The two Enforcers at the gate also became aware of their presence and looked up curiously from where they had been processing the newest arrivals. The nearest one, a baby-faced constable with closely cropped blond hair, saw what was happening and reacted first.
“Whoa, wait a minute!” he called out, taking a few paces out from the gate to intercept Knile. “No dead people. We can’t allow those in here.”
“He’s not dead,” Knile said, attempting to hitch Roman up onto his shoulder so he could retrieve the Consortium badge. “He’s sick and I–”
“Take him out to one of those witch doctors in the slums.” The constable smiled unsympathetically. “I hear they save almost one in ten of their patients if you pay enough creds. You might get lucky.”
“I’m part of the Consortium,” Knile said, finally dragging the badge out of his pocket. “Let me through.” He lifted the badge but the constable did not even bother to glance at it.
“Consortium guys don’t wear rags, and they don’t carry around dead kids.” He began to turn away. “Shove off.”
“Do I need to get a Redman down here to settle this?” Knile all but shouted.
The constable guffawed. “Oh, please do.” He hitched his thumbs in his belt. “I’d like to see that.”
“What’s going on here?” another Enforcer said, appearing from behind the constable. He was an older man with a bushy moustache and matching eyebrows. As his eyes fell upon the glowing badge that rested in Knile’s trembling fingers, he paled visibly.
“What the–?” he said, perplexed.
“What’s the matter, Sarge?” the constable said.
The sergeant glanced at Knile’s face, then back at the badge. Flustered, he fumbled for the scanner on his belt and directed it toward the badge. There was a high-pitched sound as the badge registered, and then the Enforcer stepped back involuntarily.
“That thing’s for real,” the sergeant said, glancing up at one of the security cameras mounted on the wall as if fearing his actions were being scrutinised. “Get out the way,” he ordered the constable.
“Wait a minute, this–”
“Get out the fucking way, Jimmy,” the sergeant hissed. “You don’t interfere with folk from the Consortium.”
“This guy?” the constable said doubtfully. “There’s no way he’s–”
“It doesn’t matter,” the sergeant said, gripping the constable’s shirt and wrenching him aside unceremoniously. “If he’s in possession of the badge, he goes through. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s the rules laid down by the Consortium. If there’s a medical emergency there’s no questions asked.”
“You hold me up any longer and you’ll be looking for a new job over breakfast tomorrow,” Knile told the constable as he moved forward.
“That won’t be necessary, sir,” the sergeant assured him.
“Expect a call from my superiors at Consulate Seven up on Level Two-Fourteen about this. Both of you.”
“Our apologies, sir,” the sergeant stammered. “The constable is inexperienced and he wasn’t aware of the badge–”
“Expect a call,” Knile said curtly over his shoulder, and then he disappeared through the gates and into the shadowy interior of the Reach. A thought occurred to him and he turned back one more time. “Hey! Radio ahead and tell them to have an elevator waiting. I don’t want to be held up again.”
The sergeant clutched at the radio on his belt, but Knile didn’t wait around to see what happened next. He began to move across the large open area that comprised the lowest level of the Reach, glad to have cleared the first hurdle on their path to the Infirmary.
Away from the harshness of the sun, Roman suddenly felt cool in Knile’s arms. Panicked, he checked for a pulse, and after a moment he located a weak throb in the boy’s neck.
Roman was hanging on, but barely.
“We’re almost there, Roman,” Knile whispered as he hurried across the floor. He was out of breath and his arms felt as though they would give out any second, but he did not slow down. “Just a little longer.”
Knile spotted the bank of elevators up ahead, a great array of them lined up one next to the other, and a moment later he saw two Enforcers positioned not far away, holding an elevator for him just as he’d requested.
“This way, sir,” one of them called out, beckoning with two fingers. The way he’d said sir made Knile think the word must have tasted like a rotten egg in his mouth, being forced to address a peasant with that kind of respect, but there was nothing the Enforcer could do about it while Knile possessed the badge.
Knile breezed past them, all but collapsing inside the elevator car, and then the Enforcers stepped away, allowing the doors to ease shut. They glared at him with a mixture of revulsion and mistrust but said nothing.
Knile eased Roman against the wall of the elevator, then lifted the badge to the scanner. He half expected his journey to end right there – that the illusion of safety would break with the harsh clamour of the alarm. The doors would slide open again and the Enforcers would appear, grinning with evil satisfaction that they had come out on top in the end.
But that did not happen. The scanner chimed and the appropriate floor was automatically selected. The elevator began to ascend.
Knile grasped his holophone and called Talia’s number again. He gently prised Roman’s respirator away from his face, then removed his own as well.
“Knile?” Talia said, answering almost immediately. “Where are you?”
“We’re inside the Reach. We made it.”
“In the Infirmary?”
“Not yet. In the elevator.” He swallowed, his throat parched. “Is Emil there?”
“Here, Knile.”
“Emil, did you get access to the Infirmary? Can you see what’s inside?”
“We haven’t been able to do that, Knile. Looks like you might be going in blind.”
“Damn.”
“But you’re through the hard part, right? You’re almost there.”
