Impact (17 page)

“You led them right to us,” he says. A fleck of saliva hits me on the cheek, and I have to resist the urge to brush it off.

“Led who?” I say. I twist my shoulders around without thinking, looking back at the door–Finkler has to put a hand on my leg to stop me. I can feel pressure in the wound–he's still got an instrument in it, nestled inside.

There's the sound of running feet in the corridor, and I see Harlan in the doorway, his face pale with fear. “You and him,” Eric says, jabbing a finger at Harlan. “Nomads.”

“How many?” Finkler says. He doesn't move his hand from the wound.

“Lots.” He looks back at me. “They must have been tracking you, and now you
brought 'em right here
.”

I don't know what to say to that, but I'm saved when Finkler speaks up. “Scouts said they'd left the area,” he says. It's impossible to miss the worry in his voice.

“Guess they got it wrong. And now it's coming down on top of us.”

He doesn't wait for me to respond. “Finkler,” he says. “Get below. Right now.”

“You got it,” Finkler says, and I feel him slowly withdrawing the scalpel. “Sorry about this, but we're gonna have to postpone—”

He stops speaking, and that's when I notice a different sensation in my leg. Not pain, exactly–it's more a feeling of tension, like how my muscles feel after a long run.

“Oh, fuck,” says Finkler quietly.

I lift my head. He's got the scalpel in the wound–I can just see his fingers wrapped around the handle–and there's a
lot
of blood. It's spattering his gloves, dotting the skin on his forearms. Eric is staring at him, his eyes wide.

“It's OK,” Finkler says. “I just… I think I might have nicked your femoral artery.”

“
What?
” Harlan and I say at the same time.

“Leave it,” says Eric, striding over to Finkler, trying to pull him away.

He shakes Eric off. “No way,” he says. “Gotta fix this.”

“
Finkler.
”

“If I don't, she'll bleed out.”

“Not our problem. I can lose her, but I can't lose you. Get below, right now.”

I thump my head back down on the mattress. This is not happening.
This is not happening.

“I'm not leaving her,” Finkler says. There's a note of steel in his voice, one I haven't heard before now. “She stays, I stay.”

“No.”

“You can't just leave me here,” I say, horrified. I'm feeling strangely lightheaded now, and I recognise the sensation–this isn't the first time I've lost blood.

Eric ignores me, speaking to Finkler. “Don't be stupid. You're putting everyone in danger.”

“What's the matter, boss?” he replies. “Can't handle a few Nomads?”

He sees Eric about to explode, and speaks quickly. “She's my patient. I screwed up, and I have to handle this. Boss, I
have
to. I've got clamps and sutures–it won't take me long.”

There are a few seconds when I think Eric is going to win. He's going to drag Finkler away, and leave me to die. But then something passes between them, a look I can't even begin to decode. Eric swears loudly, turning and running for the door. I see him grab Harlan, pushing him out into the corridor. “We'll hold them off as long as we can,” he shouts back at us. “Just hurry.”

“You'll be OK,” Harlan says. “He knows what he's doing.”

Finkler starts whistling again, and I hear the first gunshot echoing down the corridor.

I lay my head back, trying to remember to breathe. I tell myself that there's nothing I can do, that I have to let Finkler work.

“Goddamn it,” he says, talking more to himself than to me. “Stupid thing. Keeps slipping.”

More gunshots ring out, closer this time, like they're coming from
inside
the hospital. “Please hurry,” I say, clenching my teeth so hard that my jaw twinges. It helps keep the lightness in my head at bay.

“Sorry. Never done this before. Artery, I mean.”

I hear running footsteps, and tilt my head back to see people sprinting past the door, yelling at each other. A face appears in the doorway. Eric. His eyes are dancing, alive with the heat of battle.

“How're we doing?” Finkler says, without looking up.

In response, Eric swings away from the door, letting off a round of shots at someone we can't see.

A moment later, he strides into the room, then reaches around behind his back and pulls out a handgun.

