Macao Station

Chapter Forty-Seven

They flew through the belt in loose formation. Lina steered mainly by Halman’s and Alphe’s Kays, which stayed ahead of her and to either side. Her ship’s safety systems were running, but her trust in the safety of anything that came from Macao had long since dwindled. She half expected, at any moment, to be smashed to smithereens by an errant belt object, but even this was not enough to really frighten her. The conclusion was coming. Let it come. All she felt was a distant sense of relief.

Halman had ordered a change of radio channel, concerned that the prisoners might hear them on the default frequency. Nobody felt conversational anyway. They flew in silence.

As the belt thickened, a virtual infinity of potential ambush-points and hiding places flourished about them. The loader might spring out at them, even try to ram one of the Kays, but still Lina was unable to feel afraid. She wondered if Carver’s gang had seen them coming yet. Hadn’t she herself once joked to Eli about Macao’s prisoners escaping and establishing a pirate base out here? Another joke that had proven to be prophetic. Perhaps, in some impossible way, they’d seen it coming.

When Eli’s rock came into sight, she regarded it with disappointment. It was just a rock — large, but not so unlike a million other rocks out here. Except that this one had the ugly grey shuttle attached to it like a leech and the loader attached in turn to that. The whole thing looked lifeless, unthreatening, kind of sad. But the enemy was there, and in greater numbers now. She wondered what they hoped to achieve on that isolated boulder beyond starvation and an eventual, lonely death. She wondered if the dragon was real, if it was in there, sitting at the centre of its monstrous web, pulling the strings and watching its puppets dance to its bloody, savage tune. If it was real, would it somehow try to stop them? Could it somehow try to stop them?

Although the belt was eerie enough, the shadow that Lina had sensed there before was not in evidence now. She supposed it probably never had been and she regretted mentioning it to Halman. If, as she suspected, it had merely been an externalisation of her own fears, those fears seemed much diminished now. Perhaps the continual fright and horror of recent days had dehumanised her, burned away all of her capacity for real emotion. Even her love for her son seemed a distant concept, something she knew was genuine and solid, but that she couldn’t tangibly feel at that moment. Now she was just glad that an end was coming. That was enough.

Soros glinted through chinks in the asteroid field, pale and watery and distant, fading in and out of sight like a thief flitting between patches of shadow. She thought wonderingly about how far away Platini system was, and tried to gauge the possibilities of ever crossing that vast, desolate emptiness with her son, fleeing this merciless outpost at the end of the universe, desperately seeking something better.

She wanted the shuttle that Eli had stolen. Not just for Macao, not just for the desperately-needed supplies and parts that it held, but for her own selfish reasons too. The shuttle was her and Marco’s only ticket out of here, unless they were somehow to survive the wait for the next one. She had to have it. She would risk her life on this one throw of the dice. And she would earn the right to take the vessel to Platini. Damn it, she’d demand the right if she survived this. And she’d take anyone else who wanted to go with her. To hell with Macao Station. It had been the grave of too many of her friends.

Their Kays converged on the unwelcoming mass of rock and machinery, the tiny threads of their gas trails wavering through the belt like spider silk. The shuttle was unlit, deserted, the loader just as dark and silent. The asteroid loomed large against a backdrop of endless grey and black, its facing side in shadow. It looked like a hole in space, a vortex into which a person might fall upwards and away into the archives of the universe and disappear forever. Slowly, they approached.

They spread around the asteroid in a wide fan, encircling it and checking for danger. Finding nothing, they edged closer, tightening the net.

Si stopped his ship at the wide end of the rock and shone his headlight onto it. ‘It’s just an asteroid,’ he said, echoing Lina’s own disappointment. She wondered what they had expected to see.

She looked to her side, and there was K6-3, tagged with Ella’s name, hanging in space, appearing to regard the asteroid with the cyclopean eye of its cockpit glass. Ella’s ship rotated slightly to face Lina’s, and beckoned with one of its tool arms. Lina thought she caught the meaning of the gesture: Let’s get on with it. She waved an arm in return and brought her Kay around in a careful arc, moving down the length of the asteroid back towards the shuttle. The asteroid’s scaled surface slid along below her, gaudy with bright instawall patches.

