by C. G. Hatton
Thousands of vanes and masts were starting to move, bristling in every direction, folding in on themselves. Huge panels and vents were shifting, the surface as far as I could see becoming streamlined and smooth where it had been raised like a city skyline. My heart was beating so fast in my ears it was competing with the warning klaxons of the suit that were reaching fever point.
One minute. Sixty seconds. At least a hundred metres to the only chance I reckoned I had to get into cover. I could imagine a glowing line between where I was and where I needed to get to. Except there were thousands of tons of moving machinery in the way and there was no way I was going to make it.
Forty seconds. I upped the pace, risked letting go and freefalling a couple of times, misjudged it and crashed into a vent hatch as it clanged shut. My left leg took the brunt of it, pain shot through my knee and I almost blacked out, vision going and the whole universe narrowing to a line between me and another vent that was inching closed in what seemed like excruciating slow motion ahead of me.
Twenty seconds. The suit’s alarm was a steady, high-pitched squeal, the display blurred into a frenzied swirl of lights and lines that made no sense. I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest, punched in the head and stabbed between the eyes. And bizarrely, as I scrambled and fought my way to that tiny opening, I wondered where Maisie was and how Latia and Peanut were, and whether Calum had kept his promise. It all felt far away and like I’d never been a part of it. Like I was never really a part of anything, anywhere.
Ten seconds.
Five seconds.
I couldn’t think anymore. Could hardly grip with my left hand never mind the right. I stumbled, hit my knee again, light flashed behind my eyeballs and I crawled, inch by inch, feeling the chill dark of space creeping into my joints, and systems shutting down, cell by cell. I reached for the vent, fell as the artificially generated gravity grabbed me, felt nothing beneath me and closed my eyes.
I must have hit every inch of my body against cold, hard steel as I tumbled down. The visor cracked as my head hit against the bulkhead. I was out of time. No air. No idea where I was going to end up. I couldn’t breathe. Remember I told you someone had said once that I had nine lives? It felt like I was about to use up four through nine all in one go.
I hit something hard, rolled and sprawled.
There was a click.
The helmet was lifted away and I couldn’t help that my head hit the deck as I sucked in a lungful of clean, rich air. I thought I was going to throw up. Or pass out. I’m not sure which would have been worse.
I managed to raise my eyes.
Armoured figures surrounded me, grey insignia on the arm of each suit, all aiming weapons at me. There was a figure standing in their midst. A tall, thin guy with an almost skeletal face who looked beyond pissed, arms folded across his chest, looking down at me like I was a bug he’d found floating in his soup.
He shook his head and said, with no nonsense or further ceremony, “Get that child the hell off my ship.”
They took me back to Medical. Charlie’s wristband was resting on top of the pillow. I picked it up and held it in my hand, trying to sit still as the staff checked my lungs, muttering about my vitals and stats, resetting the brace on my knee and checking my hand. Almost suffocating out in the cold of space hadn’t done any of it any favours. They pumped me full of drugs again and told me to sit tight. There was an armed guard on the door, one of the guys in powered armour, and they left the door open like they didn’t trust me.
I sat there on the bunk, holding the wristband and clutching the dog tags around my neck as if I didn’t deserve to wear them anymore.
It didn’t take long before Mendhel turned up. He stood at the door and stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he was angry at me or disappointed but he just turned, muttering, “Come with me,” as if he hadn’t quite decided himself.
We went up through the ship in an elevator, slick and fast. He didn’t say a word the whole time. It stopped at Twelve. The lift doors opened and Mendhel stepped aside, gesturing me to leave ahead of him. I thought for a second that he wasn’t coming with me but he followed, nudging me out into the warm corridor. I still felt like a street urchin, even though I was wearing the clothes they’d given me. Like I was an imposter. I was a long way from the dusty streets I’d left behind. I didn’t want to go back, that was the last thing I wanted, but from the look on Mendhel’s face, I might have just got myself kicked out.
