Ellie Quin Book 3: Beneath the Neon Sky (10 page)

And he was so very far from losing it.

In fact, there was a very thick silver lining here to hold onto whilst he calmed himself, steadied his heartbeat, his pulse, his mind.

Ellie Quin is most definitely Mason’s candidate
. She was smart. Wily. And very fast. Exactly how he’d engineer such an abomination. But that was something he could confirm soon enough. There was a lot of blood in that entrance module, the girl was wounded, some of that had to be hers. He had a sample now.

Look on the bright side…

He now had a name, images and data on her, gleaned from the census and immigration databases here on Harpers Reach. The alternative was that he could still be pointlessly trawling through names on a list back at the labs orbiting Pacifica. He could so easily have picked the
wrong
planet to begin narrowing down his search.

Deacon smiled calmly. He had the right child and now there was nowhere she could hide on this planet. And more importantly, there was no way she was going to find a way off-world either.

Enough is enough.

Discretion be damned, this whole godforsaken backwater mud-ball was going to be quarantined immediately. Enough messing around; he would contact the Administration immediately and have the nearest military ships diverted this way to fully enforce the quarantine. A cover story could be worried about later on; an outbreak of something horrible and airborne. The most important thing right now was to make sure this little girl didn’t make it off-world.

CHAPTER 17

We have pinpointed the planet on which Mason’s child is located.

Have you found the child?

We have an identity, and we are closing in on it.

Are you satisfied that you will locate it?

There is a risk the child might find a way off-world. She has friends helping her. Under the authority you have given me I will place the planet under quarantine.

Which planet?

Harpers Reach.

There are commercial interests there for members of the committee. Are you certain this is necessary?

It is a necessary precaution.

We will issue a universal announcement that a dangerous and infectious pathogen has taken hold there. You will also have whatever military vessels can be spared to deploy as you wish.

Thank you. I have a concern you should be made aware of.

Proceed.

I suspect that the child is being assisted covertly. Although she may not be aware of what she is, it seems she is aware that we are after her. I suspect she has been warned by someone with access to information.

A traitor?

It may be that Mason was not acting alone, that the conspiracy is more widespread.

Within the committee?

That is a possibility to consider.

We shall be cautious. For now, you must continue to operate on your own authority, do whatever you deem necessary and catch this child before it is too late.

I understand.

CHAPTER 18

Jez squeezed through the gap between the arm rests and settled down in the co-pilot’s seat. ‘She’s asleep.’

Aaron set the autopilot on and turned to her. ‘How is that wound?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve seen enough episodes of Dr Emergency to guess it looks worse than it is. The bleeding has stopped anyway and I splashed on some Anti-Bact and put a bandage on it. I’m more worried about how much toxic crud both Ellie and I breathed in out there.’

‘You’ll be alright,’ replied Aaron, ‘you might have a doozy of a migraine for a few days though.’

They sat in silence for a moment, accompanied by the muted, deep bass rumble of Lisa’s engines as she sped low across the desert.

‘So where are you taking us?’

‘To Harvest City. Things are much less organized over there, it’s easier to stay anonymous.’

Jez looked up at him. ‘I don’t know what’s going on Aaron, but somebody really wants our Ellie dead.’

Aaron nodded. ‘You mustn’t tell her this now, Jez….not until she’s ready for it, but…’

‘But what?’

‘I found her family.’

Jez turned to look at him, the question forming on her lips, but he nodded before she could ask.

‘Oh no.’ Jez felt like she had been punched in the chest. A horrible suspicion was all she’d had. She gasped. ‘I heard them say things about them, I wasn’t sure what they meant. Oh crud, oh God…poor Ellie. They’re all…?’ Jez couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

Aaron remained silent for a moment, frowning as he tried to erase the appalling images from his mind. He had found the father slumped defensively over the children, a testament to his final act as the shots were fired. The mother had been worked on afterwards – presumably to find out where Ellie was, and left for dead. Their home ransacked, gutted - Ellie’s entire childhood world casually destroyed and ripped to shreds.

‘Not all of them, not when I arrived,’ Aaron’s voice faltered. ‘Her mother was still alive. She told me where to find you, before she…’ he turned to look out of the window, quiet for a moment. ‘Look, let’s just keep that our secret for now.’

Jez nodded silently. ‘Oh god, poor Ellie,’ she muttered quietly.

‘You know her better than I do,’ said Aaron, ‘do you have any idea why people are after her?’

She shook her head. ‘No. She’s just another farm girl. She’s never told me anything that, that made her….
different
I guess. She’s a little dreamier than most, quiet, focused, but you know all this anyway, right? Ellie herself hasn’t got a clue why they’re after her.’

Aaron turned round in his seat to check she was still sleeping.

‘She’s just a regular girl,’ Jez continued, ‘and the closest thing
I’ve
ever had to family, I guess.’

‘Did you hear
anything
from those men that might help us know who’s after her?’

Jez shook her head. ‘Just bits and pieces that don’t make sense.’ She stopped and her eyes widened. ‘One of the men let us go. He said he’d been hired to go after Ellie, but also hired by someone else to see she got away.’

