by Tim C Taylor
He couldn’t do this anymore. Living like a starved rat in the ruins of the Earth and having to act as if grateful to the glorious New Order – this was no life.
Leon drew himself erect and strode over to the hill’s edge. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t throw himself off. The water wasn’t close enough, anyway. Instead, he peered down the hillside steps, hands on hips, practically willing an agent of the New Order to spot him, perfectly silhouetted as he was in the moonlight. Then he could stop fighting and yield to the consequences of his curfew breach.
But the midnight shadows offered up no ending for him tonight. Leon was alone.
The cleansing wash of the waves was a balm to his ears, and with the buildings and trees that once stood here leveled during the invasion, he had a clear view out over the water. He discovered he could still enjoy the complex dance of silver-tipped waves. Even the Hardits couldn’t sully the beauty of nature.
Yet, as his eyes were drawn into the mesmerizing pattern of the water, he saw the negative spaces – the rectangles of pure black in which the waves were unnaturally absent. His eyes quickly attuned to this new pattern, and Leon saw that Bedford Bay was filled with the immaculate blackness of the alien gun platforms.
So like the Hardits, he thought. Their stealth camouflage is impenetrable, but the moonlit waves reveal them. If he had a target designator, he could easily paint these platforms for incoming fire. Not that there was anyone left to send the missiles. Earth’s defenders were dead or in hiding. There had been secret talk of flashes seen over the moon several months ago, but if that had really been this Human Legion that some said would come one day to free them, then their attack had been beaten off by the Hardits within hours.
He turned away from the water, and headed off for his nearby destination, laughing softly to himself. The authorities said the Legion was coming to Earth to take its revenge on its civilians. That they were the descendants of the million children the people of Earth had sold into slavery centuries ago.
Leon believed them. Hardits or Legion? You might as well choose between a hanging or a garroting. If help were coming to the people of occupied Earth, then it would be the White Knights who would deliver liberation – and those bastards would expect a heavy price indeed.
His spirits lifted when he ducked through the tunnel he’d cut long ago through the brambles, and entered the secret place he’d once shared with Genevieve.
Now that he was a widower, he shared this den with an even older love, hoping Genevieve wouldn’t mind.
Leon shrugged off his rucksack and placed it on the shelf in the area they’d cleaned years before, where the walls of the ruined building still stood, and most importantly, a power cable still fed electricity.
In a flurry of well-rehearsed motion, cupboards were quickly opened, equipment assembled and aimed through the open roof, and the plastic-backed heated blanket laid out across a floor still damp from the rain two nights ago.
In his youth, before the invasion, Leon must have glimpsed the building that became their den. Amongst the mangled machinery that filled most of the structure’s ruined shell, there were coils, heavy power cables, and radiation shielding. He guessed this had powered the hyper tubes, but he couldn’t remember this building. It had been a cog in a worldwide network of systems that he’d never thought to understand. They simply worked, and that was all he needed to know.
Until the day the orbital bombardment began.
Years later, he discovered this place with Gennie, and she said that day that even the Hardits couldn’t stamp out love.
He laughed sullenly at the memory. It was easier to believe your own lies when you were young, and doubly so in this hidden place where they discovered the secret pleasures of the human form. Gennie had been proven right. For a while.
“Night’s not getting younger,” he admonished himself. Leon had work to do, but there was a ritual to perform first.
Reaching into his rucksack, he weighed up whether to toast the connection to the power grid with either the flask of hot soup, or the bulb of gin. The climb up Mount Pit had tired his malnourished body, so he chose the soup.
“To you, my love,” he toasted, and gulped down the concoction of potato, roots, and crushed pine kernels. Then he switched on the power.
He had chosen the simple words of his toast with care, but if Genevieve were listening from heaven, she wouldn’t be fooled. He hadn’t been referring to her.
The status lights glowed green on his remaining love, and it hummed to life with a soft whir of positioning motors.
He glanced at the screen he’d attached, and checked the image was true.
It was a cloudless night, and the city of ZoneCap 87 – that he had once known as Halifax, Nova Scotia – no longer troubled those of his calling with light pollution.
He was Leon Vogel, and his true love was the Bolton EA-375 with 75-inch virtual aperture: the telescope he’d been given by proud parents on his admission to the school of Astronavigation and Applied Space Science at Federation University. It hadn’t quite been the course he’d wanted, but by inclination, training, and professional accreditation, Leon Vogel was an astronomer, and a good one.
Maybe one of the best, because the difference between notable astronomers and the merely good ones was finding something interesting.
And Leon had found something interesting, all right. The question that haunted him, though, was what the hell to do about it.
— Chapter 19 —
Two hours before dawn, Leon headed home, retracing his steps with as much stealth as he could muster, despite his fatigue, and the cold that had finally penetrated his two thick coats, and the soup and gin. The fear that made his tired heart beat faster was of the unknown. People talked of alien monsters patrolling the land after dark, the so-called Silent Ones. Leon didn’t believe in them. There wasn’t even a curfew officially, but people did disappear at night. That he knew to be true.
Only when he’d made his way past the dark homes of Armdale – and reached the rear of his house with no reeve patrol or mythical alien monster in sight – only then did he finally relax.
