Impact

by Rob Boffard

  Carver raises an eyebrow. “Oh yeah. That makes total sense. Thanks.”

  Chemicals. Prakesh.

  Before I can say anything else, there’s a panicked yell from behind us. We turn to see one of the workers standing over Koji, a hand wrapped in his jacket at the scruff of his neck. He has a gun in one hand, one that doesn’t look like it hit the water.

  I get between them. “Don’t even think about it,” I say. Koji is on his knees, shaking in fear.

  The man stares at me. “He’s one of them.”

  “I told you. He can help us.”

  “Who are you?” the man says, glancing at my cuffs. “What are you even doing here?”

  Carver steps between us. “Back up, Adam,” he says.

  The man–Adam–spits, his saliva plopping into the water. He jerks his head at Koji. “These people don’t deserve to live.”

  “This one does,” I say.

  Adam holds my gaze a moment longer, then turns away, disgusted.

  “What’s his deal?” says Carver, nodding to Koji.

  “Long story,” I say. “But I need him.”

  “Come on,” says the gaunt worker from behind Adam. “Jojo said to get to the boats.”

  “The hell is Jojo?” Carver says.

  “Forget the boats,” Adam says. He points to the body of one of the guards, face down in the water. “We leave without taking care of the rest of ’em, they’ll come after us. Hunt us down.”

  “You’re gonna get yourself killed, man,” says Carver. “You and everyone else.”

  “He’s right,” Koji says, and everybody turns to look at him. “Believe me, you aren’t getting to the bridge. It’s too heavily guarded.”

  Adam tries to speak, but the gaunt worker talks over him. “Then we get as many weapons as we can,” he says. He looks over his shoulder, raising his voice. “Find ’em, bring ’em here. I’ll check ’em for any water damage.”

  As the workers start to move, Carver looks down at my hands, frowning as he takes in the cuffs.

  “Hang on,” he says, casting about him. He spots what he’s looking for, and holds up the old-fashioned cutter. It’s acetylene, not plasma, and he aims it at the metal join between the two cuffs. I wince as the torch singes my skin. But within a second my hands spring apart. I badly want to get the actual cuffs off my wrists, but a cutting torch isn’t the way to do it.

  The voice inside me speaks, reminding me that Prakesh isn’t the only reason I’m here. “Carver, was Okwembu with you? What happened to her?”

  “Gods know,” he says, running his fingers along the cuff on my right wrist. “Lost her when they took me and Prakesh.” He sees me about to protest, and talks over me. “I know you probably want to throw her off the side of the ship right now, but it’s too dangerous. Let’s just get out of here.”

  “Hold on,” says the woman by the door. “There’s—”

  She doesn’t get a chance to finish. The door flies open, smashed from the other side, knocking her and the others aside.

  Gunfire deafens me. Adam flies backwards, his arms stretched over his head, like he’s calling out for his own personal god. I feel blood speckle my face, and then his body slaps the surface of the water.

  A split second later, something else comes through the door–a small cylinder, squat and black. I get a momentary glimpse of it before it vanishes under the surface, bumping up against Adam’s body.

  Koji moves faster than I would have thought he could, grabbing me and Carver, pulling us down. “Flash-bang!” he shouts.

  Everything goes white.

  69

  Prakesh

  Prakesh squeezes himself against the wall. He can’t take his eyes off Jojo’s body, sprawled across the floor in the corridor junction. Half of the boy’s neck is torn away.

  “Got him!” someone shouts, speaking over the noise of the fading gunshot. The voice is shockingly close.

  “See any others?” says another voice.

  Prakesh starts to edge away from the T-junction, moving as quickly and quietly as he can. He glances to his right–there’s a turn ten feet behind him in the corridor, with a corner he can slip around.

  Bam.

  Another gunshot. Prakesh snaps his head around, half convinced that he’s hit. But whoever shot Jojo is blind-firing, the barrel of the rifle pointed around the corner. Another shot comes, the report deafening in the cramped space.

  It feels like all the blood in Prakesh’s body is rushing to his head. But he keeps moving, sliding along the wall. The turn is three feet away. Two.

