Submantle- The Alpha Key

by Patrick Lane

  Nifty’s grin matched Scotty’s as he manipulated the control levers and began the maneuver. He did what any sensible freighter captain would do and started building the train’s momentum.

  The leading rover swept in, its grapple punching through the delve-train’s slip-shield and locking onto her hull with a thud. Seconds later, the train bucked slightly as the towline grew taut and their momentum decreased. Five more thuds sent convulsions shivering through her hull as the remaining raiders grappled onto the armored train. Her powerful engines growled in protest as they struggled against the unfamiliar burden.

  Nifty held the jolt-levers in a white-knuckled grip, and gradually increased the throttle to the Eos’s engines, which protested further as he increased their output to cope with the drag— her engines were running at just over half their capacity, but the six frigates they were towing were dragging her down.

  “Throttle back, lad,” instructed Scotty, “or they’ll be onto us. They’ll not be running at full power themselves until the trap is sprung. The cowards will break off if they sense something’s amiss.”

  Nifty slowed slightly and began angling towards Harkenwell’s dock, dragging the rovers towards the Helix’s seventh coil.

  With a diameter of nearly eight miles, the exterior tunnel walls of the Helix offered no shortage of hiding places for the remaining rovers, and Nifty found himself growing impatient.

  He wished they would just spring the trap and be done with it already, and he didn’t have to wait long. Three more frigates dropped down from the sixth ring of the Helix above them, streaking through the magma with terrific speed. The trio had not yet arrived when the remaining three rovers darted in from their hiding spot from further along the Helix’s seventh coil, off their port-bow.

  With a series of heavy impacts, the final wave of rovers attached their grapples. No sooner had the last magnetic-grapnel made contact than all twelve frigates changed direction. They no longer tried pulling Eos backwards, they were now suddenly at the fore, dragging her forwards, at a slightly inclined angle, towards the Helixes’ sixth coil. Nifty couldn’t help but admire their impeccable synchronization.

  At this range Nifty was able to make out the finer details in each craft’s displacement readings. He was surprised to find that unlike most rover fleets, which were a collection of bodged-together personal transports salvaged from scrap heaps, this squadron’s vessels were all exactly the same. They appeared to be two-man vessels with compact hulls and sleek lines that flared towards the tail. The engines were no doubt modified to provide additional towing power.

  Nifty pitched Eos from side to side in a mock attempt to dislodge them, then he throttled down until it was safe to reverse the engines.

  “Where are you hiding?” Scotty muttered angrily as he scanned the display. “Scoundrels are well concealed, I’ll give them that.”

  “They seem better organized than other rovers we’ve tangled with in the past,” Nifty offered. “This doesn’t feel right, I think we should just deal with this lot and be done with it.”

  “Hold on lad. Look!” Scotty pointed to an irregularity on the approaching coil that was causing a peculiar ripple in the magma flow. An angular shape was protruding from the Helix’s typically smooth surface.

  Nifty shifted forward in his seat to get a closer look, keeping a firm grip on the levers; his eyes widened as the shape dislodged itself from the Helix and floated into the mantle. Shaped like a sleek trident, and more than a two dozen times larger than their delve-train, the dreadnaught engaged its engines and turned to meet the approaching craft.

  “Slagg,” Scotty cursed. “What is that doing here? These aren’t rovers, this is military. This has to be what happened to the missing Rangers. We’ve stumbled into a whip-wasps nest here, lad; we need to disengage immediately, we’re not equipped to handle a craft that size.”

  “What’s our next move? With this much drag, the dreadnaught may have an advantage over us in speed,” Nifty exclaimed, his Ranger training taking over while his mind raced, looking for a way out. From the reports he had read, even if they weren’t rovers, in an unsanctioned mantle space victims rarely survived to tell tales of their attacker’s whereabouts.

  Without waiting for a reply, he yanked back on the control-levers. Eos bucked wildly as the full force of her engines fought against the frigates. Banking to port, the rover’s grappling lines scraped across the delve-train’s bow as she powered into the turn, sending the rover’s neat arrowhead formation into disarray. Nifty felt the train surge forward, the tension from the grappling lines momentarily abating as they scrambled to avoid smashing into each other.

  “Look at that,” said Scotty. He gestured towards the holo-viewer with dismay. The frigates had neatly aligned themselves back into their previous formation behind the train.

  “Time to see what this old girl can really do,” Nifty said. He gripped the levers, forcing the prow of the train down, back towards Harkenwell.

  He noted with satisfaction the ease with which the near six-hundred-year old girl began to overpower the rovers. They would quite easily make it to Harkenwell before the Dreadnaught’s weapons were in range. He was about to say as much, when he was suddenly thrown forward. The train’s engines protested loudly as she fought against the monumental forces suddenly dragging her astern.

  Both men scanned the navigation display to see if more ships had somehow fastened onto her hull, but the readings showed no new arrivals.

