He did close his eyes now, hating the final docking procedure, and only opened them again after he had felt the rapid thunder of the docking latches, transmitted through the fabric of the repair bay to his feet. Below Storm Bird, pressure doors began to close. If she was going to be stuck here for a while, and it looked as if she would, they might even consider pumping the chamber so that Xavier’s repair monkeys could work without suits. But that was something to worry about later.
Xavier made sure that the pressurised connecting walkways were aligned with and clamped to Storm Bird’s main locks, guiding them manually. Then he made his way to an airlock, passing out of the repair bay. He was in a hurry, so did not bother removing more than his gloves and helmet. He could feel his heart in his chest, knocking like an air pump that needed a new armature.
Xavier walked down the connecting tube to the airlock closest to the flight deck. Lights were pulsing at the end of the tube, indicating that the lock was already being cycled.
Antoinette was coming through.
Xavier stooped and placed his helmet and gloves on the floor. He started running down the tube, slowly at first and then with increasing energy. The airlock door was irising open with glorious slowness, condensation heaving out of it in thick white clouds. The corridor dilated ahead of him, time crawling the way it did when two lovers were running towards each other in a bad holo-romance.
The door opened. Antoinette was standing there, suited-up but for her helmet, which she cradled beneath one arm. Her blunt-cut blonde hair was dishevelled and plastered across her forehead with grease and filth, her skin was sallow and there were dark bags under her eyes. Her eyes were tired, bloodshot slits. Even from where Xavier was standing, she smelt as if she hadn’t been near a shower in weeks.
He didn’t care. He thought she still looked pretty great. He pulled her towards him, the tabards of their suits clanging together. Somehow he managed to kiss her.
‘I’m glad you’re home,’ Xavier said.
‘Glad to be home,’ Antoinette replied.
‘Did you…?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I managed it.’
He said nothing for several moments, desperately wishing not to trivialise what she had done, fully aware of how important it had been to her and that nothing must spoil that triumph. She had been through enough pain already; the last thing he wanted to do was add to it.
‘I’m proud of you.’
‘Hey. I’m proud of me. You bloody well should be.’
‘Count on it. I take it there were a few difficulties, though?’
‘Let’s just say I had to get into Tangerine’s atmosphere a bit faster than I’d planned.’
‘Zombies?’
‘Zombies and spiders.’
‘Hey, two for the price of one. But I don’t imagine that’s quite how you saw it. And how the hell did you get back if there were spiders out there?’
She sighed. ‘It’s a long story, Xave. Some strange shit happened around that gas giant and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.’
‘So tell me.’
I will. After we’ve eaten.‘
‘Eaten?’
‘Yeah.’ Antoinette Bax grinned, revealing filthy teeth. ‘I’m hungry, Xave. And thirsty. Really thirsty. Have you ever had anyone drink you under a table?’
Xavier Liu considered her question. ‘I don’t think so, no.’
‘Well, now’s your big chance.’
They undressed, made love, lay together for an hour, showered, dressed — Antoinette wearing her best plum-coloured jacket — went out, ate well and then got royally drunk. Antoinette enjoyed nearly every minute of it. She enjoyed every instant of the lovemaking; that wasn’t the problem. It was good to be clean, too — really clean, rather than the kind of grudging clean that was the best she could manage on the ship — and it was good to be back in some kind of gravity, even if it was only half a gee and even if it was centrifugal. No, the problem was that wherever she looked, whatever was happening around her, she couldn’t help thinking that none of it was going to last.
The spiders were going to win the war. They would take over the entire system, the Rust Belt included. They might not turn everyone into hive-mind conscripts — they had more or less promised that that was the last thing they intended — but you could guarantee things were going to be different. Yellowstone had not exactly been a barrel of laughs under the last brief spider occupation. It was difficult to see where the daughter of a space pilot, with a single damaged, creaking ship to her name, was going to be able to fit in.
But hell, she thought, cajoling herself into a state of forced bonhomie, it wasn’t going to happen tonight, was it?
They travelled by rim train. She wanted to eat at the bar under Lyle’s Crater where the beer was great, but Xavier told her it would be heaving at this time of day and they were much better off going somewhere else. She shrugged, accepting his judgement, and was mildly puzzled when they arrived at Xavier’s choice — a bar halfway around the rim called Robotnik’s — and found the place nearly empty. When Antoinette synchronised her watch with Yellowstone Local Time she understood why: it was two hours past thirteen, in the middle of the afternoon. It was the graveyard shift on Carousel New Copenhagen, which saw most of its serious partying during the hours of Chasm City ‘night’.
‘We wouldn’t have had any trouble getting into Lyle’s,’ she told him.
‘I don’t really like that place.’
‘Ah.’
‘Too many damned animals. When you work with monkeys all day… or not, as the case may be… being served by machines begins to seem like a bloody good idea.’
She nodded at him over the top of her menu. ‘Fair enough.’
The gimmick at Robotnik’s was that the staff were all servitors. It was one of the few places in the carousel, barring the heavy-industrial repair shops, where you saw any kind of machines doing manual labour. Even then the machines were ancient and clapped-out, the kind of cheap, rugged servitors that had always been immune to the plague, and which could still be manufactured despite the system’s much reduced industrial capability in the wake of the plague and the war. There was a certain antique charm to them, Antoinette supposed, but by the time she had watched one limping machine drop their beers four times between the bar and their table, the charm had begun to wear a little thin.
‘You don’t actually like this place, do you?’ she asked later. ‘It’s just that you like Lyle’s even less.’
‘You ask me, there’s something a tiny bit sick about that place, turning a major civic catastrophe into a bloody tourist attraction.’
‘Dad would probably have agreed with you.’
Xavier grunted something unintelligible. ‘So what happened with the spiders, anyway?’
Antoinette began picking the label off her beer bottle, just the way she had all those years ago when her father had first mentioned his preferred mode of burial. ‘I don’t really know.’
Xavier wiped foam from his lip. ‘Have a wild stab in the dark.’
‘I got into trouble. It was all going nicely — I was making a slow, controlled approach to Tangerine Dream — and then wham.’ She picked up a beer mat and stabbed a finger at it by way of explanation. ‘I’ve got a zombie ship dead ahead of me, about to hit the atmosphere itself. I painted it with my radar by mistake and got a bunch of attitude from the zombie pilot.’
‘But she didn’t chuck a missile at you by way of thanks?’
‘No. She must have been all out, or she didn’t want to make things worse by revealing her position with a tube launch. See, the reason she was doing the big dive — the same as me — was that she had a spider ship chasing her.’