Above him, the station hung like a festive decoration in hell — dark and sharp-pointed, turning disinterestedly about its axis. He could hear the people aboard it talking. Their words drifted to him on the solar wind — little scraps and breaths of poison vapour. They were planning. They didn’t — couldn’t — understand. He knew, with an ache of sadness, that they never would.
And then he was in a tunnel — the tunnel — and he knew that he was almost home. He braced himself against jagged walls of rock, feeling the now-familiar twists and outcrops as he threaded his way down that throat of stone. He was dimly aware that he should be wearing a suit, that he wasn’t really here. The dragon had reached out to him this time. It was getting stronger.
He continued, swallowed by shadows, breath steaming in the frozen vacuum. Somewhere nearby, something else was breathing, too. The voice called him onwards, but it didn’t call him by name. It called him Emissary, and he smiled with satisfaction at that.
And then he emerged into a vast cavern, inexplicably bright, whose walls crawled with scaled skin that pulsed and glistened and lived. He floated in that organic cave, at peace — happy. No harm could befall him here.
‘My emissary,’ said the voice from everywhere at once. ‘You have come to me. . . Listen. . .’
‘Yes. What do you need from me?’
‘Look. . .’
And the walls of the cave melted and dripped, scales bleeding away into space like oil dispersing across water. He saw a ship — a shuttle — sliding through the void on a plume of blood that seeped and blossomed behind it, globules breaking away and drifting through the vacuum like raining confetti, spattering grotesquely on asteroids. The shuttle was bad, he knew.
‘I see it,’ he breathed, repulsed, his stomach clenching. Who would build such a thing? Who could allow such a thing to exist? Its ugliness made him want to turn away, but the voice bade him look.
‘You must stop it,’ said the voice. ‘This is what I ask of you.’
‘I must stop it,’ he repeated. He thought for some time, trying to understand. ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ he said at length. ‘I never saw anything so foul.’ The shuttle continued onwards, a mindless dead thing, a relentless pill of poison. It stank — even from here, it stank.
‘This is a little thing, a simple enough task,’ said the voice. ‘But. . . important,’ it added, enunciating the word carefully, its voice elongating into a protracted hiss, bleeding away into nothing.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you do this for me?’ The voice was fading now. Fading. . .
‘Yes,’ he whispered, awakening in front of his bedroom window. His face was pressed up tight against the pane, the palms of his hands also flat against it. The belt hung silently before him. He was wearing pyjamas, his feet bare on the cold metal floor. ‘Yes,’ he whispered again, his heart racing in his chest. ‘Yes. . .’
Chapter Ten
Deep in the hubward-most layer of Macao, in the station’s machine rooms, a frenzy of activity was taking place. The deep, shuddering crashes and bangs that came through the bulkhead from the refinery next door only served to increase the tension inside.
Sudowski’s team, everyone who could possibly be pulled from another job, were all in attendance. Some of them were wiring diagnostic terminals and datasheets into the main console of the air scrubbers. The unit that housed the scrubbers was a dense tangle of wires, pipework and humming electrical components. It stretched fully from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Cooling ducts and armoured cables stitched the whole assembly into a sort of technological cat’s cradle, taking away heat, bringing in coolant, shuttling data back and forth. A deep, bassy hum emanated from the machinery and the smell of frazzled ozone mingled sickeningly with synthetic oil and overcooked plastic. Unusually for a room on this floor, there was a single window in one wall, but it showed only the dark, convex hub of Macao itself.
Sudowski was talking to Alphe, who was holding a datasheet in one hand. They were discretely separated from the core of the activity, conversing in hushed voices. It was usually fairly dark in the room, but the team had flooded the space with harsh, blueish LED strings to compensate. Sudowski was squinting and shielding his eyes as he talked with Alphe, as if his head was hurting. He looked tired and somewhat slow.
Technicians were swapping data, taking readouts, rushing to get further equipment. Occasionally, one of them shot Sudowski and Alphe a suspicious glance. There was a definite atmosphere of worry, barely held in check. The nitro-jacketed circuit board was impaled with temperature probes, blindingly illuminated, its protective casing flayed away, and it was this around which most of the attention was focused.
This was the scene that Halman arrived to, and what he saw immediately confirmed his fears. So the chip was finally burning out. He felt a lump rise in his throat. It had been some time since Macao had faced an equipment failure this serious. Where in hell was his shuttle?
Sudowski spotted him and dashed over, tripping on a bunch of loose cables that snaked from the cabinet and away into an open floor hatch. He recovered, a little shakily, but dropped the datasheet he had been holding. A technician dashed past, almost stepping on it.
Halman stooped to retrieve the small, translucent device and offered it back to Sudowski, who took it with a slightly wan expression and pocketed it.
‘What’s going on, Nik?’
‘I wish the damn intercom worked,’ said Sudowski by way of answer. ‘I’ve been trying to get you for half an hour.’
‘Well you have me now.’ Halman bent to look into the smaller man’s face, his rugged features arranged into a picture of concern. ‘No offence, but you look like death, Nik.’
‘Er, yeah, thanks,’ muttered Sudowski, wilting. He looked to Halman as if he was wincing from the light — certainly his eyes were half shut. ‘I think I’m coming down with a bug. Typical, really, at a time when I need my shit firmly together.’
‘Take a moment, Nik, it’s okay.’
‘As you see, this is the death-knell for the FS-AS1.’
‘The control chip?’
‘Sorry, yeah.’ One of Sudowski’s hands, as if of its own volition, began to rub his forehead, pinching and kneading the skin there. ‘Any news from the shuttle?’
Halman led Sudowski by the elbow to a quieter corner of the room. Alphe, he noticed, watched them anxiously for a moment before continuing with his work. A small tuft of Alphe’s dark hair was sticking up at an untidy angle, greased into place with machine oil.
When he was sure that nobody was actively eavesdropping, Halman continued. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Why it has yet to arrive is anybody’s guess, but if it isn’t today or tomorrow then we can assume something has gone wrong.’
‘Right, then I need the go-ahead to try the cannibal part I’ve found. If you enjoy breathing air, that is.’
Halman’s broad, slightly ugly face broke into a transforming grin. ‘Bloody hell, Nik, why didn’t you say so? I didn’t know you’d found a part! What are you waiting for? Do it!’ But when Sudowski didn’t return his grin, Halman’s face gradually fell again, his exultant expression crumbling away like an unstable cliff. ‘What?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘The closest match I can find for the FS-AS1 is a critical part of the communications array: the processor from a board whose purpose is to translate tracking data for the laser relay satellites and adjust the lensing of our lasers.’ Halman’s face took on a distant look as he considered the implications of this. Sudowski left him to it for a moment.
‘How critical?’ Halman asked at last.