Angel Stations (32 page)

Kim looked flustered. She was not used to having anyone else in here, he thought. It couldn’t be easy for her. Elias slid around in the seat until he felt comfortable, then locked the web restraints over his chest. He watched the woman slide into the pilot’s seat beside him, and took a sideways glance at Vincent.

Kim closed her eyes for a few moments, took a deep breath, then exhaled. Set in front of her and Elias was a series of screens which fed visual data from outside the ship. ‘Okay.’ She tapped some buttons. ‘Everything’s online,’ she muttered, then turned around. ‘Vincent, close up the airlock and lock it off, will you?’

She hit some more buttons and sat back, blowing a few loose strands of dark hair out of her face. ‘Okay, now we wait for departure confirmation. That might take several minutes.’

Vincent floated around behind them, examining almost everything with curiosity. Elias felt the minutes pass very slowly, and registered the look of relief on her face when confirmation finally came through.

Kim

She guided the Goblin away from the Angel Station. The screens showed only stars and the blackness of space beyond, but various other displays revealed the positions of every ship in the vicinity. She charted a course toward the
Jager
.

Kim did not want to know what Murray was intending once he reached the
Jager
. She did not believe his story, and doubts had niggled at her incessantly since he had appeared.
I am doing the wrong thing
, she had thought, over and over.
Whatever he’s paying me, it’s not worth any more trouble with the law
.

On the other hand, she had reminded herself, the authorities on the Angel Station currently had their hands too full to think of anything else. She hadn’t allowed herself to think further what that might mean in the long run. Whether there might be anything to return to, for instance. If it hadn’t been for Vincent’s sudden appearance, she might well have headed deep into the Kasper system until things blew over.

And if it didn’t get sorted out, if something drastic happened to the Angel Station? But there were other ships out there, capable of keeping a lot of people alive for a long time.

After that, well, there was always Kasper itself, if it came to that. She wondered how the military transports would react, under those circumstances – if contact with Earth was lost. Shoot people down for getting too close to the forbidden planet? Under normal circumstances, the military were legally entitled to do so, but these were hardly normal circumstances.

Later. She would think about these things later.

She excused herself, got up and went through to the aft section, the closest place she had to a real home, leaving Vincent alone with Elias.

When she eventually came back into the cockpit, Elias was still in the co-pilot’s seat, chatting quietly to Vincent. It was small-talk, mostly from Vincent, about academic life back home. She wondered if he’d mentioned anything to Murray about what he feared might happen to the Kaspians.

Kim climbed back into the pilot’s seat and made some minor course adjustments. They were almost there. She pressed a button and a screen to her right, just above Elias’s forehead, sprang to life. It revealed a grey-white shape floating against a sea of darkness. It was the
Jager
.

She glanced at Elias, who was watching the screen intently. There was a look of . . . of hunger on his face, an expression of such intense desire it made Kim feel voyeuristic to watch him. Elias glanced across at her, smiled awkwardly, then turned back to the screen, his expression a bit more guarded.

Kim glanced up at the overhead screens, just in time to see the
Jager
explode.

Or rather, it seemed to come apart as if being unfolded by an invisible hand. The cargo transport simply shattered into a cloud of silver fragments that blossomed towards them, moving fast. Kim gaped at the screen, watching the cloud approach. It was as if her eyes couldn’t quite register what they’d just witnessed. As the cloud came closer, it resolved itself differently. She reached over Elias’s shoulder and touched a screen to increase the magnification.

Silver bugs – millions of them – drifting straight towards the Goblin. She put her hand to her mouth.
Oh my God
, she thought,
what if there were people on board? What happened to them?

Larger sections of the fragmenting
Jager
were becoming visible. She could see the naked engine core, and that too was coming apart. She knew how she would describe this scene for the rest of her life; it was like a child unwrapping shiny metallic paper from around a gift, and the paper being reduced to a blizzard of fragments. Except it was a cargo ship coming apart. She felt a dull heaviness in the pit of her stomach.

