Skybreach (The Reach #3) (27 page)

“Robson traced his movements, remember?” Duran said.  “He found that Oberend has been through this terminal three times in the last week.  He’s been using the tunnels to get around.”

“So if that trend continues, we only have to wait how long?  Two more days?”

Duran glanced across at her.  Even in the dim light he could see the dissatisfaction on her face.  He had to remind himself that, unlike him, she did not have a vested interest in Oberend, no personal vendetta.  To her, Knile was just another thug.  It was understandable that she would lack motivation, especially being forced to sit around in empty terminals for hours on end.

“Robson said this was our best shot of finding him,” Duran said patiently.  “He couldn’t pin down
Oberend’s
base of operations, but he said it must be close.  That’s why he’s been through here so often.”

“I just feel kinda… useless, y’know?”

“I understand where you’re coming from, but what’s our alternative?  We can’t just walk around aimlessly out there hoping to bump into him.  Not with those looters out there.  There’s only two of us, and they’re moving in much larger packs.  It’s too risky.”

Zoe was quiet for some time, and when she spoke again her voice was soft.

“Maybe de Villiers was right.”

“Huh?”

She turned to him.  “I said maybe de Villiers was right.  Maybe we should just cut our losses and get out of here.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Don’t I?”

Duran heard voices outside, and as he turned back to the window he saw a group of about half a dozen people appear in the corridor.  They were carrying an assortment of weapons: guns, machetes and clubs, and a couple of them had blood on their faces.  They looked like the sort who were out looking for opportunities, or trouble, or whichever came first.

Disappointingly, Oberend was not among them.

One of the mob, a tall man with a gash on his forehead, tried a door across the corridor.  Finding it locked, he headed toward the terminal where Duran and Zoe were hiding.  As he reached it he yanked noisily at the door, causing the frame to rattle, and in response, both Duran and Zoe shrank back into the darkness.  A woman pressed her face up against the gap in the hoarding, trying to peer through the grimy windows to ascertain what lay inside, but after a moment she backed away and shook her head.  She said something to the others and gestured up the corridor, and the group moved on.

“Where the fuck did all of these lowlifes come from?” Zoe muttered.

“They were always here,” Duran said.  “Just under the surface, biding their time.  Waiting for their moment.  And now it’s arrived.”

Zoe seemed as though she might say something else, but then she just slumped back against the wall, rubbing her fingers at her temples.

“You okay?” Duran said.

“My head hurts.”  She reached back and pulled out her hairband, allowing her hair to spill around her shoulders, and dug her fingers into her scalp.  She began to massage herself with short, sharp motions of her fingertips, a scowl on her face.

Duran realised that he hadn’t seen her with the ponytail undone before, and now she looked entirely different with her dark locks spilling about her face.  There was a bluntness about her features, a hardness about her nose and the cut of her jaw that some might consider unrefined, but to Duran it was the epitome of beauty.  She would never pass for one of those fine-featured storybook princesses, that was for sure, but as Duran regarded her, he couldn’t recall a woman he had found more attractive in all of his years.

“Why did you join the Enforcers?” he said suddenly.

“What?” she said, opening her eyes as she continued to dig at her scalp.

“You used to work for the Enforcers, back before you joined Scimitar.  Why?”

Zoe ceased her manipulations and let her hands drop away, her amber-brown eyes taking on a faraway look behind the tangle of her hair.

“Damn.  I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”  She smiled wistfully and looked at Duran.  “My father.  He convinced me to do it.  He said there was prestige in being an Enforcer, that I’d be safe.  He also seemed to think it was the only chance I had of getting off-world.”

“Seems stupid now, huh?”

Zoe shrugged.  “He didn’t know any better.”

“No, of course not.”

“It sucked, though.  I hated every minute of wearing that uniform.  From the very first morning living in the barracks, seeing what was going on… my illusions were shattered like
that
.”  She snapped her fingers.  “I couldn’t buy into the lie like everyone else seemed to.”

“So what made you leave?”

She leaned back and allowed her head to thump against the wall, making no attempt to brush the hair away from her face.  Her eyes lost focu
s and her voice went soft again.

“There was a domestic.  Down on Forty-Two.  One of the nasty kind, if you know what I mean.  Guy goes crazy, stabs his wife.  Stabs his kids.  By the time we got there, the apartment was a bloodbath.  Everyone dead except for one kid, must have been four or maybe five years old, lying in the kitchen with a gash on his thigh.”  She paused.  “He was already white as a sheet when we walked in, wasn’t talking much.  He was already slipping away.  But the other Enforcers just walked out again.  I heard the sarge call it in as no survivors.  I was just… in shock.  I yelled at him and told him we could still do something for the kid, but he just turned his back on me.

“So I used a tourniquet on the kid’s thigh, tried to stop the bleeding.  He opened his eyes and looked at me, didn’t even ask for help.  It was like he’d already resigned himself to dying.  Either that, or he just didn’t have the strength to open his mouth.  I scooped him up and headed back outside, and I started running, running like my life depended on it.  Everyone out there was looking at me like I was some sort of weirdo.  All of the merchants and the people coming home from work, they just stared as I ran with this pale, limp kid in my arms and blood all over my neck and my face.  Then I reach the elevators and…”

She went quiet and brushed distractedly at a strand of hair, her eyes distant and hollow.  She almost seemed to have forgotten that Duran was even there.

