Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1) (18 page)

Parnell flicked the graph away and began scrolling through more menus.

“Well, take a look at this
one from today, for example.  We got a shipment through down at the gate, and all the visitor credentials checked out.  No problem.  Then, when they leave, they’re one short.  So where the hell did the extra guy go?  He can’t have just disappeared.”

“Why not?  Maybe he cut loose.”

“Doesn’t seem likely.  This guy has been a regular for years, hasn’t ever given us a problem, and his ID hasn’t shown up at any of the other checkpoints.”  Parnell scratched his head.  “Although, the weird thing is, this guy hasn’t checked in for over a month.  For three years prior he made an appearance every week at least twice, and often as many as four times.”

“So why the change?”

“Who knows?  And then, stranger still, when we went to the facial recognition from the entry, the system is reporting a ninety-three percent match to a dead guy.”  Parnell laughed.  “How do you like that?  We’re getting zombies walking in now.”

“What?” Duran said, irate.  “Why wasn’t the facial recognition flagged when the visitor checked in?  Why weren’t we alerted in real time?”

“Geez, Duran, you’re really out of the loop, huh?  The facial recognition process needs seven dedicated cores in order for it to run in real time.  That’s one huge database it has to sift through, y’know?  A lot of algorithms running in parallel.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So these days we’re down to one core, and it’s not even dedicated.  All the others packed it in.  We requested replacements from off-world, but…”  He spread his hands.  “You already know how that story ends.”

“For fuck’s sake!” Duran spat.

“Yeah.  So now it takes almost an hour for the thing to crunch through the database, which is no good to anyone.  Too little, too late.  The only reason it’s still running is because no one has bothered to turn it off yet.”

“This is exactly why we’re seeing those numbers rise for the illegals.  Reasons just like this.”

Parnell shrugged.  “Hey, don’t complain to me, Inspector.  I just work here.”

Duran rubbed his hand across his face.  “So who was it, anyway?”

“Huh?”

“The dead guy?”

“Uh, let’s see here.”  Parnell tapped on the keyboard again, peering in at the readout.  “Some guy called Knile Oberend.  Rings a bell, actually, but I can’t place it.”

Duran paled visibly.  “What did you say?”

“Knile Oberend.”  Parnell pushed the spectacles up his nose and blinked.  “What’s the big deal?”

“Bring up the footage.  Now.”

“Ah, hell no, Duran.  I just finished storing that–”

“Bring up the goddamn feed!” Duran bellowed.  “Now!”

Across the console, Singh choked on the burger he was eating, hacking and wheezing and doubling over in response to the startling sound of Duran’s voice.  As he recovered he cast an accusatory glance at Duran, but
, seeing the look on the inspector’s face, quickly looked away again.

“Okay, don’t blow a fuse, Duran,” Parnell said.  He turned back to the screen and began digging through repositories for the data.  Duran towered over him, stiff and intent as the seconds passed.  Parnell found the image bank, scrolling through a series of twenty or thirty still frames before he found the one he was after – a grainy shot of a man in sunglasses moving through the gate.

“That’s the guy,” Parnell said, tapping the screen again.  “The system is never one hundred percent when they’re wearing respirators or sunglasses or whatever, but–”

He turned over his shoulder at the sound of the door opening.  Duran was already gone.

15

Knile’s lungs were on fire again.  He sucked in a mouthful of air.

It didn’t help.  He still felt like he was drowning, that he was fighting a losing battle as the little remaining air within him slowly leaked away.  He pushed with sweaty palms at the galvanised steel that pressed in around him, a material that his imagination told him was more like the wood inside a coffin than the interior of an air duct.

Stop.  Breathe.  Relax.

With an effort, Knile forced his eyes shut and slowed his breathing.  Bracing himself with thighs and forearms, he pressed his back against the rear of the air duct and let his head dip.  He’d ditched his overalls before beginning the climb, but he was still sweating like crazy.  His neck muscles were aching and his arms and legs were beginning to feel like dead weights from the strain, but in the back of his mind he knew that this ordeal was almost over, that there was an end to this claustrophobic little prison not far away.

This was always the hardest part.  You made it through before and you can do it again.

The air duct was one in a series that linked the lowest tier in the Reach, the maintenance section, with the tier above.  Since the official modes of transport between these tiers – the elevators and stairwells on the other side of the building – were heavily patrolled, this was his best and perhaps only option for continuing his ascension through the building without being caught.

Right now he was wishing that there had been another choice.

Grunting, he began to push himself up the vertical enclosure again.

He’d discovered this route when he was young and reckless.  Hurling himself into an unknown network of air ducts was something he would be very reluctant to attempt these days, but back then he’d thought he was indestructible, that there was no situation from which he could not escape.  Sure, there were schematics he’d stolen that had given him a fairly good idea of how to make it through, but those plans hadn’t told him what it would really be like inside these ducts.  There was no light, for a start, and he had to rely on a tiny LED flashlight on his belt to illuminate the way.  Keeping a grip was also exceedingly difficult, especially in these vertical shafts when sweat began to work against him.  There were tiny joins between the sheet metal segments that helped him to find purchase here and there, but for the most part he felt like he was trying to push his way through a glass box.

The first time he’d wormed his way through, his intrepidness had eventually faltered.  After struggling for two hours, that veneer of invulnerability had been scuffed away, leaving him desperate and despairing.  In fact, before long, he’d thought he was going to die in here like a rat that had become lost in a maze, starved to death.  He pictured his body decomposing, swelling up like a balloon and bursting open, the foul stench from within wafting out through the network of air ducts like poison until it eventually seeped into the living spaces, aggravating the inhabitants who lived in this part of the Reach.

