Thief of Stars (Final Dawn, Book 2)

by T W M Ashford

  “Erm, what is she doing?” asked Klik, looking over Jack’s shoulder.

  Jack crooked his neck around, then jumped to his feet. Rogan was already halfway down the next corridor, striding towards the guard as if she had every right to be there. The soft, earthy floor disguised her footsteps. By the time he noticed her coming, it was too late.

  “I’m so sorry about this,” she said, swinging a right hook at the guard’s wide, hammer-shaped head. It connected with a metallic crunch. He collapsed to the floor with his eyes shut but his breathing steady.

  Jack hurried over, ready to run in the opposite direction at the first sight of guards. Nobody came. He snatched the guard’s pike off the floor. He hadn’t the slightest clue how to use it – beyond jabbing at people with the pointy end, that is – but it made him feel a little better to have some sort of weapon in his hands.

  “I guess their ceremonial uniforms are as flimsy as they look,” said Tuner, giving the guard’s headdress a flap. Klik dragged his unconscious body away from the elevator.

  “How does this blasted thing work?” Rogan tried yanking at the metal shutter, but it wouldn’t budge. “Is there a… no… or maybe a…? Ah. Here we go.”

  A carved stone dial was built into the wall beside the elevator. She twisted it a quarter-circle counter-clockwise. Gears inside the wall turned and the latch holding the gate shut fell out of place.

  She rolled the shutter aside. The four of them cautiously approached the edge of the shaft. Dozens of old ropes ran down its middle.

  “Of course,” said Jack, stepping back into the corridor as his vertigo got the better of him. “We would be halfway up and halfway down, wouldn’t we?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Klik, daring to peer a little further over the edge. “I think we’re much closer to the top than the bottom.”

  “Even better,” sighed Tuner.

  Rogan gestured for everybody to step back. A complicated crank mechanism of wood and iron lay just inside the shutter. One of the ropes was wound around it. She started to turn the crank, pulling the elevator up to their level.

  She paused and looked at the rest of them.

  “Don’t just stand there, for bolts sake!” she whispered. “Make yourselves useful. Go keep watch in case another guard hears the elevator coming up.”

  Jack hurried to one corner, gripping the Mansa pike tight. Klik and Tuner rushed to the other. Both adjacent corridors were deserted… for now.

  “How much longer?”

  Rogan rolled her eyes. She kept turning the crank without answering.

  A bead of sweat rolled down into Jack’s eye. He went to wipe it clear only for his gloved finger to bounce ineptly off the visor of his helmet. He groaned and settled for rapidly blinking the stinging sensation away instead.

  In the silence of their waiting he heard a faint, desperate groaning sound coming from one of the cells nearby. The hollow thud of footsteps followed the corridors of the floor above. Jack grew more nauseous and nervous with each second that passed.

  “Come on, Rogan.”

  His words were so quiet they barely left the confines of his helmet. He glanced back over at her, catching her eye. She was by far the strongest of the four of them, and yet Jack could tell from the worried look on her face that she was making slow progress. Apparently ancient pulley mechanisms hadn’t been made with rapid transit in mind.

  He turned back to the corridor and almost dropped his pike in surprise.

  Three Mansa guards were on their way down towards the elevator. Two were armed and dressed in the same ceremonial garb as their unconscious colleague. The other was Jack’s morose, black-clad friend, the jailer.

  They hadn’t spotted him.

  He waved at the others, trying to get their attention, but none of them were looking his way. Yelling at them would have given their position away and unless he’d massively misinterpreted Rogan’s expression, they wouldn’t have time to slip onto the elevator unnoticed – especially if the sound of the crank turning was the reason the guards were coming to check in the first place.

  Jack chewed his lip. It was getting really exhausting, having to pretend to be the hero he knew he wasn’t.

  “Stop right there!” he yelled, darting out from cover. He pointed his trembling pike at each of the guards in turn. “Don’t come any closer!”

  Klik and Tuner came running up behind him. Rogan stopped turning the mechanism at the sound of Jack’s voice, cursed loudly, and then continued to pump the crank around as fast as it would go. The iron gears screeched and the wood, cut from trees which had died centuries before, groaned from the additional pressure.

  The jailer shuffled backwards in surprise, gibbering to itself. The other two guards stepped forward and lowered their pikes to match Jack’s own stance. One of them spat out an expletive that Jack’s translator struggled to swap into English.

  He’d expected them to fire at him on sight. The sharp blades of their weapons glowed an angry red, unlike his own, but they appeared to have reached a stalemate. Like his pike, he didn’t really know what to do with it.

  “Lower that weapon,” said one of the guards. Her voice was garbled and heavy on the bass. “It does not belong to you.”

  “This old thing? No, I brought it from home. Put your own weapons down.”

  “Never. Everyone shall see you die for what you did. Stealing from the Mansa Empire. Assisting the treacherous Krettelian scum,” she added, snarling in Klik’s direction.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” said Jack, pretending he wasn’t incredibly guilty of both accusations levelled at him. “The person who stole from you is still out there. It’s Charon who has your Solar Core, not me and my friends here.”

  “You lie.” The other guard also sounded as if he’d swallowed a bag of rocks. “All species outside the Mansa Empire lie. They haven’t the ingenuity for anything else.”

