Angel Stations (26 page)

There
.

He glided along the zero-g corridors, braking himself frequently with his gloved hands against the walls in case he flew into someone who didn’t want him to be there. This had the advantage of allowing him to move quietly. He had peeled the security code off the arm of his suit, removing his helmet and putting it into the bag he carried over his shoulder.

The corridor branched into two, so he consulted the smartsheet, picked the one on the right. That one split into three. Again, the smartsheet. This time he picked the middle one. He heard voices coming towards him.

No sense in taking chances.

He found an open door, ducked in, looked around. He was in a toilet, the kind built for zero-g: a row of enclosed grey cubicles. He stood just inside the door, listening to the voices approach. He tried to make out what they were saying, but there were several voices speaking all at once. Fearing they were on their way to take a leak, he ducked inside one of the cubicles and discovered something.

Graffiti?

But not just any graffiti.

There were several scrawls on the inside of the door, and Elias studied them until he was sure the voices had passed on by. Mostly it was just names: people that had worked on the ship, presumably, or passengers out of deepsleep. A small, crude drawing of an engorged phallus and a list of things its owner would like to do with it, almost exclusively to the detriment of someone Elias was pretty sure was some kind of commanding officer. And then another cartoon – drawn by somebody who had a little talent – of a flaming sword.

The Primalist symbol.

Elias felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle with excitement. It was just graffiti, so seeing it here might just be coincidence.

Vaughn
, he thought;
Vaughn has something to do with this
. Vaughn was the one loyal to the Primalist creed. It occurred to Elias that he still had no idea how many people on board had been responsible for placing Trencher there.

Two? Three? A hundred?

When the voices had faded completely, Elias sneaked back out once he was sure the corridor was empty again.

His smartsheet plans showed a series of vents running parallel through the ship: service shafts that provided easy access to sensors and something called shielded-exchange nodes. He found his way to one, a low grey door that came up to his knees, with a warning marked on it: DANGER. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BRING AUTOMATIC PENALTIES AND A POSSIBLE CUSTODIAL SENTENCE. Eduardez had told him that they linked different parts of the ship together. Elias reached out for the handle and the door swung open easily. He climbed inside.

He pulled/pushed himself along a series of rungs that lined the inside of the shaft. If the smartsheet was anything to go by, this ship was huge. All he need worry about now was whether getting Trencher back out of there would be as easy as getting himself in so far.

He pushed another entry hatch open, and peered out into a corridor that looked more or less identical to the one he’d left. Still no one around, but there was a sign on the far wall reading CRYOGENICS, with an arrow pointing to the right. Elias pulled himself through, thinking that this was almost too easy. Where was the crew?

He stood and listened. Nothing.

He then followed the sign, treading as quietly as he could. Maybe it really
was
this easy.

He heard his assailant before he even saw him.

Elias turned, ramming his right elbow backwards as he span around. There was a satisfying thud as it connected with somebody’s face, though tendrils of pain shot up his arm with the impact. A man with smooth skin and short-cropped hair staggered away, blood flowing from his suddenly ruined nose. Unfortunately, he hadn’t come alone, and Elias noticed the zap stick coming for him too late to evade it.

The zap stick was a modified taser shaped not unlike a mace, which delivered a powerful shock on impact. Assailant number two had thrown it at Elias’s head. He brought his other arm up, and the mace bounced off it, but the shock it delivered sent him flying backwards.

He was unconscious for only a few seconds, then coughed himself awake, tasting blood, and realized he’d bitten his tongue. Something hard impacted with his face. As he opened his eyes, he saw a blurred figure withdrawing his fist for another punch. Elias kneed him hard in the groin. The blur fell back, howling.

‘And screw you, too,’ Elias mumbled with a swollen tongue, through a mouthful of blood. His ears were singing. He managed to right himself after a few moments, grabbed a handhold jutting out from the corridor wall, and kicked his collapsed assailant hard in the guts, the force of the blow sending the man sailing away from him.

