Trojan Gene: The Awakening

by Ben Onslow

  “Yeah.” Nick gives a bit of a shrug. “But I’ll survive.”

  I let Mon out of the kennel. He leaps onto the back of the ute. Settles, head on my pack like it’s a pillow.

  Ela’s waiting by the ute in the cold. Arms folded around her body, hands slid inside the sleeves of Mum’s Swanndri.

  Nick opens the ute door.

  “We’ll park near a layby about a couple of kilometres from the Egan’s place. I’ll show you where we’re headed then. We need to recon before we go in.”

  That makes sense: check out the Egan’s place first. Can’t do much for them if Vector are there already like they were at the Stevens’.

  “Okay.” I hold the door open so Ela can get in. Get in beside her. Shut the door. It’s a tight fit the three of us in the cab of the ute. I put my arm over Ela’s shoulders, pull her closer to give Nick room to change gear. She snuggles up to me the way she used to when we were kids, and having her tucked up close like that feels familiar.

  We get going.

  “You know Vector got Lucinda?” asks Nick as we’re driving along.

  “Yeah, saw it happen. Three StealthHovers and a hundred odd VTroops to take one girl.”

  “Fitzgerald said they sent an army. Joe went berserk when he found out Lucinda had been taken.” Nick sounds really bitter.

  “Who’s Joe?” asks Ela.

  “Nick’s brother,” I say.

  We drive along in the dark a bit longer, then Nick starts talking again. “I saw something yesterday you might want to know.”

  “What?”

  “Remember those two guys we saw with the Willises on Monday night? I’ve seen them at the Outpost.”

  “So they’re Vector?”

  “Looks like it.”

  It’s not much of a surprise. They had that pumped-up, full of themselves look Vector have.

  But I just did an eSerch on one of them. Not good.

  “Your Com not work?” I ask Nick.

  “Coms have ears,” he says, and Ela snorts.

  Fair enough. Hopefully Curley’s wrong and Dad’s computer is secure enough that the search isn’t picked up.

  No Hovers turned up and snatched me.

  Maybe Jacob’s right. Nick does have more sense than me.

  “They’re OffGrid,” I say.

  “You did a search on them?” I see him turn his head a bit in the gloom in the ute. Nick looks at me like I’m an idiot.

  “Yep, and got zilch.”

  “Did you spell the name right?”

  So he thinks I’m a complete idiot.

  “How many ways can you spell Carlos Vincent?” I ask. “What were they doing at the Outpost?”

  “Acting like they own the place. Talking to people, giving orders. They’ve even got an office.”

  “What are they there for?”

  “Don’t know.”

  We get to the layby and climb out of the ute. It’s cold and dark, almost a frost, grass white, fog hanging around below, a bit of a glow on the horizon.

  Nick blows on his hands to warm them.

  “Whose idea was this?” he asks, boots stamping on the frozen grass.

  “Not mine.” I go round the back of the vehicle to get my gear, and Mon leaps off the tray. “Think the fog will lift?”

  “Should burn off early.” Nick wanders around the ute too. Unzips the front of his pack. Pulls out a chart and a torch. Spreads the chart on the tray.

  Mon lifts his leg beside the front tyre.

  “Likes to leave his mark that dog,” says Nick, like he’ll be washing that tyre the moment he gets home.

  We lean over the map. Try to get a fix on where we are. I know the general area: it’s not too far from Nick’s grandma’s place. Been hunting here with him and Joe a few times.

  “We’ll follow this line. Come at the place from behind.” Nick, tracks his finger up a gut then across a ridge. “We’ll walk along here and work our way up to that windfall ridge. That way, when we get to the bush line, we’ll get a good view of anything going on.”

  “Okay.”

  Ela waits near us watching, and patting Mon. I turn to her, point into the gloom of the bush in front of us. I can just make out a darker shadowed area of a gully snaking up the slope.

  “We’re going up this gut,” I say, and Ela nods.