NG’s door was closed. Mendhel steered me to a line of seats outside and sat down next to me. He looked sideways at me with something like resignation in his face. He reminded me of Charlie, especially when he looked at me like that. That hurt.
He held out his hand.
I guessed that he wanted the wristband and I gave it to him, my heart sinking, feeling like I was losing a piece of myself, but he beckoned again, took hold of my wrist and snapped it back into place.
I almost cried.
“You earned it,” he said. “You want to tell me why the hell you did what you just did?”
I stared at my feet, scuffing them together. I didn’t know how to say it. I’d been so desperate to see her, to see if it was Maisie in that morgue, once I knew there were bodies from Kheris and one that was female, but I don’t know why I hadn’t just asked.
Mendhel blew out a breath. “You thought she was Maisie?”
I couldn’t explain. I wanted to ask him a hundred questions but I’d forgotten how to speak.
“Maisie is fine,” he said.
Just hearing her name made the adrenaline kick in, my heart pounding. Maisie was alive. I knew I was sitting there like an idiot. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to calm down the knots that were tangling my insides. Because I just knew from his tone that there was a ‘but’…
“You broke into Science because you thought we’d brought her body back from Kheris with us.”
It wasn’t a question. Mendhel had a way of figuring me out. I’ve never told anyone before how much I owed that man. If he hadn’t been there, been the one to take me in to the guild, the one assigned to be my handler, there’s no way I would have lasted as long as I did.
“LC, I won’t lie to you. You have to understand that. If you ever want to know anything, ask.” He sounded exasperated. He looked at me funny then said, “We need to talk.”
My stomach did a backflip. Any time anyone has ever said that to me, it’s never been followed by anything good. I stared at him, willing everything to be okay, my mouth dry, and my shoulders so tense they were starting to seize.
“Maisie’s fine,” he said again.
“But?”
“The money you transferred…” Mendhel paused. I didn’t even know how he knew about that. It seemed like everyone knew every tiny thing about me. He pulled a face, looking me right in the eye. “It didn’t get to her, Luka. It was seized by the Imperial government. Every penny of it.”
Chapter 9
It took a second to sink in. It had never felt real. They’d just been numbers on a screen, scrolling numbers that had gone on forever while I’d been running out of time. It had been a stupid game to piss off Dayton. But part of me had thought that if she had made it, then she’d never have to worry about how to feed the little ones again, never have to worry about medicine if they got sick. I’d even thought that she could buy Latia a new house, all move in together.
Except kids like us never got happy endings.
I had a lump in my throat but I sucked it up and switched off. It didn’t matter, I was never going back. Mendhel had told me that when he’d told me to choose. Get shot in the back of the head or go join the Thieves’ Guild. It hadn’t been much of a choice.
“Dayton had it set up to splinter,” he said, his voice low, “as soon as the transfer initiated. That was the only way he could get access to it without triggering any alarms. It would have split out into tens of thousands of dummy accounts, bouncing around stock exchanges, commodities trading markets, inve
stments, a whole range of transactions that would buy and sell within milliseconds, bouncing from one corporation and planet to the next until it was effectively untraceable. He had it set to re-consolidate into a number of accounts, way down the line. He might have been a thug but he wasn’t completely stupid.” He was looking at me weird. “As soon as you hijacked the data stream, the security alert went sky high. It never would have worked. And, I know, you didn’t have time to do anything different.” He smiled. “It was a nice move, impressive, I’ll give you that.”
If he was trying to make me feel better, it wasn’t working. It had been a dumbass thing to do. I didn’t care. Dayton was dead. None of it mattered. Even if Maisie was alive, there was no way back to her and there was nothing I could do to help her anymore.
Except Mendhel gave me another lifeline.
“There is a way,” he said quietly and added intently, “This is the Thieves’ Guild. This tab you’ve been given? You pull it off, you’ll be assigned to the list and given more. You can earn a lot of money here, LC, real money, and if that’s what you want, you can send every single penny of it back to Kheris. I just…”
He stopped as the elevator doors opened and the tall, thin guy from the airlock walked out, scowling when he saw me. He walked past and went straight into NG’s office.
