Lina looked into his eyes — her eyes, really, that same living green as hers, and answered honestly: ‘I suppose so, honey.’ She’d never told Marco about Sal’s brief affair with his father, which made it probably the only thing she had ever kept from him. ‘Sal was a good friend. I’d known her a long time,’ she explained. And at least that was true.
Marco embraced her briefly with one arm, keeping hold of the rope with the other. ‘Show me that somersault again,’ he said, grinning at her.
‘Okay,’ Lina agreed. She pushed off from the rope, flew backwards away from Marco and hit the floor feet-first. Using the rebound, she bounced away and executed another somersault, this one even more graceful than the first. She realised as she landed again that she was laughing aloud.
It didn’t take long for Marco to become a pro. His second somersault was as good as hers, his next one even better. Before long they were flying across the hub together, criss-crossing, hitting the floor and spinning away again, laughing and grinning and enjoying their time together. Lina had always found that the journey to the hub, through the awesome heights of the station, had given her clear perspective on events within her own life. And the weightless effect at the station’s very centre had a way of freeing the mind, as it freed the body from its usual stresses and strains. And now, with Marco here as well, she was having the most fun she’d had in years.
They threw each other into the air, jumped and flipped and twirled like ballet dancers, pushed each other, bounced from wall to wall and eventually came to rest dead-centre again, clutching the rope and breathing hard despite the micro-gee.
Lina’s gaze happened to settle on one of the windows. The belt hung silent outside, like something lying in wait. Her good mood drained away, like water through her fingers, into that endless space, leaving her feeling suddenly hollow and sick. Marco was saying something beside her, but she didn’t hear him. There was only the belt, rotating just before her face, just beyond that circle of glasspex. . . hypnotic, almost. . . an icy, endless swathe of textured space. She stared at it for some time, and as she did so a thought came to her, revelatory in its undeniable truth: she hated it. She hated this wasteland, this soulless desert. It had killed her friend — minced her — and yet it carried relentlessly on as if nothing had ever happened. Humans had no place in this cosmic milling-machine. Marco was right. They should go to Platini. Yeah, she thought. And maybe, if a shuttle ever comes, we will do.
Something was out there. . . Lina craned her neck, squinting at the window. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw the gas-plume of a lone ship, slipping out of sight and away into the belt.
‘But all the ships are grounded,’ she whispered, feeling her eyebrows tighten in a frown.
‘Mum?’ cried Marco’s voice. ‘Mum!’ Lina realised that he was shaking her by the elbow.
She turned to face him, feeling strange and disjointed. ‘Eh?’ she managed to gasp.
‘Mum, what is it?’ asked Marco, clearly concerned. He floated in front of her, small and perfect and vital in his oversized shirt.
Lina grabbed him and embraced him and they floated away from the rope and down towards the curved metal of the floor. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry.’
Chapter Twenty
‘You’ve exceeded my expectations,’ said the crazy dragon-man. He was floating just inside the mouth of the boarding tube that clamped the asteroid to the shuttle. The restraining device had been magnetted onto the rim of the tube, tauntingly reminding Carver as he worked that he was Prisoner Carver — Prisoner Carver, and not Freeman Carver any more. It didn’t occur to him once that this was maybe his own fault, the ultimate outcome of the crimes he had committed back on Aitama. No — he blamed the crazy dragon-loving son-of-a-bitch who had now returned to make his life, he supposed, that little bit worse again.
Carver shot a hate-filled glare at both the device and the man floated next to it, then fired up the cutter again to exclude the possibility of the bastard talking to him any more. The cutter actually created a fair amount of heat and humidity when it was in operation, but as soon as it stopped the cold began to creep back and the cave rapidly became unbearably cold again.
Before the man had left to return to the station he had shown Carver how to bore the rock pin into the face and attach his harness to it. This prevented him from simply floating backwards away from the face as he applied the plasma cutter — a massive and ungainly piece of equipment that filled the cavern with ringing, echoing peals of sound that overlayed each other into one deafening collage. The noise didn’t seem to be a product of the actual cutting, the melting of plasma through rock, but rather was generated inside the machine itself, which seemed a bit fucking unnecessary to Carver, but there you were. He was almost getting used to it.
He agreed with the crazy dragon-man on one point though: he had made good progress into the face, especially considering how laborious the process was. First, holding the cutter’s muzzle some few inches from the rock, he had to inscribe a circle for each cut, angling the beam inwards to create a cone-shape. This was not always altogether simple, though. Sometimes, the cut didn’t meet up properly and he had to repeat it, sometimes more than once. Or the cut piece wouldn’t release easily from the face and he had to insert another rock pin, then use this as a handle to yank the chunk out.
He had started off with big pieces, figuring this the least work, propelling them overhand into a distant corner of the cavern. However, when one of these, launched a little too hard, came bouncing back towards him as he worked and almost took his head off, he began to cut smaller pieces, of about a hand’s breadth at the wide end. And as the face gradually shifted and retreated, he had to adjust his harness-point, which could take several minutes each time.
Once or twice, he had stopped, floating dazedly in the darkness. It was all just too surreal. Was he really doing this? Really? He’d considered just turning the cutter on the crazy dragon-man when — if — he returned, imagining the thrill he would feel as the bright plasma scythed through his body, vapourising blood and tissue as it went. He’d imagined the way the crazy dragon-man would scream, and how satisfying that would be to hear. But then he had imagined starving to death in this nightmarish tomb of cold stone, his fingers burning with frostbite, the shadows that danced in his suit-light his only companions as he slowly succumbed to madness and death, and had thought better of it. He’d wondered if he could torture the code out of the man, but somehow he knew the man would die before giving it to him. He’s insane, after all, Carver had reminded himself glumly. And anyway, the crazy dragon-man usually held onto the restraining device when he was around, making it impossible to actually approach him.
So he’d worked. And he’d hoped that the crazy dragon-man would return, after whatever business he had to attend to on the station was completed. And the bastard might as well be pleased with what I’ve done when he gets back, he’d thought. So Carver hadn’t just worked; for the first time in his life of crime he’d actually worked hard, worked until he’d thought he might pass out, then continued anyway, pushing through the barrier of darkness that threatened to descend across his vision.