by C. G. Hatton
They were in the burned out wreck of the old crashed shuttle. It was just a shell, jammed half in, half out of the bombed out rubble of a store front, scavenged for anything useful long ago but cool as anything to play in. I ran up and stuck my head round the cockpit hatch. Maisie was wrestling with two of the little ones in the stripped-out troop section, tickling them mercilessly, both of them screaming. Spacey was sitting in the pilot’s seat, on top of the stack of old cushions, playing with the rusted out skeleton of what was left of the control panel. Spacey was one of our littlest. She had an attitude that reminded me of me at that age.
Maisie saw me and eased up, the kids tickling her in retaliation. She fended them off and grinned at me. “Can you remember when we used to play in here?”
We’d seen it crash. I used to pretend I was going to fly it out of there.
I grinned back. “When there were still switches in the panel?”
She laughed. “So what did you get?”
I gave the candy bar to Spacey and threw the chocolate to Maisie. “Couple of ration packs.”
She frowned. “From Dayton?”
“From the outpost.”
She pulled a face and turned back to the kids. “Come on, everyone, we have food. Time to go home.” She shooed them out. “What did you get from Dayton?”
“Nothing.” I helped Spacey clamber down out of the cockpit.
We watched the little ones run off towards the high-rise block we’d claimed as ours.
Maisie stood in the door, leaning against the mangled frame. “They didn’t give you anything?”
“Dayton wasn’t there. Benjie wasn’t there. Don’t worry, we’ll get paid next time.”
She didn’t look convinced. She climbed down and took the ration packs off me. “Whatever you do,” she said, “don’t let Calum know these are from the outpost.”
“It’s food. He’s not going to turn it down.”
She nudged me in the ribs. “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
I shrugged. I didn’t care what Calum thought of me. I cared about what Maisie thought of me.
She shoved me and grinned. “Is the chocolate from them as well?”
I nodded.
She shrugged then. “I don’t care. Chocolate is chocolate.”
We chased the little ones home and ran up the stairwell, kicking aside debris, sneakers crunching on broken glass. The whole block had no windows, no heating, no power. No one gave a shit who was in there so it was perfect. It was our hideaway. Our den. Our base of operations. Even Latia didn’t know where we were. We were the runaways, the waifs and strays of the city, a steady influx of orphaned kids who couldn’t bear life in an Imperial care system that cared more about its image and funding than any children it was landed with. And the constant battles made sure there were always plenty of orphans. Latia took care of us from a distance and that suited us all fine. We made sure she had food and she made us promise that we’d go to her if we needed. It worked. No one bothered her and no one bothered us.
We lived on the top two floors. It was the best place we’d stayed in for ages. It had taken a direct hit from an artillery shell, years ago, and half the top floor had its walls missing.
Maisie headed straight up to the main room, our penthouse suite, and started busying about with the rations. Some of the kids were playing board games on the floor, some of them play fighting in a corner.
Peanut was working at the table. I stopped and emptied out my pockets. He didn’t look up. He just mumbled, “Cheers, Luka,” and carried on working, peering through a magnifier and working on some piece of kit.
Peanut was our tinkerer. He was eighteen but he was weird so Dayton and the resistance hadn’t recruited him. It was their loss. Peanut was weird but brilliant weird. He could fix just about anything. He’d gone and got an unofficial job as a maintenance techie at the space port and he lived there, but he still came back to fix stuff for us. He was the one who’d taught me how to pick an electronic lock and hack into the Imperial command system before I was ten. He’d been caught in the bombings eight years ago and had an arm that stopped in a stump just below his elbow. He had an awesome prosthetic he got from the Imperial missionary hospital but half the time he didn’t use it. He wasn’t using it that day but that didn’t stop him doing the most intricate work I’ve ever seen. Anywhere. Even in the guild.
He picked up one of the gizmos, grunted and spotted the screwdriver. “Nice,” he said and switched it with the one he’d been using.
