Angel Stations (34 page)

‘What is it?’ she whispered quietly.

‘Thought I saw something move down there,’ he said.

He pointed, but she saw nothing at first. The passage was lit by tiny panels embedded every few feet. Then something passed in front of one of the corner lights, casting a brief shadow.

Please don’t let it be
, she thought.
Please don’t let it be
.

But she already knew it was.

‘I think we’ve got stowaways, if you know what I mean,’ said Vincent unnecessarily.

Kim watched for several moments more, then bent down to crawl through. She hesitated.
They’re not dangerous to people
, she thought.
To the Station, yes, but they don’t eat human flesh. They ignore us. Remember that
. She crawled onwards.

She emerged into the rear cargo bay. They were everywhere, clinging to every surface. She couldn’t even find a handhold.

They hadn’t been there a few hours before, when she’d last looked in here. She looked around, searching. They totally ignored her. Then she spotted it: an access panel floated in freefall, a gaping hole where it had previously been fixed to a bulkhead. The silver bugs were swarming through it. She pushed away from the crawl-space to peer inside the hatch. There should have been a range of electronics and a readout, a backup monitor for the engine core in case of general systems failure. There was now only twisted wreckage, chewed and torn.

There was a faint hissing noise, and the tiniest breeze tickled her nose, coming from somewhere behind her. She tried to trace its origin, but with the bugs swimming from bulkhead to bulkhead, she couldn’t see.

‘We’re going to have to turn back,’ she said, coming back to explain to Vincent. ‘I’ll go and speak to him now. He’ll turn back when he understands the alternative.’

Vincent nodded. ‘You should also tell him about the radiation. If nothing else convinces him, maybe that will.’

Elias was awake again as she crawled into the cockpit. ‘You’d better not be lying,’ he said, after she had told him the situation.

Or what? You’re going to shoot us all? She almost said it, but held her tongue. ‘Go take a look for yourself.’

For a moment he looked indecisive. ‘All right. Go back through.’

She turned, pushing herself back through the crawl-space. Elias emerged warily into the cabin a few moments later. He carried the tiny weapon again.

‘I know you don’t have a very high opinion of me,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘I wish you could understand.’

‘Does that mean you’ll give me my ship back?’ asked Kim.

He just looked away from her.
I wonder what’s going on in his head
, she thought. He was no mere thief; something bigger was at stake here. Although trust wasn’t on the agenda, she sought understanding.

He knelt down by the crawlspace leading back to the cargo bay and peered through.

Kim had boosted herself into a corner, as if giving Elias room to pass. Now, while his attention was momentarily elsewhere, she aimed a kick towards the back of his head. She pushed off from the corner, a few moments passing like an eternity. He still hadn’t looked up, still gripped the tiny weapon in one hand as he gazed down the narrow tunnel. She was just behind him now, falling towards his unprotected head.

He jerked back instantly, and she thought:
He knows what I’m trying
. Her boot caught him hard on the back of the neck. He made a sound of surprise, but still held on to the pistol. His free hand reached up, gripping her ankle like a steel vice.

Once Vincent realized what she was doing, he grabbed one of his discarded boots from the corner and smacked Elias hard across the head.

Elias kept hold of Kim’s leg as Vincent hit him again. Kim’s heart leapt into her mouth as she saw Elias point the pistol straight at Vincent. He didn’t pull the trigger however. Instead, he turned pale and began to sweat, his hands shaking. There was something wrong with him, she realized.

Vincent struck again, now with his fist, catching Elias on the mouth. Kim still had one foot free, and now battered the back of Elias’s head with it, bracing herself against a bulkhead to give her the leverage she needed.

Suddenly, Elias went limp, and at first she thought he was unconscious. Her leg slipped from his grasp.

‘Vincent, get the gun,’ she said desperately, then realized he already had. He held it awkwardly, clearly unused to handling weapons.

He could easily have killed Vincent, she realized, and wondered why he hadn’t. She felt she should feel pleased with their small victory. But strangely it didn’t feel like that.

