What Lies Below (5 page)

Don’t Eat That

Jack waited at the entrance to the hovel, watching the
bustling road outside while still keeping an eye on Drogan’s back. Inside the
building was a mess of old electronic junk that Jack had seen dozens of times
over the last few years, ever since he first hooked up with the older man at
the junction outside the remains of the New Stadium settlement. That had been the
day he gained a new friend, a shotgun, and also saw the fall of a settlement
that had barely begun to thrive.

Hunched over on the other side of Drogan was Racket, an old
man with only one eye over which he wore a large round lens attached to a
leather strap. Jack always thought the strap looked much too tight. The lens
made Racket’s one remaining eye seem five times bigger than it really was, and
Jack had often wondered if he could see at all without it.

Drogan was a man who knew just where to trade for most things –
especially anything that even vaguely resembled old tech. From circuit-boards out
of the back of old TV sets to the guts of a rusting, rotten computer, he would
insist on taking them to Racket, and Jack had to admit that the old man would certainly
pay top coin if the object happened to be of value to him for one of his
projects. What those projects were, Jack had no idea. He had never seen beyond
the entrance room of Racket’s building, but knew that the rest of the building,
considering its size, could hide quite a lot.

Racket had a lot of resources at his disposal to pay for
anything they found. Enough, Jack mused, to cover the costs of employing a thug
to stand outside all day, and few could do that.

“What do you mean, you can't give me a good price?” Drogan’s
voice bellowed from the room behind him. Jack glanced over at the thug, standing
a few feet away, and the man looked back. They both shrugged. This was usual, Jack
thought.

Drogan knew what he was doing, and Jack had been in the other
room a number of times to witness the conversation between his friend and the
old man as it got a little heated, but Drogan was used to getting what he
wanted, and persistence was his middle name. He’d keep on and on, and
eventually Racket would give him a little more. They all knew that Racket was bound
to try his luck with at least one thing that Drogan was trying to sell him.

Drogan and Racket were old friends and Jack had learned that
this was the way they spoke to each other. The anger was only feigned, pretend.

Ten minutes later, Drogan came out with a grin on his face. We
won this time, thought Jack.

“We ready?” Jack asked.

Drogan nodded. “Sure. Let's go get some food.”

They wandered through the market, Drogan walking a few feet
ahead of Jack, occasionally stopping to glance at something on one of the
stalls, but mostly leaving things alone.

The pedlars were almost as persistent as Drogan, constantly
waving things in Jack's face as he walked by. He was used to this, keeping his
hands by his sides and shaking his head as continued on his way.

They eventually made their way to the east side of the market
where the food places were. “What’s it to be?” asked Drogan. “Rat roasted, rat
fried, rat soup?”

“Fat lot of choice,” said Jack. He’d rather not touch any of
it, but he was hungry and they had few supplies after their last expedition. Drogan
stopped at one of the stalls where small rodents of some kind – probably still
rats, Jack thought – were skewered and roasted over a fire pit. He had to admit,
the smell was pretty good when you were that hungry.

Drogan started haggling with the seller, so Jack stood back,
watching those around him, and he noticed someone out the back of the tent. The
chef had his back to them, preparing more of their catch. The man wore a long
smock, stained with blood, and it turned Jack's stomach. But it wasn't until
the man reached out for another skewer that Jack noticed the purple mark on his
arm. It was only small, no bigger than a fingernail in size, but it was there –
a purple mark surrounded by slightly grey skin and a black spider mark,
trailing away along the man's forearm. The man must have sensed Jack’s scrutiny,
because he glanced up and pulled down his sleeve, looked at Jack once, then
turned back to his cooking.

Jack put his hand on Drogan’s shoulder. “Let’s leave these,”
he said. Drogan frowned but then he saw the serious expression on Jack's face
and nodded.

The food pedlar frowned. “What? You don't want anything now? I
was doing you a bargain.”

They walked away, ignoring the curses from the man behind them.     

No Time to Bug Out

FirstMan took a deep breath and lowered his assault rifle,
watching as the last bug kicked and writhed on the ground a few feet away
before finally lying still. There must have been a hundred dead bugs littering the
ground outside the front of the building and in the foyer by the time RightHand
and the rest of the troopers had finished wiping out the nest. He shook his
head.

I’ve never seen so many in one place before, he thought, but
then, no one really comes here, do they?

At least none of his people did.

The industrial complex was too far out, and too near The Crags.
FirstMan wondered for a moment if the crag tribes visited this place. But then,
he thought, no nest such as this would have grown to such a size, and remain undiscovered,
if it had been near the Junktown. And the crag folk would have eaten them.

He grabbed his radio, coughed to clear the dust from his chest,
and spoke. “Jack, you still okay down there?”

“Sure. We’re good. Still stuck down here and not going
anywhere soon,” came the reply. “But I think we may have found what you’re
looking for.”

“Really?” asked FirstMan, as he walked back towards the
building. “That’s good news. Bad news is I think you're buried under a quite a lot
of debris.”

“Yeah, figured as much from the mess down here,” replied Jack.

