Impact (5 page)

There's a fire.

It's not big, and it won't last the night, but it's burning well enough for now. There are trees surrounding the lake; most of them are stunted and dead, their dry branches and leaves simple to collect. It was easy for Prakesh to pull in some of the burning fuel on the water's surface, lighting a dry branch while the others build a small pile behind him.

The
Furor
escape pod has long since vanished below the surface of the lake–and it
is
a lake, long and thin, stretching further than the eye can see. The forest around them is dense and dark, the wind rattling through the dry wood. The sun has slipped below the horizon, and the sky is fading to a dark blue above their heads.

The survivors huddle around the fire. Like everyone else, Prakesh is soaked to the skin, and he can't stop shivering. Every part of him, from his ears to the toes in his squelching, sodden shoes, is numb.

And yet, despite everything that's happened, he feels excitement. These trees didn't grow in a lab: they're entirely natural, sprouting from soil that might not have been touched by humans in a hundred years. He can't wait for dawn, can't wait to see what the forest actually looks like in the daylight.

Of course, that assumes they
make
it to daylight. Prakesh is painfully aware of how poor a fire is at transferring heat. They should find something to put behind them, something to reflect the warmth back. But he can barely move, doesn't even want to try it. They're lucky they've got a fire going in the first place–without it, they wouldn't last long.

“Rub your chests,” says Janice Okwembu. She's kneeling close to the flames, and her eyes land on each survivor in turn. There are six of them: Prakesh, Carver, Mikhail, Okwembu, the pilot, plus the man who was sitting opposite him on the
Furor
, the one praying to every god he could think of. Prakesh struggles to remember his name.
Clay
. That was it. He's young, slightly plump, with long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. He's rubbing the chest of the sixth survivor: the pilot, one of the
Shinso
's original crew. The man is barely conscious, a thick trail of drool snaking down his chin.
Kahlil
, Prakesh thinks.
His name's Kahlil.

No one else in the escape pod made it to shore.

Carver gets up. He has to do it in stages, going first to both knees, then to just one, then to his feet, tottering like an infant taking his first steps. He's breathing hard–his jacket is gone, lost in the lake, and his shirt is a sodden, steaming mass.

“So now what?” he says.

Mikhail seems to be less affected by the cold than the others. He clears his throat, but Okwembu gets there first. “Well,” she says. “We—”

Carver lurches forward, moving on legs that look as stiff as the dead branches on the trees. He's heading right for Okwembu, his fists balled up.

Prakesh forces himself to his feet, his own limbs aching with the effort, and gets in front of Carver. “Not a good idea,” he says.

Carver bumps up against him, tries to push past, but Prakesh moves with him. Mikhail is up, too, reaching past Prakesh, his hands on Carver's chest.

“Aaron, not now,” Prakesh says, somehow managing to push the words past his frozen lips. Okwembu's payback can come later. If they're going to survive this, they're going to need every pair of hands they can get.

Carver roars in anger. He tries to push past again, but Mikhail grabs his shoulders, not letting him. Okwembu watches, her face impassive.

After a moment, Carver turns to Prakesh, his face incredulous. “Are you kidding me?” he says. “After what she did to Riley? We should drown her in the fucking lake.”

“That's enough,” Mikhail says. He tries to make the words forceful, but they come out slurred together.

Carver sags, then points a trembling finger at Mikhail. “Your plan sucked,” he says. “How many people did you lose? How many of your Earthers actually made it down? If you can call this making it.” He gestures to the lake, where isolated puddles of fuel are still burning.

“They knew what their chances were,” Mikhail says. “But don't you see? We
did
make it. We're back home. We can make a new life here.” His tone is pleading, as if he's trying to convince himself along with them.

“We
were
home,” Carver says.

“Outer Earth is gone,” Okwembu says calmly. She glances at Prakesh. “Resin saw to that.”

Carver stands stock still, then tries to make a rush for Okwembu again. It takes all the strength Prakesh has to stop him, but somehow he and Mikhail manage it. Carver rocks on his heels, breathing hard through his nose.

“Actually, you know what?” he says. “I'm done.”

He stalks off, muttering, heading down the shore. He's shivering, clutching himself, nearly falling twice in the space of ten yards, but he keeps going.

Before Prakesh knows what's he's doing, he's following. By the time he reaches Carver, he's feeling a little better.