‘We weren’t lying about the bugs,’ she insisted, as if justifying herself, having pushed a safe distance away from him. She hoped Vincent would be capable of using the weapon if necessary.

Elias said nothing for a moment. Then he raised himself a little, and looked over at her. ‘I may have a damaged tooth. I need access to the medical program.’

‘Fine. Vincent, just make sure you keep that thing aimed properly.’

‘Where are we going to put him?’ asked Vincent.

‘The cargo bay, I guess.’

‘Is it safe? I mean, all the bugs—’

‘How many?’ Elias interrupted.

Kim looked at him sharply. ‘I’d rather you kept quiet.’

‘You saw what happened to the
Jager
,’ he said. ‘How long before this ship goes the same way?’

Kim opened her mouth, and closed it again. Unfortunately he was right.

‘We’ve only been away from the Station for a few days. We still have time to turn back.’

‘By the time we decelerate and reverse course, it will be almost fourteen days before we reach what’s left of the Station. Kasper is much nearer.’

She stared at him in shock. ‘You can’t be seriously suggesting —’

‘There’s no alternative, not if we have those bugs on board. It’s also where the shuttle’s headed. There are people on Kasper – humans.’

‘You mean at the North Pole? The research station at the Citadel?’

‘I mean
other
people. Primalists, maybe, hiding out somewhere on the planet’s surface.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Kim, flabbergasted. ‘They’ve done aerial and satellite surveys of the whole planet, watching their culture from a distance. If humans were down there, or interfering, we’d know.’ This was ridiculous, she thought. They needed to find some way of restraining him until they could get back to the Station.

Then she remembered the tiny air leak in the cargo bay. She would not admit to Elias that he might be right about not turning back.

‘There has to be a reason why that shuttle is going there.’

‘You don’t even know where the shuttle’s going!’ she yelled. ‘You’re crazy! One thing I do know, those things have emergency protocols hardwired into them, and just maybe that’s the real reason the thing left the
Jager
when it did. Maybe its heading this way was just an accident, maybe this is its onboard computer’s response to the
Jager
coming apart. Elias, maybe there’s nobody on board. Did you think of that?’

‘Unmanned shuttles running on random algorithms don’t make course corrections,’ Elias argued smoothly, ‘unless they’ve been programmed with a destination in mind. Flying to Kasper isn’t the obvious destination for a short-range shuttle of that type. You may have noticed it hasn’t been giving out any distress signals either. It’s running silent.’

Kim glared at him. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to stay here, while Vincent and I go through to the cockpit. If you try to enter the cockpit, I’ll make sure at least one of us uses that gun to good effect.’

Elias said nothing more, his expression disturbingly smooth and untroubled.

Back in the cockpit, Kim busied herself at the familiar console.

Elias had set numerous datastreams running across half the screens, some from pockets of human life on the Angel Station that had, against all odds, survived the onslaught. The majority of the bugs, it seemed, had now disappeared from there. The emergency, for the Station at least, was almost certainly over.

‘Keep that gun aimed at the crawlspace, Vince,’ she warned, as he came and stood by her, leaning over the co-pilot’s seat and peering at the screens.

‘Look at this!’ he yelped. ‘That’s the cloud of bugs that came off the
Jager
.’

‘What about them?’

‘Says here they kept on going until they reached the singularity. Know what they did when they got there?’

Kim tapped at a control. Something was wrong, but she wasn’t sure what. Some codes she could access easily, others seemed . . . locked off. She then tried to access the navigation system, but was blocked at every attempt. ‘What did they do, Vincent?’ she hissed in frustration.

‘They flew straight through it.’ Vincent’s voice was full of wonder. ‘Flew straight through, but didn’t emerge at the next Station in the chain. My God, I wonder where they went.’

‘Vincent, I have other things to worry about just now. I can’t control the Goblin. I can’t change our course!’

The gun felt slippery in her hand. It was an uncertain weapon, partly because she had never fired a weapon, partly because even though it seemed simple enough to operate, she could not be sure if she had the nerve to use it. She had emerged into the cabin to find Elias still sitting in a corner near the cargo-hold crawlspace, arms folded neatly.

