by A. R. Knight
“I know. But how?”
“Good question! I’ve been pondering that. Oh, looks like one of them’s found a way onto the ramp. I’ll be right back, Kaishi.”
T’Oli cuts off, leaves me staring at the terminals, watching the one lit screen display a bar across it that fills extremely, extremely slowly. I think I’ve seen grass grow in my village faster than this. I tap the green triangle again, see if that makes it go faster, but no luck.
“Kaishi!” Viera calls from the back. “Help!”
As I rush into the passenger area, I see Viera take the miner in her right hand, pull back, and throw the weapon down the ramp.
“Out of power,” Viera says as I get close.
Three of the humans are at the base of the ramp, which, I notice, holds more than a few motionless, burned bodies. Viera’s been doing work.
“I’ll take them,” I say.
“You will? With what?” Viera replies.
“Myself.” I take two steps onto the ramp, to the space where the shuttle’s doorway keeps my left and right safe, to where the only place the humans can get near me is straight on. “Go back to the cockpit, let me know when it’s ready to go. And, if you see another weapon, bring it!”
Viera’s departure comes through the steel clang of her boots. Leaving me looking at a tri-armed menace loping up my way. I’m expecting to see hate in its eyes, or anger. But there’s none of those things - only desperation, fear.
What would I be like, stuck in a tube, unconscious and kept alive through means I don’t understand, and suddenly released into a wild world with a hundred others both like me and utterly different? If I had nobody to teach me where I was, what I was, who I was?
So instead of going for a crushing kick to the throat, I aim for the legs instead, crouch low and sweep my foot at the human’s knees. Buckle them and trip the person back along the ramp, into the others until the whole array collapses at the foot of the shuttle.
This gives me a bit of time to look out across the bay, back to where Vee’s taken a leap away from the swarm and, using his claws, hooked himself into T’Oli’s shuttle, which is drifting our way now.
Our way.
“What are you doing?” I shout, though of course T’Oli can’t hear me.
I feel a tug on my left arm - it’s a vice grip, strong. Nails dig into my skin. The three-armed one is back, and I turn to its frightened face as it pulls at me, tries to drag me to its friends. With my right hand, I deliver a series of blows to its stomach and its face, pushing it away, though not breaking its grip.
“Let go!” I snarl, but the thing doesn’t care, doesn’t know what I’m saying.
My feet slide on the ramp and I fall back up, use my legs to kick the human off of me. It’s an equal-opportunity snatcher, though, so it snags my foot once it loses my arm and now I’m in the same straits as before.
When Vee, over the approaching drone of T’Oli’s shuttle, makes his entrance. The Oratus pushes his way past the other humans, climbs the ramp, grabs my attacker and throws it away to the floor. Vee doesn’t stop, either - pulls me and keeps going till we’re both inside the shuttle.
Then the Oratus turns, presses a claw on the control panel inside the door, and shuts the ramp.
“Thanks,” I manage to say.
“Save it for the Ooblot,” Vee replies. “T’Oli’s making the real sacrifice.”
“What?”
“We’re ready!” Viera announces from the cockpit. “And T’Oli’s saying it knows a way out of here!”
I leave Vee to supervise the ramp’s closure and head back to the cockpit, where T’Oli’s intercom voice is giving extremely patient instructions to Viera on what buttons to push, what terminals to look at, and which levers to pull.
“This is not what I’m good at,” Viera says as I walk in. “Slow down,T’Oli!”
“Would if I could,” T’Oli replies. “But once you put your shuttle in the air, you have to fly it. Or else things won’t go well.”
All the terminals are lit now with a mesmerizing display of shifting numbers, graphs, and blinking things that, frankly, send my heartbeat into overdrive and nearly push me into a panic. How are we supposed to deal with all this?
“Kaishi’s here now,” Viera says as she punches at something that looks like a big circle. “Yell at her for a minute while I try to breathe.”
When Viera hits the screen, the shuttle shudders. There’s a muffled whine - the same one I’m thinking we heard when T’Oli took off, but here blunted by the shuttle’s own walls - and I notice the orange-lit cavern start to shift as we leave the ground.
