Solon had to agree with Folches, though. He didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits, but something had taken all those people. Fifteen hundred people do not just disappear.
Since bringing the boy onboard, the child had shadowed every step of Solon’s second, Cholos. Solon was just glad that the boy had not latched onto him. For his part, Cholos seemed to be enjoying the attention, and had even suggested making the boy the crawler crew’s mascot.
‘That’s the way,’ said Cholos as the boy tucked into Solon’s discarded food with gusto. ‘Hungry, aren’t you?’
‘Find a woman amongst the refugees that has lost her son,’ said Solon. ‘Give the boy to her.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind lookin’ after him,’ said Cholos.
‘We don’t need a pet kid underfoot, Cholos,’ said Solon. ‘Foist him off on one of the refugees. There are plenty of women down below who would take him.’
Cholos glared at Solon for a moment.
‘Don’t listen to him, boy,’ said Cholos. ‘He’s nothing but a mean old man.’
The boy, for his part, seemed oblivious to the conversation, focused on the meal before him. With a last lick of the standard issue spoon in his hands, he finished off the meal, smacking his lips loudly.
‘Cholos,’ began Solon, but his words were interrupted as the room shook violently. The crawler came to a shuddering halt, and warning lights began to flash. The wail of sirens blared from the hallway, and Solon was instantly up and moving.
‘What the hell?’ asked Cholos, knocking his chair over as he stood.
A second impact rocked the crawler, and mugs fell from their hooks to clatter on the floor. Solon clutched at the door-frame to steady himself.
‘Ghosts,’ murmured the boy, his eyes wide and fearful.
‘Go, go, go!’ shouted Folches as the crawler bay doors slid open.
The sergeant dropped to the ice and landed in a crouch, his laslock rifle humming as its charge powered up.
The storm had, if anything, become fiercer, and punishing winds lashed against the soldiers of the Skyllan Interdiction as they peered into the whitewash of billowing snow.
‘Can’t see a damn thing,’ muttered one of Folches’s men, the sound crackling through on the sergeant’s micro-bead in his left ear.
‘The crawler was hit from the north-east,’ said Folches. ‘Move out, dispersal formation.’
‘How can we engage what we can’t damn well see?’ asked another of his team, his voice strained. Fear, Folches realised. He rounded on the man, and grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling him close.
‘You done?’ barked Folches into the man’s face, and the soldier nodded curtly. With a shove, Folches pushed him away, and gestured for two of his men to move around the front of the crawler, and for the other two to proceed around its rear.
His men nodded their responses, and the sergeant began moving towards the rear of the hulking behemoth, loping along the length of the crawler with his body low and the butt of his laslock pressed into his shoulder. Behind him, the two soldiers loped through the snow and ice. The other two men, moving in the opposite direction, disappeared instantly into the storm.
Reaching the rear of the ice-crawler, Folches gestured for his men to halt, and risked a glance around the back of the immense vehicle. Smoke was billowing from the engine stacks, and hot oil was spilling out onto the ice. Steam rose from where the oil was pooling.
Crouched low, he signalled for his men to take cover.
One of the soldiers, Leon, dropped to his stomach and began crawling elbow over elbow through one of the deep depressions created by the crawler’s track units, easing himself into position and sighting his long-barrelled lasgun out towards the north-east. The other ducked beneath the undercarriage of the crawler, and squirmed forward to take up a position looking out to the north-east.
Folches leant around the corner of the crawler, peering through the sight of his weapon. The scope rendered the landscape in shades of green, and though it lit up the darkness as if it were day, the fury of the storm was such that he could see no more than twenty metres ahead.
There was nothing to see, just a swirling blanket of snow and ice.
‘Julius, you seeing anything out there?’ he said into his micro-bead.
‘Negative, sir,’ came the response.
‘Hold position,’ he said.
The wind howled around Folches, and he remained motionless, waiting. Minutes dragged by, and the biting cold began to seep through his limbs.
He lifted his head away from his gun sight, and stared out into the blanketing white gale. A shadow of movement ghosted behind the veil of swirling ice.