She stopped halfway along the shuttle’s hold — the vast, curved belly that formed the greater part of its bulk — and unfolded her tool arms. The new cutting disc looked fragile and unwieldy. She flexed the arms, checking the diagnostics one last time.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

‘Go to it,’ answered Halman. His Kay coasted across her field of vision, left to right, just above her.

She approached the shuttle warily, as if it might bite, and applied a magnetic anchor. She also spun up a screw anchor, pressed it gently to the skin of the shuttle and let it wind itself in tightly. She applied a little burst of reverse thrust, testing the strength of her grip on the larger vessel. Her Kay didn’t budge at all.

‘Right. . .’ she said under her breath.

She fired up the cutting disc and touched it to the shuttle’s hull. The vibration reverberated through the body of her Kay, making her teeth chatter together. Glittering jets of dust arced away from the cut, dissipating into space. The disc sank into the metal. She worked it carefully down in a vertical line, then withdrew it, turned it ninety degrees, and cut a horizontal. When she had inscribed a neat door-shape, she drew the cutter back. She looked to her right and saw Ilse Reno’s ship hovering next to her.

‘Nice work,’ said Ilse.

Was that the first compliment Ilse had ever given her? Lina thought perhaps it was. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

Lina put out a claw and pushed against the vertical rectangle she had cut. Silently, it gave way and popped neatly out of the hole. The door-shaped chunk floated away into the ship and was lost from sight in darkness. The lights were off in there.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lina with mock grandiosity. ‘Please step inside.’

‘Is everyone ready?’ Halman asked.

The ships drifted, equidistant, their computers keeping them safely separated. The hull of the shuttle soared away above them like a cliff face. There was a general chorus of affirmation. Lina heard real fear in many of their voices. Niya Onh sounded as if she might be crying.

Lina released the clamps that held her Kay to the shuttle and burned briefly away from it, then stopped and floated stationary just behind Ilse. ‘I’ll go first,’ she suggested, deciding that recklessness might be the better part of valour.

She closed her visor and called up her suit’s HUD. She scanned the figures that floated before her eyes. All within ideal parameters. Plenty of air. She killed the main console of her ship without bothering to shut it down properly, then braced herself in the seat. The soft darkness of space rolled away into the distance, monotonous and eternal. A brief stab of longing — for bright sunlight, solid ground underfoot, trees and seas and houses, things she hadn’t seen since childhood — struck her somewhere deep inside. She was going out there, into that, with nothing more than the space suit she wore now. It didn’t look like a place where any human being belonged. And worse than that, she had to go into the shuttle. Into the dragon’s lair, she thought darkly. It’ll eat you up! But would it? Could it?

She reached up and turned the twin cockpit release handles. The canopy popped open a hand’s breadth with a vomited expulsion of air. She reached out her hand, pushing it all the way up, then paused in wonder, trailing her fingers through the vacuum. Curious that this medium, anathema to human life, was itself completely invisible — just nothing. A vast, fatal nothing. This was the stuff of which the universe was made. It was a wonder life existed anywhere.

She undid her harness and pushed away from her seat, a little too hard, flying between the rim of the cockpit and the open canopy, sending herself floating away towards another Kay. She saw Rocko ejecting from this other vessel, clumsily pinwheeling into space.

The air of her suit smelled sickly and somehow burnt, not unlike the noisome air of Macao itself. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so alone and vulnerable, floating in space with only a few layers of fabric between her and oblivion.

Lina had never had occasion to use the in-built manoeuvring jet of a space suit before. She’d always flown pressurised vessels. In truth, she’d only ever worn a suit twice before this whole mess had started. She hoped it would be instinctive to use, because Alphe hadn’t allowed them to waste any fuel in practice. She pointed the sleeve-mounted jet away from the shuttle and fired a brief burst, sending herself drifting smoothly towards the doorway that she had cut. She hit the hull of the shuttle shoulder-first, hard enough to send a jarring shock through her body. Alphe had warned her that the jet only had about thirty seconds total burn time available, but so far she’d used less than one, so she thought that would be plenty.

She imagined the psychotic Carver waiting for her in there, all bloodthirsty grins and human-finger-necklaces. She could almost see him crouching in the metal-smelling darkness of the ancient ship, grinning. Waiting. Madness was patient, after all. That was one thing that Eli’s deception of his friends had taught her: madness was patient.

