Welby, unfazed, shot him again, this time in the face. The laser burned cleanly through the front of Marcus’s skull. His eyes glazed instantly, as if net curtains had fallen behind them, then rolled up into his head. The baton drifted away from his hand and Carver caught it smoothly, laughing softly to himself. It couldn’t have been choreographed better if he’d tried.
‘Good,’ said the dragon.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Carver. ‘Easy.’
‘I’m hungry. . .’ crooned the dragon. ‘So hungry. . .’
‘How will you eat?’ asked Carver. Welby looked up into his face indulgently. ‘Should I take them to the rock face?’ Maybe the dragon would want the prisoners ground up and poured into a fissure in the stone.
‘Until I am free,’ explained the dragon wistfully, ‘I must live my life through you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Carver, but he thought perhaps he did.
‘You, Emissary, must be my eyes, my ears, my claws. . . my teeth. . .’
‘Of course,’ breathed Carver, staring at those three drifting corpses. He was suddenly and ravenously hungry.
Chapter Forty-Seven
They flew through the belt in loose formation. Lina steered mainly by Halman’s and Alphe’s Kays, which stayed ahead of her and to either side. Her ship’s safety systems were running, but her trust in the safety of anything that came from Macao had long since dwindled. She half expected, at any moment, to be smashed to smithereens by an errant belt object, but even this was not enough to really frighten her. The conclusion was coming. Let it come. All she felt was a distant sense of relief.
Halman had ordered a change of radio channel, concerned that the prisoners might hear them on the default frequency. Nobody felt conversational anyway. They flew in silence.
As the belt thickened, a virtual infinity of potential ambush-points and hiding places flourished about them. The loader might spring out at them, even try to ram one of the Kays, but still Lina was unable to feel afraid. She wondered if Carver’s gang had seen them coming yet. Hadn’t she herself once joked to Eli about Macao’s prisoners escaping and establishing a pirate base out here? Another joke that had proven to be prophetic. Perhaps, in some impossible way, they’d seen it coming.
When Eli’s rock came into sight, she regarded it with disappointment. It was just a rock — large, but not so unlike a million other rocks out here. Except that this one had the ugly grey shuttle attached to it like a leech and the loader attached in turn to that. The whole thing looked lifeless, unthreatening, kind of sad. But the enemy was there, and in greater numbers now. She wondered what they hoped to achieve on that isolated boulder beyond starvation and an eventual, lonely death. She wondered if the dragon was real, if it was in there, sitting at the centre of its monstrous web, pulling the strings and watching its puppets dance to its bloody, savage tune. If it was real, would it somehow try to stop them? Could it somehow try to stop them?
Although the belt was eerie enough, the shadow that Lina had sensed there before was not in evidence now. She supposed it probably never had been and she regretted mentioning it to Halman. If, as she suspected, it had merely been an externalisation of her own fears, those fears seemed much diminished now. Perhaps the continual fright and horror of recent days had dehumanised her, burned away all of her capacity for real emotion. Even her love for her son seemed a distant concept, something she knew was genuine and solid, but that she couldn’t tangibly feel at that moment. Now she was just glad that an end was coming. That was enough.
Soros glinted through chinks in the asteroid field, pale and watery and distant, fading in and out of sight like a thief flitting between patches of shadow. She thought wonderingly about how far away Platini system was, and tried to gauge the possibilities of ever crossing that vast, desolate emptiness with her son, fleeing this merciless outpost at the end of the universe, desperately seeking something better.
She wanted the shuttle that Eli had stolen. Not just for Macao, not just for the desperately-needed supplies and parts that it held, but for her own selfish reasons too. The shuttle was her and Marco’s only ticket out of here, unless they were somehow to survive the wait for the next one. She had to have it. She would risk her life on this one throw of the dice. And she would earn the right to take the vessel to Platini. Damn it, she’d demand the right if she survived this. And she’d take anyone else who wanted to go with her. To hell with Macao Station. It had been the grave of too many of her friends.
Their Kays converged on the unwelcoming mass of rock and machinery, the tiny threads of their gas trails wavering through the belt like spider silk. The shuttle was unlit, deserted, the loader just as dark and silent. The asteroid loomed large against a backdrop of endless grey and black, its facing side in shadow. It looked like a hole in space, a vortex into which a person might fall upwards and away into the archives of the universe and disappear forever. Slowly, they approached.
They spread around the asteroid in a wide fan, encircling it and checking for danger. Finding nothing, they edged closer, tightening the net.
Si stopped his ship at the wide end of the rock and shone his headlight onto it. ‘It’s just an asteroid,’ he said, echoing Lina’s own disappointment. She wondered what they had expected to see.
She looked to her side, and there was K6-3, tagged with Ella’s name, hanging in space, appearing to regard the asteroid with the cyclopean eye of its cockpit glass. Ella’s ship rotated slightly to face Lina’s, and beckoned with one of its tool arms. Lina thought she caught the meaning of the gesture: Let’s get on with it. She waved an arm in return and brought her Kay around in a careful arc, moving down the length of the asteroid back towards the shuttle. The asteroid’s scaled surface slid along below her, gaudy with bright instawall patches.
She stopped halfway along the shuttle’s hold — the vast, curved belly that formed the greater part of its bulk — and unfolded her tool arms. The new cutting disc looked fragile and unwieldy. She flexed the arms, checking the diagnostics one last time.
‘I’m ready,’ she said.
‘Go to it,’ answered Halman. His Kay coasted across her field of vision, left to right, just above her.
She approached the shuttle warily, as if it might bite, and applied a magnetic anchor. She also spun up a screw anchor, pressed it gently to the skin of the shuttle and let it wind itself in tightly. She applied a little burst of reverse thrust, testing the strength of her grip on the larger vessel. Her Kay didn’t budge at all.
‘Right. . .’ she said under her breath.
She fired up the cutting disc and touched it to the shuttle’s hull. The vibration reverberated through the body of her Kay, making her teeth chatter together. Glittering jets of dust arced away from the cut, dissipating into space. The disc sank into the metal. She worked it carefully down in a vertical line, then withdrew it, turned it ninety degrees, and cut a horizontal. When she had inscribed a neat door-shape, she drew the cutter back. She looked to her right and saw Ilse Reno’s ship hovering next to her.
‘Nice work,’ said Ilse.
Was that the first compliment Ilse had ever given her? Lina thought perhaps it was. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
Lina put out a claw and pushed against the vertical rectangle she had cut. Silently, it gave way and popped neatly out of the hole. The door-shaped chunk floated away into the ship and was lost from sight in darkness. The lights were off in there.