by C. G. Hatton
I watched the searchlights as they scanned up and down Main. If you got caught in the light, they had automated sentries that opened up. I followed the pattern until I got it. It was a tough one, randomised with a five sequence alternator and an arbitrary weighter. Nice. I made sure I had it, timed my run and sprinted across and into an alleyway back on our side of the line.
Maisie and Calum were waiting for me on the roof of an abandoned building that overlooked Main. It was our regular lookout point to spy on the garrison.
I made my way up there and dropped down next to them.
“You’re bleeding,” Maisie said, grabbing my arm and twisting it to see.
Calum punched me in the back. “What happened, squirt?” he said. “You almost get caught?”
Maisie shoved him and whispered, harshly, in his ear. She was older than Calum by two weeks. That made her boss of our gang. And he hated it.
He shrugged her off.
I couldn’t help the grin, still buzzing from the adrenaline high. I never got caught and he knew it.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Maisie, “I didn’t leave a mess anywhere.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s nasty. Stuff like that gets infected,” she said. “You need to go see your grandmother.” She didn’t ask if I’d got anything. She just held out her hand.
I leaned back and stuck my hand in my pocket, rooting about until my fingers touched the cool metal of the tiny module.
I dropped it into her palm.
She didn’t even look at it, just made it vanish with a flourish as if she was performing a magic trick. The money she’d get for it would keep us in supplies for three or four days, five if we were careful.
Maisie looked me in the eye. “Nice one, Luka. Hey, you wanna see? There are new troops. We got fresh meat to torment.”
She held out a pair of field glasses. I took them, feeling a shiver spark down my spine, and crawled forward on my stomach to steal a peek over the edge of the rooftop, straining to see the Imperial Garrison, flinching back as the defence grid shot down another rocket that was getting too close and keeping my head low as debris billowed out in a glowing cloud.
The rocket attacks were still fairly regular, sometimes hitting this side of the line, sometimes that, the resistance weren’t great with their targeting.
I peeked out again, lifted the glasses to my eyes and froze.
It was him.
Chapter 3
Maisie nudged me in the leg. “What is it?” she hissed.
From the rooftop, I had a perfect view in through the gate along the main approach into the compound where an armoured personnel carrier was offloading the latest batch of Imperial troops, fresh to Kheris, with no idea what was in store for them.
Except for one. He’d been here before. He was wearing a helmet, stupid not to out there, and goggles, they all wore goggles when they arrived on Kheris, even at night, but I knew it was him. I’d seen his name on the roster in the base but almost hadn’t believed that it could be.
Maisie shoved me again. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I lied.
I stared across into the base and watched as Charlie reached back into the APC to pull out a kit bag. So he was staying. It had been over a year and he didn’t look any different. New stripes on his arm, so he’d been promoted since he was last here but the same laugh as he joked with the guys he was replacing, the same casual ease in the way he moved even though, to him, the gravity was high. Most of the troops posted to Kheris hated it. Charlie never had. We never knew any different. You didn’t realise how high the gravity was until you set foot on an Earth-standard orbital or ship. Most of us kids never got off that dirtball to feel it. I almost didn’t.
Maisie crawled up next to me and settled on her elbows, taking the field glasses and holding them to her eyes. She looked for a second but it was obvious she didn’t recognise him. He was just another uniform. Another enemy soldier to watch out for. “Luka, what’s wrong?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” I said again.
I nudged her and we shimmied backwards, away from the edge and sat up. I took the thick hooded shirt she held out and shrugged into it, looking up at Calum. “You wanna come in with me next time?” I said, knowing fine well he wouldn’t. It was mischief to even ask but I couldn’t resist.
He shook his head, looking down his nose at me. “I’ve got more serious business to take care of.”
I grinned.
A rocket hit and detonated somewhere in the darkness behind us, trembling the rooftop under us, showering down debris.
“C’mon, we need to get out of here,” Maisie said. “It’s not safe.” She squeezed my hand and held up the tiny module. “You hungry?”
She didn’t need to ask. We were always hungry.
She laughed. “Come on. This should be a good one.”
We needed it to be a good one, we hadn’t eaten in two days.
