He regained his feet, slipping and sliding maddeningly, the cutter gouging deep lines into the deck, sending up gouts of steam that blinded him. He staggered after the fleeing cowards, waving the steam away from his face, and lifted the cutter high again. One of the running figures threw a hammer back over their shoulder as they went, but Carver dodged it easily, gaining his stride, his legs pounding like great engines.
They burst out of the door and away into the station, but Carver was closing on them already. Their suits flashed whitely in his light — flapping spectres that he followed through the gloom, gaining on them, gaining on them. . . The cutter trembled keenly in his hands, spitting and gouting.
They seemed to be inside some massive warehouse where shelves like skyscrapers arced away into darkness above him. The fleeing cowards dodged around pallets of sheet metal, jumped over coils of hose, almost falling over each other as they went. He was almost close enough, now. . . almost. . .
And then his prey reached a T-junction and scattered — three left, two right. Carver skidded to a momentary halt, torn by indecision, his head bursting with pressure.
‘The woman!’ hissed the dragon. ‘Go after the woman, you fool. She and I have business still to finish. Go! Right!’
Carver took off rightwards, bellowing his rage, the cutter taking little nips out of either wall as he ran. He saw the heel of a boot disappear around the next corner and he drove himself onwards, leaving long streamers of expelled vapour behind him like contrails.
He rounded the corner and saw one of the fleeing cowards sprawled on the floor, scrabbling to regain their feet. Was it the woman? Let it be the woman! he prayed to himself as he leapt forwards and kicked the figure’s head like a football, making their helmet bounce against the floor. He dropped onto the figure’s back, seizing the fabric of their suit in one huge hand, and pulled their head up off the floor to look into the face.
‘You,’ he snarled to the little Asian-looking fucker, ‘are the wrong fucking one!’ The rage bubbled up inside him, so hot that he thought it might emerge as fire from his mouth. The face behind the visor gibbered with fear. ‘But you’ll do,’ he added, smiling with anticipation.
He knocked the little scaredy cat out by smashing his helmet on the floor a few more times, then dragged him back to the hangar and got busy. It was art, really — certainly his best work. And the dragon seemed to demand it. It hovered at the periphery of his mind, cajoling him, encouraging him, massaging that streak of darkness that pulsated in his brain like cancer. It had to be appeased. He should have caught them all, he knew.
But he didn’t allow himself to get too carried away, because those other couple of fucks had escaped, hadn’t they? Yes, and they would be back. Probably with some asshole friends, he suspected. Those sorts of people always had loads of asshole friends.
So he finished his work with the little scaredy cat and headed back out of the hangar again. He observed the small in-system ships as he passed, counting them. Fifteen in all, but one of them was in pieces, and those pieces were heaped with dust and metal shavings as if they hadn’t been touched in months. Someone had taped a handwritten sign across the ship’s partial hull, but the words on it were long-faded. And he had hit four more vessels on the way in, partly by accident and partly to appease his own childish desire for destruction. Three of these lay on their sides forlornly, clearly broken. The fourth one looked to have suffered only minor damage. Ten undamaged, then. And the loader, which he would take again.
Flying the loader had been easy, having run through a few hours of simulation. It mainly involved telling the computer where you wanted to go, and how fast, then employing whichever guidance routine was most appropriate. It hadn’t been necessary to resort to manual controls at all, in fact.
He stood just outside the hangar doorway, staring into the cavernous vastness of the warehouse, marvelling at the massive machine-parts that nested in the racking, reflecting his light dully from their oily skins. He realised then, as he imagined one of those vast pieces of metal tumbling down and crushing him to death, that the station was making artificial gravity. It hadn’t even occurred to him before. Of course, he’d known that the station would be a spinner, and even kind-of understood how that created the impression of gravity, but he hadn’t realised how easily, how thoughtlessly, he’d slip back into the one-gee lifestyle. He honestly hadn’t noticed until now, but now that he did, the sensation was an enjoyable one. He felt powerful, heavy, brutish, like a lump of malleable iron. But he still felt a little vulnerable beneath those infinite tiers of machinery. He cautiously moved along the gangway and took a left at the end.
One thing he had managed to extract from the little scaredy cat, besides some blood and teeth, was the route to the station’s prison. He had no way of knowing, of course, if the man had been lying to him, but he suspected not.
The plasma cutter swung jauntily at his side, switched off, its ceramicarbide barrel pointing towards the floor. It had become like an old friend, now. Carver was considering giving it a name, but he’d never been good at names. Fury, maybe, for the job it had done on the little scaredy cat. Or Dragonkey, for the work it had yet to do, that most important job of freeing the dragon from its prison of ice and rock. He didn’t really like either, though.
He climbed the stairs carefully, aware of the slipperiness of the steps — two floors, like he had been told. He passed a sign reading MACHINE ROOMS and moved down a narrow passage with glass-fronted workshops on either side. He turned into an even narrower, windowless corridor that continued straight until it faded into blackness.
Suddenly, something moved at the end of the passage — a flash of white — and Fury-slash-Dragonkey was in the firing position before Carver even knew what was happening. The fingers round his neck jiggled and jumped like the fingers of a gifted pianist. He stood, cutter poised, eyes squinted half shut, staring into the darkness, washing his light from side to side, seeing nothing but textured metal and rusty meshwork. Something had moved, though. Attack of the asshole friends, his mind warned him.
‘Go and check,’ said the dragon, but its voice was far away, like the voice of the sea on distant shores. ‘It’s nothing, but go and see for yourself.’
Cautiously, Carver worked his way down the corridor to the spot where he had seen the movement, trying to check both ways at once. His heart was large and slippery in his chest and his head was pulsing as if it was trying to breathe. It felt like it had swelled up tight inside his helmet. He was, for all his violent nature, something of a coward when it came down to it. Of course, he would never have admitted this, even to himself.
He reached the spot and shone his light around, immediately revealing the source of the motion: icicles had fallen from a hanging pipe and shattered on the floor here, leaving a crystalline spatter of fairy dust that Carver ground vengefully beneath his boot. He grinned to himself, shaking his head at his own foolishness. Had he really been frightened just then? There was nothing worse than him on this station, he was sure of that. Well, he thought, maybe just the dragon. Maybe.
Still grinning, he continued round the corner into a slightly wider area. Another doorway led away to the right, but Carver angled leftwards, beneath a sign reading REFINERY, creeping up the few steps and into a haunted house of leaning shadows and black metal. Immense crucibles and muscular crane-arms soared above him, cables and chains as thick as his waist drooping to the floor in places. He slunk past a control desk that overlooked some huge machine, a contraption that looked like a sewage treatment plant and stretched away into solid darkness. The place was utterly dead and still, veiled in frost and rock dust.