“Let me put it this way,” Lyssa goes on. “We’re just kids. We don’t have any medical knowledge or supplies. We can’t even call for help. So if we do go to the crash site and we find out it is real, what can we really do about it? Nothing. Do you get it?” She watches us hopefully for signs of agreement. “Instead of pretending to be something we’re not, maybe we should just do as we were told. Kids on a field assignment, obeying orders. They can’t ice us for following orders, can they? And at the end of the day, The Initiative shouldn’t be expecting kids without medical knowledge to save lives.”
“Copy that.” I have to agree. “This is the kind of crap they’ve been doing all along in the Hex: forcing us to make these sorts of decisions. We choose one way, we’re labelled as one thing, we choose another, we’re labelled something else. You heard those DEMO reports. They’re dissecting us all the time, seeing what makes us tick. So how about we call their bluff for once? How about we throw this back in their faces?”
“How do you mean, Jim?” asks Lyssa, eyes wide and twinkling with defiance.
“We do like Sergei suggested—we complete the mission. They might have intended we should do something else, for moral reasons, but they didn’t say that, did they. We can’t be penalized for following orders.”
“That’s exactly what I was getting at,” says Sergei.
But Rachel isn’t buying it. “You’re still just assuming it’s a fake crash, guys. I thought we agreed on this. You might be right, and if you are, you’ll be sticking it to The Initiative. Good for you. But if you’re wrong, where does that leave us? Maybe a dead pilot. Maybe the other team dead. And we’re out here on our own, only we don’t know where here is, plus we’ve no supplies. One of you mentioned communications. What if that ship has the only comm, and that’s our one chance to get out of here alive? You see what I’m saying? We can’t treat this as a game anymore. We do it your way, it might be too late to save ourselves afterwards. But if we check first, at least we’ll know. I don’t see as we have a choice. Lohengrin?”
The prince tries to wipe his visor with a dirty sleeve, ends up smearing it red. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll split into two teams. One team heads north to scout the perimeter of the canyon, all the way round if necessary. They'll look for a) Sarazzin’s team, b) anything else out of the ordinary, like another crashed ship, or c) a way out of the canyon. We’ll need the best runners for that. That's Rachel and Lyssa, and I think maybe I should go with them. There should be at least one guy. Sergei would be best, obviously, but stamina and speed-wise, I’m probably the only one who could hope to keep up.”
No one argues.
“And the second team needs to make straight for the crash site. That’s Jim and Sergei. You’ve both had way more world experience than any of us. That makes you better equipped to handle an emergency. If it is fake, signal to us—flash a piece of reflective metal or something. If it’s genuine, see if there’s a transmitter on board, or some emergency supplies. Maybe try to contact the Hex. Either way, wait there. If we find a way out, one of us will come back to fetch you. If we don’t find a way out, we’ll all come back, then we can decide what to do next. Did I miss anything?”
“Yeah,” replies Sergei. “How about the part where you get the girls and I get stuck with this sorry little sucker?”
We all laugh, but it’s a nervous, overdone laugh.
“Maybe we should stick together,” I suggest, deadly serious. The others respond by ruffling my hair or hugging me for being so sweet and sentimental.
But I’m not being sweet or sentimental. I’m being practical.
There’s a difference.
CHAPTER 15
Lohengrin
It’s a strange thing, feeling trapped outdoors in such a massive canyon, wide open to the glorious expanse of a pink-orange Martian afternoon. When Thorpe-Campbell mentioned a field assignment, I thought I was going to enjoy being away from the Hex. A little taste of the old freedom Sergei and I used to have. But it isn’t like that at all. We’re jogging side by side, alone, in the most remote place imaginable, but it isn’t just me and Sergei. Not anymore. Maybe it never will be again.
As skimmers, we used to know, instinctively, when it was time to move on from a particular job or a kip-house: when the grown-ups were noseying, for instance, or when we were getting too comfortable in our routine. Those can be fatal for the career of a skimmer. You have to be willing to cut all ties and just move on at a second’s notice. That might sound callous, but it’s the discipline. Survival discipline. You learn it from experience. We might only be young, but we’ve learned a lifetime’s worth already.
