Authors: Rob Boffard
He gives a nervous smile, his hands raised above him. “Cargo delivery,” he says. “Speed run from the mess. Someone sending up food for you.”
The first stomper’s expression doesn’t change, but behind her I see a couple of the
others lower their guns very slightly, their expressions hopeful. My guess was good: they’ve been up here for hours, maybe days, and chances to eat will have been slim. A shipment of food would be a welcome prospect.
I’m almost sorry that we’ll have to disappoint. Almost.
“Since when did the mess start using tracers for food deliveries?” says the first stomper.
Kev shrugs, and I marvel at how
calm he seems. “Not my problem,” he replies. “But if I go back, they probably won’t bother sending another one.” At this, the stompers glance at each other nervously. I can almost hear their stomachs rumbling. Still the woman with the ponytail doesn’t move.
“Tell you what,” says Kev. “I’ll take out the cargo, and put
it on the floor. Nice and easy.” He keeps his hands raised, not wanting to provoke.
After a long minute, the woman says, “Take off the pack.”
Kev slowly reaches behind him, pulling the pack off his shoulders and holding it out in front of him at arm’s length. The stomper nods. “Good. Take the cargo out,” she says.
“OK,” says Kev. And tears out the hidden panel at the bottom of the bag.
The chemicals inside react to the air immediately. Kev hits the deck just as the lead stomper
fires, but his body has already vanished into the huge, billowing cloud of smoke gushing from the pellets.
This was what Carver had been working on when he locked me out of the Nest for kicks. Turns out he’d been trying to build this smoke system, hoping to give us an extra escape route if we ever ran into trouble. He’d been struggling with it, not able to get the formula right. But it turned
out that quicksleep – the stuff Arthur Gray used to grab his victims – was the missing ingredient. Distil it down, add a few other chemicals into it, then combine it with Carver’s original recipe. Expose it to air, and you’ve got something that could easily help a Dancer evade someone hunting them.
With the quicksleep, and the scraps he and Kevin managed to scrounge from the Nest, there was just
enough left to make a single batch. It took Carver less than twenty minutes to mix the chemicals and transfer them to a pack, storing them inside a modified water container. He had to do it pretty quickly to stop smoke filling up the hab, but he managed it.
We dash from our hiding places into the noxious smoke, the room filling with confused shouts and gunfire. It’s clear that for a few seconds
at least, we won’t be noticed. We’ve got scarves wrapped around our faces, but the thick smoke still worms its way in, burning my throat. I sprint towards where
I think the control panel is, and a bullet ricochets off the floor in front of me; I duck, but keep running, heading towards the far end of the room.
There’s a yell from behind me. Carver? No way to tell. The smoke is everywhere now,
filling the room; a stomper materialises out of the gloom in front of me, his gun raised, but I’m moving too fast. I clock him across the throat, and he gives a loud, strangled cry as he flies backwards. His gun fires, the bullet dancing off the ceiling. I wince, but keep running.
A split second later, I slam into the wall, my fingers bending back painfully where they’ve made contact. I bite
back a cry of pain, not wanting to give away my position. I force my throbbing fingers to feel along the wall to my right, hoping desperately that I’ve picked the right direction.
It’s impossible to see now. I’m breathing too fast, inhaling too much smoke, expecting a bullet in the back at any second. But then the surface under my fingers changes, from cold metal to the smooth glass of a screen,
and I know I’ve found the control panel. My hands feel downwards, exploring the panel. It juts out of the wall at waist height, a bank of buttons capped with the screen, which I can now see glowing dimly through the smoke.
I dig into my pocket, fighting with the thick gloves, and pull out Carver’s second gadget.
It’s almost too simple to work. A tiny plastic box, filled with a small blob of
explosive putty. Inside the box, above the putty and pointing right at it, is a short spike. On its tip, another chemical, harmless – until you place the box on a flat surface and slam your hand onto the lid, driving the spike into the putty, combining the chemicals. Then you have about a second to dive away before the explosion takes your hand off.
When the bang comes, it’s so loud that my hearing
goes completely, leaving nothing but a ringing that burrows into my
skull. I’ve thrown myself to the side, away from the explosion. It’s small, but bright and hot, and enough to blow a hole the size of a man’s head in the control panel. A moment later, I feel a second thud reverberate around the room. Carver must have detonated his own device.