She clawed her way along the blistered surface of the shuttle. In some places the metal was so deeply pitted by impact marks that she could have put her whole hand into the dents. She gripped the edge of the rough doorway she had cut and looked back over her shoulder. Her companions were drifting towards her in a tentative-looking swarm.

It occurred to Lina that if there was indeed a greeting party waiting for them then Carver’s people could just sit there and blast them one by one as they came through. It’d be little more than a turkey-shoot. It was possible that someone would be able to get a radio message off, but the radios in the suits were pretty weak, and the shuttle’s hull was pretty thick, so probably not.

With this thought in her mind, Lina dragged herself round the lip of the doorway and fell into the blackness of the shuttle’s hold. She tumbled, suit-light flashing over and over, showing blurring snatches of metal railings and spidery walkways. She let out the smallest burst that she could from the suit’s arm-jet, hoping to right herself. She spun away, end over end, and hit one of the railings back-first. She cried out in pain but gripped onto it, finally managing to still herself.

When she cast her light back onto the doorway in the hull, she saw the unmistakable shape of Si Davis squeezing through, dragging himself down the metal wall with clawed hands. He looked up when her light fell on him and grinned his broad grin. ‘Hey, Lina. I saw you spinning out then. Thought you were an expert pilot.’ He gained one of the walkways above Lina and grabbed onto the railing, bracing his feet against the floor.

‘I’m still a better pilot than you,’ she retorted. But it was an automatic reply and the exchange seemed a pretty weak imitation of their usual banter. Si let it drop.

Other suited figures were clambering into the shuttle now, one by one, like great white crabs, scampering in slow motion down the walls to mass on the walkways around Lina and Si. Halman stopped beside her, holding onto the rail with one hand while his legs trailed in empty space above what would, in a one-gee environment, have constituted a very dangerous drop. Lina leant over and shone her light into the depths. She couldn’t even see the floor down there. Above her, heavy crane arms were folded tight against their ceiling gimbals.

‘Hello, Dan,’ she said.

‘Hey, Lina,’ he said. The face behind his visor was shiny with sweat, swarthy and old-looking.

Alphe dragged himself along the rail towards them, also trying to run along the walkway with his feet and mainly just managing to look ridiculous.

‘I know the way to the bridge,’ said Alphe without preamble. ‘And I have the printed schematic with me, just in case.’

‘Good,’ said Halman. He turned and looked around at his little army. ‘Are we all ready to move?’ Nobody said otherwise. ‘Then let’s go. And take it easy, now. Although you don’t have any weight to speak of, you do still have mass in this environment. That means you have momentum, and that means you can get hurt if you go crashing around the place like fuckwits. Alphe — lead on. To the bridge. And for fuck’s sake, keep your eyes peeled and your guns handy. My earlier speech about asking anyone we meet to surrender no longer applies. Now we’re outnumbered and we can’t afford such luxuries. Now we shoot first, ask questions later.’

They swam through a silent treetop village of steel mesh and flaking paint. They passed occasional small rooms — little more than sheet-metal huts — dotted here and there amongst the walkways. At one point they found their way barred by a thick forest of chains that stretched away into the great pit of shadows below them and snaked alarmingly when Lina tried to squeeze through.

‘Let’s find another way,’ she said, backing off. Her companions floated behind her, holding onto the railings.

‘How about we jump to the next walkway?’ suggested Ilse. Her eye glowed demonically red in her face and her straggly grey hair, not tied back, had fallen across her forehead beneath her visor. She looked small and mean and dangerous.

‘Yeah, no problem,’ said Si.

‘Don’t use your jets,’ said Halman. ‘Not unless you have to.’ He was leaning over the edge, casting his light onto the next walkway. It looked a very long way off and quite far below them. Lina knew that she was just constrained by her usual one-gee way of thinking, but she remembered Halman’s words about momentum. ‘Go slowly and accurately. If anyone ends up spinning out of control it might take them ages to get back to the group.’

‘I don’t think I can do it,’ said Hobbes.

Halman turned a glowering look on him. ‘Well, Doctor,’ he said, ‘at least if you crash and die, we won’t have to take you back to the morgue to freeze you.’

‘That,’ said Hobbes a little haughtily, ‘is not funny.’

They clambered over the railing and hung from the outside of the walkway, suspended above that bottomless well. Lina looked to her left, where Ella was poised with her hands behind her on the bar and her feet braced against the walkway, ready to push off.

