Before the Shattered
Gates of Heaven
Part 2: Infiltration Crew
by
Bryan S. Glosemeyer
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven
Part 2: Infiltration Crew
Bryan S. Glosemeyer
Editor: September C. Fawkes
Cover: Dan Van Oss,
Covermint Design
Published December 2018
Copyright ©2018
Bryan S. Glosemeyer
Void Forms Media
All rights reserved.
Kindle Edition
This e-book is licensed for personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold, re-distributed, reproduced, or given away to others. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Void Forms Media logo designed by Orion Harbour.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
For my Mother, who always wanted me to write,
And for my Wife, who supported me when I finally did.
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven
Part 2: Infiltration Crew
7.
SERVANTS CALLED THE game obezya, after the mythical animal. The goal was to race from one end of the deck to the other without ever touching the floor. New servants often played obezya when they pulled a boring and unsupervised duty shift, like maintenance of the grank pens on one of the lower tiers of a battleship pyramid.
Sabira raced against the other two members of her crew’s right arm, Servants Cannon and Daggeira. Along with the left arm, they were all skins, the lowest ranking servants in the crew. Though they shared the bonds of drum and weapon, each of them had started out as pit fighters. Competition created and defined them, one and all. As the newest initiate in the crew, even after two battles and the new tattooed glyphs that came with them, Sabira hadn’t fully earned their respect. Not yet.
A small service enclave along the gallery at the far end of the deck acted as the starting line. From there the gallery branched off left and right, overlooking the perimeter of the grank pens. The first suspended gantries over the pens branched off from the gallery in about fifteen meters in either direction.
Columns of shelving lined the walls of the enclave, each stuffed with containers of spare grank parts and organs. Servant Cannon won an early lead and was the first out of the enclave. He jumped from a shelf, caught a line of piping overhead, and started swinging down the gallery to the left. His arms were long, his grip was tight. Going that way was a good strategy for him.
Sabira reached the enclave’s entrance a heartbeat after Daggeira. Just as Sabira went to jump to a handhold in the gallery, Daggeira leaped across the entrance, landing where Sabira was about to step. Sabira slipped from the shelving, but caught herself by her fingertips.
“Don’t fall down too quickly,” Daggeira taunted. “What will caller think?”
Sabira had lost at obezya twice already. Both times to Daggeira. A darker corner of her mind would have preferred a pit fight to a race.
Forced to stop and steady herself to keep from falling as Daggeira swung from handhold to handhold down the gallery, Sabira realized there was only one way for her to win. She launched from the enclave entrance to the top rail along the gallery, sprung into the open air, and arced down into the pens. Landed right between the horns of the nearest grank and took off running along its spine. She needed to race over twenty-seven rows of slumbering granks to reach the other side of the pen, with more than two meters to leap across from beast to beast to get to the next row.
Granks were big, armored biomechs crafted by the Divine Masters. They slept standing on four legs. Most stood more than three meters high. The three long horns on their heads were bioengineered to act as rupture field generators. In addition to the four eyes on their faces, they also had a mound of eyes just above their big, armor-plated asses, making it nearly impossible to sneak up on them when they were awake.
Platforms were grafted to each flank, where various weapons arrays could be loaded and socketed into their spines. Hover pods could also be installed, bringing their destructive potential airborne. Between the plates of their belly armor, two long gills could open to release gaseous bioweapons.
Because they were so dangerous, while in transport aboard the pyramids the Warseers kept them sedated and penned, their horns deactivated and their weapons platforms unloaded. The pens were recessed down into the deck itself to accommodate the biomechs’ size. In each row, the beasts were clustered into pods of three. Tangles of ducts and biotubing hung down to each pod like vines in a fighting pit and plugged into the granks’ various orifices and sockets.
Sabira raced across the wide, armored backs of the war beasts, leaping from one to the next faster than they could awake. She was taking a desperate chance. If she slipped, lost her footing, or just wasn’t fast enough, she could get stomped. But she wasn’t going to let herself lose. Not again.
Grandfather Spear had told Sabira many stories of his adventures when she was just a young mine rat. She had memorized every detail. Later, in the long months and years between his visits, she would daydream about his adventures as if they were her own. Like the time he told her about winning obezya as a young servant. He had gone for the granks.
Even though the creatures were biomechs, they still had an animal nature. It was in their instincts to slowly meander side to side while they slept. If they were kept securely caged and stationary, they wouldn’t stay sedated long. Should something hit them hard enough in their sleep, they woke almost instantly. And a grank always woke up angry.
The key, Grandfather had said, was to land, run, and jump off the beast before it awakened and realized you were there. If it woke and didn’t sense any threat, it would go right back to sleep. If it woke up before you jumped off—and it sensed you—then you could kiss your glyphs goodbye. The grank would take you as a threat and try to defend itself, probably waking up others in the process.
Running across the backs of huge biomechs was much faster than either Daggeira or Cannon could swing from handhold to handhold. Sabira soon took the lead. She had cleared nineteen rows when she heard Cannon.
