Ruthless

by Jonathan Clements

  "Okay," said Johnny coldly, turning to go.

  It was getting dark. Already the Kajaani sun was dipping below the horizon. Malcolm shouted to his minions.

  "The China team are going in first. Sherman team, break out the flares. I want a perimeter a hundred feet from the landers. Don't want any more of those snow tigers getting in!"

  "Squid!" shouted Johnny. "Slow the sneck down. It could be dangerous."

  Squid answered by chanting the name of a particular bodypart. The Boy chuckled at the sound of someone speaking his language. Blarg, less prone to excitement, had found a more circuitous route that was nevertheless allowing him to gain on Squid. Wulf was taking the Blarg route, but was somewhat slowed by the Gronk hanging onto his back and whimpering about the distance to the ground. Only Nigel waited for Johnny, a few steps behind the others.

  "You're doing good," said Nigel.

  Both men began looking for footholds. Johnny found one first and heaved himself up onto the next rock. He reached back and offered a hand to Nigel. Johnny heaved his brother-in-law up to the same surface then cupped his hands at waist level, nodding downwards to Nigel to use him as a human step. Nigel planted his foot in Johnny's laced hands and vaulted up, grabbing hold of a rock above him. He swore as it came loose in his hand, tumbling past Johnny and down towards the landing site.

  "Don't forget," whispered Johnny, his voice showing the strain of keeping Nigel aloft. "We're not dealing with your everyday archaeologists here."

  Nigel's flailing hand found a new purchase in the icy hollow left by the rock he'd just pulled out. He gripped as hard as he could and hauled himself up.

  "Yeah," said Nigel, already needing to catch his breath. "They're ruthless."

  "They're criminals," hissed Johnny, seeing that the next area was full of good-sized handholds and grabbing one for himself. They climbed side by side.

  "They killed everyone on the Sherman. They wanted to kill everyone on the China," said Johnny. "Life means nothing to them."

  "Something does," said Nigel, nodding his head over at the pyramid glowing orange in the light of the dying sun.

  PRICELESS

  Squid clambered over the last of the rocks, bouncing down onto the ledge with all the excitement of a Gronk. In his eagerness to reach the summit, he had scraped against the ground and worn much of the white camo paint. With his pink face and luminous yellow chest and belly, he looked even more of a clown than usual.

  Blarg was not far behind. "Stay back," he warned Squid. "There might be traps."

  "They'd have to be snecking robust ones," said Squid, approaching closer to the entrance. Once it had been a towering rectangular opening, twenty feet tall, topped by a showy lintel carved with sun rays. Now it was on its side.

  "This could be good," Blarg grunted.

  "What could?" asked Squid. "It's like a giant letterbox tilted to the right. We can barely stand up in it."

  The Gronk's head crested the top of the icefall. It clutched tightly at Wulf's shoulders as he heaved his own body up over the final chunks of ice.

  "Yeah," said Blarg. "But if you were designing traps for a tomb, where would you put them?"

  "In der floor," said Wulf. "So that with der stepping on them, people will be dying."

  "And now," said Blarg, raising his favourite eyebrow, "what was once the floor is more like the ceiling."

  Squid snickered to himself. The gold glistened in the twilight. The occasional scratch marred the surface, gouged into the pyramid by sharp rocks it had passed on its journey. Not all the scratches were straight, either. Several swept along in striking curves, backing up Johnny's theory that the pyramid had rolled along with the ice. The bright, shinier surface petered out close to where they stood; a semi-circle of scorches and cloudy metal marking the area where Johnny's explosives had baked the surface.

  Squid peered inside and saw nothing. He fumbled for his torch.

  Johnny and Nigel finally reached the top. Johnny drew himself to his full height and waved down at Malcolm's minions below. Nigel followed Johnny's gaze but couldn't see any human beings in the half-light. Instead, all he saw was the red sputterings of flares placed around the perimeter of the landing sight in a picturesque wheel of flames. The last flare to complete the circle snapped into life, dancing in mid-air as an unseen man dropped it to the ground.

  "Shiny," said the Gronk appreciatively as Wulf gently put it to the ground in front of the pyramid.

