Impact (35 page)

Dax's mouth is moving, but the radio link is inactive. Anna can't hear the words. They're spinning out of control, away from the station, and it's all happening in complete silence. There should be noise, shouts, raw anger. Instead, there's nothing.

Dax puts a hand on her faceplate, as if he can grab it in his fingers and tear it off her head. She reaches up to push him off, but he's too strong, elbowing her arm out of the way. The fear is back, digging its claws into her shoulders. Nausea comes with it, accented by the end-over-end spin.

Her thrust meter has started to blink red. She's got a little under a third left, but if she doesn't get free soon, she might not have enough to make it home.

The Earth and the station spin around them, as if she and Dax are the centre of the universe. With a terrified cry, Anna tries to push him away, planting a gloved hand directly on his chest. But it's like her dream–the movement feels slow and soft, and she's barely able to get enough force into her arms.

Dax doesn't seem to be aware of what he's doing. His face is barely human now, his helmet misting up with his breath. He's still shouting, and she can't hear a thing. She raises her knees, trying to get between them.

The spin intensifies, each movement adding to their momentum. And–
oh gods
–Dax has activated his suit's plasma cutter. It's sparking from his wrist, firing in short bursts, blinding her. Any second now, he's going to slice a hole right through her suit.

The sight shocks her into action. Anna pulls her leg up and kicks it out towards Dax's mid-section.

It's just enough. They fly apart, and the plasma cutter misses her by six inches. She grabs the joystick, firing her thrusters to get even further away from him. She burns through almost half her remaining fuel before she manages to raise her finger off the thruster control.

Outer Earth is behind her. With a little luck, she can coast right towards it on her current momentum. She'll do it backwards, keeping an eye on Dax. If he tries to make another run at her, she'll be ready.

Dax has managed to stabilise himself, but, as she watches, the exhaust from his thruster ports changes. It's thinner now, less substantial, as if…

She switches her radio back on. Dax's voice comes through immediately. “—anybody hear me? I've got no fuel!”

“Negative.” It's one of the others–Anna can just see them in her peripheral vision, still drifting along the curve of the station. “We're too far away.”

“No!” Dax shouts, and this time fear creeps into his voice. “You can't leave me here.”

Anna keys her transmit button. “Dax.”

He reaches his hands out towards her, as if beseeching her. “Anna. Help me!” He's gripping his own joystick, squeezing the controls, but his thruster fuel is completely exhausted.

She should turn and leave. He doesn't deserve to live.

But he doesn't deserve to die either. Not like this. Not even after he nearly killed them both.

The others are too far away. There's nobody else but her.

Anna closes her eyes, then thumbs her own thruster control. The meter is blinking faster now, down to its last eighth. She uses the thrust in short bursts, aware that she's going to have to time this
very
carefully.

“Thank gods,” says Dax, whimpering. “Thank gods.”

Anna is fifty feet away. “Burn off your plasma cutter,” she says.

“What?”

“
Do it
. Or I turn around and go home.”

“It's already gone. It uses the same fuel as the thrusters do…”

“Show me.”

“OK.” He thumbs his wrist control pad. The cutter flame briefly springs to life, then shrinks and dies, the very last of his fuel burning off.

Anna corrects her course slightly, prompting her meter to blink even faster. If she hits Dax too hard, she'll send them both into a spin. They'll have to use another thruster boost to correct their course, and she doesn't have any fuel to spare.

She's coming in from above him. “Grab my legs,” she says.

She slows herself down as she reaches him, and he manages to get his fingers around her ankles. They start spinning, but it's a gentle spin, and Anna knows she can compensate for it.

Dax is sobbing now. Anna suppresses the urge to shout at him, concentrating on her movement, using incremental thruster bursts to turn them around. A warning flashes up in her helmet.
THRUST FUEL CRITICAL.

No shit
, she thinks. With a push on the stick, she sends them moving back towards the station.

They're two hundred feet away. Anna can't see the others, but she can see the escape pod airlocks, like little black pockmarks in the station's surface.

They need to head for the airlocks, but when Anna tries to correct for it, her thrust meter vanishes completely. Another set of words appears on her heads-up.

THRUST DEPLETED.

Anna keys her transmit button, doing everything she can to fight the panic rippling through her. “We're out.”

Dax gives a long, horrified moan. Anna can't take her eyes off Outer Earth. On their current course, they're not going to get anywhere near the hull. They'll sweep right over the curve of the station, and then past it, out into space.

