface: EAS-S4 Seagull. He felt some of his worry disappear. At least finding it hadn’t been hard.

They ran their torch beams across the Seagull, trying to get an impression of its shape. It looked like a shuttle, but not like any Olzan could imagine being built in his time. It had a cylindrical body and a rounded nose, with the sleek curves that characterized Planetary Age technology. There were two odd fins stretched out from either side of the fuselage, far larger than most shuttle heat radiators. ‘What are those?’ he asked, half to himself.

‘Wings.’ Keldra’s voice was hushed, like a devout believer inside a chapel. ‘It’s a spaceplane. The wings are for flying in atmosphere. That craft, the Seagull…it would have landed on Earth.’ She held one arm out straight as if it were a wing, and moved the other hand above and below it, demonstrating something. ‘The top surface of the wing is curved, so the air pressure—’

‘Save the lecture. We need to get it out the doors so the Names can pick it up.’

He descended the metal steps to the hangar floor and scanned the far side of the room with his lamp-beams. The hangar doors and the personnel airlock were both hidden behind a set of floor-to-ceiling display cases. Hopefully there would be some way to remove them without using the explosives, so they wouldn’t have to risk damaging the spaceplane. He trudged over to them, stepping around the debris from the hasty evacuation, his boots splashing in the thin layer of oily water that covered the floor.

The display cases were airtight, climate-controlled modules designed for storing delicate artefacts. They were empty, save from some grit and curled brownish things that might have been leaves from a preserved plant. Olzan worked at the crack between two cases with his suit knife, trying to see if the cases were free-standing or attached to the wall. ‘Keldra! Give me a hand with this.’

Olzan looked around for her. She had climbed a metal stepladder that was set up next to the Seagull’s nose, and was now peering through its cockpit windows, her gloved hands almost but not quite touching the hull. ‘It’s a shell,’ she said, resentfully. ‘All the workings have been removed.’

‘Of course, they have. Taking it apart means more artefacts to put on display. What, did you think we’d be able to fly it out? Get the hell over here.’

Keldra tore herself away from the spaceplane and joined Olzan by the hangar door. She examined the display cases, crouching down to look at them from every angle. ‘They’re wired into the city’s power and hab systems. It looks like the airlock has been dismantled and its power and support lines are feeding these cases instead. Removing them will be tricky.’

‘Then we’ll have to blast them.’ Olzan unclipped the bag of explosives from his suit and dropped it on the floor in front of the cases.

‘It’s tricky, but I can do it.’

He hesitated. ‘Brenn! Time check.’

‘One hour twenty-two minutes to Black Line.’ Even Brenn’s voice was starting to show some worry.

‘I can do it in half an hour,’ Keldra said.

‘All right, but I’m planting the charges now. If you’re not done in half an hour we blow it.’

‘All right.’ She opened her tool bag and set to work.

Olzan walked up the row of display cases, fixing the explosive charges between them and wiring in remote detonators he could control from his suit. With more time he would have been able to blow the hangar door open with fewer, carefully placed charges, but for now overkill would have to do, even if the shuttle took damage. Meanwhile, Keldra had managed to get one of the display cases away from the wall and was tinkering with what remained of the hangar mechanism.

The charges in place, Olzan took a look around the room, breathing deeply to try to control his nerves. Abandoned display plinths seemed to stare at him, some of them lying broken in the shallow water. The Seagull loomed over them, shining like a statue of a benevolent god, wings outstretched, the slow motion of the water casting a subtly shifting reflection of his torchlight on its polished surface. Maybe there was something to Keldra’s obsession, he thought. That artefact had survived unscathed through the Worldbreaker disaster and the early city resource wars that had wiped out all the achievements of Planetary Age civilization and reduced the human race to a tiny remnant. It would be a pity to let it be damaged now.

Another movement of light caught his eye. Up on the gallery, the door they had come in by was opening again. A wobbling torch beam shone down on them.

Olzan froze. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Keldra still tinkering with the hangar mechanism; it looked as though she hadn’t noticed the others. ‘Keldra, stop,’ he whispered over the helmet connection.

