by Lucas Bale
‘You think they aren’t going to find us eventually?’ Bradman growled. ‘That they’re just going to let us live here for the rest of our lives? Our children’s lives? What’s our plan, Gant? Are we staying here forever?’
I don’t know! Gant screamed silently. He had never wanted the burden of leading them; had never wanted to live under weight of the responsibility of keeping them alive. But apart from Kayt, there was no one else he could trust with that task.
‘Where else do you want to go, Bradman?’
‘We’re living like primitives, Gant. Hardly any power, never enough food. We wash our clothes in a river, for fuck’s sake. We’re in constant fear that they’ll find us, and then what? We’ve got a handful of rifles. There’s no way we can hold them off with those. We know what they’re capable of, what they’ll do to us if they find us. Of course I fucking want out of here.’
‘And you have a suggestion, I guess?’
‘We make a run.’
‘No.’
‘We go back to the compound—’
‘I said no.’
‘—and we see if there’s any way to remote pilot the shuttle back down here.’
‘You’re not listening to me.’
‘They left their people behind, Gant. They’re going to come back for them. You know that. That’s how it works in the fleet. Once you’re affiliated, you don’t leave anyone behind.’
Bradman was right, and they all knew it. The only person Gant had ever known who was not affiliated was Papin. What would you think of all this, Ines? You’d never have tied yourself down in the first place. He looked around at the rest of them and saw the fear etched on their faces. The desperation to have something to hope for. He couldn’t let them make a bad decision while blinded by fear.
‘We don’t even know if there is a way to remote pilot the shuttle,’ Gant replied.
‘There must be.’
Gant shook his head. ‘That’s not good enough, Bradman.’
‘My hut took a vote.’
It had been coming; he knew that. He was surprised it had taken this long for a single hut to turn against the others. It was a flimsy agreement they had made in the first place. Gant was surprised the community had adhered to it for years rather than months.
‘Don’t do this,’ he said.
‘We want to go. We’re not going to wait for you.’
‘We all agreed no hut could take that decision. It affects the others.’
Bradman straightened up, trying to make himself look more imposing. As if it would strengthen his position. ‘The shuttle changes things,’ he said. ‘We think the old pact no longer applies.’
Gant saw the community collapsing around him. Everything he’d built with the rest of them falling apart. Lives being put at risk because of fear.
Bile rose in his throat. ‘You’re risking everyone, and everything we’ve built.’
‘We can make it.’
‘I can’t let you go,’ Gant said quietly.
‘You can’t stop us.’
‘I can, and I will.’
‘Will,’ Kayt said. She laid a hand on his arm. ‘We can’t threaten each other.’
‘If they go, they’ll bring the chukiri back here. You know that, Kayt.’
‘Then we find another way,’ she said. ‘Bradman’s right. The situation has changed. We need to adapt. We need to be flexible. We can’t keep going like we have been.’
There was no sound to accompany the pale light that suddenly flooded into the room. Just a long pulse of white that banished the shadows for several seconds. If it hadn’t been night, they might not even have noticed it. The small bulb above them buzzed and then went out, and the hum of the generator vanished, leaving the hut eerily silent. Gant ran to one of the windows.
Nikolaj was running along the trail to the hut.
‘Did you see it?’ he shouted.
Gant shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What was that light?’
‘It looked like a too-bright star for a few seconds, then it was gone.’
What could knock out the generator from up there? Gant thought. An EMP from a reactor breach? It wasn’t unheard of—Sawyer had once been drunk enough to tell him what would happen if the reactor on the Tartarus had ever breached and destroyed the ship.
‘I think something exploded in the lower atmosphere,’ Gant said. ‘Something big, maybe a ship of some kind.’
Nikolaj stared at him. He was breathless and sweating hard. ‘What ship was up there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s something else,’ Nikolaj said. ‘As I was down-climbing, I saw the chukiri light a fire. A big one—the other side of the massif.’
