Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1)

by Mark R. Healy

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, adjusting his sunglasses uncomfortably. “I don’t know what came over me–”

  “There’s going to be a report about this, you understand? There will be repercussions.”

  “Yes. I apologise.”

  “Conclude your business and get the fuck off my platform,” the Redman said. The man in the aviators bobbed his head obediently. The Redman scowled at him, then stowed the gun in his suit and turned his back, resuming his position nearby.

  The railcar began to emit a whirring noise and several lights flared along its length. Departure was imminent.

  “Ursie, are you going to tell me what on earth is going on here?” Knile said.

  Reluctantly, she turned her face toward him. Tears were shimmering in the corners of her eyes. Knile saw the shame, the guilt and the embarrassment written across her face.

  And suddenly Knile knew. He understood.

  His eyes dropped to the satchel.

  “What’s in the case?” he said quietly.

  “Knile, please–”

  “What’s in the fucking case, Ursie?” he roared at the top of his lungs, and his ferocity caused the girl to stumble backward onto one knee. She sobbed and held up one hand defensively, but Knile brushed past it and stuck his hand inside the satchel. He pulled out the small briefcase with the encrypted lock. “Open it! Open it right fucking now or I’ll throw you off this goddamn roof!”

  Ursie fumbled for the keypad on the case, her hands shaking, tears rolling down her cheeks, and began to press the digits in sequence.

  “Faster!” Knile bellowed. “Hurry up!”

  “I’m trying!” Ursie wailed. “I’m trying, okay?”

  She pressed the final digit and the case clicked as the locking mechanism disengaged. Knile attempted to wrench the case from her hands, but only succeeded in knocking it violently aside. It bounced once across the concrete roof and then skidded, its contents flinging out in all directions.

  Bits of cloth flapped in the breeze. Shiny pieces of metal caught the last of the day’s light.

  Knile surveyed the guts of the case as they continued to spill out and scatter at the touch of the swirling wind. He felt numb, foolish.

  “You were the cargo,” Knile said without turning to look at the girl. He moved over to the case and picked out a grubby doll with one eye missing, turned it over in his hands. Ursie sobbed again but made no reply. “There’s no priceless artefact here. There’s no merch. This is your luggage, isn’t it, Ursie? It was you they wanted delivered to the Wire. And they used me to get you here.”

  “Knile–” Ursie began, but he wasn’t listening.

  “These people needed to get you to the Wire, but they knew you couldn’t get past the Enforcers yourself. No. They needed someone who could sneak you through the Reach undetected. Someone like me.” He picked up a little brass box with a flimsy catch and a handle on the lid, another worthless keepsake Ursie had stuffed into her luggage. “So they put my name on a passkey and then arranged for you to tag along for the ride. But I’m guessing from your friend’s reaction,” he said, looking up at the man in the sunglasses, “that I wasn’t supposed to be here at this point. That wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “You said you could take care of this,” the man in sunglasses said to Ursie.

  Her face darkened. “Shut up. Just shut up,” she replied acidly to the man.

  “So why is it that they want you, Ursie?” Knile said, dropping the trinket back in the case and getting to his feet. “Why did they go to all of this trouble to bring you here?”

  “Does it matter?” she said, overwrought. She had not bothered to pick herself up off the concrete yet.

  “Yeah, I think it does.”

  “Who cares now? It’s over,” she said, defeated. “Take your magic ticket and get out of here. You won.”

  Knile narrowed his eyes as he considered. He thought about their journey through Gaslight, scaling the walls to the Greenhouse. The party in Lux. All of the strange little occurrences in between. The events began to align in his mind and he recognised the patterns therein.

  It all made sense now.

  “You really are a psycher, aren’t you?” Knile said. “That’s it. That’s probably the only words out of your fucking mouth that weren’t a lie to me. You’re a goddamn psycher. You can influence people’s minds. Make them see things. Make them do things.”

  Ursie just looked at him, and Knile turned to the man in the aviators.

  “Let me guess. One of the scouts from your organisation discovered her and told you to get her off-world, and since she was wanted by the Enforcers, this was the only way you could manage to do it.”

  “Please, Knile, just go–”

  “You’ve manipulated me this whole fucking time, haven’t you, Ursie?” he said, turning and stalking toward her menacingly. “You’ve been pulling the strings every step of the way. You manipulated Hank to get an introduction with me, then you convinced me to bring you along on this trip, even though it was a dumb idea to haul your ass across the Reach in the first place. I should have known something was up right from the start.”

  “No, Knile.”

  “You made me see that kid out on the wall during our first climb, didn’t you? The little boy with no shirt. You wanted me to go investigate, waste my time so that darkness would come and I’d be forced to take you back inside. That way you wouldn’t have to climb anymore.”

  Her eyes were wide with fear. “No.”

  “You stole my gun down in the Mechanisms when you bumped into me on the walkway, didn’t you?”

  “I needed it more than you.”