“Wait,” he says. Carver ignores him, only stopping when Prakesh slips around him and puts both hands on his shoulders. Aaron's face is shrouded in shadow, but his shoulders are trembling, hitching up and down, vibrating under Prakesh's hands.

“Think about this for a sec,” Prakesh starts, and then Carver punches him.

He's completely unprepared for it. Carver's strength has been sapped by the cold, but he still knows how to throw a punch. His fist takes Prakesh in the side of the head, and for a moment that side of his vision is gone, nothing but black. When it comes back, he's lying on the ground, and explosions are going off in his head.

Carver is yelling at him. “Where were you? She pulled Riley out of the pod, and
you were asleep
! You just passed out!”

Prakesh tries to speak, can't. It's not just that he can't find the words–it's as if the thoughts going through his head are too big to comprehend. One of his teeth is loose, jiggling in its socket.

“I'm going to find her,” says Carver, staring out across the lake. “You can come with me, or not. I don't care.”

Prakesh knows Carver has feelings for Riley. It was hard to miss, locked in that medical bay. He wanted to bring it up, wanted to confront him, but he could never quite figure out how. Carver danced around the subject, too, radiating undirected anger. His usual upbeat, sarcastic personality had drained away. They settled for oblique remarks, snapping at each other, circling but never attacking.

And Riley's absence is like a physical pain, deep in his gut. But it's not just her. It's everyone on Outer Earth. His team in the Air Lab. His parents. And every single person who died after being infected with Resin, the virus which sprung from a genetically modified superfood that
he
created. They're all lined up behind Riley, and all of them are staring at him.

Carver might hate Okwembu and Mikhail. Prakesh does, too. But he has far more blood on his hands than they do. Not just ten more, or twenty, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands, dead because of him. He thinks back to his parents–he doesn't even know if they're alive or not, if they survived Resin. Even if they did, he knows there's a good chance that the decompression in the station dock will have wiped out everybody in Gardens. Probably everybody on the station. That thought, too, is an almost physical pain.

The tiny group clustered around the fire is all he has left. He
has
to keep them alive. It's the only way he can make it right–or start making it right. He can't do that if he's hunting for Riley.

He closes his eyes, and says, “We can't go.”

“What did you say?”

Prakesh gets to his feet. He's steadier this time, despite the pounding in his head. “If we split the group up, we die.”

“Yeah? Well, that's fine by me, as long as I don't have to be near
them
.” Carver jerks his finger back at the fire, and the figures around it, bathed in shadows.

“OK,” says Prakesh. “Go. Charge off into an environment we know nothing about, with no map and no supplies, at night, in the cold.”

“I'll stick to the shore,” Carver says, but he sounds resigned now. The punch drained the last of the energy he had stored up. “Riley had to have come down close to here. If we—”

“We don't know
where
she came down. We don't even know if her pod launched.”

“Don't—”

“You could hunt forever, and never find her.”

“So you're just giving up? Is that it?”

“I won't if you won't. But if you head off by yourself, you'll never make it.”

Prakesh twists the bottom of his shirt in his hands, wringing water out of the fabric, giving him time to articulate his thoughts. “We don't know what's out there, and we don't know what the war did to the ecosystem. Most of the planet is a wasteland, and that has a knock-on effect.”

“I thought this part of the planet was supposed to be OK for humans now.”

“Maybe. But there could still be extreme weather patterns, localised microclimates.” Carver is about to interrupt, but Prakesh talks over him. “We could be caught in a flash flood, a snowstorm. Anything. That's without talking about any wildlife we run into, or how we actually find food.”

Carver frowns. “Wildlife? You actually think anything survived long enough to get here?”

“Hard to say without data. The global population of certain species might have been decimated, but it's possible that tiny clusters could survive, assuming they adapt. If they could migrate, hunt out food sources, they might be able to—”

“I get it, P-Man.”

“Right. Sorry.” Prakesh is secretly relieved at hearing Carver use that damn nickname. It means he's calming down, thinking more like his old self.

He gestures to the lake. “But if we stay in a group, we can cover a wider area. We can find food, shelter, fuel for a fire. We can keep each other warm. And then I promise: we'll look for Riley. We'll find her together.”

Carver hugs himself, shivering. The thunderous look hasn't left his face, but he gives Prakesh a tight nod.

