‘But will the duct be big enough?’ somebody wanted to know.
‘Oh yes.’ I knew that. I had spent enough time in Sustainable Services to have learned about the air ducts. ‘There was a minimum standard circumference set, to allow for manual repair -’
‘Come on.’ Dad jerked me forward. ‘Kids first.’
‘No!’ about three women exclaimed at once. Then Mum said, ‘Not in the lead, Tuddor!’
‘Sloan, then! Hurry!’
Arkwright had already dragged a stool under the access panel. It didn’t look much like an access panel any more. It had become a semi-transparent sheet of membrane, streaked with blood vessels.
Arkwright fumbled frantically at its edges, trying to find the release catch.
‘For God’s sake, Arkwright, hurry
up
!’
‘Oh no! Oh no!’ Lais was shaking and crying. ‘Oh
no
!’
‘Just
pull
it!’ Dygall yelled. ‘Just rip it off!’
‘If I damage it, we won’t be able to reseal it,’ Arkwright replied, through his teeth.
‘Arkwright,
quickly
!’
‘Here.’ Sloan sprang onto Arkwright’s stool, causing Arkwright to lose his balance and fall back onto the floor. Sloan slid his fingers under a flap of muscle above his head. He began to peel open the access panel.
‘Someone has to hold it,’ he gasped. ‘While I climb through . . .’
I glanced at the door. Its centre was now black. The brown area was getting bigger.
I could hear the hiss of chemical reaction, even through the clamour that everyone was making.
‘Go, Sloan, go on!’
‘Yestin next!’
‘But there are samplers
in
there!
Inside
the air ducts!
Aren’t there?’ This was one of Ottilie’s staff. He was in a complete panic. ‘I’m sure there are! There must be!’
‘No,’ I said, and had to clear my throat. My voice wasn’t working properly. ‘No,’ I squawked. ‘Just filters and scrubbers.’ ‘We’ll take a chance,’ Dad said. He released my arm, and grabbed Yestin around the waist.
Sloan was already scrambling through the access hole. All I could see of him were his legs. Arkwright was holding the flap back for him.
‘You right, Sloan?’ Firminus shouted. He had one eye on his son, the other on the door.
‘
Fine!
’ came the muffled response.
‘You next,’ said Dad, and hoisted Yestin up towards the hole in the ceiling.
‘
I can’t turn around!
’ Sloan announced. ‘
It’s too narrow!
’ ‘Grab his feet,’ Dad ordered. ‘Yestin? Grab Sloan’s feet!
He’ll pull you in!’
‘Will you
hurry
?’ Lais screamed.
The black patch on the door was disintegrating; it had been eaten away. There was a hole the size of my fist, and through it I could see . . . something. Something that wasn’t pink, like a sampler, but purple. A sort of bluey-purple.
Pulsing
bluey-purple.
‘Dad . . .’ I faltered.
Dad turned. His expression was hard. ‘You next,’ he ordered, reaching for me. But Firminus was already pushing Dygall towards the hole. As Yestin’s kicking legs disappeared from sight, Firminus heaved Dygall’s unwieldy form towards them.
‘Quick!’ Firminus grunted. ‘Grab on . . .!’
‘Dad, that’s not a sampler, look!’ I could see more of the purple stuff now, because the hole was bigger than my head, and opening up fast. Through it, I could make out streaks of white, a ring of dark polyps, a series of small, winking mouths . . . ‘Dad, it’s something else!’
‘It’s attached itself to the other side of the door,’ Firminus remarked, with a kind of deadly calm. ‘It’s excreting some chemical.’
‘
Just get up there, Cheney!
’ I was tall enough to reach the access panel while standing on the stool. When I grabbed the edge of the hatch, it was slippery but yielding. So I was able to dig my fingernails into it. Dad gave me a leg-up.
I remember very clearly my last glimpse of the BioLab – a sweeping view, because I was looking down. I saw a circle of staring eyes and open mouths and sweating faces. I saw Lais cowering under a console. I saw Firminus watching the door, his arms wrapped around his chest; Ottilie standing with her hands locked together over her mouth; one of her staff hefting the magnetron pole. I saw the drooling wound in the door, which was filling the whole room with a horrible stench.
That was all I saw. Dad gave me a huge shove, and I was suddenly in the air duct. In the dark, narrow, slick, circular air duct.
The light in the collar of my pressure suit immediately flicked on. At least its sensor was still working.
‘Go!
Go!
’ someone screamed from behind me.
