Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1) (12 page)

Deimona jumped and Duran’s gun snarled.  The fugitive cried out, spinning and twisting in the air, and then he dropped out of sight as the echoing sound of the gunshot disappeared into the distance.

Duran choked back his own sense of surprise and disbelief.  Had he actually just seen that?  Had he actually just knocked Deimona out of the air like a clay pigeon at a shooting competition?

He scampered back down through the building and over to the street where Deimona had fallen, wondering what he would find.  Surely it had been a ruse, a clever ploy by Deimona to throw Duran off his track.

Deimona had probably doubled back and already disappeared into the gloom, leaving Duran to chase after this red herring.

But sure enough, when Duran reached the spot he found the man with the tattooed arms lying there on the asphalt surrounded by a pool of blood.  Wary citizens of Juncture Nine were beginning to appear in their doorways, curious now that the furore seemed to have quietened down, their faces peeking out from yellow cracks and over the lips of windowsills as they craned their necks for a better view of the carnage.

Duran stood over Deimona’s body and checked for a pulse, but he was dead.  It was over.  In the half-light he could see a wet patch, a gunshot wound in Deimona’s chest.

“Right through the goddamn heart,” Duran said, dazed.  He glanced down at the pistol in his hand as if it were a magic wand, an enigma whose power he’d been blind to until now.

He’d been saved by a miracle.

Maybe this is the turning point for Alec Duran
, he thought, allowing himself to feel a tiny bud of hope.  In moment
s it began to blossom, the self-confidence that he’d owned so long ago grudgingly re
awakening inside of him.  The kind of confidence he’d found in such abundance before things had gone bad at the Atrium.

People began to crowd around and Duran holstered his weapon.

“You bastards are never going to give up, are you?” he said quietly to the dead man.  “So how do I stop you all?”  There was no response from Deimona, no movement of his sightless eyes.

Duran already knew the answer.

One at a time.

10

The dirigible skimmed across the sky so low that the ropes that hung from its underbelly almost touched the rooftops on the buildings below.  Knile glanced up as its bloated shadow drifted across the street.  It was close enough for him to make out the faces of one or two of the occupants as they leaned out of the gondola and looked down on the city beneath them.  With dread Knile realised that one of them was a child younger than Roman, an innocent floati
ng toward the unforgiving defenc
es around the Reach.  Toward destruction.

Turn back
, he thought. 
Turn back now while you still can.

But the dirigible continued on its path, an inexorable curve that would lead it toward the towering monument in the distance.

Down on the street, the convoy was making good progress.  Knile gripped tighter on the wooden handle as he helped pull a cart laden with produce, trying his best to concentrate on the task at hand.  It wasn’t easy.  There was a knot in his stomach as he thought about approaching the gate that lay at the bottom of the Reach, a feeling that he was rushing things, that he wasn’t prepared.  That was true, of course, but there had been no other choice.  This opportunity had come upon him so suddenly, offering salvation should he choose the right path and destruction should he not.  He had to rely on his ability to improvise if he was going to make it through to the end.

As such, he couldn’t decide if each plodding step along the asphalt was bringing him closer to freedom or closer to death.

To his left, Roman shuffled along with a handle tucked under his arm, doing his best to shoulder his end of the load.  It was not by chance that Knile had ended up beside him – he’d sought the boy out when assuming his place – but Roman had maintained a stoic silence for the duration of the journey, failing to acknowledge that Knile was even there.

Knile had considered a dozen ways of apologising during the journey, imagining ways he could smooth things over with Roman, but up to this point he had held his tongue.  All of the excuses he’d come up with sounded weak before they’d even left his mouth.  If he couldn’t even accept them himself, how could he expect the boy to do so?

Instead, he decided to talk.  Not to beg forgiveness or make up stories about why he hadn’t been around.  Just talk.

“Did you know it was once a military installation?” he began.  “The Reach.”  He looked over at Roman, but the boy kept his eyes on the road ahead.  “That’s how it started.  Probably why it’s so ugly, too.  It was built to be functional, not for the aesthetics.  Over the years there were parts taken off, and others added on, and that’s why it looks the way it does.  All lumpy and asymmetrical, like they didn’t have a clue what they were doing.”

Roman wiped sweat from his brow but gave no indication he was listening.  Knile went on.

“Don’t let looks fool you, though.  It’s quite the piece of engineering.  They had to develop a new kind of alloy just to make it strong enough to stand up under its own immense weight.  The tallest man-made structure ever built, back in the grand old days of progress.

“The military used the Reach not only as a way of getting personnel and equipment into space, but also as a kind of city.  Infantry, officers and support staff and their families lived inside.  There were residential levels, industrial levels where weapons and spacecraft were assembled, greenhouses for growing food, manufacturing plants, you name it.

“Of course, with the breakdown of society and the colonisation of other worlds, the military gradually left.  Did you know that, once, there were almost fifty space elevators in operation across the globe?  When fossil fuels dried up, so did the rocket fuel, and elevators became the preferred way of getting things into space.  When they eventually stopped building grav-buster spacecraft, the elevators became the
only
way to get into space.  Those elevators worked day and night ferrying people off the planet.  One by one over the years the elevators were all shut down or destroyed, and now there’s none left at all, apart from this big ugly joint, the place we call the Reach.  Figures that it would be the last, since it was built stronger than a brick shithouse.  It wasn’t built for commerce, like the others.  It was built to be defensible.

“That’s not its real name, by the way.  ‘The Reach’ is just a nickname.  The military called it–”

“I don’t care,” Roman said finally.  He glared at Knile.  “You can keep talking the whole way there, if you like.  I’m not listening.”