Gant hardly heard the voices around him. He looked up and saw tiny flashes in the sky. His head began to spin with the thoughts swirling in his head. Debris? he thought. From some now-destroyed ship? Is that where the shuttle was from? What the hell happened?
Then came another light, much bigger than the lights he had imagined were falling debris. This light was like a comet burning through the atmosphere with a vapour trail behind it. He knew instantly what it was: another ship, descending.
The fire the chukiri had set was a signal fire.
C H A P T E R 7
A CURIOUS fugue of calm washed over Weaver, almost as though he had subconsciously accepted his own death. Perhaps some part of him understood now that the abyss that waited beyond the fringes of his life was all that was left of his future, and there was nothing he could do now to avoid it. It was the first moment of peace he had experienced since the Astratus had detonated behind him. Since the small freighter had arced away from that silent eruption of light that winked off the jagged shards of the cockpit’s shattered windshield.
Here, now, in the hold, he could see nothing of the outside, and he reckoned that his blindness might be a blessing. He didn’t know whether the automatic piloting system would be able to avoid the spinning debris from the wreckage of the Astratus now orbiting the terrestrial, or whether the hull was too badly damaged to survive the violence of a barely controlled punch through the layers of its atmosphere. All he could do was wait.
He gathered some things he considered might be useful, placed them into a pack, and then secured it, along with the heavy rifle, in a locker next to him. The cold clung to the perspiration gathering on his skin, and down here, in the bowels of the small freighter, he was glad of the space suit.
He felt the freighter alter course—dropping, he hoped, onto a line that would take it down to the terrestrial. He pulled on his helmet, not knowing what awaited him down there, and buckled himself into a seat to wait. In the whisper of his breathing he heard his own fear.
The Seneshal were following, he knew that. They would arrive in the system soon, and when they did, they would scour the planet until they found him. He felt intense frustration then, even pain, at the thought that the men who had taken the Astratus, who had slaughtered its crew, would go unpunished. There would be no retribution for their sins.
Of course, he recognised there was more driving him than some noble concept of justice, some altruistic desire to give the dead the justice they deserved. There was also his need to know the truth of this planet before the Seneshal arrived and cleansed it. What would drive them to send a privateering company warship to wipe out the entirety of the shantytowns on Jieshou—silencing thousands of people to protect whatever answers he might have found down there? What would make them kill Horan, a noviciate Caestor, and then try to kill Weaver too? He was now hunted by both the Caesteri and the Seneshal—and whatever other fetid organs of the Magistratus lived in the murky shadows of the Republic. Only the Caestor Sacri, the Caesteri’s own Praetor, could have sanctioned such a move. Weaver’s own people sought his death.
Answers. Was that all his life amounted to now? It’s been a wasted life, he thought bitterly. Decades spent in the pursuit of what he had once believed was justice. A life spent alone, with only his indoctrinated beliefs to gi
ve it meaning. Beliefs in a system he no longer regarded as just. What has any of it meant, then, these years I have spent seeking what I thought was the righteous truth?
No, he told himself, there was more than that. There had been children in the shantytowns on Jieshou. Burning in the fires ignited by the privateers’ warship. Screaming as they died. He had saved one of them, a small girl. He held the image of her face, the sight of her running away, as a beacon in the darkness of his failure. A single honourable moment that could not possibly hope to balance out the rest of his life. But perhaps it signalled the birth of something new.
He balled his hands into fists within the damp heat of the suit. It would mean something. If he lived, he would make sure of that. If he died here, he would fail, but there was nothing he could do to change that now. Except wait.
Skoryk’s freighter began to vibrate, the shockwaves of the friction burn rattling through every metal plate of the hull as it entered the upper atmosphere. A sudden violence jarred Weaver’s back and legs, kicking into his neck and grinding his teeth. The creak of old metal warping and twisting filled the hold—hull plates seeking freedom from their bolted-on prison.
