“How do we look on ammo?” Carmen asked loudly.
Marcus answered, “Enough so they’ll remember we were here.”
There was a rumble of agreement through the soldiers.
Arnie tossed the pack off his shoulder and opened it. Quey looked to Ryla who, for the first time, seemed afraid. “Looks like now’s as good a time,” Arnie announced as he lifted a pair of bottles from his pack. He handed one to the soldier next to him and tossed one to Quey. The moonshiner caught it, looked down at the clear liquid, and pondered. Going back to an ex you don’t really want because it’s easy. He’d wanted something else. Finally he could say what that was. After being on the hustle since he was fourteen, living on the move with one eye open all the time, he just wanted a bit of rest. That’s what he’d been aiming to buy with all his moonshine earnings after all. A few more years and then the rest of his life somewhere small, simple, and far away from Once Men, and Blue Moon, and the bullshit that came with them.
Arnie pulled a third bottle from his bag while Quey stood staring down at the Pickens and Zaul label. That’s what he was. That’s all he’d ever be. Just a moonshiner who’d grinded his life away one day at a time. He didn’t want fame, or riches, or anything that came along with that sort of stuff. He just wished that once, he’d have been able to do something more. He might as well have worked for Blue Moon.
“It’s been a good run,” Arnie said, raising his bottle, smaller than the others and labeless, and drank.
Quey’s brow furrowed. Railen. Dusty. Reggie. Rain. The city of Fen Quada and the countless others. Ross, whose kids didn’t have a father, whose wife was now a widow. Elvy… he hadn’t learned much about her. The dozens lying dead not far from where he stood, their blood drooling from the docks and painting the ocean red.
“What?” Quey asked, his voice a ghost.
The bottle Arnie had given to the soldiers was making the rounds. Quey looked at Arnie and waited for him to say it again. When he didn’t Quey asked, “What did you say?”
Arnie’s face shrunk. “Just that… It’s been a good run.”
Quey cracked open his bottle and said, “No it hasn’t,” then he drank. It felt good, that burn slowly moving down to his belly. He’d been away from it for so long.
The banging on the door stopped. It was replaced with a more mechanical sound. They were starting to use tools.
“Spacesuits,” Amber said as if she’d just figured out the answer to a mystery.
Quey looked over at her.
“Spacesuits!” Leone yelped.
Understanding spread through the room. They were standing under a spaceship, there was bound to be suits.
“Get that thing open,” Quey barked, then took another sip and closed the bottle. “Here,” he said to Arnie, “Better hold onto this a bit longer.”
Arnie took the bottle and shoved it and the one he’d kept for himself into his bag.
Carmen dashed up to the ship and was looking for a way in. Ryla thought that was funny as she made her way to the control panel and pressed a button. A door slowly lowered in the ships belly. It was a long ramp that led up at a slight angle. Quey hurried up into the ship, Carmen and Marcus followed.
It was dark inside but they seemed to be in a loading room, probably a place to store luggage and cargo.
“Where do you suppose they keep the suits?” Marcus asked.
“Maintenance,” Quey replied. He turned back to the door and shouted, “Can you power this thing up?”
Someone relayed the request to Ryla and a few ticks later there was the dull hum of electricity and they had light.
“There,” Carmen said and ran toward an open room just off the massive hold. Inside there were lockboxes full of tools and parts and lockers along the far wall. Inside they found what they were looking for.
“We don’t need the whole suit,” Quey barked as Marcus began pulling the helmet out. “We just need the magnetic holds.” Quey reached into the locker and pulled the boots and handgrips free then turned and ran for the door.
Ryla was waiting on the platform when Quey made his descent. He tossed the boots to the floor at her feet and she stepped into them then engaged the straps, which tightened until they fit her. The boots were supposed to be one size fits all, but still they seemed a little loose.
Quey helped her slip the magnetic grips over her hands. They fit over her palms and had a trigger for her thumb. The harder she pressed them, the tighter the magnets grip would become. He pulled the straps as tight as he could without cutting off her circulation before clamping them in place.
The security forces were working hard on the other side of that door as Quey and Ryla moved toward the edge of the ship. It stood high off the ground, more than enough room for men much larger than Quey to walk comfortably beneath, so he bent to give her a boost. She was heavier than she should have been, he couldn’t help but notice, as she stepped into his hands and he lifted her up into the air. His wound screamed and he realized in all the excitement he’d forgotten getting shot. Still, he strained to lift her higher but he was getting shaky. He was about to call for help from the room full of spectators when she said, “Hold still.”
“Hu?” he asked but then she stepped up onto his shoulder. He braced himself for the weight of her and she used him as a stool and stepped up, reaching for the side of the ship. If her balance hadn’t been as good as it was she would have fallen as Quey gripped her ankles and gave her all the height he could manage. Finally she reached the side of the ship and squeezed the thumb press, causing the magnet to grip.
“You’ll have to raise it a bit,” she yelled, pointing to the nose of the ship. Then she reached up with her other hand and caught the side.
Arnie was the first over to the panel. There were so many buttons and he wasn’t sure what any of them did. Rachel arrived shortly after and pressed one. Hydraulics began to move and the nose of the ship slowly rose upward.
