Impact

by Rob Boffard

  Prophet starts laughing.

  The sound is musical, the laugh genuine and throaty. It transforms his face completely, his mouth opening wide, the skin around his one good eye crinkling.

  He strides towards them, still chuckling. “Welcome,” he says. His voice is deep and resonant. He claps a hand on Carver’s shoulder, gripping tight, then looks at each of them in turn. “You’re safe now. Praise the Engine!”

  He booms the last sentence to the roof, and every other fatigue-clad figure on the deck echoes him. Most of them pump their fists in the air, but Okwembu sees that a few of them look down at the floor, their words almost inaudible.

  Ray clears his throat. “They came down in an escape pod. Right into Eklutna. Reckon we could go back up there, get a diver down to attach a tow rope, but—”

  “Ray,” Prophet says, drawing out the syllable. “We will take whatever the Engine sends us, and be grateful.”

  He glances at Okwembu when he says it. She stays silent, telling herself to wait.

  Carver gives an exasperated sigh. “You know what?”

  “Just—” says Prakesh.

  “No.” Carver raises his chin, looking right at Prophet. “I don’t give the tiniest shit about your Engine, whatever the hell it is. Your guys brought us here at gunpoint, so don’t give us this line about being safe.”

  “But you are.” Prophet hasn’t taken his hand off Carver’s shoulder. “All the Engine asks is that you give of yourself before you can rise into its grace, and all of us here—” he looks around at his group “—have given everything we could.”

  Clay makes a break for it.

  Okwembu doesn’t see him do it. One moment he’s being held firmly, and the next he’s running, bolting towards the edge of the deck.

  Prophet doesn’t blink. He holds out his hand, and Nessa thrusts her rifle into it. In one fluid movement, Prophet seats it in his shoulder, aims down the scope with his good eye, and fires.

  The gunshot is a thunderclap in the enclosed space. The bullet takes Clay in the middle of the back. He spins a full three-sixty, arms wheeling, then vanishes off the edge of the platform. A moment later, there’s a heavy splash.

  Carver goes crazy. He fights against the men holding him, managing to get his arm around a neck. One of the others steps forward, driving a fist into Carver’s stomach, dropping him to his knees.

  Ray brings his rifle around, aiming right for the centre of Carver’s forehead. Okwembu tells herself to stay calm.

  “No no no!” Prakesh says. “We’ll do it. We’ll do what you want.”

  Okwembu glances at him, surprised that he’d submit so easily. Then again, she doubts that Prakesh would let anyone else be killed–not after he himself was responsible for so much death.

  Carver subsides, staring daggers at Prophet.

  Prakesh is still talking. “We can help. I can grow you food, and Aaron here can fix anything. Just don’t shoot.”

  The smile is back on Prophet’s face–just as radiant, just as genuine. He passes Nessa her rifle, then clasps his hands behind his back.

  “A wise decision, brother,” he says.

  He gives no signal, no nod or raised eyebrow, but their captors move instantly. They march Prakesh and Carver away, into the ship. One of them hauls open a door further down, spinning the huge valve set into the front. Their captives are hustled inside, and the door slams behind them, almost as loud as the gunshot that killed Clay.

  “And what about you?” says Prophet, his calm grey eyes finding Okwembu. “Will you serve the Engine?”

  “No,” she says. “I won’t.”

  Nessa grunts in annoyance, raising her gun. A sadness comes into Prophet’s eyes.

  “Your Engine is broken,” Okwembu says. “And I’m going to help you fix it.”

  32

  Anna

  Anna comes to a halt just before the gallery, jogging to a stop in the corridor. She stands for a moment, hands on her knees, shoulders rising and falling as she waits out the stitch gnawing at her side.

  The gallery is a giant, cavernous, echoing space, reaching all the way up the levels, criss-crossed by catwalks. Most sectors have two or three galleries, but Apex has just the one. It’s in better repair than the others–or it was, before the fire. At least the lights in the ceiling above her actually work.

