Among You Secret Children Read online

  ~O~

  Hunched before the wings of his console, he watched as the last of the metsat balloons shot out, soaring upwards through layers of deepening shade.

  He hit a key, and a few floors above him, within a glass dome built into the wilderness floor, a hundredweight lens went trundling round on its rail.

  Soon, gaunt cliffs lurched in the background. Treacherous and storm-blown. Forever brooding.

  When he located it, the balloon was still rising fast. After a few meanders, a rogue current took hold, snatching it eastwards over the gusting dunes. To and fro it went, a creature wild and unpredictable, yet dogged, still ascending, the tiny box it carried scarcely visible to the eye. He watched it faithfully until it had whipped back towards Ansthalt, clearing the stark peaks by what appeared to be a fraction; and then it was gone, doomed to travel the firmament until it perished one day, falling to oblivion somewhere around the dusty globe.

  He reset the tracking coordinates, sending the lens right and left as he scanned the ledges for movement. Looking as always for confirmation that his clues had been noted. A belief that could not be unmade, no matter how slender his hope had become. Looking for symbols, letters, a carving in a rockface. A light, a fire. Even a hanging sheet would do.

  But even on such a week as this, outrageous, monumental, there was nothing.

  He swallowed, studying the rents of stone he must somehow haul his body up, the countless enshadowed dangers. Hidden by sheets of dust, he reminded himself, hidden safely, all trace and sign of him, all earthly evidence.

  Chapter 3 — Struggle With Sentries

  ‘Just get her out of me. Do it. That’s all I ask.’

  ‘Is she okay? What does she want?’

  ‘Something about a woman, a killer. She keeps asking for drugs.’

  Angry, fraught voices arose.

  ‘Where did she come from?’

  ‘I don’t know. She just appeared.’

  ‘But how did she get inside?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Please, I need Klaus, she ... she’s coming ...’

  ‘Has she hurt anyone? Did anyone see her?’

  ‘I promise you, I won’t hurt anyone ...’

  Above them, the vast plastic canopy rippled in the wind. She sobbed, a hand to her head. Around her the metal containers stood like the walls of some terrifying citadel. ‘Please ... help me before she comes back.’

  ‘Is she crazy?’

  ‘She ... Vadraskar ... you don’t understand, she ... please, she’s coming.’

  A tall man stepped forward from the group. With blank electric light at his back, his long face socketed with discs of glass, he directed her to be taken to the clinicians’ compound. ‘You’d better go with her,’ he said to a pale, flaxen-haired woman, and with others gathering round to stare, the stranger was escorted away.

  Chapter 4 — Escape

  The night arrived, could not be put off again, came at him like something leaping.

  He typed rapidly, putting certain cams to sleep on the stairs he planned to use, ensuring that recordings following his departure faced away from the south. He double checked the entries, then sat raking his fingers through his hair, wondering what he’d forgotten. He searched the desk, forcing himself to read back through his evening report, fearful that he’d given anything away, made a statement out of the ordinary. But everything seemed to be in order. Sweat pricked his face. He watched the screens again, restless, uneasy, then realised with a jolt that he’d forgotten to log out of the security system. This he did with great precision, no mistakes now, then he shut down all but the most basic operations and switched off his screen.

  As the office darkened a shade, he turned in his chair. The waiting was over. So, this was what it was like. This was goodbye. He took a last look round.

  For once he gazed fondly over Schwager’s filthy desk, with its unruly piles of vids and papers. The stinking rubbish. The laden shelves. He looked across at the dartboard, feathered and battered with use. At the noticeboard, crammed with obscenities and desecrations of the human image, in the midst of which was a photoplate of the entire obs bay team, taken about two years before. Now a toothless band of the patch-eyed and wondrously moustachioed and bearded, gaping insanely at him through their scars. He almost smiled.

  Rising, he noticed Lütt-Ebbins at the back, lean and alert. Stoeckl with his blond quiff ruffled, standing at his side. Schwager leering over a shoulder. Himself, frail-looking in his goggles, crouching awkwardly at the front.