“You’re both going to be grank chow!” he yelled, swinging down the gantry.
Both?
She dared a quick peek over her shoulder. Daggeira had changed her mind and gone the direct route as well. She was catching up to Sabira fast.
Sabira knew she was the stronger of the two, convinced she was the better fighter. But Daggeira was quicker, nimbler. A better drummer, too. And that irked Sabira almost as much as the fact that Daggeira closed in just two rows behind her.
“Hey, One Tit. Better get your head out of the stars,” Daggeira shouted from behind, “or you’ll end up face-first in grank shit.”
Something blurred past Sabira and nailed the grank she was jumping toward right between the horns. Four bright green eyes fluttered to alertness a moment before Sabira landed on the plate above them. She sprinted over the beast’s wide neck and across its thick, armor-plated spine. As she planted her feet to leap off the rear eye mound, the hind of the war beast bucked with astonishing speed and force. Grank plating slammed into her knee and sent her tumbling back.
Sabira’s right hand flailed and caught a weapons socket in the grank’s spinal column. Her legs tumbled over the edge of the platform, dangling in the air but not touching the ground. She hadn’t lost yet. She tried to grab hold with her left hand, but the grank bucked again and let out a deep, sonorous bellow. The platform slammed up into her ribs and sent her tumbling into open air.
Sabira fell to the pen floor and landed hard on her back and shoulder, crushing the air from her lungs. For a moment her vision swirled and went dark. The grank’s bellowing and the vibration of its thick, bucking hooves quickly brought her back to her senses.
“See you on the other side of the Gates, Stargazer,” taunted Daggeira from somewhere Sabira couldn’t see.
She had lost. A fully awake and enraged grank bucked and stomped less than a meter from her head. And a full herd of the biomech beasts surrounded her, bound to wake up and see what the noise was about at any moment.
“Oh drill me.”
8.
DETERMINED NOT TO get stomped into grank chow, Sabira rolled away from the angry biomech, ignoring the hot, painful protests from her ribs and shoulders. Soon as her feet were under her she was moving. Her vision swooped like a pendulum and took her balance along for the ride. Stumbling forward like a drunk on diggers beer, she bolted as fast as she could.
Granks always smelled strange to Sabira. A pungent mix of biomech oils and musk, tinged with a metallic sharpness that was unlike any of the other biomech drills and transports in the Labyrinth. She had gotten somewhat used to the scent after her shifts on pen duty, but now the stench overpowered her. So thick, she could feel it in her throat.
Armor-plated hide obstructed her view in every direction, and she couldn’t see which way the nearest bulkhead was. Once her wits returned a little more, she remembered all the pods were arranged to face the outer hull, the direction she had come from. She went down closer to the far end of the pens, so she needed to run at the beasts head-on.
Still off-balance and dizzy, Sabira stumbled to the next line of granks. Planned to slip through the gaps between pods. The slowly rousing biomechs had their own ideas. Their normal sleep-shuffling became quicker, more agitated. The pods shifted closer together in their lines. The biotubes attaching the granks to the ceiling groaned as they grew taut and twisted. Open pathways between the pods closed in to becomes walls of gray-black plating. She made it through the first line but had to start down the aisle looking for the next opening between pods.
The grank that had been trying to stomp her flat bellowed again, followed by the piercing shriek of ripping ductwork. Two more quick, sharp screeches preceded the ringing clamor of biomachinery crashing to the floor. The grank was free. It bellowed its triumph before charging into the herd, driving straight toward her.
All around Sabira, clusters of glowing, green eyes fluttered into confused wakefulness. She pushed forward. Dodged her way around yawning maws and thick, shifting legs. The whole herd would be awake soon, and she still couldn’t see the pen bulkhead.
Behind her, armor thudded, and weapons platforms clanged as the freed grank slammed into the others. She imagined the rampaging grank recruiting every beast it collided with into a stampede of angry, armor-plated destruction.
Sabira needed to be out of there. Now. She ran as fast as she could, but was unsure of where to go. Every dodge and turn scrambled her sense of direction further. She could get a better view from on top of a grank, but there wasn’t a single set of closed eyes on any of the beasts around her.
Movement from higher up caught the corner of her eye. She looked and saw Cannon standing atop the gantry railing. He waved madly, directing her to turn right. He was smart enough not to scream for her attention and arouse the soon-to-be-very-angry beasts even faster.
She pivoted and dashed off in the direction he waved. Behind her, two granks stumbled to the side, shoved over by their confused, angry neighbors. A rumbling chorus of bellows echoed through the deck. The charging grank pushed forward a wave of biomechanical war beasts, none of them happy about it.
Something whacked Sabira across the back. Pain shot through her torso, and her legs jellied beneath her. She banged her knee on the floor, almost went all the way down, but managed to bounce to her feet and keep going. Pain speared through her leg with every stride. She caught sight of Cannon again, corrected her course toward the way he directed, and ran on.
