A moment later she heard footsteps approaching.
‘We’ve got to follow them in. We’re searching this place from top to bottom.’
‘Great,’ said the other man with little enthusiasm. ‘Starting in here?’
Jez hugged her knees tightly to her chest and gritted her teeth in anticipation. She saw the room dance again as the flashlights were cast haphazardly around.
‘There’s nowhere to hide in here.’
‘What about behind that workbench?’
‘Go look if you want, I’m catching up with the others. There’s a bonus payment for the first shot on target. I’m not missing out on that.’
She heard one of the men head out of the room, walking swiftly. Then there was silence, save for the distant and echoing noises of the other men moving around the dark labyrinth dislodging dusty furniture, pulling open storage lockers, searching relentlessly for them.
Jez held her breath, afraid that the soft click of the oxygen valve in her mask would give her away. A long moment passed as the man in the same room as her deliberated whether this module was worth the trouble of searching, and then he stirred to life.
She saw the shadows in the room leap as the man’s torch swung around towards one of the exits and he headed after his colleague.
Oh thank crud.
She listened as his footsteps receded and then her heart leapt once more as she heard, far too clearly, Ellie’s echoing voice drifting through the winding corridors to her.
‘Jez? What the hell is going on back there?’
*
Ellie stood in the entranceway panning her torch down inside the tunnel in front of her, Harvey standing beside, clutching her hand tightly, nervously. She could hear the bang and clatter of careless movement from inside. That was definitely the sound of several people moving around in there, she thought. There was somebody else in there, apart from Jez.
The noise of movement inside had instantly halted after she called out. Whoever it was had frozen in their activity. Whoever else was in there, they had heard her. And then she heard a voice, a man’s voice, issuing an order loudly and clearly. The smooth carbon and metal walls carried his voice much further than he must have intended.
‘The Quin girl is up ahead somewhere. Spread out and find her.’
Her stomach lurched uneasily and her heart suddenly began to pound. ‘Oh my crud,’ she whispered.
*
Dammit Ellie, don’t call out again, please.
If she did, she was going to lead them right towards her. These men were going to find Ellie standing out in that greenhouse. They were going to find her, and kill her unless she found someplace to hide, and fast. Fearing that any second Ellie was about to call for her once more Jez sucked in several deep fluttering breaths, removed her mask and cupped her hands.
‘ELLIE! HIDE! They’re coming to get you!’
Her voice sounded deafening, ringing off the walls around her. Almost immediately she heard the scraping of feet and one of the men responding.
‘That was just up here!’
Oh no!
She thought those two men had moved further inside the labyrinth, but they were only in the next module. She had only a second to react before they came back in and this time would probably make an effort to look beneath the work bench. She scrambled out from under it and raced across the small room for one of the two exits.
Halfway across, a torchlight flashed briefly over her body.
‘Shit! Get her!’
The deafening metallic rattle of a pulse rifle filled Jez’s ears, followed by the whistling, whining and rattle of slugs hitting the wall behind her and the metal floor at her feet.
She dived through the exit, leaving the module and staggering into the conduit beyond. She ran recklessly forward into complete darkness, her hands stretched out in front of her, groping blindly for any treacherous obstacles dangling from the ceiling ahead of her. The heels of her boots clattered and scraped against the metal floor, making enough noise that any blind man could find her.
*
Ellie heard the gunfire, and knew instantly what it was.
Hide! Hide! Hide!
She looked around the greenhouse. There was nowhere to hide out here, nowhere. She turned to look back into the dark corridor in front of her, towards the noises of hurried movement, exchanged whispered instructions, which were now growing louder as they were getting closer. She realized there was only one way to head, and leading Harvey by the hand, she ran back inside the dark warren, trying desperately to tread as lightly as she could. She fumbled her way down the conduit and into the first module; the farming tools and machinery storage room.
Ellie knew she had one advantage over whomever it was looking for her. She knew the layout reasonably well, having explored it thoroughly on many occasions before. Although whether she could find her way around in the dark, without any light at all, she was about to find out. She could only think of one good area in which to hide, the rest of the weather station was sparse enough that any cursory search would uncover her easily. The place she was thinking of offered her more of a chance to stay hidden for longer.
*
Jez tripped over a loose floor grating, stumbled and fell. As she pulled herself to her feet she turned to see over her shoulder the flickering light of an approaching torch. They were behind her, and closing the gap rapidly.
She snapped her torch on for a second, quickly studying the way ahead. She could see what looked like a place that had once been a communal area, a gathering space. Ellie had shown her round this ‘hall’ earlier this afternoon. They had wandered through it with shards of sunlight piercing through gaps in the failing ceiling, and dappling the dust-caked floor and over-turned plastic seats.
She struggled to remind herself where the exits were off this room, and where they led to, as she staggered forward into this larger module, the torch snapped off again before those behind her could see it. Almost immediately, her long legs tangled with several of those over-turned chairs scattered across the floor. The scrape and squeal of the chairs as they slid across the ground was horrifyingly loud. A moment later, she heard the men behind her calling out to their colleagues. ‘There’s one of them over here!’
