by Peter Nealen
Unfortunately, faced with the swarming M’tait and the strange sense of dread that preceded them, most of Colonel Piett’s soldiers were already running. Verheyen and a handful of others were still fighting, though even as they turned and ran toward the back of the canyon under Gaumarus’s and his companions’ covering fire, two were struck by borers, falling to thrash out the last of their lives, screaming and bleeding on the rocky ground. Another was blasted to fine ash by a whipping, smoky beam.
Then the indig’s rotary guns opened fire, spewing heavy slugs into the draw with a rattling, stuttering thunder. More rockets poured into the gap, hitting closer and closer to the defenses, hammering Gaumarus and the Knights with their shockwaves and stinging clouds of dust and fragments. Gaumarus felt the sting of wounds on his hands and arms as the ugly, black explosions nearly knocked him flat, but Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff held on to his arm and dragged him along.
Another series of beams lashed out. One slashed the rightmost rotary gun in half, blasting the indig firing it to ash and scorched body parts. Another speared Bodhson through the chest, turning everything above his knees to ash.
Gaumarus had grabbed his coilgun as Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff had dragged him away from the laser, but he was only gripping it in one hand as they ran and stumbled past the carnage around the wrecked rotary cannon. Kan Tur and Xanar Dak were still fighting, each dashing back a few paces while the other thumped powergun bolts into the murk and the swirling, swarming shapes of M’tait. Gaumarus glanced back and saw Xanar Dak turn to run, but the Knight suddenly stumbled as a borer smacked into his sustainment pack.
“Kan Tur!” Gaumarus yelled as he shrugged off Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s grip and turned, taking a knee and leveling his coilgun in a textbook perfect shooting position. He wasn’t thinking about any of it at that point; he was simply reacting, his training taking over despite his fears and the noise and terror all around him.
Sergeant Verlot would have been proud.
He ripped off a long burst of coilgun fire, offering some meager cover for Kan Tur to run to Xanar Dak and dig the borer out of his pack before it could penetrate to his armor plate. He had to grab a tool off his belt and get deep to capture the thing, but the wriggling metal worm soon came free, and he hurled it away before levering Xanar Dak to his feet.
Gaumarus kept up his fire until the Knights had passed him, then Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was dragging him back. The scout paused just long enough to put a massive bullet into the M’tait Slayer that suddenly bounded forward, leaping over the abandoned laser cannon, and then they were running for their lives.
An indig appeared ahead, whirling what looked like a long rope with seven or eight bulbs attached to it. Only after a moment did Gaumarus notice that those bulbs were smoking…and then he remembered the diversionary explosion of the day before. He gritted his teeth and put everything he had into keeping his legs pumping, trying to keep up with the armored figures ahead of him.
The indig let the rope fly, and it spun away behind them. A series of thunderous booms echoed through the box canyon as more indig fired their repeaters at M’tait he couldn’t see behind him, and then the world seemed to end.
The catastrophic, rippling crash of the explosions smashed Gaumarus flat on his face on the ground and drove the wind out of his lungs. He saw stars, and thought for a moment he’d gone blind. It took him a moment to realize that he was being dragged, and that the darkness in front of his eyes was not blindness, but the darkness of a tunnel. A dim, diffuse glow was coming from behind them, even as the ground cracked and groaned around them. The explosives the indig had used were bringing down the walls of the box canyon in another landslide. A moment later, with a groaning boom, something collapsed behind them, and everything went black.
13
He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear, even though sounds still seemed muted and deadened, even with the built-in hearing protection in his helmet. He could hear gasps for breath, sobs of fear and relief, the rustle of movement. And amidst it all, he could hear the chirps and clicks of the indig speech. He couldn’t follow any of it, but it sounded like an argument.
A light flared, and when his face shield brightened, he realized just how dark it really had been in the tunnel. His light-enhancement had had nothing to work with.
There were easily two dozen indig fighters there in the tunnel, along with something else that bulked just outside the range of the light. Looking back, he could see the collapsed pile of rubble that had sealed off the tunnel mouth. Even as he looked though, he saw some of the rubble shift, and thought he could hear something, like a bigger version of the buzzing of the borers.
He peered back at the big object behind the clump of indig. The light was between him and it, so he couldn’t see much of it. But it looked like a machine.
Turning his attention back to the indig, he saw Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff arguing with another mountain tribesman. This one was slightly taller and thinner than the others, and had a strangely shaped crest rising from the shoulder of his jacket. A leader, perhaps?
“Can you understand what they are saying?” Kan Tur asked him, the volume of his external speaker turned down.
He shook his head. “I only learned the sign language,” he confessed. “I don’t know of any human who can really understand any of the indig languages, much less the mountain tribes’.”
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was pointing back toward the humans, but the taller one didn’t seem to respond. He didn’t even look at them. At least, he didn’t seem to. Gaumarus realized he had no idea just how far to either side the indig could see with those four blank, black eyes.
Once again, he realized just how little he really knew about their neighbors on Provenia.
Finally, the tall one made a gesture he couldn’t interpret, and Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff turned to him.
