by Rob Boffard
That’s when I recognise them. Even with their faces covered, I pick them out. There’s Anton, holding a gun on Carver. And Ivan, his arms wrapped around Anna. These are the men who took hostages in the Recycler Plant, who later interrupted my attempt to rescue Okwembu, back in the maximum security brig.
Who the hell are these people?
Anton glances at me, and under the rag he smiles. “You left a trail a mile wide,” he says. “Would have been here sooner, if you hadn’t locked us up.”
“There’s someone back here,” a man says. He’s over by the storeroom, standing above Knox.
Anton glances over. “Resin?”
“Yup. Dead.” The man nudges Knox with the heel of his boot.
The room falls silent. And, finally, all eyes turn to Okwembu. Their prize, the person they’ve been hunting across the whole station. She stares back at them. She’s still cuffed, still bent over the table, but there’s defiance in her eyes.
Anton walks up to Okwembu, his hands clasped behind him. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” I hear him say.
She’s finally going to get what’s coming to her. Anton’s going to kill her in front of all these people, and I’m going to have to watch. It’s strange – now that I know it’s actually going to happen, I’m not sure I want it to.
Anton leans over her. He undoes her cuffs, ripping the velcro off.
“You have something we need,” he says. “You’re going to give it to us, whether you want to or not.”
“And what is that?” Okwembu says, massaging her wrists.
Anton grins. “The Earth.”
49
Riley
Dead silence.
Okwembu looks from Anton to Ivan, and back again. “And how exactly do I give that to you?” she says, her tone apparently one of honest curiosity.
“Not here,” Anton says, shaking his head. “I’ll explain later. You come with us, and you do what we say. Understand?”
Okwembu rolls her wrists, stretching them out. “And if I do … you’ll guarantee my safety?”
“That’s right.”
There’s a long moment of silence. My mind is reeling. What can Okwembu possibly have that will give these people … the Earth? What does that even mean?
Okwembu nods. “Fine. Let’s go.”
“Good.” Anton barely looks in our direction. “Put the rest up against the wall and shoot them.”
Anna starts howling, twisting in the arms of the man holding her. Carver and I are marched at gunpoint towards the storage room. Knox hasn’t moved a muscle. A thin line of Resin has trickled down from his nose, pooling on the floor. My heart feels like it’s about to stop.
“Why don’t we take them with us?”
It comes from one of the others, a woman, leaning up against the wall. She’s wrapped a scarf around her entire head, so that only her eyes are showing.
Nobody says anything for a second. Then Anton says, “We don’t need them, Hisako. Anyway, I told you back at base. We’re stretched thin enough as it is.”
“Right, right, I know,” says the woman. “But think about it – if we could bring them over to our side, we’d have people with inner knowledge of Apex.” She shrugs. “After all, they’re stompers. They’ve been there. We haven’t.”
Carver and I exchange a glance. Just what are these people planning to do?
Anton walks over, conversing in whispers with Hisako and two of the others. They pull Okwembu in, too, and she talks quickly and quietly. More than once, I hear the words kill and important. Anna’s eyes are huge.
After a minute, the huddle breaks and Anton walks over to us. “Hisako’s right,” he says. “Much as I hate to admit it. You’re coming with us.”
I let out a thin breath. Anton smiles, revealing crooked and broken teeth. “I do owe you one for the Recycler Plant, though.”
He leans back, and throws a punch across my face.
There’s enough force in the blow to snap my head back. My teeth clack together, and I feel one of them break, almost delicately. There’s blood in my mouth, and my cheek is already starting to hum with pain.
Carver shouts in anger. Our arms are pulled behind us, twisted sharply backwards. My hands are snapped together, and I feel something hard and sharp-edged being slipped over them – a zip tie of some kind. It’s yanked tight, cutting into my wrists, and I grunt in pain.
Hisako tears a strip of cloth from her scarf. She blindfolds me with it, knotting it tightly behind my head, plunging me into darkness.
50
Knox
Morgan Knox isn’t sure if he’s awake or not.
