‘It was your hair,’ said Halman. And then he forced himself to look at her. His eyes looked hollow and incredibly sad. ‘She was sure that it was yours.’
‘What?’ asked Lina again, utterly failing to decipher the intention behind these words. ‘He had my hair? Is that it? Is that your big secret? Well I can die happy now. Thanks, Dan!’
‘Lina!’ Halman almost shouted. ‘Think about it. Not his ex-wife’s hair, not a lock of hair from some cherished grandchild. Yours.’
The words began to sink into her brain like heavy rocks sinking into mud. ‘Holy shit. . .’ she breathed, finally wringing the meaning from what he had said. ‘You don’t mean he was in love with me, do you?’ Suddenly, she felt almost overpoweringly sick. She clenched her jaw, trying not to actually puke inside her suit. That would not be a good development in this little adventure.
‘That is one interpretation of the facts,’ said Halman guardedly. ‘Maybe that’s why he started the fader in the first place. He had to work with you every day, saw you all the time. He knew you wouldn’t have been interested in him, knew you were all about your son. He. . .’
‘Stop, Dan! Please just stop!’ she cried. She struggled against the now almost-ubiquitous tears. This was too much. She couldn’t think about it. This was too much. If true, then this was all her fault. She was the root from which this great tree of misery had grown. ‘No!’ she wailed. ‘No. . .’
‘Lina. . .’ Halman started. She waved him to silence, and they sat that way for some time. Lina tried to let her mind go blank, but her mind seemed to have other ideas. It kept re-writing events as she remembered them, this time inserting little tags all the way through: that was my fault. . . and that was my fault, too. . . that was because of me. . . and that one. . .
And then she was mercifully jerked from this dark reverie by Ella’s voice. Ella sounded clearer this time: ‘We’re just around the corner now.’
After another minute or so, Ella appeared, moving cautiously at the head of her little group. Lina was encouraged to see that Ella was still on high-alert and she walked with her laser pistol held at the ready.
‘You going to actually shoot me this time?’ asked Lina as Ella came towards them. She already felt better. Ella generally made her feel better. That was one of Ella’s redeeming qualities as far as Lina was concerned. She’d have to put the Eli-having-her-hair matter on the back-burner for now. Hopefully, she could leave it there for ever, although she suspected not.
‘Maybe,’ said Ella, lowering the gun all the same. ‘If you give me any shit.’
‘Well,’ said Halman, getting to his feet a little laboriously. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Good to see you guys.’ And he went to Ella and, amazingly, crushed her in a clumsy embrace. He turned to Hobbes, who took a cautious step back and held out his hand for Halman to shake. Petra he simply slapped on the back. Her handsome, angular face was arranged in a tolerant smile, but she didn’t look particularly receptive to hugging.
‘They won’t be far behind, all being well,’ said Hobbes. Clearly he meant Si’s team. Hobbes had found himself the neatest and cleanest space suit that Lina had ever seen. The face behind the visor was as immaculately shaved as ever. She wondered how he did it. She had caught sight of her own reflection in one of the windows they had passed earlier, and she had been alarmed to see the deep shadows of exhaustion beneath the surface of her features. She felt dirty, dishevelled and ill-used.
‘Good,’ said Halman. ‘I hope Alphe and Fionne will be all right to finish the work on the Kays.’
‘Have the escaped prisoners left the station?’ asked Petra, her face intent. She had not just one, but two laser pistols in the belt of her suit. Lina looked to Hobbes and saw that he, however, carried only a small medical kit.
‘Well I fucking hope so,’ answered Halman. ‘The plan now, my fine friends, is to take as many ships as we have out to that asteroid, where we will take the shuttle back as originally intended. All that has changed is that there are now more of them, and that we will have to take more of us. This is gonna be our last roll of the dice. We’ll take the best pilots and the best fighters we can. And we will succeed. Because we must.’
‘Right,’ said Petra curtly. ‘I’m coming.’
‘Well, I see no other choice, either,’ said Ella. She sounded almost alarmingly upbeat about it. ‘We do have more lasers than them. That bastard stole one weapon from the back-door security desk, but luckily he never found the main locker in the prison armoury.’
‘Yeah, one of those shit-bags shot Waine with it,’ said Halman.
Ella took a deep breath and held it for a moment. She let it out in a long sigh, grim-faced. ‘I was sorry to hear about Waine and Theo,’ she said. ‘We all were. There’s been too much of this, now. Too much. I want to force it to an end.’
‘Well the good news is,’ offered Hobbes, ‘that the station’s now so damn cold outside our dorms that the lack of power to the freezer isn’t really an issue any more. We can set up a makeshift morgue just about anywhere we choose.’
Halman turned on the much smaller man, his face incredulous. ‘Well fuck me, Hobbes,’ he cried, ‘if you don’t know how exactly to cheer a man up!’
‘What?’ asked Hobbes, unaware of having said anything wrong.
Halman shook his head wonderingly and walked away down the passage, hands clasped behind his back. But he didn’t go far. He turned and came back, setting up a repetitive cycle of pacing that Lina found rather tense. She tried not to watch him, and instead chatted with Ella and Hobbes.
Hobbes was poor conversation at best, so Lina and Ella soon fell into an essentially private discussion about Platini Alpha and, more specifically, Lina’s intention to take Marco there. Neither of them mentioned the fact that simply surviving the next twenty-four hours had become something of an uncertainty. Petra sat alone on the floor at the far end of the corridor, scrunched into a ball with her elbows over her knees. Her two pistols lay in front of her like a yin-yang.
After a while, they heard Si’s voice from the radio. He was close, just checking in to confirm that they hadn’t gone anywhere since he’d last spoken to Ella.
‘I wish,’ said Halman. ‘I’m getting fucking sick of waiting here.’
A few minutes later, Si’s massive figure appeared at the end of the corridor, spotlit in Hobbes’s suit-light, virtually filling the passage from side to side. Lina could see that he was grinning widely, his squarish, lantern-jawed face showing no sign of the worry that she herself felt. Rocko, Niya Onh, Ilse Reno, Alphe and Fionne were with him. They tramped down the passage towards the others, moving slowly in their heavy suits.
The group assembled there in the deserted living area, milling about and exchanging greetings. It occurred to Lina what an odd little family they made — a much reduced family now, she supposed. She wondered how many of them would return from their next mission. The odds had not been kind to them so far.
They made their way back to the hangar, moving in formation as directed by Halman. He sent scouts down every side-corridor, into every doorway, to check for lurking enemies. The station was a frozen relic of the home they knew so well, and they passed through it in dreamy silence for the most part. Lina felt as if their lives hung in a delicate equilibrium, a state that could be upset at any moment by a laser beam, or an escaped murderer rushing from a shadowy alcove, or maybe a booby trap left by Carver’s gang. They processed through the warehouse to stand in a nervous group before the open hangar door. Relatively bright light still spilled from it into the warehouse, staining the floor like whitewash.