Tracer (39 page)

Prakesh rights a table, kicking it down with a bang. The sound cuts through everything, but not one of the looters so much as glances in his direction. Ignoring the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, he climbs up on the table, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Everybody – listen to me,” he shouts. He tries to be as strident and
authoritative as he can, but he might as well be trying to shout a message to Jupiter. Nobody pays him any attention.

He looks back at Madala, intending to tell everyone to start making as much noise as possible to focus the looters’ attention. He feels a twinge in his shoulder blades as he turns, ignores it, and then the twinge grabs on and pulls.

Prakesh cries out, dropping to one knee on
the table, his hands flying to his neck. At first, he thinks someone hit him with something, but through sweat-stung eyes he can see that everyone else is feeling it too. The looters are screaming in pain. Madala and Indira are flat on the floor, reaching for each other.

The pressure increases, pushing Prakesh down onto the metal surface of the table. His head is pounding.
It’s the gravity
, he
thinks.
Darnell’s going to spin us out of control
.

Just when it seems like the pressure can’t get worse, it does. As his vision shrinks to a tiny bright spot at the end of a dark tunnel, Prakesh hears glass cracking, and the pained sound of metal beginning to bend.

The weight between my shoulder blades pushes down harder, and my raised hand slams back onto the panel. What must it be like in the rest of the station? People pushed to the floor. Metal beginning to kink and grind as the gravity forces it outwards. The trees in the Air Lab, bending under the pressure, branches snapping.

One of the screens on the other side of the room is flashing red.
A calm voice echoes through the control room: “Warning. Horizontal thrusters overheating. Reduce rotation rate immediately.”

Come on
.

For the second time, I push myself up. My muscles feel like they’re going to tear apart. One arm. Two. Even raising my eyes to the screen takes an effort, like they’re being held in a vice.

And as I look, I see that Apogee has slipped into the sunlight. Gardens
and Chengshi are already there. With a final burst of energy, I slam my finger onto the screen, pulling back the rotation rate.

This time, there is a noise – like a giant fan powering down.
I slide to the floor, gasping for air. Gradually, the weights that have been placed across my body lift off.

It’s a few minutes before the gravity is back to normal. When I get to my feet, I realise that
my legs are trembling. I have to steady myself using the control panels, and it takes me a little while to get back to the other side of the room. The temperature has risen another degree, to 47.5 Celsius.

I try to activate the convection fins again, tapping the tiny triangles. The same error flashes up. Extreme temperatures.

I force myself to wait. A minute passes. Two. I try again.

This time,
there’s no error message. The green triangles all flick to solid. After another long minute, the average temperature reading drops to 46.

I’ve done it. The fins on the hull will be working again, venting the heat back into space. It’ll take a while, but the temperature will come back down. The enormous amount of heat generated by the million or so people here will vanish. Whatever happens now,
we’re not going to roast to death.

I’m too exhausted to cheer. I just smile. And all I can think is:
you might make smoke bombs, Carver, but I bet you’ve never spun an entire space station
.

But something nags at me. I haven’t had to use Iapetus, the piece of information Grace Garner and Marshall Foster died for. I’m missing something.

I need to get the Apex doors open – if I can get some stompers
in here, this will all go a lot faster. I’m more confident now, and it doesn’t take me long to find the screen which controls the doors. A wireframe model of the sector appears on screen, with red markers for where each door is. I tap the option to Open All.

The screen flashes red, firing up another error message. I very nearly put a fist through the glass, but instead, I take another deep breath,
and make myself read the message.

Temperature imbalance detected
.

The names of the sectors are scrolling underneath it – all over 40 Celsius, except for Apex, sitting at 22.

Access to sector will remain restricted until temperature balance has been restored. Lift restriction when this occurs?

I hit
Confirm
. No telling how long that’ll take, but it’s a start. As soon as the convection fins
have done their work, the doors to Apex will spring open. Now I just have to figure out what to do until then.

