They crawled and bounced and swam their way back to the ladder that led up into the ceiling outside the bridge. The ugly instawall flower hadn’t extended far enough to block the ladder, but it had come close. Lina was pretty sure the stuff had become inert now, but they all avoided touching it as they cautiously stepped onto the ladder one by one.
They reached the top without incident and found themselves in another corridor — lower, darker, more jumbled with machinery. Great pipes stretched away into darkness, visible inside the meshwork walls. Blueish LEDs shone from the ceiling like cold stars. Missing wall-panels showed battered junction-boxes and badly-soldered wiring.
‘Come on!’ called Lina, moving off down the passage. The others followed behind her, frightened but infused with fresh purpose.
Rocko sped past her, snagging a cable to stop himself. ‘You know how to fire the jets manually?’ he asked. ‘Cos I don’t think I do. I mean, I could do it on a Kay, but this thing must have loads of them.’
‘I think so,’ she replied. In truth, she had no idea — not specifically — but she was confident that she could work it out. She thought about Carver’s gang finding themselves suddenly trapped within their new prison of rock, desperate with fear and disbelief, and that renewed her energy and determination. She wondered how they could be certain that all the prisoners were actually stuck inside the rock and not wandering free somewhere in the shuttle. For all they knew, the enemy might be in the engine rooms waiting for them. She gripped her gun tightly and dragged herself onwards.
They emerged into a wide space filled with battered industrial equipment: air scrubbers; water purifiers; a row of sus-an casks intended for passengers; racks of hand-tools; magnetic-bed trolleys; other things that Lina couldn’t even identify. The ceiling soared above them, three times the height of the corridor’s, criss-crossed with suspended walkways and hung with winches and brackets.
‘The machine rooms,’ said Rocko. ‘It’s not far from here.’
Petra slid silently past Lina, her gun cocked at her shoulder. Ella followed behind her, checking between computer cabinets that towered on either side like standing stones. Lina trailed along, falling further behind until she brought up the rear with Si, who drifted beside her silently, a strong and reassuring presence on her mental radar.
There was a sudden bang — a little exclamation of noise, nothing really — and Petra flew backwards, crashing into Ella and sending her somersaulting into a pile of canvas drive belts where she landed on her back. Petra’s flight continued, past Hobbes, who just managed to dodge out of the way in time. She smashed into an empty shelving unit to Lina’s left, thrashing and jerking. Lina recoiled, gasping for breath that suddenly wouldn’t come. Blood was spraying from Petra’s head in a thick, beautiful fountain of escaping life essence. A rock pin — a twenty-centimetre steel spike — had been fired into her skull, right in the centre of her forehead, where it protruded like a unicorn’s horn. Petra arched her back, throwing her limbs out, rolling up the shelving unit and onto the ceiling, globules of blood spreading around her in a ruby-red constellation.
‘Ambush!’ Ella screamed, diving for cover behind a cabinet.
Si raised his pistol, firing as it came up into position, almost hitting Hobbes in his urgency. He kicked off, flying backwards towards cover, shooting as he went. Lina was firing too, aiming into the mass of white-clad, swarming shapes that was flooding into the room from the far door. At the forefront of the oncoming group was a massive giant of a man, wielding what was unmistakeably a plasma cutter. Carver.
Lina hooked one foot around a lever that jutted from some nearby machine, pulling herself down into its protective shade as she loosed shot after shot at the giant who ran towards her, dodging and ducking low, his magnetic boots clanking and banging on the deck as they released and reattached with each step. None of her shots hit him, though. One of them actually bounced off the shiny barrel of the plasma cutter itself and hit the shoulder of another prisoner. Although the beam had diffused as it rebounded, it still had energy enough to do its job. The prisoner lost control and hit the ceiling, slapping and clawing at his shoulder. Someone shot him again and he jerked once, then fell still. A pistol drifted out of his hand and floated gently away.
Lina hit the deck behind the machine, a large square thing with a plastic hood and a startling array of switches. The breath went out of her in a painful rush. Laser beams zig-zagged across the floor beside her, making her pull her knees up close to her chest. There was a loud, concussive bong! sound as something — probably another rock pin — hit the other side of the machine like a sledge hammer.
Si appeared beside her, firing as he came, ducking into cover, yelling something that Lina couldn’t hear. Shouting voices; the deafening noise of the plasma cutter; bouncing lights whose touch meant death, stitching the darkness with brilliant lethality.
She caught a glimpse of Ilse Reno, a petite figure with a red-glowing eye, clawing her way behind a large fuel tank. Lasers danced across the tank and it erupted into sudden flame, splashing Ilse with gobbets of blazing liquid as she scrabbled around it, immolating her instantly. She screamed, the pitch so high that Lina could barely hear it, and turned over, writhing as she tried to put herself out. She dragged herself around the shattered, flaming tank, as if it might still offer safety. Then, blazing and dying, she collapsed with just one burning foot protruding.
The sprinklers in the ceiling gushed to sudden life, spouting water that rebounded from every surface, clumping into crystal balls that drifted like bubbles through the air and burst afresh where they landed. The flaming fuel tank guttered but did not extinguish.
Hobbes was pinned down on the other side of the main aisle, behind a crate that was barely as big as his body, one hand over his head and the other trying to hold him still. Lina peeped out of cover and saw Rocko bouncing from behind a computer terminal, clutching his shoulder, trying to back-track towards her and Si. A prisoner flew out of the shadows to his left, and she tried to cry out, to warn him of the flanking attack, but she could not. Her voice simply died inside her throat.
Rocko spun with amazing speed and shot the man twice in the face, hitting him a third time as he fell. But Carver was almost upon him. He had the plasma cutter raised above his head, slicing into the ceiling, sending out gobbets of white-hot metal.
Lina fired at him again, but either he was somehow charmed or she was just a terrible shot, because she missed him by several metres. Ella darted out from between two tall shelves, moving like a striking shark, coming from Carver’s blind-side and hitting him bodily, knocking him back. But his magnetic boots retained contact with the floor and he immediately rebounded, swinging the cutter at her head, Rocko forgotten.
Rocko came instantly to Ella’s aid, kicking out, knocking Carver’s aim off and bringing his gun to bear on the giant. Another prisoner — a hugely fat man with a heavily-scarred face — came from behind Carver and struck Rocko on the side of his neck with what looked like a metal bar, sending him flying backwards into a rack of equipment. Ella stepped in close to Carver, kicking out at his groin. Although she connected, sending herself shooting backwards, it only seemed to anger him, and his back-swing grazed across the belly of her suit, coming within inches of her flesh.
Lina, unable to even get a clear shot at Carver, fired instead at the huge man who was floating in the air above Rocko’s prone and struggling form, hefting the metal bar in his gloved hands. Amazingly, she hit him right between his shoulder blades. The man released the bar and drifted up towards the ceiling, hands going to the burn and pawing at it in disbelief. Rocko recovered and shot him again.