Kali tore off her shirt, revealing the dalma plates strapped to her body. If there had ever been a need for modesty, she had long forgotten it.
“Unstrap me!” She turned her back on Mohab and held her arms out.
Lieutenant Kali Titian exposed and asking for help? In another lifetime, Mohab would have taken up the mantle for his people and driven a makeshift blade into her spine. But horrors had a way of evolving. In some cases, and in some places, they could shift sides entirely, even if it went against the laws of nature like light through a solid.
He ripped through the woven stone-wool. Kali handed over the stones and tugged her shirt back over her head.
“Now what?” His voice cracked. She’d shown him the bridge and the theoretical placement of the dalma plates, but what did any of it really mean next to the complex reality of manning a gunner?
Kali clearly noted Mohab’s apprehension. He found a hand squeezing his upper arm. “We can do this, Speaker’s son. A gunner needs a crew to function as a weapon of war. But as a spacecraft, it only needs one pilot. Plug in the dalma plates. We’ll get clear of the hanger, by which time the others should be free so we can open the doors. Then we can arm the weapons and take out the National Guard.”
It should have agitated Mohab to take instruction from a Bleek. Except he no longer thought of Kali that way. She could never atone for her sins, but she had been cleansed by other means – the heat of the furnace as they pushed his father’s body onto the slab; the drips off the slop trough which caught her legs as she squatted over it each morning; the mingling of her breath and blood with that of the Vary.
He lined up the dalma plates over the twin brackets, slid them in, and let go. Thin steel rods buckled in either side of the stones. There was a faint ticking of internal workings and a burning, salty smell that reminded Mohab of the stench of the delousing showers. There was a more hopeful reminder too, of ozone-scented air after an electric storm. A deep green glow emitted from the blocks, lighting up the symbols. Fluid dripped from the topmost edge of each stone, lengthening out and down in tendrils, flooding the carved surfaces.
Kali nodded at Mohab. “Good luck with the rest of the men. Strap back in as soon as you can.”
Mohab struggled to speak. He had an excruciating pain in the tender spot below his ribs – a mix of lactic acid and adrenaline. There was every likelihood that he was going to die before the hour was out. The thought turned his insides to liquid. But there was fire too, low down in the pit of his belly.
“I’ll see you on the other side of this,” he called over the roar of the waking engines.
xx
Shola Ricks looked so much more alien in the daylight. Her stitches were raw and lurid, her skin gone grey. Groff saw beauty too. The fur of her fantastically long ears shone under the natural light. He saw the quick flick of exotic eyes, so utterly un-Vary. The tail wormed behind her.
“Stay close, Shola,” he told her. Sun shining down. Fur so soft and yellow.
He pushed away the laundry trolley that he had used to smuggle her out, and gathered her to him. She smelt of dung and dry grass, shivering at his touch like a wild thing unused to contact.
“Suckgap?”
The block chief stepped out from the shadows of the building’s generator. He screwed up his eyes, smokestick between his lips.
Groff struggled to breathe. The block chief bumped his makeshift beater against a thigh.
“Doctor Harris asked me to move this subject to the infirmary.” Groff swallowed.
“That so, Suckgap?” The block chief swaggered closer. He’d earnt his position as head of the blockers on account of his height and muscle. He reminded Groff of a bull. The man’s skin was deep red leather. His square head sat on folds.
“Thing is, I’ve never known the good doctor remove any of his specimens from this lab unless the abomination is on a furnace slab.” Showing his teeth, the block chief rested his beater on Groff’s shoulder. He glanced at Shola, tucked up into the nook of Groff’s arm, and he winked. “Did Suckgap here decided to take you under his wing?” His nasty gaze slid back to the nurse. “Is that it, Groff? Did you take pity on the wretch and decide to hide her under your bed? Or were your intentions less pure?” He rested the tip of his beater against Groff’s chest.
Groff forced his dry lips apart. “Block chief. I am telling the truth. I have no reason to lie. Where could I hide the girl? What would be the point of running with her? We are caged in.”
