Zero-G (22 page)

The Boneshaker won't start. Anna, Carver and I have to carry Knox through the sector – Carver and I on each arm, and Anna on the feet. A squad of Tzevyans clears the way for us, ordering people back into their habs.

We'd never have got through Tzevya on the Boneshaker anyway. Most of the corridors are blocked off, guarded by people in makeshift face masks. They've done a good job; the wire that nearly cut Carver's head off was an early-warning system, attached to a home-rigged alarm somewhere else in the sector. It was never meant to be a weapon, even if it came horribly close.

Tzevya has drawn into itself, shutting off contact with the outside, hoping Resin will burn itself out. I don't know what world they thought they'd emerge into after it did, but it's a relief to be somewhere where the smell of decay isn't syrupy-thick.

The hospital is deeper into the sector, a few minutes from the border with Apex. Our honour guard peels off as we get there, as if they don't want to be near the place. It's small, with a narrow central corridor bordered by a few wards and offices. I expect it to be full, heaving with Resin patients, but the beds are empty. The wards are a mess, too, with upturned furniture and equipment scattered across the floor. As if they were the sight of a brawl.

Shoot on sight
, I think, and shiver.

We put Knox into one of the isolation wards at the back of the hospital, a brightly lit room with a single bed and a keypad-locked door. By now, he's dosed up on furosemide-nitrate, and he doesn't wake up when we heave him onto the bed. There's no telling how effective this second dose will be. No way of telling how long I have left before Knox's body loses the fight.

There's no point taking him to Apex now, but we still need to warn the council about the Earthers. We can't let them take the
Shinso
. It's not just the fact that they'll be leaving us behind – we
need
that asteroid. It's the source of our minerals, our building materials, the things we need to keep this place going. The things we'll need to rebuild.

Walker, the only one of the Tzevyans to have seen us all the way here, volunteers to guard Knox's ward. Anna smiles thanks, and she and Carver and I make our way back through the hospital.

“We should go,” I say. My voice sounds like it's coming from someone thirty years older. “Get to Apex.”

Carver gives me a sideways look. “Shouldn't you … I don't know. Stay here with him?”

“Would it make a difference?”

He looks helpless. “I guess not.”

Anna clears her throat. “It'll be tough to get inside. I'll get us some reinforcements.”

I grind my teeth together. “They'll slow us down.”

“You go up to Apex by yourself, or even if it's just us three, and they'll arrest you like they did the last time. You think they'll pay attention to anything you have to say? It'll be safer if we have an escort.”

“Right,” says Carver. “I'll get the Boneshaker fixed.”

“Is that what you call that contraption?” Anna says. “Can you not just leave it here?”

“Leave it alone with a bunch of Tzevyans? Do you have any idea what the gangs up here would do to get their hands on that thing?”

Anna rolls her eyes, then turns to me. “What do you want to do?”

There are a few scattered chairs in the main lobby, and I sit down heavily in one of them. I don't have much choice – it feels like my legs are going to give out. “Think I'll just sit here for a minute,” I say. “Come and get me when it's time to go.”

“Right,” Anna says, dragging out the word. She's about to say something more, but Carver shakes his head. They jog away, and the hospital doors close behind them with a hiss.

I lean back, rolling my shoulders, trying to sort through my thoughts. On the one hand, we need to get to Apex as soon as possible, before the Earthers do. On the other, they've got heavy equipment, supplies, and it'll take them a little while to get up there, even if they hurry.

There's got to be a way I can keep Knox alive. Maybe they've got something new in Apex – a more advanced drug compound, perhaps. But, really, what good will it do? Even if one exists, it's just delaying the inevitable.

At that moment, I feel the same way I did when I almost threw myself off the broken bridge. It would be so easy to go and find a high place, with no stompers around to stop me. One last run, and then it would all be over.

The thought is calming. I hold on to it, pull it close. If it comes to it, that's what I'll do.

I don't know when I fall asleep. The first I know about it is when I jerk awake, my head snapping forward. I was dreaming about my father again – I don't remember the dream, but I can feel it, like it's left some kind of psychic residue. My mouth is covered in sticky saliva. How long have I been out?

I stand up, surprised to find that my body doesn't just give up and fall apart at the seams.

With my legs aching in protest and my body pleading with me to go back to sleep, to sink into oblivion, I force myself to get up. I need to find Anna and Carver.

Although I've been to Tzevya before, I'm not as familiar with it as I am with the other sectors, and pretty soon I realise I'm lost. I'm on the top level, in a darkened corridor bordered by hab units. There's a hissing nearby, like steam escaping a trapped pipe.

