Kheris Burning (Thieves' Guild Origins: LC Book One): A Fast Paced Scifi Action Adventure Novel

by C. G. Hatton

  “Where do you think?” I said, harsh, not bothering to give him the respect our eldest usually commanded. I’d never respected him before, I wasn’t about to start then.

  I could almost see the realisation click inside his brain. His stance changed as he thought through the implications. He squared up to me. Mister Big all of a sudden. “So what do they want you to do?”

  There was no harm telling him. He was hardly going to rat me out to the Earth forces. “Break into the comms centre.”

  He stared at me for a second then laughed as if he didn’t believe it. Then he laughed harder when he realised I wasn’t kidding. “Don’t be stupid. That’s suicide. There’s no way even you can do that.”

  I walked off but I spun on my heels so I was walking backwards and stared him in the eye. “I can. I’ve done it before.”

  Chapter 9

  He stared at me, open-mouthed, no doubt trying to think of a smartass comment and failing. I spun again and broke into a run, leaving him behind easily.

  I went straight to the others. I didn’t go further than the entrance. I threw down the bag of stuff they’d given me, said to the kids on watch, “Maisie’s with them. Calum’s in charge. Tell everyone we need to move,” and I turned to leave. I reckoned Latia would be in there still, taking care of the little ones. I didn’t want to see her and I didn’t want to be there when Calum turned up.

  No one stopped me.

  I went to Latia’s place, grabbed the pass I’d stashed there, and for some reason I dropped the tiny stun grenade into my pocket too. Then I went from guard post to guard post until I found Charlie. I waited outside until he came out on his own. I stood there in the shadows, swaying slightly because my balance was still shot.

  He looked at me like he didn’t believe what he was seeing then he called out, “Luka, what the hell are you doing? Come in here. You okay?”

  I almost bolted.

  But I looked at him, wanting more than he could ever give me, and I said, “No.”

  He took me inside and sat me down. They were still on high alert and I heard them muttering that they’d have their asses chewed out for having me in there, but he told the others to shut up and clear out.

  He looked at me, shook his head and pulled two beers from a fridge in the corner. He popped them open, sat and pushed one of the bottles across the table to me.

  “Do you need a medic?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “What’s going on?”

  I took a sip of the beer. It was cold. Bitter. I would rather have had a soda but it seemed churlish to complain.

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t exactly fess up that my best friend had been taken by the resistance movement they were fighting to force me to spy on them.

  Not when I’d been doing that all along.

  Charlie narrowed his eyes. “Did the medics check you out properly before they let you go?”

  I shrugged and took another sip of the beer, straight from the bottle the way Charlie did. It was pretty disgusting and it didn’t get any better the more you drank of it.

  He leaned forward and put a hand to my forehead, steadied my face for a second, looking into my eyes until I blinked, and seemed satisfied I wasn’t about to keel over.

  “What’s going on?” he said again.

  Charlie had been there. That night eight years ago.

  “Is everyone okay?” he said, trying to get me to say something.

  It felt like I’d forgotten how to speak out loud.

  I put my elbows on the table and rested my chin down. I wasn’t safe there. But then I wasn’t safe anywhere. None of us were.

  “You want to sleep?” Charlie said.

  I shook my head.

  “C’mon, Luka, buddy, talk to me. You turn up here in the middle of the night… Jesus, I’m gonna get busted back to private if they find you here. What’s going on?”

  I shook my head again, hardly moving.

  He looked at me, took a swig of beer and reached into his pocket. He took out a pack of cards.

  I sat up.

  He placed it between us.

  Memories surfaced of thunder and lightning, the worst storm I’d ever been caught in, being soaked through to the skin and out after curfew.

  “You remember how to play?”

  I nodded.

  He took out the deck, shuffled and dealt.

  We must have played for an hour. Mean queen. Game after game. Until he made me laugh by going all in on a bum hand. I knew how bad it was because I’d been tracking the cards. I didn’t let on but he laughed and tossed his cards onto the table face up.

  He looked up at me. “You gonna tell me now what’s wrong?”

  I was about to. I swear I was about to spill it all to him. Dayton, Maisie, the codes, all the stuff I’d stolen over the years. Everything. Except someone walked in. Corporal tags on his uniform, a rifle in his arms. He didn’t give me so much as a glance. “We’ve got a problem, Sarge. They want you over in the garrison.”

  The comms were still down, they were still having to rely on runners to carry messages.

  Charlie nodded to the guy and stood up, turning back to me and pointing. “Stay here. You can bunk down over there. But I mean it. No skipping out. You understand?” He raked the cards into the pack and pushed it across the table. “Keep them.”

  And he left.

  I should have listened to him but I waited until no one was watching then disappeared, with the deck of cards in my pocket, to follow him.

  Usually when I went into the garrison, I just stuck to the main inner complex, sneaking in to the places no one expected anyone to be so they weren’t watching too carefully. And since the incident in the desert, the garrison was way too undermanned, on high alert but not enough bodies to take care of the essentials, never mind any internal checks. They were looking outwards, protecting their perimeters.

