Hank pursed his lips. “Well, I–”
“Hank, they’re coming for you. Get the Redmen into action or get the fuck out!”
“Now wait just a minute,” Hank said calmly. “Last time I saw you – a week ago – you had a passkey clutched in your fist and you were headed upstairs on a one way ride. What’s going on?”
Knile tried to calm himself, but it wasn’t working. His breathing was ragged and his mind was all over the place.
“I gave it away, Hank. I decided not to go. I had to come back.” He waved his hand dismissively in front of the screen. “None of that is important right now. You’re in danger.”
“Well, that I don’t know about that. I have Redmen here to protect me,” Hank said. He gestured to something off-screen. “I trust in them.”
“They didn’t help the last consulate and they won’t help you. Not up against this many men. Not against this much firepower. You need to get them into action before the insurgents can mobilise. That’s the only way you’re going to get through this.”
“We’ve had Enforcers brought in to blunt any potential attacks, Knile.” Hank smiled confidently. “No need to worry.”
Knile took a deep breath. “Hank, please. I know there’s a secret exit in there. At least one. You need to get up out of your chair and walk out. You need to take your people with you. If the Enforcers and the Redmen stop the attack, fine, you’ll lose an hour of paperwork, but Hank… if they don’t stop the attack, you know what–”
“Let me tell you something, Knile,” Hank said evenly. “I’ve been stationed in this office for years. Heck, more than a decade, in fact. In that time I’ve never vacated my post. Do you know why?” He ploughed on without waiting for an answer. “Because I work for the Consortium, and I don’t just get up and walk out when I feel like it. I do my duty. Even if there are maniacs outside my door, I can’t walk out and leave our terminals, our databases and passkeys within their reach. I can’t just let them walk in and take that sensitive information.”
“Yeah, but Hank–”
“Remember this?” Hank said, and Knile couldn’t help but notice something odd in his voice – bitterness? Anger? He leaned back in his chair and tapped the postcard that had been stuck to the wall, where a shiny dome-like habitat was depicted. His mouth twisted and his voice became hard-edged. “This here is my little slice of the good life. This is what’s waiting for me when I finish up here in a few months. Europa, Knile. Do you think I’d jeopardise that because there’s a few suspicious characters standing around outside my office?”
“A few suspicious characters? Hank, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t a bunch of gang bangers out looking for a quick score. These are serious players.”
Hank shook his head disparagingly, his patience at an end.
“I have to go, Knile, but there’s something I need to tell you before I do.”
Knile wasn’t sure if years of safety had made Hank complacent, or if he was simply overconfident in the presence of the Redmen, but either way he wasn’t seeing reason. He seemed almost indifferent, like a man casually watching a lion stalk toward him and expecting it to simply turn away at any moment.
Knile felt futile, powerless to stop what was about to happen.
Finally, he relented.
“What is it?” Knile said, sighing.
Hank leaned over and tapped something on his desk phone.
“Weirdest coincidence,” Hank mused. “I just got a call from someone who was looking for you. Seems they didn’t have your direct number and thought I might be able to relay a message.”
“Let me guess, some inspector in the Enforcer ranks who’s chasing after me?”
“No, not at all.” He smirked slightly. “It makes sense now, once you told me what happened to you up there. How you ended up staying on Earth.”
It was Knile’s turn for confusion. “What are you talking about, Hank?”
“Best for you to make the call and see for yourself, buddy. It came through on a longwave.” He tapped something on the phone again. “I’m sending you the contact number now.”
“What’s a longwave?”
“Hope it works out for you, buddy,” Hank said enigmatically. “And if it makes you happy, I’ll talk to the Redmen, have them go check out the situation.”
“Good, but please hurry–”
“See you round, Knile.”
The connection went dead as Hank terminated the call, and Knile was left staring at the blank screen. He stood there for a moment longer, the afterimage of Hank’s face still etched in his mind. He’d seen something in Hank’s eyes in that moment before he disappeared, a kind of sadness or regret, a look that belied his calmness throughout the call.
Knile wondered if Hank knew that he was about to die and had simply just accepted it because he had no other choice. He was duty bound to protect the consulate to his last breath.
A number suddenly appeared on the holophone, a long string of more than ten digits – the details of his mysterious contact, it seemed. Knile stared at it for a moment, wondering who could possibly be trying to contact him.
The sound of raised voices brought his attention back to the marketplace.
One of the janitors, an old woman with curly grey hair protruding from her station cap, was in the process of trundling her cart across toward the consulate. The Enforcers had responded, walking forward to meet her, one of them yelling at her to get back. The old woman pointed toward the consulate with a gnarled plastic broom as if she intended to begin work there.
The other janitors began to peel away, moving back from the edges of the marketplace as if some silent message had passed between them. They began to fan out into shopfronts and alleyways, then turned and waited.
Oh, shit. It’s starting.
Knile realised it was too late to change what was about to happen. He’d tried, and now it was up to Hank and the Redmen. The only thing Knile could do now was to get the hell out of there as quickly as he could.
He turned on his heel and took a step forward, then abruptly stopped.
