Tracer

by Rob Boffard

  To the right, a burst of sparks shoots out across the stalls as a man demonstrates a homemade plasma cutter, filthy goggles pulled down over his eyes.

  There’s at least one market in every sector. People used to rely completely on the mess for food, back when everybody had a job and showing up for work was the only way to get on the food list. They’d go to work at the Gardens, or lifting crates in the ship docks, or on maintenance crews assigned to maintain the pipes and power lines. But when the number of people here grew larger than the amount of available jobs, people started taking care of themselves.

  “Riley,” someone says, and I turn to find Old Madala grinning at me.

  Short and stooped, he’s lost most of his teeth, save for the odd fuzzy, yellow stump. The left sleeve of his overalls is tied at the shoulder, flopping loosely in place of his missing arm. He’s a regular client, a vegetable grower – our last run for him netted us a thick bunch of sweet, crunchy carrots. I don’t even think he has another spot on the station; he just seems to sleep under his table, relying on the other merchants to keep an eye on his goods.

  His toothless smile widens. “You not come see me for long time there,” he says in his odd patois. “Where you been?”

  “Just busy. Around. Thanks for the carrots, by the way.”

  “You want some more? I got a job for you, if you like.” He holds up his hand, and I see he’s carrying a small parcel, wrapped in tattered oilcloth.

  I shake my head, forcing myself to stay calm. “No, I’m on another run right now, but I’ll tell Kev to come find you.”

  “OK, no problem. But come by soon, eh? You don’t want to leave an old man lonely now, do you?”

  He gives a lascivious wink. Coming out of anybody else, it would be creepy, but Madala has this way about him that makes it hard to get angry at him.

  “I will,” I say, and lean close. “Listen, I want to ask you something.”

  He raises his eyebrows quizzically. “Information? I tell you things? Gonna cost you, you know.”

  I pout. “Oh come on,” I say. “We’ve been doing business for a long time. You can spot me this one.”

  He barks a short laugh. “True. True. What you wanna know?”

  “Anything you can tell me about the guy who sells onions over by Takashi’s. Gray.”

  His expression is puzzled. “Gray? Nothing here. Not much I know ’bout him. He stay quiet, keep his business his business, you know? I never get any trouble from him. S’good. We need more like that.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  Madala rubs his chin, then jerks his finger upwards. “Up on top levels, I think. But thinking now, my friend Indira, she live there too. Take her long time to get up and down every day, not good with her leg.”

  I interrupt him. “What’d she say?”

  He looks me in the eye. “He never there. He never go back. I think he sleep somewhere else maybe.”

  I grip his hand and squeeze. “Thanks, Madala. We’ll come find you when we’re done, all right?”

  He winks again before turning and moving back into the smoke, ducking under another shower of sparks.

  I move along the wall of the hangar. Ahead of me, two musicians have set up: a man carrying an ancient, battered guitar, and a young girl, barely a teen. She’s singing, and a small crowd has started to gather, drawn by her voice. Her song is fragile, brittle, but it carries over the wallah of the market.

  I want to stay and listen – she’s singing in Hindi, a language I can only mutter a few words in, but her voice is haunting, soft. There’s no time to stop. Not now. So I push through the group of people who have gathered to listen.

  And as I do so, I feel eyes on my back. I turn, expecting danger, but finding no one. It’s a moment before I catch sight of a woman, staring at me through the crowd. She’s around sixty, her head covered by a blue scarf, and she has the oddest expression on her face; deep sadness mixed with … something else. Before I can react, she vanishes, turning back into the crowd.

  Whoever she was, she can wait. I force myself to keep moving, pushing through the crowd, away from the singer.

  As I move towards the back of the hangar, I pass under the massive outline of the station spray-painted on the wall. Not for the first time, I wonder how they even conceived this place. It would have been so much easier to build a city on Earth, underground maybe. But Outer Earth is what happens when a bad idea gets a lot of backers. People can be pretty stupid sometimes. Especially if they’re in government, and have something to prove.

