Zero-G (29 page)

The rush of air knocks me off my feet.

I'm tumbling, my body slamming into the ground, skidding across it. The smoke turns into huge curls as it's sucked towards the breach. The roar is enormous.

Carver grabs my hand. He's got hold of one of the tugs, his feet planted on the floor and the fingers of his other hand gripping a handle on its underside. I swing my other hand up, gripping his wrist. He starts to pull, his eyes squeezed almost shut. The muscles in his arm stand out like power cables. He jabs at the tug's body with his elbow, and then the ramp is coming down, the whining of its motor cutting through the roar.

With a horrifying clarity, I see the drops of sweat on Carver's face wicking away, sucked off his skin by the force of the breach. One touches my own cheek, a tiny spot of wetness, gone almost instantly.

I don't feel fear. I hardly feel anything – just a thin, burning need to survive. I can't get any air into my lungs, and blackness starts to creep in at the edges of my vision. I catch a split-second glimpse of the airlock doors – or where they used to be. The space beyond them is endless.

Movement. Coming right at me. I duck just in time for a spinning crate to shoot past. If I hadn't, it would have taken my head off.

The pull of the air is like an arm around my chest, refusing to let go. Someone – Earther, stomper, no way to tell – shoots by us, tumbling out of control, their scream fading as they're sucked towards the breach. I want to look to the side, to find Prakesh, but I know that if I take my eyes off Carver I'm done for.

Then one of my feet is on the ramp. I finally risk a glance over to the other side of the hangar. I can't find Prakesh's tug – they all look identical, lined up along the far wall, entrance ramps shut. With a sickening lurch in my stomach, I see that they're rocking on their magrails.

I'm barely conscious now, with no oxygen in my body, moving by sheer force of will. I propel myself forward, dragging myself into the tug. There are handholds just above the ramp, and I wrap my fingers around them, the tendons in my arms screaming in protest. There's a push from behind, Carver's hands flat on my back, and then I'm sprawling across the floor. I hear Carver come in behind me, grunting with the effort. The ramp starts to close, its electronic whine louder inside.

The ramp shuts with a loud clack. I take a breath, but there's no oxygen. Nothing at all. It was all sucked out the moment the ramp began to open.

The blackness closes in completely.

I don't know how long I'm out. I know it can't be more than two minutes, because if it were I'd be dead. An alarm is blaring, the speaker painfully close to my ear, and a calm, mechanical voice is saying, over and over again, “Danger. Pressure Loss. Emergency O2 activated.”

I roll over, trying to inhale as much air as I can. My lungs feel like they're being burned away, and each breath stokes the fire. I concentrate on the motion of taking each breath, pushing back against the pain. The world has shrunk to the space around my lungs, blacking out everything else.

Slowly, the fire recedes, the oxygen trickling into my system, my lungs finally settling back into a rhythm. We're in a small rectangular loading area in the middle of the tug. Readouts and storage lockers, some the size of a grown man, line the walls, and everything is bathed in a low red light. I get to my feet, struggling to hold myself upright. I'm trembling, but quickly realise it isn't just me: the whole tug is shaking, straining at its coupling.

Carver is already on his feet, stumbling past me. “Move, move, move, move!”

I get to my feet, unsteady but spurred on by adrenaline, nearly falling as the tug lurches to one side. There's a grinding noise from below, and as I duck through the low doorway into the cockpit, I can feel it shuddering through the tug.

There are two chairs made of bucket plastic, low to the floor, surrounded on all sides by switches and glowing readouts. Carver is already sliding into the left-hand seat, throwing switches and tapping readouts. Two control yokes jut out above the seats at chest height – for a second I can't help thinking of the Boneshaker.

I follow Carver, slipping into the seat next to him. I'm not sure what's louder: the hammering of my heart, or the terrifying grinding sound from the tug's coupling. Carver gives an experimental pull on his yoke, and mine matches its movement, nearly taking me in the chest. Someone has tied a slip of paper to the handle; I get a glimpse of the message written on it as the yoke is pushed back.
Alison – fly safe, fly straight. I love you. Kamal.

It takes a few seconds for me to tear my eyes away.

There's a glass screen in front of us, curving around the tug's body. My breath catches as I look through it. The dock is a nightmare world of flying debris and whirling smoke. Bodies spin through the air, grab hold of something, are wrenched away.

On the other side, a tug has lifted off its railings and is moving towards the breach. There's no way to tell if its engines are on, or if it's being dragged by the force of the vacuum. My heart feels as if it's being physically pulled out into the dock, as if it can find Prakesh's tug all on its own.