I'm so wired that, for a moment, I'm convinced he's going to shoot me. But he just holds it out to Finkler, who gestures at him to put it on the table.

“They're coming in from all sides,” Eric says. “We have to split our defences. You see anybody come in that's not us, shoot them.”

“Got it.”

“There are too many of them. They must have been lying low, camped somewhere we couldn't see.”

“Got it.”

“We're going to hold this corridor, but they're coming in from everywhere, and we don't have nearly enough people. If we—”

“I said I got it, Eric! I'm working here!” Finkler waves him away. Eric vanishes, exploding out of the door, loosing off another volley of shots.

Finkler keeps operating. He's working with stitches now–I can feel the thread jerking through my artery. I try not to imagine what it looks like. The anaesthetic is still there, but the pain is winning, hot and sharp, shooting up from the wound.

It isn't enough to hold off the fogginess in my mind.

There's a shout from the doorway. My eyes fly open to see Finkler grabbing the gun, loosing off two quick shots. The bangs are enormous, and the shots ricochet off the corridor wall. I have just enough time to see a shadow there before it vanishes, ducking out of sight.

“Yeah!” Finkler shouts. I look over to him, in time to see a fresh spurt of blood jet up from the wound.

He sees it, too, and his brow furrows. “Here,” he says, holding the gun out to me.

I take it in one shaking hand. It's heavier than the stingers we had on Outer Earth, the surface slimy with oil.

“You've got to be kidding me,” I say.

“It's easy,” he says, raising a scalpel. “You point it at someone and pull the trigger. Bang.”

“I know how a
damn gun works
!” I say, shouting the last three words as the anaesthetic gives way, a shrieking pain blasting up from my thigh.

“Sorry,” Finkler mutters. He doesn't stop, using his teeth to hold the end of the thread. His arms are soaked in my blood. I don't know how much I've lost already, and I
really
don't want to think about it.

I keep my eyes on the door. I have to tilt my head back to look at it, so it's upside down. “How will I know who to shoot?” I say, tasting sweat.

“What?” Finkler is barely listening.

“What if I shoot one of your guys?”

A second later, a Nomad comes through the door, and I realise that that's not a mistake I'm going to make.

The man is tall, with pale skin and lank dreadlocks. He wears a sleeveless T-shirt and torn pants. At first, I think his face is scarred, but then I see that it's paint: long slashes of it, red and grey, curving around his nose and mouth.

He has a gun, long-barrelled, battle-scarred, around his neck on a sling. He leads with it, kicking open the door and flying into the operating theatre. For a second, he's brought up short, not expecting to find an operation in progress.

One second is all I need.

I raise the gun and fire, not thinking, not
wanting
to think. I pull the trigger again and again. The kick from the weapon nearly takes my head off. My view is upside down, and my wooziness makes it tough to aim: two bullets go wide, but the third finds its mark, tearing away half of the man's neck. He goes down, full ragdoll, spinning as he hits the floor.

“Jesus!”

Finkler ducked when I fired, pulling the scalpel out of the wound. The pain rockets through me, delayed by my adrenaline but finally shooting home, and I let loose an animal cry. The air is thick with the smell of gunpowder.

Finkler gets back up, wiping his forehead, staring down at the wound. “Shit. I think I sliced a muscle.”

“
What?
” The word is almost a shriek.

“No, hang on. It's fine. I just have to be careful.” I feel Finkler's fingers in the wound, opening it further. “Hang on… got it. There. Artery's patched up. No harm done. We're fine.”

He's barely finished speaking when another Nomad bursts into the room. This one is even more terrifying–his head is shaven, and the paint goes right over the top of his skull, as if his head is some kind of ancient totem. He's bare-chested, and he's already raising his gun.

I raise mine faster. I fire once. Twice. Both bullets go wide. I pull the trigger again, and the gun clicks empty.

The Nomad grins, takes a step forward. His eyes move from me to Finkler. He lets his gun drop, and takes a wicked-looking knife out of his belt. Its blade is long, slightly curved, the edge notched and gouged.
Smart
, I think, not wanting to but doing it anyway.
He doesn't want to waste ammo.

