‘What’s taking so long?’ Blake asked, barely able to keep the irritation from his voice.
Avon didn’t look up from the control panel. He’d already stripped off the cover and was delving inside the mechanics of the lock with a probe. ‘There’s no power to the hydraulics,’ he replied, never taking his eyes from his work. ‘I’m trying to trip the manual release.’
‘Perhaps I should have asked Vila,’ Blake commented, unable to resist the dig.
If Avon bristled at the suggestion, he didn’t show it. ‘Be my guest. This is a very old system, antiquated 15 years ago.’
‘But it’s definitely Federation?’ Cally asked, rubbing her hands together to keep warm. The air in the docking tube was freezing. Behind them, the rigid tube snaked back towards where it was securely connected to the Liberator.
‘Yes, without question. It’s standard security configuration.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. The Federation doesn’t just abandon its stations.’
‘No, decommission or destroy is more their style,’ Blake agreed. ‘something obviously went very wrong here.’
‘There is another alternative,’ Avon said, his words punctuated by a series of short, sharp blasts from the probe.
‘And that is?’
‘It’s a trap.’ With a sharp click, the release to the airlock snapped back. Avon extracted his hand from the control panel. ‘Which we’re now able to walk into. After you.’
‘Thank you, Avon.’ Blake attempted to slide the door aside. It wouldn’t budge.
‘Are you sure you’ve released it?’ he asked, straining against the hydraulics.
‘I doubt it’s been opened in years, bound to be a bit stiff.’ Avon leant in to help, grabbing hold of the window frame and pulling. Slowly, the door began to slip into the wall, the ancient mechanism groaning in protest. When the gap was wide enough to pass through, Blake pulled his handgun out of its holster and stepped over the threshold.
With a gentlemanly flourish, Avon gestured for Cally to go first. Rolling her eyes, the telepath followed Blake into the gloom of the station.
*
Blake’s flickering torch swept along the ceiling as they made their way down the dark, silent corridor.
‘And there’s no chance you can get the lights working?’
Avon slammed shut the access panel he’d been examining.
‘Unfortunately not. No power.’
‘And yet the life-support system is obviously operational.’ Blake drew in a lungful of air. It was stale and thin, but still breathable. ‘Power is being generated somewhere on this station.’
‘Perhaps Zen is back up and running,’ Cally suggested, raising her teleporter bracelet to her lips. ‘He might be able to shed some light on its location. Liberator, come in. This is Cally.’
She was rewarded with a burst of static.
‘Still nothing.’
‘So what do we do?’ asked Avon, pointing his own torch down to the heavy door at the end of the corridor. ‘Head back to the ship or continue strolling blindly into the darkness?’
‘What do you think?’ replied Blake, striding forward.
*
When he was a child, Blake had been routinely shipped off with his brother and sister to spend long, hot summers on his grandfathers’s farm on Madrogon 3. They lived for it, those long, sun-kissed days playing hide and seek through fields of tall, gene-modified wheat or exploring the dense woodland down in the valley. But most of all, Blake looked forward to the evenings. When the rest of the family had been safely tucked up in bed, his grandfather used to take him down into the farmhouse’s cellar. There, hidden inside empty oil barrels, were his grandfather’s most treasured possessions—his history books. Most of the titles had been banned by the Federation when Grandfather was a boy himself, but he’d smuggled them off Earth, realising their value. Within their pages, the truth about humanity was laid bare. The wars. The atrocities. The bloodshed. This wasn’t the official, sanitised history of the Federation records. If Blake had believed what he was taught at school, as so many did, he would have been convinced that Earth had always been united under one all-knowing, infallible government, ready to take its place as the supreme rulers of the galaxy. They didn’t want you to know about thousands of years of power-struggles and tribal violence. They didn’t want you to know about humanity’s mistakes.
Blake absorbed it all, a willing student. In those yellowing, musty pages he learnt that empires didn’t only rise, they fell. He learnt that time and time again, courageous men and women fought for liberty, for freedom. He learnt the word rebellion for the very first time.
Then one summer, they didn’t go to Madrogon 3. In fact, they never saw their grandfather again. Blake’s parents told him that the old man had sold the farm and retired to a more comfortable planetoid in the outer rim. He didn’t believe a word of it but those stories, read by candlelight in that dark, gloomy cellar had stayed with him all his life. Not just the stories of revolution, but exploration and adventure, tales of those who refused to accept the limits of their own world and had set sail across the planet’s oceans. The names of the ships he had read about had stayed with him all these years. Gabriel. Endeavour. Discovery.
