by Andy Remic
“Something’s not...” began Keenan, and the floor dropped away, unfolding swiftly in a series of triangular steel petals. They lunged for the ladder.
Keenan slammed the wall, hands closing on a metal rung, legs smashing against the rungs below and sending pain lancing up him. Franco bounced with his shoulder, turned, started to fall and with a mad grappling of blurred limbs managed to entwine one arm and one leg around the ladder. Pippa, however, hit the wall. She reached for the ladder, but it was beyond her grasp. She slid down the wall, down into darkness, teeth grinding as her hands frantically grasped at slick steel. Below, there was a thrashing sound: metal on metal, spinning, grinding, increasing from a standstill with the acceleration of a charging turbine. Pippa felt a scream well in her throat. Her hands, outstretched against the metal, encountered a flaw: a lip, a protuberance she couldn’t see in the gloom. Her fingers flexed, dug in and locked. Her legs banged the wall, hard. Her knees sent shockwaves of pain to her skull. Pippa released a long breath and looked up at the distant silhouettes of Keenan and Franco, and then down at what appeared to be spinning discs of metal. She blinked, and reappraised her position. They weren’t discs; they were blades.
“Holy Mother,” she whispered, and glared across at the ladder. It was too far to jump.
“Pippa!” bellowed Keenan, voice bouncing metallically. “You OK?”
“Just about,” she said, voice unnaturally quiet.
“What’s the sound?”
“Cutting blades,” shouted Pippa. “I recommend you don’t make a jump for it, or you’ll end up juiced.”
Clatters and bangs echoed down the chute as Keenan and Franco descended. Keenan stopped across from Pippa, looked over into her grey eyes and smiled. He reached out. “Come on, jump.”
She glanced down.
“If you miss me, Kee, I’m sushi.”
“I won’t miss,” he said.
“You’d better not. Or I’ll kill you!”
He grinned at her, face boyish. “Darling, if I let you drop then I’ll dive right in after you.”
Pippa leapt, hands grasping frantically for Keenan; he caught her, took her weight, and swung her up to him where she took a firm hold on the rungs. Face to face, chest to chest, with nowhere to move, they breathed one another’s sweetness.
“Have to stop meeting like this,” smiled Keenan.
“You’re messing with my head,” said Pippa.
Keenan nodded. He agreed. His life, his whole existence, felt like a tumbling confusion, but now, here, only one thing was for sure. He gazed into her eyes and saw the glint of light from wet lips, felt her taut coiled body pressed tight against his. And he wanted her, for a fleeting moment, more than life itself.
“This feels suspiciously like a trap,” said Franco. His voice echoed off into distant metal. “You say that fucker JuJu gave you directions? And timings for this huge arse-fuck of an internal puzzle? This rat maze? This hamster slaughter-house? Well, the big dumb Ket-i bastard stitched us up.”
“Maybe,” said Keenan.
Below, the discs—with tiny serrated contusions on their whining upper surfaces—spun faster and faster and faster, whirling in a blur that was still accelerating on a platter of noise; the piercing metallic shrieks increased, the thrum of the blades vibrating the very walls.
Above, high above, there was a clunk. Keenan saw Pippa’s eyes narrow. Franco, above him, glanced up. There was another, solid, clunk.
“What is it, Franco?” snapped Keenan.
Franco strained his neck, squinting, mouth a tight line. There was another clunk, then another and another. They started to get faster, and Franco’s drug-fried brain suddenly made sense of the image moving towards him.
“Keenan!” he shrieked. “It’s the ladder, it’s folding in on itself!”
The ladder, in small sections, was folding down and retreating into the narrow slots behind each rung. Viewed from below, it seemed as if the ladder was racing towards them... leaving nothing in its wake: no handholds, no handy ledge to hang from, just narrow slots too thin to get a human finger inside.
Keenan glanced down. Then up.
They were trapped, between sea and shore, hammer and anvil, between a rock and a hard place.
Anger boiled through his veins: a slow injection, a terrible rising of hot blood.
