He and Schlosser would move towards one side of the hangar entrance in order to draw the guard-machine's attention. Sal and Dantec, meanwhile, would feint towards the entrance's opposite side and draw it back towards them. Then – and here, Corso knew, was the most crucial, most vulnerable part – he and Schlosser would make a break towards the Piri Reis.
To his surprise, they agreed fairly rapidly. Corso, accompanied by Schlosser, crept towards the left side of the hangar entrance. As Corso had hoped, the guard-machine swivelled its eye-sensors towards them, and soon began to move closer. Schlosser turned to give a signal, whereupon Dantec and Sal crept over to the right side of the entrance.
After hesitating just a moment, the machine twisted around with astonishing speed and snatched Dantec up in its forward manipulators. It threw her towards the rear of the hangar, where she hit the side of a tank with a dull clang before slumping, lifeless, to the deck. Her head was twisted at a sickening angle, and it was clear she'd been killed at once.
Perhaps, Corso thought, he should have taken this opportunity to run over to the Piri Reis; but the savage brutality with which the machine reacted had triggered a deeper, animal response, so instead he had run for the nearest place of safety – one of the darkened and hopefully inaccessible spaces between the tanks.
Rather than following them, the six-legged machine simply returned to its post, as implacably watchful as ever.
After a while, they slipped over to Dantec's limp body and dragged it into the shadows. Something in Schlosser's reaction meanwhile caused Corso to suspect that he and Dantec had been more than just good friends. The trooper became uncommunicative, staring towards the Piri Reis with a dead-eyed expression as he slouched against a wall.
At least this time Sal had the good sense not to try and start a conversation with either of them.
Corso, too, found himself staring towards Dakota's ship, and after a while another idea came to him. He glanced at the two other men crouching in the dusty half-light next to him, their expressions grim and unhappy, and considered what they might say if he told them what he had in mind.
Fuck it, he thought. He was actually worried that they might think he'd genuinely lost his mind. But they hadn't seen the things he'd seen.
He stood up without warning, walking as close to the hangar's entrance as he dared. He could feel the other two's eyes on his back, but neither said a word or called out to him.
The guard-machine responded predictably by turning sharply towards him, following his progress with its tiny unblinking sensors. It took a half-step towards Corso, in a motion so uncannily animalistic that he found himself wondering if it might be part-biologicaclass="underline" a cyborg of some kind.
Corso stopped dead, and slowly raised his hands to either side of his mouth.
'Dakota!' he yelled towards the Piri Reis. 'Dakota! Can you hear me?'
'Lucas, are you fucking insane?' Sal finally called from inside the hangar.
Corso simply ignored him. Instead he glanced towards the machine, which stood there as if frozen. He found the courage to try once more. 'Dakota!' he screamed. 'It's Lucas! For God's sake, help me!'
The guard-machine suddenly reared up, the front part of its body towering over him. At the same time it emitted a deafening, stuttering howl like a siren. It was clearly warning him not to move any further away from the hangar.
Corso took the hint and fled back to the relative safety by the tanks.
'What the hell were you doing there?' Sal demanded.
'I don't want to hear from you, Sal.'
'Look, if this is because-'
'I said, shut the fuck up.'
Sal's face reddened, then he closed his mouth and looked angrily away.
Schlosser regarded Corso with a new degree of respect. 'Think anybody'll hear us?' he asked drily.
'Maybe – if the ship's scanning monitors are still active.' Corso glanced back towards the guard-machine, which had once again resumed its post near the entrance. 'Just maybe.' Twenty-six Dakota's filmsuit had activated at the very last second, swallowing her like a black tide. Now she watched as it drained back into her skin once more.
The scout-ship had slammed into the bay's interior at enormous speed, and the shipboard computers had failed again, this time permanently. For a moment, it had seemed as if her senses had blanked, as if she'd been suspended in some timeless moment between mere seconds, presumably some side-effect of the filmsuit. But in that tiny sliver of an instant, she had hung in a void.
Or at least it had felt that way. When her senses returned, the cabin was wrecked and all she could hear was a howling sound coming from somewhere outside it.
There was no sign of Roses. Probably his filmsuit had also activated at the very last second, and he'd managed to find his way out.
Dakota found she couldn't move, and after a moment of panic she realized that part of the framework to which the gel-chair was attached had been twisted out of shape, pushing her chest-first up against a console and pinning her there. It took a while to wriggle out from between these two obstructions, then get onto all fours and crawl through to the rear, where she could see light shining through an open emergency hatch.
Dakota could hear the distant buzz of the station's computers through her implants. They were evaluating the damage to the bay, since apparently it was losing atmosphere.
She crawled out on top of the hull to look around, squinting in the harsh artificial light. A strong wind tugged at her, and she realized the air was going to be exhausted pretty soon if she didn't find a way out of the bay. At worst she could rely on her filmsuit to keep her alive, but that wouldn't get her any closer to the derelict.
At least the gravity here was lower than it would be in the rings themselves. She worked her way gradually down towards the deck, which in itself was a dangerous place to be since she was in danger of being dragged at any minute through whatever hole the atmosphere was venting from. Dakota held on very tight and moved carefully, and once she had reached her objective she flattened herself against the deck and began moving away from the scout-ship.
Once she had crawled away a little, she looked behind her to see what had happened. Ceiling-mounted grapples meant to latch on to the scout-ship had been smashed to pieces during their high-velocity entry; the ship had then presumably rebounded against the bay doors before they could close properly. These had only managed to close most of the way before becoming stuck on a piece of twisted wreckage, and air was rapidly draining out through the narrow gap between them.
If it hadn't been for their filmsuits activating automatically, she realized, they'd have been reduced to jelly by the impact.
She finally spotted Days of Wine and Roses gripping onto a handhold next to an airlock mechanism at the far end of the bay, and trying desperately to get it to open. By the look of things, the breach had triggered an automatic lockdown, but that still left both of them trapped on the wrong side of the door.
Dakota reached out mentally through her implants and tweaked the lockdown mechanisms. The airlock suddenly banged open, making Roses jump back in surprise, almost letting go of his handhold – which, given the rate that air was being sucked out of the bay, could have proved fatal. He waited for her as she struggled over to his side of the deck.
They both ducked into the airlock and waited for it to cycle through. Dakota slumped down, panting, and tentatively pressed fingertips against her aching head to feel for injuries. Scrapes and bumps, it seemed, nothing more.
What she'd seen of this station through the derelict's senses amazed her. That it hadn't yet suffered a catastrophic failure of its life-support infrastructure was a source of wonder, and it was clearly barely capable of keeping the onboard population alive. At least two of the rings – including the one they now found themselves in – showed signs of having been abandoned for several centuries. The colony was like a corpse that hadn't yet realized it was dead. It wouldn't take much effort to send it drifting into the path of the nearby black hole.