Tales From the Crucible

by Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells

  The lift doors opened, and I was assaulted by the light. My eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the underworld and I was utterly unprepared to see a group of golden-armored knights of the Sanctum waiting for us. Waiting for me.

  The one closest to the door took my arm in a firm grip. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us,” they said, then flipped up the face plate on their helmet. I blinked my eyes a few times, the light pouring from the helmet nearly blinding me.

  “Aren’t you…?” A slight smile crossed the knight’s exposed face and they shot Wibble a glance. It was the spirit from the bar!

  “Don’t we make an excellent pair of actors?” Wibble said to the spirit, gleefully. “You were completely convincing.”

  “It was rather fun,” the knight said in a low, booming voice.

  “I truly thought for a moment that Wibble had injured you,” Pplimz said drily. “I am most pleased to see that it was part of the charade.”

  “Oh, I’d never hurt someone,” Wibble said, “not unless I meant to. That dent in your armor was an excellent touch.”

  “Thank you,” the knight said, shyly. “I am rather proud of that one.”

  “So, are you saying that this was all…” I looked between Wibble and Pplimz.

  “It was no accident you were directed toward our offices,” Pplimz admitted. “Do not be concerned, however. We will refund your fee.”

  “Seeing as how you were never really our client,” Wibble finished, a rosy glow suffusing her body. She turned to the knights. “Well, my armored friends, I believe that we’ve made our trade.”

  The group bowed deeply toward the two detectives, and Pplimz reshaped their body back to the thin, non-demon form I’d first encountered. They opened the suitcase, slipped on their fashionable suit jacket and placed the hat, somehow, on their head. “Shall we go, Wibble?”

  “Yes, Pplimz, we’re done here,” Wibble said. “Ooh, why don’t we go skyhopping?! I heard of a lovely new airship for hire…”

  “For goodness sake, Wibble, don’t be ridiculous.” The detectives went off bickering into the distance, leaving me to the not so tender ministrations of the knights.

  No one explained anything as they dragged me off to whatever punishment awaited me. They didn’t need to. I knew.

  I had been hustled all along. Hustled by the best.

  Vaultheads

  David Guymer

  Raymon D’arco pulled his ray blaster from its hip holster and fired. It made a high-pitched squirling noise, like an out-of-tune guitar string, and a microwave pulse leapt from the ribbed gun barrel to splash across the svarr mercenary’s chest. The thin metallic wall rumpled as the elf threw herself against it and slid to the floor with a dramatic groan.

  Ignoring her, the stormkin skirate continued out across the factory floor, faster than a walk although not quite running. At the last moment before reaching the downed elf, he dropped his shoulder and rolled into cover, avoiding the sight lines of the derricks, gantries, ledges and spaghetti criss-cross of torpid conveyer lines above him. The screeching vocals of æmbersonic, Hub City’s most criminally underrated exotic metals wavecast, blasted at tremendous volume through his cochlear implant, and he nodded absently to the rhythm as he drew back against the near wall and hit the recharge key on his E-RAYzer. A variety of antennae and vanes flipped out from the pistol’s stock to vent. Raymon’s hands goosebumped in the little bubble of warmth, the rest of his body giving a not-at-all sympathetic shiver. Steam billowed out of his mouth. As thick as the discharge of a smoke bomb.

  Pressing his finger in behind his left ear, he quietened the music. He pushed in. Something in his inner ear went click.

  “Ribongun, this is D’arco. I’m in. Where are you?”

  “Coming up from beneath!” Bursts of heavy, automatic fire ripped across the line, only slightly more frantic than the speaker himself. Ribongun spoke like someone completing a marathon as a series of fifty-yard sprints. “The Director was expecting us!”

  “Don’t get yourself killed. Not now we’re so close.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it. But! A little distraction would be nice.”

  “They don’t know what’s about to hit them.”

  He withdrew his finger from his ear and the link cut. Æmbersonic returned at its previous, punishing volume. Raymon winced, tapping rapidly on the side of his head until it became more agreeable. The svarr, spread out on the ground beside him, was still groaning.