[I have convinced Fire Arrow in the Sky that you can help us, that humans and The People must band together during this time of war,] he signed. [He has agreed that you will be allowed to keep your weapons. But understand that you will be watched and guarded, and any false move will be punished swiftly and mercilessly.]
[Where are we going, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff?] Gaumarus signed, realizing that he was probably the only one there who knew the sign language. As the indig moved around the hulk of the machine behind them, he could see Colonel Piett and several of his detachment, kneeling on the floor, watched over by indig with those big repeaters in their clawed hands.
[We are going to my home, Friend of Hunters,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed. [We are going to the Badlands, and the City of The Twenty Tribes.]
The hulking mechanism turned out to be a vehicle, all right. It was a mining machine, or at least that was what it appeared to be to Gaumarus. A massive cylinder, made of thick, riveted steel plates, mounted a massive, cone-shaped drill at each end, that seemed to double as a propulsion method. He couldn’t immediately see what the machine did with the rock and soil it pulverized as it drilled through the ground, but he also wasn’t afforded a great deal of time to investigate the machine. The humans were chivvied aboard by silent, armed mountain tribesmen.
Most of the Provenians seemed to be in shock. The Knights were quiet, staying alert and keeping their powerguns ready in their hands. Kan Tur found a place close to Gaumarus in the cramped, overloaded passenger compartment inside the machine.
“These natives seem to be full of surprises,” he said, his translator pitched almost as low as a whisper. “Did you have any idea that they could build such mechanisms?”
Gaumarus shook his head, his eyes still on Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. “No,” he said. “It’s been common knowledge for as long as humans have been on Provenia that the indig are fierce fighters, but little more than that. They have no cities, only small villages, and while they work metal, they have no real technology of their own that we haven’t given them.”
Kan Tur looked u
p and around them. “Did you ever give them self-propelled mining machines?”
“No,” Gaumarus replied. “Nor did we give them the machines they could use to make them.”
But did we ever consider what they might be doing in the Badlands all these years? Once they knew what we could build, did we really think that they weren’t smart enough to start to figure out how to build it themselves?
And that was assuming that the mountain tribes hadn’t already surpassed their lowland cousins long before humans had ever arrived on Provenia.
The miner lurched into motion, and with a terrific screaming, grinding noise, they were on their way.
Conversation was impossible over the racket. All he could do was wait and watch as the machine shook and rattled around them.
The mountain tribesmen were driving the machine from a small cockpit just above the passenger compartment. The glow of instruments was in a slightly different range than the human eye was quite used to; the indig must have seen farther into the infrared than they’d ever expected. They’d certainly never seen an indig instrument panel; they’d never imagined one existed. The controls that he could see appeared to be a maze of levers connected to an equally intricate tangle of cables and pipes.
For that matter, the passenger compartment itself, crammed with humans in and out of armor, along with several of the indigs with their big rifles, standing guard over their charges, was sheathed in bare metal but lined with various pipes and dials and cables. It looked like a mad mechanic’s hobby workshop, but it seemed to function.
He glanced around at his fellow passengers, or guests, or prisoners. He still wasn’t sure exactly what their status was. Most of the Provenians seemed unnerved at best. Colonel Piett was a quivering, sweaty mass of doughy flesh, his eyes just about rolled up in his head, clearly terrified out of his mind. Gaumarus wondered how much of his panic was due to being a “guest” of the mountain tribes, or if he was even aware of where he was. He suspected that the M’tait’s fear inducer, or whatever it was, hadn’t had to work very hard to bring the colonel to the edge of losing his mind.
Three of “his” men had escaped the box canyon. Raesh, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a lean, hard face, was leaning on his knees, peering around the compartment, taking everything in. He thought Raesh had been a footslogger, and the man seemed perfectly calm. After what they’d been through, the mountain tribes really didn’t seem that bad by comparison.
Evrard was a small, wiry man, with pointed features and shifty, gimlet eyes that were watching Colonel Piett closely. Something about Evrard seemed ever so slightly off, but he was a fellow survivor and a fighter, so Gaumarus decided he could worry about it later.
Chauwens, the fat one, was asleep, his head back and his mouth hanging open, his snores lost in the noise of the mining machine’s passage through the rock.
The ten Knights who had made it were still in their armor, their helmets rendering them impassive and unreadable.
It was getting hot inside the compartment, but Gaumarus imagined that was normal. They were churning their way through the planet’s crust, powered by who knew what sort of engine. There was a certain crudity to the machine’s construction that made him suspect that it wasn’t running on a modern human power cell.
He wondered how long it was going to take to get to the Badlands. Those feared mountains were a long way from the Monoyan Plain.
The thought of the Monoyan Plain brought him up short. He realized that he hadn’t thought about his family since the battle. He’d been too preoccupied with survival to think too much about their fate. Now, though, all the fears that had gripped him before they had left the staging area returned. Had they made it to the refugee camp? Had they made it off the farm at all? If they had made it to the refugee camp, what had become of it after the defeat?
Were they even then in M’tait hands?
The only possible consolation he could think of was that maybe the M’tait had been, in their legendary capriciousness, distracted by the battle and the siege of Cators to bother with a settlement so small as a Family farm. Of course, it was a slim hope, but it was a hope.
