Valley of Fires: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series)

by J. Barton Mitchell

  “Gideon made us to fight the Assembly alone,” he said.

  “How do you know that? Did he tell you? He predicted most of this, didn’t he? He saw the need for the Reflection Box, the campaign that would come, why wouldn’t he have predicted allies in the struggle?”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Then how do we fix it?”

  Dane finally looked at back at her, and she could see his old self returning. “The way I see it, the main problem’s communication. Each group’s got their own way of talking to each other, but as far as any unified communication goes, forget about it. You can’t adapt to battle situations like that.”

  Mira thought about it. The solution seemed obvious. “Radios,” she said. “We need radios.”

  Dane nodded. “We need lots of radios.”

  She looked up at him, the unfamiliar feeling of hope beginning to form. “Sounds like we have a plan, then.”

  11. FAUST

  HOLT MOVED THROUGH THE CROWDS of the Commerce Pinnacle, ignoring the malicious glares he received. The animosity of the pirates he brushed past didn’t leave much of an impression, neither did the dreadful heat from the sun above. He didn’t really feel much anymore. Mira was gone, and she had taken anything he might ever feel again with her.

  The only glimmer of anything approaching emotion was when he thought of Zoey. If it wasn’t for her, lost and alone, he would just stop moving where he stood, but he’d made promises. They were futile, certainly, he would die before achieving them, but he wouldn’t quit. He would just keep pushing forward, until the road finally ran out.

  Faust was nearly the same as he remembered. Massive and dirty, radiating a violent, dastardly atmosphere. Holt had always found it odd how disconnected the city was. Each of the eight Pinnacles held platforms near the ground, though built off of it, that circled around them, and buildings and walkways that climbed up to the top, but none of them were connected. To move between the Pinnacles you had to walk, take a dune buggy, or use the infamous Skydash, the complicated wire system that connected them in the air.

  Holt hated the Skydash, but he hated pretty much anything to do with heights. He watched dozens of figures sliding along it above, ripping through the air from Pinnacles to the different metallic platforms that hung in between them, called Hubs. The platform in the center of the whole mess was called the Crux, a huge, circular, metallic dais, that hung from the multitude of wires. The thing was enormously heavy, solid steel, and normally it would be impossible for the wires to hold it, but dozens of Aleve artifacts kept it from ripping loose.

  The Skydash and the Crux allowed travel to and from any Pinnacle to any other in less than a minute, and there were eight of them. The Utilities Pinnacle, which handled the city’s electricity, gas, trash, and recycling. The Commerce Pinnacle, where all trade and the distribution of plunder was performed. The Food and Water Pinnacle, its function obvious. The Communications Pinnacle, which saw to communication between the various parts of the city and Menagerie forces in the field. The Armory Pinnacle, where weapons and equipment were stored. The Machine Works Pinnacle, a massive platform for repairing and maintaining the Menagerie’s fleet of old dune buggies and aircraft. And the Command Pinnacle, the seat of power for Faust’s ruling class.

  But it was the last Pinnacle that gave Faust its true power. The Refinery Pinnacle made it possible to pump and refine the massive stores of crude oil under the city into gasoline. That gasoline allowed the Menagerie to operate their mechanized armies, and it made them a marvel in the world as it was now. Only Winterbay, far to the northeast, relied on more technology from the World Before, and even it didn’t use as much fuel in a week as Faust did in a day.

  As he moved, Holt looked and studied the Machine Works and Communications Pinnacles. It was from those towers that the reversed Menagerie flags draped down, white with red eight-pointed stars.

  The primary gossip in the city (besides Avril’s return), was the civil war that was erupting. It wasn’t the first insurrection of its kind; lots of people had tried to usurp power from Tiberius, it’s how the Menagerie worked, but no one had ever managed to take a Pinnacle, much less two.

  They’d divided the city, and from what it sounded like, the movement was becoming popular. No wonder Tiberius wanted Avril found. He was losing momentum, he needed something to bring it back. The return of his heir and Ravan, one of his premiere lieutenants, would go a long way. So would making the deal Holt had brought him. Tiberius’s decision to grant Holt sanctuary in order to consider the White Helix weaponry bargain suddenly made even more sense.