  What did she want: a medal from the Brobnar actors’ guild?

  “Hardpan,” he hissed over his shoulder, and turned as the immense sylicate following up behind crunched herself into a rough crouch.

  The vaultwarrior was almost twice his height and twenty times his weight. Her crust was hard, glossy, and black. Purple crystal formations sprouted from the backs of her hands and the sides of her head, projecting well above the cubicle wall of her supposed cover. A deep, geothermal glow seeped through the cracks in her duricrust. The scuffed walls and old machinery around her smudged and reflected it. Raymon shivered as her body warmed him through. Nor was the effect entirely physical. He smiled up at her, trying to give it the appropriate level of dash, but moved his eyes quickly on.

  “Ribs is being pressed hard. It might be on us now.” He nodded to the huge, harpoon-like weapon strapped across her back. “I hope you’ve been looking forward to using that.”

  The glassy facets of her eyes cut the wintry light into a thousand pieces as she turned her head to appraise the weapon. “I think… I have.”

  Raymon grinned. He’d been working up the courage for this for months.

  He’d known she wouldn’t be disappointed.

  He’d hoped, anyway.

  “Then get ready,” he said.

  “Where did you learn to fight like this?” she rumbled softly as she unslung the sharpoon.

  Raymon wondered how much he needed to say, under the circumstances.

  “Books. Magazines. Old reels. When I was younger, I went to Cirrus to learn the Stormkin martial art of skidad from the legendary skirate, Highblake Pontoon.”

  “Really?”

  Raymon was offended. “Really.”

  “So how did you end up–”

  “Follow me,” he hissed before she could say any more.

  He peeked out of cover, seeing no one, and then hurried across the open floor to the next partition wall. It rumpled as he pressed against it. The factory had been partitioned by a series of such walls, presumably to separate the various assembly processes, or perhaps as a maze to confound thieves and spies, or simply for the workers’ amusement. Raymon had no idea what deviant research the Director conducted here. He didn’t want to know.

  Crouching on one knee, he whipped an æmberscanner from his utility belt.

  Every skirate worth anything wore a utility belt.

  The æmberscanner was silvery, crinkly as though wrapped in household foil, and fit snuggly into the palm of his hand. The readout displayed a pair of wavy lines, intersecting over a set of three-dimensional axes. He struggled to match it to the floorplan he had memorized earlier, looking up occasionally to find a reference point amongst the silent conveyers and creaking, ice-encrusted chains.

  “Is that it there?” said Hardpan, peering easily over the top of the partition wall.

  Raymon stared at the æmberscanner a moment longer before giving up. “What can you see?”

  “An office. A control room, maybe. A central reservation. Lots of glass.”

  “Sounds exposed.”

  Hardpan grunted.

  Raymon wasn’t sure what to take from it.

  “Any sign of the Director’s goons?” he said.

  The sylicate shook her head, grit trickling down her broad shoulders.

  “I can’t believe that that svarr is all he’s got over his front door.” Raymon took another look at the æmberscanner and nodded confidently. ‘But this has to be it. Come on.”

  Gripping the now fully charged
E-RAYzer, he peered out of cover.

  A string of battened down assembler lines jigsawed their way through various steps, switchbacks and dangling walkways towards a wide flight of straight steps that led, presumably, to the control room that Hardpan had described. He rolled towards the nearest assembler platform.

  Had he simply walked, then the blizzard of beamer fire that was waiting on him from the overwalks would have cut him to ribbons.

  As it was, the volley of fire scolded across the back wall in an explosion of yellow sparks as Raymon clattered into new cover. Hardpan gasped, and Raymon glowed, as much at impressing the sylicate as at not being shot by a svarr N-72 pulse rifle.

  “Is that all you’ve got, D’arco?” Shrill laughter raked down from the machine cradles above him. “So predictable. But then what do you expect from a skirate?”

  “I’m not dead yet!”