  "Listen up," said Johnny. "I might not get another chance to talk to you all without Malcolm around."

  Blarg, Wulf, Nigel and the Gronk all turned to Johnny. Squid flicked on his torch and peered gingerly into the gloomy depths of the pyramid.

  "Something's worrying me," said Johnny. "Malcolm doesn't seem to give a sneck about money. He's acting like a collector, not a pirate on his last legs."

  "Well, that's his problem," said Blarg.

  Squid edged a little over the lip of the portal. "It goes down for quite a way," he said. "I can't see the bottom."

  "If I was Malcolm," said Johnny, "I'd hack off a chunk of the pyramid, shuttle it up to the Sherman and the China until they were as full as they could be, and then live off the proceeds for life."

  "But the markets..." said Nigel, mindful of the realities of trading.

  "I wouldn't tell anyone," said Johnny. "I would parcel it out. A couple of gold bars every year, maybe. It would be enough to live the easy life."

  "So maybe he is aiming high," said Wulf. "Maybe he wants to buy a planet or something."

  Blarg and the Gronk nodded in agreement, feverishly pretending that they knew what was going on.

  "Forget the pyramid," said Johnny.

  There were frustrated wails from the entire China party.

  "I mean it," said Johnny. "If Malcolm doesn't want it, then we don't either."

  "Maybe just a little morsel?" suggested Blarg.

  "Later," snapped Johnny. "Malcolm seems more interested in the body."

  "So he's a madman," said Blarg. "Still not our problem."

  "I think what Johnny means is that we should remember our situation," said Nigel, standing at Johnny's shoulder.

  "Yes," said Johnny. "Whatever we do in this pyramid, we still have to deal with those men down there and then somehow take back the Sherman."

  Blarg raised a finger to make a point, but Nigel talked over him. "Before," he said forcefully, "before the sun explodes and kills every lifeform in this system. Including you, me, and my wife on the Sherman."

  Over at the entrance, Squid leaned in as far as he could go. Only his legs showed as he leaned down, his piggy eyes straining to see something inside the pyramid. He was rewarded when he saw a flash, a sparkle. Far inside the pyramid there was something blocking the corridor. Whatever it was, it was golden, too.

  Squid giggled in anticipation and promptly dropped his torch. "Sneck it," he grumbled, his hands snatching at thin air. His torch bounced and tumbled down the passageway, illuminating snatches of gold until one of the thunks was more like a tinkle. The bulb had smashed and the broken torch bumped down through the dark.

  Squid realised that he had leaned a little too far over the lip of the entranceway. He grabbed at the golden walls on either side of him but found little purchase with his bulky mittens. Inexorably, he began to slide.

  "Guys?" said Squid. His mittened hands finally lost their grip and he plummeted from view.

  "Squid!" yelled Blarg rushing to the portal, but it was too late. Squid's extended yelp of fear drifted up from the shaft as he slid down uncounted metres of dark gold. After twenty long seconds, the sound of something wet smacking into something hard was heard, along with some swear words.

  Blarg peered over the edge of the portal. "Squid?" he called. "Are you all right?"

  "Of course I'm not snecking all right," said an angry voice from inside the pyramid. "My arse hurts like sneckery."

  Wulf and Nigel laughed in spite of themselves. Johnny stood thoughtfully behind them.r />
  "Blarg," said Johnny. "You're on guard up here."

  "Give me the snecky jobs, why don't you," said the Betelgeusian.

  "I want someone I can trust up here with a spare life wire," said Johnny. "I'm not dying of starvation at the bottom of a metal tomb, waiting for the sun to explode."

  "Got it," said Blarg, still sulking.

  "And look after the Gronk," added Johnny. The Gronk smiled and blinked in what it hoped was a cute expression. Blarg merely shook his head and sneered. Johnny looked back across the area his explosion had cleared in search of a place to anchor his life wire. Wulf knew the drill.

  "How about there?" he suggested, pointing at a boulder the size of a small bus.

  "Yeah," nodded Johnny. "That looks secure enough." Without a moment's pause he raised his grappler and fired the wire into the rock. It smacked home with an audible sputch, its super strong epoxy immediately taking hold.

