‘I think you’d better can it, Eli. I want you to come with me, okay? Right now,’ said Ella, clearly trying to sound reasonable — a tone that was somewhat at odds with the sight of the baton that still crackled away in her hand. ‘Just be cool, all right? We’ll work this out. But this is not the place.’ She killed the stunner, forcing her body to relax. The crowd waited in breathless silence.
‘He sabotaged the power relay,’ said Eli, seemingly to himself, his gaze creeping to the body that lay before him in a rapidly-spreading puddle of gore. ‘I confronted him.’ He looked around the assembled watchers, his eyes pleading for understanding. ‘I tried to stop him.’ Lina could see none of the Eli she knew in that shell-shocked face. ‘He had a knife. He. . .’
Just then, the towering figure of Halman emerged from the throng, to stand between Eli and Ella, dwarfing both of them. He looked titanic and strong, and Lina instantly felt a little better.
‘Eli, I want you to go with Ella,’ he said in a voice that, although quiet for him, was still clearly audible from Lina’s vantage point.
‘Hey, Halman,’ said Eli’s voice flatly, while Eli’s eyes looked about a million miles away. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Now, Eli!’ snarled Halman, seizing him by the scruff of the neck and propelling him into Ella’s arms. Ella, despite her strength, staggered and struggled to prevent Eli from falling. She was lucky, in Lina’s opinion, not to discharge the stunner into him. Jayce came to her aid, in an uncharacteristic show of clear thinking, and between them they manhandled Eli away.
‘Where’s my fucking sec-team?!’ bellowed Halman into the assembled crowd. They actually fell back, as one body, by a pace or two, revealing the nervous-looking Theo, still in the T-shirt and sweat-pants he had slept in, his chubby face devoid of its usual friendly glow. He stepped forwards, nodding curtly to Halman.
‘Yes, Sir,’ Theo said, in a voice that was little more than a croak.
‘Find the rest of the team, shut this area off.’ Halman turned to address the crowd as a whole: ‘I want everyone except for security and maintenance to go back to their quarters!’ he boomed. Nobody moved. ‘NOW!’ he screamed. ‘GO!’ The crowd faltered, losing cohesion, and began to disperse. Lina found her feet rooted to the spot. She felt as if she had woken up in another world. None of this could be happening. ‘Theo — find the rest of the sec team and lock this area down. Nobody else except maintenance is to go within fifty metres of this door.’ Theo nodded and sprinted off through the dispersing crowd, weaving around people with surprising agility for someone of his size.
Suddenly, the small but reassuringly-efficient figure of Doctor Hobbes appeared, as if he had simply materialised in place. He stepped past Lina with his medical holdall in one hand and a grim expression on his narrow face. He glanced at Halman without speaking, and knelt down beside Sudowski’s body, opening the bag as he did so. He looked as if he had already decided it was hopeless, and Lina had to concur with that opinion judging by the amount of blood that had escaped Nik’s body. Sabotage? Her mind stumbled over the word, trying to connect it with a meaning. Surely not. She had suspected someone. . . but never Nik Sudowksi. And he’d attacked Eli with a knife? Nik? No wonder he hadn’t looked too good of late — he’d clearly been losing his mind! This was an affliction that Lina felt she could sympathise with at that moment. Something in the superstructure of the station groaned faintly, but vastly, bringing her back to her senses.
‘Maintenance!’ bellowed Halman, who had always been of the school of thought that loud enough shouting could resolve any problem. His bushy moustache bristled as his jaw clenched and unclenched fiercely.
Alphe and Fionne scampered into the smoking generator room under the glowering stare of the station controller, each with a large toolbox in hand. They both made the effort not to look at the haemorrhaging body of their superior as they passed it. Fionne actually left a dainty footprint in his blood. Lina shuddered and her stomach did a single, washing-machine-like revolution at the sight, almost dumping her dinner onto the corridor floor.
‘Lina?’ said Halman, startling her back to reality. She looked up, eyebrows raised. ‘Piss off, okay? Give us some space.’
She nodded dumbly, and turned away, finding it hard to detach her gaze from the human wreckage sprawled on the metal tiles. Hobbes had Sudowski’s saturated work-shirt open to the waist and a monitoring device planted on his chest. Lina could see a long, bloody gash in the flesh there. It looked like a leering mouth. She could not believe that, even by accident, even when attacked, Eli could have done that. She caught a glimpse of bone through the wound as Halman shoved her on the back — not too roughly, just hard enough — and she finally managed to get her feet moving.
She wandered back to her quarters on autopilot, her body finding its own way there while her mind spun futilely far back in her skull, generating nothing but white noise and fragmented questions. She felt as if the station’s floor was pitching beneath her like the deck of a ship at sea. The red light began to permeate her skull, eating into her sanity like acid. When she got home she found her son standing in the middle of the floor, frightened, waiting for her.
‘Mum!’ he yelled, as soon as the door opened, rushing into her arms. ‘What’s happening? I heard shouting outside. Why are the lights off?’
Lina squeezed him in her arms, held him tightly, as if the spinning of the station might snatch him from her, whirling him away into space if she let go. He was still questioning her, repeating himself over and over, but she didn’t even hear him. All she knew was that he was here, he was okay. And in her imagination, pictures of Platini Alpha, culled from the documentary she had watched, scrolled like teasing glimpses of some alternate reality.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Why hadn’t the crazy dragon-man come back? Would he even come back? Who knew what the bastard was doing on that station? Perhaps he had been caught, jailed, even killed. What would happen to Carver then? He’d be stuck here — here in this blighted hole of ice and rock — until he died. And how long could he survive here for? He didn’t have the obvious technical knowledge of the crazy dragon-man, and he had no idea how the air system of the conjoined shuttle actually worked, or how long it would continue to do so. And anyway, the restraining device was nearby, fixed to a rock pin in one jagged surface which Carver had come to think of as a wall, despite the lack of real meaning to directions such as up, down, left and right. He wouldn’t be able to go far enough from it to get himself food if the crazy dragon-man didn’t return from whatever demented mischief he had set off upon. The man had left him an insulated flask of water, which hung, half-full, from his belt, but no food at all.
And so he worked. What else was there to do? He clung to the fading hope that the crazy dragon-man would return, that he would be pleased with Carver’s progress and would release him from the hated restraining device. He knew that this was an unlikely sequence of events, though, and as time progressed it seemed ever more so. He wondered if he might actually dig right through this damned rock and out into space. The explosion of released pressure would propel him out into the asteroid belt, where he could enjoy the twin thrills of asphyxiation and irradiation at the same time. He couldn’t even go and get a helmet, because, once again, he couldn’t leave the radius of that fucking restraining device. After considering this for some time, he decided he didn’t really care.
He sustained himself through this difficult time by daydreaming about murdering the crazy dragon-man, maybe bashing his crazy head in or strangling him until his crazy eyes popped out. He thought about what he’d do to the body, how he’d destroy it, humiliate it, reduce it to its component molecules. The cutter blared and screamed in his hands, sending out gouts of steam, filling the world with its enraged bellow. After a while, it even began to heat the air to an almost-bearable temperature.