For the first time since he climbed into the thing on Jieshou, Weaver realised almost absurdly that the old ship had no name—at least not one he knew. The thought had come to him unbidden, but it seemed darkly fitting. Am I afraid to die? Is that it? Or is it the manner of my death—leaving so much behind unfinished—that scares me? Or is it, in truth, the realisation that I deserve this anonymous, empty tomb?
He closed his eyes, placed his hands on his knees, and forced himself to breathe deeply. The freighter smelled old, a heady mix of musty and oily, as if during the months and maybe even years it had lain in Skoryk’s desert cavern, it had trapped the oldest air on the planet and held it for posterity.
He tried to occupy himself by setting out in his mind what he might do if he was still alive when the freighter hit the ground. As though this were some ordinary criminal investigation and he was on duty on Theia, instead of seated on a freighter heading for terminal velocity. But he couldn’t focus. He couldn’t bring himself to think of anything except the ship around him, shaking so hard that it would surely come apart long before it reached the terrestrial’s surface.
Far more abruptly than it had begun, the shaking stopped. The freighter had broken through the atmosphere and was still in one piece. Weaver felt a sudden surge of relief. He still had the sense that the ship was descending quickly, more quickly than he thought the APS should have been content to allow, but it was smoother now. The freighter still rocked and swayed—maybe that was drag on its extended landing stanchion, if it was still there and hadn’t been ripped away by the burn through the atmosphere—but it was calmer.
He could feel the force of the descent now on his face and body. Gravity exerted its unique pressure on every muscle and organ, pressing down on him, driving parts of him into new, agonising places. He tried to breathe, but he realised suddenly that the smoothness had been misleading—that the pressure which now drove lances into his temples and pierced the stems of his eyes was far worse.
He couldn’t prevent himself from screaming until the freighter hit the ground.
C H A P T E R 8
NATASHA GRIPPED the branches so tightly the bark cut into her fingers. Beneath her came the moan of the lifeboat’s hull, which hung from the vines and branches of the trees it had crashed into. In the distance, the fires still burned.
She had witnessed the explosion beyond the atmosphere, out in the low orbit around the planet. Had that been the Astratus or The Labour of Pronos? From down here, it was impossible to say. It seemed to her more likely that it was the wreck of the Astratus. Perhaps its reactor core had suffered serious damage, or overloaded, and had finally breached. Or perhaps those who took the Pronos, companions of the scar-faced savage lying on the jungle floor far below, had set explosives on the ship before they had left. Did it matter? All that really mattered was Skoryk’s freighter breaking through the atmosphere above her.
She watched silently, unable to take her eyes from it. At first, she hadn’t been sure what she was seeing. She’d told herself it couldn’t possibly be Skoryk’s freighter, this far out; that it was a trick her freaked-out mind was playing on her. That the primal instinct that screamed at her and commanded her to watch, to make certain, was misguided.
Yet as the freighter burned through the upper layers, and as its vague shape appeared more clearly in the sky, even as tiny as it was, she saw that it was no illusion. In the gathering twilight, the flickering burn surrounding the freighter, caused by the heat of friction, only amplified its shape, making it easier to see.
There was no doubt.
She was too stunned even to breathe. Acid burned in her throat, and her muscles began to tighten and ache. She tried to understand what might have brought Skoryk here, to this place, but she had no answers. Does it matter? she thought. There’s a ship—a way off this planet. That’s all that matters. That’s your ticket. If it was Skoryk piloting the freighter, then she would do what was necessary to persuade him to take her off-planet. Or, if he was not going to be reasonable, she would take the freighter from him by force. Then she might ask him what else he had been keeping from her about the salvage contract. Kent, Benton, Meier—even Arvika and Rasmussen—all dead because of that damn contract.
Their deaths are on you, Skoryk. Don’t ever believe I will forget that.
The freighter was moving too quickly through the sky, and she could see that it was only vaguely in control of its movements. It twitched continuously as it flew, then bucked hard. The vapour trail behind it was anything but straight. She watched in horror as the thought of escape, of getting home, began to evaporate in front of her. The idiot’s going to crash.
