Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1)

by Mark R. Healy

  “There has to be someone.”

  “Not really. I’ve spent my life on the streets. I’ve never really called anywhere home, or anyone family. I had a few people come into my life that I might have called friends. There was a kid called Jerry, same age as me. We used to run together a lot, got into trouble, got out of trouble. Set fire to the Enforcer barracks once, just for shits and giggles. Most of the time we lived hand to mouth, like you have to on the streets. But Jerry wasn’t careful about what he ate. Ended up with too many toxins in his bloodstream, and that was it.” She shrugged as if it were all inconsequential, but Knile could see the hurt in her eyes. “Who gives a shit, right? That’s just how life turns out for some of us. I don’t care.”

  “It shouldn’t be that way. Not for anyone,” Knile said.

  “Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Ursie said with a laugh tinged with bitterness. “I’ve always been a loner anyway. This is the way I like it.”

  “If you say so.”

  Ursie drew her satchel to her chest and snaked a hand inside, running her fingers along the edge of the case as if for comfort.

  “Who is it that you’re leaving behind?” she said.

  “Just some friends. No one you’d know.”

  “Mianda?”

  Knile almost dropped the holophone, such was his surprise at hearing the girl utter that name. He stared at her, not sure whether to feel rage or astonishment.

  “How the fuck do you know about her?”

  “Hey, calm down, Knile.” Her hand drew back from the satchel and extended toward Knile in a placating gesture. “I didn’t–”

  “Tell me!”

  “You were talking about her. In your sleep, all right? Last night. You were saying her name.”

  Knile thought back to a few hours previous in the storeroom.

  The dream.

  How much had he said? How much had he revealed?

  “What did I say?”

  Ursie raised her hands helplessly. “That’s about it. You just kept saying that name over and over again.”

  Knile grunted, not entirely sure she was telling the truth.

  “Yeah. Okay.” He continued his work on the holophone and Ursie leaned forward intently.

  “So who is she?”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  Ursie shrank back, disappointed. “Y’know, this is going to sound bad, but you’re the first person I’ve opened up to in years. I haven’t told anyone else the shit that I just told you, not about Jerry, not about–”

  “She’s dead, all right?” Knile snapped. “Mianda is dead. Are you happy now?”

  Ursie placed the satchel aside and drew her legs up against her chest, placing her chin on her knees as she stared at Knile with those big, round eyes.

  “What happened to her?”

  Knile sighed and gave her a glare that was meant to silence any further questions, but his heart wasn’t in it. In truth, he did feel awful for not sharing anything of himself after she had confided in him. She wasn’t so much trying to dig up the dirt on Knile’s past, he realised, but more simply wanting to share an intimate moment with a friend, something she had evidently not done in a long time.

  Knile relented. “She was everything to me,” he said wistfully. “She was my future, the only thing I ever really wanted. We were leaving here together.” He smiled sourly. “Can you believe that? I managed to get hacked passkeys not just for one person, but for two at the same time. Most would believe that to be impossible.”

  “So how did you do it?”

  “I found a married couple who were heading up the Wire together. They had capsules side by side, the whole works. It took me months of searching to find the right circumstances. This one was perfect.”

  “You stole the passkeys from a married couple?” Ursie said, dismayed.

  “Yeah.” Knile gave her a quizzical look. “What’s the problem? If you’re going to hack a passkey, you have to steal it from someone first.”

  “And you’re proud of that?”

  Knile bristled. “Of course I’m not proud of it. Don’t you think I would have chosen another way if I’d had the choice?” He tapped angrily on the phone. “We do what we can to survive, to get ahead. Sometimes you have to walk over someone else to do that.” He looked up again and glared at her. “As if you can talk, anyway. Are you proud of stealing that prize of yours?” She glanced down at the satchel. “Wouldn’t you rather have earned it honestly? I bet you would. You’re walking over someone yourself, right now. You’re about to take money, a lot of money, for something that isn’t yours.”

  “All right, man, cool it,” Ursie said. “I’m not judging you. Why are you overreacting to this?”

  “When you’re born into poverty, like you and me,” Knile went on, “you don’t get to make that choice. If you want to escape you have to take what you can.”

  “Yeah, I get it. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to set you off like that.”

  Knile glowered at her for a few moments longer, then dropped his face back to the phone. From the corner of his eye he watched her, and from the look on her face he guessed that she was somewhat surprised by his outburst. He had to admit that it was incongruent with his normally calm and collected demeanour, but he couldn’t help that she’d inadvertently hit a raw nerve.

  “In the end it didn’t work, right?” she said after a while. “You didn’t make it out.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Knile said quietly, his composure somewhat restored. He lifted his face and stared off into the distance, his eyes unfocused as his thoughts returned to the past. “Things went bad in the end, things I couldn’t anticipate.”

  “So what happened?”

  Knile sighed, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye socket and then allowing his head to thump back into the wall of the garden behind him, like a man who had held out for a long time but was now ready to confess.

