Prakesh squeezes himself against the wall. He can’t take his eyes off Jojo’s body, sprawled across the floor in the corridor junction. Half of the boy’s neck is torn away.
“Got him!” someone shouts, speaking over the noise of the fading gunshot. The voice is shockingly close.
“See any others?” says another voice.
Prakesh starts to edge away from the T-junction, moving as quickly and quietly as he can. He glances to his right–there’s a turn ten feet behind him in the corridor, with a corner he can slip around.
Bam.
Another gunshot. Prakesh snaps his head around, half convinced that he’s hit. But whoever shot Jojo is blind-firing, the barrel of the rifle pointed around the corner. Another shot comes, the report deafening in the cramped space.
It feels like all the blood in Prakesh’s body is rushing to his head. But he keeps moving, sliding along the wall. The turn is three feet away. Two.
Prakesh slips around the corner. At the very last second, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. A head, poking round the edge of the junction.
They’ve seen me. There’s no way they didn’t.
Jojo’s blood is still speckled across his face, slowly going tacky. It loosens the muscles in his legs, and he has to work very hard to stay upright, pushing himself against the wall. He realises he didn’t know how old Jojo was, if he had a last name, anything about him except for the fact that he came from somewhere called Denali and he wanted to get off this ship more than anything else in the world.
He pauses, his knees bent, trying very hard not to breathe.
The voice comes again. “Nobody here. Guess he was the only one.”
“I don’t buy it, man. Why come down here by yourself?”
“Doesn’t matter now.” There’s a muffled thump, and it takes Prakesh a second to realise that it’s the sound of a boot colliding with Jojo’s body. He has to fight down a wave of nausea. Could he keep moving? Slip away silently? He tells himself to move, but he’s frozen to the spot.
Another pause. Then the sound of metal scraping on metal–Jojo’s gun, being lifted off the floor. The sound is followed by footsteps, trailing off into nothingness.
Prakesh counts to ten. Then twenty. Silently mouthing the words, telling himself to move. It’s only when he gets to thirty that his legs kick into gear.
He peeks around the corner.
Deserted.
In ten steps, he’s crossed to the T-junction. He pauses, holding his breath. There’s more distant gunfire, quick bursts of it, but the area around him is silent.
He glances down at Jojo’s body, immediately looks away. There’s nothing he can do. He can’t even take the body with him–not if he wants to get out of here alive. And he has to make it out, otherwise Jojo died for nothing.
He should try and find the fuel hangar. Link up with the others. He keeps walking, listening hard for any footsteps coming his way, keenly aware that he doesn’t have anything to defend himself with.
The corridor opens up into a wider hub area, with various passages leading off from it. There’s a sign bolted to the wall, but the letters are rusted over, faded with age. Prakesh can just make out the words AIRCRAFT ELEVATORS, but the rest of the sign is illegible.
The boats must be on a lower level, surely, so all he has to do is—
What is that?
There’s a subsonic hum, almost inaudible. He has to focus to hear it, and focus even harder to work out where it’s coming from. It’s emanating from his left, down a corridor that’s even narrower than the others.
Prakesh hasn’t been on the Ramona long, but he’s become familiar with the sounds of the ship, the rumbles and clanks and bangs that echo through its rusted body. This is different. This is something he hasn’t heard before.
Jojo told him the Engine was below decks. He said they didn’t let the workers get close to it. His curiosity overwhelms him, and before he can stop himself, he’s walking down the corridor, treading as quietly as he can.
A light flickers in the ceiling as Prakesh makes his way down it, the buzzing and clicking accenting the machine hum. He’s holding his breath, and has to force himself to exhale. There aren’t any more guards that he can see, but he still proceeds carefully.
The passage turns right, then left, and then Prakesh is in a high-ceilinged, brightly lit storeroom. The walls are lined with racks, just like the one that nearly took him and Jojo out. The shelves are brimming with equipment, a hodgepodge of frayed wires and oversized batteries and rusted cutting torches, nestled up against machinery whose use Prakesh can only guess at.
He focuses. There’s a set of double doors in front of him, shut tight, with two folding chairs off to one side. The two who killed Jojo must have been guarding it. For a few moments, Prakesh wonders why they abandoned their post. They must have decided to join the fighting on the upper levels.
The doors are twice his size, as if heavy equipment needs to be moved in and out. A metal plaque is bolted to the door, faded words picked out on it in black lettering. HAARP MOBILE UNIT 2769X-B8 AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.
Prakesh takes in the letters. The split in the doors bisects the B in MOBILE, and the first C in ACCESS.
HAARP.
He knows what that is. He’s sure of it. But it’s like something glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, vanishing the moment you turn to look at it.
