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 our 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
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
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