It wasn’t until he put the key to the mechanical lock of his back door that he heard anything wrong.
He whirled around and saw a figure emerge from the cover of the striped maple in their garden.
“Nice walk, Leon?” asked Josephine Bonnier.
The young woman looked ghostly pale in the near dawn, but it was the note of triumph in her voice that terrified him.
“Let me in,” she insisted. “We need to talk.”
“No. Go away. I have nothing to say to you.”
“Oh? Only, I’ve been wondering how many vouchers the reeves would pay me if I notified them of a silly old fool who makes midnight trips to the old hyper tube terminal at North End. It seems mighty suspicious. Perhaps he’s part of the resistance?”
“All right.” Leon opened the door and beckoned her inside.
“So kind, Leon. Now, be a darling and boil some water. I’d kill for a mug of coffee.”
——
Leon shivered under the woman’s triumphal stare, her beady eyes piercing the steam rising from the mug of coffee he had brewed for her.
It was his table, dammit. His fucking coffee. Yet, there sat Josephine at his kitchen table while he perched on a stool nearby, a supplicant in his own house.
“It’s your son-in-law,” she announced eventually.
“Dalmas?”
“Yes, of course, Dalmas. An alert civilian saw suspicious activity in the top floor of his apartment building. When the reeves raided, they discovered an honest-to-goodness resistance cell. They had been surveilling targets throughout ZoneCap.”
Even as the horror slapped Leon, he couldn’t help but appeal to reason. “Dalmas would never get involved.” The words sound pitiful even to him.
“Of course not. He’s far too much of a pussy. But the reeves have no choice. You know that. They must take reprisals. Perhaps
if you tell them what you know, what you do in your midnight jaunts, you can win a reprieve for your family member, and a milder reprisal for the rest of the community.”
Leon fought his fatigue and fear to separate her lies from the truth. The only person Josephine Bonnier cared for was herself. She couldn’t care less whether Dalmas Bruyne lived or died. It was her own neck she was trying to save.
He stared at her, trying at first to keep the contempt from his eyes, but quickly deciding he could no longer be bothered.
Her thick, quilted coat obscured her figure, but with her fur hood pulled back, there was no missing the distinctive facial feature that marked her out as special.
Josephine Bonnier was fat.
No one would have thought that of her before the invasion, but most of ZoneCap’s registered inhabitants were little more than cadaverous skin stretched over stubborn old bones that refused to die. And out beyond the zone capital in the wilder parts of Zone 87, he’d heard food shortages were much worse.
But undernourishment was not a concern for Josephine Bonnier. He shuddered to think what a person like her had to do to win herself so many extra food vouchers.
“Tell me what you know,” said Josephine, “and I’ll put in a good word with the reeves. I have standing with them.”
I bet you do, cursed Leon silently. He took a long breath of the chill air and challenged her. “What if I am with the resistance?”
“Even better,” she said with a giggle. “The juicier the report, the easier it will be to get Dalmas off. Even you – if you really were resistance – I could get you a clinical prison execution, rather than the public garroting that your wife… Oh, I’m sorry. That’s so insensitive of me.”
Leon squared his shoulders and glared at her. Josephine was only 27, which meant she had grown up in occupied Earth. It was a harsh upbringing, but he had no sympathy for this sickening woman. His Genevieve had called her a dirty collaborator to her face when she had flaunted herself in the market one day, her well-fed figure clothed in a brand-new dress.
Two months later, Genevieve was executed in the same market square.
Josephine made good use of her ruthlessness to take advantage of decent people, but although she was sly, she wasn’t particularly intelligent. She had never needed to be.
“What do you do there?” she demanded. “Tell me what you do.”
“Think about it, Josephine,” said Leon, getting up and filling the kettle to make a coffee for himself. “It’s best you don’t know the details. If you did know too much, one day the reeves will wonder how you came by your knowledge, and it might be you having to answer their questions.”
He watched her reaction. She swallowed nervously but persisted. “Tell me what you do,” she said in a small voice.
He lit the paraffin stove, in no hurry to reply. “It’s not what you think,” he answered when the kettle was warming. “It’s not terrorist related. I’m not with the resistance. If they have any sense, the authorities should be pleased by what I tell them, but you know that even good intelligence is dangerous to know. Ignorance is the safest defense of all.”
Leon watched the doubts cloud Josephine’s face. “Dalmas is linked to terrorists,” she said darkly. “There will be reprisals. If you help the reeves… whatever you’re caught up in will still help the reeves, won’t it?”
“What I know goes beyond the reeves. My information could be vital to the New Order itself.”
“Shit, Leon. Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“Good,” she said, recovering her composure quickly. She reached into the thick pockets of her winter coat, drew a gun, and shot him.
Leon looked down at the entry wound. It stung like crazy, but the hole through his clothing seemed far too small. He took an unsteady breath and placed a hand on his back, commencing the terrifying task of feeling for the exit wound.
“It’s a tracking pellet, you pussy.” Josephine rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to have that coffee. You’re going to hand yourself over to the reeve station on Robie Street and confess everything.”