I see a man at the end of the corridor. He's hunched over, adjusting something on the enormous stack of old crates that make up the blockage. Maybe he'll know where the sector hospital is.

I take a step towards him, and my leg gives out.

I don't realise it's happened at first. The next few seconds are a series of quick jerks, like I'm jumping forward in time between each awful moment. Then I'm down, crumpling to the ground, damn near bouncing off it as I skid to a halt, screaming.

The bombs. Knox is dead. Knox is …

But when I look down, I see that my legs are still in one piece. No bloodstains on the fabric of my pants, no splinters of shattered bone poking through. And it's only my right knee that's in pain, bright and sharp. The muscles are acting up, complaining about what I've put them through.

I feel pressure under my arms, and then I'm lifted right off the ground. The man is there, pulling me up with a strength that his wiry frame shouldn't possess.

“Easy now,” he says. I have a moment to register that his accent is the same as Anna's, crisp and sharp, and then he's pushing open the door to one of the habs running alongside the corridor. He uses his foot, nudging the door open and turning sideways to pass through. My own foot bounces off the frame, and I bite my lip as the shock travels up my leg, like a finger twanging a taut wire.

The light in the hab is low – nothing more than a dim bulb on the ceiling. I have time to make out two cots, a double and single, before I'm lowered onto the bigger one. I put my head back, waiting for the numb feeling in my knee to pass.

“Any permanent damage?” he asks.

My face is prickly with sweat, but the pain has come down a little. For a long moment, I'm too relieved to speak. I really thought the bombs had gone off. I was so sure.

“Fine,” I manage to get out. I try to sit up, but he puts a hand on my stomach.

“Easy,” he says again. “Your body's just telling you to take a few minutes out. From what I've been hearing, you've had quite a journey.”

He stands. “There's some water in Jomo's hab, I think,” he says. “I'll be back in a minute.”

Before I can reply, he's gone, the door clicking closed behind him.

I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, loud and insistent. I lay my head back on the pillow. As I do so, I catch something out of the corner of my eye, on the wall by the single cot.

I raise myself up on my elbows, getting a better look at the hab as I do so. There are stacks of clothes on the thin shelves running along the wall, lined up neatly next to a small pile of wrinkly apples. The single cot has been neatly made up, its threadbare blanket positioned carefully on the mattress, its pillow just so.

The thing I saw is a drawing. The light's too dim to make it out from where I'm sitting. Slowly, I swing my legs off the bed, waiting to see if they can take the pressure.

They can. I walk over to the single cot, squinting in the low light.

Whoever did the drawing is pretty good. It's executed in black ink: a single figure, running down a cylindrical passage, its walls delicately shaded. There's someone, the outline of a person, standing at the far end, and the central figure is running towards them. Looking closer, I see that the figure is female. Her hair streams out behind her, and she's wearing a jacket that looks like …

The picture snaps into focus. The passage is the Core, and the figure at the end is Oren Darnell. And the one at the centre … there's no mistaking it. Whoever did the drawing got my dad's old flight jacket perfect.

Very slowly, I reach out. My finger is about to touch the ink when I hear a voice behind me.

“Best not. It's murder to get off your hands.”

The man has come back. He's holding out a canteen to me, and, as he moves into the light a little, I realise that he's Anna's father.

There's no mistaking it. The skin on his face is shot through with a filigree of lines and wrinkles and tiny scars, but his eyes are the same as his daughter's. He sees me staring, and raises his eyebrows quizzically.

“I brought you that water,” he says.

I want to say something, but the words won't quite come yet. The water is delicious – cold and clear. I nod thanks, wiping my mouth and passing the canteen back.

“Frank Beck,” he says, thrusting out a meaty hand. His grip is dry and firm.

“Riley Hale,” I say, amazed that I can get the words out.

Frank steps past me, pointing to the picture. “I'd almost forgotten that was there. Used to it, I guess.”

“Anna did that?”

“She's quite good, isn't she?” he says. “She drew that after the whole Sons of Earth thing calmed down. She wouldn't stop talking about how you ran the Core. Went on about it so much that Gemma – that's her mother – she told her to use some of the old matt-black we had lying around and…”

My voice feels like it's made of old glass. “Matt-black?”

“Oh – chemical residue stuff left over from water processing. I work down at the plant, you know. Anyway, she drew, er … well, this.”

He raises his hand, sweeping along the length of the drawing.

