by T Q Chant
“Four on patrol,” she muttered, scanning the surrounding area for them. She edged round the side of the building, holding the Enforcer in a two-handed grip, and dashed to the next. Adisa had shown her an entry to the tunnel systems there; the unit was some of the highest grade housing stock for key personnel on the base.
Sam thought her heart would tear itself from her chest by the time she had reached the cover of that building and worked her way through to the tunnel entrance. Her jumpsuit stuck to her with a sweat that came not just from exertion.
“Adisa, stay put. I’m still coming to you. Might be out of contact for a few minutes.”
Okafor was talking again as she hauled open the access hatch and clambered down, more meaningless platitudes about how Adisa and Sam should surrender themselves to the bright place. “Oh, fuck off you dick,” she muttered, shutting him out as she closed the hatch.
She flicked her IR sight on as she reached the bottom of the ladder. Nobody seemed to have realised her helmet had that capacity and she hadn’t been in a hurry to inform even Adisa about it (#22 – never share unless you have to). She saw the tunnels fully for the first time, bathed in the green glow of the active nitesite, rather the small, pallid sphere that had been illuminated by Adisa’s gloglobe.
“Still boring as fuck.” It was still a bewildering maze, but now at least she could see the signs printed into the plascrete walls, pointing to various key points in the settlement.
A torch suddenly splashed its light against the floor as she came up to an intersection, a bright circle in the view through her visor. She ducked into an alcove as a pair of Cho’s people came into view. She pressed herself back, forcing herself to breathe gently, listening to the steady thud of their feet approaching. She held her breath as they crossed in front of her, trusting to the inky darkness beyond the tight beam of the torch to keep her safe.
One of them stopped directly in front of her. Her grip tightened on the Enforcer and she started to bring the accelerator coils up. Then he stooped and loosened his boot seals before carrying on after his partner.
Sam forced herself to keep her breath in, not blow it out in a relieved gasp, until they were well away. The silence down here was absolute and even the smallest sound could draw attention.
She started to shiver as she stood rigid in the alcove and had to force herself to start moving again. Two down here. Two on patrol up top.
Going up the ladder in the admin building was agony. Her shoulder still hurt like a fucker and pulled as she moved, but she didn’t have any other options. She cracked the seal on the hatch and lifted it just enough to eyeball the supply cupboard it opened into, checking it was empty. She thanked the unknown designer of the system for including so many exit points that Cho’s people couldn’t guard them all.
Out into the foyer of the admin building, crouched low again to keep the big reception desk between her and the bright daylight, the broad windows that could give her away. Okafor and Cho were doing a double team broadcast now; she couldn’t imagine they went to this effort every day. Wonder if they’re under some sort of time pressure.
She didn’t have time to consider it now. She had to belly her way across a short stretch of floor to keep below the level of the windows. She was in plain view of the guard, except she was too busy staring out across the central plaza.
Up the stairs fast, new pattern boots pretty fucking quiet. She’d always hated the direct, unsubtle options but she didn’t have a smart option right now. Inching the door of the comms room open, she managed to get eyes on a colonial with his feet up on the desk, fast asleep. She slid in, closed the door after her with barely a click.
It still stirred him, boots coming down off the desk with a thud. She hit him with a stuncap, and then a second one just to be sure and maybe out of a little bit of spite. He went over sideways with another thump and she hovered, waiting to see if the noise would bring more hostiles – as such she had to think of them now – running.
“Huh, comms rooms have good soundproofing. Who’d have thought it?”
Adisa emerged almost noiselessly from the storage cupboard she had taken shelter in, smiling wanly at Sam. “This must make us even.”
“Rule thirty-eight, Adisa. No such thing as keeping score. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER NINE – JURY RIGGED
There was one minor obstacle to them getting out of there. The guard who had been posted outside the admin building was now slouched in the receptionist’s chair, legs crossed, picking her nose with one gnarled hand while the other rested on the grip of the hardround rifle across her knees.
Sam only just spotted her in time, withdrawing from the stairs, waving Adisa back with her. She put her lips close to the girl’s ear. “Any other way out of here?” She remembered her only emergency exit from the building before, going over the side to cut the transit time from the foyer. She’d probably notice the pain in her ankle more if it wasn’t for her shoulder.
“Just the windows.”
“We’d be too exposed trying to do that.” She checked the ammo counter on the Enforcer – she was down to the last clip, and now regretted her earlier profligacy. “Should have spent more time on the range in basic.”
“They’ll notice the guy in the comms room has gone silent,” Adisa whispered. “We need to distract the guard so we can get to the tunnel.”
“No shit. Any bright ideas? I could just shoot the bitch.” She’d worry about the ease with which she turned to violence – even if it was non-lethal violence – later.
“Maybe if we try up there,” Adisa said, putting the bag of parts down to gesture vaguely. “I will be alright. Whatever happens, you cannot surrender. Get the message out.”
Startled by the cryptic pronouncement, Sam whipped round to see Adisa was already heading down the stairs. The girl shot a last warning glance at her, then disappeared from view.