  She hears a voice, and looks up. Alana Jordan strides across the gallery, moving away from her. Amazingly, her stomper jumpsuit is still immaculate, stretched tight across her shoulders. Her dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail, which flicks from side to side as she walks. There’s a huge, black burn on the gallery floor, several feet wide. Surrounding it are puddles of dissipating foam. The air stinks of chemicals. Anna watches as Jordan skirts them, then she looks beyond her, to the escape pods.

  There are twelve of them, behind large circular doors, each with a small window. Anna’s too far away to see any details through them, but she can just make out the interior wall of the airlocks housing the pods.

  Every sector has some–or had, anyway. They were next to useless. A design screw-up in the station’s distant past meant that each sector didn’t have even close to enough pods for the people inside it. You could get three people in them, four at a push, and they barely had enough fuel to make it out of the station’s orbit. They were token, and everyone knew it.

  Not that it stopped people from taking them–people who wanted out, who wouldn’t listen to warnings about lack of fuel and maximum range. There are still stories about them: ghost pods, floating in the void, carrying nothing but skeletons and evil spirits. Apex is the only sector which still has all its pods. For most of the station’s history, it’s been guarded well enough that no one’s actually managed to take them.

  There are stompers around the pod doors. Of course there are. They lean against the wall, pacing the floor, looking bored and irritable. Their grey jumpsuits stand out against the gleaming white surfaces.

  Anna knows why they’re there–to keep people away from the pods, to deter anybody who wants to make a break for it. She counts seven of them, but it may as well be seven thousand. There have already been a few souls who have tried to get the hell out, coast away into the void. The stompers have shut them down.

  She has to get a look in those pods.

  Anna pulls her beanie off her head, rolling it in her hands. After the breach in the dock, the other stompers closed ranks, shutting Anna out. Alana Jordan was the worst: she’d been a stomper for her entire adult life, and didn’t exactly like the idea of someone as young as Anna sticking around. Is there any way Jordan would still listen to her? But even as the thought occurs, Anna realises it’s useless. The remaining stompers are a tight-knit group, determined to hold the station even if it’s going down. She tries to get past them and they’ll just laugh at her.

  There’s a burst of childish laughter. Three kids dart into view on the gallery floor, skipping around the puddles, giving the burn mark a wide berth. They can’t be older than seven or eight, and it sounds like there are more of them, just out of sight.

  She sees Jordan turn, hears her shout something at the kids. But it’s a distracted shout, and she immediately turns back to her colleagues. One of them reaches the punchline of a joke, and the group collapses in laughter. Jordan laughs as well, but gestures at them to keep it down, casting a worried glance towards the playing children. Must have been a nasty joke, Anna thinks.

  And then: they don’t mind the kids being there.

  Anna’s eyes widen. Any adult who came near the pods would find themselves looking down a stinger barrel. But the kids aren’t a threat.

  There are at least ten of them, kicking a ball back and forth–a tatty thing made of rags that looks like it’ll fall apart at any moment. Three of the kids are involved in another game of their own devising, one that involves a lot of running and shouting. Anna’s looked after a few children before, keeping an eye on them while their parents get some sleep, but she doesn’t recognise any o
f these kids.

  And there’s one standing apart from the others: a girl, younger than the rest, with dark hair that looks like it’s been drawn in matte-black. She wears a faded red sweater, hanging down over her knees, and she’s walking in a slow circle, lost in thought.

  Anger almost overwhelms Anna. When the Earthers headed out for the Shinso, these kids were some of the ones left behind. They didn’t deserve that. No one did.

  “Hey,” Anna says, trying to keep her voice quiet. Too quiet, as it turns out: the word is lost in the shouting from the ball game. Anna tries again, and this time the girl looks up.

  Anna waves her over, glancing at the stompers, who are still clustered in a loose circle around Jordan.

  The girl scrunches up her face, reluctant. Anna fights back frustration–she can’t go out onto the gallery floor, not unless she wants the stompers to spot her.