I hurl the gun at the Nomad. It's a last-ditch move, awkward from my position, and it doesn't even come close to hitting him. Finkler cries out–a high, warbling yell. But he doesn't move away from the table. Instead, he moves around it, trying to shield me.

The Nomad smiles, sauntering towards us, taking his time.

The room swims in front of me. I blink, and there's something around the man's neck. It's a rifle, and behind it is Harlan, yanking it backwards, pulling tight.

The Nomad grunts, tries to fight him off. He's strong, and when he wrenches his body to the side, Harlan is lifted clean off his feet. He screams, but refuses to let go, pulling the top of the rifle into the man's throat.

I will myself to move, but it's as if my mind is no longer attached to my body. I don't know if it's the fever or the blood loss. I can't do anything but watch.

The Nomad reaches behind him, slamming his fist into the side of Harlan's head, who lets go, tumbling away. But the Nomad is focused on Harlan, and he doesn't see Finkler lunge forward, doesn't even realise he's there until the scalpel is buried in the side of his neck.

His knife clatters to the floor. It's the last thing I hear before I sink into oblivion.

Everything hurts.

The ache in Prakesh's legs radiates upwards through his spine. His arms are in agony. It's his shoulders that hurt the most–every time he takes a step, the enormous bag of soil presses down on them.

He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other, blinking away the sweat dripping into his eyes. Then he's at the mustering point, the other bags of soil appearing in his field of view. With a groan, he rolls the bag he's carrying off his shoulders. It thumps on top of the rest, starts to slide back. For a horrible moment, Prakesh thinks it's going to slide right off–he'll have to pick it up, and that means crouching down, which he's not sure he can do at that moment.

The bag comes to a quivering halt. Prakesh straightens up, tries to ignore the pain in his upper body. He places his hands at the small of his back, rolls his neck.

“Move it,” the guard says.

He's sitting on a nearby crate, elbows on his knees, and his voice has a high-pitched, needling quality to it that Prakesh has already learned to hate. The guard has told him to
move it
every time Prakesh has brought another bag of soil, and he doesn't vary his tone no matter how quickly Prakesh heads back to the other side of the hangar.

Out of the corner of his eye, Prakesh sees another prisoner stumbling towards him, almost collapsing under the weight of the bag of soil. Prakesh sidesteps smartly, but something under his shoe causes him to slide, a slick of oil, maybe, and he overbalances. His windmilling left hand brushes the bag on the worker's shoulders, and he has to stop himself from grabbing hold. He finds his balance, exhaling hard. The worker glances at him as he offloads the bag. He looks brittle, like his bones are made of thin glass. Every prisoner is like that, moving as if each step will make their shins crumble.

“Move it.”

Prakesh walks back across the hangar, past the line of trudging workers, back towards the dwindling pile of soil bags. He's counted twenty-eight prisoners here besides him, plus six guards spaced around the hangar. He wonders how many people are actually on this ship, the ratio of prisoners to guards, but then realises he's too tired to care. The gruel they ate a couple of hours ago barely registered inside his body, and his throat is screaming for water.

The hangar is in the centre of the ship, and it's enormous–not as big as the Air Lab, but still a couple of hundred feet from end to end. It's baking hot, shimmering with a wet, sticky heat. There are stacks of crates everywhere, rusted together, their tops and sides ripped off in places. A disused forklift is parked near the wall, missing two of its wheels. There's even a plane in a corner of the hangar, hulking and silent, covered with frayed netting like a captured animal.

Most of the floor space is given over to huge troughs, filled with soil, running wall to wall. The troughs are badly made, little more than sheet metal clumsily welded together. The soil is poor quality. The few living plants that Prakesh can see are wilted, feeble things: tomatoes and beans and cabbage and squash.