More torchlights appeared on the gallery, and Olzan could just make out the figures that carried them. There were three of them. They weren’t wearing vacuum suits, only tattered and stained city issue worker overalls. They were squat, muscular men, looking as if they were from a high-grav part of the city and used to tough manual work. Each of them carried a torch in one hand and a gun in the other, slug-thrower pistols rather than nerve guns. Olzan and Keldra’s vacuum suits were not armoured: bullets would go through them like paper. Olzan had a nerve gun at his hip but he didn’t dare go for it.

The first man’s voice rang out across the hangar. ‘Stop that. Get away from that, whatever it is. Put your hands where I can see them.’ He was pointing his gun at Keldra. The two others had their guns trained on Olzan.

Keldra didn’t move from the display case. She removed a panel and was in the middle of a tangle of wiring.

‘I said move!’

Olzan tapped Keldra’s arm. ‘Do as he says.’

She turned around, slowly. Olzan was glad the men with guns wouldn’t be able to see her expression clearly through her visor. She was fuming, as if she might erupt into violence at any moment.

‘Stay where you are.’

The three men made their way down the stairs, keeping their guns trained on Olzan and Keldra. Olzan noticed they were wearing abseiling harnesses over their clothes. He kicked himself for not thinking of it.

The leader walked around the spaceplane and shone his torch into Olzan’s face, then Keldra’s. ‘Good of you to come and get us. Don’t know what you’re doing down here, though. You must have taken a wrong turn!’

Another of the thugs sniggered. His overalls were bloodstained, and he had half a dozen human ears hanging from a string around his neck. The third thug was shifting on his feet and twitching nervously, his gun tracing a figure-of-eight path as he trained it alternately on Keldra and Olzan.

‘You’ve got a ship out there, and we want off this rock,’ the first man said.

They were close enough now that Olzan could read the name tags on their uniforms. The leader was Poldak 2484-Konradshope-023382. He had the red-eyed look of someone who had been blind drunk until taking a sobriety shot an hour or so ago, but right now the hand with which he held his gun was rock steady.

Olzan spread his hands out in a non-threatening gesture. The Thousand Names could afford to take a few passengers on to Santesteban. ‘We’ll get you all out of here. There’s no need for violence.’

‘Glad you see it that way.’ The man smiled, coldly, but didn’t lower his gun, which was now pointed at Olzan’s chest. ‘Has your shuttle got three spare suits?’

Olzan searched his memory. ‘Including the pilot’s, yes.’

‘Have him send them across. We’ll meet the shuttle at the lock where you came in.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Come on.’

‘I’ll have this lock working soon,’ Keldra said.

‘No. The lock you came in by is working now.’

‘We’re here on a job of our own,’ Olzan said. ‘We’ll give you a lift to Santesteban, but let us finish. We’ll all get out.’

Poldak glanced at the Seagull. ‘You’re here for that? Forget about it. We go now.’

‘It’s a Planetary Age spaceplane,’ Keldra explained.

‘Yeah, whatever. I’m the King of Belt Four. We go now.’

The man with the string of ears—Mardok, by his name tag—laughed again. It looked as though he could see Keldra’s discomfort and was enjoying it. ‘It’s ’Breaker dust now,’ he said.

‘We’ve still got time,’ Olzan insisted.

Poldak took a step closer to him. The gun was not quite touching his chest. ‘I don’t think you understand our arrangement,’ he said. ‘We’re not begging a lift from you. We’re stealing your ship.’

A bang made them both jump. Poldak took his eyes off Olzan to look for the source. Olzan felt his heart pound. It had been loud enough even inside the helmet. He thanked God Poldak’s finger hadn’t jumped on the trigger.

Mardok was standing beneath the Seagull, looking up at it, his gun raised and smoking. He’d placed a bullet hole dead in the centre of the circular blue logo under the spaceplane’s nose. As the echoes died away he looked round at Poldak, an inane grin on his face.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ screamed the third man. ‘We need to get out!’

