Tracer [Riley Hale 01]

by Boffard, Rob

  “Tell me you’ve got some food in that pack,” she says. I shake my head, and she grimaces.

  It’s then that I see the pile of food on the table; they must have raided every corner of the Nest to see what we had left. It’s shockingly little, barely enough to last us three days. Some ancient potatoes, tinged with green and already sprouting little nubbly shoots. A few protein bars. Two withered carrots. A small pile of hoarded sugar shots, little jellies in thin cups. Behind the pile, a dirty bottle of homebrew. Yao reaches up, and dumps a small pile of dried fruit on the bench – apples, it looks like.

  Carver says, “Well, at least we won’t die hungry.”

  “Oh come on,” Yao says. “You don’t believe he can actually pull it off?”

  We all stare at her. “What?” she says. “He’s a guy with a camera, and now everyone on Outer Earth thinks he’s a god or something. I ain’t scared of him.”

  “Save it, Yao,” snaps Amira. Her patience seems to be exhausted. I want to tell her about Garner, about Prakesh, but before I can say anything she passes me a cup of water. “Have a drink, then I need you back out there. I want you working the market: that goodwill you stored up after we caught Darnell? Time to use it. Yao, Kevin, I want you on the gallery floor. There’s got to be some people there who need something transported.”

  I take a slug of the water; it’s warm, but soothes my throat, and I have to force myself not to gulp, to take slow sips.

  “Are you going to be OK? Your arm isn’t going to fall off, is it?” Yao asks Carver.

  “Oh, I thought I’d chill out here for a while, sweetie,” Carver replies, flashing a smile which turns into a grimace. “Let you do some work for a change.”

  Amira glares at him, then turns back to us. “We don’t know how long this situation is going to last. Even if the stompers find Darnell, food’s going to be hard to come by for a while. So we carry on as normal. Trade runs for food – only food. It’ll be tough out there, but take whatever you can get.”

  Nobody says anything, but the glances we share speak volumes. Amira’s right. With the Food Lab down, it’ll be hard enough even for those who have access to mess food. For tracers like us, who have to our find our own food?

  I’m about to tell Amira what happened back on the catwalk, but as she glances at me I pause. That can wait. Right now, survival is more important. Wherever Garner is, Prakesh will take care of her.

  “Something you want to say, Riley?” Amira’s voice is impatient, testy.

  I shake my head. “No. Let’s do it.”

  35

  Prakesh

  Prakesh’s parents live on the edge of Gardens, close to the white lights and clean surfaces of Apex. They have their own hab, a comparatively large unit with a double cot and its own bathroom. Ravi Kumar’s long-service awards still hang on the wall, strips of black metal engraved with the dates he spent in the space construction corps. His wife has decorated the hab with pot plants – some given to her by Prakesh, some grown by her alone.

  “You – inside, now,” Achala Kumar barks when she opens the door to Prakesh. He’s momentarily stunned, but no sooner is the door shut than she’s hugging him tight, her face buried in his shoulder.

  “When they said – and then that man …” she manages, and then she’s sobbing, her tears soaking through the fabric of his shirt.

  Prakesh’s father is seated on the edge of the bed. The left leg of his red pants is knotted tight below the knee, his cane resting easily across his lap.

  “It’s OK,” Prakesh says, lifting his mother’s face towards him. “We got out all right.”

  “No, you didn’t. Look at you!” She wipes at his face, smearing the soot.

  “Achala, leave the boy alone.” Ravi Kumar stands up, rising off the bed with an experienced grace. His cane taps as he limps towards them, his eyes boring into his son’s. “How bad is it? The damage?”

  “Bad.” Prakesh reaches around his mother to one of the shelves, snags a canteen. He’s more thirsty than he’s ever been in his life, and sinks at least half the water in the bottle.

  “You two got enough food?” he says to his father.

  “Don’t ask him,” his mother says, jerking a finger at the older Kumar. “He doesn’t even know how to fix the chemical toilet when it goes on the fritz.”

