Eugene Lambert - Into the No-Zone

‘Sky, I’m sorry. I –’

‘What’s that doing here?’ Colm says, pointing.

I look. And my next heartbeat is a long time coming. On the landing field squats a matt-black Slayer windjammer.

‘Relax,’ Sky says. ‘We forced it down a week or so ago. Took a while to get it launched again. I flew it in here today.’

‘It’s massive,’ I say, taking in the bulk of it.

Sky’s not listening. ‘Hurry up. We’ll hitch a ride out.’

Just then I hear the whoosh of a steam boiler. Seconds later I smell coal smoke. Gears grind and tracks clatter. Sky sets off at a stiff-legged run. Colm and I go after her, me clutching my side. As we emerge from the trail gloom I see a battered tractor chugging away from us. We chase after it, hang off the back.

Sky cheers up enough to nearly smile.

‘Like hopping a windjammer!’ she yells over the noise.

As we lumber across the field I check out the transport. Apart from some impact damage from a hard landing, and blast scars from the firefight that followed, this is one hell of a machine. It wasn’t cobbled together from scrap in a back-of-beyond workshop. Our rebel jammers are rust buckets by comparison.

We drop off as the tow-tractor chugs around to the bow end. Sky has a word with some heavily armed guards. They nod, she waves at us, and we follow her inside the windjammer through a hatch high on its side, hauling ourselves up handholds set into the hull. Easily done any other day, but my ribs are killing me.

Colm offers a hand. I wave him away.

Techs are poking around inside. Sky ignores them and leads me through an internal hatch into the cargo bay. ‘It’s in here!’

‘What happened to the crew?’ I ask.

Sky shrugs. ‘Killed or ran. What’s it matter?’

Over to one side is a metal cage. The light from the few glowtubes in here doesn’t reach, so she pulls out a shiner and thumbs it on. By its light I see the cage door gaping open. The lock’s all melted as if someone’s taken a plasma lance to it.

Sky clambers inside, squats down and shines the beam on to the hull at the back.

‘Her tag,’ she says, looking back at me, her green eyes shining.

All I see, after I clamber into the cage after her, is a bunch of scratches on the grey-painted metal of the hull.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘These!’ Sky says, pointing.

Amazingly, it is the scratches she’s mad keen to show me. There must be hundreds of them, scored and gouged into the metal. Most are old and tough to see clearly, as if they’ve been painted over. Others are fresher or deeper, still shiny. Sky points out one set in particular, tracing the lines with a shaking finger.

‘Her tag,’ she says again, biting her lip. ‘Tarn was here.’

I lean in and squint, but still all I see is a bunch of random scratches. ‘How can you know that?’

Sky’s breathing catches and she stiffens.

‘Look, I believe you,’ I say quickly. ‘I don’t see it, that’s all.’

She scowls at me. Again. ‘A tag is your mark. Only you and your mates know it; that way it can’t be traced back to you. In the camps we all tagged. The kick was to piss the guards off by tagging as many places as you could without getting caught.’ She stares into space and shakes her head. ‘Nobody tagged more than Tarn. My sister scratched her tags in places no one else dared.’

I can’t help wondering if she’s just seeing what she wants to see. No way I’m saying that though. Next thing I know, Sky’s back on her feet and shoving past me out of the cage.

‘There’s something else,’ she says.

I go to follow and my ribs take another shot, doubling me up.

‘After that, can I go and get patched up?’ I say.

Sky’s hunting for something, flicking her shiner beam about and muttering to herself. I hear her snort.

‘For a nublood, Kyle, you sure whine a lot.’

‘Just because I heal fast doesn’t make it hurt any less!’

There’s a loud clunk sound outside and the windjammer lurches violently. I have to grab the bars of the cage to stay on my feet, which doesn’t do my ribs any favours. Next thing, the floor sways and bumps under me. My guess is the tractor is hauling us away to a dispersal area in one of the Deeps’ side canyons.

Sky finds what she’s looking for. ‘Gotcha!’

As I make it out of the cage, Colm catches my eye. He nods at Sky where she’s messing with some device like a blaster crossed with a cleverbox. It makes a clicking sound. Looking satisfied, she aims it at the cage. The clicking swells to an angry howl.

‘Hear that?’ she says, like I’m deaf.

‘Kill it, will you?’ I say. ‘My head’s hurting enough as it is.’

She points the device away from the cage and it calms down.

‘Look!’ She shows me the screen on top of it.

‘What’s it show?’ Colm says.

‘Promethium-148,’ I read, slowly. ‘What’s that then?’

One of the techs looks around. ‘The old Earth name for darkblende. Those kids you rescued from that Slayer Facility – it’s the stuff they had them mining. Lethal stuff, toxic and hot. Pumps out loads of nasty gamma radiation.’

I scramble away from the cage triple-quick.

Tech guy sniggers. ‘Relax. We’re safe enough. The counter’s only showing raised rad levels. Nothing hard enough to burn us.’

I stare at him. He looks cool so I quit backing up.

And now I take in the eyeglasses, the tangle of headphones around his neck, the flame-red hair. I know this smart-arse from Bastion, the Gemini base hidden beneath the Blight shanty town. He’s the guy who picked up Rona’s distress call.

‘Hey, Ness, it’s me, Kyle.’

‘Oh yeah.’ He peers at my face. ‘What happened to you?’

I wipe my mouth. My hand comes away smeared with blood.

‘Forget that,’ Sky snaps, waving the counter-thing under my nose. ‘Darkblende gamma readings only show up inside the cage, and nowhere else. So this cage held prisoners contaminated from mining the stuff. Tarn’s tag tells us she was one of them.’ She grabs my hand and squeezes it. ‘This Slayer transport has to be the one they shipped my sister out of the Facility in!’

I try to share her excitement, honestly I do. Only I’m hurting and my head’s still full of nasty thoughts from the fight.

‘That’s great.’ I force a smile. ‘But –’

‘But what ?’ she says, real low.

‘Look, I get it,’ I say. ‘This freighter here flew your sister out of the Facility. So what? I don’t want to piss on your fire, but without the crew to ask we can’t know where it took her.’

Sky turns her gaze on Ness. ‘Tell Kyle what you told me.’

The tech’s eyes go extra big behind his glasses. ‘Hang on, Sky, I only said I’d take a look. I’ve got lots of other work to –’

She sighs. ‘Just tell him.’

Ness glances around, as if making sure his tech mates aren’t listening. ‘Okay, okay,’ he whispers. ‘So, like I said, I ran a scan on this jammer’s nav-track and the crew didn’t scrub its memory before our guys got to them. The data’s scrambled, to level seven at least. It’ll take some time, but I should be able to break it.’

We must be towed over a ditch or something because the floor leaps up under us. Ness staggers into me.

I push him away, harder than I need to. ‘What’d he say?’

‘He can hack into the transport’s navigation system and track where it’s been,’ Sky explains. And Ness nods.

Colm, watchful and quiet up to now, mutters something under his breath that sounds to me like a disgusted: ‘Great.’

Sky takes a deep breath and lets it out. Her green eyes drill into me. ‘So we can find out where the Slayer bastards took Tarn. Then go bring her back, like we agreed.’