In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘We’re finished,’ moaned Deeli. ‘Might as well taste my canteen now. Share the poison around!’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Carter, the words squeezed out dry and hoarse. ‘We’ll slip away down the slope; find some of those ground worms mining the rock-fall. They’ll have transport we can steal.’

  ‘Dead,’ said Deeli, as if he hadn’t heard Carter’s words at all. ‘Quick or slow, that’s our only choice.’ Carter ignored the slave and pushed him towards Eshean and Noah, more roughly than he had intended. The scrawny sky miner nearly fell over.

  ‘You better leave me here,’ announced Eshean, his face pale through the transparent visor of his hood. ‘If you’re planning to cross the dead zone on foot, you might as well strap that wreckage back there on your back as take me along.’

  ‘Let’s carry you anyway,’ said Noah. ‘It’s a fine day for it.’

  Below Noah’s hood, Carter noticed the glass of the man’s spectacles had been broken across both lenses. Shouts sounded from the thick clouds to their side, distant and muffled, and with all the survivors accounted for here… that only left one possibility. Carter shot a look at Deeli. ‘How many crewmen does a patrol vessel carry?’

  Deeli pulled himself together to answer. ‘There’s a pilot and a co-pilot/gunner. The standard complement in the back is five guardsmen.’

  ‘Grab the clubs from the back of the transporter. We can drop the guards in the mist, take their guns and hijack the ship.’

  ‘That’s as mad as anything I’ve heard,’ said Noah.

  ‘They can’t see us in this damn smoke,’ said Carter. ‘And they’re overconfident, same as the scum I killed back on the station. We can circle them, ambush them, arm up with their weapons and then we jump the patrol ship.’

  ‘Hunters don’t expect to be stalked,’ said Eshean. ‘It could work. Nobody fool enough to do that. Except you, Carter.’

  ‘More desperate than foolish, today.’

  ‘Crazy! Who’s going to fly the ship, man?’ whined Deeli. ‘Ferris is gone!’

  ‘I’ll do it myself,’ said Carter. ‘If it comes to it. The imperium must keep the ships’ controls simple if they expect those big lazy brutes to fly them. But we can take one of the pilots alive and tickle him with the edge of a blade to get some cooperation.’

  Carter took Eshean on his shoulder and half-walked, half-dragged the man back towards the transporter wreck. Eshean moaned in agony as he was helped. ‘Try real hard to keep at least one pilot alive, eh? Don’t need matching splints on my legs.’

  ‘I’ll lay you up inside the cage. When we’re in the mist, you yell for help, loud as you can, as if you can’t move and you’re bleeding out. Draw the soldiers in towards here.’

  ‘Carter, I can’t move, and I am bleeding out.’

  Carter climbed into the slanting back of the craft, Noah helping lift Eshean’s body up, Carter dragging him under cover. ‘Won’t need to act much, then.’

  Carter broke open the compartment holding the heavy wooden clubs, took his and passed a handle apiece to Noah and Deeli.

  ‘I’ll have one too,’ said Eshean.

  Carter tossed a length of wood at the Weylander. It was going to be more use as a crutch. ‘Swing hard, big man.’

  ‘I’ll cuff them with what’s left of my leg if they get too close.’

  Carter grunted. He didn’t voice it, but part of him wished that it had been one of the other two who had taken that mangled leg. With his size, Eshean was a hell of a hitter, while both Noah and Deeli would have been better suited to filing archive updates in a librarian’s hold. Alan Ferris dead and crushed in the pilot’s seat. Their transporter wrecked. Carter’s perfect escape plan spiked. Eshean crippled. Four of them against a company of heavily armed thugs. Kerge’s ominous warnings about attempting to escape were proving to be every bit as accurate as the gask’s prediction of the eruption. Their trail along the great fractal tree was narrowing to a single, desperate branch; with assaulting the Vandians sent to kill them the only direction left to travel.

