Skybreach (The Reach #3) (14 page)

The phone began to ring.  One of the janitors nearby was staring at him oddly and so Knile turned and began to
walk back into the alleyway again.

“C’mon, Hank.  Pick up the phone.  Pick up the goddamn–”

“Good morning, Consulate Seven.”

“Hank?”

There was a brief pause, and then Hank’s face appeared on the screen.  He looked unflustered and relaxed, his grey beard neatly trimmed as usual, not a hair out of place.

“Knile, it
is
you.  I thought I recognised the voice.”

“Hank, listen to me, you’ve got to–”

“How are you doing, buddy?  Where are you?”

“Hank, just shut up and listen.  I’m right outside the consulate. 
Your
consulate.  The insurgents are out here.  Children of Earth.”

“Huh?  Hold up there a minute, I–”

“Hank, just listen!” he practically shouted.  He glanced out surreptitiously into the marketplace again.  “The insurgents are here, Hank.  They’re disguised as janitors.  My guess is that they might have concealed weapons in their cleaning carts.”  Hank was staring at him, perplexed.  “Are you hearing any of this?”

Hank pursed his lips. 
“Well, I–”

“Hank, they’re coming for you.  Get the Redmen into action or get the fuck out!”

“Now wait just a minute,”
Hank said calmly. 
“Last time I saw you – a week ago – you had a passkey clutched in your fist and you were headed upstairs on a one way ride.  What’s going on?”

Knile tried to calm himself, but it wasn’t working.  His breathing was ragged and his mind was all over the place.

“I gave it away, Hank.  I decided not to go.  I had to come back.”  He waved his hand dismissively in front of the screen.  “None of that is important right now.  You’re in danger.”

“Well, that I don’t know about that.  I have Redmen here to protect me,”
Hank said.  He gestured to something off-screen. 
“I trust in them.”

“They didn’t help the last consulate and they won’t help you.  Not up against this many men.  Not against this much firepower.  You need to get them into action before the insurgents can mobilise.  That’s the only way you’re going to get through this.”

“We’ve had Enforcers brought in to blunt any potential attacks, Knile.”
  Hank smiled confidently. 
“No need to worry.”

Knile took a deep breath.  “Hank, please.  I know there’s a secret exit in there.  At least one.  You need to get up out of your chair and walk out.  You need to take your people with you.  If the Enforcers and the Redmen stop the attack, fine, you’ll lose an hour of paperwork, but Hank… if they don’t stop the attack, you know what–”

“Let me tell you something, Knile,”
Hank said evenly. 
“I’ve been stationed in this office for years.  Heck, more than a decade, in fact.  In that time I’ve never vacated my post.  Do you know why?”
  He ploughed on without waiting for an answer. 
“Because I work for the Consortium, and I don’t just get up and walk out when I feel like it.  I do my duty.  Even if there are maniacs outside my door, I can’t walk out and leave our terminals, our databases and passkeys within their reach.  I can’t just let them walk in and take that sensitive information.”

“Yeah, but Hank–”

“Remember this?”
Hank said,
and Knile couldn’t help but notice something odd in his voice – bitterness?  Anger?  He
leaned back in his chair and tapped the postcard that had been stuck to the wall, where a shiny dome-like habitat was depicted
.
  His mouth twisted and his voice became hard-edged.
  “This here is my little slice of the good life.  This is what’s waiting for me when I finish up here in a few months.  Europa, Knile.  Do you think I’d jeopardise that because there’s a few suspicious characters standing around outside my office?”

“A few suspicious characters?  Hank, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t a bunch of gang bangers out looking for a quick score.  These are serious players.”

Hank shook his head disparagingly, his patience at an end.

“I have to go, Knile, but there’s something I need to tell you before I do.”

Knile wasn’t sure if years of safety had made Hank complacent, or if he was simply overconfident in the presence of the Redmen, but either way he wasn’t seeing reason.  He seemed almost indifferent, like a man casually watching a lion stalk toward him and expecting it to simply turn away at any moment.

Knile felt futile, powerless to stop what was about to happen.

Finally, he relented.

“What is it?” Knile said, sighing.

Hank leaned over and tapped something on his desk phone.

“Weirdest coincidence,”
Hank mused. 
“I just got a call from someone who was looking for you.  Seems they didn’t have your direct number and thought I might be able to relay a message.”

“Let me guess, some inspector in the Enforcer ranks who’s chasing after me?”

“No, not at all.”
  He smirked slightly. 
“It makes sense now, once you told me what happened to you up there.
  How you ended up staying on Earth.
”

It was Knile’s turn for confusion.  “What are you talking about, Hank?”

“Best for you to make the call and see for yourself, buddy.  It came through on a longwave.”
  He tapped something on the phone again. 
“I’m sending you the contact number now.”

“What’s a longwave?”

“Hope it works out for you, buddy,”
Hank said enigmatically. 
“And if it makes you happy, I’ll talk to the Redmen, have them go check out the situation.”

“Good, but please hurry–”

“See you round, Knile.”

The connection went dead as Hank terminated the call, and Knile was left staring at the blank screen.  He stood there for a moment longer, the afterimage of Hank’s face still etched in his mind.  He’d seen something in Hank’s eyes in that moment before he disappeared, a kind of sadness or regret, a look that belied his calmness throughout the call.