  Split the ring into six sectors, running clockwise from Apex through Gardens, Chengshi, Apogee, New Germany and Tzevya, all the way round the ring. The names are old, given to the sectors by the first people who came here. Some of the names are hangovers from where they lived back on Earth; places that don’t even exist any more. I sometimes wonder what old Germany was really like. What it would have been like to live there, or in China, where the word Chengshi came from.

  Run a monorail round the inner edge of the ring, and there you go: one space station, three hundred miles above the Earth, fit for habitation until the sheer amount of population growth pops it like a grape.

  It’s weird to think that the floor below us is really the outer wall of the station. Thanks to its ring shape, the floors of Outer Earth are all slightly curved, although the curve is so imperceptible that you have to concentrate hard to see it, even when you’re running around it – that’ll happen when the ring itself has an eighteen-mile circumference. The higher you go, the closer you actually get to the centre of the ring, although the distance is relatively so small that you can’t feel any change in gravity.

  The spokes running out from the Core meet the ring at Apogee and Apex. Enter the path to the Core, through the ceiling of Level 6 in Apogee, and keep running, and pretty soon you’ll be in zero-G. The further in you go, the lighter you get.

  Through the haze in the market, I see Takashi’s Bar, at the far end of the hangar. It used to be a reclaimed office, the only actual building in the hangar. Takashi himself died in the riots years ago, but the bar kept his name, and it’s been selling homebrew for as long as I can remember – as well as a regular supply of super-pricey weed, if you know who to talk to.

  Takashi’s is right up against the wall of the market – right where the escape pods used to be. People have taken them over the years, cutting themselves loose, refusing to believe that there’s nothing left on Earth to go back to. Most of the pods had been stripped for parts before they even got there, their fuel tanks drained dry. Didn’t stop people from taking them.

  The last one was shot out of Outer Earth decades ago. There are ghost stories about them: pods that never made it back home, that are still floating through the void.

  I tear my eyes away from the gaps in the wall. And it’s then that I see him. Arthur Gray.

  I didn’t pay a lot of attention to him when I picked up the cargo. He has a face you’d forget instantly if you passed over it in the crush. He’s nearly bald, with just a few thin wisps of white hair around his ears. His tunic is stained brown, although the stains are liquid somehow – more sweat than grime.

  Gray is leaning over his table, a dirty box of onions behind him, deep in conversation with a buyer. I duck behind a stack of crates, and watch as they talk. He and the buyer reach some kind of agreement, and strike palms. And then, Gray smiles, and it’s all I can do not to run screaming towards him, leaping over the table and wrapping my hands around his throat. Because his smile is the most awful thing I’ve seen.

  I’m halfway through calculating my jump distance and working out whether I should skip the chokehold and just kick him in the face when I realise that Gray is packing up. He’s closing his boxes, pulling an old, rusty chain over them and clicking a solid padlock shut. He busies himself with securing the boxes to a nearby wall strut.

  Amira and Carver. Surely they’ll have seen him too. But as I scan the stalls again, I can’t pick them out of the
throng.

  Gray heads off through the crowd, moving with surprising speed. I look around, expecting to see someone slip from their hiding place and give chase, but there’s nobody. He’s heading for a gap between two stalls piled high with scrap; in seconds, he’ll be gone, vanished into the crowd. Amira might have warned me to stay hidden, but I can’t let him slip away.

  The part of my mind still working properly is screaming at me. There’s no proof he even knows Prakesh exists. Following him could be a giant waste of time – and besides, you can’t risk getting near him. Let Amira and Carver do it.

  I step out from behind the crates, and take off into the market, after Gray.

  16

  Darnell

  By the time he’s finished dragging the two tracers and the technician inside, Darnell is dripping with sweat. It sticks his shirt to his back and runs in rivulets down his chest.