The metal discs spun faster and faster. They shrieked. And in that sound of discordant metal music, harsh and unreal, it seemed to Keenan they laughed at him.
He snarled something incomprehensible...
And stared down into shimmering blades, which mocked him with an impending slaughter.
Chapter 12
Vault
Polka Yux was a rocky, barren, desolate moon, which squatted, a forgotten bastard child on the lesser-known fringes of the Sinax Cluster. Lifeless, with nothing worth mining, no breathable atmosphere, no discernable purpose, and located away from all viable trade routes, umbilicals or SPIRAL docks, Polka Yux was—in the main, and quite rightly—ignored as the actuality of pointlessness it was.
Kotinevitch stood on an Ion Platform two klicks from the moon’s bleak surface and floated on a stream of synthetic radiation uplift. She gazed around the vast oval level, at its gently glowing green edges where sparks streamed from Friction Buffers in glowing trails all the way down to the moon’s surface. She strode to the edge, her FRAG Bulk Fighter silhouetted behind her. A vast blackness lay above and a vast darkness beneath her, her vision moving and tracking and drawn by the streams—a curtain, in fact—of tiny green fireflies, which tumbled and danced and fell into infinity, blending and merging on trajectories to become a blurred haze-like semi-transparent mist of fire.
Kotinevitch watched the phenomenon for a while, entranced by the simple raw beauty, and enamoured by an almost romantic inclination at her position. Standing, like a God above a planet, it was as if she stood on a platform floating in space, surrounded by eternity, master of all she surveyed.
Eventually, aware she had to dock the advancing machines, but unwilling to pull her gaze from the majesty of—rawness—surrounding her, Kotinevitch wheeled, boots squeaking against the slightly corrugated surface of the platform; she moved to the central tower.
The Tower was a machine, a hub, and the majority of its intelligence was a concentration of navigation data built with one specific function: to gather the War Fleet.
In readiness, for... The Time: a Time, which hopefully, would never come.
Because, if this Fleet was needed... then it was already too late.
Kotinevitch eyed the machine warily as she approached; like a white needle it rose from Platform Central, piercing the infinite black with radiant brightness. A beacon, a guidance module, a totem, it seemed to Kotinevitch this pinnacle of modern technology was almost... alive... sentient, and, if not alive, then certainly divine.
She exhaled, breath escaping as white smoke. The platform was cold, colder than ice.
She climbed into the Tower’s feeder hatch and felt a moment of disorientation as it elevated her to the summit several thousand feet above. She stepped out onto the Controller Ridge and knew awe.
Kotinevitch gasped.
She felt like a Star Strider; a Builder of Worlds.
Is this what they felt like? she thought, remembering the old stories, the ancient tales of heroic pioneering Terraformers who, with the aid of World Builders—mammoth tank-like machines used in the terraforming of planets—had left Earth on decade-long journeys to find new places for the creation of colonies, in order to extendthe longevity of the parasite mankind. They had travelled the years, searching out, creating, terraforming, and, ultimately, aiding with the final transfer before Earth had spun into decline and frozen to become a static dead world, a raped shell. Is this how they felt? Surveying an infinity from the bridges of their great and terrible, and powerful machines? And knowing they held in their hands the infinite power to create and destroy... knowing they had, to some extent, become a reality of apotheosis?
During the thousand years of the Helix War the World Builders—fifteen working models—had been utterly destroyed. However, these machines were not created by mankind; they had been discovered; and despite the billions of man hours spent in an attempt to duplicate, to replicate, to understand, to remanufacture, Man—in his arrogance and actual ignoranceof technology—had failed. The World Builders used materials humanity had never before seen; they used Creation Minds that humanity could not understand. And so, listed (by many Professors) as one of the greatest crimes of the Helix War, the annihilation of the World Builders had been a tragic loss, an obsolescence of the art of creating new worlds.
Still, maybe it was for the best, thought Kotinevitch. The loss of the machines meant we had to spread our wings, had to wander and search and diversify, had to seek out other life forms and amalgamate, accept them, integrate with different cultures and customs and religions. Kotinevitch smiled. She had a feeling that, after Mankind fled the diseased and dying Earth, if the World Builders had continued to exist—if Halo and Tetrol missiles hadn’t vaporised them into component atoms—then maybe Mankind would have remained the secular, insular beast He had always been.