She pulled me to my feet and gave Calum a shove. “Race you back,” she said and she ran, dark curls bouncing, disappearing south, back into our half of the city.
I went straight to Latia’s place because, although I wouldn’t admit it, my arm was throbbing with a heat that felt like it was already trouble. I should explain about Latia. She wasn’t really my grandmother, she was actually my great-grandmother, and she lived in a proper house. A real intact home even though it was in the southside. My great-grandmother was charmed and the bombs that had hit the blocks either side of her hadn’t made so much as a dent in her walls. She was fairy godmother to all the kids that didn’t have a home and she’d given up trying to persuade me to live with her a long time ago. I crashed out there now and then. She still kept my old room for me even though I’d not lived there since she’d got fed up of me running away and finally said, fine, I could go live wherever I wanted. I had a problem staying in one place. I’ve still never really shaken that off.
That night, she wasn’t impressed with me. She made that clear as she cleaned the gash in my arm, splashing precious vodka onto it and binding it tight with a clean bandage. She didn’t say a word until she’d finished then she took both of my hands in hers and looked at me intently. “You know what they’ll do if they catch you?”
I’d heard it all before and opened my mouth without thinking. “Firing squad. Up against the wall.”
She frowned and leaned forward, moving one hand to stroke a finger across the knotted band I wore on my wrist, the one she insisted I wore, for luck, to ward off bad things. It was as if she was reassuring herself it was still there. That I was still protected. She looked into my eyes and whispered, “You are so like your mother, and her mother, it scares me.” She stood and turned away. “You know the young ones look up to you?” she said, starting to rummage in cupboards, putting the vodka back into its safe place. “They see what you do and they think they can get away with it too. You will get them killed, Luka, if you don’t get yourself killed first.”
I chewed on my lip so I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to get into an argument with her. No one ever won an argument with Latia Cole.
There’s something else I should let you know about my great-grandmother. She had a daughter, her daughter had a daughter and I was the first boy in generations. It was like it gave me a hold over her, an ace, a get out of jail free card, a pass to do whatever I wanted and I took full advantage every chance I got. I could be a little shit and I knew it. She knew it but I could melt her with a smile. I didn’t realise until way later how much it hurt her every time I skipped out. I didn’t realise a lot of things. Until it was too late. But isn’t that always the way?
Latia turned back to me, hands on hips. “Now make yourself useful and go fetch my box from the cellar.”
I loved my great-grandmother’s cellar. It was like a peek into another world, almost a kind of museum. She had books, real books with real paper. I used to spend hours down there, trawling through them. Reading everything I could about anything and everything.<
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She had boxes stacked high, crammed with old stuff, maps, gadgets from another era, clothes no one had worn in decades, mining kit from generations ago when Kheris was first colonised. Everything was labelled, some handwritten scrawls, some printed labels, some in a weird symbolic system code.
There were airtight containers down there she’d told me not to go near. Stuff from the mines and processing plants. I’d cracked one open, years ago, just to see what was in it. There was only this murky liquid that had given off fumes that were in the air before I could snap the lid closed. I hadn’t died or anything so dramatic but I’d had a headache so bad I could hardly see for three days and I hadn’t been able to tell Latia about it in case she knew what I’d done. I’d left those containers alone since then.
Her box was on a shelf by the bottom step. There was something I needed to do first though so I edged past it and squeezed through into the far corner, ending up on my stomach to crawl under a pile of boxes.
My box was hidden behind a loose wall panel. It didn’t take too much jiggling to ease the panel off and drag it out. I sat there, popped it open and as much as I meant to just drop the pass into it and scoot, I couldn’t help rifling through all my stuff. This was my cool stuff, the stuff I didn’t want anyone else to find. I had a live stun grenade in there, a slick little silver ball that had a corporate ID stamped into it. There were little pots of black and green camouflage paint that Charlie used to give me every time he came back from some other posting where, as he said it, “the whole damned planet hadn’t been red dust”. He told me once he’d seen oceans that were as big as the deserts on Kheris. That much space, all covered in water? I’d not been able to even imagine it back then. I thought he was kidding me but he’d given me a picture. That was in there somewhere too.
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 headac
he 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.