Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1)

by Mark R. Healy

  “Parnell,” Duran said as the man was about to hang up. Parnell stopped and looked at him. “Thanks. This means a lot.”

  Parnell smiled. “Yeah. Any time, Duran.”

  Duran put the holophone away and waited as the elevator floors ticked by. His fingers hovered over the buttons for 245 and 247.

  What if Oberend doesn’t head to the field generator this time? What if I lie in wait there and he doesn’t show? I might miss him altogether.

  Duran realised he still had no clue as to Oberend’s objective. Was he initiating another attack on the Atrium? Was he trying to flee Earth? Or something else.

  He cursed, feeling blind. Unprepared. It was no wonder he was always one step behind, always late to the party.

  His finger jabbed decisively on the button.

  “Time to take a gamble and move ahead of the game,” he said to himself.

  38

  Knile did not concern himself with his pursuers. He knew his surroundings intimately, and he knew his destination. Those behind him most likely did not, and that should have been enough of an advantage. All he needed to do was to keep up a rapid pace, keep on his toes, and they wouldn’t catch him.

  Ursie, on the other hand, was another story.

  Knile had unlocked the door as he’d promised, and he’d made sure the pursuers had seen him, winking his flashlight for a moment as he reached the first ladder. He’d seen them on the walkway below, and moments later they had made their way across the gap in pursuit of him.

  Still, if Ursie got lost and turned back, or if there were some other unforeseen circumstances, she might run into problems.

  There’s nothing you can do about it. Keep going.

  Was that really true, though? Was there no other option he could have chosen? How would he feel if he made it to the Atrium and Ursie wasn’t there? Could he take his place on the railcar with a clear conscience if her blood was on his hands?

  She knew the risks. She’s here of her own volition.

  And then a heartbeat later he thought: But she’s just a kid.

  Whatever the case, it was too late to turn back now. The cards had been dealt, the game set in motion, and now he had to concentrate on the task at hand. He had to get it right with the field generator this time, for a start. He had to stay clear of Wilt’s men, and he had to do it all with the clock running out.

  He checked his watch. Not much more than thirty minutes left.

  The railcar had probably descended the Wire by now. Any passengers and cargo would be unloaded, and those fortunate enough to be heading up the Wire would now be lining up, preparing to enter their capsules.

  I’ll join them, Knile told himself. It’s my time. Then another thought came to him. And I’ll find out the identity of this mysterious Sponsor.

  In these higher levels of the Plant Rooms there was more light, even though the spaces were more cramped. These levels were configured to suck in the air from outside and direct it into massive purifiers, which in turn distributed the clean air to the inhabited levels below. As such, there were a plethora of giant fans with massive steel blades that channelled the air into the appropriate conduits. They made great whooshing sounds as they turned, and caused Knile’s hair and shirt to flap and jump haphazardly.

  He leaned over the railing and peered down at the walkways below. He thought he saw something moving down there, but couldn’t be sure if it was one of Wilt’s men or just another piece of machinery. He kept moving.

  Thoughts of the woman down in Lux came unbidden to him. In truth, he hadn’t been able to think of anything else since it had happened. The timing was terrible – right at the most critical point of his entire journey – and try as he might, he could not put it out of his mind. Despite what he had told Ursie, he had to admit that the woman had looked a lot like Mianda. The similarities were undeniable.

  He’d had contradictory notions ever since that moment. Firstly, that the woman could not possibly have been Mianda, because she had surely perished in the Atrium. He’d seen the fire claim her, hadn’t he? And even if she’d gotten out of there alive, how had she ended up in Lux?

  But in contrast to this, he also decided that if she had escaped, there was no telling what could have happened to her in the years since. Perhaps she had found her way out of her life in Gaslight and joined a benefactor in Lux, or had amassed enough creds through her own enterprise to start a new life there.

  Forget about it, he told himself. You have a job to do, so forget about it.

  But he simply couldn’t.

  The fans were falling behind him now, and he increased his pace even further. The entrance to the field generator room was just up ahead.

  Ursie seemed to have conquered her fear of tall ladders for now. It was amazing what being chased by a crew of homicidal maniacs could do for those little phobias.

  When she alighted from the last rung, there were two things that immediately struck her – first, that this level was full of huge fans, and second, that the ladder was vibrating, shuddering a couple of times every second.

  They were coming after her.

  The door. Get to the door.

  She began to run, not really knowing which way to go. This level was cramped and twisted, offering no long view through which Ursie could determine a path. She reeled from one fan to the next, her hair tangled in her face, her silly, pompous and impractical dress flapping about like a tent on a windy beach.

  Her footsteps on the steel walkways sounded deafening, even though she was doing her best to move silently. She imagined her pursuers would find her by sound alone at this rate.

  You’re a thief, goddammit. Move quietly.

  She came to a blank wall with pathways leading in both directions, both of which disappeared behind large aluminium conduits. At the end of these were control panels filled with blinking lights, but there was no way to progress further. They were both dead ends.