Now, she thought, Man had been forced to integrate, to become part of a quad-galactic mixture of alien races, ethnic species and genetic experiments, all living together in one big happy boiling pot of politics and religion, and of culture and understanding. We’re a cosmopolitan species, now, she thought. Ha!
Kotinevitch reached out and, fingers a blur, allowed the computers to transmit coordinates; then her head lifted and her eyes narrowed and, with one hand on the hilt of her yukana sword, she waited.
Sophisticated, multi-species, integrated: there’s no such thing as a fucking alien any more.
Vitch smiled a very grim smile.
Well, not for long, she thought as the first massive BULK Attack Craft slammed into view, space around it distorting and wobbling, and battering Kotinevitch’s stance with a terrible pressure.
The first BULK craft fired bright purple jets and shifted, banking, and filling her vision with sheer volume. It filled not just Vitch’s vision, but also her head. It was huge. It was a world killer.
Now three BULK Freighters arrived, followed by D5 Transport Craft and a swarm of Piranha Fighters; the vision before Kotinevitch, as her fingers coordinated data on the computer, swam like nothing she had ever before witnessed. More and more ships arrived, hundreds of craft decelerating from Dead Space and distorting reality for just a moment; again and again space rippled with an Empty Displacement Effect as wave after wave of ships, shuttles, fighters, transport craft, freighters, mobile weapon units, energy organisers, mechs, and mobile brain units, all flowed into and around Polka Yux turning the desolate area of space into a hive of insane activity; turning it into a mass of devastating weaponry ten times greater than anything ever witnessed during the Helix War.
Kotinevitch looked out over her fleet.
Kotinevitch smiled grimly at her armada.
And yet, despite the apparent simplicity of her mission, she hoped she would never need this Might.
Inside, inside her breast, inside her heart, inside her soul, something finally relaxed as the fruits of her labour and pain, and anguish for the last decade ranged before her in all its magnificence, all its brutal military glory. Everything she had worked for, everything she had fought for, everything she had risked: it glistened like a dark jewel, a dark God, beckoned her to step forward to the precipice and use that which she had created for its final terrible ultimate purpose.
Kotinevitch licked her lips.
She fought herself.
And fear tumbled through her brain.
She descended the white ethereal tower, back out onto the oval platform; everywhere, in every micrometre of space surrounding the desolate moon, appeared the bulk of military craft, of Kotinevitch’s gathered War Machine: so many vehicles the eye could not count. Enough to fill the most feared enemy in Quad-Gal with absolute and unshakeable terror. Kotinevitch had amassed the greatest military fleet ever gathered. She was in control of a New Age.
And yet...
It is a deterrent, she thought.
But if we must go to war, then we will go to war.
If there must be bloodshed, then it will be terrible.
Keenan, you have a lot to answer for. Your ignorance is colossal. And you will destroy everything we have fought to preserve; you will bring Him back from the Eternity Well.
I will make sure you die for your sins.
Vitch smiled the smile of a woman ready to sacrifice everything: a woman ready to kill, to murder not just on a planetary scale, but on a canvas that spanned four galaxies.
She watched the War Machine.
It glittered dark.
“Keenan! Shit! Ahh! What do we do?” Franco was flapping; in fact, more than flapping... he was practically plucking his own feathers in his eagerness to escape the blades.
Keenan nodded, as if taking counsel from an internal dialogue. “Drop a bomb,” he said in a lazy, almost emotionless, drawl. Franco glared into lizard eyes.
“What?”
“Wait there.”
Keenan struggled to climb up past Pippa, and squeezed onto the ladder next to Franco. He unclasped Franco’s pack, delved inside, and by experience of touch pulled free a funnel grenade, or what those in the profession liked to call a Funnel Fuck. Keenan pulled the digital pin, heard the click of DNA recognition, and held the bomb in his fist as Franco craned his head trying to meet Keenan’s eyes.