  “Dross lode! Look at their energy wakes!” Scotty cursed, pointing to the trails of disturbed magma behind the rovers’ ships. “They were never pulling at full power, the trap was a trap!”

  They had slowed to a crawl, and the dreadnaught was closing in.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nifty starred anxiously at the approaching leviathan— even its image on the holo-viewer was intimidating. As the distance between the two ships closed, Eos’s systems were gradually able to provide more information about their aggressor, but the stream of specification data did little to suppress Nifty’s anxiety. He looked to Scotty for orders, knowing that fighting was their only realistic option.

  Oblivious to his attention, Scotty furiously searched the mantle, his brow furrowed in concentration as he shifted his console’s display in and out along the length of the Helix and surrounding magma.

  “Buckle up and brace yourself, lad,” snapped Scotty. He sent an alert to the cargo bays in back, letting Grunt and Snort know that they needed to harness themselves and prepare for a bumpy ride.

  Scotty leaned forward and engaged the retrofitted docking field’s lock-down feature. There was no perceptible difference in the train’s handling, but Nifty knew the frigates’ grapples were now held fast to the hull, a fact the rovers would not realize until they attempted to disengage.

  Scotty pointed to a blurred portion of the display, several miles beneath their position. “Time to test the frigates’ mettle,” he said with satisfaction. “That cloud of dross-magnets should do the trick. If we load up the hull, Eos should sink through the mantle like a stone in a pond. I doubt the pressure threshold of the frigates’ engines will last much past the tenth ring. And if they put up too much resistance we’ll just have to energy blast ‘em. I can take over the controls if you need me to.”

  “You? You pilot like my mother, we’ll be caught in an instant,” Nifty joked, eliciting a disappointed nod from the senior Ranger.

  Nifty buckled himself in and cranked back the control for his seat—the pilot’s chair snapped forward, coming to rest at the center of his console. Gripping the control-levers firmly, he squeezed every last ounce of speed from Eos as they descended towards the cloud of dross-magnets.

  An alarm flashed and the side of the dreadnaught lit-up on the display. It showed three tethered harpoons spearing out towards the delve train. Nifty could tell right away that they contained their own propulsion engines and they were locked onto Eos’s displacement reading.

  “Evasive action,�
�� Nifty barked. “Deploy countermeasure!”

  Nifty banked hard as Scotty opened half a dozen buster compartments lining the train’s rear. The busters, designed for just such an attack, burst from their moorings and sped out to intercept the harpoons. Only five managed to connect. Three on one harpoon and two on another; they exploded as one, leaving only useless tethers behind.

  “Dross,” Scotty commented. “Missed one.”

  The third harpoon was nearly upon the delve train and its gaggle of frigates. Nifty, anticipating this, waited until the last second. “Hold on!” He pulled back hard on the controls, breaking their decent—the unexpected maneuver causing the frigates to cluster in disarray at Eos’s rear.

  Thawump!! The speared head of the harpoon impacted with an unlucky frigate and released its energy blast. The charge was designed to temporarily disable a ship the size of the Eos, but for much smaller frigate its impact was catastrophic. The rover’s display fragmented and then winked out of existence, leaving an empty tether flapping behind the Eos.

  “That’ll put a brindle badger in their barracks,” Nifty scoffed

  “Ready yourself,” ordered Scotty, his voice almost drowned-out by the growl of the train’s engines. He slapped his hand across the three buttons that controlled the part of the hulls slip-sheild, leaving the smaller engine shields engaged.

  The jarring pressure of their sudden exposure almost ripped both control levers from Nifty’s hands. The full force of the magma rocked the plummeting train. Its heat-stoked hull was impervious to the extreme temperatures, but it was the slip-shield that allowed the train to forge through the mantle. It created an almost friction-less field around the train that let the vessel slip through magma effortlessly. If they hadn’t been going at full speed, they would have been swept into an uncontrolled, and potentially dangerous, spin.

  “To your left, to your left!” barked Scotty. “We’re heading straight for an eddy! If we get caught, there’s no telling where it’ll spit us out!”

  “I saw it, I saw it—it’s under control!” Nifty snapped back, exhilarated, though unsure yet whether he did, in fact, have it under control. At their current speed, even the slightest change in the current felt like hitting a wall of granite.

  “She’s holding up well,” yelled Scotty, sounding surprised, his voice oscillating as the tumbling train bounced him against the restraints of his chair. “They’re not going to be too impressed behind us though.”

  Dropping the slip-shield had slowed them down, but it had also forced the frigates to navigate the turbulent currents which the laboring train left in its wake. It was causing them to careen chaotically in their efforts to avoid a collision.

  They entered the cloud of dross-magnets and dozens of solid, metallic smacks could be heard as they pelted the train’s thick hull.

  The dross-magnets were magnetically charged chunks of metal, small enough that, individually, they were at the mercy of the magma, floating helplessly along with the current.