  Carter and his two accomplices slipped down the slope and glided into the smoke. This fog wasn’t spilling over from the crater’s lip, but hissing from side vents, solidified magma holes ranging in size from molehills to rocky mounts, arranged like wounds along the slope and bleeding fumes and gas. Smoke cover. The three of them stalked wide, until they trailed behind the guardsmen’s excited shouts. Carter quickly lost sight of Deeli and Noah, and had to trust that they were still doing what they needed to. In the distance he could hear Eshean’s pleading yells, begging for help and transport back to the sky mine. These Vandian soldiers sounded enthusiastic and pleased with themselves, hollering like they were out hunting game in the woods. What could be easier? Pumping a bullet or two into a handful of slaves who’d already been shot-up and forced down on the volcano. Given how few escape attempts had been made since Carter had arrived, this must be the highlight of the soldiers’ year. This is what the bastards lived for. Let’s see if I can’t dent their enthusiasm, along with a skull or two.

  A shape coalesced in front of him – the familiar sight of a Vandian’s armoured back below a cape, the soldier clutching a rifle and whistling to his people to let them know his position. An intimidating size, heavily built and over six foot tall. He wore a silver helmet with a rigid red brush coming down the back of the helm – a more perfect target Carter couldn’t have hoped for. Carter suppressed a yell of fury as he ran in – surprise his most effective weapon – and swung at the helm, felling the brute as his gouged helmet tumbled off to the side. An initial moan and the guardsman collapsed forward, lying face-down and still across the slope. Carter rolled him over and lifted the rifle away from the soldier’s body, keeping a wary eye on the mist. The weapon didn’t look much like the rifles back home – a metal stock engraved with imperial emblems, heavy, a metal magazine the length of a hand protruding in front of the trigger guard. Its safety catch was where its equivalent would be from the Landsman Weapon Works, though, and that was all he needed to know to work it. There was a sharp saw-toothed bayonet attached under the barrel for when it ran out of ammunition. Carter removed the soldier’s air mask and and exchanged it for his own, making sure the pig wouldn’t be coming around if he wasn’t dead already. Shouts and shots sounded from inside the hot mist, hard to triangulate but very close. Somewhere, Eshean was still calling. Carter couldn’t shoot blind – not without risking hitting Noah and Deeli, so he climbed the slope, the stinking fog starting to thin out. He figured if he could get on the lip of the crater and take position above the wrecked transporter, he’d have enough of a view to pick the soldiers off as they went for Eshean. There was a moan to his right and Carter swung the rifle around. Bodies on the rock, fuming mist passing over them like a river. Not the soldier Carter had just brained – another armoured Vandian stretched out, with Noah and Deeli close by, all prone and on the ground. The Vandian had been beaten down with clubs, same as Carter’s. Noah had a red crater where his forehead should be, below the shattered faceplate of the survival suit. Deeli was the only one alive, just, moaning as he clutched at his bleeding gut, blood smeared across the silvery fabric as though Deeli had been swinging a cleaver at a butcher’s table. The dead soldier’s rifle wasn’t here – must have had comrades who didn’t want to leave it behind with escaping slaves stalking the slopes.

  Carter knelt by Deeli, hand still on his rifle, taking his hand. ‘Stay still. They’ll have bandages and medicine on the patrol ship. I’ll come back for you.’

  ‘Won’t — need my — canteen, now,’ whispered Deeli, hard to hear through his respirator. ‘You take — it.’

  ‘Stow it. We’ll be drinking wine to celebrate getting out of here.’

  ‘Just— bones,’ said Deeli, his voice growing even fainter, ‘that’s all — we are. My wife. My boys — me. Piles — of—’

  Deeli rested his face against a rock, as if he was making himself comfortable on a pillow. He grew still, his eyes shutting and
his fingers trembling no more. Carter stood up and pulled the rifle in hard under his arm. Noah’s corpse stared accusingly at him through his broken glasses, saying not a thing. Guilt and anger fought for control of Carter’s mind, but he shook them both away. Only a cold, detached sense of purpose left. To accomplish what he had left the station to do.

  Narrower and narrower, the paths on the great fractal tree. Carter was balanced on a twig, now. ‘See you soon, boys.’

