Tales From the Crucible

by Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells

  “No.” Roz reached up to wipe her traitorous leaky eyes, then realized she still hadn’t cleaned her hands from the jetpack job. “No, I want to talk to this person first,” she said, sniffing as she grabbed a fresh rag and dabbed at her cheeks.

  “Roz…”

  “No! Grizl, you owe me this.” She put so much menace into her tone that the goblin actually shrank back a little. “You took me in when I needed help, and I’ll always appreciate that. But I’ve more than paid you back in blood, sweat, and tears, and I’ll be damned if I let you gamble away the only thing I have left of my family without at least trying to cut a new deal.”

  “A new deal?” Grizl narrowed his eyes. “What kind of deal are you thinking of?”

  “The kind you don’t get to know anything about until we get there.” Roz looked down at herself. She was still wearing protective leathers over her simple blue overalls, was covered in grease and soot, and smelled like jetpack fuel. Oh well.

  “Take me to them. Now.”

  To say that Roz was surprised when Grizl took her to a saurian bar was an understatement. saurians generally didn’t have much to do with vault matches – they considered themselves too refined for base entertainments like gambling. Roz became even more suspicious when Grizl hustled her around to the back of the establishment. “What, you’re good enough for them to fleece but not good enough to let inside?” she snapped at Grizl.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Grizl replied. “’Course, the guy I made the bet with isn’t allowed inside either. His brother owns this place, I think. He’s kind of a… renegade saurian. He’s got an apartment in the back.”

  “A renegade saurian?” Roz’s voice rose in disbelief, making Grizl turn and shush her with one long finger pressed to his lips.

  “Don’t go announcing it to the world,” he hissed.

  Roz resisted the urge to pull on her hair in frustration. “Where did you even find this guy?”

  “Just – can you be quiet for one minute? We’re here.” He stepped up to a small, rather plain-looking apartment at the back of the building, lifted his hand, and knocked respectfully.

  A moment later the door slid open on its own, and a deep voice called out, “Come in, Mr Crustic. Bring your apprentice.”

  Roz jumped. “How does he know about me?”

  “How do saurians know half the stuff they know?” Grizl asked, morosely. He wiped his feet before stepping inside, and gestured for Roz to do the same. She walked into the apartment and–

  This was more like what she expected of a saurian. The temperature was warmer than outside – set to saurian comfort levels, no doubt – the walls were eggshell blue, the furniture was soft and wide and suited to a carnisaur’s body, and all the fittings were made of gold – or at least, something that looked too close for Roz to tell the difference. The Saurian Republic was one of the oldest civilizations on the whole Crucible, and they had a commensurate amount of wealth, knowledge, and prestige. Not to mention arrogance, Roz thought. She hadn’t met many saurians – they didn’t tend to mingle with the lower echelons of society – but those she had met had condescended to everyone around them as easily as breathing. This apartment might be modest by their standards, but to Roz it was fancier than anything she’d ever set foot in before.

  “Heya, Mr Tsaagan,” Grizl said, inclining his head toward the saurian resting on the central room’s couch. He – judging from the brightly colored feathers around his head, he was probably male – was reclined in a position of ease, with a reader in one claw and a drink in the other. He wore a plain black jumpsuit, atypically drab for the species, but it looked tailored to his long, lean form. His eyes were the color of polished æmber, and his narrow snout was filled with needle-sharp teeth.

  “Mr Crustic.” Mr Tsaagan looked from Grizl to Roz. “I assumed you were coming to pay your debt, but this doesn’t look like a treasure robot to me.”

  “No, this is–”

  “Your apprentice, I know.” Mr Tsaagan stared at Roz. “Why are you here, girl?”

  “First off, you can call me Roz, not ‘girl,’” she said. Grizl sighed despairingly, but the saurian just quirked his head to the side.

  “Very well. Why are you here, Roz?”

  “Because you can’t take my bot.” Once she started speaking, the words just flowed out of her, almost as though they had a mind of their own. “TRIS is the only legacy I have of my parents. They’ve been dead for almost a decade now, and without TRIS, I…” I don’t know if I’d be able to remember their faces, or the way my mother tucked me into TRIS’s treasure vault at night, or the lullaby my father sang to me. “I need it. I came to ask if there’s another way for us to cover Grizl’s debt to you.”

