Zero-G Read Free Page A

unit, his hand hunting for a hold.
    Benson is a little way along. He’s middle-aged, with the lean body and huge arms of someone who has spent years carrying heavy sacks of soil and fertiliser. His face is ashen-grey, his eyes closed. He’s facing outwards, his hair buffeted by a stream from the aircon unit, and beyond him, a single step away, is a sixty-foot drop to the ground below.

5
Riley
    The smell in the drained pipeline is like a living thing. It crawls into my nose and squats there, prickly and burning. I almost gag, manage to keep it down. The floor in the pipe is uneven, criss-crossed with ridges and bent metal, spotted with puddles of soupy water.
    I’m on all fours, a few feet into the tunnel, when I hear Carver come down behind me. I flick on my torch as he lands, illuminating walls stained with gunk.
    “Well, Royo was right,” Carver says. “Kev would never fit down here.”
    I look back, playing my torch across his body. For me, the space is tight, but for Carver it looks as if he’s been squeezed into the pipe, his shoulders bumping up against the roof.
    We start forward. As I push myself around a corner, forcing my body into the wall for balance, my hand slips. My forearm slides into the muck, which soaks through my jumpsuit. It takes every ounce of willpower I have not to start hammering on the walls.
    “Everything OK?” Carver says.
    “Couldn’t be better,” I say through clenched teeth.
    Another right turn, then we’ll be in the plant itself. The next T-junction should have a grate which we can lift up.
    It doesn’t take us long to get there – the patoosh-patoosh of the machinery in the plant is coming down into the pipe, more felt than heard. The smell has grown stronger, too – something I didn’t think was possible. The inside of my nose feels scoured.
    There’s a crackle in my ear. Royo. “Tracer unit, come back.”
    I look down at my wrist, at the thick flexible rubber band with the small digital display. It’s the companion to my earpiece – each stomper unit gets its own dedicated channel on the system, and ours is 535.
    I touch my wrist, keying the transmit button. “Copy. Loud and clear, Captain.”
    “Report.”
    I keep my voice low. “We’re getting close. We should be inside the plant in two minutes.”
    “Good. We’ve got a team standing—”
    There’s a burst of static on the line, fading and vanishing inside a second. It’s loud enough to make me wince.
    “—static, Carver. When are you fixing it?” Royo says. If anything, he sounds even more annoyed.
    “Gimme a break,” Carver say from behind me. “I’m still trying to find out why it’s even there. The frequencies on SPOCS are supposed to be discrete, so we don’t pick up any radio—”
    “ Carver .”
    “Fine, fine,” he mutters. “Hope you and Kev are having fun up there.”
    I crawl round a corner, and suddenly there’s a grate above my head, sending thin strips of light down into the pipe.
    “We’re here,” I whisper. “Gotta go.”
    “Copy that,” says Royo.
    Someone walks across the grate.
    The light blinks out. I see boot soles, and footsteps boom down into the tiny crawlspace. I wait until the owner of the boots recedes into the distance, then keep crawling.
    I can see the exit up ahead – it’s another grate, with pinpricks of light leaking in. I look back over my shoulder as I get close; Carver catches my eye, and nods. Very slowly, I put a hand on the grate and push.
    The metal grinds as it lifts up, and I freeze.
    There are no shouts, no running feet. I lift it up the rest of the way and haul myself out.
    I’ve come up behind one of the waste vats. It’s an enormous metal cylinder, one of dozens dotted around the walls of the room, gleaming under the spotlights in the ceiling. The vats form a loose U-shape around an open area on the plant floor. The smell here is a little better, the stench of waste cut by the tang of disinfectant.
    I pad to the side, moving on the balls