  She doubled back and kept searching, soon finding a door labelled with a yellow ‘J’. But Knile had told her to look for a ‘G’, hadn’t he? She tried the handle on the door just in case, but it didn’t budge.

  Don’t panic. Keep looking.

  She kept wandering, wishing desperately that Knile had provided more guidance before sending her on her way, but there simply hadn’t been time.

  If you’d had the guts to jump that gap, you wouldn’t be here, she reminded herself.

  She followed the walkway around, hoping to find the next door in sequence, but there was just another of those blank walls instead.

  Who designed this fucking place?

  She rounded another turn, and, to her horror, realised that she was back at the ladder again. Worse, a bald man with a cog tattooed on the side of his head was emerging from the top. He saw her and smiled.

  “You lost, little princess?” he sneered.

  Ursie turned and fled back the way she had come, and in moments she heard the man thumping loudly after her.

  The door. Find the goddamn door.

  She ran, altering her path by changing course at almost every juncture, not only to throw off her pursuer, but also in the vain hope that she would somehow stumble upon the right door, the one imprinted with the letter ‘G’.

  She lost her sense of direction entirely and expected the man to jump out every time she made a turn. Her footsteps were even louder than before, but now she didn’t care. She just had to get away.

  The bald man was out there somewhere in this maze, and she knew that before too long he would find her.

  39

  Knile watched the guards in hazmat suits outside the field generator room with quiet anticipation. They conferred amongst themselves for a few moments, then hastened away from the entrance, headed for the elevator. He smiled.

  These guys weren’t paid enough to show anything more than the barest commitment to the job. Anything that seemed like hard work would have them dropping their bundle, turning tail. There had been no doubt that they would run.


  The alert Knile had triggered was, for a dumb security guard, a little intimidating. Even he had to admit that. As far as the guards knew, the flashing lights outside the field generator room signalled an imminent meltdown of the generator containment system, an event that would kill anything within a hundred-metre radius.

  Of course, there was no imminent meltdown. It was all a ruse to remove the guards from their stations, and, being none the wiser, they obeyed the warning. These weren’t technicians, but simply hired guns who wouldn’t know the difference between a meltdown and a cheese sandwich, and they weren’t sticking around to try to figure it out.

  Knile set a timer on his watch. The response crew would be here in no sooner than seventeen minutes, no later than twenty-three. They had to run tests on the environment to ensure that it was safe to enter, and that took time. Knile wanted to be gone in thirteen minutes just to make sure he wouldn’t come across them. It would be a travesty to come this far, only to be accosted by technicians as he tried to make his escape.

  The security on the door of the field generator was not easy to bypass. In fact, it was one of the toughest systems Knile had encountered. Back when he’d first discovered the room, years ago, he’d tried working on it numerous times over the span of several months, but his opportunities to do so were limited. Apart from the presence of the guards, there was also another very good reason not to hang around for long – the generator gave off an electromagnetic discharge in the immediate vicinity that was harmful to humans. Exposure of more than twenty or thirty minutes could be deadly without the right protection. There were radiation warnings plastered all over the walls, prominently positioned not only to warn of the danger, Knile figured, but also to deter any potential intruders from trying to gain access to the interior.

  Beside all of that, the encryption on the door was enough to keep out practically anyone. There might have been one or two other hackers in the Reach who might have had a chance of breaking it, but they either did not have the inclination to crack it, or they simply didn’t want to take on the task. As far as he knew, Knile was the only one who had ever done it.

  The encryption sequence had been changed since Knile had been here last, but that didn’t hold him up for long. A few alterations to his attack vector and he was through. Once the lock was bypassed, he also connected remotely into the camera system and disabled that for good measure.

  I love you. Don’t leave me.

  “That wasn’t her,” he told himself again as he pushed through the door. “It wasn’t her, and she wasn’t talking to you.”

  You have to go back.

  “I’m not going back.” He gritted his teeth and said it again, more forcefully this time. “I’m not going back.”

  The door clicked shut behind him and the whooshing of the fan blades was stifled, replaced immediately by the eerie thrum of the field generator. Through the darkness Knile could make out the shape of the baffles, a collection of elongated walls that surrounded the field generator and which slanted off at acute angles, forming a kind of tall and seemingly impenetrable hedge maze before him. These acted as an energy dispersal system, reducing the reach of the generator’s electromagnetic discharge. Above these, blue-violet waves of light swam across the ceiling like turbulent ripples, a by-product of the energy produced by the generator itself. It was beautiful in a way, Knile had thought the last time he had been here. With all that had happened in the Atrium shortly after, he had almost forgotten about the phenomenon.

  Knile began to step through the baffles, winding his way through the angular corridors within as the energy flux on the ceiling lit his way.

  He checked his wristwatch, aware that he had to work fast. Mottled iridescent hues swam across his arm in the shifting light, causing the pinpricks on the Skybreach tattoo to twinkle like a sea of stars.