And now we’re having to unlearn it.
The best way I can explain it is that we’ve always known when the time’s been right to pull away, but now, though I’m getting that urge, I find there are other forces pulling back. We’re a part of something bigger. Lohengrin, Lyssa and Rachel are not people we can walk away from whenever the feeling takes us. They’re family now. They pull in ways The Minsk Machine and I are not used to.
We reach the crash site in about twenty minutes. Despite what Sergei maintained, there doesn’t appear to be anything fake about it. Unfortunately. A putrid, oily miasma has settled over the smashed engine; the heavy dark fumes of leaked fuel rise a little and then fall like the streams of a dying fountain. The sparking ends of severed wires inside the fumes send flickers of electricity throughout the miasma. Smoke rises high, columns over the south-west canyon wall. The shuttle itself looks like it’s been cut into several segments and then hammered hard, but Sergei is the first to notice it’s really two ships, ours and a smaller one, that have crashed together. Ours is almost completely burned out. We check the cockpit section, or what’s left of it, and find no sign of the pilot. Not that anyone could have survived the crash; the cabin is mangled, crushed, and blacker than the inside of a furnace.
It’s far worse than either of us imagined.
The second ship, a common enough stork (surface to orbit taxi, the k on the end signifying the fare, which is always in the thousands), is in slightly better shape than our shuttle. Any scorch damage is only to the outside from the heat of our burning ship. Instead, the stork appears to have crashed nose-first and then flipped onto its back.
Sergei and I manage to climb inside. Both pilots are dead, their necks broken. They appear to be the only people on board, so we check them for ID. Little in their clip-belts except pre-paid account credit discs. Low amounts, nothing more than fifty clips. And fuel receipts. No wallets. No personal items. They each have one of those strange, angular glyph tattoos I saw on the necks of the white collar men that day in the café, shortly before the Sheiker assault. Worse still, when I run one of the credit discs through the remote fare scanner, to pinpoint the credit account, this is what appears under the TRANS DETAILS print option:
<<16761679_KM3323XXXX>>
Now, those numbers might not mean a thing to anyone but a handful in the entire galaxy. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people. ‘KM3323’ refers to an origin of credit, a very specific and familiar one to me. Kappa Min 3323 is the exact same registered banking centre my portable skimmer infiltrated about six months ago, courtesy of the white collar men in the café. After I’d skimmed that account, I made a mental note of the credit origin reference and the account number. If you’d have asked me to recite them to you a minute ago, my mind would have hit a blank. But memories are funny like that. Most of the time they just need the right key to unlock them. Now it all floods back. The sequencing of numbers. I’m pretty sure the account number here, 16761679, is only a couple of digits different from the one in the café. Kappa Min (not Kappa Max, whose abbreviation is KMX) being a probable Sheiker colony. Those infrared beams slicing through the dusty gloom of the smashed café, settling on me...
A Trillion +1
“Sergei, I think we need to get away from here, like, right now!”
“Why?”
“Because I
’m pretty sure this is a Sheiker ship.” I explain about the accounts, the white collar men, and the angular tattoos.
“Hm. If you’re right, we might be in even deeper,” he says, nodding behind us to the upside-down passenger cabin. “There’s no one in there, but there’s a helluva lot of gear: all-terrain suits, weapons lockers, O2 canisters, spare breathers, food and water, enough for seven or eight people, easy. There’s even a giant freaking harpoon gun. So why should two guys have all that stuff? And why should they be flying around out here?” He encourages my look of disgust. “If these are Sheikers, they might be here for us. And there are probably more of them in this canyon.”
“Rachel! The others! What can we do? Sergei, we have to warn them. Somehow. We have to let them know.”
With a bear-like grip he anchors my shoulder, stops me from running out. “We need to think it through,” he says.
“Think what through? Get off me! They’re running into danger.” I fight against his grip with all my might. It doesn’t even dislodge a fingertip.