The maw of the grank directly in front chomped at her as she circled around, its four green eyes glowing with hunger and agitation. It was still groggy and slow, however, and bit only air. After clearing its flank, the rear eye mound caught sight of her. Its hind legs bucked fast and sharp into the air, then slammed down its wide flat hooves straight at her.
Sabira dodged, avoided being stomped into the floor by centimeters. The impact of the beast slamming down its hooves sent tremors up her legs. Her lungs ached, and she felt like her heart would burst. She dodged again to get farther from its deadly bucking, and she saw it. The pen wall. Maybe seven to nine meters away. Right where Cannon had been directing her, a set of ladder rungs ran up the side to a gate in the railing.
More heavy vibrations rattled through her, and she looked over her shoulder. Wakened, confused, and angered, much of the herd bucked and stomped and bellowed. The noise was tremendous, blotted out the ability to think. Waves of plated hide roiled through the pen. And within that horrendous wave, a current of three-horned, four-eyed heads came crashing toward her.
“SABIRA RUN!”
Hearing the scream, she realized she had momentarily frozen in terror. By the time she came to her senses again, her instincts had already taken over, and she was dashing for the ladder. A heartbeat later it was gone from her sight, replaced by the thick hind legs of a grank stomping down out of nowhere.
Running far too hard and fast to stop in time, Sabira managed to raise her arms in front of her face before slamming into its leg at full speed. Bouncing hard off the armor, she fell flat on her back. The grank bellowed and stomped in triumph. Sabira rolled out of the way and caught a glimpse behind her. The stampede continued toward her, biomech eyes and horns and maws manically delighted to see their prey downed.
A memory of a voice echoed through her mind. The High Overseer looming above her in the fighting pit, the freshly carved-out heart red and glistening in his hand.
Should you find yourself before the Shattered Gates of Heaven, may the Gods find you worthy of eternal service.
A blasting hiss disturbed her memory. Jets of pink mist flooded the pen. The rumble and bellows of the stampede submerged into the gas. All their charging and bucking ceased in an instant. Soon they stopped moving altogether. Sets of glowing, green eyes winked shut all around her.
Sabira rolled painfully to her feet, though most of her didn’t want to move a muscle. Pink mist floated around her head, formed swirling eddies when she breathed. The mist didn’t affect her, other than a acrid taste in the back of her throat. She patted the hard flank of the grank she had charged right into. Deep in sleep, it made no response to her touch. Just behind her, the first beast that had awakened now slumbered, quiet and motionless. Close enough for her to read the glyphs of ownership and designation stamped across its face. The war beast had been stopped only a meter or two from the young servant girl stupid enough to awaken its fury. A jumble of biotubing, waste vacs, and sleeping monsters trailed behind it. Blue-black grank shit was everywhere. The reek poked hard at her gag reflex.
“Trickster’s asshole. We are so drilled!” shouted Cannon, the tendons of his neck straining furiously. His voice echoed in the vast silence of the pens.
“Hey there, Stargazer One Tit.” Daggeira looked down over the railing at Sabira through the mist, eyes agleam with self-satisfaction, a gloating smile smeared across her face, the emergency tranq-gas button still clutched in her hands.
“I win,” she said.
9.
SABIRA WANTED TO hate her—badl
y wanted to hate her—but couldn’t really. Daggeira did what she needed to win. Anyone who’s ever walked out of a pit respected that.
Still, more than once she fantasized about choking Daggeira out until her eyes bulged and her face swelled purple. Especially when they had to spend shift after shift vac-tubing up a lake of noxious grank shit.
It was slow, monotonous, and disgusting work. Grank shit and biomech oils were splattered all over the deck. First, they had to reassign a line of grank pods to another pen. Then clean the beasts. Back to the first pen to waste-vac up the mess. Then bring the granks back to the original pen, and start on the next line of pods.
With each step and twist Sabira took during cleanup, the coarse membrane of the sanitation suit rubbed at the burn scars on her back. Brought a scrape of agony to every movement. Servants called the scars the nine eyes. The sacred symbol of the Holy Unity, three smaller triangles aligned to form a larger triangle, had been seared into their flesh by Warseer Ahzk Vohg as punishment for the grank pens. Until the burns finally healed, pain would be the overseer for all three of them.
When they had reported the disaster to their rank, Caller Arrow, none of them blamed the others. Not even Cannon. He said they were playing obezya and woke the granks. So the three skins of the right arm shared the punishment equally.
Sabira wondered if the other two hated her for being the first to go for the granks. Hopefully, they gave her the same begrudged understanding she gave Daggeira.
Sabira couldn’t make out Cannon’s and Daggeira’s faces with the respirators on, but their body language said they were in just as much pain. Especially Cannon, who she had to admit was the least deserving of punishment. He cursed nonstop, agitated and wriggling in his membrane suit.
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven Part 2: Infiltration Crew (Shattered Gates Volume 1 Part 2) Page 1