I'm transfixed by it. I expect it to stir old memories, bad ones, but it doesn't. Instead, I find myself picking up the smaller details: the pattern on the bottom of my shoes, the way the figure at the end of the Core has the same hulking profile as Oren Darnell. She's even drawn the gloves I had on, which I used to fight off the freezing temperatures in the Core.

“I don't understand,” I say to Frank Beck. “Anna and I – we don't exactly get along most of the time.”

“Really?” he says, his brow furrowed. “I'd never know it from the way she talks about you. There was a new story every day when she was growing up, even before that bastard Darnell. Riley Hale ran New Germany Level 3 faster than anyone ever. Riley Hale jumped all the way off a gallery catwalk and survived. Riley this, Riley that. Said one day she was going to be faster than you.”

“You're kidding.”

“Not a bit of it.”

I shake my head, still staring at the drawing, then sit down on the single cot. “But
we don't get along
. At all. We never have.” I think back to the first time Anna and I met – how she got in my face, challenging me to a race then and there.

Frank shrugs. “She's always refused to be second best at anything. She was running with a crew of lads up here, but she jumped at the chance to go and work for the stompers – mostly because she'd finally get to run with you.”

“Was it you who taught her to use the slingshot?”

He gives a small smile. “Anna's always wanted to be the fastest person on Outer Earth, but it doesn't take much to see that her real talent is shooting. Drawing, too, but mainly shooting. I made that damn slingshot for her when she was a girl, and I don't think there's another sharpshooter in the six sectors who can aim like she can. I remember once when we…”

“Dad, you in there?”

Anna appears in the doorway. Frank Beck smiles. “Hey, sweetie,” he says. “I was just helping your friend Riley here.”

Anna steps inside. She briefly hugs her father, then turns to me, not looking at the drawing (
her
drawing) on the wall behind us.

“Carver's machine won't start,” she says. “He's got one of the guys helping him on it, but it'll be a while.”

Frank Beck holds his hand out. I take it, and he pulls me up off the bed.

“I've got some people together,” Anna says. “Safety in numbers, right?”

I take a deep breath. “OK,” I say. “Let's go.”

We're halfway across the Tzevya gallery when the lights go out. This time they don't come back on.

We all stop, just for a second, waiting. The Tzevyans have been pretty good at keeping their sector clear of Resin victims, but I can still smell the dead here, the sickly-sweet scent of decay sticking in my nostrils.

“Any time now,” says one of the others – Walker. But the lights stay off.

Syria clears his throat. “Let's go,” he says, pointing to one of the corridors leading off the gallery floor. The lights are still on there, flickering gently.

There are ten of us, walking slowly up towards Apex. Syria leads the way. He's barely said a word to me. Every so often, I'll catch him looking in my direction, but when my eyes find his, he looks away. I don't mind. I'm not sure I know what to say to him. No one's said a word about the Caves, but I only have to look at Syria's drawn face, at the bags under his eyes, to know that the news isn't good.

It feels strange to be moving through Outer Earth in a big group. More than that, it feels strange to be moving so
slowly
. I'm used to taking the corridors and catwalks at a run, not at an infuriating trudge. I bite back the urge to shout at them, to tell them to hurry. It'll just piss them off, and, right now, I need them on my side.

“Hey, tell me something, Hale,” says Walker. “These people want to take the
Shinso
back to Earth, right?”

“Yeah?”

“How're they even planning to get on board? I mean, they take a tug, OK, but then what? The crew isn't just gonna open up and say, come on in, right?”

“They're using Okwembu to do it,” I say. I'm thinking hard, trying to get my thoughts in order. “She knows something about the ship's operating system. I think they're going to use her to gain access.”

Walker points to the floor. “What makes them think there's anything down there? Whole planet is a wreck.”

I shrug, thinking back to Okwembu and Mikhail, back to the facility that served as the Earthers' base. “I don't know. They didn't exactly tell us their plans.”

Walker is silent for a moment. Then she says, “Why don't we let them?”

“Why don't we let them what?”

“Take the ship.”

“You're full of shit, Walker,” says a man at the back. He's Donovan, I think.

“I'm serious,” she says over her shoulder. “There's still the
Tenshi Maru
. Isn't there?”

“Way too far out,” Syria mutters.

“And hang on,” Donovan says. “You're proposing we let these people take one of our two remaining asteroid catchers, and just leave? What about the rest of us?”

“I just—”

“No. Not happening. Besides, we
need
that asteroid if we're going to have any hope of surviving.”

“I'm just saying. These people want to try dropping this thing into Earth's atmosphere without heat shielding? Good luck and good riddance.”