‘You mean there are
two
groups of people interested in her?’

Jez shrugged, ‘I guess so.’

Aaron shook his head. A few hours ago, if he’d been asked if there was anything about his young friend Ellie Quin that he would consider unusual, he would have said she was a little more introspective than most, perhaps a little smarter than most people her age…but now? He racked his mind for anything she might have said or done that would explain why someone out there desperately needed her dead.

‘I think they might be terrorists of some kind,’ said Jez.

‘Why?’

Jez considered the answer for a full minute. ‘Well who else can you think of?’

‘The authorities maybe, the Administration?’

Jez scoffed at the answer. ‘What? The Administration??? Come on Aaron, they don’t go around murdering people like that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘What?’ Jez spun in her chair towards him. ‘You’re kidding, right? They hold the whole universe together. If it wasn’t for them running things, making sure there’s peace everywhere, we’d all be clubbing each other with sticks and stones. I know
some
history Aaron, I’m not entirely stupid. I’ve watched some documentaries. And you know, there are a few groups out there, groups of sicko terrorists that do stuff like that - grab people as hostages and do really nasty things to them…kill children, kill women. They don’t like the fact that everything’s just fine, that there aren’t any wars to fight.
They
hate that.’

Jez shook her head with disbelief at him. ‘
They
are the scumbags the Administration protects us from, Aaron.
Terrorists
. Maybe some of those sick drekks have found their way onto Harpers Reach, trying to turn our world into a screwed-up psycho-mess, just like the twisted screwed-up worlds they come from.’

‘Terrorists?’ He shook his head. ‘You are so naive for someone street-smart.’

‘Well, come on, it certainly isn’t the Administration. I mean why would they fregging well do it? What harm was Ellie’s family doing to them?’

Aaron shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But then why would terrorists kill them?’

Jez shook her head. ‘We should go to the nearest law marshal and-’

Aaron cut her off. ‘Jez…they arrived in a New Haven Authority vessel, a law marshal shuttle. I saw it on the ground on my approach in. We can’t go to the police.’

Jez looked at him. She saw that too. ‘So, maybe it was stolen?’

‘Possibly. But look, I think that until we know who we’re dealing with, we must keep to ourselves.’

Jez studied him in silence.

‘I can’t understand what the Administration would want with Ellie either,’ Aaron continued, ‘but the law marshals here on this planet can be bought by anyone Jez…
anyone
. They’re just goons in uniform. Come on, you’re a city girl, you know that as much as I do, surely.’

Jez bit her lip and nodded slightly. ‘So what are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know. They’ll be looking for her and they’ll be looking for this shuttle. If I had the money I’d pay for us all to get a ticket off-world on the next ship going. But I don’t. The best I can suggest is that we head for Harvest City, we stock up on fuel and supplies, and then we lose ourselves somewhere remote on this planet, and we lie low for a while.’

‘What if you
sold
the shuttle?’

‘Hell, we’d have enough money to buy ourselves out of this system and the next, but
they,
whoever
they
are, Jez, would track the sale down in the blink of an eye. You can’t sell a vehicle like this without cutting a lot of red tape and a lot of data changing hands. And if
they
can secure the use of an authority vessel, they can sure as hell have access to vessel purchase and sale records.’

Jez looked out of the window. ‘I’m scared Aaron…and I don’t normally scare that easily,’ she said, a solitary tear rolling down her cheek. ‘We’re in a real fregging mess.’

Aaron reached out grabbed her arm firmly. ‘This isn’t the best time to go crumple up, Jez. What you need to do is be strong, for Ellie’s sake. She needs us both now.’

Jez looked down at his grasping hand. Any other man, any other time…and Jez would have balled-up her fist and slammed it into something soft and sensitive. But Aaron was the only friend she and Ellie had, and right now he was making a lot of sense, while, on the other hand, she was starting to gibber like some weak-kneed little waif.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ she replied wiping the tear away and thumping her thigh with a fist for allowing herself to look so pathetic in front of him.

‘So, we have a plan then,’ he said. ‘We’ll land in Harvest City’s port, stock up as quickly as we can, and then we go and hide out in the wilderness for a while.’

‘And no mention of Ellie’s family,’ she added.

He nodded, ‘not for now. Not for a while.’

*

The following day, Ellie watched the approach and descent with Jez, standing behind Aaron’s seat, resting her elbows on the cushioned headrest. She squinted as the late afternoon sun bathed the cockpit with a brilliant sepia glow, and the windshield glared and shimmered.

Harvest City was a far less inspiring sight on approach than New Haven. Instead of one giant enviro-dome encasing the entire urban jungle, Harvest City was built from several hundred much smaller domes, each linked together by tubular throughways on the ground and, in some cases, several hundred feet up. It was a chaotic and modular structure, rather than a grand, imposing one. It was a city that had clearly built itself up organically over a long period, one dome at a time.