Sam stood, poised but indecisive. Every fibre of her being screamed out at her to stop Adisa, to fight Cho and the others. The rational part of her brain – maybe that, maybe her fear, maybe her visceral horror at what the rebellious settlers had already done – kept her frozen just that handful of seconds too long.
“Hello, Nestani,” she heard Adisa say, her voice terribly calm. “I have come to surrender.”
“Darkness take me!” the guard shouted, chair rattling as she obviously knocked it over. “Where did you come from, Adi?”
“That does not matter. Take me to my brother, to the Marshal.”
“Umm...yeah...sure...”
The voices receded. Sam crept back down the stairs, keeping as far to the side as possible. Peering out of the windows, she could see Cho and Okafor staring towards the building, but their attention was firmly fixed on the willowy figure of Adisa as she walked towards them, the bulky colonist keeping pace with her hand on the younger woman’s shoulder.
She took her moment, dashed down the stairs and flattened herself behind the reception desk. Despite the weight of components and the water she moved light and fast, borne up by her fear.
Belly down again, dragging the packs after her, she made it into the store cupboard. Cho’s falsely reasonable voice started up on the PA system again.
“Sam? Sam, I know you can hear me. I know you’re close. Adisa says you died, but I’m afraid I don’t believe her. I need you to surrender...”
Merciful silence and darkness of the tunnels. “She is really starting to harm my inner calm.”
She needed to take stock, needed breathing space. She had to make sure she was clear and then work out how she was going to get Adisa out of this stupid fucking predicament.
She went back the way she’d come, back to one of the swanky hab units. Every nerve was stretched to breaking point down there – she’d been lucky the first time she’d encountered the patrol, and she hated relying on luck. She was in one of the taller buildings – which wasn’t saying much, as why would you build up when you had a whole p
lanet at your disposal?
“Huh. Some kinda penthouse,” she muttered, pushing into the sole apartment on the top floor. “Maybe even Adisa’s home.”
It was nice enough, roomy but spartan, but spoiled by the big spray of blood that went up one wall and onto the ceiling. It had dried enough to be brown, and reminded her a little bit of a mark’s décor in the Saw Conurb, back on old Earth.
“Arterial spray,” she guessed. “Another great memory.” Remembering the mark’s touch with a shudder, she actually wasn’t sure which memory was worse.
Cho was still talking, audible as a murmur through the excellent sound insulation. “Now we get to see the real you.” Sam went to one of the broad windows, still pretty clear and bright although they were starting to show the wear of windblown sand. Sitting cross-legged with her back to the wall, she slipped a little pixer from its slot in the helmet optics and balanced it on the windowsill over her head.
Dialling the image through to her main optics, she adjusted the spy device until she had the little vignette below, upped the magnification. Adisa, her face tight but calm, dignified, knelt in the dust before Cho, hands tied behind her back. Sam felt her guts clench.
She took a drink of water, swilling it gratefully around her mouth, forcing her brain to work. She patched her comms into the announcement system, letting Cho’s magnified voice hammer at her. “Sam, you’re not giving me a choice. I cannot allow you to continue. You must surrender now, or there will be blood on your hands. I can no longer tolerate your dissent, your rejection of the truth we offer.”
Okafor was with Cho, and Sam guessed he’d be the only one with the brains to operate any sort of trace on her. She hijacked the PA system, glad she would be insulated from the noise – she’d never liked hearing her own voice, particularly as she’d never quite shaken the Geordie overtones.
“Don’t know who you think you’re kidding, Marshal. You’re not going to kill the Administrator’s daughter.”
From the way Cho and Okafor’s heads snapped up, she could be sure the broadcast was getting through. She didn’t like the evil smile Cho had on her face. “Adisa has been judged apostate, Cane.” Her voice was hard, that of a preacher, not a security officer or a negotiator. “Her sentence is already set, just as it was for Jonathan’s wife and other son. Only he and Okafor have chosen salvation.”
Fassetti stepped from the shadows of the security office, still in his sleeveless jerkin. He’d dispensed with the healpads and his face was a mass of bruises, his broken nose unset. He carried a long, definitely non-issue, knife in one hand.
“Cho, you need to think about this and think hard.” Sam knew that the Marshal was too far gone to listen to any rational argument. Time to play by her mad ruleset. “Jonathan killed his wife and son, didn’t he? That was his right, was it? How do you think he’s going to react if you kill his daughter?”
She knew was on the verge of babbling, making things up on the fly (Always have a plan, Sam. Even when you’re improvising, have a plan!).
“I’m not going to.” Cho's words were a sentence of death for two people as Fassetti handed the long blade to Okafor.
“Okafor, don’t you fucking dare!” Sam screamed into the mike. “You take that knife and you stick it...”
Her voice choked off as Okafor stepped forward, his expression placid, even pleased. Bright flash of light as it came up, swept down –
“NO!”
bright arc of crimson –
arterial spray –
Sam dragged the helmet from her head as Adisa’s headless body toppled forward, slumping forward herself and throwing up the tepid water and the remnants of her last ration bar.
She leant back, putting her head back against the cool wall, dragging in breaths of stale air. She could hear Cho’s voice coming from her headset again, ignored it. Thought of all the things she wanted to say to Cho, Okafor and the others. The rage she wanted to scream out, the things she was going to visit on them.
