Poldak’s expression slowly turned to a look of astonished rage, the first time he had shown an emotion other than arrogance. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know!’ Olzan said.
Mardok fired again. This time the bullet went through the Seagull’s wing. Olzan saw Keldra wince, but she didn’t move.
Poldak noticed Olzan looking at Keldra. ‘You did this, didn’t you? What did you do?’
Mardok barrelled into Keldra and grabbed her by the neck again. He moved unsteadily, almost unbalancing both of them. ‘What have you done?’ he shouted. ‘I’ll kill you, you—’
Mardok’s gun fired, but the shot went wide. Keldra had pushed his hand away. Now she pulled the gun from his grasp and shoved him away from her, kicking him in the chest and sending him sprawling drunkenly onto the ground. She raised the gun, her arm perfectly straight, and shot Mardok in the head where he lay. Bits of blood and brain spattered into the oily water.
Poldak and Soodok were raising their guns to shoot Keldra, but their responses were slow, held back by shock as well as whatever had been affecting them already. One of them fired—Olzan couldn’t tell which—but missed. Keldra turned and fired twice, putting a bullet in each of their foreheads, nearly deafening Olzan as the bullets went close by his head. Her face was a mask of cold fury; her hand was trembling just a little, in anger rather than fear.
Olzan fought to get his breathing back under control. ‘What happened?’ he said at last. ‘What did you do? It was you, wasn’t it?’
‘Check your atmosphere gauge.’
He looked at the read-out on his suit’s forearm. The pressure was normal, but the oxygen concentration was significantly down. ‘You suffocated them.’
‘Hypoxia. By the time you notice something’s wrong, you’re too light-headed to think straight. I used the airlock mechanism to cycle the oxygen out gently.’
‘You killed them,’ Olzan said again. The sound of the gunshots still rang in his ears. ‘Never mind. Let’s go. There’s not much time.’
‘We take the Seagull.’ Keldra was still holding the gun.
Olzan watched the blood spread out from the hijackers’ heads into the standing water. ‘All right.’
Keldra went back to work on the hangar doors. On Olzan’s timer, the seconds to the Black Line ticked away. The device beeped as they passed the thirty-minute mark. That was the point at which Olzan had told himself he would blow the doors, but after what Keldra had done to the hijackers he was too scared to cross her. Back on the Thousand Names he’d make it clear who was captain; right now, though, he would give her a few more minutes.
‘I’ve got it,’ Keldra said at last. The timer read twenty-four minutes.
Olzan felt the relief wash over him. He put a transmission through to the shuttle. ‘Vaz, we’re coming out through the hangar. Get ready to pick us up.’
‘Tell her to go back to the Names,’ Keldra said. She was walking towards the Seagull.
‘What?’
‘We’ll ride the Seagull out. Grab a wheel.’ She kicked the chock from in front of the spaceplane’s forward landing gear wheel, and pushed the stepladder away from its nose. ‘The air pressure should push it out, but it might need a little help.’
‘Scratch that, Vaz. Return to the Names. We’ll be with the package.’
‘That maniac had better know what she’s doing,’ Vazoya crackled in his ear.
Keldra had removed the chocks from the other two wheels and had grabbed on to the landing gear beneath one of the wings. Olzan hurried over and took hold of the other one. He fumbled to get a suit line around the landing gear column. As he did so he flicked his suit transmitter to the Thousand Names’s frequency. ‘Brenn, we’ll be dropping the package out in a moment. Get into position.’
‘Ready?’ Keldra asked.
‘Ready.’
She punched a command into her suit’s wrist panel. There was a shudder, and a groaning sound from the hangar doors as the long-disused mechanism unstuck itself. The display cases against the wall toppled and then fell, their glass fronts smashing. The vacuum seal broke and the door opened the rest of the way quickly, hinging outwards and upwards. There was a roar of air past Olzan’s helmet. The display cases were whisked out, tumbling out of sight, followed by a cascade of oily water and the bodies of the would-be hijackers.
The spaceplane moved forward, as if rising out of his hands. He took that as his cue to push. On the other wheel, Keldra was doing the same. The rush of air was gone after a moment, but they had got the spaceplane moving. Shoulders to the landing gear columns, they hauled its weight across the hangar floor towards the abyss of spinning stars.
The forward wheel went over the edge and the spaceplane’s nose went down, dragging them forward. Olzan jumped onto the landing gear and hugged the column as the spaceplane pitched out of the hangar doors into the infinite drop.
Stars wheeled around them. The silence of the vacuum was broken only by Olzan’s nervous breathing. For a moment he felt as if he was falling, then he went through the reverse of the perception shift he had gone through on the approach to the starscraper. He was weightless, clinging on to the spaceplane as it drifted away from the city. Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper was already rotating away from them and becoming lost in the throng of other surface features. In the other direction he could see the thruster flame of Vazoya’s shuttle as it sped ahead of them, and more distantly the comforting sight of the Thousand Names, its cargo bay doors opening onto a warmly lit interior.
There was something else out there, bigger than the Thousand Names but dark against the stars. Olzan felt a chill run through him. It was the Worldbreaker, now large enough to be seen with the naked eye, closing in on the doomed city. Olzan willed the spaceplane to drift faster. His timer read twenty minutes to the Black Line, but he was painfully aware that the line was only a best guess, and they were already within the margin of error.
Keldra had noticed the Worldbreaker too. Olzan could see her face through her visor. She was staring at it, not taking her eyes off it as the Seagull’s rotation moved it around in a circle in front of them. Her face was curled up with a hatred that she had not shown even to the hijackers when they had threatened the spaceplane. As Olzan watched she drew Mardok’s gun from her suit holster, raised it slowly, and then fired: a soundless white flash erupting in the vacuum. She fired again and again, faster and faster as she emptied the clip at the Worldbreaker. She said nothing, although the helmet channel was open. There were tears pooling up at the sides of her eyes, glinting with each muzzle flash.
The Worldbreaker’s mouth began to open, its sickly green light a ghastly mirror of the Thousand Names’s inviting cargo bay. It had positioned itself along the city’s long axis, as if finding the best angle to swallow it whole. A grating scream sounded in Olzan’s ears: the radio interference from the Worldbreaker’s beam. At the distant end of the city, the docking spindle twisted further before snapping off and being sucked into the Worldbreaker’s mouth. Starscrapers shattered, tiny shards of glass and metal falling sparkling away.
The muzzle flashes from Keldra’s gun stopped. Her finger kept working the trigger for a few seconds, then she gave an inarticulate cry of frustration, barely audible under the radio scream, then hurled the gun at the Worldbreaker. It spun away, flashing rhythmically in the sunlight, clearly on the wrong course.