“Caged in like the dirty beast that you are.” The block chief poked the makeshift beater into Groff’s chest, hard enough to hurt. “Tell me the truth now, Suckgap. Before I beat it out.”
Groff laid Shola down in the ash. “Doctor Harris asked me…”
The beater struck Groff hard on one side of his collar bone. The block chief repeated the blow to the stomach as the nurse choked and doubled over.
“The truth, Suckgap.” The man stood over him, blocking out the sun.
More blows connected at Groff’s hip, his arm, his breastbone. He whined and fell sideways.
Shola Ricks was a blur of movement, crouching, re-angling and powering forward. The block chief staggered under the weight of the golden girl as her teeth ruptured his throat. Groff struggled to his feet under a shower of warm blood. The taste of it caught his lips.
The block chief collapsed forward and Shola sprang from his back. Only now did Groff notice the exaggerated width to her jaw. Fresh-grown muscle rippled under the skin of her thighs. Blood smeared her neck and chin like war paint.
She hunkered down beside Groff, ears twitching and turning slightly as they tuned in to each new sound.
“Thank you, Shola Ricks,” he said softly. “Thank you.”
Twenty-Eight
The huge doors to the hanger drew apart, the hot desert air and blazing sunlight flooding in. Up on the balcony, the poison had dissipated; the National Guard slept on, their staring eyes engorged and glazing over. Below, others lay broken – guards mainly but also Vary. Those prisoners who had endured ran into the yard outside the factory. With every passing second, the likelihood of their nicks being activated increased. It only needed one guard to activate his wrist cuff and select to take out every Vary inside a five-metre radius. And so the Vary fought with blind mania, chopping and smashing with the tools they used as weapons.
One guard got lucky. Holding up his arm, he activated his wrist cuff’s group setting, taking out the nearest vary in a wave of blood spray. Seeing their brothers writhing in the dirt and ashes, others attacked the guard responsible. A sledgehammer dislodged the man’s jaw. A jack handle crushed his throat.
Up in the winch pit of the gunner, Mohab was struggling to open the doors. In theory, he needed to manually re-renter the keycode at the lock pad at the same instant that Kali flew the ship over the quarry. Hovering the belly of the craft in the mined-out dip, its lower doors would be accessable from ground level. With no one to help, Mohab knew the keycode was time-sensitive, but that he was also required to activate the door rig on his own – no easy task since it was a giant coil of motion mechanics with safeguard sensors. It took extra, precious seconds to contact Kali on the bridge and have her talk him through the manual override. Her voice carried through the comms unit, calm and reassuring. Mohab pictured her in charge of the legions of National Guard once at her command. Had she addressed them with the same measured tone and inexorable strength of conviction? Of course she had.
The vast ship responded to Kali’s expert handling. After an initial lurch as it uncoupled in the holding bay, the gunner maintained a slow advance, its movement barely perceptible. Mohab was only fully aware of its flight once he cracked the hull doors enough to let in a sliver of sunlight. As he forced them fully open, rapid gunfire began to ricochet off the craft’s exterior.
Kali needed to arm the gunner’s weaponry, but without a skeleton crew to man the defence unit, she was forced to take fire without returning it. Titian’s warcraft were specifically d
esigned to withstand an assault by any of Bleekland’s enemies, but that was with the hull doors secured. Honing her concentration, Kali poured her own energy into moving the huge ship over the quarry.
Spectroimages flitted across the walls, reflecting the scene below. She saw Vary workers, hundreds of them, scattering in every direction below the craft. Some were punished on the spot and twisted in pools of blood, their nicks activated by the panicking National Guard. There were instances of rebellion. She saw groups of Vary fighting to overcome the guards and stealing nick keys. Despite their emaciation, the workers found strength in sheer numbers. It was a strange, nihilistic sight and one she felt utterly removed from.
“You’ve got to set the ship down!” The voice came cracking through the comms unit. She heard rapid gunfire too. The National Guard were firing from all directions – the quarry, the walkway between the fences, and from the watchtowers where the guns were large and ammunition plentiful.
