‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lina with mock grandiosity. ‘Please step inside.’
‘Is everyone ready?’ Halman asked.
The ships drifted, equidistant, their computers keeping them safely separated. The hull of the shuttle soared away above them like a cliff face. There was a general chorus of affirmation. Lina heard real fear in many of their voices. Niya Onh sounded as if she might be crying.
Lina released the clamps that held her Kay to the shuttle and burned briefly away from it, then stopped and floated stationary just behind Ilse. ‘I’ll go first,’ she suggested, deciding that recklessness might be the better part of valour.
She closed her visor and called up her suit’s HUD. She scanned the figures that floated before her eyes. All within ideal parameters. Plenty of air. She killed the main console of her ship without bothering to shut it down properly, then braced herself in the seat. The soft darkness of space rolled away into the distance, monotonous and eternal. A brief stab of longing — for bright sunlight, solid ground underfoot, trees and seas and houses, things she hadn’t seen since childhood — struck her somewhere deep inside. She was going out there, into that, with nothing more than the space suit she wore now. It didn’t look like a place where any human being belonged. And worse than that, she had to go into the shuttle. Into the dragon’s lair, she thought darkly. It’ll eat you up! But would it? Could it?
She reached up and turned the twin cockpit release handles. The canopy popped open a hand’s breadth with a vomited expulsion of air. She reached out her hand, pushing it all the way up, then paused in wonder, trailing her fingers through the vacuum. Curious that this medium, anathema to human life, was itself completely invisible — just nothing. A vast, fatal nothing. This was the stuff of which the universe was made. It was a wonder life existed anywhere.
She undid her harness and pushed away from her seat, a little too hard, flying between the rim of the cockpit and the open canopy, sending herself floating away towards another Kay. She saw Rocko ejecting from this other vessel, clumsily pinwheeling into space.
The air of her suit smelled sickly and somehow burnt, not unlike the noisome air of Macao itself. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so alone and vulnerable, floating in space with only a few layers of fabric between her and oblivion.
Lina had never had occasion to use the in-built manoeuvring jet of a space suit before. She’d always flown pressurised vessels. In truth, she’d only ever worn a suit twice before this whole mess had started. She hoped it would be instinctive to use, because Alphe hadn’t allowed them to waste any fuel in practice. She pointed the sleeve-mounted jet away from the shuttle and fired a brief burst, sending herself drifting smoothly towards the doorway that she had cut. She hit the hull of the shuttle shoulder-first, hard enough to send a jarring shock through her body. Alphe had warned her that the jet only had about thirty seconds total burn time available, but so far she’d used less than one, so she thought that would be plenty.
She imagined the psychotic Carver waiting for her in there, all bloodthirsty grins and human-finger-necklaces. She could almost see him crouching in the metal-smelling darkness of the ancient ship, grinning. Waiting. Madness was patient, after all. That was one thing that Eli’s deception of his friends had taught her: madness was patient.
She clawed her way along the blistered surface of the shuttle. In some places the metal was so deeply pitted by impact marks that she could have put her whole hand into the dents. She gripped the edge of the rough doorway she had cut and looked back over her shoulder. Her companions were drifting towards her in a tentative-looking swarm.
It occurred to Lina that if there was indeed a greeting party waiting for them then Carver’s people could just sit there and blast them one by one as they came through. It’d be little more than a turkey-shoot. It was possible that someone would be able to get a radio message off, but the radios in the suits were pretty weak, and the shuttle’s hull was pretty thick, so probably not.
With this thought in her mind, Lina dragged herself round the lip of the doorway and fell into the blackness of the shuttle’s hold. She tumbled, suit-light flashing over and over, showing blurring snatches of metal railings and spidery walkways. She let out the smallest burst that she could from the suit’s arm-jet, hoping to right herself. She spun away, end over end, and hit one of the railings back-first. She cried out in pain but gripped onto it, finally managing to still herself.
When she cast her light back onto the doorway in the hull, she saw the unmistakable shape of Si Davis squeezing through, dragging himself down the metal wall with clawed hands. He looked up when her light fell on him and grinned his broad grin. ‘Hey, Lina. I saw you spinning out then. Thought you were an expert pilot.’ He gained one of the walkways above Lina and grabbed onto the railing, bracing his feet against the floor.
‘I’m still a better pilot than you,’ she retorted. But it was an automatic reply and the exchange seemed a pretty weak imitation of their usual banter. Si let it drop.
Other suited figures were clambering into the shuttle now, one by one, like great white crabs, scampering in slow motion down the walls to mass on the walkways around Lina and Si. Halman stopped beside her, holding onto the rail with one hand while his legs trailed in empty space above what would, in a one-gee environment, have constituted a very dangerous drop. Lina leant over and shone her light into the depths. She couldn’t even see the floor down there. Above her, heavy crane arms were folded tight against their ceiling gimbals.
‘Hello, Dan,’ she said.
‘Hey, Lina,’ he said. The face behind his visor was shiny with sweat, swarthy and old-looking.
Alphe dragged himself along the rail towards them, also trying to run along the walkway with his feet and mainly just managing to look ridiculous.
‘I know the way to the bridge,’ said Alphe without preamble. ‘And I have the printed schematic with me, just in case.’
‘Good,’ said Halman. He turned and looked around at his little army. ‘Are we all ready to move?’ Nobody said otherwise. ‘Then let’s go. And take it easy, now. Although you don’t have any weight to speak of, you do still have mass in this environment. That means you have momentum, and that means you can get hurt if you go crashing around the place like fuckwits. Alphe — lead on. To the bridge. And for fuck’s sake, keep your eyes peeled and your guns handy. My earlier speech about asking anyone we meet to surrender no longer applies. Now we’re outnumbered and we can’t afford such luxuries. Now we shoot first, ask questions later.’
They swam through a silent treetop village of steel mesh and flaking paint. They passed occasional small rooms — little more than sheet-metal huts — dotted here and there amongst the walkways. At one point they found their way barred by a thick forest of chains that stretched away into the great pit of shadows below them and snaked alarmingly when Lina tried to squeeze through.
‘Let’s find another way,’ she said, backing off. Her companions floated behind her, holding onto the railings.
‘How about we jump to the next walkway?’ suggested Ilse. Her eye glowed demonically red in her face and her straggly grey hair, not tied back, had fallen across her forehead beneath her visor. She looked small and mean and dangerous.
‘Yeah, no problem,’ said Si.
‘Don’t use your jets,’ said Halman. ‘Not unless you have to.’ He was leaning over the edge, casting his light onto the next walkway. It looked a very long way off and quite far below them. Lina knew that she was just constrained by her usual one-gee way of thinking, but she remembered Halman’s words about momentum. ‘Go slowly and accurately. If anyone ends up spinning out of control it might take them ages to get back to the group.’