“Jim—Jim—they’ll be near the far end of the canyon by now. If there are any Sheikers out there, they’ll have made their move already. And if they’re that far away, they might not know where we are. They might not even know that their stork has been disabled. Which gives us the advantage.”
“How? You mean surprise?”
“Uh-huh. We’re career skimmers, right? We fly under the radar. In, out, then disappear.”
“But this isn’t skimming.”
“It’s no different,” he explains. “We grab what we can, we do what we need to do, then we heels-up on this crash site. But not too far. There’s got to be a good hiding place around here. A cave maybe.”
“You’re saying we should ambush them when they come back here? The Sheikers?”
“Ambush the ambushers, yeah.”
“You’re freaking smogged.”
“No, just buggo. Come on.” And Sergei drags me into the passenger cabin, where everything that wasn’t bolted down is now strewn across the ceiling-floor—all the items he described, with the exception of the weapons lockers, which are firmly magno-locked to the bulkheads. We’d need the access codes to move them or open them. So what does that leave us with, weapons-wise?
A handful of flares. A big-ass harpoon gun. And a hunting bow with about sixty-pound draw strength, according to The Minsk Machine, who’s had some practice somewhere along the way, probably in the hotel gyms, where he often passed for a young man of sixteen or seventeen. He can just about draw the string to arm’s length. Me, I can just about feel my fingers again after trying, and failing, to move the sombitch more than an inch. So I get dibs on the flares.
We haul our food and equipment away from the crash site and deposit it in one of the many low-roofed caves dotted across the bottom of the western cliff.
Before we can get comfortable, Sergei ups and lumbers off without a word, down to the upturned stork. He inspects the hull panels at the rear. After unscrewing a couple, he rubs his hands together and then yanks out a length of thick hose. It has hundreds of flexible segments that can expand and contract like an accordion. He leaves it hanging at the side of the taxi and fetches a sharp rock, which he uses to pierce the hose at multiple points. Then, inside the panel, with a vigorous twisting motion he opens some kind of valve. This pumps fuel through the hose. It spurts out through the multiple holes he’s made and quickly drenches the hull, sides, and the surrounding sand. He closes the valve and runs hell-for-leather back to our cave.
I slap him on the back as he kneels to catch his breath. “Wow, that was... What was that again, Sergei?”
“Think Colonial Day,” he gasps.
“Come again?”
He points to the flares, then to the harpoon gun at the back of the cave. “That’s how we ambush...the ambushers.”
“Holy crap. You’re gonna blow them up?”
“Maybe.” It isn’t the idea so much as the mischievous look in his eye that fills me with dread. “You got a problem with that?” he asks.
“Um, I guess not.”
But I’m reminded of the three things he’s always wanted. For my part, I’ve always assumed, deep down, that he’s just being funny. Another dumb macho thing like the Vodka McCormick’s and the balaclava and the insane high speeds he reaches on his sand bike. But for the first time, I realise he means every word of his motto:
War, women, and the Soviet way.
If things continue on as they are, all three of those are going to collide. And if I’m not careful, it’s going to get us all killed.
The columning smoke from our burned-out shuttle climbs higher and spreads farther in the pale orange sky. It could be a signal fire, but who would see it all the way out here? And even if they come, who will they be?
An hour passes, maybe two. Sergei and I reminisce for a while, which has always cheered us up. But the strain of not knowing what’s happened or might happen takes its toll, and the memories lose their lustre. Christ, even our weekend in the Big Red, the granddaddy of all vacations, only manages to dredge up forced guffaws. It’s this not knowing business. Ever since Sergei and I parted ways that day in the desert I think I’ve been suffering from some sort of mild shock. That’s the only way I can describe it. A feeling of not belonging, of not having an anchor, of waiting for things to happen over which I’ve no control. It feels like I’m in a pressure-cooker. Time and the unknown combining to squeeze me from all sides. Especially from the inside. Though the canyon’s losing heat—the sun’s about to set—I’m sweating more than ever.
