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.