Landfall (The Reach, Book 2) (17 page)

Van Asch chewed his lip.  “How much of Earth’s recent history are you acquainted with?” he said.

Ursie shrugged.  “Just bits and pieces that I heard on the streets.  They don’t have those learning places anymore.”

“Universities?  No, I expect they went by the wayside some time ago.  That’s all part of the problem.  There’s a great deal of ignorance among those left on the Earth these days.”

“Yeah, so what’s the story?”

“Back in the heady days of man’s progress, in his golden age, there were
once dozens of space elevators in operation around the globe.  Some of them looked like the one you just travelled on, while others looked substantially different.  But they all served the same purpose – they moved people and materials off the Earth and into waystations like Habitat Thirty-One, and from there out into the solar system.  Are you following?”

“Yeah.”

“This habitat was given it
s number because it was the thirty-first habitat that was built.  The elevator you rode upon was the thirty-first elevator.  Back in the day, it was nothing special, just one of many.

“Nowadays, however, things are much different.  All of those other elevators have been destroyed or decommissioned.  Now there is only one left.  This one.”

“I’ve heard all of this before,” Ursie said.

“Very well, then I’ll cut to the chase.  For the people left behind down below, there is only one elevator that matters.  One habitat.  And so they themselves began to call it Habitat One, even though that is not, and never was, its real name.”

“So it’s kinda like a nickname that stuck.”

“You could look at it that way.”

There were five or six more Redmen wandering around the concourse, appraising the newcomers with a kind of disconcerting directness.  Ursie wondered if perhaps the display was more for show than anything else, a message to the new arrivals that there was a controlling force inside the habitat that was watching them at all times.  Many of those who had been chatting happily a few moments before fell silent under the gaze of the Crimson Shield and slunk past with their tongues held in check, clearly intimidated.

“Wait here a moment, will you?” van Asch said, gesturing to an aluminium bench nearby.  “I have to see to our arrangements for a moment.”

“Sure.”

Ursie sat down and watched him walk in long,
loping strides over toward one of the Consortium offices, where he caught the attention of a neatly dressed man in a grey suit with the Consortium logo emblazoned in bold red on the breast.  The man smiled politely and they b
egan to talk about something Ursie couldn’t hear.

She looked around at the passers-by.  She’d done a lot o
f people watching in her day, but it had been a sharp contrast
to this.  Down in Link, those striding past had worn
very different clothes
to the people in the habitat.  Poorer clothes.  They’d looked hungrier, had that tinge of desperation and hopelessness in their eyes.

Ursie had started watching people from a very young age.  She would often sit in some dark, unobtrusive place – beside a pottery cart or fruit vendor’s stall – and let her eyes drift over the crowd.  Back in those days she had been looking for marks, for people she could pickpocket.  Drunks, inattentive types or those who were
simply
preoccupied with something else.  After spending a number of years practising
, she’d become quite good at it, rarely making the wrong choice.

For seven or eight hours a day she had crouched in the streets, come rain or sunshine, honing her craft.

And that was how she had eventually discovered that she could do more than just
look
at the way people walked or what they were wearing.  She could see inside them as well.

At first she had thought she was going crazy.  Random images had begun to jump at her when she looked out amongst the crowd, pictures in her head that made no sense – a small child at a dinner table, an old lady looking out at the sunset across the ocean, a man building a house in the woods.  A young girl climbing unsteadily onto the back of a horse.

The visions were the stuff of nightmares, not for their content, but for their intrusive nature.  They were both unwanted and beyond her control.  After her first encounter with them, she had avoided contact with anyone for more than two weeks, locking herself away in a dark and disused cellar, crawling out only at night to scrounge for food when there was no one on the streets.  The pickings were slim and often disgusting, whatever she could get, and there was not enough
of them for her to survive long-term.

Malnourishment began to make her weak, and after a time she realised that there was no choice left to her.  She would have to go back out into the daylight, back into the street to ply her trade.  It was either that or starve to death in the darkness.

She had been afraid the day that she’d
sat down next to the fruit stall again.  So afraid.  And the images had surged toward her almost immediately, like ghastly spectres whose only goal was to torment and destroy her, to drive her over the brink of insanity.

That first day she had simply sat there and wept, praying for it to stop.

But she didn’t give up.  The next morning was much the same as the first for a few hours, until she gathered up every last scrap of courage within her and came to a decision – a decision that would change her life forever.

She decided to stop being the victim.  With every ounce of strength that she possessed, she began to push back against the visions, tentative at first, but bolder by the minute.  An odd kind of fury had welled up within her, a resentment that she should lose th
e sanctuary of her mind, the on
e place she could always retreat to on the street, and something miraculous happened.  To her surprise she realised that the images obeyed her.  When she pushed at them they went away.

A few days later she developed the ability to selectively block or admit any image she wanted, or even close her mind like a clamp when it was required and shut everything out.  She also realised that these were not hallucinations, not the product of her own consciousness.  They were the thoughts and memories of the people around her.

She saw an old woman at a trinket stall poring over a bottle of perfume, her wrinkled and leathery hands clasping it as tremors wracked her fingers.  As the old woman sniffed the contents, Ursie saw an image materialise – that of a young blonde girl looking up at an older woman who was applying the same perfume to her wrists.

Ursie knew immediately that the young girl was the old woman herself, a far-distant memory from many years before.

