Macao Station Read online

  ‘Any day, by my reckoning. Assuming Farsight haven’t forgotten us. So until then I guess Murkhoff isn’t going to be winning any games of pool.’

  ‘Pool?’

  ‘Yeah, depth perception, right? Your three-dee vision requires two working eyes.’

  ‘And you told me not to joke about it. Damn, Eli, that wasn’t even funny.’ She arched an eyebrow at him, a slight smile on her lips, an expression that, added to the effect of her well-defined cheekbones, shock of tangled blonde hair and wide green eyes, had been known to melt some men, at least in her younger days.

  ‘Maybe not, but I can get away with it, because Murkhoff said that himself. Anyway, poor guy. Our sec-teams aren’t made for this. What’s the worst they had to deal with before this whole prison thing started? A bit of graffiti and maybe kids breaking into the vending machines. And now this. . .’

  ‘Well, I guess it keeps us spinning. Although I would say that it takes a special kind of idiot to look at an under-supplied mining outpost full of civilians and think maximum-security prison.’

  ‘Yeah, well keep those thoughts to yourself is my advice. I get the impression that the company is a little touchy about the whole affair. Halman too. Doesn’t matter what you or I think. We just get paid to crunch rocks.’

  ‘Speaking of which, hadn’t we better saddle up in a minute?’

  ‘I make it five,’ Eli responded, gulping his coffee. He motioned to the window with his cup. ‘Rocks aren’t going anywhere.’

  ‘Pardon my enthusiasm. It wasn’t genuine, I assure you.’

  ‘I should hope not. Such a startling break from character would demand a referral to Hobbes.’ He gave her a serious look, but his face was too sculpted by laugh lines to really pull it off.

  ‘Does such a referral come with any sort of a rest?’

  He chuckled, shaking his head. ‘Dream on.’

  For a minute or two they both watched the belt. The exhaust plumes of the finishing shift’s K6s were converging into a rough group and heading back to base.

  The canteen door suddenly whined open and Halman came in whistling brightly. He greeted the three miners at the other table, then wandered over to Eli and Lina.

  ‘Mind if I take a seat?’ asked Halman.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ said Eli. ‘Sit wherever you like, I reckon.’

  Halman coughed laughter, his brown eyes sparking, and sat. He was a bear of a man, as broad as Eli but taller, possessed of a surprising grace of movement, balding and borderline-ugly, at least on the outside. Much of his once considerable muscle mass had lost its definition in his early fifties, leaving him a slightly slouching, hulking individual. He’d been a soldier in the corporate militia at Platini in his earlier life, where he’d fought guerilla warfare against the union insurgents. But apart from his habitual swearing, his gentle demeanour belied his violent past. He wasn’t exactly intelligent in the traditional sense, but he made up for this by being practical and resourceful. ‘You have to work with this asshole?’ he asked Lina, indicating Eli with one thumb.

  ‘Yeah, I do. About that pay rise. . .’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Halman seriously. ‘I need that money for duct tape and nails. You know this place is only held together by duct tape.’

  Lina sighed theatrically. ‘Yeah,’ she agreed grudgingly. ‘I know, I know.’

  Eli leant towards Halman, giving him a sidelong, conspiratorial look. ‘About that. . .’ he said.

  ‘What?’ asked Halman suspiciously. He was all-too used to being harassed about the latest thing that had broken down. He did, in fact, consider it to be one of his main duties.

  ‘Well, the cooker in my quarters has been broken for two months now. I don’t have time to fix it myself — you know how hard you people work me — and more importantly, I don’t have the authority to sign for the parts myself.’

  ‘And?’ asked Halman warily.

  ‘Well. . . have you spoken to Nik Sudowski recently?’

  Nik Sudowski was the head of Macao’s put-upon maintenance division, and as such was a man in great demand.

  ‘Of course I have,’ said Halman, uncertain as to where this was leading.

  ‘Well, I asked him about it again this morning. He wasn’t exactly helpful. In fact, he wasn’t exactly conversational. The guy kinda looked like crap, to be honest.’

  ‘I saw him yesterday,’ said Halman. ‘And he seemed okay. Maybe you’ve pissed him off, Eli.’

  Lina laughed. ‘Yeah, Eli,’ she agreed. ‘You do have that magic touch with people.’