My hearing slowly comes back. The room is louder
now, filled with the terrified shouts from the stompers, telling each other to fall back. I want to yell that they’re not under attack, that we don’t mean to hurt them, but with the smoke and the explosions, I think I’d just earn myself a volley of stinger bullets. Lying on the ground, my ears throbbing and my lungs burning with hot smoke, a tiny thought in the back of my mind says that this is absolutely
the worst idea ever.
And then I hear it. A high-pitched mechanical whine.
The blast doors are opening.
I jump to my feet, and start running, ignoring the nausea brought on by the smoke. It occurs to me that I have no idea how you actually get through the doors: does a ladder drop down? Stairs? I curse myself for not thinking about it before. I’m looking upwards through the smoke, searching
for the opening. But then, no more than five seconds after the doors started opening, the sound changes: it gets lower, more throaty. As if …
My heart sinks. The doors are closing. Some fail-safe, some little electronic gatekeeper, has kicked in, and there’s no way of telling how far the doors opened before they started to shut.
A figure explodes out of the fog. It’s Carver, blood pouring down
his face, mouthing something I can’t hear. He has to say it twice before I hear him: “Jump!”
Without breaking my stride, I push off with my left leg, launching myself upwards. At the same time, Carver drops to one knee, cupping his left hand under my foot. My body acts before I can think about it, and I push into his hand even as
he forces me upwards, my own arm raised. He cries out, putting
every ounce of effort he can into pushing me up with his one arm. I force my eyes to stay open in the stinging smoke, hunting for an opening.
The edge of the door takes me in the forearms, almost causing me to fall backwards, but I swing my arms down, and then I’m hanging from the blast doors by my elbows. The whine is louder now, burrowing into my head. If I can’t pull myself up, the doors will
cut me in two.
My legs are dangling in space, and at any second I expect a bullet to slice through them. But Carver hasn’t let go of my foot, and he starts pushing upwards, standing, lifting me from below. Groaning with the effort, I haul my way upwards: first my chest, then my waist, and then my legs are up and over. I catch a brief glimpse of Carver’s face through the gap in the blast doors:
soaked red with the blood, but with eyes burning bright. Then the doors slam shut with a huge, echoing boom.
The silence is instant and total. As I lie there, in the semidarkness, the cold starts to seep in, tongues of ice licking at my exposed skin.
“She’s inside,” Oren Darnell says.
His voice is even, quiet, controlled. He grips the back of one of the chairs, his eyes fixed intently on the screen. The camera is looking down on the Core doors. It shows Hale, getting to her feet, hugging herself tightly. On the screen, the clouds made from her breath are grey pixels, blocky and stuttering.
Okwembu stands in the doorway to the
control room, arms folded.
Darnell throws the chair. It crashes across the control room, knocking over other chairs as it goes. Okwembu doesn’t respond, not even when Darnell walks right up to her. His body is drenched in sweat and blood.
“She’s tenacious, I’ll give her that,” Okwembu says.
“We have to shut her out.”
Okwembu shrugs. “The stompers disabled the lock. We can close the doors,
but we can’t seal them.”
“She knows the damn code. If she were to get in the control room—”
“But she won’t,” Okwembu says wearily. “She isn’t wearing
a thermo-suit. She’ll freeze solid before she gets within a mile of here. And if she does somehow make it through, she’ll be far too weak to fight.”
Okwembu’s eyes glitter, and Darnell sees something in them that he hasn’t seen before. Something
like excitement.
“We can kill her together. In front of everyone. And then we can tell them what’s coming.”
Darnell starts laughing, and once he does, he finds that he can’t stop. It comes from somewhere deep inside him – an awful, hacking noise, as if a malignant tumour has come loose in his chest. He lifts the knife, points it at Okwembu. His shoulder wound has started bleeding again, and
he can feel it throbbing, a deep ache that won’t go away.
“You’ve never killed anyone in your life,” he says, between gusts of laughter. “You even had me suck the oxygen out of that amphitheatre for you. You don’t
deserve
to kill her.”