  Prakesh slips around the corner. At the very last second, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. A head, poking round the edge of the junction.

  They’ve seen me. There’s no way they didn’t.

  Jojo’s blood is still speckled across his face, slowly going tacky. It loosens the muscles in his legs, and he has to work very hard to stay upright, pushing himself against the wall. He realises he didn’t know how old Jojo was, if he had a last name, anything about him except for the fact that he came from somewhere called Denali and he wanted to get off this ship more than anything else in the world.

  He pauses, his knees bent, trying very hard not to breathe.

  The voice comes again. “Nobody here. Guess he was the only one.”

  “I don’t buy it, man. Why come down here by yourself?”

  “Doesn’t matter now.” There’s a muffled thump, and it takes Prakesh a second to realise that it’s the sound of a boot colliding with Jojo’s body. He has to fight down a wave of nausea. Could he keep moving? Slip away silently? He tells himself to move, but he’s frozen to the spot.

  Another pause. Then the sound of metal scraping on metal–Jojo’s gun, being lifted off the floor. The sound is followed by footsteps, trailing off into nothingness.

  Prakesh counts to ten. Then twenty. Silently mouthing the words, telling himself to move. It’s only when he gets to thirty that his legs kick into gear.

  He peeks around the corner.

  Deserted.

  In ten steps, he’s crossed to the T-junction. He pauses, holding his breath. There’s more distant gunfire, quick bursts of it, but the area around him is silent.

  He glances down at Jojo’s body, immediately looks away. There’s nothing he can do. He can’t even take the body with him–not if he wants to get out of here alive. And he has to make it out, otherwise Jojo died for nothing.

  He should try and find the fuel hangar. Link up with the others. He keeps walking, listening hard for any footsteps coming his way, keenly aware that he doesn’t have anything to defend himself with.

  The corridor opens up into a wider hub area, with various passages leading off from it. There’s a sign bolted to the wall, but the letters are rusted over, faded with age. Prakesh can just make out the words AIRCRAFT ELEVATORS, but the rest of the sign is illegible.

  The boats must be on a lower level, surely, so all he has to do is—

  What is that?

  There’s a subsonic hum, almost inaudible. He has to focus to hear it, and focus even harder to work out where it’s coming from. It’s emanating from his left, down a corridor that’s even narrower than the others.

  Prakesh hasn’t been on the Ramona long, but he’s become familiar with the sounds of the ship, the rumbles and clanks and bangs that echo through its rusted body. This is different. This is something he hasn’t heard before.

  Jojo told him the Engine was below decks. He said they didn’t let the workers get close to it. His curiosity overwhelms him, and before he can stop himself, he’s walking down the corridor, treading as quietly as he can.

  A light flickers in the ceiling as Prakesh makes his way down it, the buzzing and clicking accenting the machine hum. He’s holding his breath, and has to force himself to exhale. There aren’t any more guards that he can see, but he still proceeds carefully.

  The passage turns right, then left, and then Prakesh is in a high-ceilinged, brightly lit storeroom. T
he walls are lined with racks, just like the one that nearly took him and Jojo out. The shelves are brimming with equipment, a hodgepodge of frayed wires and oversized batteries and rusted cutting torches, nestled up against machinery whose use Prakesh can only guess at.

  He focuses. There’s a set of double doors in front of him, shut tight, with two folding chairs off to one side. The two who killed Jojo must have been guarding it. For a few moments, Prakesh wonders why they abandoned their post. They must have decided to join the fighting on the upper levels.

  The doors are twice his size, as if heavy equipment needs to be moved in and out. A metal plaque is bolted to the door, faded words picked out on it in black lettering. HAARP MOBILE UNIT 2769X-B8 AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.

  Prakesh takes in the letters. The split in the doors bisects the B in MOBILE, and the first C in ACCESS.

  HAARP.

  He knows what that is. He’s sure of it. But it’s like something glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, vanishing the moment you turn to look at it.

