The first cell he passed contained a man lying naked in the middle of the floor, face down and unmoving. Carver didn’t linger to check if the man was alive or not — now was not the time. The second cell he passed contained a scrawny, balding little rat of a man who was sitting cross-legged on his crude prison bed, the back of his head against the wall and his eyes shut. That was good.
Carver crept on past, occasionally checking back up the passage behind him, closing in on the voice. He turned his suit-light on, but he kept it pointed down at the floor for now. Its little circle of brilliance skimmed along the pitted metal like an eye staring up at him from hell.
The next cell contained a smooth-looking, oldish man, who stood stock-still in the centre of his tiny cell, regarding Carver with reptilian eyes that glittered in the red light. Only those eyes moved, following him, as Carver stalked past. The man was smiling a neat little smile, but it wasn’t a smile that radiated any warmth at all — it looked like the smile of a crocodile that would be perfectly content to snap your leg off and eat it. Carver stared back at him, shaking his head, one gloved finger raised to his lips. The man made no acknowledgement, but he didn’t make any noise either, and that was the main thing.
Suddenly, the voice at the end of the passage stopped, and Carver heard an intake of breath. ‘Theo?’ called the voice, its owner the merest suggestion of a shape in the shadows. He dared not spot her with his light yet. The sobbing stopped as the crying person paused to listen, too. ‘Is that you? Man, you made me jump.’ Carver saw movement up ahead and the voice took on new tones of suspicion. ‘That is you, isn’t it?’
He saw the figure congeal out of the darkness — a woman in a space suit, but no helmet, coming towards him squinting. She was a large, strong-looking woman of the type that Carver naturally associated with penal workers, but she didn’t look too bright.
He splashed his light into her eyes, dazzling her, and making her fall back a step as he quickly covered the remaining ground between them, his huge boots ringing on the metal floor, the dragon leering over his shoulder ravenously, its breath a musky, charnel house stench that filtered even into his suit and filled his head with the taste of dead meat and ancient dust.
‘Yeah,’ he said, firing up the cutter, ‘it’s me all right.’
‘Oh good,’ said the woman, shielding her eyes, her words almost entirely lost in the rising bellow of the plasma cutter. The noise quickly swelled to fill the space with deafening volume, the sound echoing back hugely from the metal walls, layer on layer, loud enough to blot out all thought. ‘Hey — what the hell is–’ she shouted.
She got no further with the question, and her voice was all but inaudible anyway. Carver brought the cutter up in a smooth, controlled arc, not aiming for a killing blow just yet. It took the woman’s gloved hand off at the wrist just as she tried to pull it back. The hand went sailing gaily into the air behind her and was lost in the darkness of the passage. Carver could feel the eyes of the prisoners on him, awed and terrified in equal measure, staring out of their cages like the trapped, desperate animals they were.
The woman held the stump of her hand up in front of her face and looked dumbly at it for a moment. The cutter had cauterised it so neatly that there wasn’t as much as a drop of blood. Carver drew the weapon back and paused. The woman looked from her missing hand and back to him, her mouth hanging open and a thin trail of spittle depending from her lower lip.
‘Wait!’ she cried in a tone of dawning horror. ‘You’re not–’
‘Not Theo, no,’ Carver shouted, his grin stretching so wide that he thought the edges of his mouth might meet up at the back of his head. His brain felt like it was going to burst and rupture his skull like a fragmentation grenade.
He plunged the lance of blinding plasma into the woman’s chest, sending out a great gout of steam, then whipped the weapon upwards, virtually tearing her torso in half. He kicked out, sending her convulsing remains flying into the darkness, and roared with bestial triumph, shaking the cutter above his head like a caveman’s club. He felt exultant, wired, truly alive. This was what it meant to be free! The dragon twined around him, empowering and protecting him, phasing in and out at the edge of reality, a ghost of a dream of murder. Although it was distant, weakened in its cage of rock, for a moment Carver felt it there in the passage with him, relishing his triumph.
An eruption of noise came from the cells around him — cheers and cat-calls, whoops and crying, shouted reports that went rapidly down the line of cells as he turned in place with the cutter held aloft, revelling in the admiration of the dragon, his dragon, his dragon. Presently, he fell still, killed the cutter and stood breathing deeply, trying to regain his composure. He looked up and saw that he had gouged a thick, jagged line down the ceiling of the passage like a scar. Water dripped slowly from the cut like seeping blood in the red light, pattering softly onto his right boot. The suit felt like it was suffocating him, but he didn’t want to take the helmet off. All being well, he wouldn’t be here too long.
He went back to the cell he had passed where the man with the reptilian eyes still stood in the same place as when Carver had first seen him, smiling benignly. Carver shone his light into the cell, letting its beam play across the sparse furnishings and rusty walls. The man’s bed was neatly-made and the few personal items in the cell looked to have been carefully arranged. The metal toilet in the corner had been polished to a mirror shine. He saw that the notepads and pens on the table had been positioned at perfect right angles to the room.
‘Are there any more?’ Carver asked, looking into the man’s face.
‘No,’ said the man, his voice as prim and polite as his smile. He didn’t even narrow his eyes when the beam of Carver’s light fell across his face. ‘No more. And may I say — well done.’ He nodded once, agreeably, towards Carver.
‘What’s your name, Prisoner?’ Carver asked him.
‘Welby,’ said the man. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
That was a little odd, thought Carver, but never mind. The guy was probably just crazy, but that was okay, wasn’t it? If you bobbed for apples in the sewers, you came up with turds, right? He let the comment pass.
‘Welby, I’m here to set you people free, just like the dragon did for me. We have much work to do.’
‘The dragon?’ asked Welby politely.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Carver hurriedly. ‘The dragon in the asteroid sent me, I’m it’s emissary, and I’m here to set you free. But first–’
‘I knew it,’ said Welby, his smile widening, showing perfect white teeth. ‘The Old Ones sent you. An emissary. Of course.’
‘Welby, I’m gonna let you people out, but I need to know that you aren’t gonna fuck me around, okay? Is there anybody here who’s gonna fuck me around?’
‘I knew you would come,’ said Welby smugly. ‘I told the faithful as much. The time for vengeance is at hand.’
Carver felt himself smile too. He was already starting to like Welby. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘I guess it is.’
Chapter Forty-Two
‘Quiet!’ commanded Halman, holding up one finger. He looked ungainly in his space suit, huge and awkward.
Lina held him in her light, breathing in heavy, ragged chunks. ‘What?’ she whispered, head cocked. Whatever he had heard must have come through the comm-channel, because they were moving through a vacuum and there was nothing else to hear.
‘I thought I heard voices on the radio,’ he said at length, shaking his head. ‘Several of them. Faint, but. . .’