Sunspire (The Reach, Book 4) (34 page)

Duran stopped and half turned, staring back at the darkened road.  The mountain was masked by rain and by the shroud of night, and below them there was nothing to be seen but a world of black.  Now and then a flash of lightning would send illumination scattering across the void, but
this only seemed to create more pockets of shadows, more uncertainties.

More places where enemies might find a place to hide.

“Problem?” Zoe said at his side.

Duran waited, listening.  “I thought I heard something back there.”

“What?”

“I don’t know exactly.  It almost sounded like engines.”

“Raiders?  Do you think they’re hunting around the place?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, it was probably just thunder in the distance,” Zoe said.  “No big deal.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Anyway, we have more problems ahead of us than behind us,” she said.

Duran turned back to the road ahead, and as lightning flickered he saw the outline of a set of buildings not far ahead, and a tall, thin line disappearing into the night sky.

This was Sunspire.  The space elevator.  It had to be.

“What problem are you referring to, exactly?” he said.

“Well, there’s a few to choose from.  Let’s start with the fact that we don’t know anything about the enemy we’re about to face off against.”

“Not true.  We know that Redmen are involved, and probably that scumbag Jon Hanker.”

“Yeah, but who else?  Exactly how far reaching
is
this operation?  Did Hanker enlist other consuls, other Redmen?  We know that two Redmen went and met Talia at the dirigible.  Maybe the rest found another way here.”

“So you’re saying that we might be about to go toe-to-toe with a full squad of Redmen?  An
army?
”

“I’m saying that’s a possibility.”

Duran shrugged.  “I have a .38, and you have an M4 carbine assault rifle.  What more do we need?”

“About two hundred men.”

“Wait a minute.  You’re not telling me it’s time to turn tail and head back down the mountain, are you?”

“Fuck, no.  Not after we came all this way.  What I’m saying is that we need to plan this out.”

Duran thought for a moment.  “Okay, let’s focus on the objective.  We didn’t come to kill dozens of Redmen.  We came to thwart their plan, to let Talia and Silvestri know that they can’t start up the space elevator.”

“Yeah, sounds about right.”

“So we just need to find them so that they can get word to Knile.  We need to stop the railcar from heading down to Earth.”

“Right.  So that means we take our time, infiltrate.  Use stealth and avoid conflict.  We search the complex until we find Talia or Silvestri.”

“Then hope that they can do the rest.”

Zoe edged closer in the darkness.  He felt her lips on his ear.  “I’m proud of you,” she said.

Duran felt his cheeks flush.  “Why?”

“Because we’re doing the right thing, you and me.  I mean, how many years did the Consortium and the Redmen rule over this world, plundering the last meagre crumbs and giving nothing back in return?  They ransacked the place.  Pure greed.  They were the ones who drove us to the uprising.  It was inevitable.  And now that everything has turned to shit, they think they can just walk up and take the last ride off-world?  They fucked everything, and now they get a free pass?”  She shook her head.  “Fuck that.  They’re not leaving.  Not a single one of them, if I can help it.”

“We’re going to stop them,” Duran said, the inspiration of her words causing the fatigue in his limbs to lapse for a moment.  He felt invigorated, ready for the challenge.  “We’re going to get Talia and the others to safety, and while we’re at it, we’re going to piss on the Consortium’s parade.  Score one for the little guy.”

“Goddamn right,” Zoe whispered vehemently in his ear.  She planted another kiss, then briefly swept her tiny LED torch across the road.  “We’ve just got to keep an eye out for these IEDs that have been planted around the place.  Getting ourselves blown up would really spoil the party.”

“You think?”

She began to move forward again, and Duran followed closely on her heels.

Up ahead, Sunspire glimmered in the light of distant lightning for a moment, then disappeared into darkness once again.

41

“Okay, take a deep breath,” Knile said patiently.  “We’ll figure this out.  Let’s start at the beginning again.”

“We’ve started at the beginning seven times already,”
Ursie said through the comms uplink.  Knile watched the image of her face on the console, her brow furrowed, lips pressed tightly together as she fought to hold it together.
“I feel like an idiot.  A complete idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Knile said.  “There’s probably just a step I missed somewhere.  We’ll work it out.”

As per the plan, they’d been trying to shift transit control from the habitat to the railcar itself since departure.  Once that was done, Knile could control the descent himself, even without input from the Earthside control station.

The problem was, Ursie couldn’t seem to transfer control.  Knile had gone through the procedure with her before he’d left, but for whatever reason, the system wasn’t responding as they’d anticipated.

“How long do we have left, anyway?”

Knile checked his watch, then looked out the compartment window.  Earth was getting awfully big out there.

“We should reach the bottom in less than an hour.”

“Goddammit.  That’s not much time.”

Knile knew that she was right, but didn’t want to admit it to her.  “Plenty of time, Ursie.  We’ll get this done and still have time to sit back and watch the inflight movie.”