  Nick folds the map up again, stows it in his pack. Pulls the cord to close the inner lining and then clips the top flap.

  “Got your wrist shield?” he asks as he lifts the pack off the tray by its strap.

  “Yeah,” I raise my arm a bit. The Swanndri sleeve slides down. The shield glints dark and metallic in the half light.

  “Left your Coms at home?” I check. Locates on Coms can be tracked too. Nick and Ela nod.

  Then the three of us get going. And it doesn’t take long to realise that as brilliant ideas go, taking Ela with us isn’t one of them. We’re supposed to be in stealth mode, but in the bush, even in running shoes there’s the noise of her. She stands on every twig and breaks every branch she passes. I can hear the rustle the leaves make as she moves her feet. She knows nothing about moving through the bush quietly. Forgot to teach her that when I was twelve. Probably couldn’t do it myself then anyway. Even Mon seems to know stealth is required. He moves at the same speed with the same care as me and Nick.

  Not Ela.

  And talk about talk. Normally when we are in the bush, Nick and I can go for hours without saying anything.

  Not Ela.

  “What’s a gut?” asks Ela as we climb steadily.

  “A small steep gully that goes up the side of a ridge.”

  “A windfall ridge?” asks Ela.

  “A place where all the trees have been blown over in a storm.”

  And so on.

  It takes us about half an hour to get to the top where the track disappears.

  “How do you know where to go?” asks Ela.

  “We’ll follow the ridge. Hardly anyone hunts now that’s why the track’s grown over.”

  We walk on. Nick ahead, moving like a shadow with Mon near him.

  No loyalty that dog: goes with the one in front.

  Then Ela steps on yet another twig and the crack reverberates through the dark. I make a rapid change of plan. Decide we have to leave her behind.

  I stop, take off my pack and put it down beside a rock.

  Nick sees me do it, and waits just a bit ahead. Probably can guess why I’ve stopped.

  “You stay here,” I say to Ela. “I’ll come back and get you when we’re done.”

  She looks doubtful.

  “We’ll be quicker and quieter without you.”

  “How long will you be?” she asks.

  It’s still not quite dawn. She might be sitting in the dark alone in the middle of nowhere for a while.

  “We should be back in an hour or so,” I guess, and try to sound like an hour’s not long. “Depends what happens. There’s a torch in the pack,” I say as some consolation.

  “Won’t you need the torch?” she asks.

  “No, there’s enough light from the moon to see where we’re going.”

  She still doesn’t look too keen on the plan.

  “I’d rather stay with you.” She looks around at bush looming close and dark.

  I can’t decide what to do. I’m not too keen on leaving her alone in the dark but I have to weigh that up against being able to move fast and quiet.

  “Hurry up,” says Nick from his position away a bit from us. “We don’t have time for another lovers’ tiff.”

  He read too much into me and Ela arguing.

  I decide on a compromise. “You can come if you stay close, and move like we do.”

  “And don’t talk anymore,” says Nick helpfully. “We don’t want to alert anyone until we know what we’re walking into. And you have to keep up. We can’t wait for you.”

  She considers that, looks from me to Nick and then down to the shadowy valley. “I still want to come, I’ll be
careful, and quiet.”

  I’m still not sure it’s a good idea, but I give in. Put the pack back on.

  “Okay.” What can go wrong? We wake them up, pack them into the ute, take them to Fitzgerald, should be real easy.

  We start moving towards the Egan’s place again.

  Nick nods behind us at Ela. “Real masterful of you,” he says out the side of his mouth.

  “You were no help.”

  Nick just shrugs. I figure he wasn’t too keen on leaving her behind either.

  Eventually we’re close to the Egan’s. We stand, watching the mist in the gully get pushed further back as the sun starts to come up. Behind us the hills look like black velvet against the sky. In front I can see the farm buildings in the grey of dawn. It’s all quiet and serene, looks like we got here in time.

  Nick bangs on the door, real loud. And after a few seconds I can hear that scurrying and crash bang you hear when someone is trying to move fast but not wake up the rest of the household.