“Kaishi! How are you?” T’Oli asks.
“Been better,” I reply.
“Who hasn’t?” T’Oli merrily continues. “Can you press the bar there on your central screen that says ‘Manual’?”
It’s a red bar, and all the ones we’ve pressed so far have been green, so T’Oli’s command makes me suspicious.
“You sure that’s the right one?”
“If you don’t, the computer’s going to route you on an automatic path that doesn’t exist anymore. You’ll fly right into the wall. Which would not be good.”
The Ooblot makes a convincing argument. I press the bar.
The base of the terminal pops and what looks like a tightly-wound, light gray coil shoots out, then unwinds into a tall, three-pronged stick with a number of holes along the sides.
“Something strange just came out of the terminal,” I reply as both Viera and I stare at it.
“That’s your flight stick! See those holes? If you had claws, or used shaping techniques like me, you’d be able to grip there. Cool, right?” T’Oli says.
“Right,” Viera replies. “We’re not moving anymore, T’Oli.”
The cavern walls have stopped shifting. I’m guessing we’re hovering above the ground. Which, at least, puts us out of reach of the things below.
“Not supposed to be!” T’Oli says. “Who wants to fly?”
Viera throws a glance my way and I remember that I’m the only one that’s really worked with this stuff. Ignos, through me, piloted the shuttle away from Cobalt. It’s not much to draw on, but it’s something.
“I’ll do it,” I say, and step up to the stick.
When my hands touch it, the shuttle lurches to the right. Not much, but enough to get a small yelp out of Viera. I let go immediately and the shuttle settles back.
Somehow, we’re not dead.
T’Oli proceeds to give me a slow rundown of the mess in front of me, rendering it from indecipherable, deadly chaos into a mushy spread of semi-coherent options. The most important thing, the Ooblot tells me, is the flight stick in my hands. The shuttle’s going to go where I point that thing.
Though, right now, there’s not many good directions.
“I’m working on that,” T’Oli says when I point out our limited options. “Hang on just a moment, and we’ll have ourselves an exit.”
I’m about to ask what T’Oli’s going to do when the cavern fills with a roar. I twist the flight stick rather than pull it, which rotates the shuttle to the right, giving us a broad view of the human mass teeming beneath us, and T’Oli’s shuttle as it points its nose towards one of the thinner, collapsed sections of the ceiling and accelerates.
I don’t have a second to protest. No time to yell. Viera and I can only watch as T’Oli’s shuttle bursts up, crashing into, and through, the rock and orange lighting. Sparks shower down, followed by the gray fog clogging the air around the pit.
“T’Oli made it through!” Viera says.
Another rumbling quake follows her sentence as the ceiling around the new hole starts to collapse. The humans beneath us sense the problem and begin piling back into the hallway, back to the base from which they came.
We, meanwhile, are stuck in a floating box that’s getting hammered by falling chunks of metal and debris.
“We should go!” Vee calls up from the passenger compartment.
Oh yeah. Guess
that’s my job now.
I push forward on the flight stick, just slightly. The shuttle’s nose dips towards the floor, and when I nudge the small lever to the left, what T’Oli calls the throttle, we head forward till we’re beneath the new hole. Then I try to mimic T’Oli’s maneuver, pulling back on the stick until the shuttle’s pointing towards the sky.
“Hold on,” I say, then shove the throttle up.
The shuttle jumps like a juar, roaring up through the hole before I can even blink. The pressure should send me flying back out of the cockpit, but the acceleration triggers the netting, which drops in a flash behind me and keeps me pressed against the flight stick.
There’s a long moment when we’re simply churning into the sky before I take a breath. Before I tell myself that we’re flying. That I’m flying.
And we’re still alive.
“Yes!” Viera cries once she realizes the same. “Amazing! You didn’t kill us!”
“I thought we were going to die!” I reply.
“Me too!”
The giddy moment only lasts longer when the fog parts a second later to reveal a brilliant blue sky, white clouds streaking across it like feathers. It’s beautiful. Ignos, in his yellow majesty, makes me squint, but I don’t care.
