Impact (26 page)

Before Okwembu can do anything, Hale somehow gets away from the men holding her.

One moment she's being held by her arms, the next she's twisted free. Her hands are still cuffed in front of her, but it's as if she barely notices. She's at the table in two strides, launching herself across it. Her left foot lands squarely on the map, planting itself on the border between Alaska and Canada, crumpling the paper, and then she's diving for Okwembu.

Prophet's forearm takes Hale on the collarbone. Okwembu has just enough time to step to the side before Hale crashes across the floor.

Everyone on the bridge is on their feet, racking the bolts on their rifles. Ray plants a foot on Hale's stomach, forcing her to stay down.

Okwembu finds her eyes, holds them. She may not know how Hale managed to get here, to escape the
Shinso
and make it all the way to Alaska, but it doesn't matter. Her shock is starting to give way to anger, to pure righteous fury. She holds her ground, breathing hard, keeping her expression neutral.

Hale is a mess. Her clothing is ragged, mismatched, soaked from sea spray. She has a cut on her cheek, and dark rivulets of blood have dried on her face. She's struggling, spitting mad, her eyes never leaving Okwembu's. “You,” she says. “You. You. Y—”

Ray hits her, driving a foot into her stomach, and her body shakes from the impact. Okwembu's hand strays to the data stick, still hanging round her neck. She was about to take it off when Hale attacked her. If it had been damaged…

Prophet looks at Ray. He's deeply rattled, his lip shaking with fury. “What in the name of the Engine did you bring her up here for?”

“She's from the plane,” Ray says, giving Hale a shake. “Her friend didn't make it.”

Prophet walks over, lifting Hale's chin.

“Now why would the Engine send you?” he says. His expression hardens. “Let's start with the aircraft. Where did you take off from?”

Hale tries to get loose again, wrenching her shoulders back and forth. She doesn't succeed, and this time Ray hits her across the face, his fist landing with a sound like a gun firing. Hale falls limp, blood dripping from her mouth, pattering softly on the floor.

Prophet leans in close to her. “I'll ask again,” he say. “Where did the plane come from?”

Hale says nothing, flexing her jaw left and right, eyes squeezed shut. When she speaks, it's to Okwembu, not Prophet. “Where are they?” she says. The aggression in her voice is like an open wound. She's speaking around the blood, and more of it drips between her lips, coating her teeth “Prakesh. Carver. Are they here?”

“Now you listen,” Prophet says, grabbing Hale's chin and turning her head towards him. “That plane. Are there others like it? How many people were with you?”

Hale stares at him, like he's speaking another language. After a long moment, she swallows hard, then says, “Out of Whitehorse. Just the one plane.”

“Good. How many of you were there?”

“… Four.”

“And why did you—”

Hale cuts him off, speaking to him but looking directly at Okwembu. “I hope you realise who you've got on your ship. Whatever she's told you, it's a lie. That's what she does. She lies. You let me walk out of here with her, and—”

Iluk grabs Hale's hair and yanks her head back. She barks a cry of fury, and he spits something at her in Inuktuk.

Okwembu can feel Prophet looking at her, his eyes searching. She ignores him, looking right back at Hale.
Get control of the situation.

“She's the one who isn't being honest,” she says. “I know her from Outer Earth. She's responsible for the virus that nearly wiped us out.”

Hale tries to speak. It earns her another punch, snapping her head sideways and sending dots of blood onto one of the screens.

“Then why did she attack you?” Prophet says.

Okwembu shrugs. “She disagreed with some of the decisions I made.”

Silence. Okwembu keeps her eyes on Prophet. She suppresses the urge to elaborate, letting the seconds tick by.

“Should I take her downstairs, Prophet?” Ray says. “We lost another one yesterday. They could probably use the extra hands.”

Prophet shakes his head, looking Hale up and down. “She's violent, this one. Something tells me she won't be so comfortable serving the Engine.”

He turns away. “Take her to the stern.”

By the time Anna reaches the gallery, her shock has turned into a righteous, roaring fury. Every stride she takes feels like it drives an electric bolt of anger through her body.

She skids to a halt on the Level 1 catwalk above the gallery floor. There's a muted alarm blaring somewhere, along with the recorded voice advising evacuation. The escape pod bay doors are still closed, with nothing but darkness through their viewports.

For a moment, Anna is confused. Where were the stompers? Why didn't they stop Dax and his group from…

That's when she sees them. Two bodies, clad in grey stomper jumpsuits, sprawled face down on the floor. It's impossible to miss the blood pooling under them.

