by Stephen Hunt
‘Where shall we start looking for power sources?’ asked the barbarian prince.
Skrat tapped the plaque. ‘Let’s begin with the lifeboats on this level. Lifeboat power cells are self-contained and built to trickle-feed for centuries if needed.’
‘What if we come across a colonist in hibernation sleep inside?’
‘We’ll wake them up and ask the fellow what the devil happened on this blasted old world,’ said Skrat. ‘It’ll be good to hear someone serve up a tale of woe even worse than ours for a change.’
‘I am always happy to serve,’ noted Momoko.
‘Good egg. I’ll be sure to introduce you to Zeno,’ said Skrat. ‘He could do with a few lessons in co-worker cooperation rubbing off to jolly him along with the crew.’
Their passage through the ship was slowed by the need to bypass a series of locked doors, using the robot to power open each portal. Calder found himself surprised by the number of sealed bulkheads they encountered compared to the Gravity Rose. It’s as though someone tried to lock themselves in here, or lock something else out. But they came across no mummified bodies or bones to indicate settlers had died on board. They did pass settler cabins which, when entered, proved to be largely bare, cleared of personal possessions. Empty lockers. Faded, dirty rugs with a few discarded packing crates on the floor. Wherever the settlers went, they took their clothes, photographs and keepsakes with them. Calder’s explorations carried him through a mess-hall containing a curious sight. All the tables and benches had been dragged to the sides of the dark room, making room for piles of equipment – damaged computers and sim consoles and data slates, shattered pyramids of the devices, along with mounds of broken robots. Not humanoid models like Momoko, but variants of the service drones on board the Rose: tracked and uni-ball drones, others with dwarf-sized rubberized legs, the same short, waddling machines Calder had helped the chief supervise back in the engine room.
Momoko seemed to take fright at the scene, as though the sight of this vista of destruction might incite its human companions to vandalize its own body. ‘This is terrible, terrible!’
‘Quite curious, I would say,’ whispered Skrat, prodding the nearest pile of scrap with his rifle barrel. ‘Anything with a computer or A.I. in it seems to have been junked. Robots are highly useful protecting new settlements. They are the last thing settlers would want to destroy.’
‘I’ll protect you,’ pleaded Momoko. ‘I am useful and loyal. Do not let this happen to me.’
Lento seemed anxious again, maintaining her dumb silence as she scratched at her matted hair, wide eyes flickering nervously into the dark beyond their torchlights. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Calder, reaching out to her. ‘This happened a long time ago.’
‘I wonder if we’d find the computers on the bridge similarly wrecked,’ pondered Skrat.
‘At this point, I don’t care. Let’s just see if we can find any active cells down here,’ said Calder, ‘then head back to the surface.’ He could feel the weight of this strange, dead vessel seeping through his flesh. Once so full of life, now only filled with mysteries and the heavy absence of its owners. The musty smell put him in mind of the cold family vaults beneath his old fortress. The sarcophaguses of his relatives and forefathers, cold marble draped with spider webs and the dust of ages. He’d always hated that place, the thought that he would end up entombed there one day with only the ghosts of his ancestors to care that here lay Calder Durk . . . prince of a cold, cold world. Right now, I’d take it over this broken ship.
‘Did the masters of this vessel come to hunt?’ said Momoko.
‘Certainly not,’ said Skrat. ‘Although I dare say a few of them arrived to hunt for the adventure of the new.’
‘That worked out for them,’ muttered Calder.
They finally reached a section of the ship with ten lifeboat pod locks running along the corridor. Calder realized that someone else had once had the same idea as Skrat. The entrance to each pod lay open, heavy cables stretched out from the lifeboats’ interior, a mess of cabling running down the corridor. Skrat ducked inside each boat, inspecting the power cell connections and the instrument panels inside. After he finished inspecting the final pod, he pulled himself out of the lock and banged his heavy green tail against the deck in irritation. ‘Not enough juice left to power our shuttle engines. We could use them to extend the time our environmental systems last, though.’