Prakesh knows he has to get to the boats, knows that it won’t be long before the other workers escape. But it’s as if his feet have stopped listening to his mind. He looks around, then walks towards the door. There’s a chunky keypad on the wall by the door, but as he gets closer he sees that it’s dead, its digital display blank. And the doors aren’t sealed completely. There’s the tiniest gap.
The hum rumbles in Prakesh’s stomach.
He puts his fingers in the gap, braces his arms, and pulls.
The doors resist for a moment, then give way, moving so fast that they almost knock Prakesh off balance. The hum is even more powerful now. He steadies himself, then raises his head and looks inside.
Nothing but darkness. Prakesh is on a metal grate, and he can feel empty space below him. He moves along it, hands touching the wall. A line of switches slides under his fingers, plasticky to the touch. Taking a deep breath, he flicks them up.
Banks of lights begin to click on, one after the other. Huge spotlights in the ceiling spring to life, making Prakesh blink, chasing away the shadows.
He’s standing above another hangar–this one slightly smaller than the others. Most of the space is taken up by four enormous cubes, at least fifty feet on all sides, their surfaces dull grey metal. There’s a thin passage below him, running between the cubes. The floor is covered with thickly insulated cables, tangled up in each other, running up the walls of the cubes and into them via giant connectors. Some of the cables go higher, vanishing into the ceiling. Prakesh’s nostrils haven’t recovered from the chemicals he cooked up, but he can still pick out the sharp stench of ozone.
He puts a hand on the railing, trying to work out what he’s seeing. Again the word tugs at his mind. HAARP.
There’s a ladder hanging off the end of the platform he’s standing on. He swings himself onto it, climbing down, wincing as the noise of his feet on the rungs echoes across the hangar. He’s more careful as he hops off onto the grated floor and walks between two of the cubes.
He keeps walking, running his hand along the side of the cube. It vibrates ever so slightly under his fingers. The hum is loud now, so loud that Prakesh wonders why the whole room isn’t shaking. There must be some kind of inertial dampening, shock mounts built into the floor and ceiling…
He looks up as he comes round the corner of the cube. There’s a rectangular, rusted metal plaque, mounted on the side of the next cube along. Prakesh moves closer, reaching out to touch it. At the top of plaque is a triangle with an exclamation point inside it, its bright yellow turned ochre with age. There’s a litany of warnings underneath it–Prakesh’s mouth moves as he scrolls down it. “Unauthorised personnel… risk of electric shock… safety equipment…”
He reaches the bottom. There’s a set of barcodes, slightly raised off the metal surface. Underneath them are the words Mobile High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program–Installation 2769X-B8.
HAARP.
Prakesh’s heart starts beating faster. This is the Engine, he’s sure of it, but why can’t he remember what it does? He knows he’s heard the word HAARP before, somewhere on Outer Earth–a lesson in a schoolroom, a snatched conversation somewhere, an archived article on a tab screen.
He starts walking faster down the passage. At the very end, near the wall, is a screen built into the side of the cube on his right. It’s dusty, and as Prakesh wipes it off, it springs to life, flickering under his fingers.
The screen is old. Prakesh can see plenty of dead pixels, and there’s a crack that extends almost all the way across it. But he can still read the information displayed. He flicks across it with his finger, scrolling faster and faster. It’s data–complex scientific data. An analysis of radio frequencies, breaking them down by different values.
He moves further along. The second screen doesn’t work–the touch function has degraded, and it’s glitched out. But the third, which he finds at the back of the room, shows something different. It’s displaying complicated electrical diagrams, each one showing the flow of current.
Prakesh taps one, and a new window appears, displaying a separate graph. The lettering at the top of the window reads, Fluxgate Magnetometer Data File Reviewer.
He frowns. A fluxgate magnetometer measures the Earth’s magnetic field. But why would—
The puzzle pieces slot into place, and Prakesh’s eyes go wide.
HAARP. It’s weather control. A way of altering the make-up of the ionosphere to control climate.
Before the war, Earth’s governments tried to get various HAARP projects off the ground, but they didn’t manage to do it before the missiles fell. Except this HAARP unit is here. And it’s working. Prakesh puts his hand flat on the side of the cube, feeling the vibration travel up his arm.
This is why the area has become habitable. Why humans have been able to establish themselves here. This is the sacred Engine, the life-giver, the reason Prophet and his followers have thrived. Prakesh can’t believe something like this still exists, can’t believe that Prophet worked out how to get it running. It’s beyond belief.
And the workers are going to burn the fuel supplies. They’re going to sink the ship. And when they do, whatever this HAARP unit is doing to the climate will stop. It’ll be lost at the bottom of the ocean. This part of the planet will go back to the way it was before: a frozen wasteland. It’ll never recover.
Prakesh turns, and runs.