  Eli nodded towards Lina. ‘And she asks for a pay rise!’ he exclaimed. He turned serious again and added, ‘It just seemed unlike him, is all. Nik, I mean. He didn’t really seem himself.’

  Halman shook his head. ‘Nik’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll remind him about the cooker. Right now, it’s you lot I’m concerned about. Hadn’t you better get out there and make me rich?’

  Eli grimaced and necked the last of his drink. ‘Rich,’ he muttered incredulously. He stood up, shoving Lina on the shoulder. Reluctantly, she also rose. ‘See you later, Dan,’ he said to Halman. ‘If, that is, we don’t die from exhaustion first.’

  ‘Hardly in the risk-group for that are you, Eli?’ replied Halman, grinning. ‘Everyone knows you guys do jack shit in those ships. They do everything for you, right?’

  Eli rolled his eyes and groaned, but he didn’t allow Halman to bait him. ‘Come on, Lina,’ he said. They filed out of the canteen, gathering the other members of their shift along the way. Lina glanced back at Halman. He was staring out of the window, watching the belt, lost in his own thoughts, his large fingers drumming on the grimy table-top.

  Chapter Three

  Lina snapped her four-point harness into place, yanking the straps tight from where the much-larger Bickes had been using it. She didn’t really like how her vessel had become the unofficial stop-gap in the fleet lately — she liked to keep it set up to her own specifications. Still, complaining wouldn’t change anything. Having tried it at length, she knew this for a fact.

  She woke the computer, which reconfigured the readouts to her preferred settings and began to pre-flight all the systems. The reactor-cells were starting to show several developing hotspots — problems in the making, effectively. The more use K6-12 got, the sooner it would end up in maintenance itself — a fact which the ground crew seemed oddly oblivious to.

  Never mind. She began to leech gas into the nozzles — not enough to move the craft yet, just enough to diagnose the injection and thrust characteristics. Everything looked fine.

  ‘Okay then,’ said Eli’s voice through the speaker. ‘Everyone green?’ There was a chorus of affirmatives, some a little uncertain. ‘Then let’s roll. By the numbers, now.’ The channel clicked off, making the slightly-blown speaker in Lina’s cockpit pop quietly.

  The Kay-pilots dialled up the gas and the machines converged on the central runway in perfect synchronisation. Lina trundled past the much larger in-system loader, the heavy grey vessel used for loading and unloading supply shuttles. HUD-markers on the cockpit canopy illuminated and tracked her companion vessels, tagging them with pilot names and bearings.

  The huge hatch in the floor began to open, making a ramp, disgorging a condensing rush of air into space. Supposedly, the air in the hangar was vacuumed out before the space-door opened, but like everything else on the station, the pumps were gradually failing.

  Eli was first out, his Kay weaving slightly as its little wheels left the deck, adding thin new strata of rubber to the many layers already plastered there. The craft veered, exposing the imbalance of its gas-jets. Eli corrected quickly, though, used to the vagaries of the ship, and headed off towards the belt. One by one, the others followed him, making a total of seven vessels.

  The spinning station spread the emerging Kays into a regular fan, and they maintained this formation as they headed towards the belt, which lay below and before them like a rocky shoreline. Lina noticed that K6-
8’s navigational lights were out. She told the pilot — Sal Newman — as much. Sal just tutted, unsurprised.

  Eli’s voice crackled over the comm, somehow intrusive and over-loud in the eerie silence: ‘One, two and four — head to sector Blue-Nine. Eight, nine and twelve — sector Blue-Eight.’

  The various pilots responded in the affirmative. Lina, though, was the only one to voice the common thought: ‘And how about you, Eli? Are you going to be shirking the work again?’

  There was a slight pause during which Lina wondered if she had been a little too disrespectful. She forgot sometimes that Eli was actually her superior. He generally bore the teasing well enough, but that pause suggested to Lina that this might be one barb too many.

  ‘I’m going to prospect the unnamed sector counter-spinwards from Blue-Ten, maybe map it for mining next. That okay with you?’

  ‘Sure,’ she responded, turning smoothly towards Blue-Eight, flanked by her companions. ‘Make us rich, Eli,’ she added, trying to inject a lighter note into her voice.