“Anna!” It's Arroway, loud and clear over the suit radio. “I can—”

And then her radio dies again.

Anna can hear nothing but her breathing and heartbeat–both too fast, both impossibly loud inside the helmet. Another meter has started flashing–her O
₂
. She's burning through it too fast, just like the thruster fuel.

No. Please, no.

She's trying to look around, but all she can see is the station hull, stretching below her. A hundred feet away, but it may as well be a million.

And then another space-suited figure collides with them, roaring in from below, grabbing her around the waist. The figure's thrusters are firing, quick bursts, left and right, stabilising them.

There's a burst of static, and then Arroway says, “Got you!”

The corridor itself is tilting, sliding to one side, like the world itself has gone wrong. Okwembu forces herself to keep moving, leaning on the wall. She's still coughing, and her nose is still plugged and sore, but her eyes have stopped streaming.

The ship is going down. Okwembu knows this, knows it in her bones, and it's all she can do not to start slamming her fists into the corridor wall.

The light changes. She looks up–without realising it, she's come out onto one of the loading platforms in the side of the ship. There are a few discarded crates and tarpaulins, piled in one corner. Daylight is streaming through the opening, and she can see the ocean stretching beyond.

And there's a boat, hanging on the wall.

It's barely worthy of the name–a tiny dinghy, its tubes flat and deflated. The bottom of the boat is punctured in several places, and the whole thing looks like it's about to fall apart.

Okwembu stumbles to the drop. Her legs are starting to ache from the effort of staying upright on the tilted floor. She slows as she approaches, wanting to recoil from the edge.

But where else is she going to go?

She could try and find another dock, but the chances are that the boats will be gone, taken by the escaped workers. There's no point finding somewhere to hide–whatever just happened, the
Ramona
is sinking, and fast. What about Hale? Could she go back and finish what she started? She shakes her head, the frustration bitter in her mouth. There's no way she'd get the drop on the girl again.

She leans out over the edge, then immediately pulls back. It's thirty feet to the ocean below, right into the slate-grey water. Okwembu can't help but think of when their escape pod smashed into Eklutna Lake–how cold the water was, how it felt like it was draining her strength.

She'll have to take the boat. With its tube walls deflated, there's a chance it might not stay afloat, but it's the only chance she's got.

The ship lurches underneath her, almost knocking her off her feet, and Janice Okwembu raises her head to the ceiling and roars.

The sound trails off, and she stands there, silent, her shoulders rising and falling.

She stumbles to the wall. It takes almost all her strength to lift the boat off its storage hooks and drag it to the edge. She pushes it over, and it smashes into the water, bobbing in the swell and bumping up against the hull.

Okwembu takes one last look over her shoulder.
It's not too late. I could go back, find Hale.

The thought barely has a chance to form, and then she steps off the edge. She screams all the way down.

The ship has turned into a nightmare.

When I ran through it, after Prakesh was shot, the corridors felt like the ones on Outer Earth. I could navigate them, move through them at high speed. No chance of that now. Every corridor is tilting at a crazy angle, and anything not strapped down has piled itself up along the bottom. Doors that weren't locked shut hang open, creating low-hanging obstacles that we have to duck under. Fire alarms have activated across the ship. Most of the sprinkler systems aren't working, but a few are, and soon I'm drenched in chemical spray.

I don't know how I'm still moving. Somehow, I've managed to access one last reservoir of energy. I'm in agony: the worst of it, even worse than the insistent pain in my side and upper back, is at the bottom of my spine. The place where Okwembu hit me. Every single movement sends bolts of electricity shooting out from it.

The corridors are all but deserted. Once, rounding a corner, Carver and I see people in the distance, sprinting away from us. I can't tell if they're guards or workers. It doesn't matter. I don't dare stop moving, not even for a second.

The stairs have tilted along with the corridors, showing off their own weird geometry. We have to slow down at every stairwell, use the railings on the side of the stairs, take them in a weird bow-legged gate. I'm coming up on the stairway between B deck and C deck, getting ready to take it, picking my footholds.

It's hard going. Halfway down, my fingers come loose from a handhold. I let myself fall, knowing I'm only a few feet up, but it doesn't stop me gasping when I hit the water rushing through the C deck corridor.

Everything below my knees soaks right through. The water is a churning mass of dirt and debris, so cold that I gasp. Running isn't even a possibility now. Carver drops down behind me, and we start wading, the water sloshing up our legs.