“Yeah, okay.”
  She made an effort to compose herself. 
“Let’s start again.”

“Say it out loud as you go through.”

Ursie began to fiddle with the console at her end. 
“So, I start with the ‘Control Interface’, then ‘Current Operation’.”

“Right.”

“Then I select ‘Override’.  Now I get a menu, and I hit ‘Confirm’.  A list of options comes up, and I choose ‘Other’, and then ‘Transport Module’.  That’s it.”

“Sounds correct to me.”

A beeping noise sounded through the comms. 
“It just keeps saying ‘Module Unavailable’.  Why the fuck is it doing this?”
she said, exasperated.

“That’s the correct procedure, according to the training manual we saw.  Go back to the previous menu and try a few other options.”

“All right.  Hang on a second.”

Ursie continued to plug away at the console, and Knile could do nothing but wait.  His mind was racing, as it had been for the past few hours as they’d tried to solve this conundrum, but now he was out of ideas.  He’d literally tried everything.  There was no reason why the system shouldn’t have transferred control.  It just didn’t make sense.

Unclipping his safety harness, he wriggled forward and looked out through the window at the planet below.  Everything was shrouded in the dark of night.  He thought he could see pulses of sporadic light, perhaps a storm passing over the region, but otherwise there was nothing much he could discern.

The compartment was starting to feel like a coffin.  He realised he may never live to step out of it again.

After all this?  It can’t end here.

He glanced across his own console one more time.  The
terminal
on the right handled comms and some other onboard controls, such as locking and unlocking cargo bay doors and altering climate control in each compartment.  It seemed to be working fine.

The one of the left, however, simply displayed one word:
Offline
.  This was the console that he needed, the one that would provide access to more advanced features, such as controlling the speed of the railcar, handshaking protocols of the docking sequence, and so on.

He’d been staring at it for hours, waiting for that glowing red
Offline
warning to disappear.  Waiting for the console to spring to life.

But, obstinately, it refused to comply.

“Come on!” he muttered, reaching out and giving the console a thump, a futile attempt to wake it up.  “Don’t just sit there–”

He stopped, peripherally aware that something wasn’t right.  His mind had processed something when he’d hit the console, but he wasn’t sure what it was yet.

He reached out again and gave it a nudge.

That was it.  The stainless steel housing on the console was loose.

Leaning forward, he saw that four tiny screws were missing from the corner of the console.

How had he not noticed this before?

Shaking, he drew the shiv from behind his back and carefully levered the edges of the housing upward, far enough to slip his fingers underneath.  He drew the panel outward, then turned it over.  On the underside was a circuit board trailing a dozen or more wires, some of which Knile recognised as power conduits, while others were used for data.

A small PCB wafer jutted at right angles from the motherboard – an expansion card – and beside it were three empty slots reserved for more.  Knile blinked, disbelieving, then ran his eyes over the slots again.

His heart sank.

“Ursie,” he said, lowering the panel back into place with trembling fingers.  “Ursie!” he said again, louder this time.

“What?”

“You can stop what you’re doing.”

Ursie’s face appeared on the console, perplexed. 
“Huh?”

“I said you can stop what you’re doing.  I’ve found the problem.”

Her face lit up momentarily, thinking he had found a solution, but then she saw his dour expression.

“What is it?”
she said bleakly.

“They’ve gutted the railcar.”

“Who?”

“Sunspire, or whoever was here last before they turned out the lights.  I just checked the hardware on this control module, and it’s missing its processing components.  Basically, all I have at this end is a goddamn screen.  All of the parts that make it function are gone.”

“What?  Why the fuck would they do that?”

“Maybe they decided they were never coming back, and decided to take the most valuable parts with them.  Or maybe it was an extra security
measure
, to prevent anyone from reactivating the system from Earthside and controlling the railcar.  Who knows?  It doesn’t matter now.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”

“If they’ve stripped these components out of the railcar, it means the safety overrides probably won’t trigger like we thought they would.  The railcar is supposed to form a feedback loop with control, but it can’t do that.  Not now.  It’s not receiving the information it should.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“You have to find another solution from your end.  I’m just a passenger in this thing now, and I can’t change that.”

“Oh, fuck, Knile.  What if I can’t
do that?”

“Then this uncontrolled descent that we’ve initiated won’t stop.  The railcar will hit bottom at full speed.”

There was silence for a few moments. 
“What happens then?”

Knile shrugged.  “There’s probably a chance we’ll survive.  But you need to find a workaround if you can.”

“Yeah, okay.  Okay.”
  She sounded even more panicked than before. 
“I’m looking.”

He instantly felt bad for lying, but what wa
s he going to say?  That a full-
speed impact would not only obliterate the railcar, but maybe cause enough damage to sever the space elevator entirely, causing a shock wave that would in turn destroy the Sunspire habitat?