Ryla crawled up the side of the craft and onto the roof, then turned and started for the front. “A little more,” she called down and Rachel pressed the button again. The nose lifted to near a forty-five degree angle as Ryla made her way to it.
“You have to be shitting me,” Natalie said as they watched her pose on the tip of the craft, looking over at the metallic wall of the launch shaft.
“She won’t make it,” Burke said, mouth agape, then added, “No way she makes it.” He looked to Marcus who simply stood silent.
Quey was holding his breath. Finally she jumped.
“Oh fuck,” Natalie said moments after her feet left the ship. There was no way she was going to clear the distance. She was falling. Panic shot through Quey like a jolt of electricity and stunned him. He didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think of anything he might do, so he stood watching.
Ryla was partially synthetic. In her brain there were tiny circuit boards that helped her process information. One way this was helpful was in plotting trajectory. It really wasn’t that different from ping-pong. Though those below may have been nervous, she was not, for she knew, without a doubt, that she would fly through the air at just the arc necessary to catch hold of the bottom of the metallic shaft. When she was within range she thrust her hands out, gripping the triggers with her thumbs as tightly as she could manage and felt the sudden jerk of a stop before her chest collided with the wall and her legs dangled freely past the edge of the tunnel.
Below her there was a sigh of relief and a handful of people even clapped once or cried out. The jump had hurt more than she’d anticipated, considering she was wearing armor, but she wasn’t seriously injured so she scrambled until her feet were under her and then began scaling the wall on her hands and toes, like a free climber ascending a rock face with plenty of cracks to hold.
Quey breathed out, finally, as she began to move upward and grinned as he looked around the room. The relief was broken by the screams of metal coming from the door. He wasn’t sure what they were doing on the other side of that
barrier, but whatever it was, it was working.
Ryla made it to the top of the shaft and climbed up onto the edge where she sat for a moment, breathing deep. Her right shoulder burned from when she’d caught the edge of the wall and jerked to a stop. She moved the socket around a bit as she lifted her forearm and looked at the holographic display projecting from her device. When she saw she had a good signal she smiled slightly and activated the button that Boyfriend had given her. It wouldn’t be long now.
She took a moment, there at the top of the shaft, to look out at the ocean and the shards of light the afternoon sun spewed across it. It was beautiful and she realized how rarely she’d had an opportunity to see something like this first hand, and how little attention she’d paid it when she had. As advanced as holoscreens were, she realized, there was something about being there in person they’d never be able to recreate. Then she took a moment to note that she thought it was a shame she didn’t pack her paints.
After a set of ticks she returned her attention to her device and accessed the communication line that the militia was using. She contacted Eric Hoss.
“This is Ryla, can you hear me?”
“The robot girl?” he asked a bit puzzled.
She sighed heavily and let go of the swelling anger she felt in her guts. She’d wasted too much time on things like that all ready, made too many mistakes on account them. Besides, was it really that far from the truth? “I was curious,” she said to him. “I believe we’ve drawn a good degree of the security personnel away from your position and the robotics compound’s defenses are deployed. They’ll begin hitting targets sometime in the next fifteen minutes, depending on location, so I was wondering what you would like.”
“As far as?”
“I could open the blast doors and maybe you make it or perhaps you’re gunned down, or I can leave them closed and you’ll live but you’ll likely be trapped there until you die or are captured by Blue Moon.”
“Open the doors,” he said.
“Stand by and be ready,” she said then began to climb down the shaft.
Marcus and Carmen got a message from Eric as Ryla began climbing back down. They gave him a report on the situation and, after a moment, he said, “We’ll start moving toward your position. If they manage to get through we’ll have ‘em flanked.”
“Sir, just make it to the boats,” Carmen told him.
“I’m not leaving anyone behind,” he replied.
Ryla leapt from the side of the launch tube and twisted through the air so she could catch herself on the ship, landing like a cat, before climbing back down. When she made it to the floor she went to the terminal next to the ships launch controls and found that Blue Moon security had tried to lock down the computers. She chuckled at their feeble efforts and hacked through the system. Within a tick and a tock she opened the blast doors and released Eric Hoss and his remaining soldiers.
“I’ll be on my way,” he barked.
The doors across the room were beginning to warp around the top edges. Quey’s eyes widened when he spotted the massive sawing device burst through at the upper right hand corner and begin to cut downward. The left corner followed shortly after. The soldiers around the room readied their guns. It wouldn’t be long now.
“How long till these robots show up?” Carmen barked.
“They’re not really robots,” Ryla replied.
“No time for semantics,” Quey told her.
She looked at him and nodded a bit. “Not long now. We need to start loading into the ship.”
“We’ll give you cover,” Carmen assured Ryla, Quey, and the others.
Rachel stepped forward and said, “You can just come with us.”
She watched the tools cutting through the door and said, “No we can’t.” Then she turned to Rachel and added, “You’re brother’ll be moving to this position. When they come through those doors we’ll have ‘em in a crossfire. Mission was to get you to this ship so you could take it to the sky, but there’s a great many more to come after. Jobs that can’t be finished from space… even if you don’t blow up trying to get there.”
