‘A note,’ said Marco, handing it over. ‘From Eli. He says you had a hard night,’ he added, and Lina thought she heard a little judgemental note in that voice, although it could have been inferred. ‘At The Miner’s, were you, Mum?’
She felt the tears creeping up on her again, and fought to suppress them. She guessed that sooner or later they would have to come. But now, with her boy here, was not the time. ‘Yeah, I guess I was,’ she admitted. She patted the bed next to her and Marco sat there. He looked up into her face, his eyes innocently questioning. His hair was appealingly sleep-tangled. Lina put an arm around his small shoulders and pulled him close to her, aware that she stank of stale sweat and synthihol. She put her head against his and sat there in silence for a minute. Marco allowed this familiarity, but she could sense that he still wanted an explanation.
Eventually, he broke the silence: ‘Why weren’t you at work? Did you go after?’
‘Work finished early,’ she said wearily. ‘There was an accident in the belt last night, near the start of my shift.’
Marco’s eyes widened. ‘What?’ he gasped. ‘What? I mean who? Who?’
‘Sal,’ said Lina, a sudden lump in her throat. She gritted her teeth, trying to control herself. ‘She’s dead,’ she managed to add at last. ‘She bumped a rock, and her Kay decompressed.’
‘Mum. . .’ said Marco, and this time he embraced her. His body felt frail and bony against her own. Jaydenne had been tall and athletic, and Lina supposed that his son would one day assume a similar shape. But as yet, he was still a child.
Lina sighed deeply, not even noticing that tears were beginning to seep from her eyes and down her face, to drip onto Marco’s shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, but she didn’t know if she was talking to Marco or herself. ‘It’s okay, it was just an accident. We all know the dangers. Something just went wrong. It was just an accident.’
Marco was crying too, she realised. He released her and stood up angrily, startling her. His face was red and streaked with his own tears, now. ‘It could have been you!’ he shouted accusingly, his hands balled into fists. ‘It could have been you!’
And there it was again — that wave of love, but tinged with guilt this time. ‘Honey. . .’ she said, grasping for something. ‘Honey, no. . . It’s never going to be me.’ Marco shook his head, eyes streaming, but she stood and went to him, enfolding his reluctant body in her arms and pulling him close again. She stroked his hair and whispered, ‘I’m still here, Marco, I’m still here,’ until eventually he relaxed.
He stepped away from her and she saw by the new gleam of hardness in his eyes — a very adult look — that he was going to be all right. ‘Mum,’ he said with deliberate calm, drawing a deep breath. ‘I’ve been thinking lately, and, I mean this. . . this just makes me more sure. . . I. . .’ He visibly steeled himself and said, ‘I want to go to Platini Alpha. Or even Aitama.’ He spread his hands, as if to say There it is, and smiled thinly.
Lina shook her head. ‘Marco, is this about your father?’
Marco’s brows drew together for just the briefest instant, but when he answered his voice was steady and rational. ‘No. I don’t need him. I just want to go somewhere safer. Somewhere better. We shouldn’t be here, Mum. People shouldn’t live here. You could get another job. You said yourself that Farsight would take you at Platini Dockyard, and it has to be better than this.’ He smiled encouragingly, cajolingly, his eyes still shiny with tears. ‘Right?’
‘It was just an accident, honey. A one-off.’ But as she spoke, she suddenly recalled an image from her dream: alone in the belt, alone but for the hungry, greedy shadow that seemed to permeate the void with its reeking wolf-breath, its infinite tendrils of grasping darkness. ‘A one-off,’ she repeated, but this time it was just a whisper.
‘Mum?’ prompted Marco, making Lina snap back to reality.
‘Yes?’
‘Hadn’t we better get ready?’
‘What?’ she asked, her brain slow and muddy. ‘What for?’
‘The meeting, remember?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Lina, filled with fresh dread, her hangover swelling to new proportions.
Despite her pounding head, she managed to make cheese on toast for breakfast. She supplemented this with recon-juice from a can, rejecting the awful coffee she usually had in the morning as unlikely to actually improve her delicate condition. They talked about little, safe things: Marco’s school-work; films; station gossip. Once he’d finished, Marco excused himself to go to the toilet, and Lina sat sipping her juice alone.
She lifted the glass and looked into the liquid suspiciously. Something tasted a little off. Okay, she was quite hungover, and it could just be that. And the Farsight-branded recon-juice never tasted that great, but she had an inkling that it was neither of those things. She put the glass down amongst the crumbs of toast and sniffed the air, frowning.
‘What time is it?’ asked Marco, reappearing in the room.
‘Er, almost time to go, I reckon,’ said Lina, starting guiltily and turning in her seat to face him.
‘I wonder what they want,’ he said. She could see that he had washed and attempted to assert some sort of control over his hair. She guessed she should probably do the same.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. But she was sure of one thing: it wasn’t likely to be good news.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Take your helmet off,’ said the man. He was holding the restraining device in one gloved hand.
‘Hey, hey. . .’ Carver began to protest weakly. ‘Look, I don’t know about that, man. Won’t it take a while to pressurise in here?’
The man’s voice was tinny and inhuman in Carver’s helmet speaker. ‘I guess we’ll see,’ he said. ‘And anyway, it’s been a while. Take your helmet off.’ And he waggled the restraining device meaningfully. ‘Now,’ he added.
They had worked quickly, under the crazy dragon-man’s direction, and Carver was almost impressed by how much progress they had made, albeit in a ridiculous madman’s scheme. They had backed the shuttle carefully up to a particularly huge asteroid that the man had evidently moored it alongside while Carver still slept in sus-an. The shuttle was a big ship — the biggest Carver had ever been inside at any rate — but the asteroid dwarfed it.
Carver knew that the shuttle crossed the great distances of space, accelerating steadily for years at a time, with a shield of small particles driven ahead of it as defence against collisions. Now, the shield was dispelled, the magnetic field turned off, and to Carver this was conclusive evidence that the shuttle wasn’t going anywhere soon. He didn’t know if this was good or bad.
The shuttle was equipped, as all such vessels were, with an emergency boarding and rescue system. This consisted basically of an extensible tube, just wide enough to crawl through, with a rotating cutter at its business end. The cutting head had forced its way into the rock like a mosquito’s proboscis, setting the whole of the shuttle’s superstructure shuddering and ringing. The man had explained that this was tricky work, as they couldn’t push too hard without breaking their tethering line and sending the rock flying uncontrollably away from them. But after half an hour of this they had broken through into some sort of cavity just inside the asteroid. The boarding tube had clamped itself firmly into the hole and sprayed sealing-resin around the join.
They had crawled through the narrow tube, Carver complaining fiercely the whole time and the crazy dragon-man in an annoyingly buoyant mood, with instawall cannisters raided from the shuttle’s cathedralesque hold. These grapefruit-sized, bright yellow devices, when primed, would wait for a pre-set period of time and then explode in hideous, ballooning flowers of chemical foam that solidified within seconds into a rock-hard mass. The cannisters, despite their size, were incredibly dense, their contents heavily compressed, and the two men could only just manoeuvre them one-by-one in the awkward micro-gravity. Under the crazy dragon-man’s instruction, they had sealed four holes in the skin of the asteroid. One of these had been large enough to drive a gravpod into, but the rest had been comparatively small. The instawall had bloomed to fill the gaps then dried rapidly to a dusky, diseased-looking yellow.