“Listen,” Duran said, “I’m sorry I brought it up–”

“And they wouldn’t let me in,” Zoe went on, her eyes still unfocuss
ed.  “The sergeant in charge at the elevators said there was a contamination issue, that I couldn’t take him inside, and worse than that, I already knew that the kid was dead.  Even though his eyes were open and he was staring at me, I knew that he was gone.  That it was no use anyway…”

Duran got up and went to her side, placing his arm around her compassionately.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She pushed herself away from him and got up.  “No, it’s…”  She shook her head and scraped angrily at her unkempt hair, as if noticing it for the first time.  “I shouldn’t fall apart like this.”

“It’s okay, Zoe.”

She nodded and smiled thinly, evidently not comforted by his words.

“Anyway.  I walked out of the barracks that day and never went back.”  She turned to the window and looked outside.  “I realised that I didn’t just hate the uniform.  I hated
myself
for wearing it.”

“I can understand that.”

She shrugged dismissively.  “Yeah.  Anyway, enough about me.  Why did you join?”

Duran could see that she was trying to change the subject, and made no objection.  She had already shared more than he had expected she would, and he was happy to leave it at that.

“I guess it sounds naive now, but I thought I could make a difference.  I really did.  I thought I could help to make things right.”

“The idealist,” she said with a smirk.

“No, just another deluded kid who didn’t understand what he was getting himself into.”

“I don’t think you were deluded
, Alec.  You were just looking in the wrong place.”

“Yeah.”

Duran thought back to when he’d first worn the black, the pride he had felt stepping out on duty on day one.  He thought of the time not long after when he had been promoted to inspector, how he’d called his dad to give him the good news.  He remembered the glimmer in the old man’s eyes like it was yesterday.

The smile faded from Duran’s face, and a troubling thought came to him.  His father was down there in Link, right now, just an old man living by himself with no one to look after him.  Meanwhile, the place was being overrun
by
all manner of filth that was flowing in from the slums.  What would happen to him once they found him?

Duran had tried calling his father several times since the lockdown had been initiated, but there had been no response.  Duran wasn’t sure whether that was because something had happened to him, or if the network in Link had gone down.  Perhaps the relays down there had been trashed by rioters.

He got to his feet and began to pace, the unsettling image of his father lying dead on the living room floor lodged in his mind.

Maybe Zoe was right.  Maybe they should have already cut their losses and left the Reach far behind.

Instead of hunting Knile Oberend, perhaps Duran should have been down there in Link looking after the welfare of his father.

“What’s the matter?” Zoe said, turning to look at him.

Before he could respond, his holophone went off.  He plucked it from his pocket and held it to his ear.

“Phoenix?”

“Go ahead, Switch.”

“I’ve found him.”

Duran felt a chill down his back at those words.  “Target ‘K’?”

“None other.”

“Where?”

“He’s entered the transit system, just like we thought he would.  He just used a different entrance to the one you had staked out.”

Duran’s eyes met Zoe’s, and she sensed what was happening.  She became instantly alert.

“Tell me where he is, Switch.”

“He just went in through Waypoint Thirty-Eight.  If you head south through the tunnel you should catch him.”

Duran killed the call and dumped the phone back in his pocket, already on the move.  Zoe started after him.

“Where–?”

“This way,” Duran said urgently, flicking on a flashlight as he jumped onto the tracks.  He raced into the darkness.  “Oberend is
down here.”

27

Knile stopped suddenly and turned, staring back into the darkness of the tunnel behind him.  Roman and Remus also came to a halt and began to wave their flashlights around, spooked by their companion’s abrupt change in demeanour.

“What is it?” Remus said.

“Shh!” Knile hissed, holding up his hand.  “I thought I heard something back there.”

The three of them peered down the tunnel in the direction they had just come, listening intently, but there seemed to be nothing back there but silence and the curve of old, rusted tracks that disappeared around a corner a short distance away.

“I thought you said no one comes in here,” Roman whispered.

“They don’t, unless they can hack the doors,” Knile said.

“Or smash their way through them,” Remus added.

They stood there for a few moments longer, and then Knile began to walk again, setting a brisk pace as the tunnel began to move up a gentle incline.

“Probably nothing,” he muttered.

Roman made a disparaging noise.  “It’s not usually ‘nothing’ when your ears prick up like that, Knile.”

“Either way, we’re going to be out of this tunnel in a couple of minutes,” Knile said.  “If there’s someone else in here, they’re welcome to roam around as much as they like.”

“How far to the next waypoint?” Remus said.

“A couple of hundred metres,” Knile said.

“Wait a minute,” Roman said, directing his flashlight across to Remus.  “I thought you were some kind of expert on the Reach.  Shouldn’t you know where we’re going?”

“I’ve never been inside these tunnels before,” Remus admitted.  “I knew about them, obviously.  I just don’t have the hands-on experience of Knile, here.”  He glanced at Roman.  “I could tell you about the goods they used to transport in here, though.  I could tell you about the shuttles that once rumbled along the tracks.  They were manufactured by a company called Simmons and Lang, who also happened to manufacture–”

“That’s fine,” Roman said quickly.  “I believe you.  We don’t need to go over that.”

“It’s no trouble,” Remus said good-naturedly.  “I’m happy to share the knowledge.”

“How did you find out so much about the Reach?” Roman said.

“I worked in RA
for years.  Close to fifteen, in fact.
”

“RA?” Roman said.

“Reach Admin.  I was part of the planning and development department in Facilities.”  He smiled wistfully.  “I loved the job.  I mean, who wouldn’t?  The Reach is such a fascinating place, such a remarkable achievement of engineering and science.  Such a melting pot of cultures and socio-economic classes.  I was fascinated by it from the very beginning.”