‘I don’t think I can do it,’ said Hobbes.
Halman turned a glowering look on him. ‘Well, Doctor,’ he said, ‘at least if you crash and die, we won’t have to take you back to the morgue to freeze you.’
‘That,’ said Hobbes a little haughtily, ‘is not funny.’
They clambered over the railing and hung from the outside of the walkway, suspended above that bottomless well. Lina looked to her left, where Ella was poised with her hands behind her on the bar and her feet braced against the walkway, ready to push off.
‘Let’s fly!’ cried Ella, and she sprung away from the ledge. Lina watched her go, her heart pulsing high in her throat. Ella’s white-suited body went sailing through space, spotted in half a dozen lights, her legs pulled up beneath her and her arms out to either side like wings.
‘She’s going too fast!’ yelled Niya, her voice cracking with panic.
‘Shit!’ cried Rocko.
But Ella soared gently over the nearest handrail of the lower walkway, grabbing onto the furthest rail with one hand and managing to arrest herself. Lina heard her grunt of exertion over the comm. Ella floundered, legs flailing, then managed to pull herself over and down onto the walkway’s floor. She righted herself, hovering just above the steel mesh, and waved.
‘Come on!’ she called. ‘What’re you all waiting for?’
Rocko laughed nervously. ‘I knew she’d make it,’ he said.
Someone else laughed — Lina wasn’t sure who — and then Si pushed off, more slowly than Ella had done. Then Rocko, Alphe, Halman, Hobbes. . .
Lina took a deep breath and jumped. Remembering her recent time in the hub with Marco, she pushed off gently and drifted, slower than anybody else, across the yawning chasm of the shuttle’s main hold. She hit the nearside railing of the new walkway squarely, cushioning herself easily with her hands, using them as buffers. Petra landed next to her, whooping with exhilaration. Several of them laughed, but it was a sound filled with tension and dangerously close to the edge of sanity. They dragged themselves onto the walkway and continued their journey.
The various walkways began to angle downwards and together. Soon they could see the main door to the hold — a large airlock door, wide enough to admit a dead-lifter easily. The floor ramped more sharply downwards and, although they could have simply drifted through space, they followed it, conditioned to obey the laws of up and down.
Suddenly, Halman’s vice-like hand gripped Lina’s shoulder from behind. She turned and looked up into his face. He pulled her to a stop and the rest of the group halted behind them. He pointed, down and to their left.
Lina followed the direction of his pointing finger and her chest seized tight. She saw it: a flash of white, down at floor level, moving between the cargo racks, a light briefly flashing ahead of it, then gone again.
‘Somebody in a space suit?’ she whispered, before remembering that there was no need to keep her voice down. Either the enemy was on their channel and would hear her, or not.
‘Yeah,’ said Halman. ‘I think so.’
Everyone was craning to see, leaning over the railing. Several people were pointing pistols. Lina stared, seeing only strapped-down piles of crates and boxes down there, magnetised together in tall, improbable-looking columns. That flash again — white — someone in a space suit, for sure.
Somebody fired — a silent stitch of green in the darkness. The person below them turned with panicky speed and their light glinted briefly in Lina’s eyes. And then a laser beam passed above her shoulder, harmlessly into the depths of the hold.
‘Shoot!’ cried Halman.
The figure below was swimming quickly just above the floor, firing on the fly, missing them all again. Several people from Lina’s team responded, although Lina herself stood uselessly holding her pistol at her waist, pointing down at her own feet. The figure flew from one stack of crates to another, crashed into something and went cartwheeling out into the open. Several shots from the walkway hit the unfortunate enemy at once. One shot put out their suit-light, another caught them high on the chest and a third hit them squarely in the head. The figure’s suit burst, leaving the victim twisting and thrashing in the vacuum, their laser discharging hopelessly into empty space.
‘I got him!’ cried Rocko fiercely.
Lina had to look away — she couldn’t stand to watch that struggling, asphyxiating death. It reminded her too much of Waine. She felt no joy at this small revenge, no sorrow for the murdered man, only a faded kind of revulsion at the spectacle.
‘Another one!’ somebody screamed — Petra? Ilse? — and panic gripped the group as they spun around, trying to look in all directions. Si lost his grip on the rail and drifted slowly out into open space, suspended magically above the drop.
‘Up there!’ yelled the voice again, and Lina knew this time that it was Ilse Reno. ‘Look!’
Lina turned and saw Ilse pointing up towards another walkway that was almost invisible in the darkness above them. A flash of white — someone dragging themselves along the rail up there, legs kicking behind them.
This time Lina managed to aim her own weapon. She fired, but her laser beam flashed away into the shadows of the ceiling. Other people were firing, too, their shots making a brief but dazzling cat’s-cradle of light. The figure dived down a set of steps, rolling over in their haste, and Lina fired again. She missed again, too, although she was closer this time. She suspected that the cheap laser was pretty inaccurate and that the fault wasn’t all hers.
The figure gained the next walkway down, slightly closer to them, and it paused to return fire. The laser winked green. Halman reeled back, hitting the rail behind him and bouncing off to crash into Hobbes, with whom he entangled. They both fell, spinning away together along the walkway. Another shot from above barely missed Si where he floated, exposed, on his back. He returned fire, his broad face locked in a savage rictus.
Lina tried to fix the figure in her suit-light, but it was moving again, pushing off to fly along the walkway. She saw Ilse and Rocko sighting along their weapons. One of them missed by an even longer margin than Lina herself had. But one of them hit the figure. Lina didn’t see where the shot had landed exactly, but she saw a flurry of white shreds as the enemy’s suit exploded. The figure shot up into the darkness, convulsing, scraps of suit fabric shimmering in the team’s torch beams, then rolled away into the cavernous depths of the cargo bay. The dying man faded from the range of their suit-lights, swallowed by the darkness. Gone.
They waited in silence, stabbing the barrels of their pistols in all directions, full of adrenalin, expecting more company. Gradually, they began to relax, lowering their guns. Hobbes extended a hand to Si, pulling him back to the walkway.
‘You okay, Hobbes?’ Halman asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Hobbes. ‘But you hit me pretty hard there. You?’
‘Fine,’ said Halman. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Do you think that’s it?’ asked Petra.
‘For now,’ said Rocko ominously.
‘Let’s go on,’ said Halman. ‘But expect more. Weapons ready.’
‘Poor bastards,’ said Hobbes. Nobody ventured so far as to agree with him.
As they continued down the incline of the walkway, nearing the airlock door that led to the pressurised part of the shuttle, Lina accidentally glanced down towards the dead man near the floor. His body floated, still rolling gently in the micro-gee, arms and legs spread, suit hanging in shreds. One less to fight later, she thought. She supposed that was a good thing. At least her team had all survived. That had to be a good thing, right? We’re winning, she told herself. So far, we’re winning.