  “Achala.”

  “Well, you don’t. It’s just like the plasma cutter all over again, when you were working on the Shinso Maru.”

  “Again, you bring this up?”

  Prakesh can’t help smiling. It’s easy to forget that his mother was his father’s boss, a long time ago. He talks over them, his ravaged throat aching. “Someone tell me what your food stocks are like.”

  “We’re fine,” his father says. “We have a little stored away.”

  “How little?”

  “Enough. We’re fine Prakesh, and you need to go.”

  “No, I need to …” Prakesh stops. He has no idea what he needs to do. By now, the Air Lab will be insane: the temporary growth operations will need all the hands they can get, and Suki and company can only keep them going for so long. But Riley sent someone to him – someone she needed to keep safe. And then there are his parents. He doesn’t believe that they’ve got enough food left. Not even close. He should stay, help them keep going.

  He shuts his eyes tight. He opens them when he hears the click of his father’s crutch, feels his hand on his shoulder.

  “Prakesh,” says Ravi Kumar. “We’re fine. You need to be back out there.”

  He sighs. “I know.”

  “And not just in the laboratory,” his mother says. “You should be out in the rest of the sector. Making sure this kutha sala Darnell doesn’t get inside people’s heads.”

  “What?”

  “I always said you should be involved in politics,” Achala says, folding her arms. “People trust you.”

  “Only in the Air Lab,” Prakesh says. He can feel his cheeks getting hot. “Only when I’m talking about trees.”

  “Nonsense. People look up to you. You might prefer to ignore it, but they do. And you can’t afford to be afraid. Not now.”

  “But what if—”

  “Go,” they both say at once, then glance at each other. Achala Kumar has a strange smile on her face. “We can take care of ourselves,” she says.

  But as Prakesh looks at his parents, all he can see are the things that hold them back. It’s not just his father’s leg, which keeps him a virtual prisoner in Gardens, which has kept him away from the spacewalks he loved so much. It’s the wrinkles around his mother’s eyes, the way her neck and upper back are stooped. They were middle-aged when they had him, and the years since then haven’t been kind.

  His anger at Riley, his frustration, has found another target. He can almost feel it physically moving in his gut, swinging around to focus on Oren Darnell. He’s trying to make everyone on the station suffer, and it’s people like his parents who will suffer the most.

  His mother is right – he does need to get back. But he’s not just thinking about the Air Lab. He’s thinking about the woman Riley sent to him. The woman who said she knew something.

  The Air Lab can wait. If there’s even the slightest chance that she could help stop Darnell, he has to find her.

  36

  Riley

  It’s amazing how everybody suddenly knows exactly how long we have left. Of course, it’s not forty-eight hours any more. It’s forty-four hours and thirteen minutes – at least, according to a man I passed on the way to market. His friend disagreed, said it was eleven minutes, waving a homemade watch around like a holy book.

  The nervous energy has built up, kettling in the corridors and pushing at the walls of the galleries, thrumming with awful power. Rumours are everywhere, changing and mutating in the space of minutes, stories of possible sightings and citizen watch groups and computer hacks. I’ve never felt the station like this.

  As I approach the market, winding my way through the bott
om-level corridors of Apogee, I hear two people talking. They’re husband and wife by the look of it, and she’s cradling a baby, wrapped in tatty blankets, fast asleep.

  “If they’ve hacked the Apex comms feed, then it won’t be long before they take the control room,” says the woman. “And when they do …”

  The man interrupts her. “I refuse to believe that every single escape pod is gone.”

  “They are. You know that. But we could always take one of the tugs,” the woman replies. There are dark circles under her eyes. “If there are enough of us, we could …”

  Her words fade as I slip past. I almost want to go back, tell her not to bother. The tugs, which we use for shipping asteroid slag into the station when the catcher ships come into our orbit, don’t have nearly enough range. You’d run out of fuel long before you reached Earth. And it’s not as if we can call the asteroid catcher ships for help.