“Seems that it was a large nest, and it collapsed from above,”
said FirstMan. “It took out a couple of floors. May take us a while to get you
out of there.”

“We’ll be okay,” said Jack. “But don't take too long.”

FirstMan turned to RightHand, who was standing a few feet away,
looking around at the dead bugs and then at the collapsed rubble. It now filled
the area where the stairs and the lift shaft had been. “I guess we better get
digging,” he said.

They’re Back

Corporal Lisa Markell stood staring at the scratches on the
side of the carrier, puzzled and a little amused. It had been over a month
since she had watched Jack running off into the junk, and several weeks since
she had spied the Governor poking around the vehicle bay, and in that time she
had almost forgotten about the scratches and the compartments that had been
tampered with.

Thankfully, she had badgered Mechanical to sort out a key fob
that opened pretty much all of the compartments on any of the vehicles in the
bay, and she had managed to do it – as far as she knew – without Jackson
finding out. That, she thought, would be that last thing she wanted. She’d seen
the report the last time they were sent to the facility. Hayley had dug it up
for her.

Even though Jackson didn’t bother with the normal formalities
of talking to each trooper about their performance levels, as was usually
required, he also didn’t bother removing the officers’ report summaries from
the batch that she used to rate her troops. If she kept up her current
performance level she could be reassigned within months, maybe just a couple,
back to the Inner Zone or at least a closer facility.

No, alerting Jackson to her suspicions was the last thing she
wanted. Better to investigate, take notes, and make a full report when she was
moved on and out of his clutches and ability to harm her career.

But here were those very same markings on – and it seemed even
more unlikely – the same carrier. E2 crew. And they had been reported by the
crew leader, Tyler, as they had before.

Except this time she’d been looking at Tyler’s report on the screen
when it had been deleted. She’d watched as the entry disappeared from the
screen less than two hours after it had been put there.

Lisa coughed, wiped the sweat from her face, and swiped the
key fob over the panel next to the compartment. There was a slight click and a
beeping noise from the fob, and the compartment popped open.

Hayley, standing next to her, grinned and gave a quiet “Y
es,”
as the door swung open slowly. “We’re in.”

Lisa pulled the door open, glanced around to make sure than no
one but she and Hayley were nearby, and pulled out the small package stuffed
inside the compartment. She placed it on the ground, pulled her scanner out and
swiped it over the package.

Nothing. No signs of live electronics or life, not that she
was expecting any.

“What is it?” asked Hayley, trying to peer over her shoulder.

“Don’t know yet,” Lisa said, as she pulled back the dirty
cloth that wrapped the object. Inside something metallic glinted in the bright
sunlight.

What Lies Outside

Three hours later, Jack squinted at the bright sunlight as
he dusted himself down. He was standing a dozen feet away from the ammo-less
gun turret outside the front of the building. Three hours in the dark, waiting
for FirstMan and the troopers to clear the way down to them, was a long time,
and in that time he and Ryan had managed to sort their way through most of the
treasure that was buried in the room below. He had tried pulling away some of
the junk blocking the doorway but heard the debris above it groan in protest.
It was too risky.

So they were stuck in there until FirstMan and the other troopers
managed to clear what had fallen into the lift shaft and some of the room
beyond that.

He’d thought, given time, if they'd been stuck down there,
with no help from the outside, that he'd be able to gradually make a tunnel of
some sort through the debris, but he saw little need since FirstMan and his men
needed what Jack had found more than he needed them.

But what happens to me now? he thought, wondering if his
usefulness was spent.

But he was still alive, and FirstMan was sitting on a pile of
rocks near the broken pavement that had been churned up by nature as it forced
its way up from underneath. The man was examining the contents of the yellow
label box and nodding

“Perfect,” FirstMan said after a few minutes. “Just what we
needed, and even some replacements, if necessary.” He held up one of the sealed
packages stuffed into the box. “At least one of these, if not more, is gonna be
in working condition. Excellent job, Jack.”

“So,” said Jack, peering at the man whom he still wasn't sure
he trusted. “You going to tell me what it is you need these for?”

FirstMan looked up at him and the looked back down at the box,
“That's a long story. Where do I start?”

“At the beginning?” suggested Jack.

“Well,” said FirstMan. “As I said before, we used to work for
the facility, or should I say we used to work for the RAD. Me, RightHand, and
all my men, were Inner Zone troopers, sent out here to run missions clearing
out zones ready for scavenging. Basically doing whatever Governor Jackson
decided was needed.  His dirty work. Sometimes we were sent out here to find a
group that was particularly troublesome and were raiding the outer lying
facilities.”

“Like the Picking Factory,” said Jack.

“Yes,” said FirstMan, nodding. “Just like the Picking Factory.
When we got here, we took out the group that was trouble, but we found far more
than we expected. Thousands of Junkers out here, and as you can see they're not
the monsters that we were told about.”

FirstMan paused in thought for a few moments.

“We were given orders to wipe the entire place out,” he said.

“What? Kill them? All of them?” Jack asked, stunned.

FirstMan nodded, his expression grim. “Yes, all of them.”