The port bore no resemblance whatsoever to that of New Haven’s. Instead of a thousand-acre, checker-board landing field of color-coded pads, Ellie could see about a hundred or so hangars of varying sizes arranged either side of a long sealed concourse that led across the arid landscape towards the bubble-wrap carpet of Harvest City.

Aaron hovered several hundred feet in the air until he received a data handshake and a green guidance light began to blink above one of the smaller hangers. The shuttle, under the remote control of the port’s automated landing guidance system, steadily dropped in altitude until it hovered outside the entrance to the hangar. Then, with a gentle nudge from the aft thrusters, it drifted forward, out of the brilliant glare of sunlight and into the gloomy, pale blue strip lighting within. A moment later, the shuttle settled onto the ground with a soft bump.

‘So here we are,’ said Aaron, looking around the small hangar anxiously for anything that might indicate some kind of reception party. ‘It doesn’t look like anyone’s expecting us,’ he added with a tone of relief.

‘Let’s hope,’ added Ellie, absentmindedly rubbing the dressing on her neck. It throbbed painfully whenever she turned her head in either direction.

‘Alright then, let’s not push our luck. We need food supplies and fuel and we need to arrange that as quickly as we can.’

‘Ellie and I can go and get the food,’ Jez volunteered. She wanted to keep her friend as busy as possible. Ellie had been very quite over the last two days, brooding over Harvey, and clearly worrying about what lay ahead for them.

‘Good. You’ll find supply vendors all along the concourse, just outside the hangar. Buy as much as you can carry,’ Aaron said holding out a wad of notes.

‘Oh-my-god, is that actually
paper
money?’

‘Yes. We shouldn’t use cred-cards. It’s traceable.’

‘People here
use paper money?
’ Jez was staring at the roll of notes as if it was an ancient Egyptian scroll of papyrus.

‘Jesus, yes! Okay? Take it!’ He handed the roll of notes over. ‘While you’re doing that, I’ll arrange to have the ship refueled.’

Both girls left the shuttle and headed across the hangar floor towards a bay door signed ‘exit to concourse’, while Aaron strode purposefully over to a waiting maintenance technician to make arrangements for the swiftest turnaround that a bribe could buy.

As they approached, the hangar door slid open revealing a busy scene beyond; a bustling marketplace full of traders and shuttle owners and passengers pushing trolleys full of supplies before them.

Ellie found herself feeling a little more comfortable amid the swirling, noisy mass of people in the concourse - a fifty foot wide, windowless tunnel that stretched in both directions as far as she could see. Surely nothing was going to happen to them with so many people around.

‘So, Ellie, what should we buy?’ asked Jez.

Ellie shook her head distractedly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘A load of protein paste I guess, and some synthi-caff for Aaron…we know he needs that or he gets all cranky. And I need some little luxuries too, or I’ll just die,’ Jez replied with a forced smile. She looked at Ellie, and then cupped her chin. ‘Hey Ellie, we’re all in this together,’ she added, ‘I need you just as much as you need me, eh?’

Jez was right. There were things that needed doing, and quickly. She spotted a discarded trolley and quickly walked over and grabbed it before anyone else could lay claim to it. ‘Give me half the paper money. I’ll go and get the paste, if you want to get the other things. It’ll speed things up,’ said Ellie.

Jez smiled. ‘Good idea. Let’s meet back here,’ she turned round to look at the door that had closed behind them. ‘Our hangar is 47, meet you here in twenty minutes, okay?’

Ellie watched Jez push her way forcefully through the crowd, the bright colors of New Haven fashion contrasting noticeably with the duller-hued, more practical garments of the people swirling around her. Ellie looked down at her own clothes; the bright green polylatex boots, her orange pants, and the blue smock were somewhat less flamboyant than Jez’s outfit, but still she stood out just as much from the travelers and tradesmen all around her.

No time to worry about that now.

No, there wasn’t. They needed to get these supplies and head back out into the wilderness as quickly as possible. Ellie pushed her cart forward as she scanned the signs above the various stalls lining each side of the concourse. At the same time her eyes darted nervously from one person to the next, looking anxiously for anyone studying her too intently.

Amid the push of people, her hand reflexively reached out for Harvey’s…only to remember with a stab of pain, that he was gone. She realized that after their scramble to escape from the weather station, and the day and night aboard the shuttle hurtling with all speed towards Harvest City, all the time worrying and fretting over these mysterious people that wanted her dead, she hadn’t spared much thought for the poor creature. Harvey’s unexpected and savage attack on those men had actually scared her a little. She knew the jimp had attached himself to her, perhaps even felt something like affection for her…but she never in a million years would have predicted that he would hurl himself so ferociously onto another human to protect her like he had. A demonstration of naked aggression like that was supposed to be impossible for a jimp to carry out; according to the manufacturers, that is. Harvey had undoubtedly saved her and Jez, but she wondered whether she would ever feel totally comfortable alone with a gene-imp again, particularly one engineered for manual labor. She nervously recalled those powerful, muscular arms wrapped around Ted as he’d play-wrestled with the jimp, and shuddered to think what might have happened to her little brother if he had somehow convinced Harvey that he was a threat to her.