  There are only two of them left now: enormous vessels which track the rocks through space, pull them in, drag them back to be processed down into slag. We depend on that slag for our minerals, our building materials. Their missions take years, and right now, both of them are in deep space. If this had happened ten or twenty years ago, they might have been closer, on the moon or on Mars. But the resources that were being brought back weren’t good enough, so the catchers were retrofitted to snag asteroids. Even if we sent a distress signal, and they came back for us, they’d never get here in time.

  I expect the market to be insane, even to see looters wrecking the stalls, but it’s the same as it was yesterday, and the merchants are doing a roaring trade. Food is going for a premium, and several stalls have crowds around them, with impromptu auctions breaking out for mouldy onions or a single protein bar. I cut through a narrow gap between two stalls, earning an angry shout from the merchant. I raise a hand in apology, and as I glance behind me I notice two people in the crowd staring angrily at me, as if memorising my face. Strange.

  I find Old Madala near the bar. He’s at one of the tables outside, nursing a cup of homebrew. The cup sits on the table in front of him, his hands resting either side of it. I grab a chair, and sit down opposite him. He looks up, surprised.

  “Now, about that job you mentioned …” I begin, but he jumps to his feet, knocking over his chair. It clatters on the metal plating as he quickly walks away. I stop, confused, before pushing my chair back and following, cutting in ahead of him.

  “Madala, what is it?” I say, but as he turns to me I see fear in his eyes, and it stops me cold.

  “Go away. You can’t be here,” he mutters, and turns away again. Worry coils in the pit of my stomach, and I reach out for him, but he jerks away, the fear turning to anger in his eyes. “Go!” he shouts. “I not talk to you.” He moves away into the market, his shoulders hunched, not looking back.

  All at once, it feels like the noise of the market intensifies, crowding out my thoughts.

  A job from Madala would have scored us some food, some more dried fruit or some green beans. Now, I’m going to have to find someone else, someone who might not be so inclined to trade for something good. I push through a crowd yelling out for what looks like a block of tofu, set on a counter behind a heavily tattooed seller, facing them with his arms folded.

  The next three people I speak to act the same as Madala. In one case a merchant I’ve had a good relationship with in the past tells me angrily to never speak to him again. Nobody tells me why. At first, I think it’s just because they don’t want to trade away food or don’t have anything they need transported, but after a while confusion gives way to fear, and then to a sickening dread.

  Darnell said he’d recruited people. What if they think I’m one of them?

  I have to get out of here, now. I slip between a pile of crates and a stall piled high with battery cases, heading towards the exit. I’m hoping that something will work out, that I won’t have to come back to the Nest empty-handed, but I’m getting more and more glares as I pass by. I keep my head down, and keep walking.

  Someone steps into my path, blocking out the light. A bald man, with a nasty, thickened scar on his neck, wearing a soiled T-shirt and old denim pants. His arrival is so sudden that I almost crash into him.

  “You,” he says, and his voice is tinged with malice. “We know what you’re doing.”

  I stare at him blankly, his words not registering.

  He spits angrily, a thick gob of saliva spattering a nearby crate. “You killed a lot of people today. And you walk in here like we wouldn’t notice.”

  “Hey,” I raise my hands, startled. “I don’t know what you think I did, but I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “You’re one of them,” he says. “The Sons of Earth. I heard you got Darnell caught just to keep people occupied while you planted the bombs. That’s what I heard.” His voice has become a low growl.

  “I didn’t. I’m not!” I say. “I’m just a tracer. I carry cargo.”

  His eyes narrow again, and he steps towards me. I move back, and bump into something solid and unyielding. The crowd has closed in around me, trapping me in a narrowing circle.

  The man behind me places a hand on my shoulder, and I whirl around, throwing a punch in his direction. He swings his head to the side, and my fist glances off his ear. Then the crowd is on me, hands everywhere, grabbing and pulling and yanking at my pack and screaming obscenities in my face.

