There was a loud rush as the hangar cycled, fading away as vacuum replaced air. Lina felt her ship trembling around her as she leeched gas into the jets. It felt like a tense little animal, itching to run. One of its tool arms twitched like a palsied limb, the result of a dying servomotor, an intermittent fault that had plagued the vessel for months.
And then the hangar was washed with emerald green as the final stage of the cycle kicked in. The space door shivered and began to drop. The belt rotated mutely out there, a carousel of broken shards. Yuwan, the neighbouring gas giant, was a creamy orange disc that soared above the plane of rubble like a rising sun.
Eli’s loader was coming about, turning wide to align with the ramp, picking up speed already. Lina trundled out onto the main concourse, some fifty metres behind the ISL. She gave the dead-lifter a wide berth, her hands surprisingly steady on the controls.
‘You’re not getting away, you bastard!’ she said through gritted teeth, not caring if he heard or not.
The loader was a ponderous and fat-bodied machine, a patchwork of black and grey, prickled with manoeuvring jets. It rode high on its suspension, only carrying empty crates, but it moved with a sort of deliberate sluggishness. Eli made a last tiny adjustment to its bearing, then dialled the gas up all the way, accelerating over the lip of the runway and out into space.
Lina had been gaining on him until his wheels left the deck of the station, but then the loader quickly accelerated off, freed from friction, flung away by Macao’s rotation, banking sharply to port-side, leaving icy contrails of condensing gas behind it. Lina pushed the yoke all the way to the stop, still checking diags with one eye, feeling the vessel rattling around her as numerous loose bolts and electrical components chattered to each other. The Eli-tag on the HUD went off-screen to the left, tracked by a directional pointer. Her Kay flew from the end of the ramp and dropped away into space.
She paused for a heartbeat, letting herself fully clear the station, then banked hard to follow Eli. The greater bulk of the loader was cancelled out by its more powerful drive system and, in fact, it was slightly faster than a Kay in space. Already Eli was some hundred-plus metres in front, turning around Macao counter-spinwards, angling down towards the heart of the belt. Lina kept the yoke pinned, but he was accelerating away from her, zipping between two massive asteroids with surprising agility. She tried to turn inside his arc, wrenching the Kay over as hard as she could, but she made up only a little distance, which she immediately began to lose again. She didn’t even pause to wonder what she would do if she actually caught up with him.
‘Leave me alone!’ screamed Eli through the speakers, making Lina’s head spike with fresh agony.
No, she mouthed silently, intent on flying, her eyes checking between HUD and dashboard instruments, her knuckles white on the control stick. It’s a bit late for that, she thought grimly, as asteroids flitted past on both sides. She jagged left, Eli’s contrails washing over her screen, partially blinding her, then right, pushing on, driven by sheer determination.
‘I’m warning you!’ shrieked Eli in an almost comically shrill voice.
The belt thickened around her, pressing in. Macao had become invisible already. It might have been imagined — a mirage borne of wishful thinking. This endless textured space was the only reality left, and in it she might wander eternally, chasing this phantom madman who would remain always tantalisingly out of reach.
Eli swerved around a vast iceberg, maybe eighty metres across, clinging tight to its dirty surface. Lina lost sight of him, although the HUD still tracked the loader in its bright orange reticule. As she rounded the iceberg, expecting to catch a glimpse of him, the Eli-tag on her HUD blinked out. He must have killed the ISL’s computer, which left him flying without safety systems. Lina thought how poetic it would be if Eli was to be killed in an accident with a belt object, as had happened to Sal. But Sal wasn’t killed in an accident with a belt object. We know better, don’t we Eli? she thought. Because you murdered her, didn’t you?
As she rounded the large rock, she was confronted by a group of smaller asteroids which had been hidden from her sight. The loader was not visible. She dived her Kay into the mass of asteroids, gravel hissing off her canopy, the computer screaming proximity warnings and enforcing little corrective jolts of thrust, struggling to avoid the larger objects. She pressed on, though, basically guessing at which way he might have gone, blind beyond a hundred metres.
She emerged into a clearer space and spun her ship around, washing the belt with radar. Echoes came from everywhere — shifting, overlapping, useless. She could make out dispersing contrails, but couldn’t tell what direction they led in. The gas trail had become a cloud already — a random organic shape.
Suddenly, she shivered, her nerves jangling. It’ll eat you up! she thought again. That shadow. . . that living shadow. . . Whatever it was, she had voluntarily entered its lair. It would smell the blood that had soaked her flight suit and come for her. She thought she saw it — darker patches in the darkness, concentrations of nothing. . . patterns in the chaos. . .
‘No,’ she said aloud, alarmed at how her own voice trembled. ‘There’s nothing out here. He’s insane. Nothing but rock and ice.’
And then she caught sight of the loader. Eli had turned sharply to starboard, almost doubling back, and she saw only the merest flash of expelled gas between the asteroids, and maybe a glint of sunlight on hull. Instantly, she was after him, half-looping and maxing the gas. She checked the HUD and saw that her Kay still had its last bolt of metal in the breech of its mass driver. The loader loomed large in her canopy as Eli slowed down to avoid a clutch of chaotically-jostling rocks the size of Kays. She targeted the wallowing ISL and hit the fire control.
The ship jolted as the bolt was released. Lina watched in slow motion as it travelled towards the banking loader, flashing once in her vessel’s headlight.
‘Come on!’ she screamed, pushing the yoke almost through its stop, all her muscles tensed.
Eli braked hard, sending out a bloom of gas in front of his ship, rolling away below her faster than she could follow. The bolt smashed into one of the Kay-sized rocks, shattering it into dust, missing him by metres. She burst through the cloud of debris, sightless, knowing she had lost him, and tried to roll around the clutch of asteroids to resume the chase. But when she hit clear space, the loader was gone again.
Rocks hung all around her like a flock of silently-watching sheep, inviting her next move. She stopped the ship and hung there, breathing hard and inwardly cursing herself. In all directions, a total uniformity of stone and vacuum, a smokescreen of rubble.
Lina kicked the underside of the dash in frustration, immediately wishing she hadn’t when a warped metal plate dropped off onto her boot with a subtle little clang. She had no idea what it was or what it might be for. She held her breath, pissed at herself, waiting to see if she had broken anything terminal. Please no! she wished. Not now! But no alarms went off and it seemed she’d got away with it.
She shoved the metal plate into a corner with one foot, casting about herself. She turned her Kay in place — once, twice — but it looked the same in all directions. Nothingness, as far as the eye could see.
Where did he go? she wondered. Where does he possibly hope to go out here? Is he thinking he can fly right out of the system? And then a gap opened between two asteroids, quite at random, and she saw it.