 Jack looked away, disgusted. He'd only met Jackson, the Governor
of the facility, once, and he hadn't liked the man. He remembered how Jackson
had looked at him like he was a piece of dirt. But, to someone like Jackson,
Jack supposed he was just dirt.

“So you mutinied?” asked Jack, looking at FirstMan.

FirstMan frowned, but then smiled, seeming a little
embarrassed. “Well, yes. I suppose you could say that, but I wouldn't consider it
mutiny, as such. Maybe changing sides. You see, my father was sent out here, to
the facility, many years ago, when I was very young. I know that he worked with
the salvage crews, but I don’t know which, or under whom. I do know that I
never saw him again.

“We had money problems, you see. My father was ambitious. I
wouldn't say he was greedy, but... Well, I wouldn't know for sure, but he ran
up debts that he couldn't pay off. So they arrested him and sent him out here
is punishment. My mother went to a workhouse, and we were lucky we managed to
stay in the Inner Zone and not get kicked out into the ruins like so many.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Jack said, remembering his own father
vaguely. He wasn’t sure if he felt the same loss that FirstMan felt, though,
having been abandoned by his own parents when he was a just a child.

FirstMan paused and then looked at Jack. “Sorry, I didn't mean—”

“No, it’s fine,” said Jack. “Carry on.”

“Well the choice between killing a few thousand people out
here and disobeying orders wasn't a choice to me, nor was it to any of my men.
These people needed help.” FirstMan stopped talking for minute or so, and just
stood there, staring at the ground.

The man’s hiding something. But what? Jack thought that he was
probably telling him more than he wanted and making sure he didn’t tell him too
much.

But he’s telling you because he wants more from you.

FirstMan sighed and looked around. None of the other troopers
were nearby. They were too busy helping Ryan and RightHand empty out hidden
treasure trove on the floors below.

Finally he spoke. “That circuit board can be used to fix a drone
that we managed to capture, or should I say the Junkers managed to capture a
long time before we joined them. It was sitting among the trash when we found
it. The old guy, Haggerty, he told us a story about how it was sent to take
pictures of the Junktown, and the old chief – one of the ones that we took out when
we came here – shot the thing down from the sky. It had been in the trash ever
since.

“Well, we had a look, and one of my guys is a pretty good
tech, a dab hand at fixing stuff up. He managed to get it working, apart from
the navigation. And that's what these boards are – a navigation system that can
link in to the satellites still in operation by the Inner Zone.”

Jack frowned. “Satellites? Like in the sky?” Jack remembered
seeing pictures in an article in a magazine about such things, but believed
them to be a thing of centuries ago, of the old world.

“Yes, exactly,” said FirstMan. “We can use it to guide the
drone if we can get it working again.” FirstMan looked Jack in the eyes. “One
of the things that we carry on the troop carriers, in case of extreme
circumstances, is an EMP device. An electro-magnetic impulse explosive. It can
take out electronics within a half mile radius, with very little damage to
structures and even less damage to people. If we have this drone working, we
can use it to take out the outer wall defences at the Recycling Facility.”

“Why would you need to do that?” asked Jack.

“So that we can invade the place and take over.”

“What good would that do?” asked Jack. “Why would you want to
take over the place?”

FirstMan watched him, no longer wary, and Jack thought that
somehow he’d already decided he could tell Jack everything. “Because from there
we can control all of the facilities this side of the Trans. It’s the hub. The
only connection from the Junklands to the Inner Zone.”

“So you just want power?” said Jack, puzzled. “You want to rule
out here?”

FirstMan was shaking his head. “No, sure, yes. We want to take
over, but not just so that we run this place. It’s not all about power. But I
guess it sort of is.”

“Then what?” asked Jack. “Why bother. Why go to all that
trouble?”

“Because if we take over the Junklands, and all the facilities,
it’ll choke the Inner Zone, and they’ll no longer be able to send their Ark
ships without dealing with us. They need the resources out here and, if we
control that, then we will have something to bargain with.”

 Jack was confused. All this talk of taking over, of
bargaining, of bartering with the Inner Zone. “But why would you need to do
that?” he asked, but somehow he already knew the answer. There was a bigger
plan here. Something much grander in scale than he had first thought, and his
respect for this former soldier was growing with each new enlightenment.

“The Junkers,” said FirstMan. “All these people. If we control
the flow of resources, then we can barter. We can bargain a ticket off world. For
everyone.”

“Why tell me all this?” asked Jack.

“Because you asked,” said FirstMan.

“But, you actually think you can trust me enough to tell me
the whole plan, why?” asked Jack

“Because you have Ryan to look out for, and you have someone
you care about, like I care about these people. It’s someone to fight for.”

“Fight?”

“Yes,” said FirstMan. “I told you because we need someone to
carry a targeting beacon into the Recycling Facility, so that the drone can
locate the power plant we need to take down to lower the outer wall defences.”

“You want what?” asked Jack.

“I want you to get captured and taken back into the facility
with a beacon hidden on you. I want you to be the target for the EMP,” said
FirstMan.

To be continued in part 6...