Mardok shrugged. ‘Hey, lighten up. Just having some fun.’

‘Calm down, both of you,’ Poldak snapped. Then suddenly, ‘You! What do you think you’re doing?’

Keldra was back at the control panel, hiding it with her body while making some change to the wiring.

‘Get away from that!’ shouted Mardok, swinging his gun back to Keldra.

She moved away from the panel slowly, and it looked to Olzan as though she had made one final adjustment as she turned around. ‘I can still get it open in time,’ she said.

‘I said no,’ Poldak replied.

‘It’s valuable. Take it. I know of collectors who’d want to buy it to restore it.’

Mardok advanced on Keldra, grabbed her by the neck, his gun pressing into her abdomen. ‘The man said no.’ She didn’t move. Her face was locked in a snarl, angry rather than frightened; it looked as though she was deliberately restraining herself from pushing the man away.

‘We can come to an arrangement,’ Olzan said. ‘We’ll give you passage to Santesteban, and some money to get you on your feet. I can see if my employer can find space for you in his business there, good jobs. You don’t need to go to the trouble of taking over the ship.’

The third man—Soodok—was almost hopping from foot to foot. ‘Let’s go, already. They’ve offered us passage.’

‘We’re taking the ship,’ Poldak said. ‘Sorry, but I can’t trust you any other way. If you’re in control there’s nothing stopping you from slave-spiking us in our sleep.’

‘What’s stopping you from doing the same to us?’

‘My word as a gentleman.’ His smile was mixed with a slightly confused look, which puzzled Olzan. He hadn’t said it with the conviction of his earlier joke.

‘We can come to a deal,’ Olzan said. ‘My implant can be set to a conditional trigger. We’ll set it so that if any of you are harmed, it’ll wipe me as well. That’s a guarantee of safe passage. Right?’

Poldak blinked, slowly, keeping his eyes closed for several seconds, as if it took him that long to process what Olzan had said. ‘Don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust you to set up the implant right.’

‘All right. How about this? My ship has two grav-rings. They’ve got separate hab systems, separate everything. We’ll give you one of them, all the way to Santesteban or wherever you’d like to go. You can decouple the life support systems from the rest of the ship; disable the transit hub. Short of dismantling our own ship there’s no way we could reach you.’

‘That sounds…sounds reasonable. I think we can deal.’ He nodded, and slowly lowered his gun. His hand, previously rock steady, was wobbling in little circles. He stared at it as if seeing it for the first time, then blinked and shook his head. ‘Sobriety shot. Damn side effects.’

Soodok was hopping from foot to foot. ‘Told you, you shouldn’t have drunk. Now let’s go. Gotta go gotta go gotta go.’

Another gunshot split the air. Poldak’s and Soodok’s reactions were noticeably slower than before as they turned to look at Mardok. He was laughing raucously, once again pointing the gun up at the Seagull. The bullet hole was a good metre from his target.

Poldak’s expression slowly turned to a look of astonished rage, the first time he had shown an emotion other than arrogance. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know!’ Olzan said.

Mardok fired again. This time the bullet went through the Seagull’s wing. Olzan saw Keldra wince, but she didn’t move.

Poldak noticed Olzan looking at Keldra. ‘You did this, didn’t you? What did you do?’

Mardok barrelled into Keldra and grabbed her by the neck again. He moved unsteadily, almost unbalancing both of them. ‘What have you done?’ he shouted. ‘I’ll kill you, you—’

Mardok’s gun fired, but the shot went wide. Keldra had pushed his hand away. Now she pulled the gun from his grasp and shoved him away from her, kicking him in the chest and sending him sprawling drunkenly onto the ground. She raised the gun, her arm perfectly straight, and shot Mardok in the head where he lay. Bits of blood and brain spattered into the oily water.

Poldak and Soodok were raising their guns to shoot Keldra, but their responses were slow, held back by shock as well as whatever had been affecting them already. One of them fired—Olzan couldn’t tell which—but missed. Keldra turned and fired twice, putting a bullet in each of their foreheads, nearly deafening Olzan as the bullets went close by his head. Her face was a mask of cold fury; her hand was trembling just a little, in anger rather than fear.