Mendhel watched him go, muttering under his breath, “I can’t believe you broke into Science.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t. It felt like I was trapped, caught between feeling like crap for screwing up so badly that I might have trashed my chances here before I’d even started, and feeling resentful that I was stuck in a situation I had no control over and suddenly dependent on these people to make everything okay back at the place I could never call home again.
Mendhel exhaled, probably annoyed at himself for even giving me that chance.
“I have to go in there and persuade them you can do this tab,” he said. “Can you?”
I didn’t know and I didn’t know what to say but he’d just given me a real reason to want to.
Sienna asked me the same question, eight days later, five hours before we were due to deploy. That reputation I have of never being scared? She’s one of the few people who can see through it. I was done in the Maze, done with the briefings and had nothing to pack. They’d told us to go rest but I couldn’t. I had no idea where Hilyer was but I went to the mess and sat in a corner with a bottle of water, feet up on the chair next to me and head leaning back against the bulkhead, eyes closed. Just breathing. I didn’t want to sleep, I didn’t want to read and I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Everyone avoided me anyway. Except for Sienna. I knew it was her as she approached and I couldn’t help smiling, opening my eyes as she nudged my feet off the chair and sat down, replacing the bottled water with a beer.
“One won’t do you any harm.”
I sat up.
“This is one helluva tab you’ve been given for your first time out,” she said, voice soft.
The bottle was cold. I didn’t open it. I just held it against my forehead and looked at her from under it.
“Can you do it?”
I nodded. There was no other answer. What was I supposed to say? I’d always had this stupid response, like a knee jerk reaction, any time anyone dared me to do something stupid, no matter how dangerous. The more risky it was, the quicker I was to say yes. But there on the Alsatia, it felt like I’d stalled. Faltered right when it really counted. Like I’d suddenly realised I was in the real world and it was serious.
She squeezed my knee. “We’ll be right there. The Chief’s even saying that NG is gonna send Thunderclouds to watch over you.” She looked me in the eye. “You know what they are, yeah?”
I did. I’d read everything on the guild I could get my hands on, and a load more they didn’t realise I’d got access to.
“Have you seen one?”
I shook my head.
She laughed. “Come with me.”
She called a couple of the extraction agents to follow us and joked with them as we took the lift down to the docks. She introduced them as one of the teams that would be on stand-by if we needed them. I felt weirdly small and insignificant and at the same time like I was the centre of attention and the most important asset they’d ever covered. It was unnerving. They knew everything about us and what we were going out to do. Like there were no secrets anywhere.
No one had mentioned Science though. Maybe some stuff was held under lock and key, after all.
Sienna nudged her elbow into my arm. I’d stopped listening to what they were saying and looked up at her.
“Don’t think. This close to a tab? You don’t think, you just do.” She scrubbed her hand over my head with a laugh.
I’d never had my hair cut so short. I’d never had it long, but never as short as this. I felt like a criminal. Maybe that was the point.
I brushed her off but it made me smile.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now, you wanna see something really cool?”
The lift doors opened. The docks on the Alsatia were insane, clangs and bangs from ships hooking onto the exterior hull a constant noise, the deck reverberating under my feet. The whole area was a frenzy of logistical activity, everyone busy, crates and containers moving everywhere, slick as hell. Going down there was like scratching the surface of a shiny mirror and seeing how much chaos and effort it was taking to keep it so smooth.
I’d only been there once before, when we’d got here, in no fit state to take much notice of anything. That second time was overwhelming, but they steered me away from the main deck and into a side tunnel that was so cold I had to pull down my sleeves and bunch them round my hands.
We stopped at a door.
Sienna turned to me with a grin. “You ready?”
She hit the button and it opened with a hiss onto a gantry above an enormous hangar.