  He laughed in response, making it all right again. ‘I’ll certainly try, Lina, but no promises.’ His own Kay headed off alone towards the distant haze of the uncharted sector. The comm went dead again. Lina watched his gas-trail dissipate into space.

  They reached their assigned sector and the Kays settled into their positions, matching the average rotational velocity of the belt objects. Rock and ice loomed coldly all around them — a jagged, three-dimensional stew of tiny shards and vast, house-sized boulders. Lina nudged K6-12 close enough to one of the larger chunks. An arm extended from the vessel, thin and angular like an insect-limb, with a drill-headed probe at its tip, and began to feel blindly for the rock. The probe pushed forwards, boring quickly, extracting a tiny sample of matter. The analysis came back good — double-M, like so many of the rocks here — and the vessel unfolded its tool arms and got to work. Shiny disc-cutters flashed in the pallid light of Soros. A plasma beam flared whitely, making the canopy darken protectively. The cutting sent a steady vibration through the hull — a quiet, soporific hum. Rock was flayed away, gripped by claws, shaved and diced and trimmed, passed back to the mass driver.

  ‘So how’s the kid, Lina?’ asked Rocko.

  Kay 6-12 jolted violently as its mass-driver launched the first bolt of rock towards the distant station’s hopper and the jets rapidly compensated to prevent the craft from crashing. The first bolt hit a rock, spun away and was lost. Sometimes it could take a lot of bolts to forge a path through the belt to the station’s receiver. Lina had often wondered if it was really the most efficient method, but she supposed that brighter minds than hers had come up with it. Already, the tool arms had made the next cut.

  ‘Kid has a name, Rocko. I’d have thought you’d know that after the twelve years he’s been around.’ She craned to see his ship — above and to her left, picturing Rocko’s face — his dark skin, handsome features, clean-shaven head and the star tattoo on his cheek that showed him to be an ex-member of Platini’s Democratic Workers Union, essentially a now-dissolved insurgent group. Halman, in Platini Alpha’s Farsight militia, had fought urban battles against the DWU in his younger days. Here, though, all things were forgiven. Rocko was family now. His Kay launched a bolt towards the station. This one got quite a bit further than Lina’s had done. Below them and to the right, far off, a shuttle-sized iceberg was ploughing through the field like a juggernaut, silent and inexorable, bulldozing smaller objects out of its path.

  ‘Sorry. How’s Marco then?’

  ‘Not too bad, thanks. Doing pretty well at school. I guess he couldn’t help but pick up a little touch of genius from his mother, right?’

  Sal laughed, a bright and tinkling sound. ‘Genius, is it? Is that why you’re out here in the middle of nowhere crunching rocks for some faceless corporation?’

  ‘Hey, remember who has rank right now, Sal. And consider how easy it would be to have an accident out here.’

  Sal laughed again. ‘I don’t think you’d have to engineer one, Lina. Have you seen the reactor diags on this piece of crap?’

  ‘Can’t be much worse than mine,’ she answered.

  ‘Or mine,’ Rocko chipped in.

  They were silent for a minute or so as the Kays continued their work, vacuuming up any errant dust from the cutting, which otherwise would only add to the communication barrier already presented by the belt. A hydraulic-pressure warning lit up on Lina’s dashboard. She set the computer to run a deeper diagnostic on it, but the system seemed to be working for the moment.

  ‘He’s a good kid, anyway — say hello from me, would you?’ said Rocko after a while.

  ‘Sure, I will do. Though you can come say it yourself any time, you know.’

  ‘He’s too busy for the likes of us these days,’ commented Sal in a voice that barely contained her amusement.

  ‘Piss off, Sal,’ Rocko replied automatically.

  Lina laughed — she couldn’t help it when she heard the wounded innocence in Rocko’s voice. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot,’ she said. ‘How is the lady friend, Rock?’

  ‘She’s fine. And she is just a friend, whatever you dickheads think.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ answered Lina. ‘Well say hi from us, next time she lets you get your breath back.’

  There was a click as Rocko pointedly switched his comm into ignore mode. But he soon switched it back on again and Lina knew he wasn’t really pissed.

  The cut chunks of rock formed three tightly-converging dotted lines now, pointing back towards Macao Station. With a bit of zoom Lina could also see the bolts from the other wing, over in Blue-Nine, forming their own ordered procession, if a little less advanced than her own wing’s. The others must have had a delay in starting.

