“Stop him how? He’ll either shoot me or blow both of us into the bloody beyond.”
“If Gerald triggers an alarm, none of us will ever get off this rock.”
“Oh
“Take a hit,” Beth said. “Chill down before you go after him.”
“Fuck off.” Jed started to run after Gerald, convinced the whole world was now watching. And worse, laughing.
Gerald reached the open airlock, and ducked inside. By the time Jed arrived half a minute later, he was nowhere to be seen. The chamber was standard, like the one Jed had come though last time he’d gone inside this bloody awful maggot nest of rock. He moved along it cautiously. “Gerald?”
The inner door was open. Which was deeply wrong. Jed knew all about asteroid airlocks, and one thing you could positively not ever do was open an internal corridor to the vacuum. Not by accident. He glanced at the rectangular hatch as he passed, seeing how the swing rods had been sheered, the melted cables around the rim seal interlock control.
“Gerald?”
“I’m losing your signal.” Rocio said. “I still can’t access the net around you. Whoever did it is still there.”
Gerald was slumped against the corridor wall, legs splayed wide in front of him. Not moving. Jed approached him cautiously. “Gerald?”
The suit band transmitted a shallow, frightened whimper.
“Gerald, come on. We’ve got to get out of here. And no more of this crazy shit. I can’t take it any more, okay. I mean really can’t. You’re cracking my head apart.”
One of Gerald’s gauntleted hands waved limply. Jed stared past him, down to the end of the corridor. A dangerous geyser of vomit threatened to surge up his throat.
Bernhard Allsop’s stolen body had ruptured in a spectacular fashion as the energistic power reinforcing his flesh had vanished. Lungs, the softest and most vulnerable tissue, had burst immediately, sending litres of blood pouring out of his mouth. Thousands of heavily pressurized capillaries just beneath his skin had split, weeping beads of blood into the fabric of his clothes. It looked as though his double breasted suit was made from brilliant scarlet cloth—cloth that seethed as if alive. The fluid was boiling away into the vacuum, surrounding him with a hazy pink mist.
Jed attacked his suit wrist pad as if it was burning him. Dry air scented with peppermint and pine blew into his face. He clamped his jaw shut against the rising vomit, turning bands of muscle to hot steel as he forced himself not to throw up. This spacesuit wasn’t sophisticated enough to cope with him spewing.
Something loosened inside him. He coughed and spluttered, sending disgustingly tacky white bile spraying over the inside of his visor. But his nausea was subsiding. “Oh God, oh Jeeze, he’s just pulped.”
The pine scent was strong now, thick in his helmet, draining feeling away from his limbs. His arms moved sluggishly, yet they were as light as hydrogen. Good sensation.
Jed let out a snicker. “Guess the guy couldn’t hold it together, you know?”
“That’s not Marie.”
The processor governing Jed’s spacesuit cancelled the emergency medical suppresser infusion. The dosage had exceeded CAB limits by a considerable margin. It automatically administered the antidote. Winter fell across Jed, chilling him so badly he held a gauntlet up to his visor, expecting to see frost glittering on the rubbery fabric. The coloured lights flashing annoyingly into his eyes gradually resolved into icons and digits. Someone kept chanting: “Marie, Marie, Marie.”
Jed looked at the corpse again. It was pretty hideous but it didn’t make him feel sick this time. The infusion seemed to have switched off his internal organs. It also implanted a strong sensation of confidence, he could tackle the rest of the mission without any trouble now.
He shook Gerald’s shoulder, which at least put an end to the dreary chanting. Gerald squirmed from the touch. “Come on, mate, we’re leaving,” Jed said. “Got a job to do.”
A motion caught Jed’s attention. There was a face pressed up against the port in the pressure door. As he watched, the blood smearing the little circle of glass began to flow apart. The man on the other side stared straight at Jed.
“Oh bloody hell,” Jed choked. The balmy feeling imparted by the infusion was gusting away fast. He turned frantically to see the airlock’s inner hatch starting to close.
“That’s it, mate, we’re outta here.” He pulled Gerald up, propping him against the wall. Their visors pressed together, allowing Jed to look into the old loon’s helmet past the winking icons. Gerald was oblivious to anything, lost in a dream-state trance. The laser pistol slid from lifeless fingers to fall onto the floor. Jed glanced longingly at it, but decided against. If it came to a shootout with the possessed, he wasn’t going to win. And it would only piss them off. Not a good idea.
The face at the port had vanished. “Come on.” He tugged at Gerald, forcing him to take some steps along the corridor. Thin jets of grey gas started to shoot out of the conditioning vents overhead. Green and yellow icons appeared on his visor, reporting oxygen and nitrogen thickening around him. One thing Jed clung to was that the possessed were no good in a vacuum; suits didn’t work, and their power couldn’t protect them. As soon as he got back out on the ledge he was safe. Relatively.
They reached the airlock hatch, and Jed slapped the cycle control. The control panel remained dark. Digits were flickering fast across his visor; the pressure was already twenty-five per cent standard. Jed let go of Gerald and pulled the manual lever out. It seemed to move effortlessly as he spun it round and round. Then it jarred his arms. He frowned at it, cross that something as simple as a lock should try to hurt him. But at least the hatch swung open when he pulled on it.
Gerald stumbled into the chamber, as obedient as a mechanoid. Jed laughed and cheered as he pulled the hatch shut behind him.
“Are you all right?” Rocio asked. “What happened?”
“Jed?” Beth cried. “Jed, can you hear me?”
“No sweat, doll. The bad guys haven’t got what it takes to spin me.”
“He’s still high,” Rocio said. “But he’s coming down. Jed, why did you use the infuser?”
“Just quit bugging me, man. Jeeze, I came through for you, didn’t I?” He pressed the outer hatch’s cycle control. Amazingly, a line of green lights on the panel turned amber. “You’d have snorted a megawatt floater too if you saw what I did.”
“What was that?” Rocio’s voice had softened down to the kind of tone Mrs Yandell used when she talked to the day-club juniors. “What did you see, Jed?”
“Body.” His irritation at the insulting tone was lost under a memory of wriggling scarlet cloth. “Some bloke got caught in the vacuum.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“No!” Now he was sobering up, Jed desperately wanted to avoid thinking about it. He checked the control panel, relieved to see the atmosphere cycle was proceeding normally. The electronics at this end of the airlock were undamaged. Not sabotaged, he corrected himself.
“Jed, I’m getting some strange readings from Gerald’s suit telemetry,” Rocio said. “Is he okay?”
Jed felt like saying: was he ever? “I think the body upset him. Once he realized it wasn’t Marie, he just shut up.” And who’s complaining about that?
The control panel lights turned red, and the hatch swung open.
“You’d better get out of there,” Rocio said. “There’s no alert in the net yet, but someone will discover the murder eventually.”
“Sure.” He took Gerald’s hand in his and pulled gently. Gerald followed obediently.
Rocio told them to stop outside a series of horseshoe-shaped garage bays at the base of the rock cliff, a hundred metres from the entrance they were supposed to use to get into the asteroid. Three trucks were parked in the bays, simple four wheel drive vehicles with seating for six and a flatbed rear.
“Check their systems,” Rocio said. “You’ll need one to drive the components back to me.”
Jed went along them, activating their management processors and initiating basic diagnostic routines. The first one was suffering from some kind of power cell drop out, but the second was clean and fully charged. He