And then there was the ship that haunted his dreams—the Mary Celeste, discovered unmanned and abandoned in the middle of the Atlantic. He used to imagine the chill that must have passed over the first seamen to board its yawing deck. There they found the cabins still crammed with the lost crew’s possessions and food rotting on the captain’s table where it had been left. The greatest maritime mystery of all time. How he wished he’d been the one to find it drifting through the night.
That was until today, until he had spent an hour traipsing through the endless, echoing corridors of this station. There was no excitement, no thrill, just the growing suspicion that at any moment they would stumble upon a pile of bodies.
Something terrible had obviously happened here. Living quarters were ransacked, tables overturned, personal belongings strewn across the floor. Galleys had been looted, cupboard doors left hanging open, stale food crunching beneath their boots. Someone had obviously torn through these corridors, scavenging everything they could find. Had it been pirates? Opportunists? Who?
‘Blake, you should see this.’
Avon’s voice snapped Blake out of his thoughts. He had been standing turning a white scientist’s tunic over and over in his hands. It had been flung over a steel bench, grubby and crumpled, but thankfully free of blood. In fact, they’d seen no obvious evidence of violence. No tell-tale scorch marks on the walls, no bloodstains on the floor. He’d seen the aftermath of a pirate attack before. It wasn’t pretty.
‘Blake.’
He threw the tunic back onto the workbench and strode out of the small room. Avon was standing a short way down the corridor with Cally, where they seemed to have found some kind of cupboard fitted directly into the bulkhead.
‘Okay, I’m here. What have you found?’
‘See for yourself,’ Avon said, pushing the door open. It swung back and clattered against the wall, the sound reverberating down the corridor.
Blake’s eyes narrowed as he took in what was laid out before him. Laser rifles were lined up in racks, a dozen at least. Blake stepped closer and ran a finger down the barrel of one of the guns.
‘They’re M300 Paracarbine rifles, standard issue on all Federation stations 20 or so years ago. Gun stations like this would be found on all decks in case of attack.’
Blake raised his eyebrows. ‘I had no idea you were such an expert in firearms.’
‘I’m an expert in anything that will keep me alive.’ Avon unclipped one of the rifles and tested its weight in his hands. ‘This model was replaced by the M400, which was able to keep its charge for a longer period of time.’
‘Fascinating, but it doesn’t explain why they’re still here. Every room we’ve seen so far has been ransacked, supplies, medical equipment, clothing and yet here are 12 fully operational energy weapons left unlocked in a cupboard.’
‘That’s the thing.’ Avon swung the weapon to point straight at Blake’s head. Blake took an involuntary step back. ‘Are they functioning?’
‘I’d like to find out for sure before you wave one in my face.’
Avon smiled cruelly down the sights of the gun and twisted slightly to the left, his finger tightening around the trigger. Blake flinched, half-expecting a bolt of iridescent light to shriek past his ear. Instead there was nothing but a short, sharp click.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at,’ Blake snapped angrily. ‘For all you knew, that thing was live.’
‘Nothing is live here,’ Avon replied, lowering the weapon. ‘Computers. Scientific equipment. All dead.’
‘He’s right, Blake,’ Cally cut in, giving Avon a disparaging look. ‘Come and look at this.’
She led him into another laboratory across the corridor. Unlike the other rooms, the equipment here appeared undisturbed. Blake walked over to a computer screen embedded into the nearest work station. He wiped a path through the dust on its surface with his gloved palm. It was blank, lifeless.
‘I’ve found three more, just like this,’ Cally explained. ‘I doubt anyone has set foot in them for years.’
‘Even by today’s standards, this is advanced equipment,’ Avon commented, following them in, the rifle still in his hands. ‘Neutrino-duplicators. Microclastic scanners. Quadro-isolation tanks. It must have been worth a fortune back then.’
‘Which rules out a pirate raid,’ Blake noted, rubbing the dust off his gloves.
‘Unless they were exceptionally stupid. Most pirates I’ve met would cut off their right arms for this level of bounty.’
‘So what happened here?’ Cally asked. ‘If there wasn’t a raid, where did everyone go?’
‘And what happened to the power?’ Avon added.
Blake sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He didn’t know if it was the mystery of the station, the thin air or just spending too much time with Avon, but he was getting a headache. ‘None of this makes any…’
A clatter from outside cut him off mid-sentence. Something metallic hit the floor, the noise echoing through the silence of the corridors. They weren’t alone.
Blake instinctively drew his gun. He knew that it was as useless as the rifle which Avon still wielded, but somehow the weight of it in his hand made him feel better. He indicated towards the door. Avon returned the gesture with a short, sharp nod and padded silently towards the door. He pressed himself against the wall and cautiously peered round.
‘Anything?’ Blake hissed, inching towards the door himself.
Avon shook his head. ‘There’s no-one out there.’