  The big one was the worst. Darnell couldn’t lift him up; he had to grab him under the arms, pull him down the passage. He’s in an ugly mood. The joy he felt when he received the eyeball has burned away.

  He straightens up, his shoulders aching. Gray’s work room doesn’t have a lot in it – a few benches, a couple of mobile storage containers. A big metal table, suspiciously clean. Darnell’s gaze falls back on the unconscious trio. Should he restrain them somehow? He knows where the cuffs and the zip ties are, in the storage area at the back. Gray once showed Darnell what he called his toys; the knives and pliers and handheld blowtorches, all arranged on neatly labelled shelves.

  He shakes his head. He needn’t bother with restraints. He’s seen quicksleep in action before – they’ll be out for hours, which gives him plenty of time, and even when they wake up, they’ll be too groggy to do anything.

  Gray. The man is meticulous. Fastidious, even. But even meticulous men make mistakes, and Gray’s mistake has made things exceptionally complicated. Darnell is so close to his goal that he feels as if he can reach out and touch it. But he has only got this far by being meticulous himself, by minimising error.

  He licks his lips, and looks back at his prisoners.

  Even small mistakes can have consequences that spiral out of control. He can’t risk those mistakes. And he definitely can’t risk someone like Gray making them for him.

  He pulls a metal chair off a stack on one side of the room, and sits down heavily. He’ll need to get back to the Air Lab soon, to take care of Hale. But first, he’s going to have a little talk with Arthur Gray.

  17

  Riley

  The worst thing a tracer can do is run in the dark.

  There are parts of the station we call black runs: areas where the lights have burned out and plunged the surroundings into darkness. It’s not just about injury; it’s the gangs too, lurking in the shadows, just waiting for a rookie tracer to take an easy shortcut.

  And the number one place to avoid? The darkest part of Outer Earth? The monorail tracks running around the inside of the ring.

  Unless a food train is coming through, the tunnels are black as death – cold and silent. When the station started getting really crowded, people tried sleeping in the tunnels, but after a few got crushed under the monorail, everybody else got the message.

  I have a feeling in my gut that the tracks are exactly where Gray is going. I should wait for Amira. But there’s no way I’m letting Gray get away. Not when he might be my only link to Prakesh. I keep my distance from him, trying to blend into the stream of people in the market. I’ve never had to tail someone before; usually, I’m running away from trouble, not towards it.

  To get to the tracks, you’ve got to climb to the top level and enter via one of the old platforms. Gray pauses at the market entrance, and I tense, ready to slip behind a nearby stall if he turns around. But instead, he tilts his face upwards for a moment, then resumes trudging, heading out towards the nearby stairwell. He begins to climb, taking long, purposeful strides.

  Still no sign of Amira, or Carver. I swallow hard, and keep on him.

  The crush thins out as we ascend, and by the time we reach Level 6, the stairs are all but deserted. As I suspected, he heads straight for the monorail platform, climbing the last set of stairs onto track level. This time, I hang back until he’s out of sight.

  I count to ten, then quietly climb the stairs to the platform.

  I haven’t been here in a while, and I’m surprised to find that the digital readouts still work. There are luminous orange holograms above the tracks, meant to indicate when the next train will arrive. They’re just flashing gibberish now, endless lines of meaningless code, but they bathe the platform in a warm glow. A couple of the fluorescent lights are working, too – not even flickering. The floor is made of black steel plates, and the walls are lined with dusty benches. Metal columns sprout from the ground beside the tracks.

  I close my eyes and listen. There – very faint: the sound of footsteps, heading off down the tunnel to my left. Gently, I lower myself from the platform to the track below. The light from the platform ends where the tunnel begins, cut off, as if it’s run up against an invisible barrier. My hand rests on the edge on the platform.

  Terror grips tight. I’ve seen nothing of Carver or Amira since I left the market. I’m breaking every rule we have: never go into the tunnels, never run in the dark, and never go off on your own to tail someone while breaking the above two rules.

