‘This is it,’ replied the dragon calmly. ‘Press the yellow pad there.’
Carver spotted the control that the dragon was referring to and reached out to press it. The pad required more pressure than he had been prepared to exert, and the force pushed his own body back away from the door. There was an undulating, whispering whoosh of sound and the door seemed to shiver in its mountings, then began to open. An irritating, beeping siren began to sound, setting Carver’s teeth on edge. He floated closer again, wiping blood from his cheek with one sleeve. The old, failed emissary had clawed his face, probably with the zip of one of his gloves, and Carver’s own blood was mixed there with the murdered man’s. The wound still stung and burned fiercely. Probably infected, knowing my luck, thought Carver as he waited. As long as the bastard didn’t infect me with the disease of failure.
The necklace of human fingers around the throat of his suit lent him great strength, though — it was a powerful item. Totemic. Surely it would protect him from the taint of failure. Some of those fingers had been pretty hard to bite off, but it had been worth it. It proved his dominance over the old emissary, his right to ascension. It was his crown, his sceptre. Yes — a powerful item.
‘Fear not,’ the dragon told him. ‘You will not fail me — I will not allow it.’
Carver was unsure whether that was threatening or reassuring, and decided that it could possibly be both at once. Whatever the case, it was a little unnecessary. He had no intention of failing the dragon. His dragon. It had granted him freedom, he was certain of that. He supposed that he owed it his life.
Once the door had opened fully, Carver pushed off with his toes — he had learnt that gentle movements worked best in the micro-gee — and floated into the airlock. As soon as he was inside, the great door began to close behind him with a cyclical squeaking noise. He looked around the interior of the airlock, cold fingers of claustrophobia starting to work their way into his mind. There were no handlines here, so he clamped his magnetic boots to the floor while he waited. The airlock was cramped — only big enough for three or four people — and dimly-lit by a single LED-cluster in the ceiling. A rack of suits and matching helmets was bolted to one wall, and the suits hung limply like flayed skins.
‘You’re sure I don’t need a helmet?’ Carver asked the dragon, suddenly worried.
‘No, it’s fine. You see the sign on the wall there, above the exit?’
Carver looked up and saw the small screen to which the dragon clearly referred. It read, simply, SAFE.
‘Okay, I’ll trust you,’ he said, still a little uncertain.
‘You must trust me,’ said the dragon. ‘Do you think I let you go just to send you unprotected into a vacuum? Please.’ It sounded a little irritated, and Carver thought it best to let the matter lie. Anyway, it had a point. ‘The airlock cycle is just a precaution — it always goes through the motions, regardless of whether there’s air on the other side or not.’
‘I guess that makes sense,’ Carver admitted, glancing around impatiently.
There was another whoosh of pumping gas and then the exit door, superficially identical to the one he had entered by, began to rise into the ceiling. Carver realised that he was holding his breath, and he let it out in a rush, gulping an experimental lungful of whatever atmosphere he was now immersed in. It was, as the dragon had promised, fine.
He moved through the airlock, passing through a series of reinforcing metal ribs, dragging himself along with ever-increasing dexterity. He looked around wonderingly, unsure of exactly what manner of ship he was emerging into. It was much more cramped than the shuttle behind him — darker, simpler, older-looking. He guessed it must be quite a lot smaller, too. There were deep gouges in the nearest wall where some heavy piece of equipment had been forced into or out of the airlock, and a fair scattering of rubbish and shiny curls of swarf drifted in the corners. It didn’t look as if it had been cleaned in a hundred years. He could see the cockpit from here, and it looked small and simple after the relative technical complexity of the shuttle that had brought him to this awful solar system.
‘Onwards, then,’ he muttered to himself, feeling inexplicably nervous now, as if the ghost of the man he had murdered might materialise before him with a blood-curdling scream. It occurred to him how utterly alone he and the dragon really were out here. Anything could happen, completely unnoticed by the entire civilised universe. He imagined that he could feel the vessel pitching and rolling around him, even though he was fairly sure that without any gravitational reference point, that had to be an illusion.
‘Remain calm,’ said the dragon soothingly, instantly making him feel better, its words so similar to the rush of the fader he had taken the night before. ‘Focus on the job at hand. You’re doing just fine. Don’t worry about a thing.’
‘My dragon,’ he whispered, craning his neck to peer down the passage ahead. Something began to hum deep in the mechanical heart of the ship — it sounded like an internal combustion engine revving up. Carver ignored it and floated towards the cockpit.
Inside the cockpit was a single pilot’s seat with duct tape like scars on its cushions. The window was small and the ceiling low, hung with loops of cable cinched together with plastic ties. The console looked relatively simple — a multi-purpose main screen, a few ranks of switches, and a flight yoke which was shiny around the grip from long use. The window showed the scabbed and blistered skin of the huge asteroid. Dragon-skin, thought Carver distantly.
He drifted across to the console and began to rummage items out of the locker in its base: datasheets, one of them cracked right across its surface; food wrappers; an unidentifiable metal item about the size of a key; a bottle of beer; a pen with its point broken off. . . Not what he was looking for. Frowning, he cracked the top off the beer on a corner of the console, making it instantly fountain out of the bottle in a plume that snaked into the air, twisting and spraying droplets. Laughing, Carver intercepted the plume with his mouth, sucking it down with childish glee, chasing it back to the neck of the bottle, which he drained in one gulp.
He laughed aloud, and smashed the bottle against the main viewscreen in celebration, creating a scintillating firework of glittering shards that pattered off the walls and floor in a chaotic display. The beer had been good — very good — and he wondered how long it had been since he had last had one. Years? Was it years? If you counted the time he had spent in sus-an, it might be as long as seven years, he thought. He wanted another.
‘Remember why you are here,’ reminded the dragon, actually making him jump.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ Carver said guiltily. The dragon was right. It was always right. Hadn’t Emissary Mark One said that? Or it always knew best — something like that. The crazy fuck had apparently been right about that, at least.
‘Try the main console,’ said the dragon.
‘What? You think it’ll be there?’
‘Try it, I said,’ ordered the dragon, a hint of impatience in its voice.
‘Right, okay,’ agreed Carver. He flicked the switch marked Main Console Active, which seemed like the likeliest candidate for the job.
‘Hmm. . .’ he mused, staring into the small screen, watching the indecipherable dance of white text as it self-tested, something beginning to whir inside it.
After a few seconds the console presented him with what was clearly a home-screen, with icons that looked as if they might conceivably represent various shipboard systems. He was pretty sure he recognised manoeuvring jets, and maybe docking clamps. One of the pictures looked like a book — a stylised blue cover and several splayed pages — and as a book was what he had originally sought, Carver tapped the icon with one gloved finger. Nothing happened.