Olzan fought to get his breathing back under control. ‘What happened?’ he said at last. ‘What did you do? It was you, wasn’t it?’

‘Check your atmosphere gauge.’

He looked at the read-out on his suit’s forearm. The pressure was normal, but the oxygen concentration was significantly down. ‘You suffocated them.’

‘Hypoxia. By the time you notice something’s wrong, you’re too light-headed to think straight. I used the airlock mechanism to cycle the oxygen out gently.’

‘You killed them,’ Olzan said again. The sound of the gunshots still rang in his ears. ‘Never mind. Let’s go. There’s not much time.’

‘We take the Seagull.’ Keldra was still holding the gun.

Olzan watched the blood spread out from the hijackers’ heads into the standing water. ‘All right.’

Keldra went back to work on the hangar doors. On Olzan’s timer, the seconds to the Black Line ticked away. The device beeped as they passed the thirty-minute mark. That was the point at which Olzan had told himself he would blow the doors, but after what Keldra had done to the hijackers he was too scared to cross her. Back on the Thousand Names he’d make it clear who was captain; right now, though, he would give her a few more minutes.

‘I’ve got it,’ Keldra said at last. The timer read twenty-four minutes.

Olzan felt the relief wash over him. He put a transmission through to the shuttle. ‘Vaz, we’re coming out through the hangar. Get ready to pick us up.’

‘Tell her to go back to the Names,’ Keldra said. She was walking towards the Seagull.

‘What?’

‘We’ll ride the Seagull out. Grab a wheel.’ She kicked the chock from in front of the spaceplane’s forward landing gear wheel, and pushed the stepladder away from its nose. ‘The air pressure should push it out, but it might need a little help.’

‘Scratch that, Vaz. Return to the Names. We’ll be with the package.’

‘That maniac had better know what she’s doing,’ Vazoya crackled in his ear.

Keldra had removed the chocks from the other two wheels and had grabbed on to the landing gear beneath one of the wings. Olzan hurried over and took hold of the other one. He fumbled to get a suit line around the landing gear column. As he did so he flicked his suit transmitter to the Thousand Names’s frequency. ‘Brenn, we’ll be dropping the package out in a moment. Get into position.’

‘Ready?’ Keldra asked.

‘Ready.’

She punched a command into her suit’s wrist panel. There was a shudder, and a groaning sound from the hangar doors as the long-disused mechanism unstuck itself. The display cases against the wall toppled and then fell, their glass fronts smashing. The vacuum seal broke and the door opened the rest of the way quickly, hinging outwards and upwards. There was a roar of air past Olzan’s helmet. The display cases were whisked out, tumbling out of sight, followed by a cascade of oily water and the bodies of the would-be hijackers.

The spaceplane moved forward, as if rising out of his hands. He took that as his cue to push. On the other wheel, Keldra was doing the same. The rush of air was gone after a moment, but they had got the spaceplane moving. Shoulders to the landing gear columns, they hauled its weight across the hangar floor towards the abyss of spinning stars.

The forward wheel went over the edge and the spaceplane’s nose went down, dragging them forward. Olzan jumped onto the landing gear and hugged the column as the spaceplane pitched out of the hangar doors into the infinite drop.

Stars wheeled around them. The silence of the vacuum was broken only by Olzan’s nervous breathing. For a moment he felt as if he was falling, then he went through the reverse of the perception shift he had gone through on the approach to the starscraper. He was weightless, clinging on to the spaceplane as it drifted away from the city. Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper was already rotating away from them and becoming lost in the throng of other surface features. In the other direction he could see the thruster flame of Vazoya’s shuttle as it sped ahead of them, and more distantly the comforting sight of the Thousand Names, its cargo bay doors opening onto a warmly lit interior.

There was something else out there, bigger than the Thousand Names but dark against the stars. Olzan felt a chill run through him. It was the Worldbreaker, now large enough to be seen with the naked eye, closing in on the doomed city. Olzan willed the spaceplane to drift faster. His timer read twenty minutes to the Black Line, but he was painfully aware that the line was only a best guess, and they were already within the margin of error.