At first he thinks he’s dreaming. Or hallucinating. Hale and her friends are restrained, blindfolded, and his room is filled with strangers. One of them leads Okwembu to the door. She looks back at him in the instant before she crosses the threshold. Her eyes meet his. Triumph sparkles in them, and she’s actually smiling.
It’s that smile that jolts him fully awake. It’s not a dream, not a hallucination. They’re taking Okwembu and Hale both, and it’s happening right in front of him.
He tries to move, to cry out. But the only sound he can make is a gurgling wheeze, and it costs him dearly. Pain radiates through his body, boiling up in his throat.
Resin. That’s what Hale called it. He must have got it from those stompers, the ones who came to arrest him. Or perhaps he got it from Hale herself. Knox claws at the floor, breaking his nails on it, leaving thin smears of blood behind. He coughs, and it’s such an awful sensation that it nearly knocks him out. He can’t get enough air into his lungs – they feel stretched, like a rubber bladder, filled to the brim. He’s dimly aware that his nasal passages are blocked, jammed solid with muck.
He opens his eyes again. His surgery is empty. Okwembu and Hale are gone.
Anger explodes through him, blocking out the pain. He won’t let that happen. Hale is going to learn what it means to fail.
The remote. It’s in the pocket of his scrubs. It takes him a minute to work up the strength to roll over, another to lift his hand to his body. His fingers fumble at the hem of the pocket, but when he finally pushes them inside, he feels nothing.
No.
Perhaps he got the wrong pocket. He shuts his eyes tight, willing his arm to move, but there’s nothing in the other pocket either. She’s taken it.
He coughs again, and something rolls inside him: a long, slow movement that tears his chest wall apart. This time, he screams. The world goes dark.
When he comes back, his thoughts are a little clearer. Hale gave him something, he remembers that. Some kind of intravenous fluid. Whatever it was, it’s had some effect – he’s still having trouble breathing, but he is getting air into his lungs. That means he has a chance.
But for how long? He may need another dose, and it doesn’t seem as if he’ll be getting one any time soon.
His medical training takes over. It’s as if he’s standing above his own body, looking down on it, another doctor assessing a patient. He has fluid on the lungs, and in the pleural space behind them. We need to drain them.
Standard procedure is to do a tube thoracostomy, inserting a static drain in the chest to release the fluid. No chance of that. He can barely move, let alone carry out a surgical incision. He’ll have to use a syringe. He can insert the needle into the cavity, draw out some of the fluid. It’ll hurt like hell, but he doesn’t have any other choice.
He could let himself die. It would be easy. All he has to do is lie here. The transponder is still attached to his heart – he can feel the wires itching beneath his skin. That means Hale’s devices would detonate. The thought gives him bitter pleasure.
But then he looks up, and sees Amira.
He knows it isn’t real. It can’t be. Amira is dead. And yet there she is, sitting on the edge of the operating table, her legs swinging back and forth. Her dark eyes are locked on his. Her tank top is soaked with blood. She runs a finger along it, and it comes up dark and shining.
“Help me,” he says. His voice is nothing more than a whisper.
He blinks, and she’s gone.
They killed her. Hale and Okwembu. They took away the only perfect thing in his world. He can’t let them get away with that. He won’t.
The syringes are in his surgery, on one of the wheeled stands next to the operating table. Every movement is agony. When he rolls himself onto his stomach, it’s as if he’s falling from a great height, slamming into the ground with the force of a meteor.
He lies there, breathing hard. After a moment, he tries to rise. He barely makes it to one knee before his muscles fail, sending him crashing back down. He tries to slow his breathing, tries to ignore the horrid sucking feeling in his chest.
There’s no way he’s going to be able to walk. He’ll have to crawl. He gets one arm out in front of him, then the other and pulls.
He makes it three feet before another cough explodes out of him, spraying the floor in front of him with sticky black fluid. He stares at it, bewildered. Blood? Pus? Whatever it is, he has to drain it, and soon.