This is home. This is what I’ve been trying to find.
Until Vee brings us down with a simple question,”Where’s T’Oli?”
8 Egg Trading
By the time Sax crawls out of the mound, an egg in one midclaw, there's not a single pollen-chaser interested in him. Most, including the Queen, lie dead in piles while others twitch and flit about in confusion. None even spare him a glance as Sax takes the red egg and crawls out of a larger hole halfway up the mound.
Back in the yellow cloud, Sax finds the impact from his first drop and tracks along the pollen-chaser's flight path. Every so often, Sax stops, takes a deep breath from his vents, and lets loose a loud, hissing roar.
A crude way to get attention, but he doesn't have other options.
Still, progress is slow and Sax burns his energy hacking through the vines all day. When nightfall approaches, Sax crawls up into a flower, sets the egg aside, and dips in and out of sleep surrounded by long stalks coated in yellow pollen.
He wonders if Bas is stuck in that same place, talons dipping in wastewater, with nothing more than the grind of machinery to pass the time. Not that Sax is in much better straits - he has no food out here, and the only sound is the whistling wind as it cuts through the vines. That, though, is enough to bring about fitful dreams to guide him through to dawn.
Midway through the next day, not long after another hissing roar, Silver and Black crash through the vines in front of Sax. The Oratus has never been happier to see a pair of Flaum in his life. And, once they see the egg and Sax tells them what it means - that there's a horde of salvageable bodies not all that far away - they're ecstatic.
Until Sax relays the rest of his plan.
"No, no," Silver replies. "You can't tell them what you've found. They'll take it, they won't give you anything. Better if we bring it back piece by piece, ensure we get paid the whole amount."
"I don't have that kind of time," Sax replies. "They'll let me back in the Spire, or they'll never find out where it is."
"They'll just torture you," Black says. "Force you to give it up. There's a method to these things, Sax. Being out here is part of the punishment - you're not supposed to cheat it."
"What are you being punished for?"
"Greed." Black doesn't look the least bit embarrassed. "We want the money, this is what's required to get it."
Sax looks at the two Flaum. Processes the nonsense coming out of their mouths. This is some kind of game? A machination for profit?
The Vincere never once mentioned money as the reason for a raid, for an intercept or an ambush. Sax has been to dozens of worlds, never once under the guise of revenue. Survival was always - is always - the reason.
"Where's the Spire?" Sax hisses.
"There," Silver says, pointing back the way they came. "Keep going and you should see it by nightfall. Like we're saying, though, you don't get in."
"That's my problem," Sax says.
He doesn't get more than a few steps, enough for the Flaum to realize Sax intends to do just what he's saying, before Black calls back to him.
"Hey! Where's the mound?"
"Follow my claws," Sax replies.
Then the Oratus breaks into a run, his talons chewing up the ground and his tail straight back behind him for balance. It's a freeing sprint, even with the dust clogging up his eyes. Sax holds his vents open and gulps in the filtered air, pushing it through to his muscles, juicing them for each and every long footfall. The kilometers vanish as Sax follows the trail blazed by the two Flaum, occasionally jumping over or ducking under a vine not quite cut. The pollen-chaser egg stays clutched in his right mid-claw, cradled against Sax's abdomen as he runs.
Sax makes the Spire well before nightfall, when the roiling clouds above are only starting to fade from brighter yellow to orange and dark gold. The Spire's base expands beyond what Sax can see, coating the horizon as he gets close, and the area beyond this particular entrance is heavily overgrown. He'd have to work if he wanted to circle the structure.
Instead, Sax goes right up to the wide airlock and taps at the single-button panel outside. Nothing happens. The panel doesn't even turn on, acknowledge the press. Beyond the lines of the airlock door and the heavy metal and stone construct of the Spire itself, its ridged curves rising up into the dust, nothing moves.
"Whatcha got there?" grumbles a voice from behind Sax.