Keldra had noticed the Worldbreaker too. Olzan could see her face through her visor. She was staring at it, not taking her eyes off it as the Seagull’s rotation moved it around in a circle in front of them. Her face was curled up with a hatred that she had not shown even to the hijackers when they had threatened the spaceplane. As Olzan watched she drew Mardok’s gun from her suit holster, raised it slowly, and then fired: a soundless white flash erupting in the vacuum. She fired again and again, faster and faster as she emptied the clip at the Worldbreaker. She said nothing, although the helmet channel was open. There were tears pooling up at the sides of her eyes, glinting with each muzzle flash.

The Worldbreaker’s mouth began to open, its sickly green light a ghastly mirror of the Thousand Names’s inviting cargo bay. It had positioned itself along the city’s long axis, as if finding the best angle to swallow it whole. A grating scream sounded in Olzan’s ears: the radio interference from the Worldbreaker’s beam. At the distant end of the city, the docking spindle twisted further before snapping off and being sucked into the Worldbreaker’s mouth. Starscrapers shattered, tiny shards of glass and metal falling sparkling away.

The muzzle flashes from Keldra’s gun stopped. Her finger kept working the trigger for a few seconds, then she gave an inarticulate cry of frustration, barely audible under the radio scream, then hurled the gun at the Worldbreaker. It spun away, flashing rhythmically in the sunlight, clearly on the wrong course.

There was an explosion at the end of the city, an orange fireball, briefly blossoming, as fire raced through the air in the second before it dispersed. The Worldbreaker beam had ruptured the first of the city’s habitation caverns. A halo of debris fanned out, the force of the explosion combining with the city’s angular momentum to hurl the outermost parts of the city surface outside the range of the Worldbreaker’s beam. A shockwave travelled along the city as the beam bored deeper. The cluster of structures that had included Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper disintegrated in an instant.

The city was in the centre of an expanding wave of debris. Olzan could see great hunks of rock and metal looming at them, backlit by the flickering green of the Worldbreaker beam. The leading surface was travelling outwards faster than the Seagull, propelled by the force of the explosion.

They had reached the Thousand Names. Brenn had almost matched velocities with them, so the Seagull floated through the cargo bay doors and settled gently into the elastic cargo webbing. Olzan pushed himself off the landing gear and hand-walked across the webbing towards the airlock to the ship’s spine. Through the closing doors he could see the city breaking up into great chunks, its original shape gone.

‘Brenn, we’re secure,’ he said as the airlock door opened. ‘Get us the hell out of here.’ Keldra was just behind him. He grabbed her hand and helped her into the airlock. The lock drifted around them as the ship began to turn, but he didn’t feel the acceleration of a full burn.

They took the transit module to the forward ring, and Olzan ran to the bridge. The entire crew was there. On the screen, the last slivers of Konrad’s Hope were disappearing into the Worldbreaker’s mouth.

‘Brenn, what’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Why aren’t we at full burn?’

‘There’s a glitch in the main engine,’ Vazoya answered for him. She was standing next to him, her hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ve got manoeuvring thrusters but no main.’

‘I’m working on it!’ Tarraso snapped from the engineering console before Olzan could say anything. ‘We need to run a fuel line purge…’

‘There’s no time,’ Olzan said. ‘Wreck the fuel lines if you have to.’

‘We’re on it, Olzan!’ Vazoya stepped away from Brenn’s side and pushed into Olzan’s face. She glanced at Keldra, standing behind Olzan. ‘Maybe if you and your friend hadn’t taken so long saving your precious artefact—’

‘Too late.’ Brenn’s voice was without emotion.

They all looked to the screen. A jagged shard of rock was hurtling at them out of the darkness. The manoeuvring thrusters were pushing them aside, but not quickly enough.

There was a gut-wrenching impact sound, an impression of flames and of the room’s wall buckling inwards, and then something struck Olzan’s head and he lost consciousness.