I used to spend hours watching Peanut work. He never explained anything except to ramble at times, but he didn’t need to, I just liked watching him take stuff apart and put it back together again.
“I fixed the alternators on the bikes,” he said without looking up.
“All of them?”
He didn’t reply. He tinkered a bit more then pushed across a board. It had stats scrolling across its surface. “An IDC ship landed this morning.”
“IDC?”
“Imperial Diplomatic Corps.” He laughed. “It’s black ops. Look at it. The Empire doesn’t even have a diplomatic corps. High end stuff for Kheris. And we’ve got a courier in for repair. Real nifty. Jump capacity and everything.” He glanced up. “You wanna come take a look later?”
Working at the space port meant Peanut had an access pass. I always climbed over the fence. When I wanted to play with ships now, I tagged along and played in real ones. A diplomatic vessel meant we could scavenge the latest news from across the galaxy. That was always cool. And Peanut knew I wanted to go see a jump ship. That was the latest manual he’d scrounged for me. I grinned, said, “Sure,” watched a bit longer then left him to it and climbed out onto the open window ledge. I stared at the sky. I was tired but too hyped to chill out yet.
Maisie came out after a while. She nodded back towards the room. “We saved you something to eat.”
“You have it,” I said. I was guessing she wouldn’t have eaten much herself. “I’m fine. They gave me soup.”
She looked puzzled.
“At the outpost.”
“They like you,” she teased. She scrubbed her hand through my hair before I could stop her. “You ever wonder who your father was?”
I shrugged. I didn’t care. I knew what she was getting at. Not so much who as which one. There weren’t many blond kids with green eyes on Kheris. I stood out a mile which meant I had to work harder to hide.
She laughed. She knew I’d never talk about it. My mother hadn’t. Her mother hadn’t and if Latia knew, she’d never admitted it. An obvious Earth heritage wasn’t something to be proud of. Especially not in my family. Everyone knew but I was tolerated because of what had happened.
We sat quietly then she bumped my shoulder and turned her gaze up to the sky. Bright blue and we couldn’t see the stars beyond, but they were all we looked to. “Do you ever think of leaving?”
I managed not to laugh but I couldn’t help blurting out, “To go where?”
She shrugged then. “Anywhere. Not here.”
No one got to just leave Kheris. Anyone who had family to take care of them, money behind them, might move out of the city to the more remote settlements. There were supposed to be places that were nice. Places with trees and wildlife. But we never heard of anyone who got to leave the planet and go anyplace really civilised. Waifs and strays like us? We had no chance.
“One of them might take you,” she said, looking down and over towards the outpost.
I bit back the comment that sprang to mind and just said, “I don’t think so. Besides, I wouldn’t go. Who’d look after you?”
She glanced sideways at me with a smile beginning to crease her mouth.
I was lying. To her. And to myself. Hiding it by being flippant but it was all I wanted. It was all any of us wanted.
Chapter 6
She gave me a shove. “Go get some sleep.” She looked round. “The rest of you… chores.”
There were grumbles, mostly fr
om Calum’s little crew along the lines of, how come Luka doesn’t have to do chores? It’s great being singled out as special, it really is.
“Luka gets to sleep,” she said, “because he was up all night so you lot would have food to eat.”
That was another reason why I was tolerated. I was useful. I made sure I was useful. If you’re different, why not be the best at everything to make sure you were so different, no one could say a word against you. It was a fine line and I pulled it off because I didn’t care what they thought of me.
“Freddie,” Maisie was saying, “laundry. Calum, garbage. The rest of you, tidy up time. Come on. This place looks like a dump.”
It didn’t. Maisie kept us straight.
“Luka,” she said sternly when I didn’t move, “go sleep.”
I sloped off.
Calum glowered.