Again, with no choice, she took a chance and snapped the torch on, panning it wildly around the room. To her left was an exit, to her right another one. She recalled from this afternoon’s leisurely ramble that one of them led into a small storage room, once used as a pantry. The other led towards a maze of small, sleeping quarters…like mini habi-cubes of a sort. She could hide in the pantry, burrowing down behind racks that still contained sealed canisters of food that were probably still as fresh as the day they were sealed-in hundreds of years ago. But it was a dead-end. If they decided to search that, she would be trapped with no way out.
The cramped confines of the sleeping quarters offered her the best chance of staying hidden, cluttered as they were with all manner of personal lockers, trunks, bunkbeds and built in storage spaces. But she couldn’t remember which of the two exits led that way.
Left or right? Come on Jez you butterhead. Which one?
She turned to the left, feeling her way cautiously with her hands, trying not to bump into and noisily disturb any more of the scattered bucket seats.
CHAPTER 14
Deacon ducked through the bulkhead and joined the two mercenaries standing in the short length of corridor, Leonard following behind him.
One of the mercenaries aimed his torch up the corridor, the light picking out what looked like a larger module beyond. ‘We’ve got one of them up ahead there, sir,’ he said.
‘Who fired their weapon?’ asked Deacon.
‘It was me,’ the same one answered.
‘Did you hit her?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
Deacon cursed silently. A trail of blood spots would have been useful. ‘Alright, let’s deal with this one first. Then we can flush out the other one at ou
r leisure.’
He led them forward, lighting the way with his torch. He pulled out a hand gun from a holster strapped to his thigh. A slim, elegant gun, but powerful enough to knock anyone it hit off their feet.
This damned place was going to be a nightmare to track them down in, but then, there was nowhere to go. No one was leaving here. It was nicely isolated. This girl Ellie Quin would have been far wiser staying in New Haven, losing herself amidst the press of people there. She had played a good game up until now, staying one step ahead of him – fleeing her bolt hole in the city just in time, and then again driving out here, hoping to lose them in the wilderness. Her family had been dutifully tight-lipped about where she had headed…at first. But it was all over now, there was nowhere else for her to go, unless she fancied her chances running away on foot across the desert.
This could have been so much more difficult. If she had gone to ground in the city, flushing her out from New Haven’s grubby streets would have required him to call in a great deal more manpower for the job. He might even have had to consider putting the whole damned city under quarantine to be safe; blocking all surface-to-orbit transit until this child was recovered. He had the authority to do that, of course. Hell, he had the authority, if it came to it, to have the whole damned planet sterilized with an orbital gamma pulse; make a clean sweep, leaving not a single soul alive. The stakes were that high. But then, he noted wryly, that several senior members of the Committee had significant commercial interests on the planet, and would probably have castigated him for that, for over-stepping his authority. Even though he might have saved them all from damnation by stopping the girl in time.
Deacon smiled in the darkness. The chase had gone well. Running her to ground here was as good as he could have hoped for. If the child and her friend wanted to play a little game of hide and seek, that was just fine. In fact, this was turning out to be a bit of fun.
He led them into the larger module and panned his torch around. It looked like some sort of communal hub for the colony, the equivalent of a town hall. He knew what these old colonial outposts were like, they followed a predictable pattern. A sense of community was everything to those early trailblazers. They bolted together their makeshift modular homes around the notion of a common room, a shared space where important decisions or disputes could be discussed or decided in a quaintly idealistic and democratic way. Every one of these tough old shanty towns had a space like this somewhere in the middle of it; a hub, with accommodation and utility wings branching out from it. He swung the torch beam across from one side to the other. Two exits as far as he could see.
He ordered two of the mercenaries to check the exit on the right first.
*
Jez could hear them turning over the storage room. They were getting frustrated and impatient by the sound of it. She puffed with relief that she chose the other exit and wasn’t now trapped in that pantry with them.
She put her torch on, covering it with one hand so that most of the light was obscured. From the faint glow that emerged, she could see that she had remembered the layout of this place correctly. Up ahead, on either side of the corridor, were dozens of rounded doorways that each led directly into a domestic cubicle; simple, interconnected cubic living spaces each one designed for a couple or a small family. As she had discovered earlier - checking a few of them out with Ellie - many of them were furnished with basic cots and storage lockers, some still contained personal artifacts…poignant reminders that, once upon a time, not only hardy men and woman scratched a living here, but their children also.
She recalled there was one cubicle, approximately halfway along this long corridor on the right that had a particularly large storage trunk, tucked discreetly behind a rocking horse that had been crudely welded together long ago no doubt by some doting father from scraps of metal; a sad looking hand-made toy, with a multitude of rough edges, and sharp protrusions that must have chafed any poor child riding it.
