Angel Stations by Gary Gibson

Author:Gary Gibson [Gibson, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447221197
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2012-02-09T06:00:00+00:00

‘I didn’t tell them a thing! I swear, man! For Christ’s sake, let me the fuck out of here!’

It took Elias a minute to find the intercom button on Eduardez’s home-made airlock’s control panel. All the buttons were marked by strips of tape with Eduardez’s illegible scrawl on them, and it took a while to decipher each. In the meantime, he’d shot an occasional glance at the two-way screen that let him see Eduardez cowering inside the airlock, and let Eduardez see Elias standing menacingly outside of it.

‘So what does this button do?’ Elias probed a little flick switch, making sure Eduardez could see what he was doing.

Eduardez screamed over the intercom, high-pitched like a woman, ‘No! No! Don’t touch that one! I didn’t tell anyone anything! Please—’

‘Doesn’t seem to do anything much,’ said Elias, keeping his voice matter-of-fact. ‘What about this one here, then? Here at the bottom? It doesn’t say anything on it.’

There was a thud, and Elias looked up from the switch to see Eduardez’s face pushed up against the screen’s camera lens. His fingertips pressing hard against the glass were turning almost as white as Eduardez’s face.

‘Listen,’ said Eduardez, his voice sounding hollow over the intercom. ‘Listen, I mean it, I don’t wanna die. That’s why I’m telling you the truth, okay? I don’t know what the fuck happened to you out there, but it didn’t have anything to do with me.’ Elias made sure Eduardez could see him reaching down for the unmarked switch with a look of concentration on his face. ‘Man, that’s the override switch! In the name of Jesus, don’t touch that!’

‘Override switch?’

‘Opens the outer door! Don’t – please don’t touch it!’

‘Right, I’d forgotten about that,’ Elias lied. ‘But I can’t help wondering why you would want to open the outer door from way back here,’ he said. ‘You’ve already got an internal switch for opening the outer airlock door, so why would you need two?’

‘That’s an override you’ve got your goddamn hand on! Be really, really careful, okay? Please!’

‘Override, huh?’ Elias pondered for a couple of moments. ‘So let’s see. If somebody’s in there and, say, you want to help them get into vacuum quicker, then that’s the button you hit?’

Eduardez nodded furiously. There were now tears in his eyes.

He’s such a lizard I think I’m actually going to enjoy this, thought Elias. Some of the epoxy he had recently been using had stuck to his hands, and the skin had peeled away when he’d tried to remove it. The sore patches were now itching furiously.

‘I’ll just bet that’s what it’s for,’ he snarled. ‘Maybe you just thought you’d set me up, sit back and see what happened, right?’

‘Murray . . . Elias, please, I swear to God I said nothing.’

Elias thought there was at least a reasonable chance Eduardez was telling the truth here. But he couldn’t be sure, so he hit the switch.

Eduardez screamed loudly as the outer door opened. Elias watched with satisfaction as the pressure drop sucked him out of the door.

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