He stared in disbelief, thoughts of the janitors and Hank and everything else suddenly swept from his mind.
14
As the man stepped inside the room, Talia’s thoughts shifted to the .22 she had stowed in her belt earlier. It was the one Silvestri had given to her back in Link, the one she’d used to kill Crumb during the invasion of Skybreach, and she’d freshly reloaded it earlier this morning. Her hand brushed against the butt of the gun through her shirt, but then she hesitated.
Killing a dirtbag like Crumb was one thing. The guy had kidnapped her, assaulted her and ultimately tried to kill her. Pulling the trigger had been relatively easy.
These men, however, were something else entirely. As far as Talia knew, they were not criminals or louts, but merely a group of workmen trying to do the right thing – protect their workplace. She certainly had no justification for killing them out of hand or because they happened to be in her way.
It was Silvestri and Talia herself who were the wrongdoers here. They were the ones trying to take something that wasn’t theirs.
These thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant, in the time it took the big man to take two steps into the storeroom, and before Talia could come up with a decision on what to do, Silvestri had already acted.
Her companion moved with blinding speed. Silvestri dropped the canister he had been carrying and swept forward in a blur, catching both Talia and the newcomers off guard. He twisted his body with the elegance of a dancer, rotating his shoulders and crunching the big man in the nose with a perfectly executed palm heel strike. The man cried out and reeled back through the doorway, staggering like a drunkard, and he became entangled with the man behind him as he fell. The two of them went sprawling on the floor amid a flurry of curses and flailing limbs. Silvestri followed, lithe and sure in his movements as he attempted to reach the men before they could find their feet again.
As he disa
ppeared out into the corridor, the third man appeared in the doorway. His eyes narrowed as they set on Talia over a cruelly hooked nose that almost resembled a beak. He was the smallest of the three, but there was a wiry toughness about him that Talia recognised from her days brawling in the streets.
The guy was a scrapper, the kind of man who wouldn’t go down easily.
“Come here, you thieving cat,” the man said menacingly, advancing toward her. Something glinted and Talia saw a box wrench clutched in his right hand.
She pulled the .22 from her belt instinctively, realising she could use it to intimidate the man even if she had no intention of firing it, but as she levelled it at him, the man swung the box wrench and smacked her on the wrist. Talia grunted in pain and the .22 was sent clattering against the wall. She clutched at her hand, which had blossomed with excruciating pain, but she had no time to nurse it. The man was still coming at her, his mouth set in a furious grimace as he swung the wrench again toward the side of her head. Talia only just got her arm up to deflect the blow in time, the leather binding taking some of the impact, but the savageness of the strike was enough to knock her off her feet. She went sprawling amongst the clutter on the floor, bashing her head against a cupboard in the process.
She sensed rather than saw the man following after her, and she gripped the nearest canister and spun with it in her hands, lobbing it through the air in what she hoped was the right direction. The man was caught off guard and made a clumsy effort to bat the canister away with the box wrench, resulting in a hollow metallic clang, and the canister’s trajectory altered accordingly. It dropped onto his foot with a thud, and the man screamed in pain.
“You fuckin’ cat!” he yelped, dropping the wrench and clutching at his foot. Talia might have found his pained expression comical had he not been trying to beat her head in with a steel bar a few moments before.
She scrambled across the floor and reached for the wrench, but the man, still limping on one leg, kicked it out from her grasp at the last moment. Talia rolled as his foot homed in on a new target – her face – and she felt the man’s boot flick her hair as it narrowly missed.
She continued to turn, swivelling back onto her feet, and then the man began to struggle toward her again. Talia glanced at the other side of the room, where the wrench and the .22 lay not far apart, then back at the man. His eyes glittered and he sneered at her, almost daring her to make a play for the weapons, and as she watched him take another limping step forward, she realised that she had the advantage of speed on her side.
She turned and half-ran, half-dived across the room, and the man was there at her shoulder, jostling with her as he too sought to claim one of the weapons. The two of them landed in a heap on the floor, and Talia pushed and scratched at the man, slapping away his grabbing hands as he tried to reel her in. She saw the wrench within reach and desperately stretched out for it, then saw out of the corner of her eye that the man was crawling toward the .22.
Her fingers brushed against the cold steel of the wrench, and then it was within her grasp. She swung it with all of her might as she lurched across the floor, and as the man attempted to lift the .22 she brought the wrench down upon the back of his hand. The man screamed again and the gun dropped from his fingers.
Talia got to one knee and tried to land another blow, but her adversary rolled away. Stumbling to her feet, she went after him and swung again, cracking him on the elbow. As the man howled in pain she hefted the wrench again, slamming it against his jaw hard enough to send vibrations up her arm, and the man slumped back to the floor, out cold.
As she stood over him, panting and in pain, she heard movement behind her. She spun on her heel and found Silvestri there, slick with sweat and with blood trickling from his nose.
“Just like the old days, back on the streets,” he said breathlessly, forcing a grin. “Good fun, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not really.” She dropped the wrench on the floor and gathered up the .22. She straightened and tilted her chin toward the doorway. “You take care of those guys?”