Which still left the other one.

The first assailant, whose nose Elias had broken, had drifted further along the corridor, leaving a trail of blood globules hanging in the air. Elias kicked off from a wall until he caught up with him, grabbing the other man’s arm and punching him on the face until his eyes rolled up in their sockets.

It wasn’t hard to figure out that somebody had known in advance that he was coming. He thought about Eduardez, but he also thought about the zap stick. He went back along the corridor, dragging his captive with the broken nose after him, shedding blood everywhere. As potential assassins went, these two hadn’t been too good. Unlike Elias, they hadn’t been trained for zero-gravity combat. And zap sticks were the kind of soft weapons favoured by the public-relations departments of police forces: non-lethal but good for immobilizing people. So maybe they’d wanted him alive . . .

He pressed a couple of fingers against his captive’s neck, found he was still breathing, then searched him. He found a couple more zap sticks and a more traditional taser, also some vials and needles. Either he was a junkie or he’d intended to shoot something into Elias. Make that
definitely
wanted him alive.

The one whose balls he’d kneed was muttering something, his eyes still glassy with pain. Elias would have to figure out what to do with them both. Elias floated back over to him and kicked him hard in the guts again for good measure.

Then his eyes fell on something shiny pinned on the inside of the man’s lapel: a tiny badge, barely larger than a fingernail. It looked like it was made of silver, and represented a flaming sword.

The sound of running feet. No time to do anything with them now. Elias left his assailants where they lay and ran into the cryogenics room, sliding the door shut. There he hauled a cabinet over from one side until it blocked the door, tipping it back so that its rear edge wedged a heavy bar lock halfway up. That would have to do until Elias could figure out what to do next. He looked around him.

The cryogenics chamber was vast, its ceiling curving high above his head, following the contours of the hull. Great racks rose around him, stacked high with body pods. He went over to one pod at eye level, and peered through its tiny round window. The pod was vacant, as expected. Whatever passengers had been kept in deep-sleep onboard would have been decanted some time ago, and these pods wouldn’t be filled again until the ship was ready to make its return journey.

As someone started hammering on the door behind him, he retrieved the smartsheet, studying it with shaking hands. His head still felt light, unfocused. He tapped the zoom panel until the section of deck he’d ringed previously sprang up, showing clearly the layout of the cryogenics chamber. The ring he’d marked shifted to outline a section of the vast chamber adjacent to one wall. Elias crumpled the ’sheet up in one hand and ran.

He encountered a blank wall, and stared again at the smartsheet, frustrated, then studied the pods stacked all around him. If Trencher was stored in one of these, it would take Elias hours to find him, and he didn’t have hours to spare. A hissing sound echoed distantly off the chamber’s metal wall, the kind of sound made by an oxyacetylene torch. Elias didn’t know how long it would take them to break through, but sensed it wouldn’t be long.

He smoothed out the smartsheet, moving his view of the deck outlay from side to side, ignoring the sheen of sweat growing on his upper lip, and the rising panic inside of him. Where was he now? Was Trencher here at all? The map made no sense to him, and he wished he’d taken the time to study it more carefully. So stupid of him. He zoomed in to maximum magnification.

When he’d received the diskette from Josh, it had contained precise information about where on the
Jager
Trencher was stored. Yet, according to the same information Elias had uploaded into the smartsheet, Trencher was just here. But
here
was a blank wall, a section of bulkhead.

A sudden thought occurred to him. He went over to the wall running alongside one of the tall stacks of body pods and spotted several service hatches. He felt a blossoming of hope.

Maybe they hadn’t wanted to take the risk of storing Trencher with the regular passengers. Perhaps they had opted for more traditional smuggling techniques instead.

A clang of metal rang through the cryogenics bay. They were through. He heard voices shouting to each other, as they spread out. Surely this was the first section they’d come to investigate?

Elias picked a hatch at random. It opened as easily as the first one had.