She tried to follow its course, to work out where it was going to come down, but it was too far away. The best she could tell was that it was going to hit behind a thread of mountains to the north. She couldn’t easily make out the distance, but she guessed a full day’s walk at least, maybe more. Between her and the mountains was an ocean of jungle she could so easily get lost in. Shit.
She climbed swiftly back down to the lifeboat and squatted on a branch just above it. She was still wearing the spacesuit, and perspiration seeped from every pore of her skin. She wiped it away from her face and resolved to get the damn suit off as soon as she was on the ground. One thing at a time, she thought. Focus on what you need right now.
She studied the hull, held high up in the jungle canopy by the vines wrapped around it like a web. She guessed the boat might fall at any moment, and the prospect of being in that metal coffin as it crashed to the jungle floor flicked a shiver of cold across her skin, despite the intense wet heat. But there were things she needed from inside. She wrapped a vine around one hand, gripping it so tightly the greasy dampness beaded across her wrist and ran down her arm, then she dropped a foot through the hatch and rested it gently on one of the chairs. The lifeboat rocked with even that small shift in weight, and slipped a little as the vines began to complain. Natasha’s gaze fell on the body of the savage, unmoving, his dead eyes staring up at her. She spat down on him. Bastard.
She loosened her grip on the vine and slid her hand down a little so she had some room to move. The vine was slick between her fingers, so this time she wrapped it around her wrist as well as her hand. Then she eased into the hatch, using the chairs as steps just as she had done when climbing out.
The vines creaked and moaned again. Get moving, Natasha. You don’t have time for this.
She took in a breath and held it—then let go of the vine. As she did, her foot slipped. The branches had been wet with something—moss, perhaps—and the soles of her boots were slick. For a moment, she thought she might fall and, with the force of that clumsiness, bring the whole rickety thing down with her. She grabbed for the rim of the hatch to steady herself, heart hammering in her chest. The lifeboat continued to sw
ay gently.
She took another step, clutching the rim as long as she could while she reached for the chairs with her feet. When her arms were at full stretch, and she could hold on no longer, she turned and used the chairs as an impromptu ladder instead. Slowly, each creak of the vines freezing the blood in her veins, she worked her way down to the bottom.
She searched quickly but carefully, always mindful of the lifeboat’s precarious hold and aware of its rocking beneath her feet. She remembered seeing a locker near the panel behind which she had found the default emergency navigation switches; she went to it. The front had buckled slightly during the hard hit into the jungle’s canopy, but she could still open it. Inside, she found with only a little relief what she had hoped would be there: backpacks set aside for the lifeboat’s occupants. She presumed they contained basic survival equipment. She had no time to check; she’d have to have faith one would hold at least some of what she might need. Anything is a step up from what you have now.
Hanging next to the line of packs was a small module with a loop cord. She flicked it on and found it was still powered. A tiny holo-image appeared in front of her, projected from the base of the module: a level plateau haloed in green, with vague, tree-like icons to represent the jungle. It was an emergency navigation unit—a basic module that would scan the contours of the immediate landscape as she walked and extrapolate courses based on the information it was able to store. At the very least it would allow her to tell, in the shadows of the jungle, if she was still heading in a straight line, as opposed to being pulled away from the right path by the denseness of the trees and vines. She hung it around her neck.
Finally, she searched the lockers for extra food and slipped some packs of what looked to be military rations into the zippered main compartment of her pack.
Time to go.
She began to climb, but the movement shifted the lifeboat again, and this time some of the vines must have given way. The boat dropped slightly on one end, and Natasha slipped, falling heavily against her arm. She felt something tear the skin, and when she looked down she saw blood seeping through the torn fabric of her suit. Feeling dizzy and tired, she tried to get up, but the lifeboat was rocking even more now, and it was hard to get a foothold. Her hazy vision was worse in here too, and suddenly the whole place was a chaotic blur.