  I lash out, but it’s like fighting air. The crowd is a single being, a hive-mind, a monster with many hands and thousands of fingers. I’ve seen what happens to people who get taken by a mob. I swing my arms even more wildly, desperately trying to punch my way out, shouting for someone, anyone. But there is no help, and I’m lifted above the crowd, hands gripping my arms and legs. I’m propelled towards the back of the market, and at one point my left leg is pulled down, twisted by a dozen hands. I cry out in agony, and throw my foot out.

  The movement causes the crowd ahead of me to sway. They’re tightly packed, pushing against each other to try and get a hand on me, and they collapse in a heap of tangled limbs. The bodies carrying me shudder. The hands lose their grip and I’m thrown forwards onto the pile of people. I push frantically against them, trying to force my way up, but then more hands grip me from behind, more people bellow in anger.

  Someone grabs me. It’s Madala, his face a mask of fear. I’m certain he’s with them, that he’s trying to hurt me too, but then I see the urgency in his eyes, and then he’s hurling me forwards, away from the angry crowd.

  “Run!” he yells, and then the monster grabs him, hands pulling him inwards. I bolt, terror pricking at my sides as I jump across a nearby table and smash through a pile of discarded boxes. Behind me, Madala cries out, a horrifying wail which nearly brings me to a halt. I’m desperate to go back for him, but I keep running, and his wails follow me, growing steadily fainter.

  Somehow, I come out of the crowd facing the front of the market, and I sprint towards the doors. Behind me, I can hear parts of the beast detaching, giving chase. There are no cries from Madala now. My pack is gone, my jacket hanging on by a single sleeve. I pull my arm into the other as I run, then drop into a roll under a table, coming out the other side as my pursuers crash into it, swearing and screaming. My lungs are burning, and a stitch grips my side in a ring of iron. But I keep sprinting, and then suddenly I’m out of the market, the cries of the monster growing fainter behind me.

  How can they possibly believe that I’m a part of it? Someone must have told them. Someone said something, and the people on Outer Earth, desperate for justice, jumped on it.

  No time to think about that now. If the people in the market think I’m one of the Sons of Earth, then chances are others will too. I have to get out of the corridors, get somewhere safe. And people know where the Nest is, so I can’t go there. I’ve got to find somewhere else. I look back down the corridor, swearing under my breath.

  Movement. I swing round, my fists clenched, ready to fight. Yao steps forward out o
f the shadows, her hands up. “Easy, Riley. Simmer down a little.”

  Kev steps in behind her, his face grave.

  “Listen, you have to believe me,” I say. “I’m not one of them.”

  “We know,” says Kev, his eyes calm.

  “Come on,” says Yao. “It can’t be that bad. How many are we talking here?”

  “Everyone. All of them. They all …” I’m breathing too hard, and one of the breaths becomes a half-sob.

  Without a word, Kev hands me his pack; his water bag is full, and I suck in the water as fast as I can, slaking the ever-present thirst. “I have to get somewhere safe,” I say, wiping my mouth. “Any ideas?”

  Kev shakes his head, but then his eyes light up. “Near the Chengshi border.”

  Yao whirls to face him. “Kev! We were keeping that for emergencies.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  She huffs. “Fine. One of the Level 3 corridors, near the habs. The conduits in the floor should be OK, and we stashed some water there a while ago. You should be able to hide out for a while.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Head down on that level until you come to a power box on the wall. It’s the closest to the start of the corridor. A few steps on from that, you’ll see a trapdoor in the floor. It’s easy to miss, but it’s there.”

  I’m about to thank them, but then something bounces off the floor nearby. It’s a chunk of twisted scrap metal, and the man who threw it is at the end of the corridor, yelling behind him: “Found her! She’s here!”

  “If you want to fight them, we’ll stay with you,” says Yao quietly, without looking at me. Her eyes are fixed on a point in the distance, her fists clenched.

  I want to say yes. More than anything, I don’t want to be alone right now. And I’m not just scared. I’m angry. I want fists to meet flesh and nails to tear and scratch, and to show these people that I am not who they think I am.