Another electric bolt shoots up through her, and she pounds her fist on the railing in frustration. Jordan. That must have been her price. Places in the escape pods for her and her buddies. Did the two dead stompers refuse? Did they try to stop them?

A strange sound pulls her out of her thoughts. It takes a second to place it: someone is crying. No–not just someone. A child.

Anna launches herself over the catwalk railing, turning one-eighty degrees in mid-air, using a hand on the railing as a fulcrum. She comes down with her toes in between the railings and her heels hanging out over the edge. She relaxes into the landing, then pushes herself off the catwalk.

It's not far down–ten feet, maybe, no more. She lands with a thud, not bothering to roll, staggering a little on impact. The crying is coming from her left, and she turns her head, hunting for the source.

Ivy.

She must've been here when it all went down. She's huddled by the wall, sitting with her back against it, her hands wrapped around her knees. Anna sprints to her, pulling the trembling girl into an embrace.

“It's all right,” Anna says. She says it again, then a third time, as if she needs to convince herself.

There's nothing she can do. She should take Ivy back, find somebody to look after her. She gets to her feet, cradling the girl. Ivy is still crying, but the sobs are silent now, and she snuggles into Anna's shoulder.

That's when Anna notices the last airlock.

The viewpoints in almost all the airlocks are dark, but the last one is different. There's the faintest glimmer inside it, so faint that at first Anna is sure she's imagined it.

She crosses the floor, avoiding the two dead stompers. As she reaches the bay door, she sees that the viewport is just out of her reach. But she didn't imagine the light–it's a little clearer now, like the glow cast from a tab screen.

Her heart beating faster, she drops to one knee, whispering in Ivy's ear. “I have to put you down, OK? Just for a second.”

Ivy doesn't move. Slowly, Anna disengages the girl's hands from around her neck, and places her gently on the floor, making sure she's not looking at the stompers. Then she gets on tiptoe, straining to get as high as she can, and looks into the viewport.

The escape pod is still there.

Anna doesn't know why they didn't take it. Maybe someone got cold feet. Maybe they left so quickly that there wasn't time to inform everybody. It doesn't matter. Not now.

She crouches down, putting her hand on Ivy's cheek, feeling still-warm tears as her fingers touch the skin. The girl's face is deathly pale.

“Ivy? Honey?” she says. “I want you to do something for me.”

Ivy starts to answer, glancing at the stompers.

“No,” Anna says. “Don't look at them. They can't hurt you. I promise. Now, what I want you to do is run. Fast as you can, far as you can, until you find a grown-up. Can you do that for me?”

Ivy stares at her. Anna is about to repeat herself when the girl nods. Her enormous brown eyes prickle with fresh tears.

“Good,” Anna says, forcing a smile onto her face. She hugs Ivy one more time. “Go. Now.”

Ivy skims across the floor, her oversized red sweater trailing out behind her. She only looks back once. Anna stays put, anticipating the look, and even manages a wave. Then Ivy is into the corridor, and out of sight.

Anna turns back to the pod. Her fingers brush the release catch next to the door. “Oh, this is a very bad idea,” she mutters to herself.

She clambers into the airlock, pulling open the door of the escape pod inside it. The pod itself is tiny. There are three soft-backed seats arranged in a triangular formation at the front. A transparent locker on one side holds three space suits. Anna can't see a thing through the cockpit viewport, which stretches around the seats. The only light comes from the controls themselves, from the multiple touchscreens on the U-shaped line of controls around the front seat.

I shouldn't be doing this
, Anna thinks. But then she's clambering over the seats, dropping into the foremost one, fumbling with the safety belt. There are straps, clicking into place at her sternum. Three touchscreens in front of her, black and silent. There's a single joystick beneath them, with two thick plastic buttons–one on the top, one on the front.

She doesn't know that much about Outer Earth's escape pods. She remembers being told once that they're relatively simple to operate–they have to be, given the situations they might be used in. But how do you turn them on? How do you launch them?

Breathing fast, she gives the nearest touchscreen an experimental tap. Somewhere behind her, she hears an engine kick into action, rumbling through the little craft. The airlock around the pod comes to life. A rotating light near the ceiling comes on, and the door to the station seals shut behind her with a grinding noise.

A dozen readouts appear on the screens: fuel capacity, estimated range, attitude, thruster locations. Anna stares at them, horrified. A half-second later the displays dim, and a message appears on the centre display. LAUNCH?

Anna raises a finger. Stops.

She is out of her depth. The fear is setting in now, crawling out of her nightmares and tearing its way into the real world.
You're going to die out there
, she thinks, and it's almost enough to send her flying out of the chair, back into the station, back to her parents.
There has to be someone else who can do this.

