“All right,” the woman growled, as she pressed her fingertips against Amethyst’s neck. “I can read your body’s responses. The first time you lie to me, I will hurt you; the second time, I will start breaking bones. If you still try to lie, I will kill you. Do you understand me?”
Amethyst nodded frantically.
“Good,” the woman said. “Now, start talking. What were you doing with Bode?”
“And why,” Prince Roland added, “did you turn on him?”
Amethyst looked from one to the other, then started to talk.
***
Belinda wrinkled her nose as a faint smell of urine reached her nostrils. The girl had wet herself. It wasn't an uncommon reaction when someone was scared to death – it had been known to happen to soldiers having their first taste of combat – and it was even useful, but it was still distasteful. The girl might not even have noticed that she’d lost control of her bladder.
“My name is Amethyst,” the girl said. “I thought I was rebelling ...”
The whole story came tumbling out, piece by piece. Belinda listened, asking the occasional question from time to time, shaking her head in disbelief. How could anyone have been so stupid? But it was far from unusual. Extremists, terrorists, rebels and criminals had managed to trick innocent – and ignorant - people into doing stupid things before and would be doing it until the very end of time. Amethyst had been used, which didn't make her any less guilty. A smarter or more experienced person might have asked how the students actually benefited from starting a riot. Or, for that matter, from trying to shoot down Prince Roland.
It would have been easy to snap Amethyst’s neck. She was a rebel, a terrorist and a traitor; Bode hadn't had put a gun to her head to force her to do anything. There was a point beyond which ignorance could not be used as an excuse. If Belinda had handed her over to the authorities, Amethyst would be executed. There would be no new colony world or even penal dumping ground for her. She'd simply gone too far.
But she’d also saved Belinda’s life.
Belinda scowled as the girl finally stopped babbling, thinking hard. Amethyst had apparently had doubts after the first few weeks, but it had been too late to escape – or to save herself, if the authorities caught up with her. That wasn't unusual either; criminal gangs and terrorists both wanted new recruits compromised as soon as possible. It was harder to switch sides if the authorities knew that one was to blame for a terrorist atrocity. And besides, she’d seen enough of Bode to be terrified of what he might do to her. She’d actually been very lucky. If half the stories she’d heard about Bode were true, she would have suffered terribly before she died.
“I couldn't let him kill the Prince,” the girl had said. “I ... I was stupid.”
Yes, Belinda thought, coldly. You were stupid.
“Tell me what’s happening up top,” she ordered, grimly. “We’ve been in the Undercity for too long.”
Roland stepped forward. “And what happened to the University?”
“They declared full lockdown,” Amethyst said. “People were dying – or rioting. I don’t know what happened to the University.”
“You saved us,” Roland said, bluntly.
Belinda caught his arm and pulled him away from the girl. She stared after them, aware that they were going to decide her fate – and that she was unable to escape. Belinda had seen people like that before, people who had simply endured too much to be able to care about what was happening to them. Maybe snapping her neck would be the kindest thing they could do for her. And it was quite possible that she would be a liability ...
“She saved our lives,” Roland hissed, barely loudly enough to be heard. “We can't just kill her.”
“Yeah,” Belinda said, slowly. “But do we have to take her with us?”
“You can't leave her tied like that here,” Roland snapped. “She wouldn’t get a mile before they caught her.”
Belinda hesitated. Part of her wanted to cut the girl’s bonds and tell her to run; part of her admitted that the girl might be useful in the future. And Amethyst had saved their lives; in truth, Belinda knew herself to have been badly injured. Parts of her augmentation had simply died – and she was vulnerable. Roland might need more help in the future.
“I can pardon her,” Roland insisted. “We owe her.”
“I suppose we do,” Belinda agreed. She turned and walked back to the frightened girl. “You have a choice.”
Amethyst looked up at her, unable to speak.
“You can come with us as we try to get somewhere safe,” Belinda said. Right now, she didn't have the faintest idea of where to go. The plan to head for the Arena might have been scuppered by food riots – and there were going to be riots. Even if only a tiny handful of ration bars had been contaminated, mass hysteria and panic would do the rest. “If you do, you will have to obey orders – and if you try to betray us, I will kill you.”
She lowered her voice. “The alternative is that we free you, then allow you to make your own way out of the Undercity,” she added. “You will be free, as long as you don’t try to come after us. Make your choice.”
“I’ll ... I’ll go with you,” Amethyst said. She sounded terrified, but at the same time there was a faint hint of hope in her voice. “Please ...”
“Good choice,” Belinda said, dryly. She pulled the monofilament blade out of her pocket, spun Amethyst around and sliced away the duct tape binding her hands. “I just hope that I don’t come to regret it. Now, how did you get into the Undercity?”
“Through Rowdy Yates Block,” Amethyst said, as she rubbed her wrists. The duct tape had taken more skin with it when Belinda pulled it free. “There was a passageway there ...”
“Not too surprising, I guess,” Belinda mused. “The Undercity has been inching upwards for centuries.”
Amethyst stared at her. “But I never knew ...”