I went. I struggled along, using my elbows and toes. (I couldn’t get up onto my hands and knees, because the duct was too small.) Ahead, I could see Dygall’s feet working desperately. The duct wall shuddered with the impact of each kick and nudge.
‘I’m here, Cheney!’ It was Mum, panting. Gasping for breath. ‘I’m right behind you! Don’t stop!’
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I thrashed along, gulping down air, sliding, wriggling, until I almost ran my face into the soles of Dygall’s boots.
‘Go on!’ I screamed. ‘Keep going!’
‘Sloan, what are you
doing
?’ Dygall cried. I couldn’t hear the response. But next thing I knew, we were moving again.
Shortly afterwards, I passed under a B deck access panel, and realised why Sloan had stopped. Lying across the filter screen was something that looked horribly like an arm. I might have been wrong, of course. It was hard to tell.
Was someone lying on the floor up there? Dead or injured?
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘there’s something overhead . . . through the access panel . . .’
‘Keep going.’
‘It’s just -’
‘
Keep going
!’
So I kept going. There wasn’t much choice. Whenever I came to another access panel, I would peer through the membrane net, trying to work out our position. I didn’t have much luck, though. I could tell when we passed over streets, but not which streets they were. The shapes in the compartments were too indistinct to be easily identified. I knew we were heading away from BioLab; that was about it.
I didn’t know how many people were behind me. Had we all got out? I didn’t have the breath to ask. I almost didn’t want to.
At last Dygall came to a halt in front of me. He yelled, in a strained and high-pitched voice, ‘Sloan says we’re at MedLab! The Stasis Banks! Should we stop here?’
I transmitted the message to my mother. Huffing and puffing, she replied, ‘There are hardly any . . . samplers in the . . . Stasis Banks. It’s wall-to-wall . . . pods and their . . . sensors are internal . . .’
‘So should we stop?’
‘They’ve got a . . . double pressure . . . seal too.
And
an airlock filter . . .’
‘So should we stop or not? Mum?’
A pause. Then I heard Arkwright’s voice, very, very faintly. ‘We can’t stay in here, Quenby. It’s not an option.’
‘No . . .’
‘Tell Sloan we’ll try the Stasis Banks.’
‘Did you hear that, Cheney?’ asked Mum. ‘Tell Sloan -’
‘I know. I heard.’
I passed on the message. Within seconds, the duct began to shake as, somewhere up ahead, Sloan thumped at an access panel. It took him a while to break through. I heard Dygall say ‘Yuk!’, and wondered what vessel Sloan might have ruptured in the ship’s fabric.
‘Quenby!’ It was Arkwright again. I could hardly understand him; his words were muffled by my mother’s intervening bulk. ‘Don’t let those kids climb down first! Tell them to keep going, over the panel, and then they can back up once I’m down!’
‘Good idea,’ Mum said. ‘Cheney -’
‘Yeah. I heard.’ Once more, I transmitted the message. Sloan, however, ignored it; I don’t think he considered himself a ‘kid’. Dygall ignored it too. He often ignored suggestions. Only Yestin did as he was told.
Suddenly, I found myself on the edge of a void. Below me, two faces were staring up out of the dimness.
One of them was Sloan’s.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Just crawl across the hole until your legs have drop-space. I’ll catch you. It’s not a big fall.’
It wasn’t, either. Despite Mum’s protests, I swung myself down through the hole, until I was dangling from the ceiling like an old-fashioned pendant light. ‘There are no samplers, Quenby!’ Sloan declared, as he reached for my waist.
Dygall was sitting on the floor, with his head in his hands. The floor itself was so soft that, if I
had
come down hard, I would have been cushioned.
Sloan caught me, though. He let me down gently.
I looked around.
‘It’s so dark,’ I croaked.
‘It’s always dark in the Vaults,’ Sloan replied, using our nickname for the Stasis Banks. ‘You know that.
Hey,
Quenby! I’ll catch you!
’ I had never liked this area of the ship. Not that I had been in it very often; you had to have special clearance. But I had visited the Vaults once or twice for school, and had found the long racks of pods rather creepy. Everyone in those pods looked so
dead
- though they weren’t, of course. They were in cytopic suspension, being monitored carefully by all the sensors hooked up to them. You could see them through the clear silicon casings, face after face, form after form, like the statues lined up along a particular corridor in our mimexic tour of Ancient Rome.