“You might blow us up!”
“Either that, or we get minced.”
“Shit,” said Franco.
“Exactly.”
Keenan nodded, leant back, and dropped the bomb into the mesh of spinning discs.
Franco and Pippa cowered against their treacherous, slippery rock. There was a hiatus in time, an apparently endless pause filled with nothing but honeyed silence as the bomb fell, a spiralling trajectory, and above them with thundering great crashes the ladder folded over and over and over, down into itself leaving a slippery oil wall in its wake.
The funnel grenade connected with the blades.
They heard screams of shearing metal, the shrring of tortured circular saw steel, then a devastating crack. The world seemed to topple. Metal exploded outwards, two of the huge discs jigging and disconnecting from their framework; one went down, spinning and bouncing into dark nothingness, the other spun up, a huge distorted wheel with razor edges whirring end over end as it chased its own metal tail and reached the soles of Pippa’s boots.
She screamed.
The disc, losing momentum, hung for a moment just beneath Pippa, threatening to cut her in two. Then it fell away, tumbling silently into darkness. A stink of chemical explosive filled the shaft. Above, the shock of the explosion had upset some deep internal machinery; the self-folding ladder halted, one rung half in and half out of its aperture. It made tiny groaning noises, and moved half-heartedly in a fractured cycle. Then, with a final click, it stopped.
The three members of Combat K shivered.
Their world plunged suddenly into silence, and complete darkness.
“Are we all OK?” said Keenan.
“Yeah, said Pippa.
“Yeah boss,” sighed Franco.
“Let’s move, then.”
The smoke cleared a little, allowing light to shine up from far below. They descended the shaky, brittle ladder, past the battered smashed machinery of circular blades, now a scorched and broken mess with huge black streaks smearing the walls, and onwards, downwards, into the bowels beneath the Metal Palace.
They reached the real floor of the shaft, littered with debris and with a huge battered saw blade propped bent and broken against the wall. The chamber was a central hub, with six narrow corridors leading away. Each was a squeeze, especially for Franco’s girth of belly, and as they squatted down and Keenan waited for the pulse that would tell him the right direction through
the web of metal arteries, so Franco moaned.
“There has to be an easier way than this.”
“There is,” said Keenan. “But the path to the Fractured Emerald is—unfortunately—littered with hundreds of Ket-i soldiers. This is what you’d call a back door.”
“Nice of them to fit one.”
“This place isn’t a vault, Franco. It’s a machine. The Ket-i may have turned it to their own uses, but they have made few alterations. They don’t want to stop the machine working... cannot afford to upset the equilibrium. After all, they don’t know what it does.”
“Maybe it makes their oxygen?” joked Pippa.
“Now there’s a horrible thought,” said Keenan.
The jolt of machinery jerked through the Metal Palace; around their little hub, corridors and passages whirred and shifted, some folded into metal cubes, some opened like the petals of rare flowers. The whole circumference of the shaft base altered and flowed, like liquid. Pippa found she had her hand on Keenan’s arm. She withdrew it quickly.
“Not far now,” he said, watching her.
Pippa nodded. Her voice was husky when she said, “Let’s go.”
In a gloom of thin smoke and oil residue, Combat K moved further into the machine.
They crawled down a series of narrow, claustrophobic corridors. It stank of old oil and grease. Sometimes, rancid steam or oil smoke came floating past, making them gag. Keenan stopped at one point, wiping sweat from his brow and checking his map. He felt a great weight, a great mass above and around him, as if he were deep underground, trapped almost in a confined coffin. Yeah, he thought, a tomb: a tomb with my name stone-chiselled on the door.
“You OK, Keenan?”
“Never better,” he muttered, and pushed on.
Franco, in comparison, had become pretty chirpy and cheerful after his drugs. His recent anal anaesthetic had pepped him up no end, and he’d managed to stop moaning about needing the toilet. At one point he had winked at Pippa and said something about internal compression and the power of mind over bowel. Pippa hadn’t looked impressed.
