by T Q Chant
She reckoned she had a little bit of time, but not a lot. Okafor would be somewhere with his head buried in her pad; Cho was almost certainly out looking for her secret friend.
She flipped the medkit open, slapped on a couple of analgesic patches. She reckoned Fassetti had broken at least one of her ribs and something in her shoulder wasn’t right, but she didn’t have time to deal with that right now. She shot coag spray up both nostrils, then popped the top of her last beer and swilled her mouth out, spitting a bloody stream onto the floor before draining the tin in one long drag. “Fuck. Better.”
She managed to get the body armour on without screaming at the hot lances of pain searing through her. Helmet as well, she could do without taking any more blows to the head. Medkit into one pocket, ration bars into the other; extendable baton she kept a hold of. She made sure the unconscious Fassetti was locked in, then limped to the end of the corridor. No-one in reception.
The door stood wide open, hard light beating down through it, her way to freedom. Fucked if they were keeping her pad, though. Favouring her right leg, leaning on the wall for support, she took the stairs slowly, cautiously.
She needn't have troubled herself. Of Cho there was no sign, and Okafor was in one of the offices with soundplugs in, nodding away as he manipulated skeins of colour over her pad, thoroughly caught in a snarl of security measures. Baton cocked over her shoulder, she advanced on the young man, fury boiling through her and working with the analgesics to dull her pain.
She thought Fassetti must have hit her in the head once too often when the apparition of a slim woman – girl, really – appeared in front of her, hands out, an imploring look on her face as she shook her head vigorously.
Sam cocked the baton back further, realising she wasn’t seeing things. A look of panic crossed the girl’s face, then she fumbled in her loose-fitting tunic and produced a half-eaten ration bar, holding it out with a hopeful look on her face.
Sam read the proffered label, then slowly nodded her understanding. She made a shooing gesture with her hand, but the girl went back to shaking her head, backing up towards the oblivious young techie.
Before Sam could stop her, the girl laid one long-fingered brown hand on Okafor’s shoulder. The boy started, almost crying out as he leapt out of his seat. A look of pure joy crossed his face. “Adisa! I have been so worried about you! Where have you been?”
Sam’s hand went over his mouth. “You seem like a nice enough boy, given the company you keep,” she hissed in his ear. “But I will smash your skull in if you try anything.” She hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt – she’d never actually killed anyone, let alone bashed a head in with a baton.
Okafor almost went limp against her, and Adisa’s eyes were large with fear.
“Good boy,” she said, dumping him back on his seat but closing and scooping up her pad before he could reach for it. “Adisa, right? Keep watch out the window, let me know if you see Cho coming back.”
She crouched down in front of the safe. Oddly enough, Cho didn’t seem to have opened it since her arrival. “Gun would be nice about now,” she muttered. Okafor’s weapon was nowhere to be seen, probably safely checked in the rack downstairs. Before she could start popping the safe again, though, Adisa dashed away from the window and started tugging on her shoulder.
“Take it that means Cho’s on her way.” Sure enough, the squat marshal was striding purposefully towards the building, a heavy sack over one shoulder. Sam dreaded to think what was in it.
The flaw in her plan was rapidly becoming clear. There was only one access point for the security building – no doubt something to do with keeping the place secure. Exiting now would mean going toe-to-toe with the Marshal, and she was in no fit state to do that. The damage Fassetti had inflicted on her was severe enough that the pain relief was already wearing off, and she wasn’t even sure she was going to remain conscious, let alone be able to win another fight.
“Dammit.”
Okafor was staring at her mutely, obviously terrified. Adisa was beckoning her towards a small cupboard on the far wall. She’d stuck her nose in there when looting the place. “We can’t really hide from her in there.”
A cross expression flashed across the girl’s delicate features. “There’s a way out,” she snapped, and jabbed a finger at the floor before disappearing into the tiny space. Sam limped across and looked down. The girl had cleared a crate from the centre of the cupboard and swung open the small hatch revealed. “Must be something only security chiefs get to find out about,” she muttered, peering into the dark space and just making out the rungs of a ladder. “That’s how you’ve been creeping about without me seeing you.”
Adisa nodded, a smile lighting up her face.
“Down we go, then.”
“Not without him,” Adisa rasped again. Sam couldn’t blame her for not speaking until now, each word sounding like it was being ground out by sandpaper. Okafor hovered behind Sam. She hefted the baton but he made no threatening move. “Take me with you,” he said quietly. “They made...made me...”
She eyed the kid. He looked pretty fit, plenty strong enough to take her after the battering she’d already received, but he also seemed cowed and there was some sort of connection with Adisa. She really needed to know what the fuck was going on here as well.
“Adisa, lead the way. Kid, you’re in the middle.” She kept herself from laughing at herself saying that – she could barely have a couple of years on him.
She eyed the rungs with distaste, knowing how much this was going to hurt. There was nothing for it, though.
“Fucked if I’m going to die on this rock.”
CHAPTER SIX – TUNNEL RATS
It may only have been one floor, but each rung of the ladder was tearing agony for Sam. She gritted her teeth as she lowered herself, not letting a sound escape her lips. Cho was in the building – she could hear her calling for Fassetti, and that meant she would hear a scream.