  But the thing with the comms centre right at its heart was that it was secure, isolated, and it was a sealed unit accessed only through an entrance from the central courtyard with a double sealing airlock, bioscans and auto sentries. Only the command level, way below ground, directly underneath the garrison, deep down with the AI core and the power plant, was more secure.

  But I hadn’t just been bragging when I said I’d been in to the comms centre before. I crouched in the shadows. I had a plan. I watched Charlie flash his pass to the guards and walk through then I took off running.

  I ran the gauntlet of the rubble, the killing ground, the wall and the outer courtyard again, jumped onto the roof and dropped into the inner complex. I didn’t mess about. I found an empty office, grabbed a terminal and sat under the desk to hack into the system. I was gambling that they wouldn’t have changed the access codes. There was no reason why they would have but I still held my breath as I keyed it in.

  There was no alarm. No screaming klaxons, no flashing red alerts.

  I took my time then and went meticulously through the protocols to reinitiate the pass. It was complicated but it was one of my favourite tricks when I wanted to get deeper in than the top couple of floors. The pass would be a duplicate. They always cancelled a pass if it was lost and issued a new one with a new code. But I knew how to make it look like an administrative error, two passes active to a single ID at once and an order for immediate recall of the second. Whoever it belonged to would be pissed and inconvenienced as well as fined. That was half the fun. I always left the first, original, pass somewhere it could be found. Mind games.

  I instigated another of my little power surges to the main grid and had a poke about before I signed out. I couldn’t see anything in there about why comms were down. They were running diagnostics constantly. I read what I could and wrapped up, taking a quick glance at the schematics before I left just to make sure I knew what was what, in case they’d changed anything. It just took a second.

  After that, I pulled out, put the terminal into my pocket and headed off into the base.


  Knowing what to do and where to go was one thing, doing it was something else. The only route I’d ever figured out into the comms centre was down through the complex and into the substructure of the garrison, climbing into the twisted conduits for the cables, wires, vents and pipes that carried everything needed for life support and comms. It couldn’t be completely isolated otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to function but its security relied on the fact that the substructure was too small for anyone to infiltrate.

  Like I said already, I can get into places no one else can. I can squeeze through gaps that would give mice trouble. I’m not claustrophobic. That helps. I’m more flexible than anyone I know. And I’m strong for my build. That’s what growing up on Kheris did for a body that, genetically, was not supposed to be there. All that added up to the fact that I could make my way through pretty much any cramped and crowded space, twisting and contorting.

  I crawled through to the main manifold where all the kit split up to go where it needed to go. There used to be a spot where the AI watched. But I’d disabled that years ago and no one had fixed it. The only problem could be electrobes, those tiny organisms that were the by-product of AI activity. Did I tell you how much I hate AIs? On a bad day, if the AI conduits were leaking that badly, I’d given up and climbed out, rather than risk suffocating with the damn things. They could be nasty but I was lucky that night and the concentration of them was light enough to be irritating but not bad enough to hurt.

  I worked my way through, climbed up and slid into position to watch, right at the heart of the garrison.

  It didn’t take long to hook the terminal into the system and listen in as the techs processed intel and ran their stuff. They didn’t know what it was out there in the desert and it was freaking them all out. It was hard to stay impassive, listening in to them panic, seeing the flaws in everything they were considering and in amongst it all, there was a dreadful unease that nothing would ever be the same again.

  I got what I needed for Dayton, left the terminal and the pass in a random office and made my way out of the complex. I didn’t hang around. They’d got the power back up so I just split and made for the roof.

  Just in time.

  The sun was rising by the time I made it out to the wall. I jumped down, sprinted across the killing ground and clambered over the rubble. I ran across Main, and that’s when I made a mistake I still think about now. There was something that made the back of my neck bristle. I stopped and looked back.

  Charlie was at the gate and he was staring right at me.

  Chapter 10

  I should have run but I couldn’t. He didn’t say a word, just raised his hand and beckoned.

  I walked back across Main as if I was hypnotised. I was expecting him to chew me out but he didn’t say a word. He took me by the shoulder and steered me in through the gate, past the guards. That side of the outer courtyard was empty except for a lone gunship that had crew buzzing round it. They didn’t even look up as we walked past and into the base.

  I’d never been in through the front door before. Charlie kept his hand on my shoulder as we walked, gathering stares, a couple of people muttering as we passed. He took me into the mess hall and sat me at a table.

  He said, “Stay there,” and went off to the servery. There was no queue. There was hardly anyone in there, two soldiers with plastifoam cups, an officer eating on her own, and the serving staff. I felt exposed, sitting there in the centre of the room, my back to the door, but Charlie didn’t take long before he returned with a tray. He took a cup off it and slid the rest across to me.

  “When was the last time you had a hot meal?” he said, sitting down opposite.

  I shrugged.

  I didn’t touch the stuff on the tray.

  He nudged it. “Eat.”

