by C. G. Hatton
“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 like 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.
It was like having my own private playground.
I walked out onto an overhead beam and waved down at the others as they appeared below.
Maisie yelled up to me to be careful but that just made me climb higher. I ran out along an open gantry and saw what Benjie must have been hinting at.
I dropped down and yelled, “Hey, Peanut, come take a look at this.”
Peanut whistled when he saw it.
Calum was struggling to breathe, he was so out of shape. He pushed past us and grumbled, “What the hell is it?”
Peanut was hypnotised by it all and walked forward, almost stroking his hand along the crates and barrels. In the centre of it all was some kind of robot, half built, components glistening in the dim light, towering almost to the ceiling of the shed. It looked like it was sleeping, like it could power up at any second, turn and confront us for trespassing. The rest of its modules and parts were strewn on the floor, half in and out of boxes.
Peanut turned to look at us, goggles perched on top of his head pushing his hair out at all angles. He grinned like a kid in a toyshop, wandered back and whispered, loud and theatrical, “Holy shit.”
We left, and riding our dirt bikes back across the desert, it felt like we’d imagined it. Maisie yelled at me, “Was that even real?”
We laughed. Peanut said it was a mining robot but I argued it could be a super soldier. It had an AI, that was obvious from the conduits. Maybe its weapons were in another box. He’d said no way but he’d looked anyway, pocketing as many gizmos as he could without risking anyone noticing too much, and we’d run when we heard the main hangar doors start to open.
We should have gone straight back into the city but Calum cut me up, skidding to a halt and forcing me to stop. He pointed. The old midway telecoms tower was looming in the dust.
“Bet you can’t reach the top of the mast,” he said.
I’d climbed a few of the towers before but never that one. It was decrepit as hell, abandoned for years and near to collapse.
“Bet I can,” I said without thinking and took off for it.
I was half way up, reaching for one of the cross struts and only holding on with one hand, when there was a roar and a tremble in the air that washed right over us. The ship hit the ground out near the foothills, wiping out one of the mining facilities out there.
The fireball was massive. The mast shook, I grabbed for the bar and I almost lost it completely as my hand slipped on the slender shaft and I dangled there, mouth open, staring at the smoke and flames.
The others down below me were yelling. I wrapped my legs around the mast, slid back down and dropped onto the roof.
“They’ve shot down one of our drop ships,” Maisie said.
She was standing right on the edge and squinting out into the darkness. Dayton and his resistance army didn’t have many ships but they had a couple of low orbiters that dropped supplies to them out in the desert.
“Not a drop ship,” I said.
She looked at me, raising her eyebrows.
“Too much fuel burning.” I’d done the calcs from the distance and the height of the thick black column of billowing smoke. “It’s a deep spacer.” Only jump ships carried stuff that burned like that.
She didn’t question me. No one ever asked me how I knew all the weird things I did.
Calum swore. “We should go back,” he said.
I stared out into the night as lights began to trail out from the northern part of the city towards the crash site, emergency response and rescue teams probably, APCs bouncing along the dirt tracks, gunships tracking them, scanning the beams of their searchlights all around, looking for insurgents.
“We should go see what’s going on,” I said.
And that’s how I got into trouble.
Chapter 7
I sometimes wonder what would be different if I’d known then what I know now about that crashed ship. We just wanted to see what was happening. See if there was anything to be scavenged.
We jumped back on the bikes and took off across the desert, eventually ditching them when we got close enough. We ran the rest of the way. I was messing around, half running, half tumbling, throwing myself into backflips and somersaults. Maisie started singing marching songs and we all joined in, laughing. We didn’t have a care in the world.
That was probably the last time I can remember ever feeling like that.
We shut up when we got close enough to see the cordon they were putting in place around it. Then we got real quiet, real quick. We kept to the low ground and dried out river channels so no one could see us, hunkering down anytime a gunship flew overhead whether it had its searchlights on or not. We dropped into a ditch and crawled as close as we dared.
“Why would they build a perimeter like that?” Maisie whispered.
It was a defensive ring of overlapping fields of fire, way out from the crash site, alternate auto sentry positions and manned guard posts.
“Is that to keep us out?” Peanut muttered, “or to keep something in?”
He was paranoid as anything, did I say that?
We sat there in the dust, peering out of our little foxhole. We could just about make out the hulking shape of the wreck in there, plumes of dense smoke still billowing out from whatever in there was burning, debris and wreckage scattered on the desert floor lit up by the searchlights scanning out from the perimeter around it.
The refinery was trashed, mangled pipelines spewing steam, twisted gantries crashed into the low buildings on ground level.
It was eerily quiet.
“Is it Wintran?” Calum said, too loud.
Maisie elbowed him in the ribs.
“It can’t be Earth,” Peanut whispered. “No way. The guns would be pointing outwards if they were defending it. They’re containing it.”
Whatever it was.
Calum turned to me. “Go on then, squirt. You reckon you can get up close to it?” He laughed. “Not so cocky now, are you?”
I wish I could say I’d learned something of self-restraint in those happy times on Kheris but you know me, and you know I never have. Even now.
I braced myself to get up, and turned to Maisie and Peanut. “If it’s Wintran, it’ll have insignia.” Back then, there’d been five of the big original mega-corporations still operational. It was too big to be Zang or Marathon and I didn’t think it was UM. “What do you reckon?” I said. “Aries or Yarrimer?�
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Maisie gave me her look. “Luka, don’t.”
I threw her a grin. It wasn’t every day we had corporate Winter crash-land on our doorstep and upset the Imperial troops so much. She wasn’t persuaded but she didn’t wrestle me to the ground or anything to stop me going.
I went to climb out and stopped. I could feel it more than hear it. I ducked back down, flattening myself to the ground and gesturing the others to stay low.
They must have emptied half the troops out of the city. A convoy of APCs and jeeps rumbled past, a couple of DZs in there for good measure.
I should have stayed where I was but I didn’t. I didn’t think, just timed it right, ran out and ran alongside an APC until I could jump and grab onto the side of it.
I hunkered down and clung on, looking back and watching with a grin as Calum tried to do the same. He wasn’t fast enough. He never did have the reflexes to act on impulse.
I watched him fume as I left them behind. The problem with bullies is that they don’t like to get shown up. The problem with smartass kids like me is that we don’t realise when we are showing people up and somehow it always comes as a surprise when people take offence. At least I knew where I was with Calum. He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. Maisie was different. Sometimes she’d back me and sometimes she’d back him. And there were times I couldn’t tell.
It was a bumpy ride but I held on. I was a lot stronger than I looked, one thing to thank the gravity for.
They drove right up to the perimeter. I dropped down as they pulled up and hid underneath, watching as the back ramp clanged open, kicking up a cloud of dust, boots thundering down. There were fast and sharp exchanges of orders, crisp military precision as they hustled into position. I’ve never got the hang of taking orders and even then I found it bizarre that guys who were so smart could snap to at a yell from some idiot in command. Charlie had tried to explain it to me when I was nine, the night he was with the gunship crew that caught me out after curfew when they were grounded because of a thunderstorm. Games, he’d said as he was dragging me in out of the rain so I didn’t get caught by another patrol. You play the games and you choose which games you want to play and how you want to play them. That was the trick. That was how to be really smart. Then they’d got out the beers and taught me how to play poker.