It didn’t help. He closed his eyes and saw Waldenius Pell’s seamed, bitter face, his eyes boring into him, laden with accusation. He’d left the family to fight with the PDF, and hadn’t been there to defend the Family holdings when the M’tait had come. It wouldn’t matter to his grandfather that he’d stood and fought the M’tait, or even that he’d killed a few, in so doing surpassing so many of the Provenian soldiers. He’d left the Family, and in so doing he had failed.
He shuddered, and looked down at his hands, black with smoke and grime. With no one to talk to, trapped in the compartment, isolated by the noise, the fear and the recrimination reverberated in his mind. He couldn’t think of anything else. And the fact that he was helpless, trapped in this machine beneath the ground, heading wherever its pilots took it, only made matters worse.
Kan Tur’s helm turned toward him. He clenched his hands to disguise the shaking and straightened, leaning back against the warm metal behind him, hoping that his face was composed.
There’s nothing you can do. Absolutely nothing. You are at the mercy of the Way now. Somehow, it still didn’t help. He thought of his sister, and he felt a wave of nausea. He squeezed his eyes shut against it.
Mercifully, his ever-worsening mental cycle of recrimination and terror was brought to a sudden end as the machine lurched to a halt.
He jerked upright, his eyes snapping open. The hull outside was creaking and popping alarmingly, but that might just have been because of the heat buildup. It was sweltering in the passenger compartment, and the air positively stank of hot metal and even hotter oil. It was almost enough to cover the acrid scent of sweating humans and the stranger, spicier smell of the indig. It wasn’t a familiar odor; he had never been in a confined space with any of the scouts.
One of the mountain tribesmen went to the big hatch and pulled the lever that cranked it open. It creaked and screamed as it swung aside; the heat from the friction of passing through the crust must have burned away any lubrication on the hinges. Or maybe it had simply made the metal expand too much for the lubrication to have much effect.
Beyond, a dull red glow flickered. The indig pointed, his other clawed hand still on his rifle.
The Provenians closest to the hatch were Piett’s people. They weren’t in a hurry to step into the unknown, but the indig pointed more insistently, chirping loudly.
“Staying here will not help,” Xanar Dak said, his translator at full amplification, the mechanical voice echoing strangely and reverberating painfully in the close space. “We should go with them. We are committed now.”
Several of the Knights turned toward him; they might have been glaring. If Morav Dun or the other Knight Subcommander were still among them and had said nothing, Gaumarus could imagine why they might not take kindly to Xanar Dak’s interjection.
But he was right. There was nowhere else to go, and the indig didn’t seem to be inclined to take “no” for an answer. Clawed hands were already gripping repeaters a little more tightly.
Gaumarus looked over at Raesh. The big man met his gaze with a slight, sardonic smirk. “Shall we show them how it’s done, Raesh?” he asked.
“Sure, Corporal,” Raesh said easily. “After what we saw back there, I don’t know what they’re afraid of here.”
Kan Tur might have chuckled a little, but the sound was quickly cut off. Together, the two Knights and two battered, filthy Provenian soldiers followed the indig fighters out through the hatch.
They found themselves on a rattling gangway leading down to a rough rock floor. The cavern was huge, bigger by far than the tunneler seemed capable of making by itself. Dim, flickering lanterns hung from posts driven down into the rock along a mostly-flat pathway.
The cave rose nearly ten stories overhead, and the lanterns illuminated it only dimly, but there were enough scattered around that he could make o
ut the general shape of the place. He was quickly convinced that it couldn’t have been natural; there were grooves in the rock beside the leveled path that could only have been made by blasting. Given the indig’s recently demonstrated affinity for explosives, he didn’t find that all that surprising.
What was surprising was the train in the middle of the cave.
It was built not unlike the tunneler they’d ridden in to get there. The cars were cylinders of riveted metal, with hatches in the sides and no windows. Given that it most likely was exclusively for use underground—he’d never heard of anyone seeing anything like an indig train, which meant they kept it hidden—there was no point to having windows.
It rested on simple wheels on metal rails, but an armature led up to a cable overhead. A cable that hummed and occasionally sparked with an electric charge.
It surprised him, just how analytically he could look at all of this. No one had ever dreamed that the indig were anything but savages, slowly being taught technology and civilization when they worked with the human Provenians. The mountain tribes, especially, couldn’t have been capable of anything like this. And yet here it was.
He glanced over at Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff, but the indig was speaking rapidly and quietly with another of the mountain fighters, who was pointing up toward the surface as he spoke.
What else don’t we know? You were right among us the entire time, learning and reporting back. But this doesn’t look like anything we would have built. Maybe some of the Ancestors, long ago, but this isn’t stolen tech. Those guns aren’t stolen tech, either. They’re made specifically for you.
He suddenly thought he understood a little better just why no expedition, no matter how well-armed and well-equipped, had ever returned from the Badlands.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff finally turned to him. His inscrutable black eyes showed nothing as he scanned the Knights and soldiers moving ahead of the rest.