  “Hey, don’t drag me into this!” Grizl protested.

  You dragged me in first, Roz wanted to say, but didn’t. Hierarchy was very important to saurians, and she wasn’t going to embarrass herself or shame her master – even though he wasn’t much of one – by badmouthing him in public.

  “Hmm.” Mr Tsaagan put his drink down and stroked his scaly chin thoughtfully. “An interesting proposition, although not one I’m inclined to accept. If word gets out that I can be swayed into changing my mind about a debt, then everyone will try to renege.”

  “This wouldn’t be reneging,” Roz promised. “I want to get you a fair-value trade. I can fix almost anything–”

  “I have no personal need for a mechanic or engineer,” the saurian interrupted her.

  “I could do work for your family, then!”

  “My family doesn’t acknowledge me.” Mr Tsaagan smiled sharply. “At least not publicly. No.”

  Roz bit her lower lip. “There must be something you want,” she said. “Something I might be able to get for you that you can’t get for yourself.”

  Mr Tsaagan stared at her for a long moment, his expression impenetrable, and Roz felt a surge of despair well up in her chest. If only I’d fixed TRIS sooner, we could make a break for it. There’s no way right now, though. We wouldn’t make it a mile.

  “There might be something,” Mr Tsaagan said at last.

  Roz exhaled in a woosh, the sense of relief almost knocking her over. “That’s great,” she managed. “What is it?”

  “I have a personal interest in the history of the Saurian Republic.” Mr Tsaagan turned his reader over and activated its hologram mode. A picture sprang up in the middle of it, hovering about a foot over the device. “Particularly in its ancient transport chariots.” The chariot displayed by the hologram was a two-seater, blockier and less elegant than the modern ones Roz had seen, but there was a certain elemental ferocity to it, somehow.

  “I have a client who owns the hull of one of these chariots, and is trying to find replacements for its missing parts,” he went on. “There are rumors that some of the oldest chariots of our people, lost in conflict with the smilodon barbarians, have ended up buried in the vast trash piles of Hub City.” Mr Tsaagan caught Roz’s eyes over the hologram. “Have you ever seen anything like this in there?”

  Roz didn’t bother to deny that she ever trawled through the trash heaps looking for spare parts – it was a part of every apprentice mechanic’s job. And, in fact… “I have, actually,” she said. “It was about six years ago.” She’d been so much smaller then, able to wriggle through the tightest tunnels in the heaps, where even the cyber rats couldn’t get to her. She remembered seeing the gunky chariot, surrounded on three sides by piles of rusted metal slag but still somehow uncrushed. “It won’t be in the same place now, of course,” because the dumps were mobile beasts, shifting minutely but constantly, “but I’m pretty sure I can find it again.”

  “Excellent.” Mr Tsaagan nodded. “If you do, and if you retrieve the part I need, then I’ll consider the debt expunged.”

  Roz smiled gratefully. “That’s wonderful, thank you! I’ll start looking first thing tomorrow, and–”

  “You have twenty-four hours, beginning now.”

&n
bsp; The smile fell off her face like her personal gravity had just multiplied by a thousand. “What?” she asked faintly.

  “Twenty-four hours.” Mr Tsaagan seemed slightly remorseful, judging from the way his topmost feathers flattened out, but his voice was firm. “That’s all the time I can afford you before I have to leave the city myself.”

  “She can do it,” Grizl put in confidently while Roz was still processing. “If the kid here says she’s seen it, then she’s seen it. Roz doesn’t tell tales.”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t,” Mr Tsaagan agreed. “Is this deal agreeable to you, Roz?”

  Roz straightened her back and stiffened her knees. This was the only chance she’d get to keep TRIS. It was a long shot, but she had to take it. She’d never forgive herself if she just let her robot go. “It is,” she said. “We have a deal, Mr Tsaagan. Give me the specs for the part you need, and I’ll be back here with it in twenty-four hours.” She held out her hand, pleased that it hardly trembled at all.