He dropped his eye to his sight once more, straining to pick up the movement. He saw nothing, and swore under his breath.
‘You see that, Leon?’ he hissed into his micro-bead.
‘Didn’t see anything, sir,’ said the soldier.
‘Damn it. There’s something out there. Julius, anything?’
There was no response from the other soldiers of his squad, just the relentless roaring of the wind.
‘Julius, Marcab, come in,’ said Folches, but again just silence answered him.
‘Hell,’ he swore.
The sergeant felt movement behind him, and he swung around, his heart thumping, bringing his laslock to bear on… nothing.
He was jumping at shadows, and he cursed himself. He forced his racing heart to slow, breathing in slowly.
‘Calm yourself, man,’ he said to himself as he resumed his position. He’d give anything for a blast of his stim-inhaler around about now, but he had left the black market narcotics back onboard the crawler.
Trying to push the cravings away, Folches took a deep breath, and tried to contact his other soldiers once more.
‘Marcab. Julius. Come in,’ he whispered hoarsely into his vox-bead. ‘Where the hell are you?’
Again, nothing but silence.
He flashed a glance towards Leon, lying concealed in the crawler tracks. The motionless soldier was face down, and blood was splattered out around his shattered head.
Folches pulled back from the corner of the crawler, and a flurry of projectiles impacted with the metal, centimetres from his face.
Several of the rounds sliced past the corner of the crawler, whistling sharply as they sped through the air.
A strangled grunt carried to Folches’s ear on the wind, and he knew that the last of his squad, Remus, was dead.
Swearing, Folches leant out around the corner of the crawler, presenting the smallest target possible.
Half a dozen figures in glossy black armour were darting through the snow, and he saw larger, shadowy shapes gliding forwards behind them, several metres off the ground.
The sergeant snapped off a quick shot towards the closest of the figures, and ducked back into cover as return fire spat towards him. One of the enemy rounds struck him, slicing a neat cut through his body armour and scoring a wound across his forearm.
The cut was impossibly thin, and at first there was no pain, but then blood began to well and he cried out, clutching a hand to the deep wound.
Leaving a trail of blood drips that hissed and steamed as they struck the snow, the Skyllan Interdiction sergeant staggered away, dragging his laslock with him. He slipped in the hot oil pooling from the damaged engine block, and fell to his knees. Scrabbling through the sinking mire, Folches pushed himself back to his feet, and ran blindly around the corner of the immense ice-crawler, looking fearfully over his shoulder.
A thin, wickedly barbed blade entered his guts, sliding easily through his armour and flesh and halting him in his footsteps. His laslock dropped from his hands, and he stared up into the face of his killer. Nothing could be seen behind the cruelly slanted eyes of the blank helmet, and all Folches saw was his own face reflected back at him.
The figure was a good head taller than him, though it was inhumanly thin, and it cocked its head to the side, leaning into him as it twisted the blade embedd
ed in his stomach, as if savouring every moment of the kill. Blood gushed from the wound as it opened up, and steam rose from the heat of his innards.
A hand, fingers like the black legs of a spider, clamped around Folches’s neck, and he was pushed up against the crawler. The blade slid from his gut and was held poised in front of the sergeant’s eyes, blood dripping from its elegantly curving tip.
The figure pressed almost intimately close to the dying sergeant, as if it wanted to experience every last dying sensation of the soldier. Then it pushed the blade into Folches’s side, sliding it slowly up between his ribs to pierce the lungs.
Blood foamed up in the soldier’s mouth as his lungs began to fill, and he gasped for breath as he slowly drowned on his own blood. The black fingers remained clasped around his neck almost lovingly until his heartbeat fluttered and stopped.
Then the black figure released its grip, and the sergeant slid to the ground.
Solon ran towards the control cabin of the ice-crawler, barging workers out of his way. The sirens in the claustrophobically narrow hallways were deafening, and he winced and clamped his hands over his ears as he ran past one of the blaring klaxons.