  Egan opens the door. His feet are half in his slippers. He’s still shrugging into his dressing gown.

  He looks from me to Nick.

  “About to get a visit are we?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” says Nick.

  “How long have we got?”

  “Fitzgerald says maybe an hour.”

  “What about the seedlings?”

  “No time, leave them, just get your family out.”

  His wife appears behind him. Switches on the light.

  Egan turns to her. “Wake the kids, get them dressed and packed. Just a change of clothes.” She nods and goes back down the passage way.

  We hear whispering then movement from the bedrooms.

  “Ela and Jack will help you pack,” says Nick. “I’ll get our vehicle, take you to Fitzgerald. He’s got a safe house sorted.”

  “Where are you parked?”

  “About a kilometre away, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes or so.”

  “We’ll be ready,” says Egan, like he knew this would happen and they’re prepared for it.

  So we get the Egans away safe. All ten of them, all the kids OffGrid. Then Nick goes back to the layby, hides the ute. After that me, Ela and Nick sit on the bush-line above the house to see what’ll happen, like Fitzgerald told Nick to.

  Nothing happens. We watch the farmhouse and the barns and the long lines of glasshouses. Jacob says Egans have one of the biggest operations we’ve got. Hectares of glasshouses and barns full of equipment stretch out in front of us. Maybe that’s why they need all those kids. There’s a fair bit of work involved in an operation like this. Anyway, it all just sits there undisturbed.

  “This is a waste of time,” says Nick about two hours after sunrise.

  “Maybe Curley got it wrong.”

  “Yeah, looks like it.” He stands up. “Want to go with Plan B?”

  Sounds good to me. We go hunting again.

  Ela’s doing pretty well, but I hang back a bit and keep her with me. She might be getting better at moving quietly but there’s still the smell of her. She moves in a fog of perfume, soap and shampoo. So I let Nick go ahead. We have a better chance of getting something with Nick up front. He has his rifle loaded and the bolt half closed.

  As we go up the next ridge, every now and then, Nick walks out to the edge. Takes a look.

  “What’s he doing?” asks Ela. She might be better at moving in the bush, but she still talks.

  “Looking for sign,” I say.

  “Sign?”

  “Footprints, broken branches, bark rubbed off tree trunks.”

  He comes back to where we are.

  “There’s nothing on the track,” he says. “If we work our way higher we should start seeing something.” He holds the sling of his rifle against his shoulder and makes a snaking upward motion with his free arm.

  We carry on.

  Ela is talking again.

  “Why does he keep his rifle loaded?”

  “So he can take a quick shot. Closing the bolt the final half turn won’t make a sound.”

  We work our way up the ridge.

  “Why are we going this way?”

  “It’s better if we move into the breeze. Nothing will get our scent.” Don’t mention the fog of perfume. “That means anything ahead of us won’t be disturbed.”

  We come to a small crest with a large rocky knob that gives a good view of the gut leading down below the main ridge. Broadleaf trees wind their way down with grassy fingers separating them.

  “It looks like a perfect spot for a deer, but there still isn’t much sign,” says Nick, coming back to us.

  “We should head for the main clearing.”

  “Yeah.” Nick walks along with us. “Do you think Vector will visit the Egan place,” he asks, as we climb. The going is easy on this main ridge, the manuka fairly clear underneath.

  “Not sure. We could go back and check.” I’m starting to feel uneasy about being out hunting again after what happened to the Stevens. I guess at least this time we dealt with the people before we took off hunting. Last time the problem was we did the hunting first.

  “Yeah,” says Nick, like he feels a bit uneasy too about the way we’ve left things at the Egan’s. But we shake off the uneasy feeling and get back into hunting mode.

  “The deer can’t be too far away.” He walks on ahead. We get slower and slower and have to crawl under fallen trees. The trees have rotted down a lot, but the bush lawyer has taken over, covering them with a mat of growth.