  I thought he was going to ask where I’d been, what I’d been doing, but he didn’t. He sat there, sipping at his drink while I pushed mashed potato around the plate with a plastic fork, making channels for the gravy to run into. I took a couple of mouthfuls but it didn’t feel right, not when I knew Latia didn’t have much in and I had no idea where the other kids were or if they had anything.

  “I need to go,” I said quietly without looking up. I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  “You need to eat some decent food. I’ll get you some to take back to grandma and the others.”

  He was being too good to me and I didn’t deserve it. I half-heartedly stabbed some kind of vegetable that looked too green to be real.

  The door opened. I kept my head down but I could see Charlie glance round and curse under his breath.

  Footsteps marched right up to our table.

  Charlie’s chair clattered back and I could feel the tension in his stance as he stood to attention.

  The voice was sharp. “Why are there civilians in the base? Current status is Red, Sergeant, if you hadn’t noticed. Why is there a child in the base?”

  I put the fork down and snuck the candy bar off the tray and into my pocket. I was tempted to slip beneath the table but I reckoned that might not go down too well under the circumstances.

  Charlie didn’t reply.

  I looked up without moving. It was a guy in black fatigues, IDC insignia, two officers a step behind him, all pin sharp and hyper tense. The officers were the usual up-themselves jerks that I avoided. I would have thought they had more important things to do than worry about a grunt sergeant offering scraps of food to a feral kid, even if their all important status was Red.

  “Captain,” the guy in black said, dripping disdain, “remove this child. The sergeant goes on charges. Good gods, gentlemen, we are virtually on a war footing. Let’s remember we are representatives of His Imperial Majesty, even this far out in the godforsaken wilderness.”

  Someone made a move to grab the back of my shirt. I felt it coming and slipped sideways off the chair, ducking out of the way. Boy, was that a mistake. There was a sound of weapons being drawn and readied across the whole room. Charlie was shouting, someone else was shouting. Another hand grabbed for me and I scrambled away, dodging past uniforms as they tried to tackle me. I pushed past, tripped over someone’s foot and went flying into the IDC guy. He struck me, backhanded, across the head. I staggered back, caught my balance and just stopped, letting them get me then, firm hands gripping my shoulders. I stuck my hands in my pockets and slouched, throwing a half grin at Charlie as they spun me round and marched me out.

  It was hot outside even though it was early, the bright sun already baking the streets. I scarpered as soon as they let me go and didn’t stop until I was out of sight. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the stuff I’d lifted from the mysterious asshole in black – a credit stick, a packet of gum and some kind of data access key. Not much use to us. But to have lost them would piss him off enough to make up for whatever they did to Charlie. I grinned, stashed it all back in my pocket and ran.

  As I made my way back down the tunnels, Dayton’s crowd were quieter, more subdued, as if they’d enjoyed the euphoria of their second-hand victory but now they didn’t have a clue what to do next to make the most of it.

  I was escorted into a tiny room that felt more like a cell and sat at a table. It wasn’t the usual routine. They gave me a board and a pen, then left, leaving an armed guard on the door.

  I scribbled, half-heartedly, using my left hand because no one was watching and not bothering to keep it neat. I finished and sat, nothing else in there to play with.

  It was an age before some guy I’d not seen before came in with more boards. He had a black band around his wrist. I registered it as he placed them on the table because Charlie wore one the same. I didn’t know at the time what they were.

  “Crack these,” he said, “and there’ll be food.”

  “I want to see Maisie.”

  “Crack these,” he said again, slow like I was stupid, “and there’ll be food.”

  He pushed them towards me and walked out.

  I ignored the
m.

  Then I got bored and couldn’t resist taking a look. They were cool. Puzzles. Codes, but not military codes like I’d always had before. These were complicated. I got the first few easy then it got harder.

  I sat up.

  I can see patterns and I can remember stuff. I didn’t know it then but that was the first time I encountered AI logic strings. It was the first time I’d ever played with anything that really tested me. I forgot eating and drinking. I forgot the nagging headache. I pushed the boards aside as I completed each one, some leading onto more and more complex tasks, some simply lighting up green as I cracked them.

  They got harder and harder.

  I did the last one and looked up, feeling like someone was watching. The guard was still at the door but he wasn’t looking in and there was no one else.

  I glanced round. There was nothing obvious that was surveillance but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any. I pushed the boards away from me and sat there, waiting.

  I felt hungry then.

  No one appeared.

  I got out the pack of cards and started to play, dealing hands as if there were people there, counting the cards and playing games, shuffling the way Charlie had shown me, and messing about.

  I ended up dealing every card in the pack as fast as I could, face up into five neat piles, until I had one left in my hand. I knew what it was. I shuffled and did it again. I knew what it was each time. I must have been saying it out loud because someone did come in then. The guy with the wristband. He sat down, grabbed the deck and shuffled then stared at me and said, “Do that again,” planting the deck in front of me.

  I looked at him. “Do what?”

  “Don’t be a smartass, kid, just do it again.”

  I dealt until I had one card left. He beckoned me to give it to him. It was tempting to peek, make him think I’d been cheating the whole time, but he took it before I could.