The irony is, there are a dozen ways he could improve the yield: space the plants properly, introduce interplanting, create better fertiliser. He tries to think about the procedures, hoping to distract himself, but he's just too damn tired.

Prakesh reaches the first pile of soil sacks. He focuses on the one he has to pick up–the pile is low to the ground now, and the sack is at knee level. Like the others, it's made of thin brown fabric, harsh on the hands, with grains of dirt leaking out between the fibres. He's going to have to crouch after all.

Move it
, Prakesh thinks, and bends to pick up the sack.

There's movement in front of him, flickering at the edge of his vision. He looks up to see one of the prisoners fall–a woman so thin that her collarbone appears to be holding up her body like scaffolding.

The woman hits the ground with a staggered thump, her arms splayed out on either side of her. She gives a thin, rattling breath, then falls still.

Prakesh tries to cry out, but his throat won't cooperate. He takes a step towards the woman, reaches out to her—

A hand lands on his chest, pushes him back. One of the guards, her face utterly bored. She has long hair running down her back, deep red in colour.

“Back to work,” she says.

Prakesh stares at her. “She—”

“I
said
, back to work.”

And Prakesh knows that the woman is dead. Knows it down to his bones. Is he really the only one who sees this? He looks over his shoulder–the other prisoners are looking at him, glancing up as they trudge, but nobody is coming to help. Not a single person.

The scene swims in front of him, and a burst of nausea propels itself up from his stomach. He reels in place, bent double, aware that he has to throw up and not sure how to stop himself.

The guard doesn't tell him again. She doesn't wait for a response. Prakesh senses that she's raised her rifle, that she's turning it in her hands. Any moment now, the butt is going to crash into him, and that'll be that. If she hits him, he's not getting up. Not that he can do anything about it.

At least I'll see Mom and Dad
, he thinks.
Maybe Riley, too.
He's aware that he's trembling, but he doesn't know how to stop.

“No!” It's a different voice, high and reedy. The speaker steps between Prakesh and the guard. “He's n- he's n-”

Whoever it is gulps, two quick sounds, then says, “He's n-n-new. He d-d-doesn't kn-kn-know how it w-works, that's all.”

There's a pause. The guard's rifle doesn't crash into him.

A canteen appears, raised by a thin, grimy arm. Somehow, Prakesh gets hold of it, and manages to drink. It's a few seconds before his throat responds, and then it's almost too much, like he's trying to drink the ocean.

Somehow, he manages to keep it down. When he lowers the empty canteen, he sees the kid with the freckles staring back at him. He's just as emaciated as the others, but his eyes are alive. The guard, the one with the tattered boots, is standing off to one side, looking sour. The woman's body is still there. Two of the guards are bending down for it. (
Her
, Prakesh thinks.
Not it.
) The man holding the wrists says something Prakesh can't hear, and his partner actually laughs.

The kid with the stutter bends down, and with a grunt, hoists a sack of soil. Prakesh does the same, trying hard not to look at the body, trying not to think about what he just saw. The thoughts come anyway.
How long before you end up like that? How long before they work you to death? A month? A week?

He and the kid trudge back to the empty troughs in silence. It's only when they're halfway there, when no guards are nearby, that that kid speaks.

“J-J-J-” he says, scrunching up his face, trying to get the word out without raising his voice. “Jojo. My n-n-n-name's J-J-Jojo.”

“Prakesh.”

They reach the second pile of soil bags, and heave their loads onto it. A puff of dirt shoots up from the pile, the motes floating in the air in front of them. As Prakesh looks up, he sees that the two nearby guards are turned away, muttering to each other.

Prakesh speaks as quietly as possible, keeping his head down, aware of the guards. The water is having an effect, and his head is starting to clear. “How many guards?”

“Wh-what?”

Prakesh gestures to the nearest one, then raises a questioning eyebrow.

Jojo bows his head, hunches his shoulders. He starts walking a little faster, and Prakesh has to up his pace to stay level. Jojo shakes his head–a quick, almost imperceptible movement–then his mouth forms a single word.

Later
.