  “You made me see Mianda. Mianda!” he yelled, and she flinched away. “That wasn’t her in Lux, was it? You put pictures in my head. Voices. You made me think that Mianda was still alive. You figured I wouldn’t leave the Reach without her, and that I’d hand the passkey over to you. But you didn’t dig far enough inside my head to find out how she really felt about me. You stole a few snatches of my dreams and figured that would be enough. That was the plan, wasn’t it?” He advanced further, and Ursie squirmed backward, vehemently shaking her head. “That was the plan, wasn’t it Ursie? You little fucking rat!”

  Something inside her snapped, and she ceased her retreat.

  “Fuck you, Knile!” she yelled, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Don’t you dare judge me! Not you! Not after what you’ve done!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “These people,” she said, waving at the man in sunglasses, “are the only ones who ever saw anything good in me. The only people who ever thought I was worth a damn.” She glared up at him. “Do you know what it’s like to live on the street and never have anyone to call your friend? To never have anyone there to comfort you when things go bad? No one to miss you when you’re gone? That’s my life! I live that every single day. And these people were the first ones to ever look at me and think I was special. That I had worth.”

  Knile shook his head, incredulous. “What do you think they see in you, Ursie? Do you think they want to be your friends? Maybe they just want to put you on an operating table and cut your head open to see how it works.”

  “Yeah? And what are my other options, Knile? Maybe I should sit around here living hand to mouth, waiting to die from the toxins in the food? In the air. Maybe I’ll get thrown into the Cellar by the Enforcers and never come out again. No. Screw that. I’ll take my chances up there.” She jabbed a finger upward. “Because that’s the only place I have a chance of finding happiness. Of living my dream.”

  “No, Ursie,” Knile said calmly. He held up the passkey. “That’s my dream, and you’re just an interloper. You’re just a thief.”

  She shook her head at him in disdain. “Will you listen to yourself? Do you hear what you’re saying? You’re a hypocrite, don’t you realise that? You tried to steal someone else’s dream too, remember? Isn’t that why Mianda hated you?”

  Knile stepp
ed back as if she’d slapped him in the face. “What?”

  “You’re a walking contradiction, Knile. You just can’t see it.”

  He turned away from her, staring down at the golden passkey in his hand. He ran his thumb along the indentation in the key.

  Knile Oberend.

  It was his name on the passkey, his DNA that was encoded. The man in the aviators couldn’t stop him from boarding the railcar, and he knew it. Knile could blow right by him and take his place on the Wire, ride the railcar up to Habitat One and never see this place again. He could leave all these people behind.

  All these bad memories.

  Alton Wilt’s words reverberated in his mind.

  You’re like me, aren’t you? You know what it’s like to sell your soul in order to see your dream come true.

  Knile pressed a hand to his forehead. No, Wilt. I’m not like you.

  He thought of Talia, condemned to a life in Link, and Roman, who was, at this very moment, being drawn into the web of a monster. He thought of Hoyer Honeybul’s grinning face.

  He thought of Roman’s last words to him.

  See you on the other side.

  “I’ll find a way to help them,” he said out loud, but the words were hollow in his own ears. There was no conviction in his voice.

  Wilt had been right. He had to admit that now. Knile had left people in his wake, friends like Talia and Roman who had been cast aside like afterthoughts of his own all-consuming obsession with leaving the Earth. Hell, even the girl he’d rescued in Lux, the Candidate, had been discarded and left in the arms of the Enforcers, those Knile knew to be corrupt.

  No one was going to help Talia. No one was going to help Roman. Least of all Knile Oberend.

  He suddenly felt that burning sensation in his fist again, just as he had felt in Lux at the sight of the girl on the bed. In his mind he heard her voice and the voices of all those others who had been oppressed, those who were buried in the depths of the Reach and who would never be heard. People who had sheltered him when he had been in need, people who had shared his moments of joy and commiserated with him through his failures. People like Talia and Roman.

  It was then that he realised that there was no point running from those bad memories. No point running from his failures. Those thoughts would chase him to Saturn, to Jupiter, to wherever he went. To the ends of the universe.

  Running wasn’t the solution. He needed to stay and make things right.

  He wanted to do something that wasn’t just about him. He wanted to atone for the wrongdoings of the past.

  In the same moment he realised something else. Mianda was gone. She was gone and she wasn’t coming back, and now there was nothing he could ever do to earn her love. But all was not lost.

  There was still something he could do that would have at least earned her respect.

  He turned back to Ursie, the passkey limp in his hand. He strode over to her, and then the passkey clattered on the concrete at her side. She gasped and looked up in surprise, the tracks of tears still wet on her cheeks.

  “I don’t care what you do with that, Ursie. Take it if you want, or throw it away. I don’t need it anymore.”

  Ursie regarded the golden passkey with disbelief. She extended one hand halfway toward it, then stopped, as if she thought it might disappear in a cloud of smoke if she were to touch it. She glanced up again at Knile, but he made no reaction.

  Finally she scooped up the key in her hand and got to her feet, and the man in the suit reacted immediately, opening his briefcase and taking out a black cube.

  “Here, quickly,” he said in his deep voice. Ursie stepped over to him and inserted the passkey into an aperture on the device. “Encode,” he ordered.