  Adjusting the E-RAYzer’s focusing lenses to minimum beam width and maximum range, about twenty feet, he turned, half rose, and aimed upwards.

  A torrent of fire put him back down again.

  A svarr elf, small enough to hide amidst the detritus of the packed-up assembler lines, cackled as it let rip. The occasional beam found Hardpan where she was sheltering, diffracting through her head of crystals as though it was snowing rainbows. Gales of high-voiced laughter rang out from the assemblers.

  “Damn it, we’re pinned,” he hissed.

  “If we double back, can we get around them?” said Hardpan.

  Raymon looked at his scanner. “I doubt it. They know what we’re here for, and there can only be so many ways into the Director’s offices.”

  “Then how do we get inside?”

  Raymon slid into a fetal position with his back against the assembler panel and head between his knees as beam-fire scorched across the sloped terminal back.

  “You’re up!” he yelled.

  “Me?”

  “They’re N-72s. Shadows mercenaries love them because they’re quiet and cheap. They’d shred a human, but you can take it. Why do you think I was so insistent about bringing a sylicate along?”

  Hardpan’s face fissured into a deep smile. Purple light dribbled out.

  “All right then,” she said. “On three, two…”

  On one, she rose out of cover like a Dis phantom, her sharpoon clutched in two megalithic hands. Beam fire scattered off her duricrust, followed by shouts of annoyance and the occasional cry of “No fair!” from the ambushing svarr. She moved towards the staircase. Raymon tucked in behind her, keeping low, his own aim loose, allowing the giant sylicate to soak up the mercenaries’ heat.

  They made it to the top of the stairs.

  One mercenary left.

  A giant, bulked out with the metal plates and thick muscle padding of an aggro-vest. He was a couple of inches taller than Hardpan. A steel buckler was strapped across one forearm. The other held a sledgehammer. Behind him was what could only have been the Director’s office, glass walled, raised onto its own sublevel on stilts to look down on the myriad assembler lines below it.

  The giant planted his trunk-like legs and spat on the ground.

  “I’m up…” Hardpan muttered to herself, then raised the sharpoon.

  It wasn’t really necessary to aim with a weapon like that.

  When Hardpan pulled the trigger, the air surrounding the massive gun’s heat exchangers gave a quiet little cry as the moisture was sucked out of it and heat expelled. The weapon was actually much less effective in the cold, something to do with the relative ability of hot and cold air to carry moisture, but an impressive six-foot long spike of solid ice slowly grew in the firing track regardless. Raymon would have loved to see what it could do in summer.

  A second squeeze on the trigger loosed it.

  The giant roared as the ice spear hit him in the chest, and punched the air in helpless aggression as he was pushed clear of the platform edge and fell the seven or eight feet to ground level.

  Hardpan, meanwhile, was still moving, arms pumping, irresistible as an avalanche, the paneled flooring rattling in its housings. Raymon could have walked faster, but Spire, he would not have wanted to be anywhere close to in her way.

  “That door’s going to be locked,” he said.

  “May I?” said Hardpan, tectonic with excitement.

  “Be my guest, only–”

  The sylicate walked through the door without stopping. It shrieked free of its frame and went flying inwards. It crashed into the back wall with a crunch of glass and a shower of electrical sparks.

  Raymon winced.

  “–be careful,” he finished.

  He swung around to cover their withdrawal, taking low-power potshots whenever a head popped over a railing, but most of the svarr seemed to have given Hardpan up as a bad job and were keeping well down.

  He backed in after her.

  A bank of clunky, unlit monitors, now with a bent door sticking out of them, covered one wall. Broken glass littered a sweep of switches, sliders, and dials. A second door stood off to one side. The sounds of heated hand-to-hand combat rang from the other side of it. Nearer to there was a desk, and behind it, a chair. Ignoring the door, and the ongoing sounds of fighting, Raymon walked around the desk and the chair. In the wall behind them was a safe. He touched it.

  The metal was icy with the cold.

  “Trust the Director to be too cheap to heat even his own office.”

  Harpdan looked up. “Is it cold in here?”

