Chapter Forty-Eight
Marco sat on Clay’s bedroll staring out of the window at the soulless enormity of the belt. He, like his mother, had begun to hate it. He wondered if that vast blackness would eat her, render her dead, erase her from his life and from the universe itself. So many had died — adults all, those invulnerable giants who ruled his world with such confidence, but who had now become the victims of fate themselves, subjects in a new kingdom of horror.
The fear inside him had become so steady, so ubiquitous, that he hardly felt it any more. That was another thing he had in common with his mother, although he didn’t know this. It did, in fact, never occur to him that she could be afraid herself. Mothers weren’t afraid. End of.
Clay had given up trying to talk to Marco some while ago and was now immersed in his handheld games console, his stubbled head bent closely over the device. The game was Corp Wars — a good one — but Marco had lost all interest in it. He’d been winning effortlessly — he had played it a lot more than Clay — but the lack of challenge wasn’t the issue. Attempts to engage himself in the game had quickly begun to feel artificial, like lying to himself. All that mattered was what was happening out there. Murderers and thieves — people who seemed to want them all dead — roamed out there amongst the tumbling stones.
Macao was a dying body, a failing flywheel that spun in darkness, hope diminishing with every turn. Nobody had admitted it to him, not openly, but he knew this to be true. It wasn’t that he had no faith in his mother. He practically revered her. She was the only one who had never left his side. At least, never before. He no longer even cared to know his father. With time and distance had come, inevitably, detachment. His mother, however, had always cared, always protected him. But despite his faith in her, he was angry with her for taking such a risk. He also had faith in disaster, a faith acquired across the bloody days he had endured of late. Disaster was a voracious, living thing, and he felt that it had stolen into Macao from the belt outside and taken up residence. He could not have expressed this feeling in as many words, of course, but it was no less tangible for that. Disaster had moved upon them under cover of the endless night, stealthy and scheming and fatal.
For a while, his teacher had attempted to lead a class, there amongst the squalor of the dorm. She had bumbled along, fudging her words, confusing the subject. Triangles, he remembered. Something about triangles. As if triangles mattered right now. It wasn’t as if the key to finding the relative lengths of their sides was the same key that would restore the power, return the shuttle, bring his mother back alive. And his teacher had seemed to agree, because she had faltered, stopped, then put her hands to her face. She had been weeping silently behind those hands when she dismissed the class. Her only accomplishment had been to scare her charges. Triangles remained a mystery to them. Nobody cared.
And so he sat. And waited. And wondered why Clay didn’t seem as concerned as he was. Ella was out there, too. Did Clay not care? Or was this just his way of coping? Whatever the case, after a while, Marco began to resent it. He would have left Clay alone and returned to his own bed, but this one had a better view of the window.
Personal possessions still lay everywhere, scattered across the dorm like fallen soldiers, but now there were almost no clothes amongst them. It was getting cold — really cold — and people had put all their clothing to use. And the air didn’t just taste bad, now — it actually seemed to sting the nose and throat. Marco wondered if it might be connected with his growing headache. Looking around him, he saw an alarming number of people rubbing their foreheads or massaging their temples.
Time, he knew, was running out. And almost everyone who mattered to the operation of the station had gone out there into the belt. He wondered if that was wise. Previously, he would have trusted the adults implicitly, especially Halman. He knew his mother trusted Halman, and that was as good a recommendation as Marco could have wished for. But now. . . now he was no longer sure.
They had taken their collective eye off the ball and Eli had let madness grow inside him like rot, unseen and unsuspected. Amy Stone was now in charge at base, but barely. Marco had seen two fist-fights already since Halman and Ella had left. People talked in tight, secretive groups, in hushed and desperate tones, shooting suspicious glances at those around them. The extended family of Macao had become a gaggle of disparate, sullen little groups.
One of the refinery guys began to play the guitar — something slow and sad and beautiful — but his attempt lasted only a minute or so before he was harangued to stop. They were in no mood for entertainment. Others watched the windows, too, waiting for salvation to emerge from that endless abyss. Maybe it still would. Maybe. The darkness shifted and swelled out there, chaos and pattern intermixed, shards of black and grey scattered like broken glass across the floor of the universe.
Chapter Forty-Nine
‘Down there,’ said Alphe a little uncertainly, indicating the short flight of steps at the end of the passage. ‘The bridge.’ Above the steps down was a metal ladder leading up through a hatch in the ceiling.
‘What’s upwards?’ asked Halman. The noise of machinery was louder here and he had to shout to be heard, which seemed somewhat at odds with the intended theme of stealth. His dark eyes were darting like flies in a jar.
‘The passage to the machine rooms,’ Alphe shouted back, ‘and the boarding tube.’
‘Is the noise coming from the machine rooms?’ asked Niya.
Alphe shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But I suspect not. The machine rooms are for stuff like scrubbers, filtration and hydration systems, auxiliary drive systems. . . None of it’s really that loud.’
‘It’s coming from the asteroid,’ Lina shouted. ‘The sound’s echoing back down the boarding and rescue tube.’ She looked around at the faces of her companions. ‘They’re mining,’ she added darkly.
‘For what?’ asked Hobbes, hovering at Lina’s shoulder, holding fast to a handline on the ceiling.
‘Come on!’ ordered Halman from the front of the group before anyone could reply. He waved them onwards, but as he moved off he shot a meaningful look back at Lina. He knew, she thought. He might not be in danger of winning any chess tournaments, but she thought he knew. Ilse shoved her on the shoulder from behind, setting her moving.
They squeezed into the shuttle’s bridge one by one, guns probing the multicoloured cavern of overhanging control panels and angular metal surfaces. Two chairs — pilot and co-pilot — were bolted to the floor before the console, conspicuously empty. The sliding covers that would rise and seal around them to make sus-an casks were retracted into the floor like drawn-back lips. Rocks tumbled outside, tagged on the main screen with distance and direction indicators. The ship’s computer was silently working away, alone, the ever-watchful idiot-guardian.
Lina floated past Halman, feeling claustrophobic in her space suit. Bunches of cable hung from the ceiling like tendons, linking one mute hunk of equipment with another. Red and yellow telltales marbled the shadows. She braked herself against the main screen, momentarily face-to-face with the asteroid belt outside, then turned to survey the room. The others squeezed in behind her, fanning out. The grinding, hammering noise was very loud in here, the rattling growl of a machine-monster in a frenzy.