  He continued to climb the slope, homing in on the increasing fur­nace heat from the stratovolcano’s crater. Black ash fell again when he came to the vent’s lip, the great beast’s interior masked by a vast column of smoke, waves of heat buffeting against him. Tracking along the edge he ran low in the direction of the mangled transporter. Carter had almost run past the crash site when the mist briefly cleared down below, allowing him a horrifying glimpse of two grunting soldiers, swinging their bayonets into Eshean like miners swinging pickaxes at a rock face – the Weylander stretched out in the ground behind the craft’s passenger cage, already dead. Lifeless, but his body being used like a punch bag with a steady, continuous thud of blades into his chest. They were attacking him contemptuously, rhythmically, showing what they thought of slaves that attacked their masters. Dese­crating his corpse. One soldier lashed from Eshean’s left with his bayonet, the other swinging on the right, venting their fury on all that was left of the slave.

  Carter bent down on one knee and took aim. When he pressed the trigger, the rifle surprised him. Not a single shot, but shaking with a continuous burst, the barrel rattling and bucking as he fought to keep it depressed in the direction of the two guardsmen. Whatever the hell Carter was shooting with, the two men were thrown back hard, tossed into the wreckage, their armour shredded by the spray of bullets, his rifle left clacking as the magazine complained that it was empty. Carter was getting to his feet, thinking about searching the dead guards for ammunition or just taking their rifles, when a furious red-faced Vandian appeared from the mist no more than a foot away, charging while firing his officer’s pistol at Carter. He hadn’t got off more than a single, wild shot when Carter’s empty rifle swept around like a club and cracked into the officer’s gloved hand, sending the pistol careening away into the air. Both the officer’s crimson gloves locked around the rifle’s stock and the two of them wrestled for the weapon – empty and useful only as a bayonet-tipped spear. Stumbling and pushing and pulling, the Vandian’s eyes wide and manic through the oxygen mask built into his helmet. Like all of the thugs in armour Carter had come across, the officer looked like he’d been bred from a nation of giants. Bigger than Carter; better fed; not rangy after being sweated close to death working the sky mines; used to full gravity on the ground, too. They struggled and grappled, grunting at each other like animals, Carter desperate for the freedom evaporating around him – this brute probably just as desperate to return to his base with the corpses of all the escaped slaves piled across his patrol ship’s deck. His legs ached. Carter could feel the strength slowly draining out of him as he stumbled back up the slope, pushed, higher and higher, giving ground to the Vandian officer. Sweat poured into his eyes faster than he could blink it away. Carter tried to concentrate on the tug of war for the rifle, the weapon’s stock slipping through his hands as the officer’s superior health began to tell on him. Heat hammered into his spine. They were on the crater’s ridge. Angry bombs of volcanic debris whistled down like mortars, tossed out of the volcano; the smallest debris from the barrage enough to decapitate the two insig­nificant figures struggling for life on the crater rim. Side-vents oozed rivers of lava off to their right, a bubbling grey mass flowing down the stratovolcano’s slope. There was a shattering explosion as it reached the transporter and burned through the surviving fuel reservoir, then the whole wreck was carried away, slowly melting, nothing left of Eshean or the Vandians who had murdered him. Whoever triumphed here would have to sprint through hell’s own garden to survive. In a final act of desperation, Carter let go of the rifle and the officer tumbled to the side as the momentum of the struggle took him forward clutching his prize; Carter pulling the short-sword out of the officer’s belt as he passed. Carter cracked the bayonet aside with the blade, the officer lunging forward and back in a professional thrust that should have speared Carter through the heart. Not many ways to beat an opponent with a longer reach and only a few weak spots between his steel plate. The Vandian seemed to have reached the same conclusion. He thrust again towards Carter, his aim only thrown off by the boot-quaking bellow of the stratovolcano behind them, the quake quickening, brittle rock under their feet shattering with the force of the roar. He screamed. Falling. Falling. Both Carter and his quarry tumbled directly down the crater’s steep interior – sword and rifle sent spinning into the boiling steam. The hot rock slope cracked around Carter’s ears as he rolled and turned through the fumes, gaining momentum. The glowing white-hot dome at the volcano’s centre illuminated the thick vapour cloaking Carter, even as the screaming officer was lost to his sight. While plummeting, Carter’s head glanced into a lava-dome solidified as hard as granite. It was almost a mercy when unconsciousness erased the furnace whirling up towards him.

