He was beginning to build up a fair cache of extracted cones of rock now, which floated, jostling and knocking together in the pitch-dark volume of space behind him. Now and then, one would bump into him, and several times he came close to cutting his own leg off when this happened. He launched the chunks away again, but not too hard, having learnt that excessive force would only cause further ricochets and disorder. When he turned and aimed his suit-light into the mass, he was alarmed at how many pieces there were. He’d made his own, mini asteroid belt, but one that was trapped in this awful cavern with him. The rocky cone-shapes twisted and tumbled, looking to Carver like gnashing fangs.
Once, while he stared into this debris-filled space, he imagined that he saw shapes within the chaos, patterns congealing out of the surface disorder, concentrations of shape that came and went, real then unreal again, almost teasing. He screwed his eyes shut, the cutter wedged against the rock-face, willing reality to resume its course. When he opened them again, the patterns had gone, if they had ever been there at all. Shards of stone spun, glittering in the crystalline beam of his light, dangerous but entirely material.
He returned to work, moving his harness point further into the face and yanking on the line to test it before restarting the plasma cutter. His whole body ached, everything from his skin right down to his bones. He considered taking a break — after all, who would ever know? But he decided against it, knowing that he’d never be able to make himself begin again. He wondered what the crazy dragon-man would do when they failed to find anything within the asteroid. Would he fry Carver’s brain until it killed him, just out of spite? Why not? How much time that gave him, he couldn’t guess, but he was aware that he was probably just accelerating the eventuality by his relentless pace of work. Still, what else could he do?
And so he cut, launched the chunks into the mass behind him, moved his rock-pin, cut again. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, his body aching all the time, wreathed in the steam of the cutter, possibly the single furthest human being from civilisation, alone at the frozen frontier of space, waiting for a crazy man who might never return.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘What now?!’ bellowed Halman in response to the latest knock on his door. He threw his datasheet aside, grimly satisfied by the way it skipped off his desk, breaking one corner of its plastic case, and landed on the floor.
The door opened, slowly and haltingly, as the person outside turned the crank-handle in the access panel, the system that had replaced the now-defunct electrical one. Ella Kown was standing there, her posture somewhat defensive.
‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked, stepping cautiously inside anyway.
Halman squeezed his head in his large hands, exhaling heavily. ‘Of course it fucking is, Ella!’ he spat. ‘When have we ever had a worse time than this?’
Ella nodded diplomatically and approached his desk. ‘Can I sit down? I’m kinda beat.’
Halman indicated the chair opposite his. ‘Why not,’ he said.
Ella collapsed into the seat with a sigh. ‘So what’s the news?’ she asked.
‘Alphe and Fionne are working on the relay,’ he told her. When he’d left them, they’d had the entire floor up in the gennie room, and had both been crawling around within the bowels of the machinery, conversing heatedly in a technical language that was, to Halman, completely unfathomable. What was clear, even to him, was that the relay wasn’t the only thing to have been damaged. The turbines, which used steam from the reactor to actually generate electricity, had also been attacked. Halman wondered why Nik hadn’t sabotaged the reactor itself, if devastation had been his priority, but he was relieved that this hadn’t happened. Things could always — always — be worse. Although, when you thought about it, that wasn’t a whole lot of consolation.
Alphe had burned himself quite badly on some overheated conduit, but had refused to leave his work, dignifying Halman’s suggestion that he be replaced with the merest of grunted responses. Halman had decided that the most helpful thing he could do would be to leave, and this was what he’d done. He had returned to his office in a daze, walking through the newly-darkened interior of his station like a ghost, heated conversation, accusations and demands all around him, panic thrumming in the foul-tasting air itself. He had passed several rooms where helpful passers-by had stopped to release the occupants who had been trapped within by the failure of their automatic doors, and had somehow failed to understand or actually use the manual backup systems. Possibly, some of them had seized up, having never been required before. He was glad that the station’s builders had, for whatever reason, never got around to automating all of the doors on board, or just opening all the rooms could have turned into a major task.
‘Are they making any progress?’ Ella asked, managing a surprisingly casual tone.
‘I don’t know, Ella. Why don’t you ask them?’
‘You know who we could use right now?’
‘Yeah. Nik,’ he replied gruffly. Ella nodded in agreement. ‘The same son-of-a-bitch who apparently caused all this.’
‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ They sat for a moment, considering this. ‘What if they can’t fix it?’
Halman looked to the window of his office. A blizzard of stone hung suspended in the night out there. He wondered briefly how the pane was still powered, but then he remembered that the windows acted also as solar panels, generating enough electricity to run themselves. He reached out and turned it off. ‘They have to fix it,’ he said.
‘But what if they can’t?’
‘Well, then, the patched-up air system goes off when the battery dies, the Kays can’t fly, aeroponics stops, the water doesn’t run, or clean, the positioning jets stop, we lose gravity-effect, the heating goes off, and we die. As for how long we have. . .’ He spread his hands, and offered a single, humourless bark of laughter. ‘Ask Nik.’
‘Oh crap. . .’ Ella groaned.
‘How’s Eli?’ asked Halman abruptly, changing the subject.
‘He’s in medical, with one of my guys watching him. In shock, naturally. Devastated, from what Hobbes says. He’s sedated for the moment, so some small mercy there.’
‘What was he doing around the machine rooms anyway?’
‘He wasn’t really able to explain it to me earlier, and as I say, he’s out cold at the moment. He does, of course, have clearance to be down there if he wants. Going for a walk? Maybe he saw Nik and followed him up there.’
Halman huffed inconclusively, his moustache bristling. ‘I suppose so,’ he said at last.
‘You don’t suspect him of any wrongdoing, do you?’ asked Ella.
Halman looked at her from beneath knitted brows. ‘Don’t you?’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that your job? To be suspicious?’
Ella pursed her lips, considering this. At length, she said, ‘Dan, this is Eli. I don’t believe this went down in any way other than how he has described already. Nik’s prints were smudged together with Eli’s on the knife, suggesting that Eli did take the knife off him.’
‘Okay, so it’s inconceivable that Eli would blow up the relay then murder Nik. That’s a given.’ Ella nodded, attentive. ‘But. . .’ Halman raised a finger to emphasise his point. ‘It’s also inconceivable that Nik would blow the relay then try to kill Eli. I guess the whole fucking thing’s inconceivable. Yet here we are.’