  Prakesh knows he has to get to the boats, knows that it won’t be long before the other workers escape. But it’s as if his feet have stopped listening to his mind. He looks around, then walks towards the door. There’s a chunky keypad on the wall by the door, but as he gets closer he sees that it’s dead, its digital display blank. And the doors aren’t sealed completely. There’s the tiniest gap.

  The hum rumbles in Prakesh’s stomach.

  He puts his fingers in the gap, braces his arms, and pulls.

  The doors resist for a moment, then give way, moving so fast that they almost knock Prakesh off balance. The hum is even more powerful now. He steadies himself, then raises his head and looks inside.

  Nothing but darkness. Prakesh is on a metal grate, and he can feel empty space below him. He moves along it, hands touching the wall. A line of switches slides under his fingers, plasticky to the touch. Taking a deep breath, he flicks them up.

  Banks of lights begin to click on, one after the other. Huge spotlights in the ceiling spring to life, making Prakesh blink, chasing away the shadows.

  He’s standing above another hangar–this one slightly smaller than the others. Most of the space is taken up by four enormous cubes, at least fifty feet on all sides, their surfaces dull grey metal. There’s a thin passage below him, running between the cubes. The floor is covered with thickly insulated cables, tangled up in each other, running up the walls of the cubes and into them via giant connectors. Some of the cables go higher, vanishing into the ceiling. Prakesh’s nostrils haven’t recovered from the chemicals he cooked up, but he can still pick out the sharp stench of ozone.

  He puts a hand on the railing, trying to work out what he’s seeing. Again the word tugs at his mind. HAARP.

  There’s a ladder hanging off the end of the platform he’s standing on. He swings himself onto it, climbing down, wincing as the noise of his feet on the rungs echoes across the hangar. He’s more careful as he hops off onto the grated floor and walks between two of the cubes.

  He keeps walking, running his hand along the side of the cube. It vibrates ever so slightly under his fingers. The hum is loud now, so loud that Prakesh wonders why the whole room isn’t shaking. There must be some kind of inertial dampening, shock mounts built into the floor and ceiling…

  He looks up as he comes round the corner of the cube. There’s a rectangular, rusted metal plaque, mounted on the side of the next cube along. Prakesh moves closer, reaching out to touch it. At the top of plaque is a triangle with an exclamation point inside it, its bright yellow turned ochre with age. There’s a litany of warnings underneath it–Prakesh’s mouth moves as he scrolls down it. “Unauthorised personnel… risk of electric shock… safety equipment…”

  He reaches the bottom. There’s a set of barcodes, slightly raised off the metal surface. Underneath them are the words Mobile High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program–Installation 2769X-B8.

  HAARP.

  Prakesh’s heart starts beating faster. This is the Engine, he’s sure of it, but why can’t he remember what it does? He knows he’s heard the word HAARP before, somewhere on Outer Earth–a lesson in a schoolroom, a snatched conversation somewhere, an archived article on a tab screen.

  He starts walking faster down the passage. At the very end, near the wall, is a screen built into the side of the cube on his right. It’s dusty, and as Prakesh wipes it off, it springs to life, flickering under his fingers.

  The screen is old. Prakesh can see plenty of dead pixels, and there’s a crack that extends almost all the way across it. But he can still read the information displayed. He flicks across it with his finger, scrolling faster and faster. It’s data–complex scientific data. An analysis of radio frequencies, breaking them down by different values.

  He moves further along. The second screen doesn’t work–the touch function has degraded, and it’s glitched out. But the third, which he finds at the back of the room, shows something different. It’s displaying complicated electrical diagrams, each one showing the flow of current.

  Prakesh taps one, and a new window appears, displaying a separate graph. The lettering at the top of the window reads, Fluxgate Magnetometer Data File Reviewer.

  He frowns. A fluxgate magnetometer measures the Earth’s magnetic field. But why would—

  The puzzle pieces slot into place, and Prakesh’s eyes go wide.

  HAARP. It’s weather control. A way of altering the make-up of the ionosphere to control climate.

  Before the war, Earth’s governments tried to get various HAARP projects off the ground, but they didn’t manage to do it before the missiles fell. Except this HAARP unit is here. And it’s working. Prakesh puts his hand flat on the side of the cube, feeling the vibration travel up his arm.

