by C. G. Hatton
One of the soldiers climbed in, rifle in his arms, corporal’s stripes on his uniform. My heart was going nineteen to the dozen. I could smell the smoke and explosive fumes on my clothes. He looked round at us all, his eye catching mine for a second. I stared back, blank, bracing myself, expecting to be hauled off there and then and shot as KRM, but he just turned to the driver and said, “Only adults with current visas. The kids are all native. They stay.”
There was a clamour, crying. Spacey gripped my hand tight. I shifted my weight to get up but the schoolteacher stepped forward. “No, we all go. We have papers for all these children.”
They didn’t have papers for me. The school had given me some when they made me enrol but I’d lost those years ago.
She was steadfastly avoiding looking at me.
The corporal shook his head. “We have orders. Transport is limited. We’re taking citizens with visas. With somewhere to go. The adults can go through. This bus needs to back the hell up.”
He turned. She stepped in front of him and he shoved her aside. There were more yells. I stood, shaking off Spacey’s hand and standing in front of her. The soldier went to bring up his rifle. In a bus full of schoolchildren, he went to raise his rifle. The driver was shouting, the other adults were shouting, the schoolteacher the loudest, and it felt like the guy was a hair’s breadth from opening fire but another soldier climbed on board, hands up, yelling for quiet, telling his buddy to stand down, for Christ’s sake. “We’ve got a transport,” he said. “Freighter captain just in from Erica says he’ll ditch his cargo and take the kids. Corporal, get them all processed and get them through. Christ, this is the last thing we need.”
He left.
The corporal was pissed and started demanding papers. The schoolteacher turned to me. She mouthed, “Sit down,” trying to be reassuring but her hands were shaking.
I sat. Spacey clambered onto my lap and we sat there as the school staff fumbled out all the official crap they had to appease the asshole corporal. I had no idea how she accounted for me. I perched on that seat as the bus finally pulled through the gate and into the port, heart pounding, injured leg stretched out, Spacey sitting on my other knee, and it would have been so easy to go with it, just close my eyes and go with them.
But it could never be that easy.
The bus pulled up at some kind of terminal building and they ferried us off and inside. I hesitated at the door. I held Spacey’s hand tight and leaned down to whisper in her ear. The woman was watching us. Spacey did me proud. She listened intently to every word I said. I felt her little chin go up, that defiance we had ingrained into us kicking in.
“I’ll come find you,” I whispered. “I promise.”
She hugged me tighter.
I stood up. “I need the bathroom,” I said.
The schoolteacher looked at me, something like dismay in her eyes. She nodded, took Spacey’s hand and led her away.
I split.
We were inside the perimeter. All the attention was focused outwards, inside no one was watching too closely. I checked the time and limped out across to the workshops.
The maintenance bays were open, seemingly abandoned. There was the small courier ship Peanut had mentioned and a couple of shuttles parked up in the service bays. But there were no people in sight and it was obvious Peanut wasn’t there. I wondered if he’d found a way off-world already, if he was even still alive, and my heart sank. I stood there in the dark, chest heaving, leaning heavily on the crutches.
He walked in behind me, flicked on the light and made me jump out of my skin.
“Comms are back,” he said, throwing tools and components onto the workbench. He didn’t even seem surprised to see me. “Whatever was on that ship jamming comms, UM must have trashed it when they got in. They’re in, did you see that? And there’s Imperial reinforcements inbound. They’re less than a day out. The garrison can probably hold out that long, I reckon, then it’s going to get really ugly.”
I didn’t care. I pulled the key out of my pocket and held it up. “You need to help me get this into the garrison,” I said, words sticking in my throat. “Dayton’s going to kill Maisie and Latia unless I do it and I can’t get in.” I faltered. That was still tough to admit. “Peanut…”
He wiped his hand on a rag. “That’s the key you stole. I had a feeling that’s why Dayton wanted you dead. I figured it had to be something to do with that.”
I checked the time again. My hand was shaking. “He’s had a change of heart. Seems he doesn’t want me dead now. He needs me to do something for him. With this key, and I don’t even know what it is. I have to get back into the garrison and get to a secure terminal. I have less than four hours or he’s going to kill them… Peanut, I don’t know how to get in.”
“I tried to get back to you,” he said. “What happened?”
I couldn’t breathe and I opened my mouth to say Benjie the son of a bitch betrayed me but I couldn’t say it. I shook my head. “Just tell me how I get in.”
Standing in that workshop, with Dayton’s people setting fire to our city and Imperial forces about to descend on the colony in force, I reckoned I’d just run at the wall if there was no other option. I’d figure something out or die trying. Latia and Maisie deserved that from me at least.
I was trembling, about to walk away and be damned when Peanut shrugged in that unassuming way of his and said simply, “You don’t need to. That diplomatic vessel is still parked right outside. Get on board that and you have a connection right into the heart of the garrison.”
I think I just stared at him but he was throwing me a lifeline.
