Thieves' Guild Series (7 eBook Box Set): Military Science Fiction - Alien Invasion - Galactic War Novels

by C. G. Hatton

  There was also some stuff from my mother but I kept that wrapped up and didn’t open it very often. That night, with a bandage wrapped tight around my arm and the gash beneath it still hurting, I reached to pull out that neat little package and, I can remember clear as anything, my hand was almost trembling. Except Latia called down to me and I packed up fast, tucking the pass into the side pocket where I kept them and shoving the box back into its hidey-hole.

  Latia took her box with a smile. Getting that from the cellar usually meant lemonade and a good two hours looking through old photographs. This time though, Maisie appeared in the doorway just as we sat down. She ducked past the ragged dust curtain hanging over the doorway and came in. She had a bag in her hand that she placed on the table. Food. But not much of it.

  I stood up. “Is that all you got?”

  She nodded, scowling.

  “It was worth twice that,” I said, too blunt, again without thinking.

  She knew it but what could we do? She glanced at Latia then pierced me with that look she had. “Dayton wants to see you.”

  Chapter 4

  I gave Latia a hug, grabbed a bag of chips and ate them on the way. You never kept Dayton waiting. Dayton was KRM, leader of the infamous Kheris Resistance Movement, and if Dayton sent word he wanted to see you, you didn’t mess about.

  The sun wasn’t up yet so I had to be careful, avoiding the patrols as I ran through the city to one of the safe houses. The first one I tried had a cordon around it and a DZ32 tank parked outside. Have you ever seen a DZ? I wish we had a few of those now. Huge, bristling with AG weapons platforms, unbelievable stealth. They could run silent. Totally silent. Except the Earth troops on Kheris used to switch off the suppressors so the noise of them would freak us out. That night, the DZ was stationed on watch, blocking off the whole street, and quiet. It was job done, resistance sympathisers cleared out, and the Imperial soldiers were milling, flashlight beams bouncing, poking about in the buildings nearby. I watched from a distance then split.

  I tried the diner next. That was the same. At that one, the soldiers were shouting, on alert, guns up, grunts posted on watch in a perimeter. I shrank back into the shadows of an alleyway across the street. They were emptying the place, marching the staff out in cuffs along with a couple of poor suckers unlucky enough to be in there, and shoving them into stress positions against the wall. Nasty. I could see in the flickering light of the broken neon sign that they were bitching and complaining, but not stupid enough to fight. They’d be questioned then set free. Dayton was careful and he made sure his people were careful too.

  I slipped away and headed for the bakery. That was clear. The guy on watch recognised me and let me in.

  “They’re at the diner,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yeah, we know.” He clipped me playfully round the ear and grinned as he pulled me inside. “Get yourself in there, kid. Don’t keep the boss waiting.”

  There were a few people sitting at tables drinking coffee, talking in low voices that stopped as I walked in. They watched me as I went through, disappearing into the back, past the ovens, breathing in the smell of baking bread and pastries. They sometimes gave us bags of donuts, but nothing was on offer that morning.

  I ran down the stairs to the basement and walked in on a card game, smoke spiralling from cigars and a stench of stale beer stinging the air. They ignored me for two rounds then one guy threw in his hand and stood. He gestured me to turn, checking me over and patting me down. I wasn’t carrying so much as a pocketknife, never did when I went down there. Although we were all supposed to be on the same side and we were just kids, Dayton was really paranoid about who got close to him.

  The guy nodded finally, all without a word, and took me through to another room where there was a hatch in the floor. He pulled it up, gestured for me to go down and let it drop shut behind me.

  It was cold down in the tunnels. The kind of damp cold everyone else bitched about but I didn’t mind. I don’t like being too hot. Maisie always joked that I overheated because I lived at twice the speed of everyone else. It wasn’t, it was because we lived on a freaking desert dirtball of a planet. But someone told her once that every living creature gets a finite number of heartbeats. Use them up fast, like a mouse, and you die young. She decided my days were numbered. Someone else told me that I must have nine lives. By then I’d already used up two of them. So I reckoned I was fine for a while yet.

  Of course, that was before I joined the guild.

  The tunnels snaked under the entire city and out into the desert. The Earth Empire troops occupying the colony knew the KRM had them but they didn’t care. It wasn’t worth the trouble to clear them out as long as the mining facility was kept running. The only real estate here the Empire cared about was the mine and the space port, and all the defences were geared around those. As far as Earth was concerned, the resistance could have as much of the desert as they wanted.

  The tunnels were rat runs, old metro systems abandoned during the war, spreading out in all directions, all the way to the old mines, and rumour had it they were primed to blow at the touch of a button. We didn’t believe it, the same way we didn’t believe the rumours that some Wintran corporation or another was going to back the rebellion and give us everything we needed to kick the Empire out once and for all. It was all nonsense.

  I didn’t bother to wait for transport and ran into Dayton’s guards about a mile and a half out.

  They confronted me as I approached, gesturing with their guns that I had to stop. I held my hands in the air, turning slowly as one of them frisked me again.