Freddie grinned at me as she grabbed the bag of laundry. I gave her a wink and disappeared off to our bunkroom, mouthing to Maisie, “I’m going…”
Once in there and out of sight, I went straight to the window and watched as Freddie staggered out into the street with the huge bag. Freddie was one of the middlings, the seven to twelve year-olds of our gang. She was nine going on twenty nine, small and cute and twice as stubborn as I could be.
It took me two minutes to climb out, shimmy down the rope we had hanging there and run to catch up with her. I crept up and grabbed the bag as if I was stealing it. She laughed and bumped hips with me as we walked, her black hair swinging in its insane topknot.
“Why do you enjoy pissing Calum off so much?” she said.
“Because it’s easy.”
“What are you going to do when he’s boss?”
“Calum won’t ever be boss.” Maisie had told me a long time ago that she’d never leave me alone with him, that she’d take him with her when she went, just to protect me from him. I’d told her that wasn’t necessary but she’d just laughed and thumped me.
Freddie hooked her arm through mine. “You’ll be an awesome boss,” she said.
I couldn’t think that far ahead but I humoured her anyway. “We’ll have chocolate for breakfast every day.”
She laughed.
It was funny until we saw that the road we needed to go down was blocked off. We heard the DZ before we saw it. It was battered and dirty, its main turret swinging to track us as we approached. A soldier walked round, looking paranoid and hot. He was holding his rifle like he wanted to have someone to shoot at.
He waved us away, saying loud and clear in his brash Earth accent, “Bomb. Take another goddamned route, kids.”
It happened every other day. Sometimes they went off, sometimes it was all just drama and inconvenience.
Freddie was craning her neck trying to see what was going on. I steered her away. I had the bag on my shoulder and I swung it round just enough to bump her off balance, surreptitiously picking a candy bar neatly out of her pocket as she nudged me back.
I gave her a smile. “Why are you flunking Math?”
She shook her hair out of her eyes. “Who told you that?”
No one had told me. I’d seen her grades when I’d snuck back into the Imperial missionary school to grab some stuff I’d left behind. “What’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem,” she said, jumping over a fresh crater in the road. “I just don’t like the teacher.”
“That’s no reason to flunk it.”
“Says you.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “You don’t know what it’s like. You have it easy.”
And there was the lie. They all thought I didn’t have to try and they couldn’t have been further from the truth. I had to work harder than any of them because not knowing how to do something drives me crazy. It always has. It just looked easy because I made it look easy to wind them all up.
I held out my hand, offering her the candy bar.
Her face lit up. “Thank you,” she said then caught herself. “Hey, wait.” She glared at me, patting her pockets. “That’s mine.” She snatched it off me with a fake scowl then laughed and kicked at a stone. “You could teach me algebra,” she said, looking back at me all coy.
I nudged her again so she stumbled.
“It’s all about balance,” I said. “You don’t stand a chance.”
“You’re so funny.” She glanced behind us and I got the feeling there was someone watching. She was more solemn as she turned back to me and dropped into step beside me. “Seriously, Luka, you need to be careful around Calum.”
I should have listened to her. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have ended up in the mess I did.
It was that night that the ship crashed out in the desert. We shouldn’t even have been out there but I told Maisie what Benjie had said about the ore plant and she’d agreed that we should go see, reluctantly and only once I’d relented and said I’d catch some sleep.
She thought I was reading more into it than there was. “Benjie uses you,” she’d said, unimpressed that Benjie was still influencing the gang even after he’d gone. “Do you realise that, Luka?” I told her she was being stupid. I loved doing the stuff he asked me to do. It was a game. Thing was, I got to be better than he was. Much better. He used to laugh and raise the stakes each time, and what was twisted was that it was that that made me better. Like I said, I learned a lot from Benjie.
We skipped out as soon as it was dark. We left the little ones with Freddie and a couple of the other older middlings watching them. We didn’t tell them where we were going.