‘Camping in the jungle, waiting for a pirate shuttle to fly over and spot us?’
‘There’s enough there to fuel a ground vehicle, perhaps, if the vessel’s cargo hold contains a working jalopy,’ said Skrat.
The four of them followed the cables, Calder hoping to find that big if at the other end. A jeep, tank, electric bike . . . anything. The power lines ran into a room, and there was enough energy left inside for the lights’ sensors to detect their presence and flicker hesitantly into life. No ground vehicles being charged. The room looked more like a laboratory. A line of transparent tubes filled with liquid, stagnant and still under the blinking blue lights. Each tube contained a creature. Like an evolutionary progression in reverse. Twisted bodies starting with human cadavers and ending up in a series of small twisted forms that were undoubtedly the knights who had rescued Calder from the jungle and guided him to the hunting lodge. Off to the side were larger tanks containing the symbiotic mounts the knights rode, a few adult-sized, while others floated as tiny foals.
‘Now that is interesting,’ said Skrat. ‘A science centre.’
‘Were they doing medical experiments on the wildlife?’ asked Calder.
‘Only tangentially.’ Skrat tapped the nearest tube with no result. Trapped inside for hundreds of years, Skrat was unlikely to elicit any movement from these test subjects. ‘No navels on the humans inside the suspension fluid. These were clones; testing bodies without sentience. The settlers were undertaking a DNA-hack. Researching a way to transform themselves from human into these creatures.’
‘The knights? Why in the name of the gods would anyone want to become a knight?’
‘It’s the opposite of terraforming, dear boy. You change the pattern of your body to adapt to the local world, rather than modifying a planet into your preferred habitat. Just select a successful local species and reverse-engineer its DNA, then redesign your own body on the same pattern. A curious decision for Abracadabra, though, unless the settlers belonged to some extreme environmentalist sect. Such practices are normally reserved for worlds with acute deviations from the norm – toxic atmospheres, high gravity, gas giants and the like. It’s a tad hot for humans outside, but nothing that a little air conditioning and a decent ship suit can’t cope with. They really did go native.’
Calder was stunned by the implications. He probably had met the settlers’ descendants. He just hadn’t realized it at the time. ‘And abandon tool use, technology, shelter and fire? Just return to the wild to live like animals?’
‘No accounting for taste,’ said Skrat. ‘But it was obviously the last roll of the dice for the colony; otherwise they wouldn’t have been powering their laboratory with lifeboat cells. I’d say that remodelling their form was far from their preferred option.’
Calder followed the cables. Not all of the lines were plugged into the banks of laboratory machinery. A flex of thick red power lines led out through a side exit. He held up his torch and walked over to inspect where it ran, Momoko and Janet Lento moving out of his way. Lento stood by one of the tubes containing a suspended knight and laid her hand on the transparent material, as if greeting the creature whose descendants had saved them back in the jungle. She groaned sadly. Calder pointed his torch through the exit. A stairwell, the cables following the treads and vanishing into a pit of inky darkness.
Skrat came over to stand by his side. ‘The garage bay and landing ramps should be at the ship’s keel.’
Calder had a feeling that when the settlers finally left, they were riding symbiotic steeds, not mechanised ground crawlers. ‘You kno
w, hiking back to the base through the jungle doesn’t seem so bad . . .’
‘Stout heart, Mister Durk. If we’re lucky we might find a microlight or a small helicopter.’
Janet Lento just stared into the pool of darkness and refused to be dragged down the stairs, so Calder and Skrat left her in the care of Momoko and pushed on alone, descending a further two levels. Heavy doors led out to the other decks, but they were sealed, and the power lines kept on coiling lower, so they ignored the exits and stayed trekking down. At the end of the stairs they found the vehicle bay. It was empty, although there were vacated parking and repair stands for a number of ground transports. The vessel’s ramp was lowered to what had been the valley floor when the ship had landed. No vehicles beyond, either. But there was a small concrete building buried by a wall of sediment, its entrance open and still accessible opposite the loading ramp. The ship’s cables ran inside it. Calder stared at the mud ceiling above them. We’re standing in a small pocket of air inside the sediment. A cave. Mud compacted as hard as rock over the years. Calder felt like a tomb robber down here.