  Zipping up his jacket, he imagined the emptiness growing there in the days after he’d gone. Nothing left of him but a gallery of severed handshakes; his colleagues staring speechlessly at the vacant chair. Someone, perhaps Derring, being handed the suicide note while the rest looked on. A few standing in the doorway as it was read aloud. Listening with gloomy, downcast faces. Listening in silence.

  How he’d miss them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered; then with a shaky intake of breath, he went to the door.

  ~O~

  The tiny bathroom flickers as a power surge passes through the system. Darkness. Then everything stutters, gleams white again. He gouges at the filler until another tile comes loose. He places it upon the others and continues, dust piling on the floor.

  When the gap is wide enough, he drags out his bag and sets it down. He dampens the powder and uses it to refit the tiles. When the wall looks how it ought to look he wipes it down and cleans the floor and takes the bag through to his sleeping quarters. The first thing he checks is the mini tanks, making sure they’re full. He pulls a pair of overalls over the pair he is wearing and zips them up, loosening the ankles a little. He slips his note inside the breast pocket. A gasp of impatience, also fear, escapes him when he almost leaves the room in his goggles, and he tears them off and dumps them in the bag and stows the bag in a corner, covering it with a blanket. Then he heads out and goes along the foamboard-insulated corridor, moving away from the crowded lifts on his route down to the basement.

  Helical flights of stairs link one floor with another at Van Hagens, and he negotiates patiently the winding path he has picked until he’s descended beneath the vibrations of the shuttle station and is approaching an authorised-only zone. So far no one seems to have noticed him, no eyes have met his own. Then a group of workers climb towards him, wheezing, spraying bucket coughs into sleeves and handkerchiefs. He hurries down past them, his cap low over his face, then at the next level he clips on a fake ID card, and from the next walkway he enters until the moment he pushes through the steel double-doors that lead into the waste plant, he suffers like cold dead meat the checks and patdowns he’s been dreading more than anything.

  He goes further into the plant. Blueprints he has studied bleach to nothing in his mind against the hot reality of his environment. Incinerator bins stand in rows like great headless chess pieces, clanking and steaming, generating a fuming haze within which figures in visors and padded gear roam about with stoking rods like terrible herdsmen. Yells proliferate in that roaring sunset glow, and he checks to see if anyone is addressing him, but all are busily preoccupied, operating controls, taking readings. Drenched in sweat, he sneaks to the back of a bin and hides, treading off the spare set of overalls before going to the extraction pipe.

  He grips the wheelvalve and turns it. The valve moves with rusty resistance. He turns it again, struggling, grinding it round until the pipe is sealed, leaving the smoke to bottle up inside the furnace. He does not know exactly how long it will take for the alarm to sound, but reports he’s read suggest an hour. Before planting the overalls nearby, he makes sure the note is sticking out of the pocket. It must not be missed. He checks around again, then heads away.

  He is in and out of his room in seconds, exiting with his bag. He continues up the levels as if to return to his office, but on reaching the obs bay, he crosses to a service room where junked furniture and monitors lie about awaiting repair or some other fate. According t
o the rotas, a maintenance crew is due to sign in shortly. He goes behind the main desk and drops low into a seat and swivels round so they won’t see him. Waiting with a raw pounding in his ribs that will not go.

  He is close to retching by the time the first arrivals come, has to fight to remain seated. With a brusque clatter, a handful of men stream into the room, coughing and hawking as they discuss women and shift patterns and a showvid they’ve seen in the lounges. They round up tools and cleaning materials from their lockers, then, with a banging of doors and the wheeze of atrophied lungs, they file out again, this time joined by a quiet figure wheeling a porter’s trolley, upon which sits a waste container holding the bag. He follows the crew into a service lift and stands with his cap pulled down, the men talking, belching, yawning as they ascend. They leave the lift as a single unit, entering a cool and dimly lit walkway at the crown of the base, where after a few turns they halt, waiting for the guards to wave them through.