A burly orderly, his overalls covered in oil, ran into Solon as he rounded a corner, knocking him back into the wall.
‘Sorry, boss,’ said the man, helping him back to his feet, and Solon pushed past him.
He vaulted a steel banister, landed on the gantry below and ran on, turning to the right towards the control cabin. His boots rang out sharply as he climbed a short flight of stairs, and slammed the door to the control cabin open.
‘What in the hell–’ he began, but his words of reproach to the relief driver died in his throat.
A fist-sized hole had burned through the side window of the cabin and driven through the drive-mechanics on the wall opposite, leaving a smoking hole that dripped with molten metal. The driver was slumped back in his seat, half his head missing, the devastating blast having clearly passed through him when it had struck.
Solon gagged at the stink of burnt flesh, but moved into the cabin, trying not to look at the corpse, and failing. There was no blood. Whatever had struck him had cauterised the wound completely, forming a blackened crust. The blast had hit him in the temple, and everything in front of the line drawn between his ears was missing, down to his mouth, which was drawn in an almost comical expression of shock.
Tearing his gaze away from the corpse, Solon moved to the control console. It was dead, no lights flickering along the length of its panel at all, and he swore. He flicked a few switches, muttering an entreaty to the Omnissiah, but nothing happened. He balled his hand into a fist and stuck the console.
‘Come on, damn you,’ he swore.
Red warning lights flickered, the needles of the dials wavering back and forth, and Solon let out a surprised laugh of success.
His small victory was short-lived. A beam of solid darkness punched through the side of the control cabin, destroying the console in a shower of sparks. Cables and wires were fused by the lance strike and flames exploded outwards with immense force, shattering the already ruptured plasglass windows of the cabin and hurling Solon backwards through the cabin door.
Thrown backwards down the stairs leading to the cabin, the flesh of his face and arms blistering from the heat, Solon hit the deck hard. Frantically, he fought to rip his thermal undershirt off, for the synthetic material was melting onto his skin. Shaking the smoking, skin-tight shirt loose, he hurled it away from him, and began to stagger back.
The crawler, the closest thing he had to a home since he had been expelled from Sholto guild eighteen years ago, was beyond redemption. It was dead, and the vultures were circling outside to descend on its carcass.
He had to get away.
Rounding a corner, he almost ran headlong into Cholos, with the frightened boy Dios in tow.
‘Solon,’ began his second, his face panicked.
‘Not that way,’ he shouted, turning the man around and pushing him before him. ‘The crawler’s done. We have to get the hell out of here.’
Screams and shouts echoed up through the corridors, and Solon and Cholos fought their way through panicked workers. The crew looked to Solon for guidance.
‘Get your exposure suits on,’ the overseer bellowed. ‘We stay here and we are all dead.’
Or as good as, he thought, thinking of the distinct lack of bodies aboard the crippled crawler they had come across just hours earlier.
‘Damn,’ swore Cholos. ‘My suit.’
‘Where is it?’ asked Solon.
‘In my locker,’ answered his second. ‘But Solon, the refugees... there are not enough suits for them all. We can’t leave them.’
‘We stay here and we die.’
‘But all those people?’
Solon swore and punched the wall, bruising his knuckles.
‘What do you want me to do, Cholos? I can’t save them, and with the generators down, they’re going to freeze to death as surely in the cargo bays as out on the ice.’
‘There must be something we can do,’ said Cholos.
‘Well, if you come up with something, I’m all ears. Maybe that bastard Folches can call in support from the Skyllan Interdiction, or something. I don’t know.’
Cholos let out a long breath, and rubbed a hand across his face.
‘Take Dios, Solon,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you down below. I’ll be quick’
Solon looked down at the boy, who was staring up at him with wide eyes, and swore. Cholos dropped to his knees.
‘Go with Solon,’ he said slowly to the boy. ‘He’ll see you safe. You understand?’
Dios nodded solemnly.
‘That’s the way,’ said Cholos, ruffling the boy’s short-cropped hair as he stood once more. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘I’ll meet you on deck three,’ said Solon.