Mohab’s voice came through again, squeezed high with desperation. “Kali! We need to get the others on board! We need to take out the watchtowers. You need to deliver us from this pit.” There was a sob of maddened emotion, and then, “You owe us, Lieutenant.”
She did, didn’t she? For a fleeting moment, all sound closed off and her whole world refracted to a single pinpoint of light. There was only her, floating in a warm ether of nothingness.
The ship lurched as a magnetic grenade attached and fired; Kali recognised the bloom of soft grey smoke off the gunner’s helm. The wall screens showed more fire coming in from the watchtowers. Grenades slid through the air like birds. Explosions echoed in the distance, triggering light alarms across the length of the controls on the bridge.
“Bringing her down now,” she said into the comms unit. Her chest tightened. It was time to land the craft and fill the hull with a people she had once known as beasts. Time to give the Vary a fighting chance at razing Abbandon to the ground.
Sister Eva was the next on board. “We’ve got the bastards on the run!” she cried, turning to stretch out a hand and help others up into the hull. Mohab recognised most, but not all.
“We take those we can!” he shouted, doing his best to process the scores of wild and bloody faces. “We must close the doors. We need to man the weapons.”
There would be no chance of accessing the rest of the ship while the hull doors were still open. Kali had warned Mohab that much. In the black heat of the barracks, it had all sounded so feasible. ‘Load up with able bodied prisoners, close the doors to seal the hull, gain access to the gunner’s interior, then man the ship and activate its weaponry.’ The reality, though, was crushingly different. Gunfire pinged off the exterior of the hull, taking out whole rows of men who would never make it inside. A lucky few dodged the rock-shot, making it on board before any guards could get close enough to trip the prisoners’ nicks. Once hauled up inside, the diamantine skin of the craft disrupted the signal. Grown men cried in relief, even as the bullets whistled through the hull.
Mohab wanted to pull Sister Eva out from under the stampede. She deserved that much. But there was no time. He’d no idea how many men were on board. The initial plan had focused around volunteers from his barracks, but that hadn’t accounted for the riot they had sparked. The quarry was an amphitheatre, the clash of guards and Vary playing out below like blood sport.
Kali’s voice filled the hull, the sound distorted and disembodied. “I need those doors closed. Make sure Groff is in!”
“Groff! Groff?” Mohab pushed past the sweating bodies, checking faces and shouting at the men to fall back. He found Sister Eva; she held her arm to her chest where it had been crushed, but she was at least breathing still.
“Tuck yourself up at the back of the hull, out of the way,” he told her, and scrambled on. He couldn’t find the nurse or the hybrid child Groff had talked of rescuing. There were only the wild eyes of other men and the teeth-shattering hum of the hovering gunner.
“Oh, Shola Ricks. Oh, baby girl.” Groff fell to his knees and cupped her bloodied face. “Only, not such much of a girl now. Not so much. More a wild thing. More a hunter.”
Next to them, the block chief continued to bleed out from his shredded throat. He had stopped twitching and lay in the dust, red spit foaming at the corners of his mouth.
The camp sirens wailed. Mohab half-expected Shola Ricks to throw back her head and join in the howling. He stared at the fox girl in the stark sunlight and there was so much less of the girl he had known in the beast he had set free. She stank of alien, crawling things. Crouched at his side, her thin limbs jutting at strong angles, her breath, fast and shallow.
A roach skittered in front of them in the dirt and she leaned forward on all paws, cocked her head and sniffed at it. There was no recognition of the murderous act she had just committed, only this sniffing of a bug and tasting its carapace with her tongue.
“This place breeds monsters,” Groff said softly.
There was nothing for it but to run and keep on running. In the distance, he could see the gunner over the quarry, the vast discs oscillating and leaving their film in the air.
“We’ve got to go, Shola.” He tugged her arm and she snapped at him instinctually.
“Don’t you even…” He tried again, squashing the roach under his foot to break her fascination with it.
This time she hissed.