  After what seems like an age, the girl wanders over. “I’m not supposed to talk to people I don’t know,” she says, folding her arms.

  Anna smiles. “Then why are you talking to me? Aren’t you gonna get in trouble?” She sits down on the corridor floor, crossing her legs. Now she’s looking up at the girl, instead of the other way round.

  “You’re weird,” the girl says, scrunching her face up again. It’s like she’s seen an adult doing the expression, and is trying to copy it.

  “Maybe I am,” Anna says. “But you’re kind of funny-looking yourself.”

  She regrets the words the instant that they’re out of her mouth. But the girl just giggles, her eyes bright.

  “What’s your name?” Anna says.

  “Ivy.”

  Anna tries to keep her face neutral. Because, right then, she recognises Ivy. When she, Riley and Carver got taken captive by the Earthers, Riley used Ivy as a hostage so they could escape. She held a knife to the little girl’s throat. Anna can only hope that Ivy doesn’t remember that she was there.

  “I’m Anna,” she says, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  Another face-scrunch. “You don’t have to treat me like a little kid, you know. I’m almost six.”

  Anna exhales. “Right. Sorry.”

  Someone from the ball game shouts Ivy’s name. “I have to go,” she says, turning back, about to skip away to join them.

  “Wait,” Anna says, a little too loudly. She drops her voice. “Can you do something for me?”

  Ivy looks over her shoulder. “I’m not supposed to talk to—”

  “—people you don’t know. Right. But it’s nothing big. You don’t even have to leave the gallery.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “See those doors? Over on the other wall?”

  Ivy looks. “Mm-hmm.”

  “Do you think you can look in the windows for me? I want to know how many space suits are inside each one.” She thinks back to what she knows about escape pods. “They should be strapped into lockers on the wall. Each locker has a little window in it, so you should be able to see inside them.”

  “Why?” Ivy says.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you wanna know about the space suits?”

  “I just do, OK?”

  Ivy folds her arms. “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to go and tell Mrs Alana that you’re here, and she’ll come and throw you in jail.”

  “All right, all right,” Anna says. She gets up from her sitting position, squatting on her haunches, beckoning Ivy closer. “I think there’s something bad going on.”

  Ivy eyes light up. “Bad?”

  “Real bad. And I think the space suits have something to do with it. I can’t count them, because Mrs Alana will chase me away.” She looks Ivy in the eyes. “Can you do that for me?”

  “No,” says Ivy, shaking her head. Anna’s heart sinks.

  But then Ivy points to the ball game, to a particularly tall boy of about eleven or twelve, wearing a dirty blue pair of overalls. “I can’t see in the windows. Marcus can.”

  She waves him over. Three or four children trail behind him, like a council member’s entourage. Up close, Marcus is even taller than he first appeared–certainly taller than Anna, with scraggly black hair and a wide nose. The first bumps of acne are beginning to spread across his cheeks. He reminds Anna of Kev, one of Riley’s tracer friends who became a stomper, too. Kev, who died when a bomb that had been planted in him—

  She makes herself stop, shuts that line of thought down quick.

  Anna expects him to be suspicious, but as she tells him what she wants them to do a grin spreads across his face. He starts nodding even before she’s finished, rocking on the balls of his feet. His excitement is infectious, spreading to the other kids. Anna has to shush them, glancing towards the stompers at the other end of the gallery. “But you have to be careful,” she says. “They can’t know I’m here, or that I asked you to take a look.”

  “I don’t like it,” says one of the other boys. He has the hood of his sweatshirt up, and a froth of red hair dances under the edge of it. “We could get in trouble.”

  “Not if we’re careful,” Marcus says, echoing Anna’s words.

  He lifts the rag ball away from one of the other kids, tosses it back and forth in his enormous hands. Then he turns on his heel, draws back his foot and kicks the ball. It lofts across the gallery, its shadow moving along the floor, and lands squarely in the middle of the group of stompers.

  Anna squashes back against the wall of the corridor as the kids barrel back into the gallery, shouting and laughing. A couple of the stompers look irritated, but the others are smiling. One of them taps the ball with his foot, sending it back towards the approaching Marcus.