  I take a deep breath, and step into the darkness of the tunnel.

  I have to force myself to pause so my eyes can adjust. In the distance, I can hear Gray’s footsteps, getting fainter and fainter. Even so I wait until I can make out the edges of the track, then slowly make my way along it. I’ve shifted onto the balls of my feet, trying to move as silently as possible. If a train comes along, I’m finished, but I calm myself by thinking that if Gray has a hideout here, then he’ll know when it’s safe to walk the tracks.

  Air whistles down the tunnel. In the darkness, I place a hand on the wall to steady myself. The sound of my fingers on it is dull and faint, the metal slightly greasy to touch. The walls of Outer Earth are several yards thick to protect us from radiation, but it still feels as if the vacuum is sucking at my hand, inches away, scrabbling at the wall. It’s so easy to forget that we’re in space, that the station is just a tiny metal capsule floating in the void.

  The footsteps have stopped. I freeze, listening hard. How long have I been walking? Is he still ahead of me?

  But then I hear his breathing, haggard and rough, right next to me, and it’s all I can do not to scream. Instead, I quickly flatten myself against the tunnel wall. I can hear him moving now, a faint rustle of cloth, then the tiny glow of a keypad. He’s up ahead on the opposite side, his back to me. The beeps as he punches in the code seem as loud as klaxons. There’s a click, and suddenly light floods the tunnel. He steps through, and the door shuts behind him with a resounding slam, plunging the tunnel into darkness again. When the echo fades, there’s the only sound of my heartbeat, so loud that I’m sure he must be able to hear it behind the door.

  I hop the tracks, and run my hands over the keypad, mentally kicking myself for not thinking this far ahead. Of course he’d have a lock on the door. He wasn’t just going to leave it open for anybody to find. I look around, my eyes searching the gloom for anything that could help, but see nothing. Carver would know how to hack this thing, and if I’d waited for him … I swear under my breath, and I’m about to turn back to the keypad when I glance up, and stop dead.

  Surely not even I can be that lucky.

  One of the plates in the roof is loose. There’s just enough light to see that it’s pushed very slightly to one side, with darkness beyond the opening.

  I have no idea where it goes, or if I’ll even be able to squeeze through, but it’s the only option I’ve got. Getting into it is going to be tricky. I consider tic-taccing off the wall, as I would to enter the Nest, but that’s no good. It’ll be way too noisy. No, there’s got to be another way.

 
; I look around, and see the struts on the wall next to the door. They’re old and rusted, but look like they’d support my weight. I brace my hands on the outer lips of the strut closest to the hatch, then lean back experimentally. The rust bites into my palms, and the strut groans slightly, but it holds.

  I lift my feet onto the wall, and start to pull myself up, hanging back off the strut, my arm muscles flaring in protest. When I reach the top, I very carefully reach one hand back. My fingers catch the edge of the roof plate, lose it, catch it again and pull it towards me. With a creak of old metal, the loose plate slides across the opening.

  I tense, take two quick breaths, then throw myself backwards, grabbing the lip of the opening with both hands. Part of the edge is jagged, slicing into my right palm. Hot blood runs down my wrist, and I have to stifle a howl of pain as I swing backwards. I force myself to use my momentum, and as I begin to swing forwards I pull myself up in one movement.

  I’m forced to my stomach almost immediately. The crawlspace above the opening is tiny, enough for me to lie prone but no more. It’s thick with wires and cables, and everything has a fine film of dust which tickles my nose. I run my thumb over the wound in my hand, hissing with pain: it’s cut deeply in a ragged line, just where the fingers meet the palm.

  One more injury to add to the list, I think. Racking up quite a score there.

  The sound of air rushing down the tracks has vanished. I have no idea if the crawlspace even follows the path Gray took; it could diverge, or swing off in a different direction entirely. Worse, it could split into multiple paths. And – I taste another dose of bitter fear at the thought – there’s no way to turn around. The only way out of here is backwards.