‘Eli,’ said Ella coldly. ‘It must be Eli.’
‘What. . .’ began Alphe, trailing off into nothing. The team stood rooted in place, dumbfounded.
And then the space door began to open in the floor, sheets of ice sloughing off it and tumbling away into space, forming a ramp that protruded like a tongue.
‘The safeties are still off!’ cried Liu. ‘We can’t stop it!’ Lina looked across at him and saw, to her dismay, that even he had now stopped smiling.
‘Weapons!’ yelled Alphe, lunging for one of the tool-boxes.
‘Weapons?’ parroted Fionne. ‘What for?’ She tried to say something else but her suit’s faulty comm shredded it into random noise.
‘If that’s Eli in that ship,’ said Lina, reaching for a large wrench that lay beside K6-12 on the floor, ‘we have to bring him in.’ She didn’t think she managed to sound any more excited by this prospect than she felt.
‘Us?!’ yelled Fionne, horrified. ‘But I. . . I can’t. . . I. . .’
‘Look!’ cried Alphe, straightening up with a hammer in his hand.
A ship was coming into sight, weaving carefully around the few errant asteroids that had come almost within mass-driver range of the station. It was a large and squarish vessel with manoeuvring jets jutting from its hide like porcupine quills and a small cockpit stuck onto the front like an afterthought: the in-system loader. It came about on a swooping arc, twisting about its lengthwise axis to approach the station with its wheels to the ramp. They could now make out the figure of a space-suited pilot behind the console.
‘Oh shit. . .’ breathed Liu — the first time Lina had ever heard him swear. He had found himself a handheld gas-torch, which looked virtually useless as a weapon. She thought he might be able to lightly toast Eli with it, but that was about all. Eli. She remembered what the crazy bastard had done to Sal, Nik, Jayce and Tamzin, and a lump began to swell inside her throat, making it hard to breathe.
The team shuffled nervously, their faces frightened behind their visors, bristling, trying to ready themselves. They stood poised, fearful, weapons outstretched. Even Fionne had found some sharp-looking implement to arm herself with, and it looked horribly unnatural in her hand.
The ship was rolling up the ramp onto the deck of the hangar now, gas jets erupting from its hull, landing lights winking red and green. Lina could feel the tension in the bodies of her companions — those minute muscular twitches as they fought the urge to turn tail and flee.
‘We have to do this, guys,’ said Alphe, sounding a little too uncertain himself to inspire much confidence. ‘He has to be stopped here. It’s okay — there’s one of him and five of us.’
The loader was approaching, slowing, moving down the ranks of Kays towards them. They could see the pilot looking at them, now, and Lina had the sudden impression that it wasn’t Eli after all. She had sat in the pilot’s seat of the loader herself, and she was about the same height as Eli. There had been space above her head, she was sure of it. But this person looked as if they’d been crammed into the cockpit, and if so they must be absolutely huge.
Fionne was chanting, ‘Come on come on come on come on. . .’ in an endless mantra, her eyes stretched so wide open that they looked as if they might just pop from her head.
The ship turned sharply about its axis, sideways across the width of the hangar, blocking the flight deck and side-swiping Petra’s Kay. The smaller vessel rolled silently onto its side, crunching into another of its fellows, shearing off tool arms and crumpling hulls. The loader ploughed on, wrecking a third ship as it finally came to rest with injured Kays littered around it like toys that it had tired of and discarded. The pilot was hidden from sight again.
The loader settled jerkily onto its suspension, lowering slightly, its jets sputtering to a stop. The hangar was deceptively still and silent. The last wisps of condensed gas trailed away, fading into nothing. The loader’s landing lights filled the space with pulses of sick colour — putrescent green and bloody red.
At the top of the loader’s short ladder, the hatch began to open.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Carver cycled the main hatch of the loader, as the dragon had told him to do, then rushed down into the vessel’s small cargo hold with the cutter gripped in both hands. One of those hands wore an incongruous bright red glove from the ISL, a replacement for the one he had torn. It looked right, that red hand. The red hand of vengeance, he thought.
His head was thrumming and throbbing, beating like a drum, but he felt good. He felt charged. The power of the finger-necklace infused him and enfolded him. The dragon wound around his body like a shawl of dark feathers. Its voice was quieter here, further from its den, but he felt its presence nonetheless.
He emerged from the loader’s cargo hold as quietly as he could, forgetting that they wouldn’t hear his footsteps in the vacuum. He could hear their voices, though, over the radio. They were shrill and breathy, full of fear.
He ran along the body of the loader, crouched low and grinning ecstatically to himself. The cutter was heavy in his hands, solid and reassuring. As he crept past the loader’s landing gear he saw his intended victims crowded round the ladder that led up to the ship’s main hatch. They had fallen for his trick. Idiots. Let the hand of vengeance strike them down.
The cutter came alive, spluttering out globules of plasma which solidified into a continuous stream. He burst from the shadows at a run. Was that him laughing or the dragon?
Someone was slowly ascending the rungs of the ladder while the rest of the cowards hung back watching them. They looked like they were holding hammers and spanners, the hopeful fools.
Carver broke cover, accelerating to the fastest pace that he could manage in the suit, with the cutter poised above his head.
‘Where is he?’ asked a woman’s voice over the radio.
And then, just as he was about to swing the cutter, which should have neatly cut through all three of the idiots standing on the deck like a sheathe of wheat, slicing them in half at their waists, one of them — a little Asian-looking fucker — turned round and screamed.
‘LOOK OUT BEHIND!’
Clearly wired to the max, they turned as one, flinching away from him as the cutter went shimmering through the air. Its beam sliced neatly through one of the loader’s radio antennae, then passed close enough to the belly of one of the men — some inbred who looked like a fucking farmer — to singe the material of his suit. Carver actually saw the white fabric blacken as the cutter swung in its wide arc, possessed of its own unstoppable momentum.
He brought it back round in another swipe, angling down in a diagonal line, stepping in. But his feet slipped on the deck, which seemed to be covered in ice, and he fell to one knee, the cutter sizzling through one of the loader’s tyres, making the whole ship slump slightly as if threatening to simply fall on him.
Carver screamed in rage, scrabbling up, the cutter flailing in one hand, out of control. The dragon twined around him, faster and faster, hissing like a steam engine, utterly enraged.
‘Kill them! Kill them!’ it screamed distantly. ‘Don’t let them get away!’
But they were quick — quicker than he was, at least. The person on the ladder spun and leapt down onto the deck. Carver caught a brief glimpse of her face as she went. She looked like the sort who might enjoy some quality time alone with him: older than him, perhaps, but kind of handsome, with tangled blonde hair that hung across one side of her face. I’ll fucking get you! he inwardly vowed. But she was already off — they all were — and running towards the large door that gaped at the end of the room like a portal into purest darkness. He felt the dreaded miasma of failure closing in around him like poison gas.