  “Those Stormgates in the Atrium, they’re built to admit anyone holding a passkey. Anyone else who tries to go through gets blocked. Simple, right? Except things get complicated when you’re talking about a hacked passkey. The hack is never quite one hundred percent. Sometimes it doesn’t work like the original, and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. So I added in an extra safeguard.

  “There’s a field generator located in the level below the Stormgates. I happened to come across some information about it when I hacked Hank’s terminal.”

  “Hank the Consortium guy? How did you do that?”

  “He got a little too trusting and left me alone for a couple of minutes at his desk. That’s all it took.”

  “So what did you find?”

  “It was a maintenance report, something really unremarkable, but it caught my eye. One of the Consortium techs had sent around a routine bulletin, letting the staff know that they’d detected strange behaviour with the Stormgates during power fluctuations of the field generator. More precisely, when there was a dip in power, followed by a sudden restoration of charge, the field generator would oscillate at a certain frequency that caused the Stormgates to reverse. It was only for a millisecond, so it wasn’t viewed as a major problem, but I saw an opportunity there.

  “By overriding the power regulator to the field generator, I was able to increase the juice and cause those oscillations again. But the problem was, it was only meant to last for a few minutes. Instead, it went on for almost half an hour.”

  Knile was plagued by regret at the thought of it, but at the same time he experienced an odd sense of relief, as if finally telling someone the story was like a kind of catharsis.

  “The Stormgates were open for half an hour?”

  “Yeah, and talk about that kind of thing spreads like wildfire. By the time Mianda and I reached the Atrium, there were people everywhere. I think they all must have thought that the Consortium had finally thrown open the gates and were letting everyone out.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We tried to get t
o the elevator that led up to the Wire. There were people all over the place. Lots of confusion, lots of excited and hysterical citizens. Then I saw the insurgents.”

  “Insurgents?”

  “Yeah, one of the groups who want to see the Reach destroyed. They’d tried to recruit me a few months before, and that was how I recognised them. They called themselves ‘Children of the Planet’ or something. They’d brought improvised explosives with them, and took their opportunity to do some damage inside the Stormgates.”

  “Oh, god,” Ursie breathed.

  “Yeah. A lot of people got killed. I was lucky to make it out of there myself.”

  “Mianda?” Ursie said softly.

  Knile shook his head. “She couldn’t have made it.”

  “Why not?”

  “She just couldn’t.” Knile waved the thought away. “Anyway, the Enforcers had been trying to track me for a while, and I found out that they blamed me for the explosion.” He looked at her as if imploring her to believe him. “I’m responsible for reversing the Stormgates, but that’s it. I didn’t try to kill anyone.”

  “I know you wouldn’t, Knile.”

  He grimaced. “And now I have to do it all again. I have to get you through the Stormgates, so I’m going to have to reverse the field one more time.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Not this time. I know what I did wrong. This time I’ll only make them reverse for a much shorter amount of time. No one will even notice. We’ll just have a smaller window to get you through, is all.” His mood lifted. “Either way, I’ll be fine.” He grinned roguishly, attempting to shrug away the last of his melancholy. “I have a passkey with my name on it, so the Stormgates won’t pose any problems for me.”

  Ursie returned his smile. “And then away you go, right? Up into the heavens?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Who’s waiting for you up there? Who’s your Sponsor?”

  Knile just shook his head. “I don’t know that yet.”

  “What? How can you not know?”

  “That part of the deal wasn’t revealed to me.”

  “Do you think it could be–”

  “I don’t know who it is,” Knile said, not wanting to hear what she had to say. He had no intention of playing that particular game. “I’ll find out when I get there.”

  “What if it’s someone you don’t like?”

  “Then I’ll do the same thing I’ve always done. I’ll improvise and get myself out of trouble.”

  Knile lifted his head and looked through the vines again, cursing softly. “This old guy is really giving me the shits.”

  “Why do Sponsors even exist?” Ursie said thoughtfully, not ready to relinquish the conversation just yet. “If the Consortium is here to make money, why not just take payment from the people down here? Why go through all the hassle of involving Sponsors?”

  “It’s a way of regulating the traffic,” Knile said. “The place that sits at the top of the Wire, Habitat One, is just a transit station. It’s not a refuge for the masses. What would happen if people down here spent their last cred on a passkey, and then had no way of booking passage to one of the habitats in the outer colonies? They’d sit there milling around in Habitat One, steadily increasing in number until the whole habitat burst apart – or at least until it ran out of food and air. The Sponsors are a way of ensuring that the passengers have somewhere to go once they step off the Wire.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Ursie said.

  “Of course it’s not fair. Who ever said it was?” He shook his head at her. “You know that most people are never leaving this world, right? Most of them are going to rot here.”

  “Yeah,” Ursie said. “People like me.”

  Knile felt a pang of guilt, realising he must have sounded like a self-satisfied prick right at that moment, wallowing in his own sense of superiority.

  “Look, Ursie. You’re a good kid. I’ll, uh… once I’m off-world I’ll find a way to get you out of here.”

  She gave him a wan smile. “How many people have you told that lie to, Knile?”

  He frowned, indignant. “What? It’s not a lie.”