“If you go in there, you put yourself at risk. But if we meet her here, she’ll have two of us to deal with. Let her come to us.”
Darnell considers it, but only
for a second. Every iota of hatred he possesses has focused down into this one thing. He’s not going to
let her come
. He’s going to fix it. He’s going to fix her.
He steps past Okwembu, and only stops when she puts a hand on his arm.
“You’re hurt,” she says, gesturing at his mangled shoulder. “It’ll only slow you down in there. If you’re going to go, then at least let me give you something for
the pain.”
Darnell looks down. Okwembu is slipping the cap off a syringe, filled with clear liquid. She moves to slide his sleeve up, and that’s when he knocks her arm aside. The syringe explodes against the wall.
“It’s butorphanol,” she says, raising her hands. “Pain meds. That’s all. Just—”
Darnell hits her.
Okwembu goes down, collapsing on all fours. Darnell steps over her, striding down
the passage. It’s only when he reaches the stairs that he wonders if he should kill her. He half turns back, then stops himself, because all he can see is Riley Hale. Okwembu isn’t important. There’s nothing she can do to him.
Darnell laughs again, turning away. He begins climbing the stairs.
“Oren,” says Okwembu from behind him, her voice thick with pain. When he doesn’t respond, she says it
more sharply. “Oren!”
He barely hears her. Barely realises what he’s doing. All he can think about is how every step takes him closer to the Core.
Closer to Hale.
Every breath is visible, as dense as the smoke in the room below me – and every one I suck in cuts deep into my lungs. This isn’t like the cold I’ve felt in the Nest, when I’ve woken from a deep sleep with the blanket bunched around my feet. That you get used to. This is dry cold, ripped from the absolute zero of the vacuum, channelled and controlled to bring down the colossal heat of
the fusion reactor and the superconducting cables that carry its power to the rest of the station.
I’m at the bottom of an enormous cylinder, stretching upwards to infinity, lit with huge spotlights that nevertheless fail to cut through the gloom completely. I count six cables, each as thick as three men, spaced around the cylinder. There’s a catwalk, laid around the sides of the cylinder in
front of the cables, curling steadily upwards like a coiled spring.
I get to my feet. Six miles from here to Apex. If I can keep the pace up, it should take me about two hours to run the Core.
Of course, I have to do it in sub-zero temperatures, and in a gravity that will get lower with every step.
I head towards the ramp that leads to the catwalk, then stop.
How do the Core techs get up there?
After all, if you’re in a bulky thermo-suit, carrying heavy equipment, you aren’t going to walk upwards for three miles every time a pipe springs a leak.
It takes me a moment to spot it, hidden in the shadows behind where I came in. An elevator. A golden ticket right to the top. I can’t help cracking a smile.
My footsteps are loud in the vast space as I cross the room. The thought occurs to
me that they might have found a way to shut down the elevator after I broke in, but it opens as I touch the button. The lights on the inside flicker to life, illuminating the cramped space. Under normal circumstances, it’d probably be a chore to ride in, but right now, I can’t get in there fast enough.
I thumb the Up button, fighting to push it hard enough through my bulky gloves. Despite the
padding, my hands are already numb, and my cheeks are throbbing gently, as if I’ve been slapped. I try to stay as still as possible, hoping to conserve energy. The elevator hums to life, and with an enormous clanking noise, begins to move slowly upwards. I hold my breath, expecting that at any moment it’ll shudder to a halt, and start downwards, where a group of heavily armed stompers will be waiting.
But the lift keeps moving, slowly making its way up the tube. My chest is still warm, and my sweat-soaked undergarments don’t appear to have frozen.
It occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve been by myself since I was locked in the brig in Apogee. There’s nobody to back me up: no Amira, no Prakesh, no Carver or Kev. And the higher the elevator gets, the further I go from everybody else.
The Dancers would get a real kick out of this place. Imagine being able to run as you approach zero gravity. Amira would …
I shut my eyes tight. I take Amira, and Yao, and Grace Garner, and put them in a very small place, deep in my mind. I force
myself to do it,
will
them to stay silent.
Later
, I tell them.
Later, when this is over, we can talk
.