She glanced at Elias to her right. He looked shaken and pale, but he was studying the screen closely.

After a few minutes it became clear the components of the expanding cloud were now streaming towards the Angel Station. The Goblin lay directly between the Station and the
Jager
’s prior location.

‘Is there any way we can avoid them?’ asked Vincent from behind her.

Kim was about to answer, but just then the Goblin shuddered, as if making its own response. For a moment they heard a sound not unlike the patter of rain against a window pane.

‘They’re not stopping,’ said Vincent with relief. She followed his gaze to the screen displaying the scene behind them. Far behind them now, the bugs were moving towards the Station.

She wondered what would happen when they eventually got there.

Thirteen

Pierce

As the Station started to come apart, Pierce thought:
If I make it through this, I’ll have such a story to tell
.

The whole Station was getting quieter, quieter than Pierce had ever known it to be. He’d been assuring everyone he met this evacuation was just a temporary measure, that the authorities back on Earth knew what was happening. The news of the invasion of silver bugs had finally gone public all across the Grid, and constantly updated reports were running on all the public datafeeds. Headlines and videos blazed on smartsheets everywhere, held anxiously in the hands of refugees waiting for rescue, or lying discarded in the abandoned corridors of the Hub.

Other reports were coming through, too, about a wave of radiation moving towards the Kaspian system, and only days away. It wasn’t hard to guess someone somewhere had been withholding information, almost certainly someone high up in the chain of command.

Pierce was located in Central Command, a bundle of habitats and office units, watching the coordination of the rescue effort. There were going to be a lot of questions asked about delays in the evacuation effort. For the moment at least, no traffic was heading in or out of the singularity. Avoiding the bugs anywhere throughout the Station was no longer possible. They were even infesting Central Command.

Pierce heard a loud clang, and the operations room around him shook. A klaxon sounded, then came a crunching noise like a steel girder being bent double in one instant by some huge malevolent hand.

He had already abandoned the idea of looking for a Goblin to escape in, finding a streak of integrity within himself he’d never suspected existed. He acted as the Mayor for the people who lived on the Angel Station, even though that in itself was a kind of joke. Somewhere along the line, however, he’d come to believe in his role. There was no one else between the military administrators of the Station and the civilians who made up the bulk of its population, so he’d decided to stick around to help as best he could, and accept a military evacuation when the time came.

And because he was officially an employee of Central Command – being a civilian as well didn’t seem to make a difference – he was obliged to go last. Like the captain of a sinking ship, he thought, with less bitterness than he would have thought he’d feel.

One of Holmes’s aides ran through the door. ‘That’s it. Out, everybody,
now
. We’re losing atmosphere. Get down to Bay Green Seven.’

Pierce watched as everybody else got up from their consoles.
Well, what are you waiting for?
he thought, and ran for the door.

Along the corridor, silver bugs coated the walls and ceiling. Huge holes had been eaten out of the bulkheads. Emergency lights now functioned in many parts of the Station; communications and power had been shut down in several sections. But thankfully most people were out of harm’s way.
Can’t they shut the damn klaxons off?
he thought.

Oh, not good, he thought, when they got to the corridor connecting that part of Central Command to the rest of the Station. The corridor had sealed itself off, swinging the emergency airlock down from the ceiling on its enormous hinge. Pierce and the others peered through the tiny viewing window set into it.

Only stars visible. No sign of the connecting corridor beyond. He wondered if that was the loud noise he had heard – that they had all heard. No access to Bay Green Seven, then.

He looked at the sweating faces all around him. ‘Six?’ suggested someone wearing the uniform of a lieutenant. ‘It’s back down this way. If we go back down here,’ he pointed down another passageway, ‘and cut right, that connects to the Hub.’ The lieutenant didn’t wait to see if anybody disagreed and took off at a run. Pierce ran after the lieutenant. They all ran.