  Then he was through, and the light of the field generator hit him with such force that he winced and covered his eyes. When he opened them again he saw the huge orb in front of him, an obsidian sphere as tall as two men, spinning laterally on its axis as curls of that blue-and-violet energy wafted around it like strands of luminescent mist. It was both beautiful and awe-inspiring, an artefact of technology that made him marvel at man’s potential to create.

  They made things like this, but they couldn’t stop the Earth from dying.

  Knile might have stayed just to look at the spectacle of the generator for longer had there not been other more pressing things on his mind.

  He found the control terminal over by the wall and jacked into it with one of the cables he’d brought in his backpack. The terminal itself was air gapped so that it couldn’t be tampered with remotely. There were no outside systems that connected with it whatsoever. That was why he’d been forced to come here, into the room itself to access it locally.

  Concentrate. Don’t make the same mistake as last time. The reverse has to happen for just a small window of time.

  He knew where he’d gone wrong on that previous occasion. He’d configured the field generator’s power input to increase too slowly. Once it reached the required setting it had found an equilibrium, remaining at the critical state for far too long. That was why the Stormgates had remained in a reversed position for almost half an hour.

  This time he needed the power to spike instead of having it climb gradually. If he calibrated the inputs correctly, he could make the fields reverse for a much shorter duration, only about five seconds. That would be perfect.

  Still, he and Ursie would need to be ready when it happened or they’d miss out.

  He checked his watch again.

  Damn, where is the time going? Only thirty minutes left to get to the Wire.

  He weighed up the timing. He needed to balance the time it would take to get to the Stormgates, and then again to ascend the final elevator to the Wire.

  Twenty minutes to get to the Stormgates. Ten to get to the Wire. That should do it.

  He set his watch to count down to the mark, then began to calibrate the field generator settings, performing some on-the-fly math as he did so. He punched in the digits that he thought would be correct, then, as he was about to leave, counted up the numbers in his head again.

  No. That’s only going to reverse the field for one, maybe two seconds. If I lower–

  There was a noise behind him, and a terrible thought came to him.

  I didn’t lock the door behind me. Too damn preoccupied with Mianda–

  He turned and saw Alton Wilt coming at him like some nightmarish spectre, the light shifting across his face and causing his features to distort and churn grotesquely. Knile reacted swiftly, turning his body and slipping his hand behind his back as he reached for the 9mm in his belt.

  His fingers caught nothing but air. The gun was gone.

  Ursie fought against the exhaustion that was threatening to overwhelm her, pushing herself on even though her legs felt like rubber. The soles of her feet and her ankles throbbed, and she felt as though they might give out any minute. She wondered if she would even be able to get back up were she to fall.

  Adrenaline had driven her through the Greenhouse, through Lux, even through some of the Plant Rooms. Now even that had gone, packed its bags and headed to a more hospitable climate, somewhere far away from her. She was running on empty now. There was practically nothing left to give after this day and a half of mayhem that she had endured with Knile.

  For the first time, she wondered if any of this was worth it. Had she simply gotten herself in too deep?

  No, she thought, gritting her teeth. I’m not ready to give up, not when I’m this close. There’s a future waiting for me if I can just get out of here.

  She turned again and saw another of those blank walls before her. With dread, she knew that she was heading for a dead end, and worse – it was too late to turn around. From the footsteps behind her it was clear that the bald man was almost upon her.

  She kept going into the dead end, and as she rounded the corner her foot s
nagged on the edge of the platform and she went down in a heap.

  Terrified, she struggled into a sitting position, reaching madly for her satchel. She dug her hand inside it and touched the case. Her future.

  She was out of sight of the bald man, tucked away in a corner of the dead end.

  Please go past. Please.

  She squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to tap into that last mote of strength stirring within her. She concentrated her energy, tried to find focus.

  Breathe. In and out. Come on, breathe.

  The man was getting closer, just a few steps away now. She had a terrible premonition that he’d seen where she’d gone. She hadn’t fooled him at all.

  She could picture his grinning face as he wove between the curves in the walkway, preparing to drag her back to Wilt or just slay her where she sat.

  She readied herself for one last effort.

  The kid wasn’t half as smart as she thought she was, Tucker figured. She was tiring, that much was evident, but even at full strength she would not have outrun him. Her many changes of direction hadn’t come close to shaking him off either. This was easy meat, the kind of task that Tucker revelled in.

  Tucker was enjoying this more than he should have. He’d always been one to enjoy the pursuit more than the catch itself, the feeling of suspense before the final moment came, but something about this one was really stoking his fire. Maybe it was the kid’s vulnerability, her seeming helplessness that made him feel so powerful, so vital. The end result of this encounter was inevitable, and he knew that she must be feeling it as keenly as he was.

  Tucker eased off his pace, savouring the final moments of the hunt. There was time. Plenty of time. Once he’d finished with the kid he’d be able to return to his boss to complete the mission, his final task for Alton Wilt. Then after today, Wilt would be gone. Tucker would be elevated into his place.

  After today, people would be calling Tucker the boss. And Tucker liked the thought of that.