Knile grimaced.  “It’s a long way there.  I don’t know if I can talk that long.”

“You’re doing a good job so far.”

“C’mon.  Don’t leave me hangin’, Roman.”

“I’m trying to do a job here.”

Knile glanced back at the heavily laden cart behind them.  It had been covered in thin, stretchy fabric that protected it from the harsh conditions outside Grove.

“You can’t talk and pull at the same time?” Knile said.  Roman turned his attention back to the road.  Knile was about to say more, but then decided to give it a rest.  He wasn’t getting anywhere.

Knile looked at the faces around them on the street, and it was apparent that these people were very much aware of the cargo being hauled past them.  They watched the convoy with a kind of lust, a deep longing that was fueled by their hunger and their discontentment with eating sludge every day instead of real food.

Knile felt both pity for them and, at the same time, a vague sense of unease.  Desperate folk could be dangerous and unpredictable.  While it was unlikely the people of Link would risk being cast out into the slums for causing unrest, Knile was suddenly thankful for the security detail.

“I just hope we don’t get eaten before we get there,” Knile muttered, turning away from the gaze of one particularly wild-eyed woman.

“We don’t get trouble,” Roman said.  “Not with the guns along for the ride.”

“Good to know.”  Knile decided to see if he could squeeze a few more words out of the boy,  inclining his head in the direction of the Reach.  “So what happens once we get there, anyway?”

“We take the merch through to the transfer station and unload it.  Little Gus normally does the deal, makes sure the creds land in Giroux’s account, and then we load up the supplies being sent back to Grove and get out of there.”

“Little Gus?”

Roman pointed to the front of the convoy where a short man with a clipboard walked beside one of the carts.

“He’s one of Giroux’s inner circle.  Good guy.”

“I don’t think I remember him,” Knile said.

“A lot’s changed since you were away, Knile.  You can’t seem to grasp that.”

Knile sensed the bitterness in Roman’s tone.  “Guess I need to open my eyes, right?”

“Might help.”

“Well, now that you mention it, I can see a few things that are different about you, Roman.  You were only about nine or ten when I left, and now you’re this tall
,
gangly teenager.”  Knile reached across and tweaked Roman’s bicep playfully.  “You’ve even grown some good cart-pullin’ muscles there.”

“I’m not just a taller version of the kid you left behind.”

Knile flinched inwardly at the bluntness of Roman’s words.

“I know that.”

“How would you know that, Knile?”

“Roman, I–”

“Look, just save it,” Roman said evenly.  His anger seemed to have subsided, replaced by a pensiveness that belied his age.  “I don’t want apologies.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sorry a hundred times.  That won’t change anything.  You taught me a lot of lessons out here in these streets.  You taught me how to put together a filtration unit, how to solder old expansion boards to make something work, and
,
when all that failed, how to steal and evade the Enforcers.  You and Talia and the others taught me how to survive.  And I guess the final lesson you taught me was that we really are in this alone, that I can’t rely on anyone else to get me through life.  I have to stand on my own two feet.”

Knile kicked a stone with his boot, all too aware of the desolation that hid behind those words.

“That’s really not a lesson I meant to teach you, Roman.  Not that way.”

“But it’s one that we all have to learn, just the same.”

“Not like that.  No one should have to learn it like that.”

Knile looked away.  He was beginning to regret his attempt to reconnect with Roman.  Perhaps he would have been better off leaving the past undisturbed instead of blundering in with his ham-fisted apologies, knocking away scabs and leaving the wounds raw once again.  And now here he was with the boy finally opening up, just as Knile had planned, but he wasn’t liking anything he was hearing.  Not one bit.

“Dumb shit,” he cursed to himself under his breath.

On the edge of the road the hungry people continued to watch the convoy go past, some glancing up from their tasks and their conversations, vaguely interested, others standing stock still and watching the food-laden carts trundle past as if they’d been hypnotised
.  One man, wearing a dusty black coat and hat, glanced up at Knile and then quickly averted his eyes again, fiddling absently with what looked like a deck of cards in his hands.

“Anyway, I learned those lessons well,” Roman went on.  “So well that I’ve even found a way out of this life.”

“Oh?” Knile said.  “Where are you going?”

“I’m headed off-world.”

Knile waited for the punchline, but there was none forthcoming.  The expression on Roman’s face suggested he was deadly serious.

“Huh?” Knile said, flabbergasted.

“I’m getting out of here.  I’m going to one of the colonies.  Maybe one of the Jupiter ones.”

“What are you talking about, Roman?  Is Giroux helping you out?”

“No, Giroux can’t help,” Roman said.  “I found my own way.”

“Which is?”

“I’ve been on a bunch of these convoys now.  Maybe twenty or thirty in the last couple of years.  I’ve kept my eyes and my ears open whenever I’m in the Reach, just like you taught me.”

Knile was beginning to wonder if Roman was about to embark on some sort of suicide mission, and the very thought of it made him queasy.

“I don’t like where this is going,” Knile said.

“Keep it in your pants, Knile.  Relax.  I made it into the Candidate program.”

Knile shrugged, dumbfounded.  “What the hell is the Candidate program?”

“Well, I saw these kids about my age wandering around in blue uniforms near the transfer station one day.  They were doing little odd jobs – carrying stuff, escorting people to elevators, that kind of thing.  Saw them at least two or three times before I worked up the courage to ask one of them what they were doing.  The kid told me he was a Candidate.  Turns out these kids in blue are chosen to jump the queue and head off-world.  They’re the brightest and best of those that are left here on Earth.”