“No.”
“The tracker will tell me your location and what you say,” she continued. “Every word you’ve just spoken has also been recorded. If you deviate from your journey to Robie Street, I will inform on you myself. If you see the reeves and do not confess, I will know. Whatever you do now, you’re finished, Leon Vogel, but I swear I’ll do whatever I can to commute Dalmas’ sentence. I can save him from your wife’s sad fate.”
Leon turned off the paraffin stove. “All right, Miss Bonnier. I’ll do what you say.”
He risked glancing at her. He needed to see the sneer of triumph on her face, to be certain that this was personal to Josephine Bonnier. She didn’t even try to hide her glee at his humiliation. Now there was no doubt in his mind: it was her who’d caused his Genevieve’s death, and that meant she deserved what he was going to send her way.
Flicking his gaze to the cracked tiles of his kitchen floor, he let out a long breath, steaming in the chill morning air. Keeping his gaze low, because he didn’t want one last look at his house – not with her defiling it – he pushed open the back door and marched sullenly off to the reeves.
Assuming she really had planted a tracker inside him, she was guilty of possessing technology prohibited by the New Order, whereas he was only guilty of breaking a curfew that officially didn’t exist. If he was going down to hell, she was coming with him.
Except Leon still held onto a thread of hope.
His information was good. So good that the reeves wouldn’t believe him at first. But if he were lucky, their fear of failing to pass on vital information meant they would check his credentials as an astronomer.
And then they would listen properly, and they would escalate, because Leon had discovered that a planet was in the wrong place.
Well, technically, Ceres wasn’t a planet so much as a planetoid, and a particularly dull one at that, but it was still a helluva big rock.
And it was on a collision course with Earth.
— Chapter 20 —
“Back up!” growled the reeve.
Reeve Justin Brunswick glared across the interrogation table, biting his lip. Was he really going to do this? Was he really going to throw his life away?
He shrugged, only increasing the confusion and hurt on that poor bastard, Vogel’s, face. Well, this idiot deserved all that was coming his way for not keeping his fucking mouth shut.
“I don’t care about your bullshit story of tracking devices and curfew-breaking neighbors. I want to hear about Ceres. I want to know when it’s going to intercept and why.”
The astronomer hurried to obey, but while Brunswick had been speaking, the prisoner’s mouth had filled with blood, making him splutter incoherently.
“Take your time,” said the reeve in a pleasant-enough voice, although inwardly he wanted to grab this stupid little prick’s head and bash it against the desk until it popped.
Could he still do that?
Brunswick considered his chances. An unfortunate demise during interrogation was his best chance to survive this dangerous information. But if the truth got out, half the reeves in Zone 87 would be lining Bell Road in one of those mass crucifixions the Hardits loved so much.
No, this required discretion and tact. “Don’t take too much time,” he told the prisoner, who had been using his finger to probe the inside of his mouth.
Vogel spat out several half-shattered teeth, coated in gobbets of sticky blood.
“Six months,” the astronomer lisped through a broken mouth. “Intercept in six months. Approximately. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Hardits’ way of wiping out the Earth. If it does hit, no one will survive. But I can say that this change in orbit is definitely artificial. Somebody is moving Ceres deliberately.”
Brunswick was old school. He knew he’d sold his soul to stay alive, and he’d remortgaged his honor for a handful of privileges that would have
seemed pathetic to people born before the invasion. He hoped to hell and back that there was no such thing as an afterlife, because if there were, it would not go well for Justin Brunswick. Nonetheless, he retained a thin strip of honor. In a world where decency meant death, he could at least feel good about watching the backs of his colleagues, of standing beside them against adversity if needs be. He just never realized how much it meant to him until now.
He moved round to Vogel’s side of the desk, making the little idiot so nervous that he nearly soiled himself. But Brunswick grabbed a cloth and gently wiped the blood from the man’s face. “Cheer up,” Brunswick told him. “This could yet turn out to be your lucky day.”
Vogel’s eyebrows shot up in confusion, but the prisoner didn’t dare ask for an explanation.
Brunswick offered one anyway. “See that?” the reeve asked, pointing up at the recorder screwed into the ceiling. “It’s for videoing our little chat. Apparently, before the invasion, they had recorders for the protection of the guests whom we invite to our interview room. That’s not why they’re here now. The main purpose of that little box is not even to keep an accurate recording of what you say, although that is sometimes useful. Their principal function is to prevent the suppression of information. Everyone is under suspicion all the time. From the lowliest prisoner in the reeve house, up to the governor himself. Everyone permanently under observation. Every friend a potential informant, every inch of this sorry planet a potential location for a hidden microphone. That evidence recorder is precisely for situations such as ours.
Brunswick waited until the little man calmed somewhat. Then he reached out to grab his hair and then slammed his head into the table. “The recording isn’t streamed somewhere into the data sphere,” said Brunswick with relish as he smashed the dazed astronomer’s head down once again.
Brunswick held the man’s bloodied head up by the hair and peered into Vogel’s face. “It’s a one-off WORM recording, heavily time stamped and encrypted. It’s taken away by hand – even I don’t know where. It does mean I can do this…”