  I stifled a yawn. They made a big deal of it and finally gave me a shove towards the door.

  I pushed through and wandered down the long tunnels, directed at each intersection towards Dayton’s command bunker.

  No one looked up as I walked in. They were used to me going in there and they ignored me, all of them busy hammering away at terminals or poring over charts.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and slouched by the door, waiting, reading what I could off the screens I could see.

  One of the generators must have been struggling because it was fumy as anything in there. I got a headache just standing there.

  I didn’t recognise Benjie until he sidled up next to me. He looked older. Like one of them now. Like he’d aged way more than the three or four months it had been since he’d left us.

  “Hey, squirt,” he whispered, pretending to be looking for something in the cupboard next to where I was lurking. Even his voice was different. Deeper.

  “Hey.”

  Benjie had the shadow of a beard. Dark lines around his eyes as he looked over at me.

  “I came to check on you all,” he said quietly, intently. “You’d moved already.”

  I nodded. We always moved when our eldest hit fifteen and had to join Dayton. It wasn’t so much that we didn’t trust them all of a sudden. We just didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t us.

  He knew I wouldn’t tell him where we’d gone and he didn’t ask. Benjie was the best. He’d taken care of us two years ago, the night the Empire had decided to clear all the street kids out of the southside, and he’d taught me everything I knew back then about keeping quiet and staying hidden. He’d been boss for a long time and he’d been more like a big brother to me for a lot longer. He was the one who’d taken me into the gang all that time ago, when I was seven and getting into trouble, two years after Operation Rainfall when my life had turned upside down.

  “How’s Maisie doing?” he said.

  She only had six months to go before she’d be in here with him. I had a while yet. I was one of the olders, but only just.

  “She’s fine,” I said. She was doing more than fine. But she always had. She’d pretty much looked after us even when Benjie was boss. And everything he’d taught her, she was teaching me.

  He smiled then glanced away. Someone was looking at us. He gave me a nudge. “Listen, don’t go outside the walls. Stay i
nside the city. Don’t go anywhere near the workshops at the ore processing plant. You hear me? I know what you’re like. Stay safe, okay?” And he went back to his work.

  Thing is, Benjie did know exactly what I was like. Saying that just made me want to go take a look. And I knew he’d know that. Something was going on and it almost felt like he wanted me to go find out.

  I grinned. Benjie was cool. I knew he’d still be watching out for us.

  They left me standing there for another half hour. It was weird being in there, watching. Like I was intruding on another world.

  Dayton was giving out orders. He wasn’t the biggest guy in the room but you could tell he was in charge. He had a way of standing, big shoulders, shaved head, black ink tattoos tracing elaborate designs around his skull, and a tense presence about him that made him stand out even if you didn’t know who he was. He’d been running the resistance on Kheris as long as I could remember. Long before that probably. The promise was that we could chase the Imperial bastards off our land and reclaim the riches that should have been ours. Most of the kids bought into it. I just wanted the bombings and rocket attacks to end.

  Dayton banged his fist on the table. The guys he was instructing didn’t like what he was saying but Dayton shouted the loudest and they sloped out, glaring at me as they pushed past to leave. I sidestepped neatly and watched as he talked quietly to some of the others, a muscle ticking in the side of his jaw as if he was more pissed off than usual, and eventually he looked up at me, squinting.

  He raised a finger, beckoning. “Come here, kid.”

  He pulled out a chair and gestured me to sit. He sat on the edge of the table, leaning forward. He looked more tired than angry. He smiled at me. “When was the last time you kids had anything to eat?”

  I shrugged. I’d just eaten a bag of chips.

  “They’ve changed the codes,” he said. “Can you get in there and get us the new ones?”

  I nodded.

  He stood and patted me on the back as he walked away. “Good. You want food? Bring those codes back here, kid, and you earn a week’s worth.”

  Maisie was waiting outside, sitting on a wall opposite the safe house, the rising sun glinting off a couple of intact windows with the promise of a hot day to come. She was shielding her eyes, watching for me, and she grinned as she saw me.

  She jumped down and dropped into step alongside me. “What did he want?”

  “Codes.”

  What else would it be? Dayton wanted me, then he wanted codes.

  “You didn’t get any sleep last night,” she said. “You can’t go straight back out there.”

  I didn’t stop. “We don’t have much choice.”

  Dayton paid well and she knew it. She grabbed my arm. “Luka, wait.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll get you some chocolate.”

  She pulled me into a hug and shoved me away just as fast.

  I grinned and broke into a run. Codes were easy.

  Chapter 5

  The prevailing winds had brought in a dust cloud that was hanging heavy over the city as the sun rose and the heat built to its usual stifling intensity. I knew which outpost to go to from the roster I’d seen while I was inside their system in the garrison.

  I perched on what was left of the schoolyard wall, dangling my legs and kicking at the rubble.

  There were newbies on duty. You could tell because they were still wearing their regulation issue goggles. It took a while for the newbs to adjust to the dust and harsh light of Kheris. I’d heard them bitch about it enough. That and the gravity.