Carver punches the air as our tug rumbles to life. Needles jump and skitter behind their transparent housing, and the yokes shudder with the force of the engine. “Strap in,” he says, reaching behind him and fumbling for a belt. I scrabble for mine, finding it above and behind me; it goes down over my shoulders and between my breasts, clicking into a buckle between my legs. As soon as I slide it home, the straps pull tight, forcing me into the seat and knocking a little breath from me. Another tug is moving, tumbling clumsily across the floor, spitting sparks as it scrapes across it.

Carver has his hands on the yoke, staring intently at the readouts.

“You
can
fly this thing, right?” I say.

“Sure,” he says. But he doesn't move, his fingers still wrapped around the yoke. Below us, there's another metallic growl as the tug strains at its magrail.

I close my eyes. “You can't fly it, can you?”

When I open them again, Carver is staring at me. There's a small, apologetic smile on his face.

With a final, fatal wrench, our tug tears loose of its coupling, and we're spinning and crashing towards the void.

Morgan Knox comes to just as the airlock doors breach.

For a few confused seconds, he doesn't know what's happening. He's pulled across the dock, and his lungs feel like they're being crushed in a vice.

Stop
, he thinks.

But he can't. His hand snags something, one of the wheeled pallets the Earthers were using for cover, but he's pulled away almost immediately. His head collides with the floor, and brilliant sparks explode across his field of view. A second later, a whirling dagger of metal buries itself in his thigh. He has no air to scream with, can only watch in horror as the shard is ripped out by the pressure, trailing a fan of blood.

He can do nothing. He is a small child in the grip of a giant. The world around him is a roaring nightmare, a maelstrom of debris and bodies.

And then it …
changes
.

The sound dwindles, then vanishes. Knox is out of the storm, and he's looking at Outer Earth. It's huge, bigger than he could have ever imaged. He can see it curving away from him, see the glittering convection fins on its hull. Beyond it, the blackness of space is split by a billion tiny pinpricks of light.

Time slows to a crawl.

He can't breathe. He can't do anything. But as he looks at Outer Earth, Morgan Knox is gifted a moment of clarity. He realises what's happened, realises that Outer Earth has suffered a breach. And that's when the real fear grips him, pushing past the confusion.

Because he knows what's going to happen next.

He feels it on his tongue first. A prickly sensation, like a mouthful of iron. It's the moisture boiling off. His face is swelling, the skin stretching and warping. His eyes … oh gods, his eyes. The pressure is unbelievable.

And yet, he can still see. His vision has shrunk to two small circles, but it's enough to see Amira Al-Hassan, floating in front of him.

Morgan
, Amira says.

And then she screams.

The sound tears Knox apart. What's happening to him is happening to her as well. He can see her skin starting to stretch, the tissues in her face swelling up. Her limbs contort, bending into impossible positions. She's dying, she's dying again, and there's nothing he can do about it.

Morgan, help me!

He tries to move. But his body has stopped listening to him. He needs air, needs oxygen, but there's nothing he can do.

Amira's eyes are horribly distorted, swollen red bulbs with a misshapen iris at the centre. She stops screaming, and suddenly her voice is full of scorn.
You can't do it, can you?

He tries to speak.

You failed me.

Then she vanishes. Like she was never there. Like she never existed in the first place.

Knox's vision shrinks to a pinprick, then vanishes completely.

If we weren't strapped in, we'd be smashed to pieces in the tug's insides. The entire body shakes as we roll end over end, slamming again and again into the walls and floor of the dock. Another tug looms in the cockpit glass, but I barely register it's there before we hit it. The bang throws me back into my seat again as we spin off.

I get a split-second glimpse of the airlock doors, of torn and shredded metal. And then, all at once, we're out.

The only sounds are the tug's humming engine, and my own shaky breathing. We're still tumbling, with debris flying past us, but it's now against a backdrop of inky blackness. Every few seconds, the side of the station swings past, huge and dark.

“Yeah. OK. All right,” Carver says, more to himself than to me. He's got hold of the yoke again, and is hesitantly reaching out to the instruments, flicking switches and running his finger along labels. I look away from the spinning hell outside the window, trying to ignore the lurching in my stomach.

Something hits us, bouncing off the roof with a dull boom. When I open my mouth, my voice is louder than I intended. “Get us under control.”

“I'm trying.”

“Try harder!”

“Why don't you stop giving me shit and look for the thruster controls?”

I start scanning the dials and digital readouts, but it's like I'm looking at another language – one made of numbers and arrows and strange symbols. My finger hovers over the controls, and I have to exert real effort to move it.
Zero-G. We're in zero-G now.
It's impossible not to think back to when I ran the Core, a year ago. When I fought Oren Darnell in the microgravity.

“Got it!” Carver says, and twists a knob on the control panel. There's a low groan as the tug jerks itself into life. The spinning world outside the window is slowing, coming to a rest. For some reason, I expected everything to be darkness – for the blackness of space to be total. But it's as if we're floating in a chamber bathed in brilliant light. Objects slowly rotate, catching the light and holding it: a crate, a discarded stinger, the arm of a crane. A little way away, another tug spins gently, the cockpit dark and empty.