Ursie made the connection, understood what she was experiencing with a kind of unexplainable surety.  This ability to see the thoughts of those around her did not have to be viewed as a curse, but instead could be regarded as a gift.

As she practised, Ursie found that if she allowed these projections to drift toward her, she could open her own mind and envelope them, as if she were placing invisible arms around the other person’s thoughts.  And when she did that, she also found that she could begin to influence them.  With the right amount of nudging and tweaking, she could subtly influence the thoughts that she embraced, manipulating them to her will.

After that day she never went hungry again.

Now as she looked at the stream of people moving past her in Habitat Thirty-O
ne, she saw very different thoughts stretching out toward her.  These people were not concerned about where their next meal might come from, or finding a doctor for a sick child.  They were preoccupied with their appearance, with their shopping agenda, the amount of time it would take before they arrived at their chosen habitat somewhere out in the solar system.

Ursie was baffled.  These people were so foreign to her that she had no idea how to interpret their cognitive processes or how to best use those thoughts to suit her own ends.

“What are you doing?”

Ursie jumped, gasping.  Van Asch had returned and he now stood before her, looking down at her with knitted brows.  He had still not removed those impenetrable aviator sunglasses.

“Uh, nothing,” Ursie stammered.  “Just waiting.”

Van Asch sat down beside her and placed his suitcase by his feet.

“I should caution you,” he said slowly, enunciating each word.  “You should not be reaching out with your… abilities.  Not here.”

“No, I–”

“This is not the dung heap anymore.  You’re not amongst the downtrodden, the worthless.  You’re amongst educated people now, people who are not so easily examined.  Not so easily swayed.”

“Yeah, sure.  I get it.”

“And I will caution you about one other thing.”  He turned to face her directly.  “Do not try to read me.  I work among people with your abilities for a living, and I’ve been trained to protect myself against intrusion.  I would consider it a betrayal of trust if you were to try digging around inside my head.  Is that understood?”

Ursie nodded meekly, not wanting to get on the guy’s bad side.

“Yeah.  No problem, Mr. van Asch.”

He reached up and adjusted his sunglasses.  “You’re wondering about these, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, a little.”

He smiled.  “I don’t have to be a mind reader to figure that out.”

She laughed.  “I guess I’ve been staring at you.”

“It’s all right,” he said, relaxing his shoulders and leaning back into a more comfortable position.  “Perfectly natural to be curious.”  He waved his hand at the windows above.  “It’s the sunlight, you see.  Here, so close to the sun, I find it so bright.  It’s unbearable.  I’ve spent too much time out on Callisto, where things are far dimmer, generally speaking.”

“Callisto?” Ursie said, her mind racing.  “Is that where we’re going?”

“Yes, but uh…”  He paused and rubbed at his chin, uncertain.

“What is it?” Ursie said, alarmed.

“Well.  I have some bad news.”

17

Knile watched Roman as the boy turned the stick of meat over and eyed it distastefully.  Roman glanced back at Knile, his eyes full of doubt.

“This thing is truly disgusting,” he said.

Knile grinned at him as he bit into his own chow stick.

“You’ve been living the good life in
Grove for too long, Roman,” he said good naturedly.  “All of that fresh produce has left you spoilt.”

“Whatever.”

“I could check to see if they have a raspberry soufflé?”

Roman rolled his eyes and half grinned at the jibe.  Then he drew the cube-like wad of meat that was stuck to the end of the stick toward his lips and took a tentative bite.

“Yep,” he said thoughtfully.  “Tastes as bad as it looks.”

“Chow sticks are full of essential vitamins,” Knile said facetiously.  “And right now they’re all we have to eat.”

“What meat is this, anyway?”

Knile shrugged.  “That’s the great thing about chow sticks.  You never really know.  Could be rat, weasel–”

“Human?”

“If you’re lucky.”

They sat side by side on a pair of stools at the counter of a little snack outlet as the proprietor, a little man with a thin moustache who was as greasy as his wares, regarded them while he cleaned a steel spatula.  Named ‘Tuckerbox’, the place had been the only eatery open in the middle of the night in this part of Gaslight, the others shut up tight behind graffitied steel roller doors.

“Lamb,” the proprietor said in a thick accent.  “That’s what you eat there.”

“Lamb turds?” Roman said.

The proprietor scowled.  “Finest ingredients,” he said in his broken English, waving the spatula at them.  “All meat imported.”

“Yeah, I can guess where this is imported from,” Roman grimaced.  “The sewers out in the slums.”

“It’s protein, and it’ll fill you up,” Knile said.  “Keep you going.  That’s all you need right now.”

“Shouldn’t we actually be walking instead of sitting here?  What if we’re late for meeting Talia?”

“We’re on time.”  Knile glanced at his watch.  “Rest your legs for a minute while we eat.  There’s still a long way to go.”

Roman looked as though he were about to say something, then seemed to think better of it.

“Something on your mind?” Knile said.

Roman shrugged, but then turned his body to look at Knile more squarely.

“I wanted to hate you,” Roman said soberly.  “You and Talia both.”

Knile had been waiting for this, and in some ways was surprised it had taken this long.

“You probably have every right to, Roman.  We sent you off to Grove instead of asking what you really wanted.  Instead of listening to what you had to say.”

“Yeah.  I guess you did.”  Roman chewed a greasy piece of meat and swallowed uneasily.  “But you came back for me.  You could be off-world by
now, but you chose not to go.”

Knile nodded.  “In the end it wasn’t really a choice, Roman.  I had to come back.”