“It’s the only remote access into the whole secure level of the base,” he said, throwing me a pair of maintenance crew overalls that were two sizes too big, and a pass that wouldn’t fool anyone if they so much as glanced at it. “A diplomatic vessel will have all the security clearance you need. And it’ll be a damn sight easier to break into than a garrison under siege.”
I grabbed the overalls and struggled into them without thinking.
He looked me up and down and laughed. “Yeah, you look nothing like an engineer. Just keep your head down. And leave the crutches. I’ll get you something that’ll help.”
Peanut also gave me a headset, a tiny bead to stick in my ear, and told me we could talk if needed but keep it to a minimum. I gave him a hand to throw a load of parts and kit into crates on a loader then hunkered down between them as he drove out. The whole place was still in chaos. I could hear the shouts and yells as the soldiers at the gate processed the incoming crowds. It was getting more and more desperate. Peanut drove round and stopped at the accident and emergency centre that was across from the terminal building. I stayed down and out of sight. He vanished inside and reappeared, tossing a small box to me and jumping back into the cab.
I braced myself as he drove off again, fumbling open the box and downing a handful of the painkillers, double dosing, not realising how bad it had got until it started to ease off. The drugs kicking in gave me a rush of confidence that started to push out the despair. I could do this. I was the kid that could do anything, who’d never been caught. I felt like I was holding all the aces and the game was mine to control.
Peanut drove the loader right up to the diplomatic ship. I hid there, listening as Peanut argued with the guards on the access ramp that he didn’t care they didn’t know they had a bust Prazi manifold, it had been reported and it was flashing up warnings on all systems, and if they wanted to make orbit before the space port was overrun they better let him on board to fix it. They bitched that no one had notified them but as Peanut pointed out, the whole place was in turmoil and the space port personnel were barely able to maintain what little order there was. It was hardly surprising in all the chaos, he said, that no one was telling anyone what was going on. I heard the guards grumble their agreement, the life of the military grunt, the other sagely conceding that it was not theirs to reason why. They laughed at that then told Pe
anut he’d better make it fast because they had clearance to go as soon as the boss got back.
While he distracted the guards, I dropped down and sneaked around the back of the loader and up the ramp. I glanced over my shoulder as Peanut got the guards to help him unload the heaviest crate. Then I was in.
The entry way was undoubtedly being scanned, but the guards on the ramp had just called in that maintenance technicians were coming on board for urgent repairs so I was banking on nobody watching a monitor being surprised at seeing a guy in coveralls coming on board. I paused for a moment to get my bearings, orienting from what I’d seen of the outside of the ship with what I expected inside. She was a big ship but not huge, not one of the deep spacers that hauled millions of tonnes of freight and cargo across space. There would be a flight deck, crew’s quarters, a messing area, engine room and a secure communications area. That was where I needed to get to.
I ditched the baggy overalls behind some containers. I reckoned I’d have a better chance of pulling off dumb, scared kid trying to sneak off planet than I did maintenance engineer. I would even have squeezed out a tear or two if required. Most grown ups really don’t know what to do with a hysterical kid. It makes them uncomfortable and I figured if it came to it and I blubbed enough, they’d be more likely to ditch me onto the terminal staff than arrest me for spying or terrorism.
I moved round the bay to an airlock that was open. I could see the cameras monitoring the bay. The two security guys were huffing and puffing up the loading ramp as they struggled with Peanut’s overloaded crate.
I took a gamble that anyone watching was focused on them and I darted through the airlock into a corridor, instinctively turned right and saw what I was looking for. Maintenance access hatch. There was a maintenance terminal just inside. It wouldn’t give me access to ship’s systems without a pass key and I didn’t have time to hack it, but I didn’t need to, all I needed was the general layout of the ship’s deck plans. They flashed up. A quick glance was all I needed then I split.
I went up and pulled myself into a cable conduit. It was tight but I’d been in worse and I wormed my way along until I reached a junction where there was an access to the ventilation system. No electrobes because there was no AI. Earth would never have an AI on one of their black ops ships. I popped open a grill and squeezed through a hole that was uncomfortably small, scraping skin and drawing blood as I went. It seemed like Lady Luck was dealing me another good card. In another six months time I wouldn’t have been able to get through it at all.
The vent shaft was only slightly wider. No adult could ever have fitted through it. I wriggled as fast as I could, hoping I wasn’t too late. I reached the spot I was after, directly above the comms centre. If it was manned, this all came to an end here but Fate dealt me another ace and the room was empty. I still couldn’t enter though, not yet. I carefully removed the ventilation grill, being careful not to trigger the mesh of laser sensor beams across the opening. The conduit might not have been large enough for an adult to squeeze through but that didn’t mean Earth wasn’t paranoid enough or stupid enough to leave every opening into a secure area unprotected. I got into position. Now it was all down to Peanut.
After what seemed like an age had passed, and with my arms starting to scream and tremble with the strain of the braced position I was holding, the lights flickered off ever so briefly and that was my signal. As we’d planned, Peanut had killed the main power and disrupted the backup from kicking in.