He pulls himself through gunk. It’s sticky, like snot. He has to stop to rest more than once. On the third time, a coughing fit nearly tears him in two. But somehow he keeps moving, putting one arm in front of the other.
The stand is in front of him. He’s going to have to get to his knees again.
He moves as carefully as he can. A single cough, a single tremor in his fragile lungs, could unbalance him, and he doesn’t know if he can get up a third time. Slowly, oh so slowly, he gets his right leg underneath him, then raises himself up on his knee like a sprinter at the block. He can see the tray of instruments on the stand, see the scalpels and forceps. The syringes, he knows, will be in a small plastic case, just out of sight.
He touches the tray, and that’s when the cough explodes out of him.
His hand comes down on the tray’s edge, sending the instruments flying through the air. He tumbles onto his side, retching, as they roll and skid across the floor away from him.
51
Prakesh
Every step Prakesh makes is as loud as an explosion. He stumbles into one of the Buzz Box supports, bounces off it, nearly loses his balance on a pile of loose metal pipes. Behind him, Julian’s stinger fires a second time, a third, the bullets ricocheting off the floor behind him. Iko is still screaming.
Julian stops firing. Without the muzzle flash, Prakesh is instantly cloaked in darkness. But his retinas haven’t adjusted yet – he’s running through a bright, black void, hands out in front of him, hot breath tearing his chest apart.
“Find him!” Julian says.
Not if I can help it, Prakesh thinks. The thought is interrupted as something collides with his shin.
It could be anything: a piece of scaffolding, a stack of metal sheeting, a machine battery. It hits him in the same spot as before, when he was walking through the Food Lab. The first time, he was moving at walking pace – now the sensation is so sharp that he’s convinced his legs have been sliced right off. He tumbles end over end, landing on the floor beyond the obstacle, cracking his skull so hard on it that the black void blossoms with colour.
He pushes against the pain, telling himself to get up. He rises to his knees, fingers bent on the slimy floor, and stops.
The Food Lab has gone silent. No explosions of sound. No crashing of metal. As long as he stays down, he can control his movements. Adrenaline made him run, but he can see past it now, and it’s a much better idea to stay hidden.
There’s a flicker of light from the Buzz Box – Julian, sparking the plasma cutter back to life. Prakesh sees the obstacle he tripped over. It’s a corrugated metal sheet, propped horizontally between two supports. He ran right into its leading edge. His fingers find his right shin, and he feels a slick wetness. The wound is skin-deep, nothing more, but he still has to bite back a hiss of pain.
Iko is moaning now, and Prakesh hears Julian telling him to shut up. “Roger. You, Owen and Jared spread out. Sweep the floor. Find him.” To Prakesh’s ears, he sounds insane: someone at the very end of a very long tether.
Roger says something Prakesh can’t quite hear. “Neither does he,” Julian replies. “You find him, and you beat the shit out of him.”
They only have one stinger, he thinks. Should he make a run for it? All he has to do is get to the entrance to the Air Lab, and he can seal them inside. No. From where he is, it’s too risky. He can’t track them all, and he doesn’t know how fast they can move.
He can hear them now, their footsteps crunching on the melted plastic. He closes his eyes, trying to pinpoint them on the floor, but there are too many echoes. The sounds fold in on themselves, multiply, coming from a dozen directions at once.
Prakesh opens his eyes. The metal sheet he’s crouched behind is long – fifty feet, at least. He can move along it, and then … yes, there, a stack of yellow plastic barrels he can hide behind. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets there, but it’s the best chance he’s got.
Keeping his head down, Prakesh moves on his hands and knees, listening hard, trying to time his movements to coincide with the hunters’. He feels like the only thing louder than his hands on the grimy floor is his heartbeat, thundering loud enough to blow a vein in his neck.
“Come on out,” Roger says. His voice is distant, coming from the other end of the floor. The light has grown dimmer, as if the search has moved away. With any luck, they haven’t spread out too far.
