Tracer (30 page)

“Do you think they’d just give up and go home?” Okwembu
taps the screen, pointing to the doors, where a wisp of smoke is curling away. “They blew the lock.”

Three stompers are already through the gap, starting to strip
off their thermal suits. Three more are clambering through, hanging off the open doors and dropping down.

“Thought they’d send more,” Darnell says.

“It’s a classic stomper tactic. Sacrificing numbers for speed.” Okwembu’s voice has been torn to shreds by Darnell’s grip, but there’s no mistaking the worry in her voice.

Darnell reaches behind his back for his knife. He pulls it out, running a
finger across the edge. A wave of dizziness overcomes him, and his gut rolls with a burst of nausea, but it’s gone almost as soon as it starts.

“I’ll deal with them,” he says.

Okwembu doesn’t look at him. “No.”

He bristles. “You think I can’t handle a few stompers?”

“They have stingers. You don’t. I’ll wait until you get close, then kill the lights. You should have some element of surprise.”

She turns, looking Oren Darnell dead in the eye. “You need me. You don’t want to admit it, but you do.”

Oren Darnell leaves the control room, rolling his thumb across the point of the blade.

It’s just like before
, Darnell thinks.
They’re going to take everything away from me
.

He’s barely aware of what he’s doing. He’s walking through the top level of Apex, heading for the Core entrance, but his body is moving on autopilot. His mind is somewhere else, twenty years and two sectors away, and this time the memory is so vivid, so overpowering, that he can’t fight it off. He
sinks into it completely.

At first, it was just him and Mosely outside the hab, but then the corridor filled with dozens of people. He kept telling them that he had to go to school, that he was going to be late, but they didn’t listen. They all kept stealing horrified glances into the hab.

The thing that used to be Darnell’s mother had melted into the cot. Plants covered her, their tendrils
and roots and leaves colonising the spaces between her bones. A glistening, yellow ring of fat surrounded the corpse.

Darnell didn’t understand the shocked faces, the horrified looks. She’d been useless before, and now she was helping his plants grow. Didn’t they see what he’d made?

The protection officers huddled a short distance away, exchanging angry words, their hands over their mouths and
noses. He tried to talk to them, but they ignored him. That was when he first heard the words “Controlled burn”.

Darnell went crazy. He fought, pleaded, begged. But he was still a child, a long way away from the size he would attain later. When the chemicals arrived, he tried to knock them over, but the white-clad operator pushed him away. Darnell can see the look on his face, even now. The stupid,
bovine hatred.

The corridor was narrow, unable to contain too many people. But in Darnell’s memory, there were dozens,
hundreds
of people there. A tiny flicker of hope sparked inside Darnell. They would help him. They wouldn’t let his plants burn.

But no matter how much he pleaded, they wouldn’t do anything.
They just watched
.

And when the fire started, they were cheering. More than that: they
were
laughing
. Cackling as his plants burned. In his mind, he can still hear some of them jeering at him.

With an effort, Darnell pulls himself out of the memory. He makes himself focus by rolling his thumb down on the point of his knife. A tiny drop of blood wells up, and the dart of pain helps focus him. He comes back just in time to hear a noise from up ahead.

The corridor he’s in ends in
a T-junction, and as he looks up he sees a stomper peek round the side. The stomper catches sight of him, sucks in an excited breath, and vanishes.

A second later, the corridor is filled with shouting and the sound of running feet. Six voices shout at him to drop the knife, six stingers aim right at his chest. The six become four when two of the stompers turn, covering the corridor behind them.

Darnell stops, lowering the knife. His eyes flick up to the ceiling where, just behind one of the long recessed light bars, he can make out the eye of a camera. He looks back to the
stompers, memorising their positions, fixing them in his mind. It’s hard – his memories want to fight him, fuzzing his thoughts – but he manages it.

The lights click off, plunging the corridor into darkness.

Darnell
reaches out, grabs the nearest stomper’s wrists, and twists. He hears the bone break cleanly, followed an instant later by a scream of pain and the sound of a stinger clattering to the floor.

The other stompers open fire. A bullet grazes Darnell’s shoulder, digging a furrow in his flesh. He barely feels it. He’s already moving, staying low, using the flashes from the stinger fire to pick his
targets.