And then Outer Earth comes into view, and my mouth falls open.

We're about a mile away from it. Part of the station is cloaked in shadow. But the rest of it is awash with sunlight, gleaming like a jewel. The convection fins on the hull are huge, glittering slabs. The core at the centre is a mess of protruding cylinders, all radiating out from the central reactor. I can make out the tiny puffs of fire as the hull lasers open up on approaching objects, vaporising them, preventing them from damaging the station.

“No,” Carver says, sucking in a horrified breath. I follow his gaze, and a breath catches in my throat.

The dock. It's as if a deity, angry and vengeful, made a giant fist and punched out the side of the station. The breach has torn a hole right through, a jagged wound that must reach into Apex itself. There's a cloud of glittering debris above the breach.

“Anna,” I say, and it's a full second before I realise I've actually said her name. I turn to Carver, tearing my eyes away from the station. “Do you think she…”

“Don't worry,” he says. “She'll have got clear.”

But his eyes say something different.

He rotates the tug – I can hear the thrusters shooting off, like compressed air. The station swings away. The glow of the Earth, far below us, is just out of sight.

“There!” Carver shouts, pointing out of his side of the cockpit. I raise myself up as high as the straps will allow, my body assisted by the low gravity.

The asteroid is so big it takes my breath away. I know it's smaller than a single sector on Outer Earth, but at that moment it looks impossibly large. It's steady against the blackness, pitted and pockmarked, with shadowy craters and a trailing veil of ice reaching out behind it.

And on one side, dwarfed by its cargo and only just visible: the
Shinso Maru
. A tiny speck, connected to the asteroid with dozens of thin, silver threads. Each one of them will be a flexible carbon-fibre cable, twenty feet across.

It's hard to believe that the Earthers' plan will work. I try to picture them entering Earth's atmosphere, coming in behind the asteroid, using it as a shield against the intense heat.

“How far away are they?” I say.

“Close enough,” Carver replies, pushing the yoke forward. I can feel the thrusters kicking in. The rumble comes up through my seat.

I push myself up out of my seat again. “I don't see the other tug.”

“They got a head start.”

“Or they didn't make it at all.”

“Calm down, Ry. They'll have got there. Prakesh'll be OK.”

He tries to make the words sound comforting, but doesn't quite get there. What comes out sounds almost mocking, and I can see that he knows it, refusing to meet my eyes. The memory of the kiss surfaces, and won't go away.

“Did you see any kids?” Carver says.

“Kids?”

“The Earthers – they had children with them, back in that mining facility.”

We fall silent as the implication sinks in. The children have been left behind – every one of them, including Jamal's little girl, Ivy.

“Hey, look on the bright side,” says Carver. “Your bombs haven't exploded. Guess my solution worked after all.”

I touch my ear, without meaning to. There's no way Knox survived a dock breach. I guess Carver's right.

Against all odds, I feel relief. Sweet, beautiful relief. I hold onto it, just for a moment.

Carver corrects the tug, pulling down on the yoke, but it just slides the other way, nearly vanishing below us. “I wish I knew how to read this thing's instruments,” he says. His forehead is shiny with sweat, his mouth set in a thin line.

We fall silent. My gaze drifts to the ship, larger now. It's in the full glare of the sun, and what I see takes my breath away. It's like something from a distant galaxy; from a civilisation much older than ours, one that has been around so long that they've evolved in a completely different direction. The ship is a huge, slowly rotating cylinder, half a mile long at least. It looks awkward and ungainly, with enormous thruster cones jutting off its body. The surface isn't a uniform grey like I thought at first. It's mottled blue and brown, too, with an almost plant-like texture. It's a little below us, off to the left. I point to it. “Can you bring us around?”

Carver pulls the yoke down, but nothing happens. His brow furrows, and he does it again, harder this time.

“Carver?” I say, trying and failing to keep the nervousness out of my voice.

“The thrusters.” He breaks off, pulling the yoke towards him again. “They're not responding. They must have been damaged when the airlock blew.”

I grab my own yoke and pull. A strange image comes to mind: a picture I saw years ago, in a school lesson I thought I'd long forgotten. A boat of some kind, the couple in it rowing hard against an unforgiving ocean current. When I pull the yoke down, the tug remains locked on its course, the hum of its engine steady. If we stay on our current course, we're going to shoot right past the
Shinso
and its asteroid, with no way to make it back.

“Can we fix them?” I say.

“Sure,” Carver says. “If we had a few hours and I actually knew something about tug engines.”

He's pulling at the yoke now, hurling it in different directions, the asteroid looming large in our field of view. “Come on, you piece of shit, work,” he says. “Come on. Come on!”