Ten feet away from the end of the metal sheet. Five. Still nothing. Prakesh stops a foot from the end, dropping down onto his elbows. The barrels are a few feet away. To reach them, he’s going to have to cross a gap on the floor – a gap dimly illuminated by the flickering light of the plasma torch.
Prakesh listens hard. He can hear them: footsteps, a bang followed by a muffled curse, Iko’s helpless whimpering. He thinks they’re at his four o’clock – no way for him to tell if they’re looking in his direction or not. Nothing for it. He can’t stay here.
He looks up at the barrels, takes a deep breath. He’ll move on the balls of his feet, like he’s seen Riley do, staying low and quiet. He tenses his thighs, preparing to move.
He sees the shadow a second before he leaves his position. He freezes, and that’s when the voice comes, shockingly close, no more than three feet above his head. “He’s not here!”
The speaker is standing on the other side of the metal sheet, his filmy shadow stretched out across the gap in front of Prakesh. Slowly, very slowly, Prakesh turns his head and looks up. It’s Roger – Prakesh can just recognise the shape of his head and shoulders. He’s looking back towards the Buzz Box, and as Prakesh watches, he idly rests a hand on the metal sheet. It shakes slightly, just touching the edge of Prakesh’s shoe.
“Keep looking, then.” Julian sounds hoarse and anxious.
Roger drums his fingers on the metal. Prakesh can’t look away. If Roger turns his head, even a little, and looks down, there’s no way he’ll remain undetected.
Roger grunts in frustration, shoving off from the metal sheet. Prakesh breathes a long, low sigh – then chokes it back when he sees where Roger is going. The man is coming round the end of the metal sheet, between Prakesh and the barrels. There’s nothing Prakesh can do.
52
Riley
The blindfold is hot around my face, and my fingers are already starting to go numb from the biting pain of the cuffs. I can’t stop running my tongue over my jagged tooth, and my cheek is still burning from Anton’s blow.
My entire sense of balance is gone, destroyed by the blindfold. My feet are constantly tangled up, and my captors have to hold me upright to stop it happening. A few times, I really do start to fall – my stomach lurching as my centre of gravity topples – and they have to pull me back.
I don’t know how long we walk for, or where we go. For a while, Anna and Carver are alongside me – I hear them spit the occasional curse as they, too, struggle for balan
ce – but after a while they go silent. My imagination runs away from me: maybe we’ve been split up, our captors taking us to different places so they can break us individually.
Whoever they are.
My legs are burning. It’s been a long time since I took any pills, and the stitches have become hot lines, flipping back and forth between bright sting and maddening itch.There’s nothing I can do. I try to ignore the burning, pushing other thoughts to the front of my mind. Prakesh. He’s never felt further away than he is now. At least he’s safe – I don’t like that he’s sealed away, but the Air Lab is a lot less chaotic than it is out here.
After a while, the sound around me changes – it feels muted somehow, like we’ve moved away from the main body of the station. I start to hear other noises – people shouting orders, the clanking of machinery. A few minutes later, we come to a stop. The noises have got louder now – it’s as if I’m in an enormous factory. Every muscle in my body feels ready to collapse.
“What do we do with her?”
“Take the blindfold off. I don’t think it matters now.”
I feel the material being unwrapped, light slipping in as the layers come off, and when the last one falls away I have to squint against blinding overhead lights. My eyes fill with tears, and, as I blink them back, I see Carver standing alongside me. His blindfold is being pulled off, too. Anna is being brought up behind us. Okwembu is there as well, her hands clasped behind her.
I look around, and my mouth falls open.
We’re in one of the old mineral-processing facilities, where they bring asteroid slag and turn it into something useable. There are dozens of these places across the lower sectors, so it’s impossible to figure out the exact location. Smelting kilns line the walls, bracketing enormous centrifuges. They’ll spring to life when the Shinso Maru comes in, delivering its asteroid cargo. The space construction corps will break it down, and the tugboats will bring the pieces in to be turned into slag, which will be processed to get the minerals out. The asteroids are our building material, our fertiliser, our chemicals.