Knile wondered if Hank knew that he was about to die and had simply just accepted it because he had no other choice.  He was duty bound to protect the consulate to his last breath.

A number suddenly appeared on the holophone, a long string of more than ten digits – the details of his mysterious contact, it seemed.  Knile stared at it for a moment, wondering who could possibly be trying to contact him.

The sound of raised voices brought his attention back to the marketplace.

One of the janitors, an old woman with curly grey hair protruding from her station cap, was in the process of trundling her cart across toward the c
onsulate.  The Enforcers had responded, walking forward to meet her, one of them yelling at her to get back.  The old woman pointed toward the consulate with a gnarled plastic broom as if she intended to begin work there.

The other janitors began to peel away, moving back from the edges of the marketplace as if some silent message had passed between them.  They began to fan out into shopfronts and alleyways, then turned and waited.

Oh, shit
.  It’s starting.

Knile realised it was too late to change what was about to happen.  He’d tried, and now it was up to Hank and the Redmen.  The only thing Knile could do now was to get the hell out of there as quickly as he could.

He turned on his heel and took a step forward, then abruptly stopped.

He stared in disbelief, thoughts of the janitors and Hank and everything else suddenly swept from his mind.

14

As the man stepped inside the room, Talia’s thoughts shifted to the .22 she had stowed in her belt earlier.  It was the one Silvestri had given to her back in Link, the one she’d used to kill Crumb during the invasion of Skybreach, and she’d freshly reloaded it earlier this morning.  Her hand brushed against the butt of the gun through her shirt, but then she hesitated.

Killing a dirtbag like Crumb was one thing.  The guy had kidnapped her, assaulted her and ultimately tried to kill her.  Pulling the trigger had been relatively easy.

These men, however, were something else entirely.  As far as Talia knew
,
they were not criminals or louts, but merely a group of workmen trying to do the right thing – protect their workplace.  She certainly had no justification for killing them out of hand or because they happened to be in her way.

It was Silvestri and Talia herself who were the wrongdoers here.  They were the ones trying to take something that wasn’t theirs.

These thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant, in the time it took the big man to take two steps into the storeroom, and before Talia could come up with a decision on what to do, Silvestri had already acted.

Her companion moved with blinding speed.  Silvestri dropped the canister he had been carrying and swept forward in a blur, catching both Talia and the newcomers off guard.  He twisted his body with the elegance of a dancer, rotating his shoulders and crunching the big man in the nose with a perfectly executed palm heel strike.  The man cried out and reeled back through the doorway, staggering like a drunkard, and he became entangled with the man behind him as he fell.  The two of them went sprawling on the floor amid a flurry of curses and flailing limbs.  Silvestri followed, lithe and sure in his movements as he attempted to reach the men before they could find their feet again.

As he disappeared out into the corridor, the third man appeared i
n the doorway.  His eyes narrowed
as they
set on Talia over a cruelly hooked nose that almost resembled a beak.  He was the smallest of the three, but there was a wiry toughness about him that Talia recognised from her days brawling in the streets.

The guy was a scrapper, the kind of man who wouldn’t go down easily.

“Come here, you thieving cat,” the man said menacingly, advancing toward her.  Something glinted and Talia saw a box wrench clutched in his right hand.

She pulled the .22 from her belt instinctively, realising she could use it to intimidate the man even if she had no intention of firing it, but as she levelled it at him, the man swung the box wrench and smacked her on the wrist.  Talia grunted in pain and the .22 was sent clattering against the wall.  She clutched at her hand, which had blossomed with excruciating pain, but she had no time to nurse it.  The man was still coming at her, his mouth set in a furious grimace as he swung the wrench again toward the side of her head.  Talia only just got her arm up to deflect the blow in time, the leather binding taking some of the impact, but the savageness of the strike was enough to knock her off her feet.  She went sprawling amongst the clutter on the floor, bashing her head against a cupboard in the process.

She sensed rather than saw the man following after her, and she gripped the nearest canister and spun with it in her hands, lobbing it
through the air in what she hoped was the right direction.  The man was caught off guard and made a clumsy effort to bat the canister away with the box wrench, resulting in a hollow metallic clang, and the canister’s trajectory altered accordingly.  It dropped onto his foot with a thud, and the man screamed in pain.

“You fuckin’
cat!
” he yelped, dropping the wrench and clutching at his foot.  Talia might have
found his pained expression comical had he not been trying to beat her head in with a steel bar a few moments before.

She scrambled across the floor and reached for the wrench, but the man, still limping on one leg, kicked it out from her grasp at the last moment.  Talia rolled as his foot homed in on a new target – her face – and she felt the man’s boot flick her hair as it narrowly missed.

She continued to turn, swivelling back onto her feet, and then the man began to struggle toward her again.  Talia glanced at the other side of the room, where the wrench and the .22 lay not far apart, then back at the man.  His eyes glittered and he sneered at her, almost daring her to make a play for the weapons, and as she watched him take another limping step forward, she realised that she had the advantage of speed on her side.

She turned and half-ran, half-dived across the room, and the man was there at her shoulder, jostling with her as he too sought to claim one of the weapons.  The two of them landed in a heap on the floor, and Talia pushed and scratched at the man, slapping away his grabbing hands as he tried to reel her in.  She saw the wrench within reach and desperately stretched out for it, then saw out of the corner of her eye that the man was crawling toward the .22.