“You all right there, Jim? You seem fidgety.”
“And you seem like you could doze off at any minute. How can you be so calm?”
“Only on the outside, brother.” He shifts position on the hard floor, brushes a pesky rock from under his ribs. “Chrissakes, why’s no one come yet? Thorpe-Campbell, Hendron, Graaf: those dooraks must know something’s up by now.”
“What? You mean you no longer think this is all part of the test? Wow. I mean let’s take a moment to savour that flavour. That’s one big calorific chunk of humble pie you’re—”
“All right, all right. No one likes a smart-ass. And you guys didn’t exactly get it right either,” he retorts.
“Not exactly.”
“No. Your pal Lohengrin’s gone and led two girls into a situation he knows nothing about.”
“I know. We should’ve all stayed together, shouldn’t we.”
Sergei gives my arm his softest punch. It still hurts. “That was your instinct back there, wasn’t it. That we shouldn’t split up.”
“Yeah.”
He punches me again, harder this time, in the same spot.
“Agh! What did you do that for?”
“For not trusting your instincts,” he says. “That prince might be the smartest in the team, but that doesn’t mean he’s always right. Next time, argue your point. Make him convince you you’re wrong.”
“And if he can’t?”
He shrugs. “Then you’ll have to decide whether his decision makes sense, too. If it does, follow him, give him the benefit of the doubt, like I did. He’s already proved himself the best leader in the Hex, so we should trust him.”
“And if he’s not making sense?”
“Then you know what to do. What we’ve always done. That’s why I said you should listen to your instinct. It’s a survival instinct—like mine. It’s sharp and it will look after you because you’ve let it in the past. It will tell you when’s the right time to rely on others and when’s the right time to sack them off.”
“Well, listen to you. Mr. Minsk Machine. Maybe you should hold a survival class in the Hex.” I study him for a few moments, try to weigh him up. “So why did you come back, Sergei? Why did you really come back?”
“To the Hex?”
“Uh-huh. And don’t say for the money. You keep going on about your—”
“Crap.” He grabs me by the shoulders. Just as I�
�m about to fend him off—it feels like he’s about to pound me into the dust for interrogating him—Sergei joins me face-down on the deck and whispers, “Stay low, don’t move.”
“They’re here?”
“Someone’s here.” He lifts his chin for a quick peek. “Climbing out of the river. About six of ’em.”
“Out of the river? Why the hell would...” It’s my turn to look, even more deftly than Sergei. He’s right about the number—six—but not about the hiding part. “They’re ours,” I tell him. “They’re all buggos.”
“How do you—?” He cuts his question short when he peers down again and sees what I see. Six students, three male, three female, huddle together at the water’s edge on this side of the river, rubbing each other in pairs to stay warm, just like we were told to in PT class.
“So they’ve found the other team,” he says, waving to them, not shouting—just in case they’re not alone. “Five and five makes ten. There’s six down there, and us two. Eight. So what’s happened to the other two?”
One of them spots us and urges the others to come over. It’s then, as they approach at a jog, that I recognise Rachel and Lys by their running styles. Sarazzin is there, too, with Orkney, Ramirez, and Heathcote, one of the Harpies. Which leaves Walpole missing from that team. And from ours...?
Oh my God.
We’ve gone and lost the prince!
“Jim, Sergei—thank God you’re okay.” Lyssa, dripping wet and shivering, traps us both in a desperate hug that’s both embarrassing and kinda cool at the same time. She doesn’t hold back, never has. In contrast, Rachel’s gentle embrace is sweet but a little reluctant. She might not have bothered if Lys hadn’t done it first, but not because she likes us less. She’s just more reserved, that’s all.
“Tell us what happened,” I say. “Where’s Lohengrin?”
“Taken.” Lyssa tosses her hair in a slick stream over her shoulder, then wipes her streaky visor with a sleeve. “Whoever they are, they’ve taken him. Walpole, too. And we don’t have much time. They’re on their way!”
Star Binder Page 18