Donovan scoffs.

“They're going to use the asteroid as heat shielding,” Anna says.

“Bullshit.”

I shrug. “Actually, it makes sense. They'll have to be damn careful, though.”

Walker ponders that. “But you said they didn't tell you anything about their plans.”

“They didn't,” I say. “Carver worked it out. He…”

I trail off. Something is jogging my memory, something I saw when we were captured by the Earthers.

It slips away, back into a mess of thoughts. There are still far too many loose ends, too many things we don't know.

“They've got weapons,” I say. “They're ready to fight their way into the dock. The people in Apex need to know they're coming.”

Walker shrugs. “People in Apex need to find out what this Resin thing is. That's what they need to do.”

“Got that right,” says Donovan. Syria huffs, flicking an irritated glance in his direction.

Anna falls into step alongside me. For once, her beanie is off, tucked in her jacket pocket. Her blonde hair is stuck to her forehead in untidy strands. Was she right about Mikhail? Is he the connection between us, the reason we aren't sick?

And if he is, does that mean that he and the Earthers cooked up Resin?

That thought again, flickering at the back of my mind, vanishing before I get a fix on it.

When we do reach Apex, it's a relief to see that most of the lights are still on. Of course, the doors are shut – huge slabs of steel, blocking off the wide entrance corridor.

Anna stops, resting her hand on the door.

“Now what?” says Syria.

“Why don't you knock?” Walker says.

“Wow. You're a genius, Walker,” says Donovan.

“And you're an asshole.”

“Yeah, well,” says Donovan, walking over to one side of the door and dropping to his haunches. “I'm an asshole who's going to get us inside.”

He's pulling at a panel on the wall – trying, I realise, to get to the wires behind it. He thinks he can short-circuit the doors somehow. I want to tell him not to bother – this is Apex, where if they want you outside, you stay outside.

At that moment, the doors give a massive mechanical whine and begin to slide open.

Behind them is a stomper, stinger up, aimed right at us. Syria swears, dropping the stretcher and scrabbling for his own. Walker, Donovan and the others already have theirs out.

The stomper is huge – a heavily muscled woman, not tall but built like a human version of the Boneshaker. Her name comes to me out of nowhere: Jordan. She was there when Royo sent Carver and me into the pipes outside the Recycler Plant.

The eyes buried in the black beetle-mask of her respirator are cold. “Don't move,” she says. “Not a damn step, you hear me?”

“We're not sick,” Anna says, raising his hands.

There's a second stomper now, coming up behind the first. I see his eyes widen. “It's Hale,” he says to Jordan. He notices Donovan, still crouched by the side of the door, and trains his stinger on him.

“Get her into a brig somewhere,” Jordan says. “Rest of them can go on their way.” She looks at Anna and the others. “Thanks for the delivery.”

“Step aside, stomper,” says Syria.

Jordan raises her stinger and fires. The bang is enormous, the bullet burying itself in the ceiling. We duck on instinct, and two of the people in our party take off, bolting away from Apex.

“Next one won't be a warning shot,” Jordan says. “Hale – come with us.”

“Just
listen
to me,” I say. “Do you think I'd come back here if there wasn't a damn good reason?”

She doesn't lower her stinger.
I was wrong
.
I thought I could negotiate with them, get them to give us passage. But none of this is working out like I planned.

“You've got one minute,” she says.

I let out a shaky breath. “Is Royo—” I begin, but Jordan cuts me off.

“Still alive, for now,” she says. “I'm in command. Now talk.”

It takes less than that to tell them all about the Earthers. But when I'm finished, the stompers don't put their guns away. “Crap,” Jordan says.

“But…”

“No. It's crap. I don't believe a word of it. Now you—”

There's an enormous roar, and then the Boneshaker bursts into view behind us. Carver is leaning back, as if trying to control a rampaging beast. Both the stompers are staring at the Boneshaker.

In the next instant, two things happen.

Donovan explodes off his haunches, moving faster than he has any right to. He shoulder-charges the nearest stomper, sending him sprawling.

The move distracts Jordan for a split second. I use it. I dart forward, jabbing at her gun arm. The heel of my left hand smacks her on the back of her wrist. The heel of my right hits the stinger itself.

It's a move that could get me killed if I miscalculate it, but it works. Jordan's stinger goes flying, ripped out of her hand before she can squeeze the trigger.

The Boneshaker comes to a screeching halt, rocking from side to side. Carver cuts the engine. He looks at me, then at the stompers, then at Anna, then back at me.

“What'd I miss?” he says.