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.
Chapter Thirteen
Danyal Halman sat at his desk, watching the slow but continuous activity out in the belt, shown magnified in his office window. The Kays were doing their best to clean up after the accident, which mainly, sickeningly, meant vacuuming up the all-but vapourised and homogenised remains of Sal and her ship, now stirred into a diffuse cloud by the roving asteroids. At least nobody else had been caught in the blast. Thank whatever god you may subscribe to for small mercies.
Explosive decompression — the words wandered darkly through his mind, for about the thousandth time that night. He tried to imagine — tried not to imagine — the sucking, ripping, terrifying sensation that Sal Newman must have felt in that brief moment before her grisly death, when she had been blended through a tiny hole in the skin of her Kay, just before the ship’s structure disintegrated into flak.
He sat, watching, feeling physically weighted down, his stomach burning with acid indigestion, as if someone had lit a fire in there. He wondered absently if he was developing a stomach ulcer. Wasn’t that a fairly normal reaction of the human body to prolonged stress? Didn’t matter, he decided. He could use some time off in sick-bay, maybe let somebody else have a turn at being Station Controller for a bit. His large hands idly toyed with a small square of ceramicised germanium, turning it this way and that, twirling it between their fingers. It was the burned out chip from the scrubbers, its label blackened into unreadability. It was as light as a shard of bone.
The belt lay spread out like a solid swathe of desolate, rugged landscape — a hostile vista across which a man might stumble, dying, beneath the cold light of Soros forever. The little glimmers of the Kays were as insignificant as fireflies, the merest seeds of life.
Sal. Sal Newman. Sal was dead. She was not the first to die in a belt accident, but she was the first in many years now. Halman felt cheated. It shouldn’t have happened. How, damn it, how had it happened?
Eli said that her Kay had bumped into a pointed rock, piercing the hull. Simple. But that wasn’t the whole story, was it? Because the Kays weren’t supposed to be that damn stupid, or it would happen every time someone flew one through the belt. The Kays — the bloody unreliable, treacherous Kays that any humane and sensible company would have condemned — were supposed to know better. Something else had failed, and this time a person had died. Make that one more fuck-up for those greedy Farsight tight-asses. It was almost good that the array was down or Halman might have been unable to help sending them some sort of damning, ranting, career-ending message. He’d worked his whole life for the company — hell, he’d even fought for them — but he’d never been as angry with them as he was now.
On the upside, if there was one, Eli was seemingly okay. He had seen Hobbes, who had given him the once-over, offered him a sedative, which he had refused, then released him. He was shaken, but he would live. Lucky Eli. Lina had refused even to see the doctor, and had just gone home to her son. Halman thought that Marco’s company would be more beneficial to her than Hobbes’s at any rate, so that suited him just fine. Rocko had gone to see Fionne. Ditto there.
He wondered if Ella Kown should be involved, maybe interview the survivors. But what, really, was the point? Statements would have to be taken, he supposed, but there was no real rush. After all, they couldn’t be sent back by laser, and until — unless — the shuttle arrived, they couldn’t be sent via that, either. So fuck it.
The little lights moved, swarming, in the belt. They looked like carnivorous fish excited by blood in water, and the analogy made his stomach turn. He supposed that he should eat something. What time was it? Late, he thought, but the wall-clock in his office had been broken for months. It was on Sudowski’s list of things to fix, but it was way down near the bottom of Sudowski’s list of things to fix, and as such, remained broken.
And also, worryingly, the air was beginning to taste bad. At first, he’d thought he was imagining it. But as the hours ground on, he became more and more convinced that he was right. The air was beginning to taste bad. There was a chemical tang to it, like burnt ozone, that caught in the back of the throat. The scrubbers were scrubbing, but at a reduced, cautious rate designed to prolong the life of the barely-suitable replacement chip. How long did they have before it, too, burned out?
He held up the scorched square of the original chip, superimposing it over the dark rectangle of the office window where endless rocks processed away into infinity, letting the light catch on its dull edges. He turned it over, running his calloused thumb across its surface, inwardly cursing it. He felt like crying. And then, with no knowledge that he had intended to do so, he dashed it against the wall of the office with sudden ferocity. Brittle with heat-induced fatigue and age, it shattered into dust with a dry and understated little noise, its remnants raining down like ash.