Angel Stations (25 page)

He hit the wall behind her hard enough to hear a faint ringing in his ears, finally ending up in an ungainly pile at her feet. The inhabitants of the Station seemed to have an uncanny ability to avoid airbound astrophysicists. People just cut around him, many casting amused and slightly superior glances. He blinked, and thought,
Hope I didn’t hit my head too hard
.

‘Vincent! For God’s sake, are you all right?’

Kim pulled him to his feet. ‘I thought you were going to run away from me,’ he said, feeling a little unsteady. She looked away from him for a moment, then turned back just as he was about to speak again.

‘Don’t say anything. I know,’ she said quickly. ‘Really, I know. I just panicked when I first saw you.’

‘I’ll have to admit I did wonder why—’

‘Things have been difficult,’ she interrupted tersely. ‘I’m sure you understand.’ He did, all too well, and it hadn’t changed his opinion of her one bit. He’d been entirely aware of the pressures on her. ‘So,’ she said, with what sounded to Vincent like false levity, ‘what brings you all the way out here?’

At last, someone he could talk to.

Elias

On the surface, the Angel Station seemed the focus for a cross-political power-sharing. This was a way of guaranteeing that no one nation held absolute power over any one Angel Station, and thereby gaining potentially unlimited military superiority through any Angel tech discovered. Which was the reason, Elias had discovered, why security gave every appearance of being incredibly tight, enough so as to make him feel nervous.

He was therefore reassured, upon further enquiry, to discern high levels of corruption just below the well-polished, regimented surface. His introduction to Bill, by Eduardez, had indeed proved only the tip of the iceberg.

It had been years since Elias had last worn a space-suit. He had a plan already worked out in his head, and the closer he got to his goal, the more excited he felt. He breathed deeply, staring out through the curving glass of his helmet, calming himself, focusing. He reached out, touched a button. A door slid open just in front of him. Somewhere, Elias could hear a hissing, something like a brief whisper or a sharp intake of breath, then he was in vacuum. He waited to see if anything went wrong, but there was nothing but silence. He gazed beyond the open airlock door and saw only blackness.

A radio crackled. ‘Hey, Murray, you there?’ It was Eduardez.

A few days earlier, Eduardez had shown him an external view of the
Jager
. The photograph was blurry, out of focus. ‘Aren’t they going to realize the instant someone comes near?’

‘Sure, but the point is making certain they think you’re a friend, not foe,’ explained Eduardez. ‘They got guys buzzing all over it just now, making repairs. Security ain’t so tight as they’d like.’

‘I don’t want to take any more chances than I have to.’

‘Sure, I understand that. Things are fine. Me and Bill go back a long way. I do him little favours – share and share alike, right? Otherwise life gets pretty boring out here. Look at this little gizmo here. You see that?’ A slim black box, roughly soldered. ‘This contains the same software used to run automated security routines on the
Jager
. This identifies you as a member of the repair crew, so you keep it on the back of your suit and you’ll be fine.’

Elias eyed the little black box with suspicion.

‘What if anyone asks what I’m doing there?’

Eduardez chuckled. ‘Man, nobody going to ask you that. Little box does that for you too. Isn’t a security routine on or around the whole Station hasn’t been cracked some time or other.’

‘What’s with all the security, anyway? I thought the aliens were just primitive or something.’

‘The ones down on Kasper, yeah, but they ain’t the ones built the Station. And what do you mean, why security? Don’t you know what happened here?’

Elias frowned. ‘I read some stuff about the Station on my way here.’

Eduardez stared at him in unfeigned amazement. ‘Like when everybody disappeared? Elias, the whole crew that used to be here before the Hiatus, they just upped sticks and vanished centuries ago. Nobody found ’em, no trace of ’em anywhere.’

Elias looked blank. ‘I thought that was just bullshit.’

‘You serious, telling me you don’t know about this? Ain’t nothing going to happen now after all this time, but, still, what kind of back and beyond you been livin’ in anyway, Elias?’

Elias stepped forward. ‘I’m not paying you to insult me, okay?’