“Indeed. But they were tougher than they looked,” he said ruefully.
“They looked pretty tough to begin with.”
“Yes. That’s what I meant.” His smile broadened and his golden tooth flashed.
Talia returned the smile wearily as she tucked the .22 back into her belt.
“Let’s get out of here before more ‘fun’ arrives.”
They regathered the canisters they had dropped when the fight began and lugged them out through the doorway and into the corridor. The two men Silvestri had subdued were lying nearby, their faces bloodied, their bodies stacked on one another like pancakes.
Talia hesitated. “Are they…?”
“Taking a short nap,” Silvestri said as he moved past. “They’ll have a headache and some nice bruises when they awaken.”
“Okay,” Talia said, relieved. “It wouldn’t have been right to–”
There were suddenly vibrations in the floor and the walls around them, as if the place were trying to shake itself apart, and trails of dust began to spill from the cracks in the roof. Talia staggered, and then a shock wave slammed through the corridor and knocked her to her knees. She grunted and looked across at Silvestri, who had fallen against one wall.
As she tried to get up, a second shock wave hit them with even more force than the first, and now she could hear the distant sound of shrieking metal and the clatter of large, heavy objects grinding against one another.
She pictured great machines deep within the Reach shaken loose of their shackles and tumbling aside with calamitous effect.
“Oh my god,” Talia breathed, horrified, as the trembling began to subdue. She climbed to her feet and glanced at Silvestri, who was still leaning against the wall. When he looked at her she saw the same concern mirrored in his eyes. “They’ve done it again.”
15
Duran hastened through the dim corridors of Level Fifty-Three as Robson chattered away in his earpiece, his incessant, droning voice like a bug that had crawled into his ear and which couldn’t find its way out again.
“Phoenix, you’re approaching the target.”
“You said that already, Switch,” Duran muttered tersely. “Twice, in fact.”
“Really? Damn. I keep losing track of who I’m talking to.” There was a chuckle on the other end of the line. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever had to coordinate three operatives at once. It’s kinda cool.”
Duran adjusted his earpiece as he moved past an old man pushing a trolley in the other direction. It was filled with groceries and a pack of reconditioned spring top batteries.
“What’s the word from Songbird and…” He struggled to recall de Villiers’ callsign. “And Falcon?”
“Songbird is already on her way home. Her target was benign.”
“What about Falcon?”
“Still investigating.”
Duran thought back to earlier in the morning when the various members of Scimitar had gathered around Robson’s terminal, allocating the day’s tasks. In the twenty-four hours since they’d begun their hunt for Jozef Gudbrand, they had made little headway. The guy was a recluse, no doubt about it. On the few occasions where Robson had tracked down footage of him moving about the Reach, he had invariably disappeared into an area that was unmonitored, effectively dropping off the radar. His followers used the same method of operation, covering their tracks whenever they returned from their forays into Gaslight with unnerving ease.
Robson had estimated the general vicinity in which the cells might have been based, but the areas were too broad to be of any practical use. It was not as if Duran and the others could go around door knocking until someone with a circle imprinted in their forehead opened up.
As they had reviewed the data this morning, they had come up with only three slight possibilities: the first was the sighting of three members of Children of Earth up in the Plant Rooms, which de Villiers had agreed to inv
estigate; the second, a man who bore a strong resemblance to Gudbrand appearing in Lux, which had been Zoe’s destination; and the third, a facial match of a man wearing janitor clothing here in Gaslight who had been listed as belonging to Children of Earth several weeks prior.
Initially, Duran figured that he had been given the most uninteresting assignment. They were clutching at straws following this lead. The facial recognition had only registered at about a seventy percent match, since the guy was wearing a station cap that partially masked him from the camera’s view, and that wasn’t a particularly convincing result. Duran figured it was probably a mistake, and that he would be back at the Scimitar hideout looking for something else to do in short time.
However, now that he was here on Fifty-Three, he was beginning to sense that all might not be as it seemed. There were a large number of janitors who had begun to coalesce here in the last ten minutes. When he’d left Scimitar a short time ago, the cameras had shown the presence of three or four in the area, which was pretty standard, but now there were dozens.
Social meetings for janitors, maintenance crews, and other workers in Gaslight were not uncommon, he supposed. He’d just never seen them in quite this kind of concentration.
Duran began to walk up a slight incline toward a more open area where many people were gathered.
“Do you still see my target, Switch?” Duran said.
“Gimme a sec, Phoenix.” Duran heard the sound of Robson’s fingers on a keyboard. “Yeah, I got it. Dead ahead. In the marketplace. South-eastern corner.”
“Right. On it.”
Duran entered the marketplace proper and looked around. There were plenty of Enforcers here aligned in front of the entrance to one of the consulates, part of Prazor’s attempts to provide more protection to Consortium assets. One of the janitors, an old woman, was arguing loudly with a couple of Enforcers, waving a plastic broom at them as if she were attempting to shoo kids off her front lawn. The other janitors had begun to walk away, but they seemed to have taken an interest in the exchange, for now they all turned to watch it.
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