The dense forest of cables towered around her, constricted by perspective, ending in a black pit above. The journey seemed to take a very long time.
She reached the top and virtually floated out of the cage. How long did they have left before the power went off and the air was sucked out? Halman had said two hours. Had it been closer to one or two by now? She cursed herself for not bringing suits. She should have thought. But somebody would stop them from draining the air, surely. Rocko had seen her go. Surely she had time enough.
She bounced and swam through the narrowing tunnels until she reached the ladder that led up to the hub itself. Exactly why there was a ladder here she had no idea, because it was easier to just jump up into the hub than to actually use it. This was what she did, and she shot into the steel drum of the hub itself with more speed than she had intended, flying right across to land awkwardly on the opposite wall.
‘Mum!’ cried Marco in alarm.
She looked up and there he was, floating dead centre in his jeans and T-shirt. She pushed off and headed towards him, crashing into him and banging her chin on the top of his head. They tumbled together onto the opposite wall, almost falling down the hatch to the floor below, locked in a death grip.
‘Marco!’ she exclaimed, letting him go. He scrambled to his feet, drifting away from the floor-slash-wall again, back towards the centre.
Lina pushed off again as well, and they floated together in that eye of stillness, equidistant between the curved walls. On either side of them, perfect circles of space peered in: belt on one side, endless starscape on the other.
Lina extended one hand to gently touch his face. Marco flinched away from her, tears in his eyes.
‘You ran away,’ she said softly, not intending it as an accusation.
‘I. . . I. . .’ he stammered, tears streaming down his face now. ‘I don’t want you to go, Mum! Don’t go out there!’ He waved one arm angrily towards the belt. ‘I don’t want you to go out there!’
‘Marco, I have to,’ she said, knowing that this was true. ‘Something bad is happening here, Son,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Something wrong. . . It’s something that threatens us all. And I have to fight it. I have to try. So yes, I intend to go out there to the shuttle.’
He shook his head, angrily, refusing to even consider her words. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘You don’t have to! Don’t go out there! He’s out there!’
‘Marco. . . We’re all in serious danger here. That means you, my son, are in danger. If we leave the shuttle out there then we won’t have the parts we need to fix the power and the air. And then,’ she continued slowly, emphatically, ‘we will die. I cannot allow you to die if there is a chance that I can prevent it. I made that promise before you were even born — it’s an implicit one, a promise that all mothers make.’ She snared his thin arm with one hand and drew him closer. ‘I have to try and fight it. And it’s going to be okay. I’m gonna fly that shuttle back in here tomorrow, and your old mum will be a hero.’ She forced him to look at her, steering his face with one hand under his chin. ‘And then, once Macao has everything it needs, I’m going to take that shuttle, we’re going to get on it — you and I and anyone else who wants to come — and we are going to Platini Alpha. We’ll sleep all the way and wake up in a new world. You were right. It’s time we left this place. But first. . .’ She stared into his quivering, tear-streaked face and felt herself beginning to cry again, too. She was turning into a veritable salt-water tap these days, it seemed. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she said again, drawing him to her chest and squeezing him as tightly as her aching back would allow. But as she looked out at the belt, where it hung in the glasspex circle above his shoulder, she wasn’t so sure. It stared implacably back at her like an eye, until she had to look away.
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘Head through the corridor behind you,’ said the dragon in its calm, insistent voice. ‘Find the airlock.’
‘Right,’ agreed Carver. ‘Right, that makes sense.’ Everything the dragon said seemed to make perfect sense — it seemed a very sensible creature, all in all.
He swam through the doorway that led out of the shuttle’s bridge and into the echoing bowels of the great ship, clawing his way along the handlines provided for that purpose. Drifting globules of blood surrounded him like evil fairies, sometimes spattering softly against his suit or face. He didn’t look back at the bridge where the crazy dragon-man had died. Crazy dragon-man mark one, he reminded himself. He smirked contemptuously as he went. It was kind of funny, really, the whole thing. The old emissary was drifting in the belt now like the worthless jetsam that he was.
He passed through the thick doorway, designed also to act as an emergency bulkhead, trailing his gloves across the ancient metal as he went. Huge pieces of alien equipment loomed from alcoves on either side of the passage — gunmetal-coloured, statuesque machines whose purpose he would never understand. Thick, ribbed pipes and armoured conduits hung from the ceiling, wrapped around protruding brackets and corners like massive techno-snakes, threatening to entangle his clumsy body. The air tasted sharp and coppery, like the taste of a battery on the tongue. Steam hissed from a vent in the grilled floor, making him recoil, blinded, waving it away from his eyes. His body spun around, inverting, and he bumped his head on the floor before he could right himself.
‘Careful, now,’ said the dragon, a hint of wry amusement in its voice.
Carver swore, floundering his way back to the handline, where he paused for a second to compose himself. ‘Yeah, yeah, that occurred to me already,’ he muttered. He dragged himself along to the end of the passage, passing the boarding tube that led back into the great asteroid without even looking into it. No more digging for now, he thought to himself with some satisfaction. Important business to attend to first.
At the end of the passage was a junction. He knew that one side led to an airlock door into the cavernous cargo bay. The old, failed emissary had informed him that it was unpressurised in there and full of spares for the station. That, therefore, could not logically be the way to the docked ship in which the crazy dragon-man had returned to the shuttle. He took the other turning, leftwards.
The new corridor zigged and zagged with apparent randomness, its path presumably dictated by some fundamental constraints of the ship’s design. He passed beneath some sort of shaft that led away into impenetrable darkness far above, offering a dizzying glimpse into the shuttle’s soaring architecture. He stopped and peered up into it, squinting.
‘Is that the way?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said the dragon. ‘Just carry on.’
‘No,’ agreed Carver. ‘I’ll carry on.’ His brain felt pleasantly fuzzy, as if he were slightly drunk or very tired. It was a kind of reassuring fuzziness, though, as if it diminished Carver’s own responsibility for his actions. He had already decided that he liked being the new emissary — the very notion seemed to fill him with a sense of importance, a new perspective on his own place in the universe. Finally, he had a purpose. Perhaps his whole life had merely served to prepare him for this moment.
At the end of the passage he came to a vast convex door, clearly another airlock, smaller than the one to the cargo bay.
‘Is this it, do you think?’ he asked the enveloping darkness around him.