‘Well, something made that noise. Cally?’
The telepath closed her eyes for a second.
‘Sorry. Nothing.’
A door slid open and shut further down the corridor. Blake and Avon exchanged a glance and the computer expert was out of the lab and running towards the sound without another word, Blake at his heels and Cally covering their back. Even as they ran, Blake felt a slight swell of pride in his chest. A few short months ago they’d been strangers, but now were beginning to work like a team, no matter how much they bickered.
They were on the door before they knew it. Without thinking, Avon slammed his palm against an operating control and the door slid open. His surprised look said it all. The door was powered.
Soft footsteps were shuffling away from them into the dark. Without hesitation, they raced forward, taking a sharp left and running down a corridor that yawed slightly beneath their feet. Blake ran through what he remembered about the construction of the station. This must have been one of the struts linking the main ring of the station to its central core.
He flashed his torch forward and for a split second thought he made out something in the beam of light. Was that a face, glancing over a narrow, bony shoulder?
‘Wait,’ Blake called into the darkness, ‘we just want to talk.’
But whatever—whoever—it was obviously didn’t share the same desire. They heard feet scrambling on the floor and a grunt before a large red barrel came rolling towards them. Avon sidestepped it easily and swore at the sound of a bulkhead door creaking open.
‘If that shuts, we’ll be locked out for good.’
He charged forward even as Blake’s torch picked out the shadow of a heavy door sliding closed. Avon dropped to his knees and skidded forward, ramming the butt of the rifle into the gap. There was a crunch as the plastic buckled against the pressure, but it was enough to spring the safety mechanism and the door hissed open slightly, before trying to close again.
Breathing heavily in the thin air, Blake slid to a halt and offered Avon a hand, which was accepted gratefully. Avon hauled himself up and, struggling for breath himself, turned to face the door.
‘Here, let me.’ Blake passed his torch to Cally and slipped his hands around the door. He heaved back and felt it give slightly, enough for Avon to slide in and put his shoulder to it. Thankfully, the hydraulics didn’t put up much of a fight and they’d soon made enough of a gap for Cally to slide through.
‘Which way now?’ she asked, as Blake and then Avon followed her. Avon pointed to the right, where light was spilling dimly through a window.
‘That’s as good a place as any to start looking.’
Leaving the door repeatedly trying to close behind them, the three rebels moved forwards towards the light. Blake raised his hand as they drew near enough to see the crack that ran the length of the grimy opaque glass. They all paused as Blake grasped the handle of the sliding doors. Both Avon and Cally nodded, indicating that they were ready and he yanked the door back, half expecting someone to come bowling out at him.
No-one did. Instead, opening the door revealed another well-equipped lab, with waist-high steel work stations lining the walls. Above them yellowing fluorescent tubes flickered and sparked, flooding the room with a stark, strobing glare. As soon as they stepped inside, Avon’s eyes dropped down to the cupboard doors set beneath the work stations. One was slightly ajar. He glanced at Blake and pressed a long slender finger against his thin lips.
Blake didn’t even dare breathe as Avon crept over to the cupboard and reached for the door. His fingers hadn’t even touched the metal before there was an explosion of noise from within the work stations. Doors flew open and equipment tumbled out as someone scrambled inside the cupboards. Avon swung the door open and looked in.
‘It’s like a dog-run. No dividers between the cabinets. I can see them.’ From within the cupboard came a frantic scrabbling.
‘Cally, stay there,’ Blake barked as he made for the last cupboard on the far wall. Behind him, a door slammed open and a figure scrambled out, slipping on the papers that spilled out with it. It bolted for the door, only to be caught ably by Cally.
‘Calm down,’ she said soothingly, trying to avoid a whirl of flailing arms and legs. ‘You’re safe.’
A foot caught her in the shin and she gasped, loosening her grip enough to let go of the struggling figure. It hit the floor and backed across the room on all fours like a huge, gangly spider. When it made contact with the cupboard doors, it drew itself into a ball, hugging bare, bruised legs to a thin chest, wide, terrified eyes peering over scuffed knees.
Blake held out his hands, hoping the gesture would make his intentions clear.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he said gently, inching slowly towards the shaking creature. ‘We don’t mean you any harm.’
Cally was beside him now, limping slightly but staring intently at the figure, trying to make telepathic contact. She sighed and flashed a look at Blake.
‘Nothing. I can’t get through to it.’
‘To him, Cally, to him.’ Avon crouched down beside the cringing life form. ‘It’s a boy.’
Avon was right. He must have been about 13 and, although the limbs were elongated and bony, and the head larger than normal, he was definitely human. Bright, petrified eyes set beneath a heavy brow looked up at Blake.
‘But where did he come from?’