I’m about to step away from the screens when one of the other menu options catches my eye.
Comms
.

I open it up. A list of sectors appear – numbered, not named – and they’re all set to Inactive. I change that, then speak as clearly as I can. There’s no way of knowing if my words are
going out – there’s no microphone visible. But I say the words anyway.

Prakesh comes back.

He’s lying on the floor of the mess, and the pain between his shoulder blades is slipping away. The inside of his mouth is dry, as if he’s woken up with a killer hangover.

He raises his head, blinking against the light. Madala and Indira are unconscious, splayed out next to each other. Prakesh gets to his knees, fighting off a sudden burst of nausea, and sees Dreads
slumped against an upturned table. The man is staring up at the ceiling, as if daring it to fall on him.

Prakesh uses a chair to pull himself up. His legs feel like they’re made of mashed potato, and for a second he’s not entirely sure where he is. Then he catches sight of the serving area and the kitchen beyond, packed with groggy people swaying to unsteady life, and it all comes rushing back.

Prakesh grabs the table he kicked upright, and pulls himself onto it. It’s all he can do not to lose his balance – the world goes woozy for a second, and the black tunnel threatens to come back, feathering the edges of his vision. He pushes past it, raises his hands to his mouth.

“Everybody – listen to me.”

In the stunned silence of the mess hall, his voice is impossible to ignore. Dozens of
eyes turn towards him, surprise and hostility pinning him to the spot. He pushes past those, too.

“This is what he wants,” he says, jabbing a finger at the ceiling. He should have pointed at the comms screen, sitting in a top corner of the room like a malevolent god, but it doesn’t matter. They know who he means.

“He wants us fighting. He wants us to hurt each other. And if we keep doing it,
then he wins. Simple as that. There’s enough food for everybody, if we work together.”

More silence meets him. The crowd is recovering from the effects of the gravity increase now, and he can see them starting to mutter to one another. One or two are even turning away, back to the kitchens and stores, as if to get a head start on the others.

“I know everyone is scared,” Prakesh says, but it’s
no use. More and more of them are turning away. In desperation, Prakesh hunts through the faces of the crowd, eventually stopping on a young woman. She’s about Riley’s age, with a red shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She’s got a child pulled close to her, a little boy, her hands on his shoulders. Both of them are looking back at him, and it’s not anger that Prakesh sees in their eyes. It’s confusion,
and fear.

He tries again, speaking to the mother, to the little boy. “I know everyone is scared. You want to feed your families. You want to get back some control. You want to protect the people closest to you.”

He pauses for a second. The table creaks under him, and he feels someone moving to his side. Dreads. He glances at Prakesh, and gives a short nod.

“Right now,” Prakesh says, “the woman
I love is in danger. She’s risking her life for us – for you – to stop Oren Darnell.
And that scares the hell out of me, because I don’t know how to help her, and she might not make it back. But you can’t just care about the people closest to you. That’s what Outer Earth has been about for so long: look out for you and yours, and screw everyone else. We can’t do that. Not now. The only way we
make it through this is if we help each other.”

For a long second, Prakesh is sure he’s blown it, that the crowd is going to ignore him. But the silence stretches on, and even those who were heading back towards the kitchens are staring at him.

The comms system crackles to life.

A horrified gasp ripples through the crowd. Even Prakesh jumps, glancing up at the comms screen, expecting Darnell’s
face to appear. But there’s no image. There’s just a voice. And as Prakesh hears it, his heart almost explodes out of his chest.

Go, Riley, go
.

“This is Riley Hale. I’m in the control room in Apex. Oren Darnell is dead, and I’ve turned the heat convectors back on. I …”

I swallow. My next words were about to be: Okwembu is responsible. She did it all. But before I can utter the words, I realise that they won’t help. People won’t believe me. I have to find her. I have to
make
her tell them herself. Somehow.

“Whoever’s listening,
none of this was my fault. I am not responsible. But I will find the person who is.”