  However, now they began accumulating on the delve-train’s hull, they were becoming a dead-weight torpedo, and it was plummeting them inexorably down into the monstrous pressures near the earth’s core. Nifty made a mental note to congratulate the old man on his clever, though potentially fatal, maneuver.

  As they sank farther, the roaring of liquid rock passing by at high speed was drowned out by the thundering noise of a thousand tiny impacts. A brief look at the speed gauge confirmed what Nifty had already suspected, they were accelerating.

  “Slagg!” cursed Nifty, as the delve-train suddenly rolled hard to starboard, the hull shuddering violently. He struggled to regain control and aim the bow back down towards the cloud. “What are they doing?”

  “Trying to shake loose, lad,” Scotty replied as he ran a quick check on the delve-train’s modified docking field.

  “For all their fancy maneuvers, I doubt they’ve ever practiced escaping a dross cloud while being dragged along by an accelerating delve-train,” Nifty said confidently, though Scotty's tension was apparent from the vise-like grip with which he held onto his armrests.

  Finally, the delve-train punched through the bottom of the cloud and the rattling on the hull stopped abruptly. At the upper edge of the holo-viewer, Nifty saw that the dreadnaught had just entered the cloud and was still closing in. “How deep do you think the frigates can go?” He yelled over the reverberating protests of the train’s hull.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Scotty shouted, “but I suspect it’s not much further than the bottom of the Helix.”

  The dreadnaught exited the cloud just as they passed the tenth ring. The larger craft had turned its broadside towards the delve-train, and wasted no time in deploying a barrage of torpedoes. No less than twenty missiles materialized on the display, racing towards them with deadly speed.

  “Filthy cowards!” Scotty scowled. “Where did they get torpedoes?”

  They braced themselves for the inevitable impact, knowing that the delve-train could probably shake off a couple of direct hits, but not much more.

  “Here they come!” yelled Nifty, hunching his shoulders as he resisted the impulse to shut his eyes. On the display, the red dots were now virtually atop the train. They waited, braced, prepared, but nothing happened.

  No explosion, no impact, no anything.

  Cautiously, Nifty checked the display. The collection of tiny dots had flashed past the train, continuing down towards the core.

  They’d missed, all of them. Impossible!

  Less than half a mile below, the torpedoes detonated. The explosion ballooned into a cloud of smaller particles. Instinctively, Nifty pulled back on the control levers, his eyes still fixed upon the curved, red web of dots which threatened their escape.

  “Limpet mines,” cursed Scotty. “Hundreds of them.”

  The delve-train shuddered violently as Nifty fought to control their descent. At their current speed and distance, and with the weight of the dross-magnets and the firmly attached frigates, there was no chance that they could veer safely away from the mines without coming dangerously close to the dreadnaught. That left them with their second, equally unattractive option of stopping completely. Both decisions would leave them in the clutches of their pursuers.

  They desperately needed a third option.

  Nifty wracked his brain for a way out, but couldn’t help feel impressed at how neatly the rovers’ commander was handling their escape. Many long-range weapons had been developed in Submantle, but their use was frowned upon as being cowardly. Only the most ruthless of brigands would even consider it. However, by using the torpedoes to lay out a network of mines, which could be avoided by simply stopping or changing course, the rover captain had brilliantly balanced the time-honored precepts of Submantle engagements on a razor’s edge, forcing them to decide between capture and destruction.

  “Will those limpet mines favor the engines or the dross-magnets?” Nifty wondered aloud, not really expecting an answer. But there was no time to ponder the question—he slammed the throttle forward, heading straight for the deadly net.

  “We’re about to find out, lad,” Scotty yelled back, followed by, “Look!” as he pointed to the holo-viewer.

  The frigates were past the tenth ring, and, true to Scotty’s earlier assessment, the smaller craft’s engines could not contend with the pressures at this depth. The wake signature from one of the parasitic crafts suddenly broke formation. It began careening back and forth before breaking away, flipping end-over-end until its engines failed completely. The orphaned towline now whipped about wildly, wrapping itself around a nearby frigate and causing it to veer chaotically.

  Nifty punched the delve-train into the mines as Scotty deactivated the lock-down field and simultaneously sent a shockbolt of energy along the remaining tethers, sending the frigates tumbling into the curtain of limpet mines. He then re-engaged the slip-shield and the mass of the dross-magnets flaked away like rust from an old metal bar, drifting away in clumps
towards the waiting mines.

  Nifty noticed the difference immediately. Once the turbulence of their maneuver calmed, the control levers became manageable again. We’re clear! He thought, as the train surged forward, finally free of its tethers.

  Behind them, three frigates exploded, their engine’s signals suddenly vanishing from the viewer. Seconds later the train pitched forward as the shock-wave from the exploding mines hit them. The damaged rovers, their protected inner hulls now just glorified buoys, began their inevitable journey upwards towards the crust, buffeting about in the current like oversized, metal bubbles. Further detonations now came from the fore, as the dross-magnets intercepted four mines, two of which detonated uncomfortably close to the train.