“Yeah. I just like to know what’s coming where possible.”
“Seems like you won’t have that option this time around.”
“Guess not.” He glanced at the rapidly increasing floor indicator. “This thing has almost reached the top. I’ll call you again when I’ve hit the Infirmary.”
He didn’t wait for a response, ending the call and stooping to gather Roman up in his arms again. With the boy in his grip, he braced himself for the final leg of his journey.
38
Ursie and van Asch reached the departure gate, but the Redman and the technician were deep in conversation and did not even bother to acknowledge the presence of the newcomers. Ursie and van Asch were forced to stand there awkwardly while they waited to be noticed.
“This is the third time in the last month,” the Redman was saying. “That’s not good enough.”
“Hey, what am I going to do?” the technician replied impatiently. “Must have been a faulty batch of boards in the last shipment. I’ve replaced it every time and it just shorts out again.”
“Find a way to fix it,” the Redman said. “I don’t care how.”
“Excuse me,” van Asch said pleasantly, and the two men turned as one to look at him. “We have a problem with our passes. I wonder if you could look at it? We’re running late.”
The Redman turned back to the technician. “I’ll be back this afternoon to look at this again.” He nodded politely to Ursie and van Asch as he began to walk away. “Good day.”
The technician went back to work, fiddling with a screwdriver on the circuit board as if Ursie and van Asch weren’t there.
“You can help us?” van Asch said expectantly.
“What’s the prob, bud?” the technician said wearily, his eyes never leaving his work.
“There was a problem encoding our passes back at the transit desk. They used the wrong date, it seems. I wonder if you could let us through? We’re running late.”
The t
echnician eyed them suspiciously. “Can’t do that. You’ll have to go back and sort it out with the people over at transit.”
“But we don’t have time for that.”
The technician snorted contemptuously. “The cruiser won’t leave without you, bud. Don’t worry about it.”
“Please,” van Asch said as the technician straightened and began to rummage through his tool kit. “We really would appreciate your help.”
“Get lost,” the technician said dismissively, wiping at his fingers with a cloth. He began to say something else, but Ursie had already closed her eyes and shut out his words.
This guy is standing between you and your future, Ursie, she thought. Make him see reason. Make him change his mind.
Van Asch had warned her against using her abilities, but what was the point of being discreet if they were going to be left stranded here on Habitat Thirty-One? What if they were deported and sent back to Earth? She’d be right back where she started from.
No. She couldn’t let that happen. It was time to take control of her destiny.
She slipped into the technician’s mind. It was a complicated jumble of thoughts. There were highly technical procedures floating around in his head at that moment – images of circuit boards and processors, voltages. Coupled with that were memories of the Redman. From what Ursie could see, it was evident that the technician and the Redman had been involved in many verbal stoushes over the preceding months, and the technician had developed an intense loathing for the man. He felt bullied and intimidated by the Redman as well, and that was causing feelings of shame to bubble to the surface of his thoughts.
Find something you can manipulate, Ursie. Make him open the gate. Van Asch is depending upon you.
Ursie dug deeper, uncovering more of the technician’s memories. He’d eaten processed meat from a can for breakfast, his favourite meal. He was lusting after a young blonde woman who worked for the Consortium in the finance department on Level Two.
All of this happened within a blink of the eye. Ursie examined each thought and promptly discarded it as she attempted to find what she was after.
Suddenly she saw a bright flash within the man’s mind and a portal appeared. The only way she could describe it was like the light at the end of a tunnel. Something began to pour out of that white void, the likes of which she had never seen before – a slew of images that wormed outward like tentacles, a vast array of them, things she could only describe as tendrils of memories. It was as if a thousand thought fragments were all trying to occupy the same space, crowding in on one another and overlapping as they attempted to align themselves and move deeper into the man’s mind. Yet these memories seemed entirely juxtaposed with rest of the man’s consciousness, as if his very thoughts had somehow thrust out in another direction and formed an offshoot. A tangent.
A split second later, Ursie was overcome by horror and revulsion. She realised what was happening.
Another psycher was already in this guy’s head.
The tentacle-like protuberances of that other thought stream brushed against Ursie’s own consciousness, and a jarring pain like a bolt of lightning coursed through her skull. She shrieked in agony and fell backward, and for a moment the world blacked out completely. When her sense returned she saw the technician lying on the floor nearby, blood leaking from his nose and a vacant expression on his face.
Van Asch was not far away, hunched over on his knees. He strained to raise his head, then looked right at Ursie.
“Stupid girl,” van Asch growled, picking himself up off the floor. “Stupid fucking girl.”
Van Asch’s sunglasses had been knocked from his face as he’d fallen, and now Ursie beheld his entire face for the first time, free of its disguise. Immediately she understood why he had been attempting to cover his face with the sunglasses all this time.
His eyes. There were ghastly. Bloodshot and bloated, surrounded by ravaged red skin, these were the eyes of a demon. A ghoul. Van Asch advanced on her, and the muscles around those bloated orbs twitched and spasmed uncontrollably.