The Oratus turns, making sure to keep his claws in full view, and looks right into the small hovering camera of a microdrone. Simply a metal ball containing a battery, a camera, and a thousand tiny jets, the drone stays out of Sax's reach, but it's focusing on the egg.
"A trade," Sax says to the thing. "A pollen-chaser egg to get back into the Spire."
"We're after wings and mandibles," the voice behind the drone replies - Sax thinks it sounds like an old Flaum, but it's hard to be sure. "What're we going to do with an egg?"
"Hatch it, breed it, harvest the results," Sax says. "Or go for the hive, a couple of days that way."
Sax points, but not the way he came. Far to the right of it. Silver and Black are on Plake's crew, and the last thing Sax wants is to save Bas and find themselves stranded on this waste of a world because he annoyed their ride.
"You think I'm going to let you back in for that?" the voice says, but the drone belies the intentions, as it swings around for a different angle on the egg. "Go get a few more and we'll talk."
"No," Sax says. "You'll let me in now. For the egg."
The voice laughs. "It's like you think you've got some power here, Oratus, but your Vincere buddies aren't on Rathfall. Don't know how you put yourself on the surface, but there's a price to get in this way, and you're not paying it with that egg."
Sax turns back to the airlock panel. It's a single-button, which means it's simple. Probably been here for some time. Sax isn't an engineer, but he's broken a lot of doors, and most of the locks come down to a simple switch. Connect the right wires, or break the right thing, and the door opens.
"What're you doing now?" the voice asks as Sax puts one foreclaw up to the panel. "It's not going to let you in."
"I'm going to tear it apart until it does."
The drone buzzes over near Sax's head. "You'll be trapping yourself, and everyone else, out here!"
"You'll be losing all your profits."
The drone hovers for another second. Sax drags his claw along the metal side of the control panel, letting the shriek sound long and loud. It blinks to life before Sax scrapes a single side.
"Good choice," Sax says, hitting the button.
The airlock shudders and opens slow, with dust cascading off the doors in yellow waterfalls.
"The egg, then," the voice says. "A fair trade."
/> Sax doesn't reply, but walks towards the airlock instead. The drone hovers close, dropping back only when Sax begins to enter the doors. Which puts the microdrone in the perfect position for a swat from Sax's tail that sends the machine careening into the ground, where it pops and fizzles into a hundred pieces.
The little robots are annoying.
The other side of the airlock shows that the Spire's ground entrance wasn't always a profiteering mess. Sax walks into a mostly-empty ring dominated by a central cargo elevator., and a smaller passenger version alongside it. Unlike the docking bays near the top, which hold an even assortment of small and large transports for goods and passengers alike, down here there's only a single option for him.
The rest of the level is smooth stone flooring and plain white lighting. Sax is almost disappointed that Fraykt doesn't have a squad of flunkies here for him to dismember; it's so dull. The cargo elevator tries to liven things up with rushes of rumbling action every few seconds, and the floor still reeks of pollen, showing that an airlock can only do so much when everyone coming inside is coated with the stuff.
Sax makes it all the way to the passenger elevator in three long strides, egg still in hand, and taps the request button. No lock on this one. No microdrone.
But there is the whoosh of an opening door, the humpf of a big, burly Flaum emerging from what Sax thought was a stack of old shipping containers but that, looking more closely, is a makeshift control room. This Flaum, though, makes Sax hiss in laughter.
Yes, the Flaum's holding an assault miner of a type banned for civilian use. Yes, he doesn't look thrilled - Sax figures the microdrone belonged to this angry furball. But the Flaum's also sporting a deep blue dye job, one that he's not been able to redo in a long time, as bits of bright tan fur are poking through at the roots.
"Laugh again and I'll shoot you right there," the Flaum barks in response. "You crushed my drone."
"Payment for wasting my time," Sax replies.
"I'll be wasting a lot more if you don't give me that egg right now," the Flaum says.
The Flaum's wearing a look Sax has seen too many times to count. There's a squint to his eyes, a set to his shoulders, and a tensing of the Flaum's muscles that says as soon as the egg makes its safe flight his way, the Flaum's going to be exacting a price of his own with the miner.