‘Okay, sorry.’ Eduardez raised a placating hand, giving Elias an up-and-down appraisal at the same time, like he was trying to see if he was armed. Elias had a couple of ceramic pistols hidden in the back of his jacket, the kind that weapons scans didn’t usually pick up. Just in case.

A couple of hours before, Eduardez had guided him to one of the outermost reaches of the Station’s human-habitable section, a complex latticework of tubes and supporting struts. Mostly hydroponics, Eduardez informed him while leading him down long corridors filled with heat and plant life. There was even a kind of petting zoo with a couple of dogs and cats. Gerbils floated in the zero gravity like fat, furry bees, watching the men’s passage with tiny eyes from behind wire mesh. The scent of the animals, of the plants, was furious. By the time they’d emerged beyond the hydroponics, Elias was sweating from the heat.

‘What I don’t get,’ said Elias, ‘is why they don’t just rotate the Station and get some kind of gravity. They did it with some of the big military ships I’ve been on, so why not here?’

‘You kidding? Could be that’s what blew the Oort Station up in the first place.’

‘I thought that’s because they jerked around with the circuitry or something.’

‘Yeah, that
and
they tried to spin the thing. Nobody’s going to spin any more Stations to see if they can find out the real reason. So zero gravity it is, for evermore, or until somebody figures out how to make our own singularities. Besides, the place is a mess in every other way that needs to be fixed before they can get around to anything else. They tried using these ’ponics to make the place more self-supporting, but almost all the food and air still gets brought in from outside. Whole thing leaks atmosphere faster than we can breathe it. Here, see that?’

Eduardez pushed through into yet another hydroponics pod, preceding him in. Elias watched as Eduardez scrabbled at a hatch in the plate-steel flooring, under rows of tables covered in biogenetically adapted plant-life. The air smelled sweet and moist. He pulled the hatch up, and Elias reached down to help push its lid to one side. There was a space inside which Eduardez wriggled into and out of sight. After a couple of moments’ hesitation, Elias followed him.

There was more room underneath there than he might have expected. Even enough to stand up in. ‘What is this?’ Elias asked, looking around what appeared to be some kind of storage space. It looked dark, unpainted bulkhead; the only light shone down through the hatch they had climbed through. Elias could see what looked like an airlock door set into one wall.

‘My little hideout,’ said Eduardez. ‘I sometimes keep stuff here I don’t want anyone else to know about.’ Smuggling, Elias guessed.

Eduardez went over to some crates, and pulled one open. It was filled with medical pressure punches, the kind that shot stuff in without using a needle when you pressed it onto your arm. Eduardez pulled one or two out, and turned to Elias like a bon vivant offering a glass of sherry to a friend. ‘Want a shot?’

‘No, thanks. I want to keep my head clear.’

‘Suit yourself. Don’t mind if I do?’ There was a tiny squeak as he pressed the punch against his arm and hit the button. He shook his head. ‘Woof. Needed that. You’re missing out, you know.’

‘You have a job to do, and I’m paying you for it. That means you need to keep your head clear.’ Elias pointed at the crate. ‘Touch any more of that stuff before I go over there, and I swear I’ll kill you.’

Eduardez turned red and looked away. ‘Okay, okay. Jesus.’
Can I really trust him?
Elias wondered.
But maybe I don’t have any choice
.

‘Let’s go over this again,’ said Elias, trying to keep his voice light and conversational. Every instinct in his head was yelling:
Get out of here. You can’t trust this man. You don’t know anything about him anymore
. Instead, he said, ‘I’m going over in some kind of shuttle, right?’

‘It’s a stripped-down Goblin. Gets used for hull repairs, moving stuff around between the Station and nearby ships. Unpressurized, which is why you need a suit. Remember, all the usual safety codes and routines have been stripped out of it, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get it anywhere near any ship without being automatically hailed. Okay, here we are.’ He opened another crate and pulled out a pair of spacesuits that, even to Elias’s untrained eye, looked like they had seen better days.

His reservations didn’t get any less. Elias stepped outside the airlock, trying to remember his military training. The Goblin was right there, only a few feet away. It had been reduced to a jumbled platform, with a series of cargo palettes arranged around its rear circumference. The palettes were currently empty, but he’d need to use at least one of them.