  Jacob walked the streets of Hangel’s royal city, heading towards the area of the capital where the air brokers plied their trade. Jacob took the path that circled the plateau with Sheplar, Sariel and Khow; not for the spectacular views over the country below, but so they could feel the high-altitude breeze slipping in. This road was built into the ramparts, which from their genteel state of disrepair, obviously hadn’t seen an assault for centuries. Hangel simmered already, the morning sun working its way to its full height. Small wonder the streets up here were so narrow; all the better to provide shade during the day. That and making the most of the mesa’s limited real estate. An embrasure protected Jacob from the fall; he couldn’t see the slums below without peering through arrow slits. Just the flat immensity of the savannah beyond – a few flat stands of trees breaking up the plains, a palette of yellows and browns and oranges as far as the eye could see, right up until the horizon was swallowed in heat shimmer. The height of the upper city didn’t seem any protection against mosquitoes, though. Jacob’s sweating skin itched, covered in bites from a single night spent in the librarians’ guest quarters. He put the discomfort out of his mind. For the first time since their journey had begun, he had a name for their destination. It might take decades to fly to Vandia, but as long as Carter stayed alive, Jacob would free his son from slavery. Whatever it took, whoever he had to face.

  They passed elaborate stone staircases leading down to homes built into the escarpment, gates guarded by brutal-looking soldiers in the same uniforms as the men who had admitted them into the city. The four travellers approached a wicker chute designed to carry rubbish away from the mesa and onto the slums below. Far away enough from the merchants’ exclusive residences that the smell wouldn’t be a problem. A long line of servants queued up with slop buckets from the previous night. This was, Jacob suspected, a fitting metaphor for the arrangement between Hangel’s rich citizenry and the masses they kept subjugated. There appeared to be a disagreement at the front of the line. It sounded as though a local choir was practising, discordant singsong complaints. As Jacob got closer he found the cause of the dispute. Among the jostling crowd a wailing newborn was being held in the air, a half-breed from the mottled green sheen of the baby’s skin. One of the gad servants was attempting to toss the baby down the wicker tube, while other workers jostled and shouted, trying to save the newborn.

  Jacob pushed his way through the crowd to the front. ‘What is this?’

  ‘My son,’ cried a female gad. ‘They are taking my son from me!’

  ‘It has been commanded,’ said the servant holding the child. ‘You know the king’s orders. You should not have lain with your master.’

  There were chants of ‘shame’ from the crowd, servants moving forward menacingly, the mob’s tenor growing more discontented
by the second.

  ‘And how much choice was she permitted in the matter?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘You are not a Hangel. This is not your affair, foreigner,’ said the servant, glancing nervously around the mob. His adherence to the letter of the law appeared to be the minority view among the commoners. ‘All half-breeds must be put to death.’

  ‘So, you’re just going to put this baby out with the trash?’

  ‘I have no choice,’ protested the servant. ‘The head of my household has ordered me to get rid of him.’

  ‘You always have a choice, friend,’ said Jacob, ‘take it from someone who’s made a few bad calls in his life.’

  ‘Fine for you to talk of bravery, you with your foreign accent and your travel belt jingling with money. You will be gone from here, soon. It is not you who will feel the lash on your back for disobeying your master.’

  ‘Is this wise?’ warned Sheplar, his toothy grin disappearing as he was shoved about in the near riot. ‘If we attempt to right every wrong from here to Vandia, the day will never arrive when we save your son.’

  ‘I’ve had a bellyful of looking the other way,’ retorted Jacob. ‘I don’t reckon I can travel much further with my eyes closed.’

  ‘It is why the Rodalians fly so high,’ said Sariel. ‘So the clouds may better conceal the sight of their backs fleeing their foes.’

  Sheplar’s voice rose indignantly. Khow had to restrain him from laying into the vagrant. ‘I am no coward, you thieving scoundrel. Let me hear you say it!’