  “Did you recognize him?” Ravan asked. “The kid at the top of the Machine Works, out in front of the other rebels?”

  Ravan was walking next to him and Castor behind. The Helix returned the Menagerie’s stares with his own challenging ones. He was surrounded by hundreds of pirates, but Holt wasn’t sure he’d bet against him.

  “No,” Holt answered.

  “Looked like Rogan West. You can tell by that hair, always wanted to rip it out by the roots. He was here when you were, head mechanic at the Machine Works, which explains how they took that Pinnacle.”

  Holt didn’t remember him, nor did he care.

  “The rebellion wasn’t happening before you left?” Castor asked.

  Ravan shook her head. “Usual rumors of disgruntled pirates, but those are nothing new. Everyone wants more than they have.”

  The roar of a crowd overpowered everything suddenly, and Holt glanced to his right. The Commerce Pinnacle sat on a rocky hillside, higher than any other, and from the platform, Holt could look straight down at the source.

  The disconnected nature of Faust wasn’t the only reason you had to use the Skydash or some other means to move between its different sections. The swath of desert land in between the platforms was occupied by a giant structure called the Nonagon, named after the geometric shape it resembled, a nine-sided polygon, each side representing the eight star points of the Menagerie rank system, as well as the ninth and final position, that of Tiberius himself.

  Each section held rows of auditorium-style seats that stretched around the perimeter, and above hung huge red banners, each bearing a different, aggressive white symbol. A tarantula, a dragon, a wolf, a charging bison, and so on around the entire stadium, every one of the nine sections with its own unique totem.

  The Nonagon was an arena, and very few who entered it ever came out. The floor of the structure, in front of the rows of seats, was divided into a large circular swath of metal surrounded by a ring of dirt, roughly as big as a football field. From the center rose a large pillar, probably a hundred feet tall, made of a latticework of strong metal. The Turret, a tower full of gears, struts, pulleys, chains, and cabling, all of which could be reconfigured in a variety of ways.

  Cheers from thousands of fans washed up and over them. A match was going on, the round had just begun. Four figures inside the arena divided up, each holding some item that was unseen, navigating between metallic cubes that had pushed up from some substructure underneath the arena floor. As they did, other things pushed up as well, only these were much more dangerous. Steel, razor-sharp spikes shot up and withdrew back out of sight all throughout the grounds, and the team was desperately trying to avoid them as they moved toward the Turret, spinning slowly in the center.

  “Tough luck,” Ravan observed. “They drew Scorpion.”

  The Scorpion configuration was widely considered the most difficult draw you could face in the first round. As Holt watched, one of the competitors disappeared in a cloud of dust as a spike shot upward under his feet. Tough luck indeed.

  “Is that the Nonagon?” Castor asked, watching intently. The fact that a White Helix, who lived most of his life in the Strange Lands, had heard of the Nonagon was a testament to its infamy.

  “What else would it be?” Ravan asked back. The crowd cheered wildly. “Avril’s supposedly in her father’s box. Wonder if she likes it, a White Helix would make an
interesting competitor.”

  Holt felt her eyes on him, but he said nothing, just kept walking.

  “You always hated it,” Ravan said. “But you liked talking strategy, how you’d beat the Wolf or—”

  “Aren’t you meeting your men here?” Holt cut her off as they reached the Handover Ward. He felt Ravan tense at the sharpness of his words, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t here to stroll down memory lane. The sooner they got this deal finished, the sooner he could be on his way.

  “Yeah,” Ravan said tightly. “Five minutes.” She headed off into the crowd while Castor and Holt waited.

  The Handover Ward was where pirates, returning from the field, turned in their plunder, and it was how profit was distributed. Like everything invented by Tiberius, it was much more complicated than it needed to be, but that was the point. The Menagerie leader long ago figured out the best way to make sure no one questioned something was to make it more complicated than they could understand.