There were plenty of ways out of the city. It was easy enough to avoid the security cameras and guard posts. We took the dirt bikes, made it to the edge of town and took off into the open.
It was a dry night, a chill wind blowing dust in dancing flurries across the surface of the desert. I rode down a bank and hunkered low, dragging a scarf up over my mouth and nose, grinning at Maisie as she spit and spluttered, and throwing her a rag she could use. Peanut was wearing goggles. He looked insane. Calum was sweating, even in the cold air. I laughed at them and rode on ahead.
There was something about being in that big, wide open space in the cold of night. I went ahead because I wanted to be by myself. It made me feel that the universe was bigger than our fraught little corner of nonsense. I don’t know if I even believed it back then. I don’t think I did. It was just something to hold on to. To hope there was more. To think things could be better. I had no idea of the price that would be demanded of me to get there.
I skidded down into the ditch surrounding the ore plant and abandoned the bike, crawling on my stomach to peek up over the edge. The towers were belching their usual clouds of green tinged gases, steam pouring from vents and pipes to swirl up into the night sky. It was patrolled by guards, a couple of tanks parked at the entrance.
I waited for the others and we worked our way round, slipping through the fence where it went right next to one of the buildings that had been bombed years ago, where the rubble made it look like there was no way through but there was if you knew.
Calum was looking behind us the whole way, cracking his knuckles. Nervous. I knew what was wrong. He was getting big. And he was stocky to start with. He’d look a fool if he couldn’t fit through the gaps any more. I half hoped he wouldn’t be able to but he did. With a squeeze.
Inside, we had to avoid the buildings of the main processing plant. They were all watched by automated security systems. They couldn’t cover every inch of the outside so we could wander around and play, so long as we watched out for the guards. I ducked under a pipe that was hissing steam. The hairs on the back of my neck were tingling, gut instinct screaming at me to leave, but I wanted to know why Benjie had told me not to go out there. Twisted, I know. Trust me, it’s not a good way to be. It never ends well.
I worked my way round to the workshops, past the massive storage tanks where they kept the chemicals for the extraction processes. There was a tang to the air, the kind that sticks at the back of your throat. It was lik
e the crap in those containers in Latia’s basement. The chemicals were nasty. We had shelters in town that we had to use whenever there was a major leak of the worst of the gases they produced. I gave the storage tanks a wide berth and kept the scarf pulled up tight over my mouth and nose.
The hangar doors of the main workshop were closed. If we so much as approached the doors, we’d set off the alarm. I had an idea of how I was going to get in but I’d never done it before. I told the others to wait and ran round to the waste outlets where the pipes that were twisting out of the building and across to the processing plant were almost too hot to touch. I climbed up and squeezed through, burning a patch of skin off my elbow and jumping up onto a ledge that gave me a chance to get up onto the roof.
I crawled along to the intake I was looking for and looked down. There was a ventilation fan rotating in a lazy spin. It was the only opening that wasn’t protected. I watched the motion of the blades. There was a distinct chance that I could either get jammed stuck in there or cut in half. I climbed down, wedging myself above the blades as they swept round the vent, holding my breath and counting.
I went for it. One of the blades skimmed my shoulder, almost snagged my shirt and nearly took off my hand as I shimmied past and dropped. I bounced down the vent and dropped down into the workshop, scrabbling into cover and listening in case there was anyone in there near enough to have heard.
Nothing.
I gave it another minute to make sure it was all quiet, checked that my shoulder was intact and crept out into the workshops.
From inside, it was easy to hack into the security system and trash it enough to fool it into ignoring us. I set up a feedback loop. They wouldn’t even know it wasn’t working.
I made sure there was no one in there, went to the front and opened a side door for the others.
I didn’t wait for them. It was weird walking around in there, amongst the huge machines, only occasional lights that cast a dim, eerie glow. I wandered around, gawping at the crates. I followed the main aisle and climbed up onto the gantry, getting deeper and deeper into the shed.