“You’re a psycher,” Ursie gasped, climbing to her feet.
“I told you not to use your abilities here,” he grated.
“Who are you?” she demanded breathlessly. “Who are you really?”
“You should have left him to me. I would have taken care of this.”
Ursie glanced around the concourse, but there was no one in the vicinity. It was just her and van Asch and the catatonic technician.
“Tell me the truth,” Ursie gasped, reeling away from van Asch. “Tell me the truth or you can forget about me coming anywhere with you.”
Van Asch stopped, then a slow smile crept across his face.
“Do you really think you have a choice?”
Ursie thought back over the past few days, about the thoughts that had been floating around in her mind, about the decisions that she’d made, and she realised that he must have been subtly manipulating her the whole time.
“You tried to taint my memories of Knile, didn’t you? When we went back to our quarters. You crept inside my head and tried to plant a seed of hate in my mind.”
Van Asch shrugged, mildly amused. “Your resolve was wavering. You were having second thoughts, so I gave you a nudge in the right direction.”
“Tell me what you want, van Asch, or I’ll scream so loud I’ll bring every Redman in this place down on us.”
Van Asch seemed to consider her threat, then nodded.
“Very well, I’ll tell you.” He leaned toward her. “You’re right. I’m a psycher, just like you. But unlike you, I’ve had to deal with this affliction for decades. I know the blackest depths of it, the horror of it.”
“What are you talking about? What affliction?”
“This thing we have, this ability to see into others’ minds. It’s not a blessing, Ursie. It’s a curse.”
“No,” Ursie said adamantly. “That’s what I thought when I first discovered I had it. But then I learned to control it–”
“You can’t control it,” van Asch said stridently, surprising Ursie with his conviction. “For a while you think you can, but in the end it overwhelms you. It’s like a muscle. The more you flex it, the stronger it grows. You’re a babe, yet. You’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do. Once you’ve used it for two or three decades, you’ll understand. It consumes you.” He closed his grotesquely bulging eyes wearily, then slowly opened them again. “In the end, the voices don’t stop. The images don’t stop. They can’t be stopped. They grow louder and more insistent until there is nothing in your mind but screaming. Screaming!” he yelled, distraught. With his mask pulled away, his sanity seemed to be fraying at the edges.
“There must be a way–”
“Look at me, Ursie,” he said, bringing himself under control with great effort. He pointed at his face. “I haven’t slept in two years. Two fucking years. I don’t even exist in a conscious state anymore. I’m caught in some nightmarish netherworld in which I can never find peace, oscillating between wakefulness and sleep, reality and memories.” He spread his hands. “Now, I need this to end.”
“What do you want with me?”
“I need your help to find the cure, Ursie. I want to save both of us. You need never experience this hell if you help me.”
“How?”
“By experimenting on ourselves. By using treatments. There’s a way to cure this sickness, I’m sure of it.”
“You’re lying. You have no intention of testing anything on yourself. You want to experiment on me,” she snarled. She’d seen enough inside his head to know that his intentions toward her were not pure. “You want to turn me into your lab rat.”
Van Asch seemed to lose his patience. “I told you not to look in my head,” he said sharply.
“Too late,” Ursie said. “I already saw too much when our minds collided. I’m not the first psycher you’ve recruited, am I?”
“No.”
“You�
�ve been collecting psychers from all over the Outworlds and the Earth as you search for this cure, haven’t you?”
“I have.”
“And you’ve been conducting your little tests on them, right? Using electrocution, torture, whatever you can to try to strip their abilities from their minds.”
“Conventional methods have failed,” van Asch admitted matter-of-factly. “I’ve been forced to pursue extreme–”
“And you don’t stop the experiments until the subject dies.”
“No. I don’t stop.”
“There never was a company. It’s just you.”
“This conversation is redundant, Ursie. You already know the answers, it seems. Now we have to leave.”
“Not a chance.”
“It’s not an offer anymore.” Van Asch’s eyes blazed. “In fact, it never was.”
Ursie’s defiance and her anger wilted under the intensity of his gaze, and, terrified, she turned and began to run down the concourse. She had not taken more than a few steps before a great, dark tide seemed to sweep over her, like a throng of ghostly hell hounds leaping onto her back. She was slammed into the unyielding floor hard enough to make her teeth rattle.
She cried out and tried to get up, but it felt like a great boulder had been placed on top of her, pinning her where she lay.
“You’re the strongest one I’ve ever seen, Ursie,” van Asch said behind her. “Apart from me.” His footsteps neared. “We’re going to achieve great things together.”
Through the agony of van Asch’s mind pressing in on hers, only one coherent thought occurred to Ursie.
Get out of his line of sight. His hold over you will falter if he can’t see you.
She gathered her strength and every last ounce of willpower she possessed. Then she did something she had never done before.
She lashed out with her mind to cause hurt. To maim. To destroy.
It was a primal thing, more instinct than anything else, an act of rage and desperation with no focus or precision. She felt as though she were blind, swinging her fist at an opponent she could not see and hoping that it connected, knowing that it was over if she did not.
Landfall (The Reach, Book 2) Page 26