“It seems there is a great deal that you never knew,” Belinda pointed out, rather sarcastically. “You’ve been a fucking fool. Try and do better in future.”
She leaned back, then beckoned for Amethyst and the Prince to follow her. “We’ll get up through Rowdy Yates ourselves, then try and link into the Marine network,” she added. If they could, she reminded herself. Half of her implants had been fried. There were ways to get into the network through the civilian datanet, but if there was a full lockdown in process the datanet would have been disabled. “That should tell us what is going on.”
Prince Roland gave her a sharp look. “And what do we do then?”
“What seems best at the time,” Belinda said. She had no idea what they would have to do; they just didn't know enough to make even vague plans. Perhaps they should try to reach the orbital towers and climb up to orbit. Or the military spaceport ... “We’ll find out what’s going on and then we will decide what to do.”
They started to make their way up towards the entrance to Rowdy Yates CityBlock, every one of Belinda’s remaining sensors scanning for trouble. No one moved to block their path, or even demand a toll for moving through their territory, something that Belinda couldn't help finding ominous. The crime lord Amethyst had told her about, the one who had been working with Bode, would have lost face in front of his rivals by how they’d escaped the first ambush. Logically, he should have tried to stop them before they could get up into the Inner City ... but nothing materialised. Belinda puzzled over it as they climbed up a half-ruined set of stairs and through a large compartment that stank faintly of diesel. A handful of rusty vehicles lay in one corner, buried deep under the megacities.
Pug would have loved it, she thought, grimly. Her teammate had had a gift for driving and repairing all sorts of vehicles, to the point where his superiors had tried to talk him out of Pathfinder training. But he’d been too stubborn to take their gentle hints as orders and passed through the training with flying colours. And now he was dead.
The level of pollution in the air seemed to be rising rapidly, according to her implants, alt
hough they were having problems in identifying the specific pollutants. A nerve gas warning flashed up in front of her eyes for a brief moment and she almost grabbed Roland to carry him backwards, before realising that the warning had to be a false alarm. She had immunities worked into her body; Roland and Amethyst would have dropped dead by now, if the nerve gas had been real. The alert vanished a second later, to be replaced by a warning about dangerous chemicals from an industrial plant. Someone had been dumping them into the Undercity.
No one was guarding the stairwell that led up to Rowdy Yates. Belinda clutched her knife in one hand and inched up the stairs, her remaining sensors picking up sounds of screaming and fighting from high overhead. A handful of bodies lay near the access point, three of them wearing Civil Guard uniforms. Judging by their condition, they had been battered to death when the gang had surged up from the Undercity. The other bodies had been shot, but there were no weapons lying on the ground. Someone had to have taken them to use against their former owners.
“Come on up,” she said, grimly.
Roland appeared, one hand holding his pistol so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. His face, already pale, seemed to pall further as he looked at the devastation. “What happened?”
“The Undercity is rising up,” Belinda said. No wonder no one had sought to bar their path. With their food supplies contaminated, the gangsters had decided to attack the Inner City ... and if every gang had made the same decision, the lid was well and truly off. “I think we’re in deep shit.”
She attempted to ping the nearest network node, but there was no response. Ordinarily, she would have been able to tell if there was no node or if it was simply not responding to her, but her implants were so badly damaged that it was impossible to be sure what was happening. A wide-band scan picked up countless alerts on the civilian emergency frequency, all hysterical and none of them very informative. As far as she could tell, there were no Civil Guard or Marine transmissions at all.
It would be a long walk from Rowdy Yates to the Arena – if that was truly the best place to go – and the streets were in chaos. They’d have to be incredibly lucky if they avoided having to fight. And yet, where could they find an aircar? If there was a lockdown underway, they’d all be grounded; registered aircars had transponders that deactivated them on government command. An unregistered aircar would risk attracting unwanted attention from the Civil Guard ...
“There should be emergency vehicles in the loading bay,” Amethyst said, when Belinda had explained the problem. “By law, they’re supposed to be there.”
Belinda nodded, ruefully. That was true ... assuming that someone on the Block Committee hadn't decided to cut corners by not buying the vehicles after all. “It's our best chance to avoid having to walk,” she said, shortly. “Let’s go.”
Han had been bad, a nightmare – and Belinda had missed the worst of it. Earth seemed to be rapidly becoming worse; every level they passed through brought new horrors. Men mutilated and then murdered; women and children raped and then left to die ... the savagery of the Undercity had finally burst upwards, completely out of control. Some of the bodies even seemed to have been gnawed ... Belinda saw Amethyst looking sick and felt a touch of sympathy for the girl. She’d never really understood what was happening until it was far too late.
One room had been a teenage community centre; by law, every teenager was supposed to spend at least two hours a day socialising with his or her fellow students. From what Belinda had heard, it was one of those laws passed by people who thought they knew what was best for Young Children and Teenagers ... and it didn't work as well as they’d expected. Now, the community centre had been ripped apart; bodies lay everywhere, many savagely mutilated. A middle-aged woman, probably the supervisor, had been tied to a chair and forced to watch, before someone had mercifully cut her throat. God alone knew what she’d done to deserve it, if anything. The savage uprising wasn't really under anyone’s control.