Several feet further in, all the service tunnels connected together via a single passageway running parallel to the chamber wall. He crawled along it, hoping his hunch was correct.

He found a panel that didn’t look quite right – or to be more precise, someone had glued a plastic panel over a steel hatch, but with apparent haste. It wasn’t difficult to pull it to one side and peer into a space beyond, which looked like it had once contained equipment of some kind.

Instead, there was a body pod, and Elias’s heart rejoiced. He wondered how much time he had left as he crawled inside. Then he remembered the ceramic pistols, and reached behind himself. To his relief he found they were still there safe in the pack over his shoulder, underneath his loose helmet.

Looking through the pod’s tiny viewing window, he recognized the face of a man he’d given up for dead several years ago.

There was the sound of a hatch being opened behind him.

Shit
, thought Elias, and scrabbled back. He saw shadows around the hatch he’d crawled through.

‘In here!’ someone yelled. Then the voice faded, as its owner stepped back from the hatch to give the alert. Elias clambered back and proceeded further along the service tunnel on all fours. There wasn’t time to study the ’sheet and see where else the passage might lead from here. He had to go deeper and hope they didn’t know the layout of the ship any better than he did.

Pushing himself along the tunnel as fast as he could go, after fifteen metres he came to a blank wall. Dead end.

Shit again
. Elias was starting to feel desperate. The only way out was back the way he’d come, where they’d be waiting for him. He lay low on the tunnel floor, allowing just enough room to reach behind him and extract both of the pistols. Gripping one in each hand, he worked his way back towards the hatches leading into the main pod bay. He listened for the voices.

Then he remembered he was still wearing his space-suit, the helmet hanging loosely over his back. Eduardez had warned him that all the safety protocols on the Goblin had been disabled. What else did that mean?

Time to find out.

A head showed itself through one hatch, peered his way, and caught sight of him approaching. A hand reached in, gripping something shiny. Elias lifted one of the tiny ceramic pistols and fired. The figure fell back out of sight, howling.

Elias swiftly shifted around in the tightly confined space of the service corridor, and tapped into the control pad on the front of his suit. He tried to picture the current position of the Goblin but realized that was useless, as he’d proceeded through so many twisting tunnels.

He reached into a pocket for the smartsheet, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the open hatch ahead. They’d now dragged their comrade away, and Elias figured he had just a minute or two before they decided what to do next. Elias suspected they would try very hard to kill him, regardless of what orders they’d originally been given. Trapped in here as he was, Elias realized they had the upper hand, unless he could come up with something soon.

Keeping one gun trained on the hatch, he quickly smoothed out the smartsheet with his other hand. He glanced at it. Wasn’t there something . . .? Ah,
there
. The smartsheet displayed a row of buttons next to a schematic of the cargo ship. He flicked through a series of options until he found what he was looking for.

What Elias had briefly forgotten was that he could view information about the
Jager
in realtime. Of course – like any standard smartsheet, it could hook into the local Grid and update automatically.

He hit up what he needed, and watched as the schematic updated. He tapped rapidly through the decks until he got an external schematic. It showed tiny dots moving in realtime around the body of the ship.

Bingo.

He located the ID code for the Goblin he’d come in on and noted its coordinates, relative to the
Jager
, from the information running in columns next to the schematic. He next found the remote-control panel on his suit and started tapping information into it. He watched as the Goblin’s icon shifted position on the smartsheet, now moving rapidly from one side of the cargo ship to the other.

He had not failed to notice that the cryogenics chamber in which he was trapped sat next to the hull. The realtime display – as Eduardez had cheerfully pointed out – showed where the repair work was being carried out; the hull’s outer layers stripped back, leaving inner walls exposed. Accordingly, it was clear to Elias that the section of inner hull directly over the cargo bay was remarkably vulnerable at present.

The tiny dot of the Goblin was now directly above the cryogenics chamber. He tapped further commands into his control unit and watched as the Goblin shifted position again, this time moving further away from the cargo ship while its nose remained pointing towards it.