“All right,” he says. “But if Okwembu so much as says one word to me, I'm going to do to her what I did to you.” He grimaces. “Sorry about that, by the way.”

Prakesh is about to answer when he hears a panicked shout from the fireside. He and Carver swing round. Okwembu and Mikhail are on all fours, leaning in close to the guttering flames. The smoke has grown thicker, swirling in huge curls around them.

“Oh shit,” Prakesh says.

He starts jogging back towards the group, Carver on his heels. He's desperately hoping that he's wrong, but even before he gets halfway back, he can see that the fire–their one source of heat–is going out.

The noise drags Anna Beck out of her sleep.

For a moment, she can't separate reality from the nightmare. She was lost in space, drifting, alone, unable to move no matter how hard she tried. Slowly, she convinces herself that she's awake.

The hab is dark. Her father is sitting up on the other cot, blinking in confusion. Her mother is curled up tight, still deeply asleep. There's no alarm–they cut them off to save power days ago–but she can hear running feet, raised voices.

Then the voices resolve, and Anna hears the word “Fire.”

She stares into the darkness. A fire isn't a reason to panic. The sector's chemical suppression system should deal with it, stop it spreading. So why are people freaking out? Why the running feet and confused shouts?

Something's wrong.

She kicks the covers off and runs, throwing open the hab door and rocketing into the corridor, sleep falling away like shed clothing. There's a man in her way–she tries to dodge past, but she's still not fully awake. It slows her reaction times: she smashes into him, and she goes flying, skidding on her ass down the corridor.

“Where's the fire?” she shouts up at him.

The man is middle-aged, stubbled, naked from the waist up. He's holding a blanket around his shoulders, open at the front. Anna can see his ribs, gaunt and bony.

She scrambles to her feet. “Did you hear what I said?”

He blinks at her, and she wants to scream at him. Then he says, “Down in the gallery.” He has the voice of a man who is not entirely sure that this isn't a vivid dream. He probably thinks he's going to wake up, and that Outer Earth will be good and whole again.

No point waiting to find out. She's already running, going as fast as she can.

At least it isn't far. She's in Apex sector: home to the station's main control room, the council chambers, the technicians who kept the place running. Outer Earth suffered an explosive decompression, a breach in the dock that rendered most of it uninhabitable. Everyone still alive–a thousand people or so–is crammed into this one sector, the smallest on the station. She can be at the gallery in five minutes.

Anna has no idea what she's going to do. All she knows is that she has to be there. So she runs, barrelling through the white corridors of Apex.

The last time she ran this fast was when the dock's airlock doors gave way, after the Earthers' attack. She almost didn't make it. The rush of air when the doors gave out almost took her off her feet. But she was in one of the side corridors then, a little further away from the dock. Someone–she still doesn't know who–grabbed her, pulled her along, got her across the border. It sealed shut behind her, leaving her sprawled across the floor, gasping for air.

Just before she reaches the gallery, up in the Level 3 corridor, she runs into a group of people packing the passage. Two stompers are just beyond them, pushing the crowd back. Only one of the lights in the ceiling is working properly, but underneath it Anna can see lazy wisps of smoke curling through the air. She can smell it, too, hot and sharp.

She pushes herself onto her toes, craning her neck, trying to see what's going on. She can just see into the gallery. There are no visible flames, but the catwalk is flickering with orange light. But why haven't the suppression systems kicked in? Where's the chemical foam?

A little way past the stompers holding the crowd back, a technician is down on his haunches, doing something to the wall. One of the panels has been removed, and the stomper is messing with the wiring, cursing and swearing. He grabs a hand-held plasma cutter, sparks it to life. That's when Anna realises what's happening: the suppression systems really have failed. If they can't fix them, the fire will rage out of control.

“What's happening?” she says to a man in the crowd.

“Electrical fire,” he answers, not looking at her. “Circuit in the gallery floor just blew up.”

And this is when Anna realises that there's nothing she can do to help.

She can run, and she can shoot. In the past few days, after Outer Earth shrank down to this single, tiny sector, she's discovered that she's good with kids, looking after several of those who found their way into Apex, who lost their moms and dads. Right now? None of those things are worth spit. What was she thinking?