I’d always had the sense that one of those motionless figures was going to open his or her eyes as I trudged past. Even though I knew it was impossible. No one just snaps out of cytopic suspension. It takes a long time, and a lot of careful adjustments. If it’s not done with absolute precision, you can get badly hurt.
Surveying the silent ranks of B Crew, stretching for a long, long way in both directions, I suddenly thought:
something’s wrong.
They didn’t look normal.
‘Ooof!’ said Mum. She had come down a little too fast, and had fallen to her knees. But she quickly struggled to her feet again. ‘Cheney? Are you okay?’
‘Mum, look.’ Nervously, I edged towards the nearest pod. The beam of light from my collar-spot hit its casing, which was no longer a clear, glassy silicon, but something softer and more cloudy. (It looked almost as if it would wobble if you touched it.) Nevertheless, despite this change, my light-beam did manage to penetrate the casing and illuminate what lay beneath.
There was still a person inside, who seemed to be disappearing into a kind of pink jelly. The tube inserted under his skin, near his collarbone, was now the same colour as the skin itself. The trodes on his body were sending out shoots, weaving a fine web across his head and limbs and torso. One of the filaments had even worked its way into the corner of an eye . . .
‘Don’t look!’ Mum snapped. She jerked me away. ‘Don’t look.’
‘Oh . . . oh no . . .’
‘We can’t help them, Cheney, don’t look.’
It was too late. I had seen, and felt sick. I had to take big breaths. ‘They’re connected to CAIP,’ I groaned. ‘They’re part of the ship, now . . .’
‘Shh!’
It was like a nightmare. It was the sort of thing only the sickest of minds could ever have imagined. But there was worse to come.
Yestin had slid down from the ceiling. Arkwright had followed him, and now stood dragging his fingers through his sticky hair, his chest labouring, as he shook his head at Sloan. Arkwright’s knees were shaking. His expression was blank.
Sloan frowned. He squinted up at the access panel. His collar-spot wavered over the dark, gaping hole above him.
‘Where’s Dad?’ I whispered. ‘Where are the others?’
But I already knew the answer. I could sense it, from the way Arkwright winced and closed his eyes.
The others weren’t with us.
It was Sloan who finally found the words. I was speechless.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Tuddor sealed the panel,’ Arkwright replied hoarsely.
‘Behind you?’
‘I didn’t . . .’ Arkwright paused, took a deep breath, and turned his huge, bloodshot eyes towards my mother. ‘There were samplers coming in,’ he explained, choosing his words with an obvious effort. ‘Samplers and those blue – I mean, those scent pellet things. I’m sorry, Quenby, I didn’t know. Not until . . . it was Tuddor who made the decision.’
Someone patted my arm, but I didn’t even look around.
‘What happened to my dad?’
‘Cheney, I’m sorry, I don’t know -’
‘They got him!’
‘No -’
‘They did!’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see.’
‘You did see!’ I could tell from his face. It looked bruised. When I stepped forward, Sloan grabbed me.
‘What happened, Arkwright?’ my mother demanded. She spoke very quietly. ‘You’d better tell us.’
Arkwright hesitated, and I felt as if my chest was going to burst open. Sloan was still holding my arm. Dygall hovered at my side. Yestin was behind me – I wasn’t sure where.
I could barely stand up, let alone keep track of Yestin.
‘One of the samplers got Lais,’ Arkwright sighed, at long last.
We all waited, mute with shock.
‘It went straight past Tuddor and attacked Lais. The last thing I saw was, Ottilie got hit by a scent pellet. That was the
last thing I saw
.’
‘But they should have come after us.’ Dygall had finally found his voice. ‘Why didn’t the others follow us? Tuddor and Firminus and the rest?’
‘No time,’ said Arkwright. ‘They had to seal the air duct before any samplers got in.’
‘But -’
‘When I last saw Tuddor, he was alive. Firminus too,’ Arkwright added.
‘If they were alive, they would have come after us!’ I gasped, and Mum suddenly seemed to snap out of her daze. As Sloan fell back, she came up and put her arms around me.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, as if she were trying to convince herself. I could feel her shaking. ‘Dad’s smart. Dad’s very smart. He’ll think of something. He will.’
‘That’s right,’ Dygall agreed faintly. ‘He – he could have got out while the samplers were attacking someone else. He could have.’
‘He had to seal up the duct, Cheney.’ Yestin’s contribution was low and lifeless. ‘Maybe he had to get out of BioLab before he had a chance to
un
seal it. Maybe he’s hiding somewhere.’