Instead she took three deep breaths, in through her nose and out through her mouth, before she pulled the helmet on, closing her eyes and closing the pix feed by touch.
“Rule one hundred,” was the only thing she said into the mike before she cut the channel and switched off the comms unit.
**********
The old underground chamber felt empty now. Sam sat on the gritty floor, cross-legged and staring at the opened console panels.
She’d only known Adisa for a few days, but in that time she’d grown to like the girl, and certainly to trust her. She’d been the only person on this damn rock she’d been able to trust. And to see her die, and die like that...
Sam wasn’t entirely sure how she’d even managed to get back to the comms bunker. She must have been careful, she certainly hoped she’d been careful, or it wouldn’t be long before Cho and her people started kicking in the somewhat rusted, stiff door. She had the water she’d collected and the computer parts, she just had no real idea how to go about putting the system back into working order.
May as well just give up. Go in and try to scam through it? Pretend like you’ve decided to join their fucking cult?
“Get your shit squared away, Cane,” she told herself. This was when she had to stop thinking like a grifter and start being the soldier she’d almost been. “This is what those fuckers want. They want you down, want you broken. Surrendered.”
She pulled herself to her feet, opened the pack Adisa had handed to her. Adisa had laid herself out a little work station on one of the console tops, wiped clean of the grit that had worked its way into the chamber. Sam started carefully laying out the pieces in that space, examining each of them in the hope of identifying if any had been broken during her escape.
“OK, looks good.” Now she just had to work out where to put which bit. She eyed her pad, unsure whether it would have data that old, that obsolete, even in its enormous datastack.
Walking over to the first of the open panels, she realised Adisa was well ahead of her. Neat, still slightly child-like writing covered the inside of the panel, offering simple instructions for what to do. Had Adisa planned against this moment, or just made notes for herself?
“Wish I’d got to know you better, Adi.”
It would still take her a while to work it out and even longer to patch it all in. Her technical skill went as far as simple repair jobs, like the splice she’d done on the main array. She pushed that thought away; she didn’t want to think about how comprehensively Cho and her people had fucked with her, even before she’d got to the planet.
“Rule four – it’s never personal.” It felt pretty damn personal, though. They’d gone to a buttload of trouble to mess with her head – mess with the head of whoever came to explore this place. Wouldn’t have mattered who that person was, but it had been her and she was pissed off at them for it.
Her time was still short; she set to work.
It was, perhaps, the hardest thing she had ever done. The task itself was not exactly straightforward, but what made it truly difficult was the dawning realisation that Adisa had in fact written the instructions for Sam rather than as notes to herself. They were without doubt an idiot’s guide to repairing the system.
And every time she closed her eyes, she could see Adisa’s headless body toppling forward onto the vast streak of blood that had shot from her neck.
She worked non-stop. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and keeping her mind occupied would reduce her desire to diminish her supplies – although as they had been calculated as short commons for two people, they were sufficient for her alone.
The pad was no use for this, so she linked it to her helmet comms and set the joined-up system to work finding and cracking the comms band Cho and her people were using.
She timed the work, the hauling out and splicing in of chips and solid state boards, the replacing of shot optic fibres and abraded connectors. She wasn’t just simply swapping parts f
or their equivalent – a lot of what had originally been cannibalised would be long gone. Adisa had worked out which more modern parts could be taken from the comms array and then forced into compatibility with systems more than two decades old.
Sam was just lucky that the majority of the damage had been the original raid for parts. The bunker, until they’d forced their way in through an old vent, had been secure, and the atmosphere was dry.
“Five hours,” Sam said as she finally rose from the awkward crouch she'd adopted for the final piece of work. “I imagine you’d have done this in one, Adisa.”
She regarded the rat’s nest of cables and tooth links that surrounded her. “Nothing to say I’ve even succeeded, of course.”
She’d only be able to work that out once she’d cleared the solar panels and seen whether they would pour power into the system. It stung that Adisa had died doing something that might in the end have been futile.
“Gotta stay positive, Sam.” She checked her chrono. It would still be daylight up top and she didn’t want to start the final dig until nightfall. That gave her some time to plan the message she was going to send – basically a variation on her earlier unsent dispatch with a bit more it’s gone fucked, send someone to get me right fucking now. It occurred to her that she could start to plan what she was going to do when this job was done, but she dismissed that thought. No point until she knew whether or not she got a message out.
She got up, swigged some water and finally took the wrapper off a ration block. She ate it dry and uncooked, chewing and swallowed mechanically. No relish, just the need to feed herself, to stay operational. She set about exploring the rest of the little facility while she ate.
It wasn’t much of a facility beyond the control room and launch system that ran up the centre of the mesa. She still wasn’t sure what the system was exactly, hadn’t bothered to look it up. She just needed to know that it worked. There was a small ready room with a pair of cots, both stripped back but recently slept on. A final heavy duty door with a handwritten sign that said ‘Rover’s Kennel’. They’d only glanced at it briefly earlier but Adisa was sure there was nothing important back there.