  In less than a minute, the kids have almost all the stompers involved in the game. Even Alana Jordan is taking part, nudging the ball with her enormous feet. Ivy takes it on the run, knocking it ahead of her, darting around another stomper as if he wasn’t even there.

  Anna can’t help smiling. Somewhere along the way, she’d convinced herself that it wasn’t going to work. That the kids would ignore her, or, worse, that they’d tell the stompers about her. But it’s like Ivy said: they aren’t little kids any more. Not really. They all know what’s happening to Outer Earth, they’re all scared, all looking for something to take their minds off the situation.

  Marcus has moved away from the game. He walks casually over to the first bay door, looking over his shoulder. When he sees that the stompers are still kicking the ball around, he stands on his tiptoes and looks into the window.

  Anna sinks back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. He’s going to see three space suits in each one, she thinks. They’re all there. You got it wrong.

  An angry shout from the gallery brings her back. She tilts her head, angling it around the corner of the passage.

  What she sees nearly stops her heart.

  One of the stompers has seen Marcus looking in the bay door windows. He has the kid by the front of his overalls, yelling in his face. The game stops abruptly, Ivy skidding to a halt with the ball balanced under one foot.

  Anna tells herself to run. Marcus will give her up in a second, and she doesn’t want to be anywhere near here when that happens. But she won’t leave him. If that stomper hurts the boy, Anna tells herself, she’ll tear him in half. She stays rooted to the spot, hand frozen on the wall.

  The other stompers have surrounded Marcus, arms folded, all their good humour gone. Jordan is talking now, jabbing a finger in the boy’s face. The stomper holding him gives him a shake. Ivy runs right at them, but the other kids hold her back, grabbing her by the hem of her enormous red sweater.

  But Marcus is talking, gesturing wildly. She can’t hear what he’s saying, but Jordan and the stompers are listening close. The other kids are all trying to talk at once.

  After a minute, the stomper lets him go.

  Anna’s shoulders are shaking. Before, she could hardly move, but now it takes everything she has
to stay put. She wants to rush out there, drive an elbow or a knee into someone’s throat, show them what happens when they threaten kids.

  The game resumes–slower than before, but still enthusiastic. And Anna can’t believe her eyes: Marcus is continuing to look into the bay door windows. The stomper who accosted him stays close, and he doesn’t look happy at all, but he lets Marcus do his thing.

  After he looks in the last one, Marcus gives the stomper a friendly wave, then returns to the game. Ivy still has the ball, kicking it up into the air now, again and again, daring someone to come and take it from her.

  Ten minutes later, the game finally ends. The stompers call time–they’re out of breath, standing with their hands on their knees, shoulders rising and falling. The kids take off, laughing, knocking the ball in front of them.

  When Marcus and Ivy and the rest of them enter the passage, Anna is waiting, sitting against the wall. This is it, she thinks. If everything is still where it should be, she’ll forget this insanity. She’ll get her matte-black, and finish her drawing.

  Marcus comes to a stop in front of her. “You OK?” Anna says. “What happened?”

  He says something, but it’s in a hoarse stage whisper, as if there are listening devices embedded in the walls.

  “What?” Anna says, leaning in close.

  “Told ’em I had a bet with a big kid,” he says, grinning. “That I could touch all the pod windows without getting caught. They let me.”

  Anna returns the smile, more relieved than she cares to admit. “OK. What did you see?”

  “There’s a suit missing,” Marcus says, still in that ridiculous whisper. “In one of the pods on the end. There’s only two suits in the locker.”

  Anna sits back against the wall.

  “What does it mean?” says Ivy. Her eyes are huge.

  “It means,” Anna says, “that we’re in big trouble.”

  33

  Prakesh

  The passages are narrow–so narrow that they have to walk in single file, the struts on the walls brushing their shoulders. The stairs are the worst, steep enough almost to be ladders. The sound of their footsteps is dulled, buried by other noises.