The stompers’ training takes over, and they react just like Darnell hoped they would: feet planted, not moving, aiming with two hands. They’re static, slow, and Darnell is a whirlwind, smashing and crushing and slicing. His body is soaked with blood, both his and the stompers’. Somewhere very distant, his shoulder is on fire, and it’s joined by a screaming pain from the side of his head
as a bullet rips off the top of his left ear.

The lights come back on.

Three stompers are dead, their bodies ragged with stab wounds. Two more are down: one is unconscious, the other cradling her broken arm, moaning in pain. Only the final stomper is still standing. He points his stinger at Darnell, his hands shaking, and pulls the trigger.

Click
.

The stomper tries again, and again, shaking
his head furiously. Darnell towers over him. He reaches down, and plucks the useless stinger out of the man’s hands. In that instant, the look in the stomper’s eyes is exactly the same one Mosely had, all those years ago.

Darnell smiles.

There’s no choice but to leave Amira and Grace Garner behind. We can’t carry them, not with time against us, but I promise myself that I’ll come back for them.
If I come back at all
.

I follow Prakesh as we leave the control room from the back. Deeper inside the complex, the corridors are wider, designed to let heavy equipment pass through. I’ve never been this way, and I’m surprised
to see just how clean it is, with soft lighting and spotless floors. At one point, we cross through another hangar, smaller than the Food Lab but still enormous, criss-crossed with conveyor belts and littered with processing equipment. There’s nobody around, and the black conveyors lie silent.

“Monorail’s this way,” says Prakesh. He’s sure-footed, taking the stairs two at a time. More than that:
he seems upbeat, confident even. I want to scream at him. Instead, I force myself to match his pace, pushing away the anger, trying to focus on the movement. Stride, land, cushion, spring, repeat. Behind us, Royo puffs as he tries to keep up. He’s fit, but heavy with muscle, and his bulky frame – made heavier with his combat
armour and equipment – isn’t built for speed. He keeps snagging his gear,
muttering under his breath.

What Amira did is like a splinter, lodged deep in my mind. We were hers. Her crew. Her Dancers. She was the calm, controlled centre of everything we did. We would have died for her. Yao did die for her. It wasn’t just that it was unquestioned loyalty; it was loyalty that never needed to be questioned.

But it meant nothing. She betrayed us. And worse, she betrayed
us over something so stupid, so pointless. She must have felt like that for years, locking the thought away in some deep, dark part of her being, nurturing it. And then one day, Janice Okwembu found her, and pulled that poisonous little thought into the light.

In the end, the Devil Dancers were just in the way.

But I can’t let what she did be the end. I won’t. Okwembu and Darnell betrayed the
station, and Amira betrayed her crew, but it doesn’t matter. Because I’m not just loyal to the people who are supposed to lead me. I’m loyal to things no one can ever change or touch or hurt. Like the memory of my dad. Like the hope that one day I might run in the sunlight.

I won’t let what Amira did stop me.

My stomach growls as we walk through the processing hangar, but I ignore it. I’m hungry,
and thirsty, and more exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life, but I can’t focus on that now.

The hangar leads to a loading dock, brightly lit, and two huge rolling doors which lead onto the monorail tracks. I’m worried that there won’t be a train there, that we’ll have to walk the tunnels, but there’s one sitting by the platform, ready to receive cargo. Most of the cars are flatbeds, lined
with heavy-duty locking mechanisms designed to hold large containers. Several of these are stacked along one wall of the loading dock: huge, misshapen things, tall as two men, made of bent metal.
Above the main doors, two large screens display destinations and shipment details in that orange text.

The heat hits us as soon as we walk out onto the dock. The air is muggy, cloying and thick with
warmth, and beads of condensation run down the walls. At this rate, it won’t be long before people start dying from heatstroke. Any longer than that, and we really will be roasted alive.

“Where’s the driver’s seat?” I ask Prakesh. He points to a few cars up. It’s little more than a raised platform, a small space with waist-high railings and a bank of controls. Beyond it, the darkness of the tunnel.
Royo climbs up, and Prakesh and I follow, jumping in behind him.

