According to their body clocks it was time to sleep; he would be foolish to try to push them further.
He had a restrainer harness on the pallet. That should keep Balveda secure. The machine could stand guard, and he would use
the remote
sensor on his suit to watch for movement in the immediate area where they slept; they ought to be safe enough.
They finished their meal. Nobody disagreed with the idea of turning in. Balveda was trussed in the restrainer harness and
barricaded in one
of the empty store rooms off the platform. Unaha-Closp was told to sit itself up on one of the tall gantries
and stay still unless it heard or saw
anything untoward. Horza set his remote sensor near where he would sleep, on one of
the lower girders of a hoist mechanism. He had wanted
a word with Yalson, but by the time he had finished making all these
arrangements several of the others, including Yalson, had fallen asleep
already, lying back against the wall or laid out on
the ground, their visors blanked or their heads turned away from the weak lights of the others’
suits.
Horza watched Wubslin wander around the station for a bit, then the engineer, too, lay down, and everything was still. Horza
switched the
remote sensor on, primed to alarm if it sensed anything above a certain low level of movement.
He slept fitfully; his dreams woke him.
Ghosts chased him in echoing docks and silent, deserted ships, and when he turned to face them, their eyes were always waiting,
like
targets, like mouths; and the mouths swallowed him, so that he fell into the eye’s black mouth, past ice rimming it,
dead ice rimming the cold,
swallowing eye; and then he wasn’t falling but running, running with a leaden, pitch-like slowness,
through the bone cavities in his own skull,
which was slowly disintegrating; a cold planet riddled with tunnels, crashing
and crumpling against a neverending wall of ice, until the wreckage
caught him and he fell, burning, into the cold eye-tunnel
again, and as he fell, a noise came, from the throat of the cold ice-eye and from his own
mouth and chilled him more than
ice, and the noise said:
“EEEeee…"