  Mr Tsaagan extended his own hand and carefully shook, mindful of his claws. “I look forward to it.”

  Acid-proof overalls, check. Æmber ash-filtered ventilator and goggles, check. Compact tool field kit, check. Zap blade, check. Roz stuffed a protein bar and another pouch of water into the pocket on the back of her pack, then shouldered it and fastened it firmly around her torso. She secured the zap blade in its sheath at her hip, checked her boots for holes for the fifth time… and finally admitted that she was stalling.

  You can’t stand around waiting forever, Roz reminded herself, and forced her feet to head toward the Nexian junk heap, one of the biggest, oldest piles of trash in all of Hub City. It wasn’t a long walk, even with thirty pounds of baggage, and she was there in fifteen minutes. The smell was enough to have her strapping her ventilator on before she could even see it.

  All right, here we go. You’ve got a chariot to find and not a lot of time to do it in. That was true, but… it was a lot easier to be brave about entering the dump when she was in a well-lit room in the middle of the day, instead of alone at the edge of the pile at twilight just as the cyber rats were starting to become active. One of them, a big, scarred critter with a bionic eye, scuttled out of the heap in her direction. It stopped a few feet away, looking Roz over like it was assessing her for parts.

  “Come any closer and I’ll zap the tail off you,” she warned it. The rat stared a moment longer, then yawned, showing off its shining, metallic teeth, before scurrying back into the pile.

  “Rats with fangs. Great.” Roz sighed and shook her head to clear it. She could do this. She’d trawled the pile enough to know which way the shift was progressing, and even though she hadn’t seen the chariot in six years, she could extrapolate where she expected it to be.

  She tapped her finger against the holo-projector built into her left-hand glove, and her personal map of the dump sprang a few inches into the air.

  Roz had spent years compiling this map – it was only smart to mark down where the best hauls were, or spots where you might have hidden some raw materials to come back for later. Sometimes the caches were found, but the dump was so huge that there was space for everyone who wanted to trawl it. That didn’t mean it was without its dangers, though. Apart from the rats, there were several gangs of looter goblins who tried to lay claim to the dump, constantly fighting with each other and either scaring off or shaking down anyone else they found in it. They didn’t like direct confrontation, preferring to set traps for unwary dump-divers, but Roz had gotten good at recognizing those over the years.

  As for the gurgle pools… well, that was what the ventilator was for. Roz just hoped it would buy her enough time to get out of the way if she ran into one.

  “Okay.” She tapped the map, lining it up with where she was about to enter. “I probably need to go… a little over a mile in,” she muttered to herself. It didn’t seem like so far out in the open air, but she’d need every second once she got deep into the trash. “You can do this.” You have to do this.

  Roz squared her shoulders, double-checked her straps, then walked over to the edge of the pile and began to climb. Her favorite entrance was halfway up the heap, and she wanted to get inside while she still had some light. After about ten minutes, she found her personal mark – a small, stylized R – on a rusty metal sheet, and lifted it up. Beneath it was a small, jagged-edged tunnel leading down at a forty-five-degree angle. Roz crept inside, slowly lowered the metal sheet back down, and began to crawl.

  Watch for the rebar on the right… little dip here… gotta bring something to sop that oil up, I slip in it every single time. The first hundred yards of this was old, familiar territory for her. She looked for signs that someone else had been in her tunnel and saw a few – mostly rat droppings, ugh – but there weren’t any thread-wires or fresh, flat pieces of metal that could be pressure plate-traps left by goblins, so that was good. It was dark, but she’d rigged her goggles with a night-vision setting that lit everything up in shades of orange and green and gold, depending on their temperature.

  Hopefully, Roz would see anybody coming her way before they noticed her, and have time to hide.

  Roz’s tunnel filtered out into a wider one, tall enough to walk in as long as she hunkered down. She carefully picked her way along the floor of it, avoiding anything that steamed, crackled, or looked too sharp for her boots to handle. The refuse of a hundred different civilizations and cultures lay in fractured, brittle piles all around her, ninety-nine per cent true trash, one per cent genuine treasure.