‘Let’s fly!’ cried Ella, and she sprung away from the ledge. Lina watched her go, her heart pulsing high in her throat. Ella’s white-suited body went sailing through space, spotted in half a dozen lights, her legs pulled up beneath her and her arms out to either side like wings.

‘She’s going too fast!’ yelled Niya, her voice cracking with panic.

‘Shit!’ cried Rocko.

But Ella soared gently over the nearest handrail of the lower walkway, grabbing onto the furthest rail with one hand and managing to arrest herself. Lina heard her grunt of exertion over the comm. Ella floundered, legs flailing, then managed to pull herself over and down onto the walkway’s floor. She righted herself, hovering just above the steel mesh, and waved.

‘Come on!’ she called. ‘What’re you all waiting for?’

Rocko laughed nervously. ‘I knew she’d make it,’ he said.

Someone else laughed — Lina wasn’t sure who — and then Si pushed off, more slowly than Ella had done. Then Rocko, Alphe, Halman, Hobbes. . .

Lina took a deep breath and jumped. Remembering her recent time in the hub with Marco, she pushed off gently and drifted, slower than anybody else, across the yawning chasm of the shuttle’s main hold. She hit the nearside railing of the new walkway squarely, cushioning herself easily with her hands, using them as buffers. Petra landed next to her, whooping with exhilaration. Several of them laughed, but it was a sound filled with tension and dangerously close to the edge of sanity. They dragged themselves onto the walkway and continued their journey.

The various walkways began to angle downwards and together. Soon they could see the main door to the hold — a large airlock door, wide enough to admit a dead-lifter easily. The floor ramped more sharply downwards and, although they could have simply drifted through space, they followed it, conditioned to obey the laws of up and down.

Suddenly, Halman’s vice-like hand gripped Lina’s shoulder from behind. She turned and looked up into his face. He pulled her to a stop and the rest of the group halted behind them. He pointed, down and to their left.

Lina followed the direction of his pointing finger and her chest seized tight. She saw it: a flash of white, down at floor level, moving between the cargo racks, a light briefly flashing ahead of it, then gone again.

‘Somebody in a space suit?’ she whispered, before remembering that there was no need to keep her voice down. Either the enemy was on their channel and would hear her, or not.

‘Yeah,’ said Halman. ‘I think so.’

Everyone was craning to see, leaning over the railing. Several people were pointing pistols. Lina stared, seeing only strapped-down piles of crates and boxes down there, magnetised together in tall, improbable-looking columns. That flash again — white — someone in a space suit, for sure.

Somebody fired — a silent stitch of green in the darkness. The person below them turned with panicky speed and their light glinted briefly in Lina’s eyes. And then a laser beam passed above her shoulder, harmlessly into the depths of the hold.

‘Shoot!’ cried Halman.

The figure below was swimming quickly just above the floor, firing on the fly, missing them all again. Several people from Lina’s team responded, although Lina herself stood uselessly holding her pistol at her waist, pointing down at her own feet. The figure flew from one stack of crates to another, crashed into something and went cartwheeling out into the open. Several shots from the walkway hit the unfortunate enemy at once. One shot put out their suit-light, another caught them high on the chest and a third hit them squarely in the head. The figure’s suit burst, leaving the victim twisting and thrashing in the vacuum, their laser discharging hopelessly into empty space.

‘I got him!’ cried Rocko fiercely.

Lina had to look away — she couldn’t stand to watch that struggling, asphyxiating death. It reminded her too much of Waine. She felt no joy at this small revenge, no sorrow for the murdered man, only a faded kind of revulsion at the spectacle.

‘Another one!’ somebody screamed — Petra? Ilse? — and panic gripped the group as they spun around, trying to look in all directions. Si lost his grip on the rail and drifted slowly out into open space, suspended magically above the drop.

‘Up there!’ yelled the voice again, and Lina knew this time that it was Ilse Reno. ‘Look!’

Lina turned and saw Ilse pointing up towards another walkway that was almost invisible in the darkness above them. A flash of white — someone dragging themselves along the rail up there, legs kicking behind them.

This time Lina managed to aim her own weapon. She fired, but her laser beam flashed away into the shadows of the ceiling. Other people were firing, too, their shots making a brief but dazzling cat’s-cradle of light. The figure dived down a set of steps, rolling over in their haste, and Lina fired again. She missed again, too, although she was closer this time. She suspected that the cheap laser was pretty inaccurate and that the fault wasn’t all hers.