Ryla looked up from her device and noted, softly, “Time to go.”
Outside there was a low rumble and then a shriek of metal and vibrations shook the air. Something crashed into the island. Natalie was herding Amber and Leone onto the ship with Arnie following slowly, he wasn’t sure if the feeling in his hands and feet were nerves or the liquid in his bottle taking hold.
The doors were beginning to come down. Blue Moon security tossed a pair of grenades in through the opened section of the door and the soldiers moved to cover.
“Go,” Carmen barked.
Ryla and Rachel started up the ramp and onto the ship with Quey following behind. Once inside it hit him. He’d never been to outer space. For a great many of the populations of other planets it was nothing of note but to him… his hands were shaking.
They gathered at the nose of the ship. Arnie went to the chair in the center of the small room and shrugged off his bag. “Won’t take but a set of ticks,” he said and began flipping switches. The engines came to life with a sudden clank and then a dull hum followed.
Natalie strapped the kids into seats near the sides of the room, somewhat oval in shape, before taking one of the seats nearest them. Rachel found a place nearer the front. She wanted to see, though she couldn’t say why.
“I’m going to go make sure the systems are running okay,” Ryla said and started for the door.
“You can’t be walking around until we break atmo,” Arnie told her.
“Be sure to engage the gravitational stabilizer,” she told him plainly.
“Of course,” he barked before adding, “But still. It’s not a good idea to just wander.”
“I’m not,” she said. “And anyway, I have my boots,” she replied with a shrug before she spun on her heels and disappeared out the door.
Gunfire cracked like fireworks in the distance as the ship began to rise up toward the launch tube. From one of the tiny oval windows Quey watched as a firefight began in the hangar below and then another of those massive electronic bellows issued and vibrated through the ship.
“Everyone strapped and ready?” Arnie shouted.
Quey took a seat near the window and strapped himself in.
The ship rumbled for the better part of a minute before Arnie pulled a lever back and sent Quey’s stomach end over end. He’d gone fast before, been on plenty of rollercoaster’s in his day, even been outside a train going 800 kilometers an hour, but he wasn’t prepared for this.
As the ship left the launch tube and streaked out into the sky Rachel leaned over the arm of her chair and vomited. Quey looked at her, then at the others and said, “Right. Maybe not my best idea.”
The ship banked hard in a direction Quey couldn’t identify and his vision clouded. He almost lost it all over himself. When the ship straitened and his body caught up to the speed he took a few deep breaths and said, “Definitely had better,” as his vision began to clear.
Looking through his window he saw the island below. Sacks of flesh and metal walking on a multitude of legs filed onto the beach across the island, opposite the loading docks. Each one had to be the size of an elephant and he realized that they might have been once, but these were far less clumsy and a deal deadlier. Other, smaller creatures poured from the mouth of something whose head was lying on the beach while its body remained mostly under the water. Creatures spread across the beach like a tide. As they gained altitude, Quey could see the shape of the creature in the water as a shadow under the waves. It was bigger than the island.
What the hell have we done, Quey wondered to himself as the ship raced ever upward and he saw what they’d let loose on the world.
Ryla kept in contact with the soldiers on the ground. She’d taken the time to link into their devices and activate their camera feeds. She used her sheet to keep track of what was happening down there.
When Eric
Hoss arrived at the hanger he found Carmen and her remaining soldiers pinned down near the launch pad. What Carmen claimed about that situation proved true, however, and the two sides easily gunned down the Blue Moon security forces standing between them.
They settled in for a spell and waited to be sure no stragglers were looking to pop up with a surprise, then gathered and hurried toward the docks. They made it to the main corridor before spotting one of the things from the forth basement.
Ryla sat up a bit and scanned through the cameras. She knew what they looked like, a combination of metal and flesh, knew also that each was different in its own way. Some were larger, some had more legs or arms than others. Some had distinctive faces and mouths, others had eyeballs sunk deep in sockets and teeth that jutted from around a gaping hole. What she was curious to see was what they would do. How would they function?
Eric and his men weren’t planning to fight these things, whatever they may be. Instead they chose to live, and that meant running. All Ryla could see was the jostling of cameras. Every once in a while she’d see one stabilize but by the time she flipped to it the feed was gone or motionless. Even when she switched to Carmen’s. She saw Eric linger for a moment, watching until a series of crunching sounds came through her speaker. Then he turned and ran, a meager dozen of his original eighty-four men following his lead.
The ship began to shake for a split and then the tone of everything changed. She felt nothing save the gravitational stabilizers holding her down and thought, ‘hmm, this is space.’
And I Mean to Have Another
Saffron was in chaos. The alarms had come through Blue Moon headquarters in Saffron City one by one and then the communication network crashed, leaving them not only in chaos but in the dark as well. They were in the middle of that when someone brought streaming video from the signal to their attention. Creatures from the robotics compound were tearing across the planet. Eventually it became clear they were heading for military targets but it seemed they didn’t mind making stops along the way. Any building registered to Blue Moon seemed to be a target and without the communication network running, it was impossible to coordinate evacuations or rescue.
The Saffron Malformation Page 82