  The diags came back from the hydraulic system. It was losing pressure at an increasing rate from a rupture in one of the reservoirs, probably caused by a minor accident station-side. The ground crew should have spotted it really. That was supposedly what they were for. The cutting arms would likely become inoperable within the hour. Lina ran through all the camera angles, and eventually she spotted a microscopically-thin trail of leaking fluid that formed an inky ribbon, stretching off into space. She cursed under her breath, but not quietly enough to prevent the others hearing.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Sal with forced casualness. Sometimes, when things went wrong in the belt, somebody ended up dead or hurt. Not often, but it had happened before. Everybody feared the inevitable next disaster.

  ‘Nothing serious,’ Lina said. ‘I’m just losing some hydraulic fluid.’

  ‘Wanna head back? We’ll be okay.’ Sal, despite being ranked below Lina, suffered from a persistent desire to look after her. Lina knew this stemmed from the time when Sal had been involved in a brief affair with Lina’s then-husband, and Marco’s father, Jaydenne. Marco, born on board, had still been a baby at the time. Sal, a pretty redhead several years younger than Lina, had offered him the attention that Lina herself had been unable or unwilling to supply. But Sal, who had still been a newcomer to Macao, had given Jaydenne up because of her conscience. Lina suspected Sal had loved him. She couldn’t imagine how hard Sal’s decision had been. Sal had worked hard across the intervening years to ingratiate herself to Lina, and to be fair, it had worked. Jaydenne had gone to Platini Alpha, leaving his wife and infant son behind like unwanted baggage. Their relationship had, by that point, been dead for some time anyway. Sal had remained, and had become a friend.

  ‘I’ll see if I can last it out. If the tool arms stop working I guess I’ll have to drop it back. Maybe there’s another ship that I can grab.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s a spare at all,’ replied Rocko. ‘Unless you want to take one that hasn’t been pre-flighted.’

  ‘I guess I might have to,’ said Lina, her voice slow and unenthusiastic. ‘Maybe some of them will be done by then. Anyway, this one was checked.’

  ‘Maybe it just sprung,’ suggested Sal. ‘Could be from a micro
-impact. Otherwise, the power-on diags should have caught it.’

  ‘Could be,’ Lina said. ‘I didn’t notice an impact, though. Maybe they can just bodge it — quick weld, bleed and refill.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sal without conviction.

  For a moment then, Lina felt how tenuous, how fragile their existence was out here. She could actually sense the delicate, straining bonds that held everything — the Kays, the station, the people, their whole overburdened frontier world — together. The vastness of space loomed around her, endless in every direction, a vista without horizon. She felt tiny and vulnerable, a single byte lost in the cacophonous datastream of creation. She looked up at Macao. The station loomed through the rock-haze, turning darkly about its hub, its two huge spokes like muscular arms that gripped its outer rim. It didn’t look like a place that could sustain life. For all its bulk, it looked too fallible, too delicate. This was a feeling she had suffered from more and more of late. She shook herself, shivering, and turned up the heater.

  ‘When’s that damn shuttle getting here again?’ asked Sal after a while.

  ‘Soon,’ answered Rocko. ‘It should be soon, right?’

  ‘It better had be,’ said Sal. ‘I heard Gregor’s out of real beer.’

  ‘Oh that’s just bloody great! Thanks for that!’ enthused Rocko falsely. ‘I’ll sleep easy now I know that, Sal. We’ll expect a riot, then.’

  ‘You two, cut the crap!’ demanded Lina. It was unusual of her to curse, and it surprised the others into obedient silence. ‘The supply shuttle is due next week. Maybe everyone can restrain the urge to riot until then.’

  ‘At least we’ll get our new batch of psychos for the lifers’ wing,’ added Rocko quietly, possibly expecting further reprimand.

  Lina’s Kay had diced up the last of its asteroid and she pointed it towards the next likely-looking candidate. The face of the new rock loomed huge and cliff-like, glinting in the ship’s spotlight. She wondered briefly what epic journey had brought this chunk of stone to Soros, what cosmic furnace had originally smelted it, long before humanity existed. The belt was an archive — a stone recording of ancient stellar history. It would still be here when Macao fell into final, terminal disrepair and was forgotten.