  “Oh, really? How exactly are you going to get me off-world? Do you have all the money and power it takes to become a Sponsor? Do you have any idea about how things work up there? Any contacts? Or are you just going to improvise everything?” Knile looked away from her, unable to come up with an answer. “You don’t have an answer, do you.” It was not a question. “You just sprout that bullshit to deflect people who look like they might get in your way.”

  “That’s enough,” Knile growled.

  “Well, guess what?” Ursie went on. “I don’t want to leave here. Why would I? This place” – she jabbed a finger to the floor – “is where I grew up. It’s the place where I learned to survive. Everything I know is right here. Why would I want to go off-world, to a place where I don’t know anyone, where I have to figure out how to survive all over again?”

  “If that’s what you want, good luck to you.”

  “It is. All I need is some creds so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life eating bugs and running from Enforcers. That’s all. I don’t need any worthless promises.”

  Just then there was a noise from the far side of the enclosure, a hissing noise that was getting progressively louder. Ursie sat up in alarm.

  “You done chewing me out now?” Knile said, unperturbed by her harsh words. He held up the holophone. “I finally found the right building control system to hack.”

  They both poked their head above the garden edge, and some distance away Ursie could see a fine grey mist descending over the plants at the other end of the room. She understood.

  “You turned on the sprinklers,” she said in wonder.

  “These aren’t irrigation,” Knile said. “These are for putting out fires. Let’s hope that gets our friend’s attention.”

  They both turned to look at the old man, who initially seemed oblivious to what was transpiring at the other end of the room. Then slowly he raised his head, cocking it this way and that as he tried to figure out what was going on.

  “Come on, old fella,” Knile crooned. “Take the bait.”

  The old man pushed his threadbare sun hat up and scratched his forehead again as if trying to decipher some convoluted puzzle, squinting myopically down the garden rows in the direction of the noise.

  “He’s not going to leave,” Ursie said.

  But just then the old man bent and threw one last pipe onto the pallet, then began to shuffle off down the nearest aisle, his eyes transfixed on the gently hissing mist that drifted down from the sprinklers in the ceiling. Knile wasted no time in getting to his feet, his backpack slung over his shoulder.

  “Get your things and let’s go,” he said.

  27

  The old elevator squeaked and groaned in protest as it crept upward, like a mechanical counterpart to the arthritic old man who had stood outside its doors down below. Ursie decided that it needed a good oil change, or whatever procedure it was that made an elevator run smoothly. This particular one hadn’t seen a service in a very long time, she judged, and she began to wonder if it would even have the fortitude to take the two of them where they needed to go.

  “Why this elevator?” she said as the carriage shuddered again. She ducked and winced as if the roof might topple inward any second.

  “It’s the shortest route to our next destination. That means less chance of running across any more of these night owls.”

  “So what if we see more of them?”

  “We want to avoid them if possible. We don’t know how many of these guys are working for this ‘Mr. Wilt’ character. The fewer that get a look at my face the better.”

  “And if we can’t avoid them?”

  “Don’t panic. Just act like you belong here. We’re wearing maintenance gear, so if anyone asks, we’re here to repair a water leak. We don’t need a story that’s
any more elaborate than that.”

  The elevator ground to a halt and made a sound that was like the forlorn caw of a dying crow, a twisted and ruined caricature of what had probably once been a pleasant musical note to indicate the destination had been reached. Knile and Ursie waited as the doors moved jerkily apart, and then they stepped out into the hall.

  Two young women wearing gardener uniforms were slipping into gloves and boots nearby, gossiping animatedly in hushed tones. They looked up as Knile and Ursie appeared and their conversation faltered.

  “Mornin’,” Knile said casually, giving them a wave as he continued on his way, his hand on Ursie’s shoulder. She looked up at him curiously, noting the twang of an affected accent in his speech.

  “Mornin’ to you,” one of the women called back. “More early risers, I see.” She wore a red bandana in her hair with the knot tied at the top.

  “Well, you know what they say,” Knile said over his shoulder, still using the accent. “Water leaks nev’r sleep.”

  The women giggled flirtatiously but Knile did not look back again. He kept a firm hand on the girl as he guided her away down the corridor.

  “Easy as that, huh?” Ursie said.

  “Like I told you, just play it cool. If someone says hello, you say hello back, just like normal. They’re less likely to remember you if you act like everyone else.”

  Around the corner there was another young woman standing in front of a wheelbarrow packed with tiny green seedlings. She was tall and athletic, her blond hair in a long ponytail that hung down her back, and her figure curved in all the right places against her tight-fitting brown shirt. She stood with her arms folded across her chest as she listened, somewhat impatiently, Knile thought, to a shorter man standing with his back to them.

  The blonde’s eyes flicked to Knile and Ursie as they neared, and then she nodded at something the man was saying, pressing her arms tighter to her chest and shifting her feet restlessly as she returned her eyes to his face.

  As they reached them, the man glanced back at them and Knile’s heart lurched into his throat. The man’s pushed-in pug-like face was easily recognisable.