Every nook and cranny of the warehouse was a hiding place from which the dreaded Carver might spring. Every outcropping piece of machinery, every tarpaulin-covered pallet, every massive spool of cable, was a skulking human form. Lina’s breathing seemed to fill the entire world. She held the pistol in front of her like a ward. Frost glittered everywhere like fairy dust, making the place into a sinister wonderland. There was only silence from the comm. Ella and Si were too far away to talk to now. Lina wondered if they were all okay, and who, if anyone, would find the escaped prisoner first. She hoped, for all her most altruistic desires, that it would not be her own group.
The hangar door was standing open, dangerously inviting. The lights were on inside, showing rows of gunmetal ship’s hulls and reflective cockpit glass. They crept inside, explorers in their own lost world.
The in-system loader loomed in the centre of the hangar like a vast beetle that had landed there, surrounded by its cowed harem of battered Kays, almost blocking the flight deck completely. The space door hung open at the far end like an unravelled tongue. It was disturbing to see it left like that, just hanging open, almost inviting the void to spill into the station, living shadows and all, to drown the remaining survivors like flood water.
‘My ship,’ said Lina, pointing towards K6-12 with her gun. It sat over on the right-hand side of the hangar, in the shadow of the loader, with just enough of an angle to be able to move it without moving the loader first. She was sentimentally glad that the incoming vessel had not damaged it. ‘I could just take it now and go out there. If Carver’s here, maybe there’s nobody alive on the shuttle at all.’ She looked at Halman, who froze in place, his face scrunched in thought. ‘I could just go, Dan.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, we take care of this first. Eli could still be out there, or the pilot. We deal with this first, then you and Ella go together as planned.’ Lina started to object but he stopped her with a single shake of his head. ‘Don’t fucking argue with me now, Lina,’ he said with soft menace. ‘Not now.’
Lina huffed, annoyed, and turned away. She let her light play across the ships, caress their battered hulls. ‘Fine,’ she said.
‘Lina and Waine, wait here and guard the door,’ commanded Halman softly. ‘Keep your wits about you. Anything happens, shout — I won’t be far. Actually, if you see Carver, shoot first and then shout.’ He beckoned Theo with his laser pistol. ‘Theo — with me. We’ll sweep down to the other end, check the control room, then come back.’
He waved Theo over to the other side of the hangar, and they moved off down the rows of Kays with their weapons cocked at the ready. Lina tried to take some comfort in the fact that Halman had once been a low-ranking officer in the Farsight army at Platini Alpha, but she couldn’t do it. He was still a large man, but he looked too old now, too hunched, too drawn, and although she knew the shadow of a fighter still dwelt within him somewhere, it was at best well-hidden.
Halman could be seen in silhouette, gun outstretched, skirting the central control desk and Ilse’s broken and upturned Kay while Theo moved away down the far side of the hangar. Halman approached the dead-lifter, which was parked in the middle of the flight deck, overshadowed by the loader that had pulled up on the far side, almost touching it. Suddenly, his suit-light flashed as he turned to look back towards Lina and Waine.
‘Oh shit,’ said Halman’s voice over the radio. ‘Oh shit. Oh no.’
‘What?’ demanded Lina. ‘What is it?’
‘The bastard. . .’ muttered Halman. He had stopped before the dead-lifter and was seemingly frozen in place staring at it. It looked like something was on the lifter’s forks, something torn and tattered that Lina couldn’t distinguish from her distant vantage point.
‘Come on!’ she called to Waine, already setting off at a run. Theo was also heading towards Halman, calling out to him, unanswered.
Before she actually reached him, Lina saw what Halman had found. Halman himself hadn’t seen it until he’d been right upon it, but with the benefit of his light, which was now firmly planted on the object in question, Lina could make it out quite clearly. She stopped, skidding to a halt, transfixed by what she saw hanging from the lifter’s forks. She willed her feet to continue moving, but they seemed to be stuck to the floor. Maybe she had inadvertently activated the magnets on her boots.
Whatever else Ronnie Carver might be, he was certainly creative. He seemed to have made a sculpture in human remains. The body hanging from the lifter’s forks had been not just butchered but almost entirely reworked, cut right open and somehow peeled, reshaped into something inhuman and monstrous. Ribs had been splayed open like wings, limbs had been broken and re-jointed, hands twisted into talons, flaps of meat carved crudely but enthusiastically into new forms. Scraps of space suit hung here and there like streamers. Pieces of skin and intestine, cauterised by the plasma cutter, lay strewn around the floor like bits of rubbish.
Lina knew instantly what it was: a dragon. A dragon made from a sacrificed human body, strung up with wire that had clearly come from the large spool on the floor by the central desk. A message, an omen, a harbinger of disaster cast in human flesh and blood.
‘Dragon!’ she gasped, her mind reeling in horror, flailing, grasping for something to latch onto before sanity slipped and fell away, possibly to be lost forever. It’ll eat you up! She was falling, falling into darkness that loomed beneath her like the mouth of a waiting monster. I’m going to take my son to Platini Alpha, and one day all this will seem like a bad dream, something that never really happened at all. . . And although she didn’t really believe it herself any more, that was enough — just enough — to hang onto. She stood reeling, hands to the sides of her helmet, her muscles suddenly as limp as rags, holding her up out of mere habit.
‘Oh shit,’ sighed Theo, approaching the lifter with his hand out as if to touch that hideous creation of murdered meat.
‘Don’t!’ cried Lina without thinking, as if the thing might suddenly come to life and eat Theo whole like a wolf in a children’s fairy story. She reached out one unsteady hand, meaning somehow to stop him, but it was all right — Theo stayed his hand and simply stood staring in awestruck revulsion.
Waine walked slowly past her, gliding silently as if on rails, to stand shoulder to shoulder with Halman. But Lina saw his eyes as he passed, and they looked dull and glazed in his wrinkled face.
‘That fucking bastard,’ snarled Halman, moving closer to Liu’s destroyed corpse. He turned around, his face full of horror and slowly-growing anger. ‘Poor fucking Liu,’ he said.
Lina regained control of her muscles, and she forced her feet to carry her forwards. Her throat was hitching and constricting, making her breathing heavy and hard. The thought of going out there again, into the belt, now seemed utterly unthinkable. For all her earlier determination, all her speeches to her son, she simply didn’t think she could do it now.
In her earpiece, she heard Waine begin to cry. This seemed significant to her — another bad omen.