  Raymon covered his mouth and tried not to laugh.

  “Is the æmber inside?” asked the sylicate.

  Raymon checked his scanner. “Definitely.”

  “Then open it.”

  He grimaced. “Vaultcracking isn’t my area.”

  He pushed his finger into the soft spot behind his left ear and waited for the click, but before he could say anything, the second door blew open as though thrown wide by a spirit entity of furious electronics and sparkler bombs. He backed away from the flash-bang after-glare as a goblin hustled inside. He was white faced, wildy red-haired, a pair of goggles covering most of his face. He was about four feet tall, wearing a trench coat that was fractionally too large, a pair of gloves with slightly too many fingers and so many belts, baldrics and bandoliers stuffed with tools that he jangled when he moved. A highly experimental jetpack was strapped to his back. Raymon had never yet seen it fly.

  A robot rolled inside after the goblin. An armored footlocker on wheels. It was two feet high and about five long. Various colored bulbs decorated its “front”, apparently to convey emotion, but someone had stenciled it with a pink smiley face that was both anthropomorphic and very, very disturbing. Strobes of gunfire lit up its ghoulish, painted-on grin as it unloaded its formidable arsenal onto the corridor, numerous arms telescoping from shuttered panels grasping a larger and unlikelier-looking weapon than the last.

  The goblin hurriedly closed the door and leant on it.

  The red bulb on the robot’s indicator panel blinked on to indicate disappointment.

  “Beep,” it said.

  “Late as always, Ribs,” said Raymon.

  “I thought you were going to provide the distraction for us!” The goblin, Ribongun, or Ribs, eased off the door with some relief as its sensors timed out and fired heavy-duty locking pins into the architrave.

  “They’re getting wise,” said Raymon.

  “You know I hate change!”

  “Beep.”

  “Not that it would have been a problem if X-TRM-N-8 here hadn’t insisted on killing absolutely everything.’

  “Beep.”

  A pink, happy, light blinked on.

  Raymon was genuinely unnerved.

  Ribs leant closer, forcing the taller Stormkin to crouch. “Where on the Crucible did you find that psychopath?!” he hissed.

  Raymon shook his head quickly. That was a conversation for another time. Although he did worry that the robot was taking this whole thing just a little too seriously.

&nbs
p; Meanwhile, the goblin had already capered around to assay the safe in the wall. His goggled eyes skipped over it, clicking and tutting under his breath.

  “Can you break it?” said Raymon.

  “Do I ask you if you can fly the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  The goblin frowned. “Fair enough, then.”

  “Just get it done quickly.”

  Gunfire knocked on the other side of the door, and Raymon was very conscious of the fact that, courtesy of Hardpan’s efforts, his own point of entry no longer had a door at all.

  “Beep,” said X-TRM-N-8, deploying another bucketful of heavy weaponry.

  Ribongun threw open his coat, selected a set of tools, and set to work.

  “So how’s she working out?” the goblin asked a moment later, muttering around the set of pins in his mouth.

  Raymon looked over his shoulder and smiled absently. “A natural.”

  “Good luck explaining the door.”

  Raymon opened his mouth to protest when the safe gave with a click.

  “Ta-dah!” Ribongun spread his arms with a flourish as the armored door eased open. A thin golden light trickled out, gilding all of their faces with one exception. Hardpan’s glow was brighter.

  “Well?” said Raymon.

  The goblin turned to him. His baggy features loosened into a grin. “Make contact with the Archon, captain. Our business with the Director is done.”

  The rapid bass of indescribable phyll glasshouse music thumped through the Hub City tavern’s thick walls. It vibrated through the polished wood of the bar and made the stools tremble like children lined up at the deep end of a pool. The air was aniseed and smoke. The carpets probably tasted of it. Paul Hendry, until about an hour ago Raymon D’arco, leaned on the bar, resting on his elbows. His loose, doublet coat was undone, the sleeves rolled up. His tricorn hat sat on the bar beside him. His utility belt looped over it.