  Ursie placed her thumb on the passkey’s indentation and the device swam with red and blue LEDs.

  “Of course,” Knile said with a rueful grin. “You’re the Sponsor. You own the key to the encryption. You can put any name on there you want, any time you want.”

  Ursie looked uncertainly over her shoulder at him, but there was no animosity in his voice. The loss of the passkey seemed to have purged him of his angst and his inner turmoil. A calmness had come over Knile that was quite unlike anything she had seen before.

  The process finished with a beep, and Ursie removed the passkey again. She ran her thumb across the indentation.

  Ursie Meyer.

  She smiled and let out another sob, but this time the tears running down her cheek were those of joy and relief. She turned to Knile to offer her gratitude, but he had already turned and was walking away into the gloom.

  The railcar completed its start-up cycle and a klaxon sounded.

  “We must go,” the man in the aviators said. “Now.”

  Ursie scurried over to the briefcase and threw a few of the nearby items back inside, then got to her feet and hugged it to her chest.

  “Knile!” she called. Knile stopped and glanced over his shoulder at her, his face still calm and purposeful. “What are you going to do?”

  His eyes dropped as he considered what to say. When he lifted them again his voice was filled with belief. With boldness.

  “I’m going to leave Earth. But I’m not going to leave it alone.”

  Ursie nodded and felt her cheeks flush. “I’m sorry for what I did to you, Knile. I know you hate me, and that you’ll never believe another word that comes out of my mouth, but that’s the truth. I wish I’d done things differently.”

  “I don’t hate you, kid.” He smiled faintly. “How could I? You’re more like me than you could ever know.” He made a little upward motion with his chin. “Go. Your ride’s waiting for you.”

  The doors of the elevator opened and Knile stepped inside. Ursie and the man in the suit had already made it to the railcar. Knile watched her insert the key into a slot beside one of the technicians, and a nearby capsule opened like the petals of a tulip sliding apart to welcome the morning sun.

  Knile raised his face and saw the darkening heavens sprinkled with stars high above, the Wire a taut and silver thread that bisected the sky. As the elevator doors eased shut the vista slipped from view, and Knile found himself alone inside the four walls of the compartment.

  He breathed deeply and waited for the elevator to take him downward into the Reach once more.

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  Author’s Note

  Thanks for reading EARTHBOUND. I sincerely hope you enjoyed it!

  I’ve wanted to write a novel about space elevators since reading Arthur C. Clarke’s FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE some fifteen years ago, a story that captivated my imagination like few have before or since. There was no apocalypse in Clarke’s novel, but I was intrigued by an end of the world scenario where everyone was struggling to squeeze their way through one last checkpoint, the final route off the planet. The problem was, I could never think up a plot worthy of such an idea.

  When the basic plot finally came to me, things happened fast.EARTHBOUND was written in six weeks flat, which is not a bad rate for 110K words – at least by my standards. There’s a reason why that happened the way it did.

  I absolutely loved writing this story.

  Rather than using a post-apocalyptic world to explore the meaning of humanity as I did in THE SILENT EARTH series, I decided that I wanted THE REACH to be a fast-paced rollercoaster ride that was full of action – and perhaps even a bit of fun. I hope that’s what I achieved in EARTHBOUND.

  THE REACH series will continue with book two, LANDFALL. I hope you come along for the ride!

  As a new author I'm endeavouring to bring in new readers. If you enjoyed EARTHBOUND, please write a review on Amazon, as this will help others find out about me.

  All the best,

  Mark

  About the Author

&nb
sp; Mark R. Healy is an author and musician from Brisbane, Australia. He lives with his wife Nic and children Elise and Hayden.

  Mark’s Website: markrhealy.com

  Facebook: http://facebook.com/hibernalband

  Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/author/markhealy

  Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/O2dhT

  You can find more of Mark’s stories through his project ‘Hibernal’. This project features professional voice actors, original music and Mark’s own sci-fi stories to create a cross between audiobooks and movies. The result is an atmospheric, immersive and unique theatrical experience for the listener. This project is available to hear online at http://hibernal.bandcamp.com and can also be purchased through iTunes and Amazon. Just search for ‘Hibernal’.

  Contact Mark by email: contact@markrhealy.com

  Acknowledgements

  As I churn through this latest series of novels I’m writing faster than ever before and placing more strain on my small but very important support network. My apologies to the following people in advance for more of the same in the near future:

  My partner Nic for the dozens of roles she plays in my writing every day. My alpha reader, my sounding board for frustrations and concerns, my artwork advisor, and just about everything else you can imagine.

  Pete Turner for beta reading. Pete, your feedback is always on the money and these books are greatly improved by your input.

  Hayden Wright for not only proofreading but for providing great feedback into the story as well.

  My editor Eliza Dee at Clio.

  Also thanks to Saul Caldwell, Mike Kershaw, Rohan Healy, Gayle Martin, and Jo Keiler.

  And the final ‘thank you’ is for those who read this book, and who managed to make it as far as the Acknowledgements page! With all the books that are available out there, I appreciate you giving me a few hours of your time. See you again soon, I hope.