The figure gained the next walkway down, slightly closer to them, and it paused to return fire. The laser winked green. Halman reeled back, hitting the rail behind him and bouncing off to crash into Hobbes, with whom he entangled. They both fell, spinning away together along the walkway. Another shot from above barely missed Si where he floated, exposed, on his back. He returned fire, his broad face locked in a savage rictus.

Lina tried to fix the figure in her suit-light, but it was moving again, pushing off to fly along the walkway. She saw Ilse and Rocko sighting along their weapons. One of them missed by an even longer margin than Lina herself had. But one of them hit the figure. Lina didn’t see where the shot had landed exactly, but she saw a flurry of white shreds as the enemy’s suit exploded. The figure shot up into the darkness, convulsing, scraps of suit fabric shimmering in the team’s torch beams, then rolled away into the cavernous depths of the cargo bay. The dying man faded from the range of their suit-lights, swallowed by the darkness. Gone.

They waited in silence, stabbing the barrels of their pistols in all directions, full of adrenalin, expecting more company. Gradually, they began to relax, lowering their guns. Hobbes extended a hand to Si, pulling him back to the walkway.

‘You okay, Hobbes?’ Halman asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Hobbes. ‘But you hit me pretty hard there. You?’

‘Fine,’ said Halman. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Do you think that’s it?’ asked Petra.

‘For now,’ said Rocko ominously.

‘Let’s go on,’ said Halman. ‘But expect more. Weapons ready.’

‘Poor bastards,’ said Hobbes. Nobody ventured so far as to agree with him.

As they continued down the incline of the walkway, nearing the airlock door that led to the pressurised part of the shuttle, Lina accidentally glanced down towards the dead man near the floor. His body floated, still rolling gently in the micro-gee, arms and legs spread, suit hanging in shreds. One less to fight later, she thought. She supposed that was a good thing. At least her team had all survived. That had to be a good thing, right? We’re winning, she told herself. So far, we’re winning.

‘Is it far?’ asked Petra, swimming past Lina with surprising agility. She held her pistol at arm’s length, pointing to her side, as if trying to distance herself from it.

‘Not that far,’ said Alphe meaninglessly.

They descended to the floor level, following the handlines that stretched between steel poles bolted into the floor. Those towers of crates leant over them. They passed a dead-lifter, secured against low-gee inside a cradle in the wall.

‘It’s quiet,’ said Ella in a whisper, scanning around herself. ‘Too quiet.’ She laughed nervously. ‘That’s a bit clichéd, isn’t it?’ she asked, a little quiver in her voice.

Lina looked around. The dead man in the shredded suit was behind them now, gently pirouetting in a perpetual dance of death. Halman pushed to the front of the group and hit the pad beside the airlock.

Rocko and Ella hung back, acting as rearguard. Lina cast her light up into that night sky of soaring cranes and vaulted metal, seeing only a collage of black layers, watching for the incongruous flash of white that would mean more danger.

The airlock door opened silently and they followed Halman inside. The airlock looked old and well-used, its walls heavily scarred by collisions. Lina noticed a dangling bundle of plastic relays held together with insulating tape, which did little to reassure her.

Halman pushed through to the far end and cycled the airlock. The door by which they had entered dropped suddenly into place, trapping them. There came the building rush of pressurising air and then the opposite door slid open.

They emerged into a wide corridor lit by LED lights. Pistons moved beneath the grated floor like ligaments stretching and contracting. The airlock closed behind them with finality. They raised their visors and pulled themselves along the handline in a rag-tag procession.

‘Shhh!’ hissed Ella suddenly.

Lina turned to see Ella behind her, frozen in place with her head cocked to the side and one index finger raised for quiet.

‘What?’ Lina whispered.

‘I thought I heard something,’ said Ella.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Halman. ‘You think it was trouble?’

Ella shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Sounded like some sort of machine noise. I want to scout ahead for a minute before we rush in en masse.’

Halman floated past her, towards the opposite wall. He dragged himself along it, clawing with his gloves, trying to see round the corner at the end of the corridor. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Si — you too. Everyone else sit tight and make sure nothing comes out of that airlock behind us.’

Halman swam off down the corridor, followed by Ella and then Si, who ricocheted clumsily from floor to ceiling as he went, cursing quietly.