‘Secure yourself,’ said Eduardez, his voice crackling over the intercom. Elias found the console and the pilot’s seat. There were straps for his feet just below it.

A wave of pain washed over him and the universe seemed to spin for a moment. He tasted bile in the back of his throat, and knew it was the Slow Blight eating at him.

‘Remember, Murray, you can also run this thing by remote control, you got that?’

Elias nodded to himself.

‘Hey, Elias, wake up. You all ready for this, man?’

‘I’m ready,’ said Elias, feeling anything but.

‘Everything you need is on the smartsheet, man,’ came Eduardez’s voice. ‘You do like I said, you’ll be able to waltz in there and waltz right out. Nobody’ll even know the difference.’

Elias looked at the controls of the Goblin, remembering what he’d been told.
Ignore them. Use the remotes built into the suit
. All the suits and transport in use around the Kasper Station employed exactly the same protocols, designed for use by people possessing a minimum of skill or knowledge.
Just tell it where to go, and it’ll take you
.

Elias had already taped the co-ord code for the cargo ship onto the arm of his suit. He punched it into the screen in front of him. With a jerk, the stripped-down Goblin moved off, performing what looked like a series of complicated manoeuvres with a variety of tiny jets studded around its body. The cargo ship soon hovered into view on a console screen.

The
Jager
was of the same class as the ship that had brought Elias in, usually filled with travellers in the suspended animation of deepsleep. But there was at least one passenger not on the official manifest.

Minutes passed, and the Station shrank behind him. Then more minutes. As he got closer, the
Jager
just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until it looked more like a great grey-white cliff extending from side to side of his vision. The universe seemed filled with the sound of Elias’s breathing.

There was a small lever just in front of Elias’s mouth. He reached out his tongue, and a tiny 3D image of a section of the ship ahead appeared on one side of his visor. A cargo-bay entrance in the side of the
Jager
was outlined in red and the Goblin guided itself in towards it with the minimum of fuss.

He could now see other figures, moving around the exterior of the
Jager
like minnows caught in the wake of a whale. A couple of other craft looked like the one Elias was riding in. He could see where patches of the hull had been peeled back, exposing the bare skeleton of the ship in parts. The
Jager
was clearly undergoing major maintenance work.

The radio crackled again. ‘Okay, Murray,’ said Eduardez’s voice. ‘I’m going offline now. Don’t want anybody to eavesdrop on you this close, right?’

Elias found the switch for the radio and tongued it off.
Not that they’d get any clues from what you just said
, he thought,
asshole
. He drifted forward in silence towards the enormous ship, and suddenly his perspective shifted so that he felt like he was falling slowly towards the ground.

There we go
, he thought. He could now discern the hatch with his naked eyes.

A few moments later, he parked the Goblin a few metres from the exterior of the
Jager
, untied himself from all the straps, and pushed himself over gently to make a soft impact on the
Jager
’s hull, right next to the same hatch that, Eduardez assured him, would gain him entry.

Elias reached down and pulled some tools out of the hip pocket of his spacesuit. One of them was like a spanner crossed with a spatula, a stubby metal arm with one end vaguely resembling a geometric half-crescent. It fitted perfectly into a slot in the hatch door and, as Elias turned the metal arm anti-clockwise, the door rose up and open. A puff of air passed him, escaping into eternity, as Elias fell inside.

He found himself in a corridor with nobody else around. Eduardez had got him in. Now the rest was up to him.

Trencher was here somewhere. Over the past few days, Elias had felt a certain attitude on his part drop away like used skin: an ingrained feeling of grey hopelessness that had characterized his life for some years now. For a long time, he realized, he’d been merely existing, biding his time. No great purpose in life had revealed itself to him. Now he felt a new confidence, and for the first time in his life understood why some people weren’t afraid of death. As long as you went out fighting for something you actually cared about, it really was possible to die without fear. As long as it didn’t make you careless.

So far, there was no sign there was anyone else on board – anyone awake at least. According to Eduardez, there was a skeleton crew operating somewhere far away on the other side of the ship. Elias pulled out the smartsheet Eduardez had given him; it provided a deck-by-deck layout of the ship, acquired, according to Eduardez, at great cost. He flicked through the decks rapidly until he found the section he’d marked earlier.