The emergency section had been sealed and the power had failed. Belinda couldn't tell if that was a security precaution or another case of poor maintenance finally catching up with them, but it hardly mattered. She had to jigger a power cell from a food dispenser and use it to unlock the hatch, something that would have been beyond anyone from the Undercity – or Imperial University, for that matter. Maybe it was a case of fridge brilliance after all ...
“There’s an aircar,” Amethyst said, relieved. The aircar was ancient, but it looked serviceable. “But where is everyone?”
“Good question,” Belinda mused. She checked the aircar thoroughly; as far as she could tell, it was fully functional. “Get inside. I’ll open the hatch.”
It wasn't difficult to crank open the hatch, allowing her to stare out over the megacity. Smoke was rising from hundreds of different places, far too many for the emergency services to handle. High overhead, chunks of debris seemed to be falling through the planet’s atmosphere ... what was going on up there? Her implants reported high-energy discharges in low orbit ...
She turned and walked to the emergency lockers, searching for something she could use. Most of the equipment had been taken, but she managed to find a datanet terminal and several tools. Pocketing them all, she walked back to the aircar and joined the other two.
“Time to go,” she said, quietly.
Chapter Forty-One
Combined with the food shortages, this was the final straw for Earth’s population. Starving and angry, the population rose up and attacked the government. But by then it was far too late. Even if the Emergency Committee had folded quickly, Earth had fallen too far to be saved. The lid had come off a pot that had been simmering for generations.
-Professor Leo Caesius, The End of Empire
Earth’s Traffic Control System was the envy of the Empire, at least according to the government’s propaganda. The happy owner of an aircar – barely one in a million citizens – could set the destination, then sit back and relax as the TCS guided the aircar through the air, avoiding all danger of a collision with either another aircar or one of the cityblocks. In practice, Belinda knew, it was just another example of the government treating the population like children. The novel idea of actually allowing people to take responsibility for themselves had never crossed their minds.
The system had been breaking down even before the crisis had begun. Belinda had reviewed its safety record when planning Roland’s expeditions outside the Summer Palace and discovered that there was at least one accident nearly every day. Aircars would fly into buildings, or ram other aircars, killing everyone onboard. She couldn't imagine ever boarding an aircar that didn't have a manual override, but the citizens of Earth had just tamely accepted it. Now, the TCS was completely down. How many aircar owners could even fly their cars?
She stared out of the window as the aircar flew away from Rowdy Yates CityBlock and headed towards Imperial City. Normally, she would have taken the aircar higher up, but she didn't dare. The orbital defence network seemed to be in the middle of a civil war – either that or Earth was under direct attack – and one side or the other might start shooting at aircars. And then there were whatever forces the Emergency Committee had in place to defend the Imperial Palace.
The smoke seemed to be growing thicker as they headed northwards. Down below, hundreds of thousands of people swarmed through the streets, smashing away at everything they could touch and destroy. The Undercity was rising up ... and so were the poorer parts of Earth’s population, the parts that had borne the brunt of bureaucratic mismanagement for so long. Now, with safe food supplies running out, they no longer had anything to lose. Why not take it out on the government?
She banked the aircar to avoid a CityBlock, wincing in horror as she saw people spilling out of the windows and falling down towards the streets far below. Running from the rebels or just overcome with hysteria ... it hardly mattered. They were falling to their deaths. How many of them were going to die before it all ended, if it could end ... she
glanced up sharply as something raced through the atmosphere, high overhead. It looked large enough to do real damage when it struck the ground.
“Crap,” Roland said, lightly.
Belinda sucked in her breath as the Arena came into view. The entire structure seemed to be blazing as howling mobs tore through the complex, hunting down and killing everyone they could catch. They’d loved the gladiators, but they’d hated and envied them too; now, with civilisation collapsing around them, the population had turned on the Arena that had been used to distract them from the truth. Belinda saw a handful of monsters from various worlds – all bred to be extremely dangerous – escaping from the Arena and heading out into the city. If Earth survived, they were going to have to be hunted down before they could breed. No doubt it had seemed to make sense, at one time, to bring breeding pairs to Earth. Now ...
“Crap indeed,” she said. The plan for getting help from the Arena security staff seemed to have collapsed before it had even fairly begun. “Now what?”
She guided the aircar over to a rooftop and landed gently. “Keep an eye out for trouble,” she ordered, as she picked up the datanet terminal and examined it thoughtfully. “I’ll see what I can get out of this piece of junk.”
The terminal took several tries to link into any datanet node, but at least it had found something, unlike her implants. Belinda accessed functions that few of Earth’s citizens even knew existed and pulled up an outline of the network’s current status. It wasn't good; a third of the nodes seemed to be completely offline, while the civilian network had been put into lockdown. In theory, that should have cleared the network for military traffic, but in practice the network seemed to be on the verge of complete collapse. The fighting in orbit had taken out a number of critical processors.
The Empire's Corps: Book 03 - When The Bough Breaks Page 38