Lina placed the palm of one hand against the wall, trying to temper the feeling of instability that she was suffering from. Through the padded skin of her glove she could feel a distant, low thrumming in the shuttle’s structure, as if something was vibrating in the bowels of the ship, some kernel of life-force trembling inside it. She felt a frown crease her face. Ella had thought she’d heard machine noise. What were Carver’s escaped psychos doing in there?

Of course, the answer that presented itself to her miner’s mind was: Digging. Mining. But mining for what? Metals? Surely not. What, then?

‘They’re digging for it,’ she breathed, making Alphe glance up at her, his honest face open in enquiry.

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing,’ she answered, unwilling to explain herself. She had already tried that with Halman and she was pretty sure that he thought she was crazy. She shut the thought from her mind and looked away. ‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated. How would spouting mystic bullshit about buried dragons actually help at this stage? It wouldn’t change the fact that, whatever happened, they had to get this shuttle back to the station.

‘Nothing?’ he pushed, alerted by the tone of her voice. ‘Sure?’

Petra dragged herself over, Hobbes close behind her. Niya floated just before the corner of the passage, watching Si’s back as he disappeared off into the ship’s innards.

Lina glanced around, aware that she had drawn a crowd. ‘It’s just that Ella thought she heard machine noise. If you put your hand on the wall, you can feel a vibration through it.’ The others did as she suggested. ‘You see? I wonder if they’re mining for something.’

‘I just want to get to the bridge, release the clamp and get the hell out of here,’ said Petra. She looked around herself. Peeling walls loomed at unnatural angles, a world devoid of true directional reference points. They had oriented themselves with the floor as best they could, but the impression of order felt tenuous at best. Petra shivered, hugging herself. ‘It’s creepy.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Hobbes in a flat tone that was a long way from his reassuring doctor-voice. Lina wished that he had agreed to carry a gun, but she supposed it probably breached the Hippocratic Oath or something.

‘They’re coming back,’ said Niya quietly. Her voice was almost too cutesy to belong to a real person — she always sounded like a cartoon character to Lina, an effect enhanced by her tiny figure and angelic face. They dragged and swam their way towards the corner. Si returned first, followed by Ella and then Halman.

‘Well?’ asked Lina. ‘What’s the plan?’

‘We think we know the way to the bridge,’ said Si. ‘The shuttle’s interior seems to have been changed a little from the schematic that Alphe has.’

‘Changed?’ asked Petra. ‘How so?’

‘It’s old,’ Halman said. ‘The architecture of these things often gets altered a little over the years. But we know which way to go. We think.’

‘Any sign of life?’ Lina asked. Hobbes floated at her elbow, struggling to stay still despite having hold of a handline. He steadied himself on Lina’s shoulder with the other hand, almost making her lose control herself.

‘Nobody we could see,’ answered Ella. She absently scratched the side of her nose with the muzzle of her pistol. ‘That noise is louder down there though. But we can’t tell if it’s coming from the shuttle’s machine rooms or the asteroid. No more of those bastards,’ she said, indicating the hold behind them, where they had left two men floating dead in the vacuum, ‘so that’s the main thing.’

‘Come on,’ ordered Halman, beckoning them to follow him. ‘Let’s move out. Eyes and ears open, folks. Petra and Rocko take rearguard. I don’t want anyone popping out of some unseen hatch or some shit and getting the drop on us.’

Halman led them round the corner and into a longer, narrower passage. The tension was high, like a current that flowed through all of them. The noise grew steadily louder as they progressed, becoming a continuous murmur that none of them could deny. They turned right at the end of the long corridor, passing beneath a wide grate in the ceiling from which steam hissed in roiling bunches, ivory-white in their lights, blinding them. They dragged themselves through, fearful of being attacked in their temporarily vulnerable state.

They continued. Right, then left. Down, then right. Past looming doors through which strange machinery and angular ducting could be glimpsed. They let Alphe push to the front of the group and lead the way, reading from his schematic, which, although wrong, was still the best guide they had. The metal walls pressed in on them, tightening like jaws. Macao seemed to be another world, an impossibly distant base, hardly a sanctuary itself. They passed no windows — except for the bridge, the shuttle had none. They crawled and swam through a grey, self-contained world of growing, growling machine noise and rough metal walls marred by amateurish welds. Marco, Lina thought. Platini.