“Shola… fucking… Ricks! I promised I’d deliver you from this hellhole and I intend to keep that promise.” Grabbing the fox girl by the scruff of the neck, he dragged her away from the blood scent of the block chief’s body and into the shadows of the generator and the barracks beyond.
Everywhere, Vary struggled to find weapons against the blockers’ makeshift batons and the guards’ beaters and lethal wrist cuffs. Those prisoners unfortunate enough to find themselves in range of the cuffs had no method to fight back; they collapsed in fits of rabid ecstasy and bled out. The sight made Groff sweat in terror. He’d no choice, though. He had to press on, whether Shola intended to come willingly or not.
The reflector walls showed different angles of the camp. Kali was most interested in events at the far side. Behind a second wall of slice wire, Vary women and children had been herded into the yard outside their barracks and were being processed for work detail.
Time was running out. Having steered her father’s troops for so long, she had a keen understanding of procedure and protocol. Insurrection would be met with violence – short, brutal and meaningful. ‘Cut out a man’s heart and he will be made weak by blood loss.’ Her father’s rhetoric. Kali appreciated the sentiment. There had also been times aplenty when she and her fellow guards had taken the words literally.
“The sins of the father will be exacted on his children,” she said aloud. The comms unit was still active and she imagined her voice echoing through the hull. She meant the words as much for herself as for the Vary.
“I am closing the doors,” she shouted at the comms box, trying not to think too hard about the chaos inside the hull or the camp at large. Instead, she unhooked the locking gear to the hull doors. A warning flash on the console told her that the doors had been damaged by the rapid fire from the watchtowers. Or jarred open by something. Either way, she hadn’t time to worry. They needed to leave the nest of the quarry and fire up the gunner’s weaponry. Else every man, woman and child would die in the ashes.
Groff beckoned Shola after him. Together, they crossed the patch of ground between the infirmary and the National Guard quarters. The quarry road stretched into the middle distance where the gunner squatted. The ship might have been birthed of the ruptured earth below, a scintillating blur.
The air cracked with gunfire. Voices, everywhere – screaming, pleading, demanding. Men lay dead or dying, a great bleeding spread of them. Vary with their nicks activated. Guards with their skulls caved in. Prisoners who lived, like him, in daily pain and terror, had found strength to fight back. Swathes of them had been taken out by the firepower
from the watchtowers, but the Vary struggled on, pouring like termites from the dark crevices of the barracks, the factory, the quarry, and the assembly yard.
“We head for the ship,” he told Shola Ricks, and hoped she understood. Seeing her rip out the block chief’s throat had left him uncertain whether she had any semblance of herself remaining.
She stared at him with unnatural eyes.
I am a fool to have thought I could ever save you, Groff thought. I wanted to break you free, but now I see the cage is welded to you. He had committed to her rescue though, sacrificed easy passage on board the gunner to run and fetch her. And so he led the way, flattening against the wall of a barrack building, pressing her back with his hand when guards ran past. They hid often, in the shadows and in doorways. All the while, the gunner hovered at the quarry, its reverberant hum underpinning the atmosphere. Occasionally, Shola would give a short, sharp bark of alarm. Groff did his best to soothe and to quiet her.
At last they were on the quarry road. Groff found an abandoned riser wagon and he scooped Shola up and made her lie, belly down, on the wagon base.
“Don’t peep over.” He punched the drive unit to activate the board. Tucking in at the rear of the wagon, he guided it forward, in and out the fallen and the mayhem of battle. There were Vary running towards the barracks and Vary running towards the quarry, a great exodus who left a trail of wounded and dead in their wake. Groff felt a wave of hope. He and Shola had a chance now. Together, they would find ways to undo her animalistic behaviour and to right the wrong in her nature. First though, they needed to make it to the hull doors.
Groff counted down. His heart swelled with possibility and the franticness and hurt beneath his ribs. Breath burned in his throat. His limbs felt molten.
He could see Mohab waiting in the doorway, searching the battle below. Mohab’s eyes fixed on Groff and he started yelling.
Rise Page 20