  "Keep on this side of me," warned Johnny. He tugged experimentally on the can-sized launcher, clipping it to his belt like a mime artist pulling on an imaginary rope. But the life wire was there all right. Momentary glimmers in the twilight showed a gossamer thread stretching all the way from the rock.

  Johnny backed over to the entranceway, feeling the super strong thread tighten. Taking care to use only the motorised winch buttons on the launcher, he played out a little until he was able to perch on the lip of the tilted entrance. He then slowly began to lower himself inside. The angle of the pyramid allowed him to rappel down at an even pace. Johnny kept his feet planted to the metal wall, grateful for the giant rubber treads of his snow boots. He edged down a couple of feet at a time, staring intently at the shaft surfaces for any clues about the pyramid. Even with his alpha vision, he saw little. The walls were featureless, devoid of adornment. The only change in the smooth metal monotony was to one side where a golden staircase formed a zigzag wall. There was a grating sound above him as the monofilament life wire bit into the corner of the entranceway.

  "How do we look?" called Johnny.

  Above him, Wulf looked closely. Although he couldn't see the wire, he could see the razor-thin gash that the wire was sawing into the substance of the pyramid. Given a couple of hundred years, Johnny would be able to saw the pyramid in half.

  "It is cutting der metal," called Wulf, "but it will hold."

  "We should go down there with him," said Nigel.

  Wulf nodded. "We will," he said. "Let Johnny check first."

  "I really want to see inside that pyramid," said Nigel.

  "Don't we all," sulked Blarg.

  The Gronk peered down after Johnny with a concerned look on its face. It was now very difficult to see in the dark. The suicidal Kajaani sun was now completely below the horizon, and the only light came from the perimeter torches at the landing site below and the occasional flicker of an uncaring star.

  Nigel stamped his feet in a futile effort to keep warm. There was silence again, broken only by a tortured creak as the life wire bit deeper into the metal.

  Wulf looked up at the sky and, as was his habit on every world, tried to get his bearings. But the patterns in the sky he knew so well only worked on Earth. There was no Great and Little Bear here, no Hunter, no Girl Bending Over. The component stars of Terran constellations made new patterns from this new vantage. As Wulf did on every other world, he began to make up his own constellations again. There, he decided, were the Eyes of Johnny, twin glares of white-hot intensity in the east. And to the left, he decided, was the Happy Stick, its haft slightly shaky but hammer-shaped nonetheless. There, perhaps, the Pyramid itself: three stars in a vaguely equilateral triangle.

  As Wulf stared at the sky, a line of bright fluorescence suddenly wiped across its expanse like a god's glowing window sponge. A great, green glowing line, wider than a Viking's arm, traced a silent passage across the sky. It shot through with a distant fizz, as if a million milky bubbles coursed within it. Wulf smiled to himself. The stars might be different but the Northern Lights were the same. Being here in the snow and watching the aurora borealis reminded him think of Scandinavia, and he blinked back a sentimental tear.

  The Boy stared open-mouthed in amazement, really, truly wishing that he had brought a camera. He had never seen anything like it.

  "Wow," the Boy permitted himself to say before he realised that someone might see him being impressed. He quickly turned away from the bright display in the sky, permitting himself only to look at them out of the corners of his supercilious eyes.

  The Gronk was watching, too, making cooing noises of appreciation as the green light appeared to double back on itself, flickering intensely with the energies that seemed to flow within it. The river of light now stretched all the way across the sky and was expanding by the second. As it widened, fresh new colours appeared in its midst: blues, and yellows, all sparking and whirling, sending out branches of light in new directions before spilling back into the central stream.

  "Sneck," said Blarg, irritably.

  "It is beautiful," said Wulf. "The Valkyries are in der sky, hunting for heroes."

  "It is not snecking beautiful," said Blarg. "And there are no aerial tarts looking for trouble."

  "You have no sense of poetry," mumbled Wulf.

  "You have no sense of danger," said Blarg.

  The men on the ledge were silent once more, and for a moment the only sound was that of Johnny's life wire slowly defacing the pyramid. The Boy stood apart from them, openly staring at the sky in wonder once more.

  "He's right," said Nigel after a while.

