Against Gravity (50 page)

A terrible cold had begun to creep over him and he wondered just how much his body would be able to take of what he was about to put it through. Even though he knew he was running out of time,
this gave him more than a moment’s hesitation.

Kendrick reached for a handhold positioned just outside the airlock door and pulled himself further out onto the
Archimedes
’ hull. Then he gazed upwards towards the comms array at
the centre of the endcap. In the distance he saw a figure in a spacesuit.

It had to be Draeger.

Kendrick gripped on to the rungs and pulled himself slowly upwards, working against the station’s spin. He imagined himself as a machine, an automaton incapable of feeling fear or any
other emotion. All he had to do was hang on to those rungs and not let go.

All the while a painful numbness gnawed at the edge of his thoughts. There were limits to how long he could survive like this. He kept on climbing, concentrating solely on the rhythmic flexing
of his muscles, ignoring the gathering pain as he pushed himself on. Chunks of metal and concrete became visible around him in the inky blackness, some of them spinning wildly. Pieces of the
shattered hull, he presumed.

He glanced towards the comms array and saw that Draeger had almost reached it. Kendrick yelled soundlessly, his lungs empty and useless, then pulled himself along faster. Draeger appeared as yet
unaware that he was being pursued.

When a shadow passed over Kendrick he almost lost his grip. He managed to hold on and stared up at the underbelly of a shuttle with unfamiliar markings. The craft moved on, disappearing from
sight beyond the curved rim of the endcap as it performed a docking manoeuvre.

He’d been right. A man as cunning as Max Draeger would never have come all this way without a carefully planned strategy of escape.

Draeger finally turned his way, perhaps catching sight of the shuttle as it passed overhead. His face was invisible behind the faceplate of his helmet, but it was clear he could see
Kendrick.

Now Kendrick knew that he’d become everything Sieracki had intended for him to be: a man-machine built for killing. He felt a distant, almost inhuman sense of satisfaction as he clambered
rapidly up towards the spacesuited figure ahead of him.

On the side of the communications tower Draeger had opened a panel behind which lay a display screen showing status lights. As Kendrick rushed towards him, he tried to scramble out of the way
and, in doing so, something slipped from his gloved hand. Draeger reached out for it frantically.

Kendrick caught it easily with his uninjured hand and realized that it was a datachip. He could guess only too well what information was contained in it. Though his numb fingers held it
clumsily, he continued squeezing it until the brittle plastic snapped and disintegrated.

Now Draeger was trying to get away from him. As he turned for a handhold, Kendrick let the fragments of the crushed datachip spin away. Then he reached out for his adversary.

When Draeger kicked out frantically with one boot Kendrick lost his grip for a moment before grabbing the other’s leg and hauling himself on top of him. Draeger struggled and twisted
beneath him, letting go of the rungs. He floated away for a moment before returning to hit the surface of the station with a thump after his safety cord had reeled out to its full length.

Kendrick ignored the gloved hands that beat frantically at his face as he reached for Draeger’s helmet and released the clasps holding it in place. Draeger continued to struggle
desperately for his life but was clearly finding it difficult to manoeuvre inside his bulky space-suit. Kendrick could see the man’s mouth working uselessly behind the visor, his eyes wide
and full of terror. Then Kendrick twisted Draeger’s helmet off its retaining ring and wrenched it away, careful even so not to let go of it.

He watched Draeger’s features become puffy, the man’s mouth moving soundlessly, his limbs still flailing. After several seconds he grew limp, his lips ceasing to frame dying words
that would never be heard. Draeger’s face became frozen for eternity in an expression of shock and dread.

Watching an unaugmented human undergoing implosive decompression was far from pretty. Kendrick tried to register some kind of emotion. But he only felt empty, used up. Draeger was dead, but he
himself didn’t feel any different.

As blackness began to creep across his vision, a desperate, all-consuming need to survive now drove him on. He thought of his wife and daughter, disappearing from the world for ever; of Caroline
and her slow, terrible death; then of Peter McCowan.

There were no guarantees that Draeger’s spacesuit would fit Kendrick but the two men were of a similar height and body type. Kendrick pulled the suit open and manoeuvred Draeger’s
corpse out of it. It spun away from him slowly, tumbling end over end.

Carefully, he slotted himself into the suit, first wedging the helmet as best he could between two rungs and praying that it wouldn’t work its way loose. The suit felt tight and
uncomfortable, but Kendrick suspected that he only had seconds left before he lost consciousness. Then he gripped the helmet with both hands and pulled it on quickly.

With the last of his strength he tapped at the panel on the spacesuit’s arm and was rewarded with the sound of hissing air. Overwhelming nausea filled him as his lungs shuddered back into
life. He twisted helplessly on the end of the safety line as agonizing spasms racked his body.

After several minutes the worst of it had passed. Kendrick reached into the pockets of the spacesuit – and finally found what he was looking for.

28 October 2096
The Edge of Infinity

Kendrick only realized that he had indeed lost consciousness when he awoke some minutes later.

As he held on to a rung he felt the entire station tremble under him. The stars twisted and flickered as if distorted by a vast lens. A sudden powerful spasm rolled through the hull and finally
Kendrick lost his grip. He spun away, the spacesuit’s safety cord snapping out to its full length but holding firm. Slowly he drew himself back and took a firm grip again on a couple of
rungs. He didn’t even want to begin to think of the damage already done to his body tissues during the time he had spent in full vacuum.