‘The original settlement’s entrance?’ asked Calder. ‘Would they have built it underground?’
‘A pity Professor Sebba isn’t with us,’ said Skrat. ‘We could defer to her expertise in such matters. This cave doesn’t look very secure, and that building’s entrance isn’t large enough to pass a vehicle through. Let’s leave.’
Calder felt a wave of relief at the decision. Trekking through the jungle towards a base overrun by pirate raiders wouldn’t seem as half as arduous after communing with the ghosts of the failed colony down here. As he turned, Janet Lento came sprinting out of the stairwell at the back of the landing bay, an insentient warbling screech sounding from her throat. Momoko stumbled wordlessly behind her, his heavy metal feet stamping across the ship’s steel and torchlight swinging wildly. And then, shockingly, a third figure swung into view at the bottom of the stairwell. As tall as Momoko, a powerful shadow encrusted in hundreds of wicked, jagged spines; a slim eyeless axe of a head. It resembled one of the clockwork golem knights from the fireside stories of Calder’s youth; a black-armoured demon. But it didn’t move like a machine . . . advancing rapidly, sinuous, panther-like. Janet Lento’s nonsense warnings came back to Calder. It’s covered in spines. Skrat opened up on the interloper with his rail rifle, quick pulses of fire which lit the darkness of the landing bay. Calder joined him, instinctively, almost surprised to remember that he had been holding a weapon too. Hyper-accelerated pellets jounced off the creature, sparks flying and lighting up the darkness, but they might as well have been firing wooden arrows from a child’s bow for all the good they were doing. It shrugged off the volley, staggering slightly as it absorbed the impact, and then kept on lurching straight at them. Janet fled past the two crewmen, disappearing into the opening inside the mud-covered concrete pillbox. Momoko shambled after her. That seems like a plan. Best one we’ve got. Calder and Skrat turned and raced after the robot and the tanker driver. They sprinted into a corridor inside the pillbox, a passage which gave onto a circular chamber, lights flickering into life on emergency power. Unfortunately for them, this wasn’t the entrance to a well-protected underground colony complex; only a simple stone chamber with a raised dais, a man-sized stone egg fused with the wall behind the platform. Not much different from an empty grain storage silo. Or a manure fermentation tank. But not quite empty. The power cables terminated at a rusting console resting on a metal stand in front of the wall. Calder’s eye’s darted around. One way in. No way out. He swivelled about, but it was too late, the exit stood blocked by a six-foot tall figure. Gazing at the creature’s armour was like looking at the rainbow on an oil slick, hundreds of serrated spines which appeared to shimmer, an evil jinn granted humanoid form. Plating seemed to click into place as it came forward, hundreds of intricate pieces shifting around each other. Hypnotizing. But not enough to prevent Calder opening fire on it, emptying his magazine into the creature alongside Skrat. Roaring pulses of rapid fire overwhelmed the enclosed chamber, folded and reflected inside the tight stone space. But to little visible effect. Now Calder was at close range, he could swear that the pellets were actually striking the creature, but wrapping around it like rain drops slicking off an umbrella before rippling, absorbed into its armour.
‘It’s bloody impossible,’ hissed Skrat. ‘The kinetic shock alone would pulp one of those sky-borne dragon monstrosities into soup.’
‘It’s using some kind of shield, I think.’ Calder drew his machete and powered it into life, the active blade appearing to shimmer as it began vibrating almost too fast to follow. ‘Get on that platform, I’ll draw it around to me – then you three leap off and break for the exit.’