‘I’ll be there, boss,’ replied Cholos, giving Solon a tense smile.
‘You’d better be,’ said Solon, and slapped his second heavily on the shoulder, urging him to move. ‘Go.’
Cholos ducked through a side hatch, and Solon glanced down at Dios once more.
‘Come on, boy. Move,’ he said, gruffly.
The boy gave him a salute, his face serious, and the two of them set off towards the cargo bays. It took them the better part of five minutes to move from the crew area to the cargo holds, passing through twisting corridors and past dozens of panicked crewmen.
Punching the locking plate of cargo bay three, the door hissed open and swirling wind struck him. Screams were lost in the gale roaring through the cargo hold, and Solon saw that one of the cargo bay hold doors was wide open.
Through the blinding snow and ice, Solon saw a dark shape hanging in the air outside, hovering four metres above the ground. It was sleek and black, with wicked blades and spikes protruding along its sides, and it rocked slightly as the winds buffeted it, like a ship rolling on the open sea.
Black figures, taller and slimmer than a man were dragging people kicking and screaming towards the skiff hanging in the air outside. As he stood frozen on the spot, transfixed by the horror of what he was seeing, a struggling woman was knocked to the ground by a backhanded slap, and hauled towards the gaping cargo bay door by her hair.
A score of people were already trussed up on the mid-deck of the skiff, lying in a moaning pile, their hands bound behind their backs.
One of the black figures turned its faceless helmet towards Solon, and he felt a fear that he had never before experienced as the reflective eye lenses bore into him.
The figure barked a word in a language that Solon could not understand, spun on its heels like a dancer and swung something up from its side. With a flick of its arm it hurled the object towards him, spinning it end over end.
Even as the dark figure cast its weapon, Solon was backing away, and he tripped over the boy, Dios, who was clinging to one of his legs. Solon fell, swearing, and the spinning weapon scythed above
him to strike one of his crewmen who had come up behind him.
The man fell, gagging, his hands clutching at the weighted wires wrapped around his neck. A flicker of energy coursed along those constricting wires and the man fell, convulsing violently, to the ground.
Scooping the boy up in his arms, Solon punched the door panel, bringing the hatch slamming back down, and turned and ran, leaping over the twitching figure on the ground.
The other cargo bays were to the left, the engines to the right, and Solon paused for a second, not knowing where to go. The boy wrapped his arms around Solon’s neck, burying his face against his chest, and a pair of Solon’s crew came running down the stairs towards him, their faces fearful.
‘Run,’ shouted Solon, and as he heard the hatch behind him slide open he made his decision, turning and bolting to the right.
The pair of crewmen stood staring behind Solon, firstly in incomprehension, then in dawning horror. There was a rapid sound like air being expelled, and one of the men collapsed, his left leg peppered with tiny splinters that tore through his overalls and the flesh beneath. The other man turned to run, but he was too slow and splinters shredded his legs from under him. His agonised scream followed Solon as he ran into the engine room, slamming his shoulder against the wall as he rounded a sharp corner.
The massive twin-engines were silent, and he raced between them, his heavy boots echoing loudly. Steam billowed up from beneath the walkway grid, where the massive drive shafts and gears of the crawler lay dormant and motionless. He swung around to the right, and grabbed the metal rungs of a narrow ladder that climbed one of the inner-hull walls.
‘Hold on, boy,’ he said, and the child tightened his grip, clinging to Solon like a limpet. With his arms free, Solon pulled himself up the ladder, expecting at any moment to be cut to shreds by the enemy.
Half way up, he leant out from the ladder and tried to loosen the access hatch that led out to the exhaust stacks. The circular wheel-lock wouldn’t budge.
‘Come on, damn you,’ Solon hissed, casting a quick glance towards the entrance to the engine room as another strangled cry echoed down the hall. His hands were slipping on the wheel, and he strained with all his might to turn it. His face was red with exertion, and he had almost given up hope when he felt the hatch lock give a little. With renewed strength, he yanked the wheel into the unlocked position, and pushed it outwards.
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