I heard him say, “Go,” over the headset and I moved. It gave me only seconds before the power was back on. I dropped through the small hole. I wish I could say it was impressive, that I performed some amazing feat of acrobatics and flipped to land on my feet with feline-like grace. The truth was that I fell like a bag of rocks, hit a console, bounced off, crashed into a chair and cracked my head for good measure. Everything went hazy for a second then I looked up. The lights were back on, the detection grid was functional again, there was a trickle of blood running into my eye but there were no alarms going off. And there was a secure Imperial Diplomatic Corps communications terminal right in front of me.
I pulled the access key out of my pocket, stuck it into the terminal and watched as it came to life, scrolling numbers and accessing systems so fast it was dizzying.
I don’t know what I was expecting but I was past caring. I just wanted it done. It slowed and started to process a series of protocols. And that’s when it got my attention.
It wasn’t even accessing the garrison’s database. It was all right there on the ship. I watched as it ran through reports and configured accounts. It didn’t take much to add it all up.
“Oh shit,” I whispered, heart sinking and a chill descending so fast I shivered.
Peanut suddenly sounded loud in my ear. I’d forgotten I was even wearing the comms gear. “How’s it going, squirt? I’m pretty much finished here. I’ve tinkered with some stuff and changed out a few parts but these goons are looking over my shoulder. I can bluff them but they’re going to start getting twitchy if I take much longer. How are you doing?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Luka?”
“Peanut, it’s a ledger.” I grabbed at the terminal, fingers twitching, shoulders trembling. I got it to respond and I got it to do what I wanted. I started to query it, pulling up stats and reports, feeling sick deep inside as I saw what had been going on.
“A ledger?” he said across the connection. “Why would Dayton want you killed over a ledger? That doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“None of it does.” I couldn’t say what was going through my head.
I hesitated.
“What’s wrong?”
“Dayton gave me another key.”
“Put it in.”
I had a really bad feeling, deep inside, tugging at every instinct I had.
Peanut nudged me. “Do it.”
I pulled it out of my pocket and stuck it into the terminal, watching as it engaged and half expecting there to be a bang, a massive boom as the garrison exploded.
It didn’t. The terminal started to scroll through the ledger. Numbers flashed up as it accessed an account and began transferring tens of millions of Imperial credits.
The connection engaged again. “What the hell is it doing?” Peanut said.
“It’s making Dayton rich,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Dayton’s not working for the resistance, he’s working for the Empire.”
Chapter 22
I sat back, watching as the money flowed. “They’ve been paying him. They’ve been paying him to betray us and keep the rebellion as ineffective as hell. That’s why he wanted me. He thought I knew. That’s why he needed me dead.” It caught in my throat as I said it. “So I couldn’t tell anyone. You should see this.”
I pulled up one report after another.
“He’s been working with them the whole time.” I scrolled back and paused the stats. “That offensive two years ago, when they tried to clear us out… we took massive losses, the Imperial forces took nothing.” I scrolled back again. “That time Dayton blew the supply lines to the mines…” I almost laughed, “…it was staged. They knew exactly where and when he was going to attack and had countermeasures in place before he even instigated it. When Dayton attacked the airfield, the trucks they destroyed were obsolete. They were left there for him to destroy. So it could look like a victory.” I sat there staring at it. “The Earth forces didn’t lose anything. It was all staged… It goes right back.”
“To Rainfall?”
I had a lump in my throat. “Yeah, Dayton told them where we were.”
Where the leaders of the resistance were. It wasn’t by chance that our building, that my family was targeted. It was a surgical strike.
And the whole time the numbers flashed and the cash flowed into Dayton’s account.
It finished and I thought that was going to be it, but then it started to transfer data, lists and
names, account numbers, downloading the full details of the ledger from the IDC database onto Dayton’s key. It was a whole list of people on the Empire’s payroll. And not just on Kheris.
“We can’t let him get away with it,” Peanut said through the link.
“No.”
There was a clatter and brief static.
Peanut cursed. “Whatever you have to do,” he sent, “do it fast.”
I heard him yelling at whoever had come in, banging something and complaining loudly that their coupling system was shot as well.
I looked back at the terminal and the data scrolling across it. I’d only got a glance but I knew every line of that ledger, each digit of every account on it, every detail of every transaction. I knew enough to sink Dayton forever. I just had to decide what to do with it. And then I realised something. The key hadn’t just opened the data file, the account it was transferring funds to was an Imperial account. The type that every Imperial citizen is given at birth.
I reached for the terminal.
Peanut yelled to them that he was finished before I was done. My hand was shaking so bad I almost blew it. I hit the last command, pulled out the keys and abandoned the terminal. Peanut told me to run so I ran.
The ship was firing up its engines before we even got back to the workshops.
Peanut shoved me inside. “What now?”
“We need to get away.” I emptied the box of painkillers, trying to figure out how many more I could take. “I need to go get Maisie and Latia and we need to get out of here.”
He squinted at me. Peanut knew me too well. And he’d never questioned me, never chided me, never doubted me. And right then, he said, “What have you done?” like for the first time, he wasn’t sure.