  "About what?" said Wulf.

  "Have you ever seen aurora like that before?" asked Nigel.

  "Well," said Wulf, "maybe once in Iceland..."

  Nigel shook his head. "Not on Earth you haven't. There aren't enough charged particles."

  Even as Nigel spoke, the sky above him fountained with light, bursting in haunting silence. There was far too much energy flowing erratically above them for it to be innocuous.

  "Those lights are coming from the sun's energy," said Blarg. "And there is far, far too much of it."

  Wulf looked back at the sky as realisation dawned. The prettier the colours and the greater the display, the more radiation there was pouring out from the sun.

  "Der star," breathed Wulf. "She is going to blow."

  "Soon," agreed Blarg, but that was a relative term where stars were concerned.

  The lives of interstellar bodies were measured in billions of years. In stellar terms, young whippersnappers were older than life on Earth itself; Sol was barely a teenager. Kajaani, on the other hand, felt imminently unstable. Maybe not today, thought Wulf, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, Kajaani would blow itself out of existence. It was the mitigating "maybe" part attached to the hopeful "not today" that bothered Wulf the most. The chances of Kajaani exploding at that very moment were remote, to say the least, but Wulf still didn't like the odds. Given the choice, he would prefer to be several light years away.

  Johnny, meanwhile, was in no mood to be hurried. He was jammed in the shaft, resisting the temptation to rest his head against the frozen golden wall. It was lighter in the shaft now, the distant glow and shine of the aurora making its way into the pyramid. Patches of glowing light danced across the sheer golden surface, causing the upended staircase to cast strange, undulating shadows.

  "You took your bloody time," said an angry voice. Squid crouched at the bottom of the shaft, picking idly at the broken remains of his dropped torch. He sat on a floor decorated with the same sunburst design that graced the entranceway to the pyramid, wedged among the links of a giant chain that snaked across the floor.

  No, Johnny reminded himself. Not a "floor". The pyramid had rolled away from its former site. He was looking at a wall. Alpha vision showed him the long, thin line that neatly transected it. Not a wall, at all.

  "There's a door!" he shouted up. "Squid landed on a door."

  Squid looked down at his feet in surprise, irritated that Johnny
had made the discovery and not him.

  "Yeah," he added, belatedly. "That's right."

  Looking for some means to contribute to make up for his mishap, Squid kicked the giant links beside him.

  "But it's chained shut!" yelled Squid. "I mean, big-time." He pointed at the links beneath, each the size of a human head. Johnny's feet finally reached the bottom of the shaft. He patted the chain experimentally then motioned for Squid to help him lift it. Mumbling a momentary complaint about his aches and sprains from the fall, Squid half-heartedly complied. The pair strained to lift the chain, but the links were impossible to budge.

  "Can you break them?" called Wulf from the entrance.

  "No," said Johnny. "They're snecking huge."

  "We're gonna need to cut through!" yelled Squid, dejectedly. Even if Johnny had any number four rounds left, they wouldn't be able to blow the chains apart. They were going to need something much more heavy-duty.

  Up by the entrance, Nigel, Blarg and Wulf looked at each other quizzically. All they had was a Happy Stick and a couple of penknives. Wulf looked down the icefall at the distant lights of the bandit camp and wondered if Malcolm's minions had anything of use.

  "Could you saw through it?" called Nigel, observing the damage wrought by Johnny's life wire.

  Johnny looked closely at the chain. "No," he said, after a while. "Nowhere to get leverage."

  "Blow it open," shouted Blarg. "Go back down to the others and drag them in on it. They must have brought something."

  Johnny thought about it. Malcolm seemed more than happy for Johnny's gang to be doing his dirty work, and it was hardly like he had offered much in the way of equipment. But what had he been expecting? Blarg was right. Malcolm was bound to have spare equipment, maybe even some laser cutters or an oxyacetylene torch. But Johnny didn't want to risk it; they were lucky they hadn't been found out so far already.

  "You know," called Wulf. "I do not wish to be der worrying wart thing, but can we be doing this before der sun explodes?"

  Wedged in next to the slightly smelly bulk of Squid in the shaft, Johnny willed himself to have a bright idea. It wasn't working.