She looked down at Okafor. His eyes were huge in the dim emergency lighting, looking up at her, calculating. Slowly and deliberately, she took her injured arm from the ladder and ran one finger over her throat. He nodded jerkily and hurriedly finished the descent.
Adisa didn’t pause at the bottom, but silently swung a hatch up and disappeared into the inky darkness below. Sam had heard that IGC Corps security headquarters had an escape route – in case colonists became a mob – but had never credited it with much truth. She probably needed to be at a higher paygrade before they’d tell her anything.
As she reached the bottom of the ladder, Sam could hear Cho shouting with rage, obviously finding Fassetti unconscious in the cell. She couldn’t make out the words, but Sam could certainly feel the rage as the Marshal bellowed for her other deputy. It was all the encouragement Sam needed to drop into the darkness. She hissed with pain as she landed, let herself topple sideways against cool plexlining. She was disoriented in the darkness, the top of her head brushing the ceiling of the tunnel; then a cool dry hand took hers and drew her forward. She leant on the wall with her other hand, wheezing for breath. If she could have seen anything, she knew her vision would have been swimming.
It felt like an eternity, walking down that pitch-black tunnel. Sam felt herself getting weaker, the last dregs of the painkillers being overwhelmed by the beating Fassetti had given her.
The thought of him lying face down, battered into submission, gave her the surge of adrenalin she needed to keep going. She’d never thought of herself as a violent or vindictive person (Rule #12 – Don’t get angry, don’t get even), but it had certainly felt good putting the lanky bastard down.
The wall that had been half-supporting, half-guiding her fell away suddenly and she staggered and went down on one knee. It was still pitch dark, but she sensed they were in a much bigger space; that was confirmed when a low red emergency light came on and she realised they were in a small subterranean...bunker was the only word she c
ould think of for it.
It was also, she realised, Adisa’s home – or at least it had been since the calamity had struck. Metal racks on one side were lined with her meagre supplies (including a couple of ration bars Sam recognised), neatly laid out and obviously organised into ration portions. Water recycler. One or two personal items and changes of clothes. A door in the far wall.
“How long have you been down here?”
“Since my father killed my mother,” Adisa said quietly, and Okafor broke down in tears.
Sam let herself sink back against the wall and then slide down onto her haunches. One-handed, she fumbled another drug patch out of the medkit and managed to slide it onto her damaged shoulder before pressing it down, activating the adhesive. She’d have to be sparing with those, but her shoulder was swelling up and would render her whole arm useless if she didn’t do something about it.
“We can’t stop here,” Adisa whispered. “The Marshal will work it out eventually.”
“It’s her fucking tunnel, she’ll work it out pretty soon.”
Okafor shook his head. “They...you...forget. The bright place, it makes you forget.”
“The fuck is this bright place?” She eyeballed Okafor, saw the way he was trembling. “You know, I have a lot of questions but right now is not the time for them. Grab what you can carry and let’s go somewhere a little more secure, shall we?”
Problem was, she couldn’t think of anywhere more secure right then.
**********
Adisa came to the rescue, just as she had in the security office. It seemed she knew the colony site like the back of her hand, including the bits that weren’t in the plans Sam had studied. She led them through the door Sam had noted earlier and into the darkness of another tunnel, lighting the way with a handheld glowglobe. It seemed from the twists and turns that there was a whole network of tunnels down here.
“This wasn’t a scratch job, was it?” she said after Adisa had led them into another, smaller chamber after maybe thirty minutes of turning this way and that. “This has been properly built.”
“Our father and the Marshal decided to build it when the colony sats started picking up unidentified jSpace activity in the outer system.”
It took Sam a moment to realise that it was Okafor rather than Adisa who had spoken. Looking between them she realised there was indeed a family resemblance.
“Didn’t do you much good when the raiders attacked.”
“They came up from the tunnels, not from the sky,” Adisa rasped, casting an angry glare at her brother. “Our father let them in.”
Sam sat down properly. She didn’t know if she was safe here. Right now she was in too much pain to care. “You’re the administrator’s children? Jerry Jonathon’s kids?”
Adisa nodded. “He betrayed the colony. Him and the Marshal. And my brother.” That last was said in a terrible, quiet voice.
“I followed my father,” Okafor said miserably. “I didn’t realise until too late...what he had done.”
“You had a little brother.” Despite the pain she was in, Sam's mind was racing. “The woman and child in the hut.”
Both teenagers were weeping openly now. “He...he made an example of them,” Okafor said, his voice broken. “To cow the others.”
“What did you do?” Adisa screamed suddenly. She launched herself forward, beating at her brother, clawing at the arms he raised to protect his face.
He made no attempt to fight her off. “I followed our father!” he shouted back, his voice a bleeding guilty wound. “I was scared,” he continued, his voice quieter. “I didn’t want him to kill me, not like Mom or Jack or the others who would not submit.”
Sam stared at them as Adisa fell back, hands covering her face, sobbing. She felt utterly drained. First the high of finding herself in human company once again, then the low of that company turning on her. Now she was getting caught up in a family dispute involving a couple of massacres.
