Then they had turned the scrubbers to max, raised the temperature of the air to allow for its cooling as it flowed into the asteroid, and waited for the rock to pressurise. After a while, the man had equipped Carver with an airflow sensor, taking one himself, and they had crawled back into the rock and checked for leaks around the instawall seals.
Throughout most of this procedure, the man hadn’t spoken to Carver except to give him simple orders. But worryingly, he had spoken to someone else from time to time, in a hushed and secretive voice. Carver hadn’t caught any of the words, and he hadn’t wanted to, truth be told. Here I am, he’d thought, pressurising an asteroid in the middle of fucking nowhere, my only companion the psycho with the dragon in his head. He wished he’d gone to jail after all and wondered what else the bastard had in store for him.
Gradually, the rock had filled with air, as measured on the man’s little device. The whole process, with Carver’s reluctant assistance, had taken only two-and-a-half hours. And now here they were.
‘But what if it ain’t breathable yet?’ objected Carver, knowing it was futile to resist.
‘The meter says it is,’ the man told him factually.
‘Then why don’t you try it?’ suggested Carver.
The man pushed off from one of the rocky walls, his suit-light dazzlingly bright in Carver’s eyes, and floated down towards him like a descending angel. ‘Because,’ he explained reasonably, ‘I’m too valuable.’
Carver nodded sarcastically, scowling. The crazy dragon-man was almost close enough to throttle now, but he didn’t dare try. Not yet, he promised himself, but as soon as I find a way. . . ‘Right,’ he mocked. ‘You’re one important guy.’
The man nodded agreeably. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Now take it off before I fry your evil little brain into a paste. Okay?’
Carver took a deep breath, clenched his jaw, and without another word unfastened the clasps and lifted his helmet clear. For a terrifying moment his chest hitched, paralysed by the expected vacuum. But then he realised that he was breathing after all. The air tasted a bit shitty — worse even than it had on the shuttle — but he was breathing nonetheless. ‘Fuck you, man,’ he declared. ‘I live to fight again.’
‘Splendid,’ said the man, adding, unbelievably, ‘Well done.’ He unclipped his own helmet and removed it, hanging before Carver in the stillness of the asteroid’s cavernous interior.
‘What next?’ asked Carver, starting to shiver quite violently, despite the fact that the air pumped from the shuttle was heated to a temperature that was almost unbearably hot at the source. His breath steamed, rolling, in the combined beams of their suit-lights. ‘What does your dragon want?’
‘Well,’ said the man, ‘we’re going to dig it out of the rock. But it wants a few other things, too. Little things.’
‘And if it gets them?’ asked Carver, trying to sound reasonable, like a man who could be fairly bargained with. ‘Can I go then?’
The man’s grin broadened, and Carver could see the vacancy behind his eyes. They were like windows of mirrored glass, revealing nothing, one-way only. And his smile, for all its breadth, lacked any warmth or humanity — it might as well have been spray-painted onto a skull. ‘It hasn’t told me yet,’ he replied. ‘And I haven’t asked.’
Carver turned slowly around, letting his suit-light play across the ragged walls of glinting stone, somehow too smooth to be artificial and too rough to have been hewn at the same time, wondering if this freezing rock would be his grave. He turned back to face the crazy dragon-man. ‘Do you think,’ he suggested in a voice laced with cold undertones like hidden riptides, ‘that you could ask?’
‘We’ll see how good you are,’ said the man. ‘You see, the dragon says I need to head back to Macao. I have a few more errands to run.’
‘Errands,’ parroted Carver. ‘Right.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the man, failing to catch the mocking tone to Carver’s voice, or maybe just ignoring it. ‘It was pleased with last night’s events, but it needs a few more little things before it can really help us.’
‘Did I mention that you are one crazy dragon-loving bastard?’ asked Carver, sure now that he was not going to get the answer he wanted and starting to get angry again. He didn’t care if the man zapped him some more. He was beyond giving a shit by this point.
The man’s distant stare intensified, his eyes narrowing and his gaze boring into Carver’s face, such that Carver quickly regretted baiting him and wished that he could take it back. ‘I know what you think of me,’ said the man in a voice as slow and cold as a glacier grinding across the aural landscape. ‘And I know you would kill me if you could. But this will not happen. I’m going back to the station soon, and you — you — will dig. And if you make good enough work of it then maybe I will ask the dragon for your life.’ Carver was transfixed by the man’s stare now, speared like a bug on a pin. ‘But I warn you,’ said the man, his smile slipping and then melting away altogether, ‘that the dragon is hungry, and it is not necessarily inclined to mercy, especially for the likes of you.’
‘Hey. . .’ said Carver, intending to strongly defend his position, even make an impassioned plea for his life. It came out as the merest breath, and trailed away into nothing.
‘Come,’ said the man. ‘And we’ll find some digging equipment before I go. This shuttle will be rammed with mining kit.’ He sounded calmer, more reasonable again, and Carver tried to convince himself that he hadn’t been scared just then, that this was just some poor crazy fucker living out his schizoid fantasy on a blighted rock. But something had chilled him to his core. That frozen kernel still remained as he followed the man back through the tube and into the booming depths of the inter-system shuttle.
Chapter Eighteen
Eli came slinking into the plaza from the direction of the rec area, but the loud whine of the un-oiled automatic door betrayed him. Everyone turned to look, confounding any hopes he’d had of creeping in unnoticed. He gave an embarrassed little wave to Halman and called, ‘Sorry I’m late, Dan!’
Halman, standing facing the assembled crowd next to one of his senior admin staff, a greying and severe battleship of a woman named Amy Stone, showed him a slightly forced smile and answered over the general hubbub: ‘That’s okay, Eli, we’re still waiting for Sudowski anyway.’
Eli nodded and pushed his way through the mass of bodies towards where Lina and Marco stood near the front of the group, which was centred more or less on The Miner’s. The place was shut now, its grimy windows dark and shuttered. Eli gave her an enquiring look — How’re you doing? — and she gave him a wan little smile in return — Not too bad, thanks. And if her head would just stop pulsating, she even thought that might be true.