I can’t think of anything more to say. I step away from the screen, and cast another glance around the room. All the readouts seem to be OK, and the warm orange light from the screens seems oddly reassuring.

I’m about to leave to search for Okwembu when something catches my eye. One of the screens at the end
of the room, showing a view that I haven’t seen in years.

The Earth.

Scorched brown land, dull blue ocean. Swirling, simmering
clouds, flecked brown and white. It’s almost unchanged from the last time I was shown a picture of it, years ago.

But there’s something else there.

Something horribly familiar, hanging in the middle of the camera’s view, stark against the curve of the planet.

Every
muscle in my body is paralysed. My mouth has gone completely dry, my thoughts frozen in place. I know that silhouette. I know it because I’ve seen it more times than I can think of. On broadcasts, in pictures. On the Memorial wall in Apogee.

It’s the
Akua Maru
. The ship from the Earth Return mission.

I tell myself to stop being ridiculous, that it can’t be the
Akua
, that this is archive video,
something set up by Okwembu as a cruel, cruel taunt.

My hand moves without me telling it too, touching the screen gently. An orange square blinks around the form of the
Akua
. An option appears at the bottom, displayed in the orange light.
Ship broadcast frequencies: Inactive
.

I touch the screen, and the broadcast activates. I manage to say one word.

“Hello?”

For a long moment, there’s nothing.
Then there’s a burst of static, emanating from speakers somewhere in the room. And I hear a voice, twisted with time and distance, as familiar as my own.

“Janice?” says the voice. “Is that you?”

I don’t know what to do. My hand is still on the screen, and I can’t pull it away.

“Are you there?” the voice continues. An edge of anger has crept into it. “Answer me. We don’t have much time, and
everything must be ready for my return. Respond.”

With my eyes on the ship, I manage to speak one more word.

“Dad?”

At first, there’s just silence, broken by the crackle of the radio signal in the empty room.

I can’t take my eyes off the screen. I can see the
Akua
more clearly now: the curve of her hull, the swept-down fins jutting off the sides, the cylindrical body. It doesn’t seem real.

The static swells and roars. “Who is this? Who are you?” The voice fires a bright line back down the years to
a man standing tall in his captain’s uniform, looking down at me, with a gentle half-smile on his face.

“It’s me, Dad,” I say, my voice shaking. “It’s Riley.”

There’s contempt in his voice when he replies. “I don’t know that name.”

“Dad …”

“And I don’t know your voice either. Whoever you are.”

“Dad, I promise, I’m—”

“No!” The transmission is so loud and so sudden that I nearly fall backwards
in surprise. The voice is warped now, malformed, not just by distance and signal quality, but by something else. “Riley is dead. She’s dead. You’re a liar!”

“No,” I whisper. “I’m not dead.” And then, louder: “Please, Dad. Please listen to me.”

“Don’t call me that,” he snarls, and the venom in his voice burns a horrible, ragged hole in my mind. “You’re not my daughter. Do you hear me? You’re
not her.”

The static vanishes, plunging the room into silence.

I hammer the touch-screen, desperately trying to raise him, my voice cracking and turning from a harsh whisper into a full-on scream. Every fibre in my body wants me to run; to run and run and never look back. But I can’t run from this.

It’s some time before I can raise him again. When the static returns, I don’t hear anything for
a long time, nothing but my breathing. Someone has taken the world I knew and turned it inside out. There is so much I want to say, but every time I try, the words won’t come.

Eventually, he says, “Whoever you are, it doesn’t matter. You’ll all pay for what you’ve done.”

I can’t make sense of his words. It’s like I can hear them individually, but not connect them. There’s no way my father could
be the one speaking them.

I force myself to stay calm. “Dad,” I start, but then my voice cracks again. “Dad, how is this possible? You’re still alive – how …”

“Why do you keep calling me that?” he says, but there’s something else in his voice beyond anger. A tiny, desperate note of hope.