Angel Stations by Gary Gibson Page A

were overwhelmed. Elias signalled for the other two to retreat further back.
    New orders came through from Command. A 3D map came up on the inside of Elias’s helmet, showing him the route to take. He signalled to Eduardez and Farell, and they moved off again, re-entering the cavern they had just retreated from, and meeting with Company B coming from the opposite direction. A Korean named Lee Huang led them. The miners had vanished into the darkness.
    ‘We got ’em,’ said Lee. ‘They’re retreating now, pulling back. They weren’t prepared for this kind of onslaught.’
    Elias thought of saying something, like, How do we even know they’ve done anything illegal? But he kept his mouth shut. They moved off together, coming to what the Command map indicated was a central dormitory complex.
    It was open to the vacuum.
    ‘ We didn’t do this,’ said Eduardez. ‘Who did this?’
    Messages flew between Command and the three companies who had boarded the asteroid. Something had gone very wrong. Company C was on its way. The miners had simply pulled back, ceased resisting.
    So where were they?
    As they moved into the dormitory complex, they found miners everywhere, faces slack, their twisted bodies floating in the airless vacuum. Blood, and pain and bodies , thought Elias. They were all dead, so Pachenko had been right, not that Elias had ever doubted him. Blood, and pain and bodies .
    They had suicided, down to the last man, woman and child. He turned to see Lee vomiting inside his helmet.
    Things became very strange after that; his memory of subsequent events grew patchy. One memory remained strong: they had attempted to rescue some of the miners. Like trying to fix something that can’t be fixed, he’d thought crazily. But one thing he remembered well, above all else. Something he would never forget.
    There had been a child, her face blue with hypoxia. He had watched as the girl was cut from her pressure suit and placed on a gurney. There she had lain in the stillness of death. He stared at her, and touched her face gently, a hollow feeling deep within him, in a place where a part of him had once lived but now seemed lost forever. He wanted so badly to bring her back, to rectify all the things that had caused her to be here, in this time, this place.
    Then the miracle had happened.
    The miracle that had sealed the fate of anyone who had emerged, transformed, from the gene treatments.
    Especially Elias.
    Getting back home had been far from easy. Once the mission was over, Elias had a gut feeling they’d try and find a way to hold on to all of them forever. They were, he realized, too valuable or too dangerous to be let go. So Elias had bribed a sergeant to stow him in a deep-sleep coffin on board a cargo shuttle that took a year to wind its automated way back to Earth after a long, slow solar orbit. After that, well, losing yourself in London was easy, if you knew how, and Elias had become an expert.
    The experiments had left him changed, different – and not just because of the nightmares that he knew would haunt him forever. And one day, sitting in the secluded corner of a bar, the darkness obscuring his features, he was listening to an old man telling a story he hadn’t heard in a long time, and felt a chill run down his back as the details of it flooded back to him. He distantly recalled the childhood stories, something whispered in those steel and concrete playgrounds that were the streets he’d always known from infancy. It was a story of someone blessed with a kind of second sight, the power to heal. Sometimes the Primalists came into the story – and someone who was the Messiah the Primalists had been waiting for. But always, in these stories, he’d eventually deserted the Primalists, instead of leading them into the Promised Land, wherever that was.
    Studying any one particular variation of this legend, it was easy to find yourself realizing, only when it was much too late, that you’d been following