I try to be as careful as I can–I can't afford to fall. I do that, and the cold will sap what little energy I have left. But as we reach the junction, I realise that the water is getting higher. It's snuck up over my knees to mid-thigh. Soon, it'll be at my waist, then my chest.

The lights are starting to fail. The bulbs in the ceiling are flickering, casting strange shadows across the walls. A door flies open as I walk past it, nearly smacking me in the face. I dodge back, knocking my elbow on the wall of the passage as a spew of debris splashes into the water. I take a deep breath, then keep going.

It's impossible to miss the bulkhead doors. They're larger than the others, built more solidly. They drop down from the ceiling–I can just see the edge of the door below the roof, marked with more yellow and black chevrons. There's a lever, flat against the wall. A big steel rod half my height, with a rubber grip at the top, ready to be pulled down and outwards. There's an identical one on the other side of the door.

I don't know how many compartments have flooded already. If too much water gets through too many compartments, the ship won't be able to stay afloat. We have to seal this door, or it all goes down. And if Carver is right, then whatever is keeping this part of the planet alive goes down with it.

The water's at my waist now. I step in behind Carver, gripping the lever with my hands just underneath his. Then we summon every last bit of strength we have left, and pull.

Nothing happens. The lever doesn't move an inch.

I try not to think of the words
rusted
and
seized
. I don't let myself dwell on the possibilities. We try again, putting all our weight into pulling the lever back. As we do so, it moves, just a little, and I let out a cry of triumph.

My hands are wet–wet enough to slip free of the rubber grip, and I fall backwards into the water. My clothes protect me for no more than an instant. I'm fully submerged, shocked into immobility by the cold. I feel Carver's hand brushing my shoulder, and then he pulls me upright.

I splash over to the lever again, shivering, furious with myself. This time, I can't get a good grip. My wet, numb hands can't hold onto it. Carver steps in front of me, motions me off. He pulls the lever back, the muscles in his neck standing out like thick cords. “Come on!” he shouts.

It's working. It's working! I can see the lever starting to move. Any second now, it's going to go all the way. We can shut this door, then get the hell off this ship.

A gunshot echoes down the corridor, the bullet ripping past us.

I look round, and that's when I see a ghost.

Prophet.

He's wading down the corridor. White teeth gleam on his blood-soaked face. His left shoulder is in tatters, his arm hanging on by a shred of skin and muscle.

If I'm in bad shape, he's worse. I don't even know how it's possible for him to have followed us down here. Then I remember Oren Darnell. His mid-section was crushed in a massive door, his organs turned to pulp, but he kept on coming. He wouldn't let himself die.

Prophet's the same. He isn't going to be alive for much longer, but whatever energy is fuelling him, it hasn't run out yet. He must have overheard us on the bridge, talking about what we were going do.

He raises his pistol, fires again, the bullet slicing the water a few feet from us. There's only one spot of available cover: the bulkhead doorframe. We swing ourselves around it, pressing up against the wall on the other side. Prophet takes another shot, and it ricochets off the frame.

The water is above my waist now. Despite the cold, despite the soaked clothes against my skin, I feel sweat break out across my forehead. We've got nowhere to go. All he has to do is come a little closer, and he'll have a point-blank shot.

The lever. The one on this side of the door. It's right between us.

“Help me with this,” I say, wrapping my hands around the top of the lever, keeping my body as flat against the wall as I can. Prophet has stopped shooting. Smart. He's saving his shots, waiting until he gets closer.

“No,” says Carver. “You'll trap us inside.”

“You got a better idea?”

Carver groans in frustration, then leans over and wraps his hands around the lever. We're on either side of it, and we're going to have to pull it outwards for this to work.

“OK!” I shout, and we both lean into it, trying to force the lever away from the wall. But it's exactly like the one on the other side. It barely moves, budging only a fraction, and we don't have enough leverage to push it out from our position. We can't lean out–that would mean exposing ourselves in the doorway.

Prophet is getting closer, wading down the passage towards us. It might be my imagination, but I swear I can hear him breathing, harsh and ragged.

Carver lets go of the lever. “No dice. We're going to have to lean out.”

Inspiration hits. “We both do it in one move, OK?”

Carver shakes his head. But he too reseats his grip, tensing his shoulders, bracing himself against the wall. He knows we don't have a choice.

“The Engine will have its revenge!” Prophet shouts. He doesn't sound human.

Carver and I throw ourselves forwards, moving in unison, pulling the lever out and down as hard as we can.