At that moment, Anna feels every single one of her sixteen years. Sure, she could fight through the crowd, use her tracer training to get all the way to the front, but what good would it do? At least it looks like the stompers got everybody out–there should be nothing in the gallery but the escape pods, which won't do anyone much good anyway. No point escaping if you don't have enough fuel to de-orbit. Even if you somehow managed it, your pod would incinerate the second it hit the atmosphere.

She leans against the corridor wall, her eyes closed, fists knotted in frustration.

Two stompers, clad in black and grey, are trying to push through the crowd. They're a few feet away from Anna when she sees that one of them has a squat, orange gas canister in her hand. Supplies for the plasma cutters being used to weld the metal across the edge of the door.

But the crowd isn't parting. They aren't letting the stompers through.

Anna moves without thinking. She snatches the canister away. It's ice-cold, the pressurised gas inside filming the metal surface with condensation.

The stomper who was holding it lashes out at her in surprised fury. Anna ignores her. She takes two steps towards the opposite corridor wall, and jumps. She leads with her right foot, planting it squarely halfway up the wall, then uses it to kick her body upwards and outwards. She twists in mid-air, and now she's high enough to look over the heads of the crowd, all the way to the door.

Anna used to have a slingshot. She called it One Mile. It was nothing more than crudely welded metal with frayed rubber strips, but in her hand it became something else entirely. She could plant a shiny ball-bearing in a target from fifty yards away, knock grown men off their feet, shatter jaws and break fingers. She was that good.

One Mile is gone, lost when she and Riley and Aaron Carver were captured by the Earthers. But Anna can still shoot. She can still aim.

She throws the canister backhanded, sending it flying over the heads of the crowd. One of the technicians is quicker on the uptake than the others: he catches it, taking it in the stomach as he wraps his hands around it. Anna has just enough time to see him turn, handing it off to someone else, and then she crashes to the ground.

The stompers pick her up, slam her against the corridor wall. She even recognises one of them: Alana Jordan, a heavy-set woman with long black hair and a sour face.

That's when she hears the
click-hiss
of the suppression chemicals. The smell of smoke vanishes, replaced by the iodine tang of the foam.

The crowd is cheering, high-fiving each other, hugging. One of the technicians–maybe even the one who caught the canister–is shouting over the noise. “We got it. It's contained.”

Everyone visibly relaxes, shaking their heads and laughing, like all their problems have just been solved. Jordan lets Anna go. She dusts herself off, a small smile creeping across her face.

A man detaches himself from the crowd. He's handsome, mid-twenties, with angular cheekbones. He's dressed in the white jumpsuit of a council member, and he looks exhausted, his eyes bloodshot. Anna's smile vanishes. Dax Schmidt is the last person she wants to talk to.

“Are you out of your mind?” he shouts at her.

No
, Anna thinks.
I've only got one foot out the door.
She's on the verge of spitting the comeback right in his face, but he looks as if he wants to reach over and strangle her. His anger is unbelievable, and it stops the words in her throat.

“That canister could have exploded,” he says. “You could have killed a lot of people.”

“Well, it
didn't
,” Anna says, furious and embarrassed at the same time. People in the crowd are looking over at her, not even bothering to disguise their interest. “Besides,” Anna says, pointing to Jordan. “They weren't going to get there in time.”

“What? The gas? They were doing fine. They didn't need extra.” Dax looks back over to the technician–they can see him clearly now that the crowd is dispersing. He's slotting the panel back on the wall, the plasma cutter by his side.

“But the stompers were—”

“I don't know how much you know about plasma cutters,” Dax says. “They use them in space. They last for a really long time. You think the tech couldn't use a single canister to cut through a couple of fused power boxes?

“But they—” Anna stops. Every word feels like it takes a year off her age. She wants to tell Dax that she's killed people. That she had a long gun, during the siege in the dock. But she can't figure out how to say it without sounding stupid.

“It's called a
back-up
, Anna. I sent word to the protection officers to bring it over in case the first one failed.”

“Leave her be, Dax,” says Jordan, turning away. “She's just a kid.”

Dax starts to follow, then looks back over his shoulder. “You shouldn't be here. Go home.”

Anna watches him leave. The exhaustion hits her like a punch to the gut, and she slides down the wall, breathing hard. She reaches up, grabs the edge of her beanie, and pulls it down over her eyes. Her blonde hair splays across her cheeks.

She would do anything to have Riley here right now. Riley, and Carver, and Kev. She has to tell herself, not for the first time, that they're gone.

It's just her.