Lina seated herself in the familiar pilot’s seat and booted up the computer. Clearly, the other shift hadn’t used her ship today, although that was probably set to change again if K6-3 continued to malfunction. Still, it was good to find everything set up the way she had left it for once. She dutifully checked the diags. As usual, they showed reactor patterns that would have made the vessel unusable in most places, but that were well within the tolerated limits on Macao. The ground crew had repaired the hydraulic leak, as promised, though, and the gas was full. She wriggled in her seat, trying to embed herself in some manner that would prove at least bearably comfortable, gave up, and closed the hatch. It snicked smoothly into place, tinting the shadows of the hangar orange and overlaying the scene with a HUD readout that tagged the other Kays with their ID-codes and pilot names.
The ground crew were leaving the flight deck now, heading towards the control room. A klaxon, accompanied by a brief strobe of red light signalled that the deck was clear. As the last Kay sealed itself around its pilot there was another klaxon, and this time an orange light. There was a pregnant pause, during which the Kays sat poised and humming gently in their alcoves, steaming with exhaust gas, waiting for the air to flush. There was a subdued rushing noise as the air was cycled out of the hangar and then a pulse of green before the door in the hangar’s deck began to open, forming a ramp that dropped away into space — a yawning mouth of darkness with glittering rock and ice caught in its throat.
The Kays trundled across the concave flight deck and assumed launch formation. One by one, they accelerated down the short ramp and out into space, fanned by the station’s spin into a broad front. They converged, rotating, into their two usual wings, with Eli in the centre, and headed towards the belt.
‘I’m with you today, Lina,’ said Eli’s voice over the comm, peppered with static.
She glanced to the left, where his ship coasted along beside her, thirty metres away, keeping lockstep.
‘Oh really?’ she asked. Usually, it was Eli’s job as flight leader to prospect for high concentrations of double-Ms in the unexploited sectors. She realised that he was probably hoping to increase production, fearing that Farsight might demand reparations for their lost shuttle. This hardly seemed fair to Lina, but it certainly seemed feasible.
‘Yeah, eight, nine and twelve — Blue Eight. One, two and four — Red One.’
The pilots confirmed their instructions and the shift split into its two wings, Eli taking point in Lina’s wing and Petra leading hers. They diverged gracefully, dialling up the gas as they went.
Lina remained unable to shake her concerns about the air scrubbers, despite the job at hand. She found herself flying by instinct, her mind repeatedly wandering from the task. Luckily, the ship’s computer had the matter safely in hand.
She checked the rear-view, half expecting to see the prodigal shuttle coasting up to the station. But she didn’t. Rocko and Sal kept up a stream of chatter over the comm, but it was distant and muted to Lina, far-off static.
She realised that she was starting to get the fear that she had felt last time in the belt, and hopelessly tried to tell herself to stay calm. They were so cut off out here. She could almost see that fragile silver thread — the intangible, essential lifeline that stretched away through space, joining them to the way stations, then Platini, and beyond that the inhabited universe Sol-wards. That thread was nothing, really. They were alone. But then, they always had been. So why did it suddenly bother her so much? This thing with the laser array — did that really make any difference? It took years to talk to Platini, anyway. So did it really matter? They had always depended on the shuttles to survive, and the loss of communications didn’t change that. But that thought only led her to the real problem: Where was the shuttle? Phrase of the week, she thought and smiled humourlessly to herself.
Lina realised that they were in the outskirts of the belt when the vessel’s manoeuvring jets began to give their customary little nudges here and there, trying to adhere the Kay to its planned trajectory while at the same time avoiding the sometimes-erratic asteroids as they rolled and drifted through space, occasionally bumping into each other.
‘Are you listening to me, Li?’ asked Eli’s voice, making her jump.
‘Huh? Sorry?’
‘Oh, you are alive in there, then. I called you three times.’
‘Sorry, I guess I was gathering space-dust for a minute.’
‘I don’t wanna go too far in, okay? This is almost dense enough, now.’
‘Yeah, sure, just say when.’
They flew onwards for another thirty seconds or so before Eli gave the word to decelerate and set up shop.
‘The only problem with having you along, Eli,’ said Rocko as the Kays slowed to a near standstill and began to choose their rocks, ‘is that we’ll have to actually do some work today.’
‘Not that you aren’t welcome, or anything,’ added Sal with a hint of mischief in her voice.
Eli’s Kay coasted smoothly in between Lina’s and Rocko’s, its tool arms flexing like the fingers of a metal hand, reaching for a large asteroid that shimmered in its spotlight.
‘Too right,’ said Eli. ‘Have to keep an eye on you slackers, don’t I?’
‘We have to keep an eye on you more like,’ suggested Sal as her Kay coasted away from the others towards the far left of the group. It anchored onto a rock and began its work.
As they mined, Lina and Rocko drifted gradually away from the others, leapfrogging from one likely-looking asteroid to another. Typically, their samples showed almost entirely good double-M-types. The pilots were all well-experienced, adept at identifying the best targets by sight. That was one of the few things the Kays actually needed a human pilot for. The confusingly-similar albedo ratings of silicate-heavy non-double-M asteroids in the belt made radar scanning worthless. The ships rapidly analysed samples to confirm or deny the humans’ judgement. They usually confirmed it.
Sal and Eli were soon left some distance behind and to their left. Lina tried hassling Rocko about Fionne for a while, but in truth her heart wasn’t in it. He responded with steadfast patience: no, she wasn’t sick of him yet; yes, she had been keeping him up at night, thank-you-very-much; no, Rocko wasn’t suspicious of the amount of time she spent with Alphe when Rocko was on shift. Lina soon gave up this line of enquiry, defeated by his relentless good spirits. They worked in silence for a while.
Macao sat far above them, locked into its infinitely-repeating spin-cycle, a monolithic wheel in space. Even from this close, she could hardly see it at all. It looked to her like it could easily just slip below those waves of stone and sink forever, unnoticed.
The vibration from the Kay’s cutting equipment became soporific, and Lina had to literally pinch herself to stay awake. She tried to engage herself by running a full batch of system scans, but they didn’t tell her anything new and the process was an inherently tedious one. She glanced up at the HUD-marker showing Rocko’s K6-9, which was partially hidden by a huge, gnarled asteroid that looked strangely like a clenched human fist.
‘Hey, Rocko,’ she said, bored of silence now.
‘What?’ he asked, clearly suspicious of another Fionne-related enquiry.
‘Talk to me,’ she said.
‘About what?’ he asked. His Kay looked spectral in the milk-light of Lina’s ship, only half-real, an alien avatar of the man.
And then Sal spoke, her voice small and tinny, distorted even over this short distance by the belt debris. She said one word: ‘Eli!’