  From here they progress along a corridor lined with unmarked rooms and offices. Behind squares of frosted glass he sees lab-coated figures at work, part of an overnight skeleton crew charged with checking that all is well on the base, that it is breathing regularly; that its organs are clean and its arteries humming as they should. From every corner the draughty suck of air filters. He trundles the trolley along. Somewhere a telephone rings. A technician exits a doorway and enters the room opposite, closing the door behind him. The walls have arrows pointing the way and the crew follow them towards the station’s rumbling interior. Up ahead, massive concrete drums appear within a cordoned maze at whose centre lies his goal. They pass an unmanned checkpoint where hazard warnings scream in yellow and red, and when the crew turn a corner, he holds back a moment and diverts away, ducking under a chain and pulling the trolley behind him as he enters the shadows.

  He passes the column of a galvanised flue whose vents spray a chilling white vapour and hiss at him. Heading deeper into the plant, passing ribbed tanks underlit by display readings. Everything buzzing with electro-chemical processes at once lethal and vital to life. Moth he scare, wants his clap-claps over his face to hide, mummy daddy where are you, but he cannot hide now, must continue until it’s over ...

  ~O~

  Coming out through drifts of steam he checks around again, now clad in breathing gear. He leaves the drums and heads for the ladder leading to the hatch. On his way he falters, noticing what is strung from it top to bottom. A florid tangle of lights, pulsing red.

  Pushing back his cap, he goes as near to the ladder as he dares. The lights are sensors. Sensors. Someone has connected them to the ladder’s every rung and strut. They’ve wired it — wired it — primed it to shriek out at any breach of light or heat or touch. He could be a single movement from triggering it; a warm breath away. He whimpers, looking up. The outline of the hatch is visible in the concrete ceiling, just as he knew it would be. His sole means of getting outside. He takes a precautionary backward step, reeling to think of the documents he has pored over to get this far, the days of agony striving to get this right — yet it seems his information is worthless. He has studied plans not three months old, not three months, that show a simple key pad system in use and nothing else, a system he has the code for and which on activation would flip the hatch open without a sound, leaving him to sprint from the base just as the smouldering events in the basement were being analysed. With a croak of disbelief he backs away and goes off in search of the trolley.

  The guards are deep in conversation when he approaches their booth. Ashen, it dawns on him that he has little time left before his overalls are discovered; before the smoke jets out, condemning him to big, dirty trouble. The guards appear unconcerned by his passing, just as they are oblivious to the moist glare in his eyes as he takes the trolley bar in his grip and furiously accelerates.

  Chapter 5 — Injection

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘I really think you should rest. Most people —’

  ‘Please. I need to get out. I feel trapped here.’

  ‘But you can’t just walk out. They won’t allow it.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave, I ... I want to see Klaus. Is he here? Did he leave?’

  ‘Klaus?’

  ‘The scientist. You don’t know him?’

  ‘There’s a few people here with that name. I’d need to speak with our command group first.’

  ‘Just let me sit, then. Please. I can’t stay in this bed.’

  ‘That’s fine. We can do that. But I still need to monitor you. And you may need another injection.’

  ‘Injection. That’s the needle?’

  ‘That’s it. That’s what it’s called.’

  ‘Yes. Give me another. And I’ll sit a while.’

  ‘We need to talk, too.’

  ‘... Talk?’

  ‘About who you are. Why you’re here.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I ... I can talk now.’

  ‘Okay, well, let’s get you a seat.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  The pale woman smiled, maskless and gentle-looking. ‘I meant to ask yours, but ...’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nina. Yours?’

  She hesitated. As if summoning the strength. The will. ‘Jaala,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, Jaala. Let’s get you up.’ Standing back, the woman turned to one of the armed men looking on and said, ‘Gert, unlock her, please.’

  Chapter 6 — Advice From A Friend

  Upon the ninth moon, his own birthday arrived. He sent up the usual metsat salute, but this time there felt something mechanical about the process, something pointless and abhorrent.