“I am too tired and hurting too much to work this shit out,” she said to herself. Her head was still thumping and the two kids shrieking at each other was just adding to the pain. She couldn’t tell if they were telling the truth, or if this was just some sort of sick adolescent fantasy or some psychotic break brought on by the horrors they had seen. Or maybe perpetrated.
Apparently Adisa had heard her despite the shouting match with her sibling. “How can you doubt me after what Fassetti did to you?”
“Look, Adisa. That wasn’t the first time a cop has given me a kicking.”
“I thought you were a cop?” she spat back.
“It’s complicated. Not saying I don’t think something a bit fucked up is going on here – I think something a lot fucked up is going on here – but I’m also not saying I totally believe a couple of kids. Particularly not a couple of squabbling kids.”
Adisa’s eyes widened in shock. “Ok, given what you’re fighting over, that was a little unfair,” Sam said, subsiding again. “Look, I’m hurting here. I’ve barely slept for a week. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, what the pair of you have been through. Right now I just need to get this vest off, get some meds in myself, get my shoulder sorted. Then maybe I have a chance of working out what the fuck is going on.”
“Neither of us have medical training,” Adisa said, her rage subsiding.
Sam brandished her pad with a smile. “Never fear – this will tell us everything we need to know.”
**********
It took Sam and Adisa, with the help of the pad’s medical encyclopaedia, about an hour to work out that Sam did indeed have cracked ribs – cracked but not broken, thank fuck – and that her shoulder had just been dislocated and was now (probably) back in place properly, although she’d continue to pay for that damage for a while.
“We need to secure a supply of pain suppressors and antiflams if I’m going to keep functioning. We’ll need food as well. Three of us are going to get through the supplies pretty fast.”
“I have a couple of stashes. So I could keep moving around.”
“Ain’t you a clever girl.” Sam eyed Adisa thoughtfully before broaching the next subject. “We could try talking to the security chief.”
Adisa shook her head. “She was one of the worst. Why do you not believe me?”
Sam pulled herself to her feet awkwardly. They’d improvised strapping for her ribs, which made moving and breathing difficult but less painful. Less chance of one of the damaged ribs popping and skewering a lung, which would make breathing really difficult.
“Try to see it from my side. I’ve been dropped cold into a death-zone. On one hand I’ve got my boss – yeah, my boss – who doesn’t trust me and thinks I’m a crook. Could be able to persuade her otherwise, though running like that probably didn’t help. On the other, I’ve got a couple of kids telling me their own dad, and my boss, went mad and started randomly butchering people.
“It’s just...gonna take some persuasion.”
“I was with the Marshal. I have seen what she has done. You must believe me – you must both stay out of her hands. Stay out of the hands of my father.”
“You’re telling me they’ve gone mad.”
“Not mad.” Okafor’s voice was hushed now, a disturbing hint of reverence in it. “They have gone to the bright place and have been born anew.”
“The fuck is this bright place you folk keep talking about?”
“It is where you pass into their gaze and are renewed.”
“Fuck,” Sam breathed, “You fuckers have caught religion, haven’t you?”
“You must understand,” Adisa said. Her voice was becoming stronger, but still cracked when she spoke. “The people here, the people of our colony, they are good people. Those...those from beyond. They broke them.”
“It started slowly,” Okafor took up, his voice mournful. “Little acts of sabotage. Words sprayed on our buildings that no one could make sense of. A fatal accident. Then peop
le disappearing, one at a time, at night. Then the secondary site went quiet, and the Marshal disappeared on her way there.”
“They terrorised you. In the way they were trying to terrorise me.”
“People became scared. Then the heads of those who had gone missing started to turn up, and we became terrified. Dad...Dad told them he would do something. Took volunteers and went out looking for the Marshal.”
Adisa picked up the story. “When he came back – alone, long overdue – he was different. We did not realise how different.”
Sam held her hand up, listening not to her but to the darkness around. “I’d love to hear more, but I’m pretty sure they’ve worked out where we’ve gone. Think I heard a hatch being opened.” Her heart was pounding in her ears, her breath coming fast despite the strapping.
“Could be.”
“Please,” Okafar burst out. “You must leave me. You must not take me with you.”
“You want to go back to them, despite what you say they’ve done?” Sam asked, unable to keep the doubt from her voice. “And after you insisted we pull you out?”
“I made a mistake. You do not understand. I am a danger to you. I will be. Sister, you must let me go.”
“You went into the bright place, didn’t you?” she whispered, folding him into her arms.
“No. No...not yet. When you are made anew, you cast off old ways, and I have skills that they want.”
“So you’re a free agent, and you can tell them to go fuck themselves. On your feet, kid.”
“I have not gone to the bright place, but they put a little bit of it in me. To control me.” He rolled up the sleeve of his desert smock to show them a little device strapped on his arm, a savage-looking needle jammed into a vein. At the core of the device was a phial of liquid that glowed faintly.
“They’ve got you hooked on some drug.”
“They said because I use tech so much that I need more purification before I can go to the...”