Kendrick looked out to the distant curvature of the Earth as it slipped past his point of view and saw a blaze of light appear at the edge of its globe. Sunlight scattered across the
Archimedes
, and the suit’s visor darkened automatically.

“Kendrick, listen to me. Where are you?”

He recognized Buddy’s voice coming over a private channel. “I’m outside,” he said weakly. “Draeger is dead.”

“Jesus, I can’t believe you’re still alive. I mean . . . no, I don’t know how you did it, but I can see you.”

“I’ve got the detonator, Buddy. And I’m pretty sure Draeger didn’t manage to send anything Earthside.”

“Just a minute, you’ve got the trigger? The
nuclear
trigger? Christ. I . . . no, wait, Kendrick, listen to me. You’re not thinking of doing anything, are you?”

Kendrick floated in the silence of space. Had those cracks visible in the side of the station been there before?
No, of course not.
Black lines now extended far and wide across the
surface of its vast cylinder. He pulled out the detonator and studied it, remembering McCowan’s words.

A ghostly light burned from deep within the cracks.

“Buddy?” he said. “Buddy, what’s happening inside there?”

Buddy laughed. “You didn’t see any of it, did you? I can’t begin to describe what it’s like . . . just light, everywhere.” Buddy was gasping hard, as if he’d
just run a couple of miles. “You can’t begin to imagine. Everyone else is safe in a pressurized area, and all we can do is hope it stays that way until we’re through. Look, just
stay where you are. I’m almost there. I—”

Static crackled across the sound of Buddy’s voice, like waves crashing upon a shore, and washed the last of his words away. Kendrick gripped the detonator a little harder, looking back the
way he had come. He saw another spacesuited figure moving rapidly towards him across the rungs.

Great chasms of light flickered from deep inside the
Archimedes
. A gantry broke loose and spun outwards from the space station, trailing fragments of metal. Kendrick pulled himself closer
to the hull and watched as the debris spiralled away into the darkness. There was now no sign of Draeger’s shuttle.

Space rippled again, and the light from stars older than the universe itself spilled across the hull of the
Archimedes
.

Buddy pulled himself speedily over the rungs until he and Kendrick came face to face. Visor to visor, Kendrick could see the sweat on the other man’s brow. He held up the detonator so that
Buddy could see his finger poised just above the button.

“You’re not going to do it,” said Buddy, more a statement than a question.

“Here’s what I’ve been thinking.” Kendrick gripped the detonator hard, terrified of letting go of it. “The Bright were contaminated with Robert Vincenzo’s
deranged thoughts. Correct?”

“You tell me, Kendrick.”

“Then bear with me. Robert’s contamination damaged the Bright’s chances of successfully passing through the wormhole leading to the Omega.”

Buddy waited, mute. Kendrick continued. “McCowan came to me one last time. He knew what I was thinking, what was running through my mind. And, you know what? I thought I was imagining it
at first, but I knew what he was thinking too. It wasn’t telepathy or anything supernatural. Along with Peter McCowan, I was inside the machine that calls itself the Bright, and I could read
McCowan as well as he could read me – maybe not with as much skill.”

Buddy waited while Kendrick continued. “The Bright were infected with Robert’s insanity. When I looked into Peter’s thoughts, what I saw told me that it might be too
late.”

They rode on a mountain of steel and rock into a great shining chasm of light. The wormhole was preparing to suck them through.

“You can see that it’s happening,” Buddy implored him. “We’ll be there soon. Doesn’t that mean
anything
to you?”

Kendrick laughed shakily. “I only want what’s
real
.”

“You could let go of the detonator. You don’t need it any more.”

Kendrick looked back towards the Earth. “The
Archimedes
might not go through. Until we know one way or the other, I’m hanging on to this.”

Buddy made a move forward and Kendrick jerked away, holding the device out between them.

“The
Archimedes
will go through,” Buddy insisted, his voice hoarse. “For Christ’s sake, Kendrick—”

“No, listen to me. If the
Archimedes
goes through, then that’s it – it’s gone. You’ll have got where you wanted to be, thanks to a man complicit in one of
the greatest acts of mass murder of our century, but I guess you aren’t worrying about that too much.” Buddy’s eyes were filled with desperate panic while Kendrick continued.
“But if it doesn’t go through – if you’ve got it wrong and there’s any chance that Los Muertos or any other pack of lunatics could come here and grab something
powerful enough to destroy a solar system, then I hit the button. Do you understand me?
I hit the button
.”

“Fine, okay.” Buddy nodded, his expression tense. “But it
will
go through.”

Kendrick laughed, surprised at how ragged the sound was. “Maybe it will, Buddy. Maybe it will.”

He pushed himself back a little until he bounced against one of the lower girders of the satellite array, wedging himself there into a narrow space. “Come near me meanwhile,” he
insisted, “and I’ll blow the station anyway. Better that than risk the alternatives, don’t you think?”

Buddy stared back, his expression unreadable.

Kendrick glanced towards the Earth, wondering if that view of it would be the last thing he would ever see. Half a dozen tiny lights burned now between the
Archimedes
and the world below.
More shuttles on their way
, Kendrick thought,
hoping to salvage whatever’s left – if there is anything left.

They waited there, suspended between Heaven and Earth.

Gary Gibson works as a graphic designer, and was previously a magazine editor, in his home town of Glasgow. He has been writing since the age of fourteen, and this is his second
published novel.

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