  Large conveyor belts ran in crisscrossing patterns along the platform, the smaller belts converging into the larger main one, which shuttled the pirated loot into Faust’s warehouse. Items were stuffed into bins, divided by category: weapons, ammunition, perishables, toiletries, water, the list was near endless, and each one had their own belt. Monitors were stationed at each, making sure the bins were loaded correctly, weighing them, and marking which crew had brought them in before sending them off.

  The last part was the most important, and it was where things got really convoluted. The loot was divided between the crew bringing it in and Faust itself, into a sixty/forty split, with Faust coming out ahead. As each bin entered the warehouse, it was weighed. The division of profit was figured out by that weight. The split rarely, if ever, came out even, so Faust’s take was rounded up, while the pirates’ was rounded down. This meant the weight of each bin going through the system was critical.

  Pirate crews were allowed to trade smaller items of their own for larger ones from other crews, in an attempt to get their weight as close to their favor as possible. In the end, though, the odds were stacked against them, Faust always came out ahead of the 60 percent figure, and that was no accident.

  Holt watched Ravan meet her men, a large collection of bins in front of them, bigger than any other crew’s. It made sense: they’d been gone months, they would have plundered a lot of loot in that time.

  Ravan caught his eye, and the look she gave him was complicated. She was hurt by his recent indifference, but she wore that hurt differently than most. There was no sadness, only a a darkness, an anger that took time to recognize for what it really was, but Holt had seen it enough to know. The truth was he’d been the cause of most of it, and any other time it would have bothered him. It was liberating, in its own way, not worrying about other people’s emotions anymore, not caring what happened next, though there was a nagging feeling underneath that something was wrong, but it wasn’t strong enough to push to the surface.

  The roar of the Nonagon overwhelmed everything again. The Menagerie watching from the edge of the Commerce platform reacted either with boos or cheers, and money and trade items exchanged hands as bets were resolved. A blaring tone of sound, like the one they’d heard earlier, blasted in the arena, signaling the end of the first round. The cubes withdrew back down into the underworks, the Turret stopped spinning, and a huge clock face on top of it whirled into view. It was numbered 0 to 120, and the giant hand on its face began to tick clockwise.

  “Two minutes,” a loud, amplified voice announced through giant, staticky speakers. “Two minutes.”

  Below, the team was regrouping, one of them clearly injured, hobbling back toward where the dirt ring met the solid circle of the arena floor. They’d managed to survive, and that was something.

  “How does it work?” Castor asked in amazement, the look in his eye an unusual one. He was clearly imagining himself in the match below. As much as the pirates of Faust enjoyed the Nonagon, none of them had the desire to be a competitor. It pretty much meant certain death. But Castor had faced such stakes daily, he was White Helix after all, and the Strange Lands had a myriad of ways to kill you. It wasn’t a surprise he would be drawn to the Nonagon, that it might even feel like home. Holt thought about Ravan’s observation a few minutes ago. How would a White Helix perform there?

  “It’s an arena,” Holt answered, “but you don’t fight other people, you fight the Nonagon.”

  “It takes four?” Castor asked.

  Holt nodded. “Usually they’re captured prisoners, but sometimes it’s Menagerie, people who’ve committed crimes against the city. They can choose to face the Nonagon instead of being executed, and if they survive it, they get life imprisonment. If they beat it … they’re freed, but no one ever beats the Nonagon.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Three rounds. Each has three different possible configurations. Supposedly they’re determined randomly, but I always assumed it’s rigged, like everything else here. See the banners above the different sections?”

  Castor looked from one to the next, studying each, all nine of them. A tiger, a cobra, a harrier, each fluttering on their crimson banners in the hot, desert winds.

  “Each one represents a configuration. The round before was Scorpion, steel spikes that shoot up from the ground, real nice. If you’d been sitting in the Scorpion section when it was picked you’d get a profit bonus. If Scorpion kills the four competitors, you get even more, while the other sections lose. If the team survives the configuration, you lose profit, the other sections gain.” None of that included all the ancillary gambling that took place during the matches. The pirates bet on everything, from which configurations would be chosen to which would be beaten or simply survived, to which items would be picked and used, and all of it was encouraged by the ruling body and Tiberius.