  When the balloons had gone he turned the lens to the east. Granular peaks stood in the distance, before which the ash blew slowly across the barren miles. At night when he sent the lens roving he’d find patches of glazed flats out there amidst the dirt and humps of concrete, patches where the sediment had at one time melted and solidified. Lying beneath the stars like filthy sheets of ice, glinting blankly.

  The skies darkened week on week, his mind festering as it drifted. Sometimes all he could do was imagine it, imagine the horror ...

  The buildings wrapped in flame. The people deserting them catching fire as they ran, limbs burning as they clutched each other; faces with their blackened muzzles raised, their screams distorting. The tornados sweeping through. People like tapers, burning in their clothes. Children sucked skywards like puppets from the smoking ground, ascending to the smoke-filled and racing heavens. He tried to picture how the fires had looked back then from far away, far out in the void.

  A planet like an eyeball. Pulsing. Crimson. Insane.

  Winter erupted in a gale. He whispered to the moon’s surly continents, the passing snows. On his father’s birthday the metsats threaded away to a sky that held the same cast of light as if an eclipse had fallen, a soft residual light that felt almost eerie to him, a subtle and breathing aftermath of the dead white dusk. He dutifully scanned the mountain’s fissures and ledges, checked every snapped branch and displacement, the marks on every trail. Searched until his eyes were burning. But they burned for no one but himself.

  ~O~

  ‘Alone again?’ said a voice from the door.

  He let the chair swivel slowly on its screw as he turned to face Lütt-Ebbins. He blinked.

  A tall man with thinning grey hair leant further into the room. ‘What’s happened to Schwager?’

  Moth sad, so sad. So alone.

  Lütt-Ebbins closed the door. ‘Is he really sick, or just trying it on? Just between you and me.’

  Moth watched him, breathing uncomfortably as Lütt-Ebbins mentioned something about the sickroom.

  ‘Maybe I’ll call down there some time, see if he’s still there. See what’s happened to him.’

  He watched him adjust his spectacles, glancing about as if checking for something. He listened only remotely as his visitor spoke, asking if he fancie
d joining him for a drink later that week — joining some others as well. Casually mentioning something about a discussion group; interesting people talking about interesting things.

  ‘Gets on well with Linz, doesn’t he,’ Lütt-Ebbins mused, speaking from Schwager’s desk. He stood picking through the litter, reading the labels of various vids and book covers; sniffing cartons, tossing items into the bin. ‘Not everyone does. Linz isn’t easy.’

  Moth watched him without curiosity.

  ‘I suppose that’s in his favour.’

  A crackle broke out from the wurmbad fitted above the printer unit, where spools of weather readings bulged over the table, unread and useless. He shook his head when Lütt-Ebbins sent a questioning look his way, watched him go to the glass cylinder and tap the bottom. Inside it, a frazzled specimen was see-sawing to the bottom of the solution, its long feelers splayed gracefully in a ballet of death. He watched Lütt-Ebbins tug it from the seal and shake off the droplets, then bite into it just as a replacement came shivering eel-like down the tube. The new creature circled the glass with flicks of its tail, exploring the office with huge saucerlike eyes. Lütt-Ebbins returned to the desk crunching noisily, sucking the good juices through the hole where the creature’s head had been. He picked through a few other items, then tossed a vid disapprovingly among the others, and as if reaching a conclusion about something, said, ‘So, what do you think?’

  Moth looked down at his hands, fingers linking, unlinking. ‘I, ah, I’ll see,’ he murmured. ‘It’s just that I’m busy. Derring wants some help. Ah, report writing.’

  An air of disappointment seemed to hover around Lütt-Ebbins’ features as he noted this. He made a few more probes at conversation, glancing about all the while, then with long strides went to the door.

  ‘I’d keep it locked if I were you,’ he said, tapping the doorframe thoughtfully as he looked back. ‘There’s, well ... let’s just say there’s some funny people around.’