  Was that part of a martian blaster? They guarded their weapons jealously, she could probably sell that for – but no, she already had a goal. Don’t get distracted, Roz. Eyes on the prize.

  She pressed on into the heart of the dump, lifting holey hydraulic tubes out of her way and checking every pile of metal shavings she passed for pawprints or fresh gang signs. Nothing. Before an hour had passed, her map showed that she was already almost halfway there. This is going to be easy!

  Clink… clink… clinkclinkclink…

  Roz turned her head toward the strange, pattering sound. What on the Crucible was–?

  “Ah!” She dodged to the side just as a pair of huge cyber rats leapt from the top of the tunnel at her. The top of the tunnel, how had they – what were they–?

  Magnetic paw implants? Whoever was modifying these rats had waaay too much time on their hands.

  Roz drew her knife as the rats flanked her, their alloy claws digging viciously into the refuse as they stalked closer. “Stay back,” Roz said, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice. She didn’t want to yell – no need to bring more trouble down on herself – but she didn’t want to fight if she didn’t have to, either. Sometimes you could back a rat off with your voice.

  The one on the right side snapped at her, narrowly missing her foot and biting through a piece of sheet metal instead. Okaaay, there would be no talking these rats down. She flicked the button on the bottom of her zap knife to change its range, then pointed it at the closest rat.

  Zzzzaappp! A hundred thousand volts of electrical energy shot between them, crackling as the beam encountered the rat’s gleaming, upturned nose. The cyber rat leapt into the air with a squeal of pain, jumping so high that it bounced off the ceiling. It fell down into a heap on the tunnel floor and lay still.

  Roz didn’t have time to check it – the other rat leapt onto the wall, scuttled up beside her head, and swiped at her with its claws. A sharp pain radiated from the side of her head – it had scratched her! Roz snarled under her ventilator mask and swung her zap knife around, straight for the rat. It dodged, but not fast enough.

  Shnict!

  The rat squeaked with dismay as it looked at its severed paw twitching on the floor, cybernetic ends still sparking with electricity. Roz brandished the knife at it. “I’ll go two paws for two if you don’t back off!” she hissed, prepping her knife to send out another stunning bolt. The rat looked between her and the knife and, af
ter baring its teeth for a few seconds, turned and fled back down the corridor of refuse.

  Roz made sure it was out of sight before checking on the first rat. It was knocked clean out, twitching faintly but still unconscious. Roz decided she could afford to ignore it while she checked out how badly she’d been scratched. She checked the ambient levels of gas on her ventilator – the air should be breathable – then slipped it over her head so it rested around her neck.

  “Augh.” It smelled foul in here, like battery acid if it was capable of rotting – Roz always forgot how absolutely disgusting the miasma could get in places. She quickly pulled off her backpack, unzipped a side pocket, and pulled out her mirror and medkit. She activated her glove’s flashlight and took a look. “Dang it.” It was a nasty cut, arcing from above her ear over to her temple and deep enough to send an oozing sheet of bright red blood down the side of her face. Roz didn’t think it needed stitches, but she definitely couldn’t leave it open either – if she got an infection down here, it could turn into something that even the best mender couldn’t fix.

  She splashed a dose of disinfectant across her head, wincing at the burn, then rummaged through her field kit until she found her super glue. This stuff was goblin-made and would bind almost anything together, but it was specially designed to release skin after a few days, just in case the user made a mistake.

  She looked at herself in the mirror and grimaced. “Lovely.” Her hair stuck straight up on one side, her ear was still sticky with blood and she needed to wait until the glue dried to put her ventilator back on, which meant she got to bask in the scent of chemicals, crap, and rusty metal for at least a few more minutes. “Just another half a mile,” she told herself, glancing at her map. She could be there in a few more hours if she hustled.

  Roz replaced her medkit but decided to leave the ventilator around her neck while the glue dried. Then she strapped her pack on and headed down the tunnel again. She didn’t have the benefit of night vision now, but the flashlight from her glove was more than enough to light the way until she could–