  This is why the area has become habitable. Why humans have been able to establish themselves here. This is the sacred Engine, the life-giver, the reason Prophet and his followers have thrived. Prakesh can’t believe something like this still exists, can’t believe that Prophet worked out how to get it running. It’s beyond belief.

  And the workers are going to burn the fuel supplies. They’re going to sink the ship. And when they do, whatever this HAARP unit is doing to the climate will stop. It’ll be lost at the bottom of the ocean. This part of the planet will go back to the way it was before: a frozen wasteland. It’ll never recover.

  Prakesh turns, and runs.

  70

  Riley

  I close my eyes a split second too late.

  The flash jabs hot needles into my retinas. The bang finishes the job, slamming my ears closed, filling them with an awful, high-pitched whine. A spray of water splashes across my face.

  It feels like a whole minute before I can open my eyes. When I do, the generator room is exploding around me. I see a worker go down, his head snapping backwards as he takes a bullet. A guard is out of ammo, using his gun like a club, swinging it back and forth as two workers dodge out of range. A generator tips over, sparks flying as it lands on top of a prone guard, pushing her under the surface of the water.

  Carver helps me, pulling me to my feet. Somehow, he’s got hold of one of the rifles, and is trying to load it, yanking at the bolt. The mechanism is jammed, stuck halfway. He gives up, swinging it at an approaching guard. The butt takes the man in the face, and he spits a thick gout of blood as he topples sideways, crashing against the wall.

  The impact from the hit travels up Carver’s arm, knocking the rifle out of his hands and into the water. I don’t wait for him to retrieve it. I just grab him and go, heading for the corridor. He pulls me back at the last second, just as another volley of bullets explodes past the door.

  “We’ll never make it!” he screams. I can barely hear him. Koji appears behind him, hyperventilating, hardly able to stand upright.

  He’s right. That corridor is a death trap–a couple of guards hanging back will be able to cut down anyone coming out of here. I cast around for something to use, an
d that’s when I see the man Carver took down. More importantly, I see what’s on his belt.

  A squat cylinder, just like the one that came through the door. What did Koji call it? Flash-bang.

  I sprint over to him, skidding onto my knees in the water, grabbing the cylinder. It crosses my mind that the water might have damaged it, but there’s no time to check. We lose nothing by trying.

  “Koji!” I shout. I can’t tell how loud my own voice is. It hums in my ears, sounding as if it’s coming through thick padding. He looks over to me, and I toss him the grenade.

  He catches it with two hands, almost fumbling it, but then he reaches up and pulls a pin out of the cylinder. He spins around, hurling it underhand into the corridor.

  The bang is just as loud, but this time we’re prepared for it, hands over our ears, our eyes closed. And a second after it goes off, Carver and I rocket out of the door.

  For a moment, it’s almost like we’re tracers again, running through Outer Earth. I can feel him behind me, hear his feet pounding the metal, like we’re sprinting through a sector with me on point. The corridor is filled with thick smoke, stinking of gunpowder. A guard appears in front of me, on his feet but unsteady. I barely pause as I knock him aside, elbowing him in the ribcage.

  “This way!”

  It’s Koji, pointing at a turn-off from the corridor. Somehow, he’s managed to stay with us. I’m closest, and I skid to a halt alongside it, quickly peeking my head round. Deserted.

  The surviving workers clamber out of the generator room, coughing and blinking. We can’t leave them here–not after everything they’ve been through. I motion them to follow us, and they accept the order without comment. Two of them, I see, have managed to retrieve rifles. I almost ask them to test-fire the guns, check if they work, but decide not to. Last thing we need is someone getting hit with a ricochet in the tight corridors.

  We keep moving. There’s no telling how far this little worker rebellion has spread–not without a way to communicate with Prakesh’s group. An alarm is blaring somewhere, harsh and guttural, but there’s no more gunfire. I make Koji take the lead–the bowels of the ship are impossible to figure out, every corridor identical, with the same ribbed walls and recessed doors.