Carver kicked out, doubling Ella over and launching her like a missile through the air. Instantly, he charged after her, running through a blizzard of water, the cutter flaming and blazing in his hands. Lina saw the picture of insane, murderous rage on his pinkish idiot’s face as he slashed through a power-press with the tool, sending up thick blasts of mineral steam.
Ella landed just behind Lina, crashing into a tool-rack, stunned. The pistol came out of her hand and flew away into the shadows behind them. Lina noticed a sneaky-looking, rat-faced little man with a pointed chin trying to creep up on her left, and she sent him scurrying for cover with a shot from her pistol. A red light illuminated on the weapon’s side. It had overheated.
Hobbes launched himself out from behind his box, hands still covering his neck and head, into the more substantial cover of a large waste compacter. He dragged himself over it to the other side, but Lina saw a laser beam hit him in the sole of one foot as he disappeared.
Carver was almost upon her now, but he was utterly intent on Ella, who still lay stunned and motionless. Lina popped up, aiming the laser at him. Of course, it didn’t fire. Oh shit, she thought as he turned his murderous face on her. I forgot about that. She saw Eli’s fingers strung around his neck and wondered fleetingly if her own would join them soon. Maybe he’d make a bracelet from them instead. Why not? He could start a whole fucking accessory line. In a few seconds she’d be dead, so it hardly mattered to her.
‘Aaaaarrgghhh!’ screamed Carver, flexing his huge arms at her. She could see the cords of muscle standing out above the neckline of his suit, the beads of sweat on his skin. And there was nothing in his eyes. Nothing.
Suddenly, Rocko popped up next to Carver and shot him in the side. Carver didn’t fold over in pain and he certainly didn’t die, although the hit was clearly a clean one. He did, however, spin to face Rocko, bringing the cutter around in a flickering backhand swipe. Rocko fired a burst of thrust from his suit’s arm-jet, flying back out of range. The cutter passed through some indiscernible snarl of machinery without slowing at all, sending electrical components and shorn wires flying. Smoke from the blazing fuel tank spread and drifted around the combatants. Lina smelled the repulsive savoury odour of burning meat.
‘Lina!’ Si screamed next to her. She turned to face him, feeling dreamy and slow. ‘Get out there and cut the tube! Go! Take Ella with you! We’ll push them back. There aren’t that many of them — we can do it! In thirty minutes, we’re gonna fire the jets. It’s our only chance. Now move!’
And then he rose up next to her — fearless, towering — and pushed up towards the ceiling. He passed right over Carver’s head, bounced back down to the floor and landed behind him. Carver spun, trying to bisect Si with the cutter, but Si checked his elbow, stopping the swing. For a split-second, Lina saw the two giants locked together, each straining to overpower the other, and then, with an immense effort of will, she leapt from cover.
She threw herself towards Ella, feeling something buzz angrily past her cheek, millimetres away from her skin — probably another rock pin. A laser beam, scintillating green, stroked the metal next to her, probing for flesh. She landed beside Ella, dropping her own gun and seizing her friend by the shoulders. She managed, somehow, to drag Ella round to the other side of the tool-rack. Her handhold on the rack slipped and she almost sent them both drifting into the open air, where they would have been easy prey. But she made it by sheer effort of will. The rack didn’t offer much cover, though. As if to prove this point, a laser beam passed right through one of the gaps in it, hitting the floor between Ella’s splayed legs and making a neat little burn there.
Lina slapped Ella round the face. ‘Ella!’ she screamed, spluttering out water. Rocko was shouting behind her. Hobbes too. He sounded like he was in pain. ‘Ella! Come on!’ There was a loud crash. She saw a tower of crates come apart and float away from each other, off to her right.
Ella jerked, her eyes flickering, and stiffened in Lina’s arms.
‘Wh. . .’ she managed to croak.
‘Ella! Come on!’ Lina repeated, shaking her friend by the scruff of her suit. Ella flopped uselessly, scratching Lina’s face with the zip of one glove. ‘You have to help me! Move, damn you!’
‘Lina. . .’ said Ella, fixing her with a glassy eye.
Another projectile hit something nearby, making a sound like a struck gong. Someone was moving along the racks to their left, closing in through the smoke and water vapour. The sound of Carver’s plasma cutter filled the world.
‘Move!’ Lina screamed into Ella’s face, and this time Ella moved.
They launched themselves back towards the door they had come in by, Lina grabbing for whatever handholds she could reach. Ella became less and less of a burden as she fully returned to her senses. They dragged themselves along handlines, clawed their way along pitted walls and metal-tiled floors. Lasers probed the space behind them. Rocko was shouting, but Lina couldn’t hear the actual words. Neither did it matter any more. They had a plan. One last plan. For it to work, though, they had first to get away. Even as long shots went, she thought this was a pretty unlikely one. Would the others be able to actually beat the prisoners back to the asteroid? Maybe, if Si could defeat Carver. . . then maybe. Thirty minutes. That tube had to be severed. Their last chance.
Lina fled, rat’s teeth of panic nibbling at the edges of her mind. She tried to concentrate only on the task at hand — where the handlines were, which way to go, how much time they had. When she finally dared to look behind her there was nobody in pursuit. She had left her friends, and she felt a twinge of guilt that she thought might become an unbearable sense of remorse if she survived this and they did not. But this was how it had to be. Whatever had befallen her comrades, they had clearly slowed their attackers down enough to allow Lina’s escape. As for pushing the enemy back to the asteroid. . . who knew? Thirty minutes thirty minutes, her mind chanted. How many left?
She imagined Marco, waiting in the freezing dorm, maybe looking out at the belt, wondering whether she would return. Clay would be waiting with him. Maybe that was why Si had suggested she take Ella with her. How exactly she had ended up subordinate to Si in this matter, she didn’t know.
They flew down the ladder to the bridge level, not even bothering to touch the rungs. The vile instawall bloom protruded from the bridge like a massive fungus.
Lina was achingly aware that neither of them was armed any more. The noise of Carver’s cutter had become inaudible, but still they didn’t slow. Perhaps he had simply switched it off to mask his pursuit. Perhaps her friends were dead. Or perhaps Carver was himself dead, his posse forced back to the asteroid. Who knew? From the radio, silence punctuated by bursts of static and the occasional indecipherable yell.
She wondered if they might somehow trigger another trap, but what could they really do except attempt to touch nothing and hope that it wouldn’t happen? They hurried onwards, back towards the cargo hold, deep in the haunted bowels of the vessel.
‘What do you have in mind?’ Ella asked after a while. She was dragging herself along the line on one of the walls, giving a hard yank and then letting it run through her hand until she slowed, whereupon she would repeat the process. Lina was using a rather less elegant frantic scrabbling technique. ‘What are we going to do? You have a plan, right? Surely we aren’t just running away.’
‘I want to get back to the Kays,’ she answered, forcing the words out through the gaps in her laboured breathing.