  “But how do you win?” Castor was enraptured. He’d probably try and beat the thing by himself if he could.

  “Each round is timed, nine minutes. You either survive in that nine minutes, or you disarm the configuration. Disarming is the only way to win, but very few teams ever do. It’s all most can do to just not get killed.” Holt had heard of only two teams that ever managed to disarm all three rounds, out of hundreds that had competed. It was virtually impossible, but that was the point. It kept Tiberius’s rowdy, unkempt, violent followers entertained, kept their focus off him, and prevented them from doing the kinds of things that Rogan West and his rebels were trying right now.

  At the thought, Holt looked up at the Machine Works Pinnacle and its reversed Menagerie flag, and as he did, he noticed something odd. A group of boys were there, near where the Skydash lines connected from the Crux to the Pinnacle. Maybe two dozen. Even from here Holt could tell they were armed, and, as he watched, they leapt onto the cables of the Skydash and zipped downward toward the Crux. When they landed, some stayed, unstrapping rifles from their backs, while the others jumped onto new cables and slid toward the Commerce Pinnacle, one after the other.

  “What’s this?” Castor asked hopefully next to him, watching the same thing. The answer quickly became obvious.

  The Commerce Pinnacle was much less crowded than usual, due to the Nonagon match, and Holt figured that was the whole plan. Gunfire flashed from both the Crux and the kids slinging downward.

  The pirates on the platform jumped for cover, most of them unarmed. The ones that were returned fire as best they could, but the snipers on the Crux were good shots.

  Holt saw three Menagerie fall near him, saw Ravan and her men take cover behind one of the conveyors, but they weren’t prepared for an attack, they only had their sidearms. Holt didn’t even have that, but the truth was, even in all the chaos, he still had his strange detachment. It was like he was watching it happen to someone else, and he just stood and stared curiously as the bullets flew and people fell.

  Castor grabbed him and shoved him behind the closest conveyor, staring at him in amusement. “Your reaction ti
me could use some work.”

  More bullets sparked around them, and the Menagerie nearby were firing back. Above them, on the Crux platform that hung over the Nonagon, the snipers kept their fire up, pinning everyone down. The main force, about a dozen, cut loose from the Skydash and hit the platform running, firing as they advanced. There was no way the rebels could take the Pinnacle with this small a force, they must have something else in mind.

  Castor’s eyes were full of excitement. “What do we do?”

  It took a moment for Holt to realize Castor was asking him. He had no real desire to do anything, but the truth was, Holt had an agenda, and these rebels were screwing it all up. As usual, he had no real choice.

  “Can you handle the ones on the Crux?” Holt nodded upward. “There’s four, looks like.”

  Castor studied the snipers there and his only answer was to nod in anticipation.

  “Do it then,” Holt told him.

  “Seek,” Castor intoned, pulling his mask up and grabbing the Lancet from his back. “And find.” Then he leapt upward in a flash of yellow, grabbing one of the Skydash cables and twirling around it like a gymnast, launched himself even higher.

  The pops from Ravan’s sidearm were overwritten by the big bangs from the rebels’ shotguns and rifles, and Holt peered over the conveyor. The rebels were by the Pinnacle’s main gas line, which was mined and processed here at Faust along with the petroleum, and it was critical to the Handover Ward. The combustion engines that ran the conveyor and processing system were fueled by that gas.

  Two of the rebels moved for the big, metal wheel that closed and opened the line’s main ball valve, while the others covered them. They turned the wheel and shut the valve … and the conveyors all around Holt sputtered and died.

  One of the rebels lit a portable cutting torch, then started slicing the wheel at the base. Holt saw what they intended now. Cutting the wheel with the valve closed would cripple the Handover Ward’s processing system until the Menagerie could install a new one. It was a good plan, shutting down Tiberius’s ability to process and distribute profit to his crews would cause a big shake-up, and probably bring more pirates over to their side.