I’d seen pictures, even scoped out the plans and specifications out of curiosity, but it was nothing compared to seeing it for real. Peanut would have pissed himself.
The Thundercloud was huge. It hung there, suspended, humming like it was alive, engineers crawling all over it in mechanised suits, drones hooking up tubes and conduits like they were feeding it.
Sienna let me gawp like an idiot for a second then she gave me the rundown, pointing out each feature, each vane and turret, energy systems, tracking systems, defence grid actuators, ammunition storage, firing tubes of phenomenal scale.
“There’s nothing like them,” she said, leaning on the handrail. “The most advanced weapons platform either side of the line. No one else has anything close.”
One of the extraction agents clapped me on the back. “One Thundercloud can wipe out a city in the blink of an eye. Or she can pinpoint a single human target from orbit. And you’ll have two of them babysitting you, kid.”
The other one added like she was trying to reassure me, “Her intelligence is off the scale. Highest grade AI there is.”
It was an AI. I knew it was but my stomach still flipped when she said it. I didn’t know if I wanted to be on the ground with that thing in orbit, targeting me. I think I even took a step back as if it could hear what I was thinking.
Sienna must have read the look on my face. “They’re smart. We trust them. Don’t ever think otherwise.” She gave me a shove. “And besides, you’ll have us. We might not be there on the ground with you, but we’ll be watching. Okay?”
I stared at it. “I’ll be fine,” I muttered.
I had to be. I didn’t have much choice.
The extraction guy acknowledged one of the techies down in the hangar with a wave and turned to me. “Do you want to come meet her?”
“What?”
“Do you want to go down there and meet the Thundercloud? Skye is one of the best.”
I looked down and into the dock bottom and spotted Hilyer with another of the extraction teams. They were standing alongside an AI core
transfer pod waiting to be loaded into the hoist that would lower it into the heart of the gigantic weapons platform. From this angle I could just make out a pulsating sphere that looked like it was made of liquid mercury, constantly shifting and changing shape inside the pod. Just the thought of being that close to one made me feel queasy and knowing it had a name was too weird.
“No. Thank you.”
Sienna squeezed my shoulder. “Are you going to be okay?”
I didn’t know.
Honestly? I was such a mess I thought they were going to change their minds, pull me at the last minute, take me off the list and throw me out on my ear.
And when I stumbled off the prisoner transfer drop ship, wrists and ankles manacled, into Redemption’s prison yard, I wished they had.
Chapter 10
It was hard not to panic, shuffling out into that dark chill rain and seeing the guards with guns ready, the high walls, the razor wire, floodlights bright after the darkness they’d kept us in on the ship.
We’d dropped out of orbit into a deepening dusk, flying low over a rough sea to an island, waves crashing against dark cliffs that gave way to low hills that seemed to stretch forever, just the blinking lights of occasional masts and waystations breaking the monotony. I’d peered out of the window and watched the lights of the buildings appear below, the ominous sprawling structure looming from the moorland, matching the schematic and virtual models of our briefings. Mendhel’s words echoed in my mind as we circled waiting permission to land… “One of the highest security containment facilities in the Empire. A central core houses the admin block, above a power plant and the AI that controls the whole penal colony. There are five separate adult prisons on site, all with wings that stretch out in interconnected blocks, maximum security going down five levels below ground level. Accommodation for the staff is in a self-contained village within the complex. The juvenile facility is separate, on the perimeter, smaller, self-contained – central exercise yard with accommodation blocks, school blocks, sports fields, gym. There are three separate landing fields, again all self-contained, one to service the juvenile facility, one for staff, the other for the adult prisoners. The entire facility is surrounded by sixty foot high walls, monitored by the AI, protected by guard towers and automated defences. The reach of the AI extends beyond the walls to cover the entire island. There is no way out. There are no gaps. There are no blindspots. This is one of the best kept, well maintained, highly funded correctional facilities in the galaxy. This is the machine that feeds the Imperial Xùnzhí Corps. The Emperor’s penal battalions…”