Lina peered round the edge of the door into the hangar, scanning the shadows for human shapes. She saw nobody living, but Theo’s body lay in two twisted halves not far inside, the stump of his pistol next to him. She couldn’t see Waine’s remains — he had fallen behind her Kay, and was out of sight from her vantage point. The loader was gone, but the space door still yawned open at the far end of the flight deck.
‘Let’s go,’ said Halman. ‘Carefully, now. Ella, Si — I want you to go round the back and check the control room. Rocko, Lina — down the far side. I’ll go down the right with Petra. Everyone else stay put and eyes open.’
The hangar proved to be empty except for the corpses of their friends. The toppled Kays lay around the deck forlornly. Lina was almost personally offended by this, and she realised with a glint of dark amusement that she considered the ships — all of them — to be hers.
Si found a pair of dirty and ancient-looking tarpaulins and he threw one over Liu’s desecrated remains and another over Theo and Waine, whose corpses he dragged together to lay beside each other in death. He said nothing while he did this. As he finished and turned to walk away, Lina caught a glimpse of his face. It was utterly blank but for two patches of angry red high on his cheeks.
They closed the space door — it looked too easy for someone too stray to close, slip on the ice and fall into space. They parked a Kay right on the lip of the ramp, anchoring onto the deck itself, to obstruct any further unwanted attempts to land. Halman stationed Petra and Si at the hangar door to guard against any attack from that direction, even though they were all agreed that Carver’s mob had surely left Macao.
Alphe and Fionne, quiet and shell-shocked, returned to work on the Kays, trying not to look at the tarpaulin-covered humps that represented the butchered bodies of their friends. The others formed a rough perimeter around the two techs, facing outwards with their guns drawn. It seemed to Lina like a classic case of too little, too late.
After a while, Ella distributed spare air cartridges to those who needed them. The suits were clever enough to allow hot-swapping of these, as long as it was done relatively quickly. It was still a dangerous procedure, though, as any delay with the installation of the new cartridge could leave the recipient airless and in serious trouble. Luckily, all the replacements went well enough, and Lina chided herself for being a little surprised at that. She was getting too accustomed to disaster. She wished that she had gone back to the dorm with Si’s team. It might have been her last chance to speak to Marco. But it was too late now, so she supposed she would simply have to survive the coming assault.
Alphe and Fionne progressed in silence, sharing the telepathic link common to long-time work partners everywhere. They finished the installation of the enlarged cutting discs and then checked all of the Kays for obvious defects. It had been agreed that they wouldn’t fly any of the ships that had been bumped by the ISL. Several of them looked superficially all right, but Alphe and Fionne admitted that they needed Liu to confirm that. Without him, they said, it might take them some hours to be sure. They had done what they could.
The others came and stood beside Alphe, regarding the modified Kays in critical silence. Eventually, Halman turned to Alphe and asked, ‘Are you happy with them?’
Alphe sucked his lips thoughtfully. ‘Yeah,’ he said at last. ‘Happy as I can be.’
‘Good,’ said Halman, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Listen up, you lot!’ he began, turning to address the group as a whole. Lina felt numb and detached, as if this was all happening inside a holo and she was merely watching from her sofa. ‘We have ten operational Kays. The following will go to the shuttle: Myself, Lina, Ella, Hobbes, Si, Rocko, Petra, Ilse, Niya and Alphe. Fionne, as the only non-pilot here, you are excused, and hereby ordered to return to the dorm. Report to Amy Stone and tell her what’s happening. She is, of course, in charge ’til I return.’
‘Okay,’ said Fionne in a quiet little voice. Lina wondered how she felt about Rocko going without her. Not too good, she suspected.
‘Lina will cut into the shuttle’s hold. Ilse will fly the other modified ship, in case something goes wrong with Lina’s. We will enter the shuttle as quickly as we can, flying across in suits. Anyone who wants to play fuckaround with us, we shoot them. You all up for that?’ He cast around for agreement, his expression deadpan. Nobody answered verbally, but their faces were set and hawkish. ‘Good. Once inside, we head for the bridge, where we will release the clamp on the boarding tube that joins the shuttle to that damned rock, and. . . away we go.’
‘Piece of piss,’ said Si, with some small trace of his habitual ebullience.
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Halman.
‘Well,’ said Ella decisively. ‘No time like the present, eh?’
‘Fionne,’ said Halman. ‘Go home, okay?’ She nodded sadly, then ran to Rocko. She embraced him, their suits briefly making one amorphous whole. ‘I love you,’ she whispered, the words clear in everyone’s earpieces. They pointedly looked away, trying not to listen. ‘Yeah,’ said Rocko. ‘I love you, too.’ Then she released him, turned around and simply walked away.
They went to their respective ships, climbed the steps, and strapped themselves in. Ella took the one they had parked across the ramp, and she moved it out of the way with apparent ease, even skill. Lina watched in her HUD as a field of identifier-tags came to life. The enlarged cutting disc looked obvious and somehow wrong.
As she let the cockpit pressurise so that she could remove her helmet for a while, she considered the trial that lay ahead of her. Out there in the belt, a strange and bloodthirsty enemy awaited them. Eli was almost certainly dead, but still a reckoning was at hand. She realised that she was no longer afraid, though. A conclusion was approaching, most likely a bloody one, maybe a personally fatal one. But nonetheless, she welcomed it.
‘Come on,’ she whispered, looking to the left, where Halman was bringing his Kay round with the halting uncertainty of someone who hadn’t flown for years. Ice dusted down from its landing gear and shivering hull. Was it significant that he was in Eli’s old ship? She wasn’t sure, but she no longer cared about the omens. She just wanted it to end, one way or the other. ‘Come on,’ she whispered again. ‘Let’s go.’
The Kays converged on the runway behind her, manoeuvring around their injured fellows. She waited for their icons to align, then hit the pad to open the space door. The ramp dropped away, angling out of sight. Lina caught glimpses of dark rock and endless night as she dialled up the gas, aware of the slipperiness of the deck. As the vessel accelerated off the end of the ramp, she risked a backward glance at the station. It was rising away behind her already, dark and vast and silent, like a gravestone in space. It disgorged the following Kays in a regular arc.
‘I’m coming back,’ she whispered, wondering who she was speaking to. Her hand was sweating on the yoke, making it slippery. She angled it down, heading towards the belt.
Chapter Forty-Six
By the time they made it to the shuttle, Carver’s eyes were stinging worse than ever. His sight, however, had almost returned to normal. Seriously, he hadn’t doubted that it would — would the dragon allow its emissary to stay blind? Hardly likely. Although he sat in the back looking down at his own knees, squinting and blinking in pain, he could tell that the prisoner was flying the loader with a fair degree of skill. The other prisoners sat around him in silence and he could feel their tension and excitement all around him. Everything was going to plan.