  I watched the troops mill around the outpost, weapons out, twitchy as anything, close enough that I could see what was going on, far enough away that they wouldn’t tag me as a threat. I was just a bored kid, throwing stones into a bombed out building.

  It didn’t take that long before an APC pulled up and Charlie got out. He talked briefly with the others then one of them climbed into the vehicle and it left. I waited for Charlie to spot me and jumped down as he waved.

  Charlie being there made it easy. I walked forward. One of the newbs brought round his rifle, finger on the trigger, staring at me as I approached as if he thought I could have a bomb hidden under my grubby tee shirt.

  Charlie gestured his buddy to stand down and said, “Hey,” to me.

  “Hey,” I said back.

  “You’ve grown. What are you now? Thirteen, fourteen?”

  I shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “They bombed it.”

  “The missionary one on the north side,” he said. “Aren’t you lot supposed to go there now?”

  I shrugged again. I’d gone a couple of times. “They didn’t like that I knew stuff they didn’t.” And I’d got into a fight with this huge kid that was picking on the others. Put him in the hospital. They hadn’t liked that either.

  Charlie looked like he was trying to stifle a grin or trying to decide whether to give me a hard time but then he just said, “You see the meteor shower last night?” He was testing me. Teasing.

  I shook my head.

  He smiled like he knew fine well that I would have been out after curfew and would have seen it. “C’mon inside.”

  I followed him into the cool shade of their outpost. He threw me a candy bar and watched as I put it carefully into my pocket.

  “What about you?” he said. “When was the last time you ate anything proper?”

  I shrugged again.

  Standard response.

  “Sit down.” He pulled out a rickety chair and steered me into it.

  I perched there, watching as he dug out a ration pack and put it in front of me. That would cost us fifty to a hundred on a good day. Just that one pack. He rummaged in it and pulled out a pouch of soup, twisting the tab to heat it.

  “Don’t eat too fast,” he said. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

  The newb was staring at me. Charlie glanced at him. “Goulden, go make yourself useful and check on the stat reports.” He sat down opposite me. “How’s grandma?”

  I took a sip of the hot soup and raised my eyes. “She’s fine.”

  “What have you done to your arm?”

  There was a small pocket book on the table, open, intricate code filling every line, but it was facing him not me. He flipped it shut as we sat there. It was Goulden’s name on the front, not Charlie’s. Charlie would never have been so careless.

  He gestured again. “Your arm?”

  I took another slow sip. “Just caught it on something. It’s fine.”

  Charlie shook his head and stood. “You up for an errand?” He walked round.

  I couldn’t reach for the code book and open it right in front of him but I didn’t need to. I’d seen enough.

  “Sure,” I said, reaching into the rat pack instead and palming the chocolate bar.

  There was a sting on my neck. Cold and sharp enough to make me flinch.

  “Antibiotics,” Charlie said. “You’re welcome to the chocolate. You don’t need to steal it.” He sat down again. “Do you know the west outpost, quadrant seven?”

  I nodded, mouth full of soup.

  “I give you a kit bag to deliver and there’s more candy.” He looked at me seriously. Charlie was always one of the cool ones. He was the one who taught me how to play poker when I was nine. He stuck out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  It didn’t take long to deliver the bag. I took out a couple more ration packs and a med kit that were in there before I dropped it off. Charlie was just playing games, making me feel like I was earning the favours. It almost made me feel bad to steal from him but I was glad he was back.

  I headed straight back down into the tunnels. Benjie had gone and Dayton wasn’t there but one of the others sat me down. They knew the drill and didn’t mess about with any pleasantries. A woman gave me a board and a pen, looking at me like I was a freak when I took the pen in my left hand. I swi
tched it to my right. No one native to Kheris was left-handed. I scribbled out the lines and lines of code, switching it in my head from the upside down glyphs I’d seen in the book, recreating a perfect copy of the cipher currently in use by the occupying Imperial forces.

  I was done before anyone noticed. I sat there for a while, expecting someone to come over and throw me out. When they didn’t, I reached carefully for one of the other boards stacked there and sat flicking through it. It was just some kind of manual, tedious as anything, but I’d read it all by the time anyone noticed and came over. They took it off me and said, “Go, scram, get out of here.”

  That wasn’t the way it worked.

  “I get paid,” I said, standing and squaring up to them.

  Everyone else was ignoring me already but one guy said, “Not this time.”

  “But…”

  “But nothing. You want my boot up your ass? Now scram.”

  I didn’t move. He grabbed my shoulder and slapped me round the back of the head hard enough to hurt then shoved me away with a, “Get lost.”

  It sucked.

  As I left, I palmed a couple of gizmos and a screwdriver someone had left on a table on my way out and skedaddled.

  Up on the surface, I made my way to the outskirts of the city and the block we were calling home for the minute. High-pitched chatter and squeals were echoing down the street, Maisie trying to be heard, trying to be stern but laughing too much.