Hope you suffocate on it,
he’d thought bitterly. 
Every last one of you.

He’d only kept going because, well… what other choice was there?  There was no point heading back, since he was certain he’d get lost that way as well.  He’d become confused, believing that any direction he attempted to go would lead to death, that there was no way out of this labyrinth at all.  He’d prepared himself for the end, thinking of what a foolish and ignominious way this was to die. 

He hadn’t stopped, though.  He’d kept going while there was still strength in his body, and, miraculously, he had eventually prevailed.  That day he had reached his destination.  Now as he retraced the steps in his mind, he believed that he could do it again.  He could make it through and continue on his way toward his destiny.

He pushed onward and upward, gritting his teeth and fighting against the slippery steel, bracing his legs to prevent a fall.  Time passed in slow motion – he couldn’t be sure if he’d been in this shaft for a matter of seconds or many long hours.  It was irrelevant, he decided.  Everything was irrelevant, but for the mechanics of pushing himself upward, sliding hands and feet and body, bracing, and repeating it over and over again.  Moving himself further along the network and onto the next section of ducting.

At the top of the shaft was a narrow right angle that he remembered well.  He’d been wedged there, the first time, stuck fast.  He’d recalled an alley cat in the slums that had, in his youth, attempted to run under a wooden fence and broken its back.  It had lain there, mewling pitifully, until one of the older boys had stepped forward and stomped it repeatedly to finally put an end to its misery.

That was how Knile had felt the first time he had been through here, like the cat under the fence, except that there was no one to come and end his suffering should he find he could go no further.

He knew how to approach it this time, however, how to angle his body and wriggle and use his legs to brace himself and apply the force necessary to squeeze through.  It only took a few moments before he’d progressed, squirting through the gap with relative ease, a feat that almost seemed too simple.  He looked under his armpit in surprise, wondering why.  Then he realised that he had probably lost some weight since his last attempt, and this fact, coupled with his new approach, had made a previously difficult task very easy.

“Starving to death in the lowlands finally has an upside,” he muttered.

He continued through several more shafts, breathing easier now, and then he saw light ahead.  Wriggling forward, he came to a grill that opened out into a corridor beyond.  Taking a few moments to make sure that no one was around, he began to wrestle with the frame.  The false screws that he’d added years ago popped out and skittered across the floor outside, and then he lowered the frame gently downward.

He silently thanked the maintenance crew for not discovering the false screws over the years.  If they’d been replaced, he’d have made a lot more noise bashing his way out, and that was the kind of attention he didn’t need.

Knile began to push his body outward, making sure to keep a good grip behind him.  First time around he had slipped while trying to exit the duct, exhausted and overeager to be free of his confinement, and fractured his collarbone.  He remembered at the time that he had almost welcomed the pain, revelling in the acuteness of it, the feeling of it throbbing in his neck, because it meant that he was still alive.  Death had not claimed him inside the air ducts.

Now he levered himself out of the cavity and dropped easily to the floor.  Returning the grill to its proper place, he collected up the screws and wedged them back in place, more an exercise in covering his tracks than an investment in the future.  After all, he was never coming this way again.

Taking a moment to brush himself off and collect his thoughts, Knile began to move along the corridor.

16

The second tier of the Reach encompassed roughly sixty floors, from Levels Forty to One H
undred, and was collectively known as ‘Gaslight’, a slang term that had become ubiquitous in its use.  The name was derived from the old-fashioned style of light fixtures that could be found
across the many levels, ceiling-
mounted lamps enclosed by iron frames and five glass panels in the shape of a trapezoid.  These gave off a nostalgic kind of watery yellow light, a s
tark change from the bright fluoros of the maintenance tier below, and the mood was, in turn, reminiscent of a more romantic epoch in history.

They weren’t real gas lights, of course.  Oil and gas supply had long since dried up on Earth, the last of the fossil fuels sucked from the ground in the heady days before the evacuations.  These lamps were powered by electricity, either from the reactor at the base of the building or through the solar panels that were built into the exterior of the Reach.  Perhaps it was a testament to the waning productivity of these energy sources that the lamps seemed even dimmer than the last time Knile had been here.

Knile wound his way through the corridors and up several flights of stairs, passing a few of the inhabitants without incident.  Not for the first time, he pictured how this pl
ace may have looked in its heyday, the curving steel
walls burnished and gleaming, the floors clean and unbroken.  Back then it had probably seemed modern and, to an extent, even luxurious.

In contemporary times it was a far cry from that ideal.  The walls were turning a jaundiced shade of yellow and there were streaks of rust where moisture had permeated the joins in the metal.  Yellow line markings on the floor that had once provided pedestrians with routes and directions had all but worn away from the passage of many feet.  Interactive information kiosks on the sides of the thoroughfares stood dark and unused, their screens cracked and covered in graffiti in garish shades of pink and lime green.

The Enforcer presence was not particularly strong in Gaslight and Knile did not anticipate encountering them in any great numbers.  This tier belonged to the working class of the Reach – many of the cleaners, couriers and maintenance staff lived here, along with meat workers and those who toiled away in the greenhouses above.  These were folk that Knile identified with.  He had lived here for some time and had gotten to know many of them during that period.  He supposed there was a chance that he would be recognised, but he was not overly concerned by that either.  These weren’t the kind of people to rat each other out to the Enforcers.