She made her way as quietly as she could up the corridor, with her torch still on and covered by her fingers, listening carefully for the slightest sound of movement up ahead. She hoped to God Ellie had heard her warning cry and found somewhere to hide too. Ellie seemed to know this place like the back of her hand. Hopefully, she had found some little nook in which to lie low.
A noise up ahead.
Above the ever-present moan of wind, the slightest scrape of movement. Very close. She quickly snapped off her torch, pulled her oxygen mask away from her mouth and held her breath, waiting to see if another sound followed.
Clink.
A foot placed down just a little too heavily.
Shit-o-la.
Someone was up ahead at the other end of the corridor and moving down towards her. In the pitch black, Jez decided to feel her way forward to the next cubicle doorway, and if she could do it without noisily bumping into anything, she would silently slide into it, and let the party up ahead pass her by.
She crouched down and put one hand out in front of her face, feeling for any dangling nooses of wire, whilst her other hand fumbled ahead in the space in front of her feet for anything she might trip over. And, as quietly and quickly as she could, she scuttled forward.
She heard another footfall and then labored breathing; two masks clicking as the oxygen valves opened and closed. Whoever that was, they were very close.
Those sons-of-bitches had wised up and turned their flashlights off and were stalking her in the dark now. They probably even had night-vision goggles, similar to ones she had seen on a toob drama once; goggles that let you see anything in the dark, albeit with a spooky green tinge. One of them was probably already lining up a shot on her in the dark. She involuntarily cringed, her eyes clamped shut, her mouth hung open with a silent scream, dry as a desert, waiting for the inevitable echoing crack of gunfire.
Oh crud, get it over with you-
Her hand, stretched out in front of her and dug into something soft and wet.
‘Ouch!’ a voice yelped.
‘Ellie?’
‘Yes dammit! You just poked me in the eye,’ she hissed angrily.
CHAPTER 15
Aaron checked his navigation display once more. He was nearly there. The floodlights of his shuttle lit the dark landscape below and ahead. He began to slow Lisa down. He would have thought by now that the glow of lights from the Quin farm would have been visible. It was late, but there would be some lights on, surely, somewhere. He scanned the horizon again, looking for the faint glow of some internal light even, diffused by the foggy transparency of a plastic dome.
Nothing.
He was almost upon the farm according to the navsat co-ordinates he had logged in after dropping the girls off. It had to be somewhere up ahead now.
All of a sudden, the brilliant glare of his floodlights was reflected back from something out there in the thick darkness of the night. A moment later the hemispherical outline of one of the smooth enviro-domes loomed into view.
There it is.
He slowed the shuttle down to a crawl, wary that the roar of his engines on full blast might wake up the whole family. He could settle her down gently on minimal power, not exactly a silent landing, but a little less of a disturbance. He circled the farm slowly, looking for a suitable place to set down. There was not a single light on anywhere, not even any faint night-lights in the central dome in which they lived.
He put the shuttle down in front of the entrance to one of the agri-domes and turned off his floodlights. As the dust settled he waited in his seat, the dim amber glow from the control panel the only source of illumination, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark. He waited a few minutes to see if the dull rumble of his arrival had awoken anyone.
He had pre-arranged to come by and pick them up tomorrow morning some time. But the things he had needed to do in Harvest City had been accomplished with far less hassle than he had anticipated. And rather than accumulate another day’s worth of docking fees, Aaron had decided to set off ear
ly, and a little presumptuously, park up overnight outside the Quin farm. He had even hoped he might be invited in for a little home cooking and in return, the following morning, he would happily offer to show Ellie’s family around the shuttle in return. He knew she had a little brother who would no doubt go ape-wild over the experience.
But, no one seemed to have woken. He saw no lights coming on inside. And as he carefully studied the farm he noticed that the round hatch to the nearest agri-dome had been left wide open.
Hang on, that’s not right.
Ellie’s father was an oxygen farmer, leaving a door open like that would be a cardinal sin for him; a criminal waste of their yield. Aaron rose steadily from his seat and made his way towards the rear of the cabin, a growing sense of unease gnawing away at him as he grabbed a mask and prepared to exit.
*
It was unbearably hot and stuffy inside the storage locker. The three of them were squeezed together, an untidy tangle of limbs, most of them Harvey’s. They breathed alternately with masks off and on, doing their best to extend the dwindling supply of oxygen in their masks’ cylinders. There couldn’t be much left, and soon they were going to have to do something, or they were going to suffocate.
Ellie took a guess that they had been in the locker now for over an hour. For the first twenty minutes or so, they had listened with a growing sense of panic as they moved tirelessly around from module to module, noisily, angrily hunting them down. Sometimes, judging from the noises, they seemed to be drawing closer, then for some reason heading away. Despite their best efforts, it didn’t seem to be an organized or systematic search. They had checked some of the cubicles in the sleep quarters, but not all. At one point, they gave the cubicle next door to theirs the once over, pulling the sleeping cots loudly to one side and opening, and slamming shut, every cupboard and storage unit within.