He thumbs a switch on the far left of the panel. Nothing happens.

Royo stands, brow furrowed, staring at the controls. After a full minute, Prakesh leans forward. “Ah, Royo, maybe you should try some of the other buttons?”

Royo turns slowly and stares at him. Prakesh raises his hands in apology. “OK, then. Sorry,” he mutters,
then glances at me as if to say,
what’s with this guy
?

Eventually, Royo stabs a few more buttons, and the engine below us hums to life. The rest of the control panel lights up, clicking gently. Royo exhales, turning to us to say something, but as he does so we hear the crackle of the comms system. We all spin round at once, to see a large screen above the loading doors – unnoticed until now –
briefly flash up the Outer Earth logo. This time, there’s no trickle of fear down my spine. Just cold intent. Whatever Darnell’s doing, I know we can stop it.

He’s no longer in the council chamber. Instead, he’s somewhere in Apex, and the feed is almost too glitchy to make out. His words mutate, twisting themselves into new and hideous sounds, and his face is a mess of damaged pixels. Blood soaks
the top half of his body.

“It’s time to talk about those sleepers,” he says. “Actually, it’s time to talk about one in particular.”

I know what he’s going to say. I squeeze Prakesh’s hand tight.

“She’s a tracer, and she’s been planting bombs all around the station. Her name is Riley Hale. Kill her and bring her body to the gallery in Apogee, where we can see it, and you get to live. Everyone
else gets to die.”

He leers. “In fact, you don’t have to kill her right away. If you bring her to the gallery and set her on fire” – he lingers on the words, tasting each one – “then we’ll make sure that some food gets left somewhere for you.

“Until then, I’d like to show you what happens to people who think they can stop us.”

The camera pulls back. He’s in front of an escape pod access point.
Inside the pod, hammering on the doors, are three stompers. The pod isn’t big enough for all of them; I can see their bodies squashed up against one another.

Without another word, Darnell launches the pod.

The feed ends.

I can feel Prakesh and Royo staring at me. Below us, the train idles. Darnell kills the feed.

I turn to them. “Well, it wouldn’t be much fun if it wasn’t a challenge, right?” I say, but their faces are grave.

Without a word, Royo pushes a large lever forwards, and the monorail begins to slide slowly out of the station. For a moment, we’re swallowed by the blackness of
the tunnel, but then the massive lamp on the front of the train flickers to life, bathing the track ahead in a soft, yellow light. Royo pushes the lever forwards a little more, and we begin to pick up speed, the struts on the side of the tunnel starting to pass more quickly.

Not quick enough
.

“How far to Apogee?” I say. I have to raise my voice to be heard over the train.

He shrugs, his eyes
on the tunnel ahead. “Twenty minutes, maybe? Half an hour?”

“Can we go any faster?”

“We’re at full acceleration already,” he says.

I look over my shoulder. Behind the cabin, the empty pallet cars rumble and shudder over the track, bumping together. I turn back to Royo: “What if we got rid of the other cars? Would that make a difference?”

“Good thinking,” says Prakesh, and before Royo can say
anything, he hops down onto the back of the car and begins to walk his way to the end. Kneeling down, he begins pulling at the coupling. After a few seconds, he looks back to us, yells something, but in the noise of the tunnel I can’t make it out.

“What?” I shout, barely able to hear myself. He jabs his finger downwards.

Realisation dawns. “Is there a control for the coupling?” I yell to Royo.

“I don’t know,” he says, looking around the console. “But if every car unhooks at once, this entire damn train could derail. We have to make sure that we only unhook
our
car.”

Visions of tumbling train cars bearing down on our little cockpit fill my head. I glance around the console, appalled by the number of buttons and levers and switches. How many controls do you need to make a train go forwards
and backwards? It’s not as if this thing’s going out to catch asteroids.

“Got it,” says Royo, and his hand flies out, turning a raised switch one click to the right. Behind us, I hear a loud clunk over the roar of the train. The car gives a huge lurch forwards as it disconnects from the others, and as I turn I hear a cry of surprise. It’s Prakesh; the car disconnecting has hurled him backwards,
and his feet are hanging off the edge, his fingers frantically scrambling for purchase.