‘Tell me what you did to my ship, or I swear I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

‘Some things I learned in the military. Override procedures they don’t mention in the manuals. The army’s good for that kind of thing.’

‘Tell me where we’re heading.’

‘Kasper.’

She stared at him. ‘And just what the hell do you think we’re going to do when we get there?’

He shrugged. ‘Find that shuttle.’

‘Elias, I’m not even sure this ship could make it down to the surface of a planet.’

‘Neither am I, but it’s an option. The Goblins were all designed with such an eventuality in mind.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘For a start, the details are listed under the emergency protocols contained in the console. The Goblins are derived from a very functional military design. Some of them are ex-military, in fact, which is one reason people like you can afford them, being surplus to needs, decommissioned. They can handle re-entry if they need to.’

‘Elias,’ she protested, feeling desperate, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed, this thing is hardly aerodynamic in shape.’

‘It can make it,’ he replied. ‘All these kinds of ships have the necessary shielding. As I already told you, I came here looking for a friend of mine, who was brought here against his will. Why they would bring him here wasn’t initially clear to me, but now it is. Somebody wants him back, and that somebody is on Kasper. It’s the only logical conclusion, the only possible conclusion.’

‘Or maybe you’re insane, and you’re imagining all of this.’

He smiled without humour. ‘You’re welcome to believe that if it makes you feel more comfortable.’

‘Tell me how to access the Goblin’s navigation systems,’ she said, raising the gun threateningly.

‘No, not ever. I’m sorry.’

‘For God’s sake, I can’t even radio out a distress signal. We’ll die if we can’t . . .’

He stared back at her calmly. Her hand was shaking, she realized.

‘Elias, listen.’ She then told him about what Vincent had said, about the radiation coming from somewhere near the centre of the galaxy. Maybe he’d understand now, she thought, if he even believed her.

‘Look on the public news channels if you don’t trust me,’ she said. ‘It’s just starting to break.’

He continued staring at her, but after a moment his focus shifted, so that he seemed to be gazing at some faraway place Kim could not imagine. ‘You know, it’s all starting to make sense now,’ he said after several seconds.

‘So you’ll turn us back?’

‘I told you.’ His voice was strangely calm. ‘It’s too late for that. We’d never make it.’

‘We have to try,’ she said, hearing desperation growing in her own voice. ‘We could send out an emergency signal, and someone might be able to meet us halfway.’

To her horror, he shook his head from side to side. ‘Things make sense now,’ he repeated. ‘Kim, I’m not trying to get any of us killed. We’d have a better chance by maintaining our course to Kasper anyway. Even if it comes to the worst, we can find a deep cave somewhere . . .’

An idea came to Kim, making her start. ‘The Citadel,’ she said.

Elias looked at her blankly.

‘The Citadel,’ she said again.

Elias shook his head; clearly he didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘It’s a place on Kasper, the biggest Angel artefact of them all. It goes deep, Elias. Very deep.’

Fourteen

Vaughn

Vaughn slid his shirt off, revealing a well-muscled chest criss-crossed with tiny long-healed scars. He dropped the shirt into a basket. A girl called Ann came into the room and handed him a cup of what the Kaspians, roughly translated, called green wood tea. She left with a vague smile.

Matthew knocked a few moments later, and entered Vaughn’s office. The room was low and wide, with windows that looked across at the Northern Teive peaks. The Kaspians rarely ventured this far into the mountains, and even if they did make the attempt, there were ways to dissuade them. Mists hid the valleys far below. Some of their nomadic tribal peoples still travelled up to the foot of the Northern Teive peaks, but Vaughn wasn’t worried about them being able to scale those heights just yet.

Vaughn’s home doubled as a kind of city hall, and the surveillance systems were run from a room directly below his office. It was the other backup systems that Vaughn was concerned with just at that moment. They would be required when the fire came and the world was made anew. Those other systems would be stored in the Retreat, as the deep caves had come to be known. Preparations for the catastrophe that would wipe out the native civilization were under way, and if it wasn’t for the loyalty and the patience of the people around him, Vaughn didn’t know how they might have managed it.