  Nick and I unload our rifles and put the safety on. Then push ourselves through the deer tunnels that wind through tangled bush. Deer are small and streamlined compared to people so it is hard. Ela follows and makes no comment about crawling through the grubby burrows.

  We come out into the first of a series of empty clearings.

  Deer have been here. The grassy areas are cropped.

  After a while Nick signals to us to be quiet, and shows Ela a set of fresh footprints leading down through a clearing.

  I get ready in case I can get a shot and follow close. Ela behind me now. There are prints and droppings everywhere. It looks like something has been living here. We creep forward quietly, with eyes and ears alert for anything. And then suddenly hear a branch snap ahead of us.

  We all freeze. There’s something there all right. A small stand of mountain totara shields us from the next clear area. A deer could just be on the other side. We can see the trunks of the totara have been rubbed by stags. Twenty or thirty trees have been nearly stripped of their bark. Those trunks stand white, stark and naked. Contrast with the brown of the manuka behind them.

  Nick sees the ivory tips of antlers weaving through the manuka and totara towards us.

  “He’s coming straight for us,” he whispers. Closes the bolt quietly and raises his rifle. Antlers disappear and reappear as the stag threads his way through the trees.

  “What a beauty,” Nick whispers again. He’s looking through his scope to find the target.

  Concentrates, breathes, and adjusts his stance.

  “Stop moving,” he says to the stag under his breath. A flurry of breeze moves the leaves around us. The stag’s eyes bulge open. His nostrils flare as he catches a scent. And then crash, he’s gone.

  “The bastard took off,” says Nick.

  “Not your fault. A gust of wind and that was the end of the place.”

  “What happens now?” Ela asks. “Do we chase it?”

  “No, that one’s gone for good. It will be nervous for days now,” I say. Nick looks at me a bit surprised, but doesn’t say anything.

  Mon’s sniffing around the edges, looking back at us after every second or third tree as if to say, “Come on, he went through here.”

  We sling our rifles back over our shoulders, and I put my spare arm around Ela. Turn to Nick, “What do you want to do?”

  Nick thinks about it for a moment. “We’ll let the area settle.”

  12.

  Vector


  Wednesday 15th Feb 2051

  11:10 a.m.

  We squat on the grass. Unpack the packs. I pull out the primus, gas canister and billy. Assemble the primus and sit it on the ground.

  Ela walks over to the edge of the clearing and looks at the view. When she is far enough away not to hear him Nick asks the question I guess he’s been bursting to ask since we let the stag get away.

  “What happens if we see something across a ridge like we did last time?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “If we go after it, Ela’s not going to be able to keep up.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I didn’t want to chase the stag.” She might be able to move a bit quieter in the bush now, but she’s an Elite female, she’s never going to be able to chase a deer.

  I decide to make the sacrifice. “I’ll stay with her and you go after it.” There isn’t any other way.

  Lucky that decision never gets tested.

  “Yeah, right,” says Nick.

  I prod the billy handle to keep it upright.

  Anyway, how would we get the thing out if we did shoot it? We are miles from the ute now.

  “We should have moved the seedlings out of the glasshouses. We would have had time to save them,” says Nick.

  “Yeah.” I pour everyone a hot chocolate. Hand Nick and Ela mugs and then sit down beside Ela on her coat. She shuffles along to make room for me. I pick up a sandwich, take the top piece of bread off to check the filling, ham and tomato. I stick it back down and take a bite. “It was too dangerous to have your ute there. If Vector arrived while we were doing it they’d have got us.”

  “We could have moved them into the bush come back for them in a few days.” Nick twists his wrist shield around, like it’s cutting into his arm again. “If Vector did come they’ve got the seedlings now.”

  Then I think of something I hadn’t thought of before: it wasn’t the seedlings Vector was interested in at the Stevens’.

  “Vector didn’t take them last time: they just smashed them like they smashed everything else.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Nick, looks surprised by the idea. “They took the girls.”

  That puts a different slant on almost everything. We thought this was all about the seeds, but it can’t be.