‘Is it far?’ asked Petra, swimming past Lina with surprising agility. She held her pistol at arm’s length, pointing to her side, as if trying to distance herself from it.
‘Not that far,’ said Alphe meaninglessly.
They descended to the floor level, following the handlines that stretched between steel poles bolted into the floor. Those towers of crates leant over them. They passed a dead-lifter, secured against low-gee inside a cradle in the wall.
‘It’s quiet,’ said Ella in a whisper, scanning around herself. ‘Too quiet.’ She laughed nervously. ‘That’s a bit clichéd, isn’t it?’ she asked, a little quiver in her voice.
Lina looked around. The dead man in the shredded suit was behind them now, gently pirouetting in a perpetual dance of death. Halman pushed to the front of the group and hit the pad beside the airlock.
Rocko and Ella hung back, acting as rearguard. Lina cast her light up into that night sky of soaring cranes and vaulted metal, seeing only a collage of black layers, watching for the incongruous flash of white that would mean more danger.
The airlock door opened silently and they followed Halman inside. The airlock looked old and well-used, its walls heavily scarred by collisions. Lina noticed a dangling bundle of plastic relays held together with insulating tape, which did little to reassure her.
Halman pushed through to the far end and cycled the airlock. The door by which they had entered dropped suddenly into place, trapping them. There came the building rush of pressurising air and then the opposite door slid open.
They emerged into a wide corridor lit by LED lights. Pistons moved beneath the grated floor like ligaments stretching and contracting. The airlock closed behind them with finality. They raised their visors and pulled themselves along the handline in a rag-tag procession.
‘Shhh!’ hissed Ella suddenly.
Lina turned to see Ella behind her, frozen in place with her head cocked to the side and one index finger raised for quiet.
‘What?’ Lina whispered.
‘I thought I heard something,’ said Ella.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Halman. ‘You think it was trouble?’
Ella shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Sounded like some sort of machine noise. I want to scout ahead for a minute before we rush in en masse.’
Halman floated past her, towards the opposite wall. He dragged himself along it, clawing with his gloves, trying to see round the corner at the end of the corridor. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Si — you too. Everyone else sit tight and make sure nothing comes out of that airlock behind us.’
Halman swam off down the corridor, followed by Ella and then Si, who ricocheted clumsily from floor to ceiling as he went, cursing quietly.
Lina placed the palm of one hand against the wall, trying to temper the feeling of instability that she was suffering from. Through the padded skin of her glove she could feel a distant, low thrumming in the shuttle’s structure, as if something was vibrating in the bowels of the ship, some kernel of life-force trembling inside it. She felt a frown crease her face. Ella had thought she’d heard machine noise. What were Carver’s escaped psychos doing in there?
Of course, the answer that presented itself to her miner’s mind was: Digging. Mining. But mining for what? Metals? Surely not. What, then?
‘They’re digging for it,’ she breathed, making Alphe glance up at her, his honest face open in enquiry.
‘Eh?’
‘Nothing,’ she answered, unwilling to explain herself. She had already tried that with Halman and she was pretty sure that he thought she was crazy. She shut the thought from her mind and looked away. ‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated. How would spouting mystic bullshit about buried dragons actually help at this stage? It wouldn’t change the fact that, whatever happened, they had to get this shuttle back to the station.
‘Nothing?’ he pushed, alerted by the tone of her voice. ‘Sure?’
Petra dragged herself over, Hobbes close behind her. Niya floated just before the corner of the passage, watching Si’s back as he disappeared off into the ship’s innards.
Lina glanced around, aware that she had drawn a crowd. ‘It’s just that Ella thought she heard machine noise. If you put your hand on the wall, you can feel a vibration through it.’ The others did as she suggested. ‘You see? I wonder if they’re mining for something.’
‘I just want to get to the bridge, release the clamp and get the hell out of here,’ said Petra. She looked around herself. Peeling walls loomed at unnatural angles, a world devoid of true directional reference points. They had oriented themselves with the floor as best they could, but the impression of order felt tenuous at best. Petra shivered, hugging herself. ‘It’s creepy.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Hobbes in a flat tone that was a long way from his reassuring doctor-voice. Lina wished that he had agreed to carry a gun, but she supposed it probably breached the Hippocratic Oath or something.
‘They’re coming back,’ said Niya quietly. Her voice was almost too cutesy to belong to a real person — she always sounded like a cartoon character to Lina, an effect enhanced by her tiny figure and angelic face. They dragged and swam their way towards the corner. Si returned first, followed by Ella and then Halman.
‘Well?’ asked Lina. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘We think we know the way to the bridge,’ said Si. ‘The shuttle’s interior seems to have been changed a little from the schematic that Alphe has.’
‘Changed?’ asked Petra. ‘How so?’
‘It’s old,’ Halman said. ‘The architecture of these things often gets altered a little over the years. But we know which way to go. We think.’
‘Any sign of life?’ Lina asked. Hobbes floated at her elbow, struggling to stay still despite having hold of a handline. He steadied himself on Lina’s shoulder with the other hand, almost making her lose control herself.
‘Nobody we could see,’ answered Ella. She absently scratched the side of her nose with the muzzle of her pistol. ‘That noise is louder down there though. But we can’t tell if it’s coming from the shuttle’s machine rooms or the asteroid. No more of those bastards,’ she said, indicating the hold behind them, where they had left two men floating dead in the vacuum, ‘so that’s the main thing.’
‘Come on,’ ordered Halman, beckoning them to follow him. ‘Let’s move out. Eyes and ears open, folks. Petra and Rocko take rearguard. I don’t want anyone popping out of some unseen hatch or some shit and getting the drop on us.’
Halman led them round the corner and into a longer, narrower passage. The tension was high, like a current that flowed through all of them. The noise grew steadily louder as they progressed, becoming a continuous murmur that none of them could deny. They turned right at the end of the long corridor, passing beneath a wide grate in the ceiling from which steam hissed in roiling bunches, ivory-white in their lights, blinding them. They dragged themselves through, fearful of being attacked in their temporarily vulnerable state.
They continued. Right, then left. Down, then right. Past looming doors through which strange machinery and angular ducting could be glimpsed. They let Alphe push to the front of the group and lead the way, reading from his schematic, which, although wrong, was still the best guide they had. The metal walls pressed in on them, tightening like jaws. Macao seemed to be another world, an impossibly distant base, hardly a sanctuary itself. They passed no windows — except for the bridge, the shuttle had none. They crawled and swam through a grey, self-contained world of growing, growling machine noise and rough metal walls marred by amateurish welds. Marco, Lina thought. Platini.