Skrat didn’t argue, he chivvied the other two survivors in front of him. Perhaps he recognized the logic that Calder was the one who had been trained from the age of four in everything from buckler to great sword, lance and morningstar. Or perhaps Skrat suddenly just wished to live. I know how he feels. Calder’s adversary stopped and started as he ran at it, whether from the unexpected attack or the stream of abuse he screamed towards the thing, it was hard to tell. Out of practice on the war cries. Hardly enough to make a squire’s ears blush. When was the last time . . . simple and bloody sword and axe-work? Must have been when he and his faithful man servant had bearded the baron’s company of killers outside a derrick worker’s hut. Before imposed exile and his current spate of offworld misadventures began. He lunged forward with the blade, but the figure ducked back, his buzzing blade tasting only air. It appeared uncertain now, stepping back, its thin axe-head of a skull wavering as it faced an unexpectedly homicidal ex-prince.
‘Devil-head!’ yelled Calder, masking his fear. ‘I’ll take your skull and hang it in my cabin.’
Lento shrieked behind him and their attacker made a similar sound, as though aping the woman, although for the life of him, Calder couldn’t see where that noise was being produced. It had no mouth, no nostrils, no ears. Just a bony black cleaver of a skull. It lowered its bulk towards the ground, like a bull sniffing the air before the charge, swaying from side to side, sections of its armour sliding around, an eerie puzzle rearranging itself. Calder risked a look back from the corner of his eyes as he edged to the side, still carefully marking the creature. He was about to yell to Skrat to get a move on, but the other three had vanished! What the hell? How had they slipped away without him noticing? Lento has just been yelling her lungs out a couple of seconds ago.
‘I’ll take your skull,’ vibrated the words from the figure, ‘and hang it in my cabin.’
‘Sorry, you’re too ugly for me to keep as a parrot,’ said Calder, brandishing the machete. ‘And we’ve got all the pets we need on the Gravity Rose.’ Unfortunately, Calder had the suspicion he might be regarded as one of them.
The monster came spinning in Calder’s direction, spiked arms flailing, and he danced to the side, more matador than swordsman in this contest. Calder tried to maintain a fencer’s space between himself and the creature, controlling the distance, but he realized it had nicked his shoulder with the edge of one of its spines. Cut and bleeding. He prayed to the gods that this demon relied on brute force and was too unsubtle for poison. The creature stamped towards him, making the floor quiver. Calder backpedalled and leapt onto the dais. He’d have a fraction of a second when the creature leapt and was in the air, leaving the prince the advantage of height and an unopposed swipe with his machete. Would an active blade cut through something that could shrug off rifle rounds fired full-auto on max-mag? Calder never found out. The wall jumped out like a molten stone flood and enveloped the prince, leaving him the briefest of seconds to realize that his friends had never made it out of this chamber at all. The wall ate them.
***
Lana held onto the webbing in the shuttle’s cargo bay for dear life as the craft swung about in the air. She only just heard Steel-arm yelling from the cockpit that he was going to try and glide t
hem down, the roar of the engines outside stuttering and coughing. Whatever the Heezy sentinel had thrown at the command shuttle while it was taking off, she could tell it had taken a powerful bite out of their lift capacity. Lana had never heard an engine so damaged yet still working, protesting every inch of lift being milked out of its dying airframe. Sighting the wing through a porthole, Lana watched billowing waves of smoke trailing from their thrusters. Little red alerts spun in the space in front of the troop benches . . . flame icons with the text “alarm” flashing on and off above them.
‘I thought military shuttles were designed with triple redundancy baked in,’ called Lana.
‘It’s humanity that’s redundant here,’ said Zeno. The android needn’t have sounded so vindicated by his judgement. Unusually for her friend, he actually looked air-sick.
‘Are you okay?’
‘The Heezy brother down there directed some kind of pulse at the shuttle. It fried half the ship’s systems, even our shielded ones.’
‘So much for A.I. solidarity.’
‘I always knew being designed this human was going to be the death of me.’
‘Hey, tin-man, it’s your machine ancestry that just took a zap.’