The corridor leading to the Hub and Green Six was still intact, but it was getting hard to breathe. ‘That’s the atmosphere dropping low,’ he heard somebody explain. Pierce turned and recognized Holmes’s aide. He could not remember the young man’s name. The bulkheads shuddered around them. Pierce glanced back the way they had come, and saw the whole corridor behind them twisting out of shape.

Any pretence at order, at military discipline, went out of the window as they scurried down the corridor connecting into the Hub.

Kim

Kim increased the magnification on the rear viewscreen until they could see the whole Kasper Station in all its glory. Something was wrong with it too. Sections of the human-habitable portion had come adrift, were floating near the mouth of the singularity. Other sections were twisted and bent.

‘You know,’ said Vincent, ‘when all this started, I even wondered if those bugs were intelligent.’ Kim and Elias stared at him. ‘They’re artefacts, obviously. Machines. So, even if they’re not living creatures as such, they’re definitely programmed to perform certain tasks. The question is,’ he said, ‘just what it is they’re programmed
for
.’

‘Do you think they were intended to destroy?’ asked Elias. ‘Some kind of weapon?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. But the main factor that’s been obvious all along is that they consume metals in order to reproduce, no, duplicate themselves. Like Von Neumann machines.’

How does he do that?
wondered Kim. He just talked away in that calm voice, and somehow the tense atmosphere had been defused. They were all still frightened, unsure what was going to happen next, but they were now thinking about other things too, like the whys and the hows. ‘Machines that make copies of themselves?’ she asked.

Vincent shrugged. ‘It’s pretty obvious that’s what they are.’ He pursed his lips. ‘You know, there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about. I mean the Angel Station – the main body of it that isn’t human. They don’t seem to have been eating that, do they?’

‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ Murray scowled. ‘Just look at it. The whole thing’s coming apart.’

‘No, the human-inhabited bit of it is, those sections added on to the original alien Station after humans arrived in this system. The original Angel Station – the part that encircles the singularity – they haven’t touched it.’

Kim was thunderstruck. ‘Do you think they’ve got some connection with the Station, the bugs?’

A hint of a smile twisted the corner of Vincent’s mouth. ‘I don’t know – nobody does – but I’ve got an idea. What if they’re some kind of defence mechanism?’

They stared at him. ‘I mean, think about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what happened to the original human crew of the Angel Station when the Hiatus started. Something else might have attacked them. Something from the original Station itself.’ Vincent looked pleased with himself, but Kim noticed Murray was staring blankly into some place inside himself. He looked bleak and miserable. She remembered. Of course.

‘Your friend. I’m sorry,’ she said, moving towards him until he could see her properly. ‘Do you think he was on board?’

He looked up at her. ‘I have no reason to think he wasn’t,’ he said at length, clasping his hands helplessly in front of him. He looked like a man who had just found out that someone very important to him had died.

Pierce

The Station trembled around them. Something banged explosively far around the curve of the Hub, followed by a moaning, sucking sound that sent a freezing chill down Pierce’s spine. A gentle wind tossed his hair. Then the wind became stronger, then began to suck at him. It was getting much harder to breathe, or to think.

‘The Hub is breached. Green Six is this way,’ pointed the lieutenant. But everyone knew where Bay Green Six was and was already running. They were close to it, very close. Pierce knew there were military shuttles docked there ready for departure by the last remaining crew. The wind had become a hurricane.

Someone had reached the bay door, and punched in a security code. Each tap of a finger on a glass screen seemed to take an eternity. Then the door slid open. Slowly.

Black spots began appearing in front of Pierce’s eyes. He was panting for air; they all were. They squeezed and crushed their way through the door, giving way to blind panic. Pierce turned and glimpsed the lieutenant behind him. Something happened to the Hub behind the man. A strip seemed to peel away from one of the bulkheads, and Pierce saw blackness beyond. Then something invisible reached out for the lieutenant and the two men behind him, pulling them through the air towards that blackness. The door slid shut, cutting them off.