And then, before she can stop herself, her finger touches the screen.

It takes a while for the guard to return. She strides over to Prakesh, rifle swinging. “Higher-ups say to do it. Get going.”

He doesn't waste time getting to work, already aware of what he needs. The ammonium sulfate is easy. Prakesh can get that from the slippery white fertiliser pellets. Same with the sulphur–that's the yellow insecticide. They give him a plastic cup to use as a scoop, but some still gets on his hands, prickling at his skin.

The calcium hydroxide is the tricky part. He needs calcium oxide first, and the usual source of that would be a stick of chalk. The guard assigned to watch him just stares blankly when Prakesh asks for some.

He tries to keep the frustration off his face. “What about shells?”

“Shells?” the guard says slowly. He's not much older than Prakesh, with dark brown skin and a shaggy mess of black hair, but he holds his rifle like it's an extension of his arm. Like it would be the work of a single thought to bring it up and pull the trigger.

“Yeah, like—” Prakesh can feel the word, dancing on the tip of his tongue.
What the hell are those things called?
The name snaps to the front of his mind. “Barnacles. They'd be stuck to the ship? Right at the waterline. I just need two or three.”

He takes a step forward, moving without thinking, and is brought up short by a rifle barrel in his face.

“You don't move,” says the guard. “I'll get them.”

Slowly, he lowers the rifle, then calls one of the others over to spot for him. He stalks off, his boots tapping on the metal floor of the farm.

They've got Prakesh in one corner of the hangar, set up with a couple of old tables. There's a portable gas ring, purloined from the mess hall. Fresh water sloshes in a big metal drum. They've even managed to find him some tongs, their metal surface blackened with age.

It's not even close to perfect. The chemistry he's about to perform is unbelievably inefficient, the kind of procedure that would make his old Air Lab colleagues burst out laughing. But it's all Prakesh has.

He waits, hands on the table, head bent. Jojo and the others are still at the troughs, working on the soil. Every few minutes, a guard will pull some of them away, letting them take a piss break.

Please let this work
.

The guard returns with a handful of barnacles: lumpy, misshapen things with jagged white shells. He dumps them onto the table. “Ruined my knife getting these off,” he says, tapping a chipped blade hanging from his belt.

“Sorry,” Prakesh mutters, gathering the shells.

He gets both hands under one of the metal drums, lifts it up, then smashes it down on the shells. They're hard, weather-worn, and it takes a few hits before they begin to crack.

The gas burner is tricky to get going–Prakesh can't stop his hands from shaking, and he keeps fumbling the butane lighter. Eventually, he does it, and a scorching blue flame rises up from the plate.

Prakesh holds the smashed shells over the flames until they smoulder and crumble, kicking off a thin white smoke. He catches the fragments in one of the plastic beakers. He can feel the heat singeing the skin on his fingers, and bites his lip, pushing through it. Soon, the beaker is full of clumpy, off-white powder. Calcium oxide, or something close to it.

He dumps it in the water-filled drum, using the tongs to stir it. There. Calcium hydroxide.

The guard leans in. “So how does it work?”

“Huh?”

“This chemistry shit.” He gestures at the drum.

“Oh,” says Prakesh. “Well… calcium hydroxide from the shells will react with the existing fertiliser, and it should make it more potent, so…”

“Right.” The guard's actually interested, his gun lowered, tilting his head to one side as he regards the drum. “My mom showed me this stuff in a book once. Didn't really know how it all worked but I always wanted to try it.”

The drum goes on top of the burner. Prakesh has to get the guard to help, which he does willingly, handing his rifle off to one of the others. Even then, they nearly send the entire mess flying when the guard's fingers slip. Prakesh pulls it back at the last moment, exhaling a shaky breath.

“There,” says the guard, dusting off his hands. “What's next?”

Prakesh's mind goes blank for a moment, surprised at having such an eager lab assistant. “Uh… the sulphur. Right over there.”

“Yeah, you got it.”

The guard brings it over. Working quickly, Prakesh dumps several scoops of the sulphur into the pot, then stirs it all together. The ammonium sulfate fertiliser goes in last, followed by a thick sheet of scrap metal as a makeshift lid.

“So shouldn't there be some sort of, what's it called, reaction now?” the guard says.

Prakesh shrugs, trying to ignore how much his shoulders hurt. “It'll take a little time, but sure.”

“Nice,” says the guard, hands on his hips. “Guess you'd better get back to work.” He sounds genuinely apologetic.

Prakesh walks with his head down, sliding in next to Jojo. The kid says nothing, doesn't even look at him.

Prakesh digs his hands into the soil, and tries not to look at the metal drum.