  Both guards inched forwards. Jack inched back without thinking. He jabbed at them with his pike, but it didn’t seem to do any good. They probably knew he couldn’t do much else with it.

  He hissed at Klik through the corner of his mouth, not wishing to take his eyes off the approaching Mansa for even a second.

  “Any progress?”

  Klik flailed over to Rogan. She strained against the crank, struggling to get the rope to wind any further.

  “Any progress?” she repeated.

  Rogan didn’t look up. The pistons inside her arms were being pushed to their maximum pressure. Yet the metal drum the rope was wound around wouldn’t budge. It shuddered and groaned.

  “So… close…”

  Rogan nodded towards the edge of the elevator shaft. Klik peered over and spotted the rickety wooden platform only a couple of storeys below. It was possible they could all make the jump without breaking any bones or parts. Whether the ancient platform would survive their fall was quite a different matter.

  “Almost… dammit!”

  Something old and rotten in the winch’s foundations snapped. The metal drum buckled in on itself, the gears spun like bicycle wheels free from their chains, and the whole wretched contraption tore itself free from the floor. Ropes cracked like whips. Klik barely had time to step out of the crank’s way before it crashed into the shaft, following the primitive elevator back down into the abyss.

  “I take it we’re not going that way, then?” asked Klik, quietly retreating into the folds of her cloak.

  “Guys? What’s happening?” Jack’s retreat around the corner was encouraged by the advancing guards. He kept swinging the pike, but it didn’t seem to deter them in the slightest. The jailer had long since shuffled off to get backup. “That didn’t sound good. Please tell me you didn’t just ruin a thousand year old piece of holy Mansa history.”

  “Oh, as if your puny arms could have done any better,” snapped Rogan, as they all bunched together outside the open elevator shaft.

  “Three more guards are coming down the other corridor,” said Klik, follow
ing a quick peek back the way they came. She reversed into Jack and they both jumped.

  “Erm, so what’s the plan now?” Tuner gave Rogan a nervous tap on the hip. “Because even I’m not sure we can fight our way out of this one.”

  “The stairs.” Rogan said it so quietly it was barely a whisper. She nodded towards the archway. “We’ll do it the old fashioned way. The really old fashioned way.”

  “Good idea five minutes ago,” Jack replied sarcastically. “Back when they weren’t sending a small army up to get us.”

  “Well it’s either that or jump down the elevator shaft, Jack. Which of those sounds better to you?”

  At that moment a pounding alarm started screaming throughout the tower. All the soft, ethereal lights turned red. Klik covered her ear-holes with her hands and winced.

  “Stairs it is,” shouted Jack.

  The four of them ran towards the narrow archway as one. The furious Mansa guards charged after them like a frenzy of sharks smelling blood in the water. Klik went first, leaping down the stone steps two at a time. Rogan scooped Tuner up in her arms and chased after her.

  Jack swung his pike in a wide arc as he backed through the opening. The edge of the blade caught one of the guards across the arm. It sliced off the sleeve of his uniform and sprayed a geyser of purple blood all over his neighbour’s face.

  “I’m sorry!” he yelled, continuing to jab at the rest of them. He was now inside the stairwell, but getting the long pike through the archway was proving a cumbersome challenge. “I really don’t want to be doing this!”

  He was just about to drop the pike and make a run for it when he heard a rumble of footsteps coming back up the stairs. Rogan raced towards him, followed by a wide-eyed Klik, followed by a flickering mass of angry shadows from the floor below.

  “Other way!” she shouted, gesturing wildly with the arm not carrying Tuner. “Other way!”

  “The other way is up, not down!” Jack stabbed at the throng of frustrated guards on the other side. There was only enough room for one of them to fit through the archway at a time, and only then when a razor-sharp pike wasn’t being flailed at them. “What do you expect us to do – fly down?”

  Jack froze. Rogan and Klik rushed past him.

  “Actually, that’s not so bad an idea…”

  The Mansa guards grabbed the handle of Jack’s pike and yanked it out of his grasp. He let it go willingly, and the unexpected lack of resistance sent the frontmost guards sprawling backwards. Jack sprinted up the stairwell, yelling for the others to wait up.

  He switched on the comms in his helmet and tried to reach out to the Adeona and Brackitt. All he got back was dead noise. He groaned, having expected as much. Higher. They needed to get much higher.

  He tried to ignore the clatter of Mansa foot soldiers chasing after him, hoping that, despite his spacesuit, his comparatively spritely build might give him the edge over them. Random memories of school history lessons forced themselves to the forefront of his mind and reminded him of the reason why medieval castles were typically built with stairs that ran clockwise. It was so attacking forces, who were most-likely right-handed, would struggle to swing their swords as they ascended. Jack hoped it would play in his favour now… presuming the Mansa weren’t all naturally ambidextrous, of course.

  He passed another archway, and then another. All that endless spinning around was starting to make him feel queasy.

  “Jack?” Brackitt’s voice croaked out from amongst all the static. “Rogan? Is anyone there?”

  “Yes!” Jack wheezed into his helmet. “We’re all here. Prepare the ship. We’re leaving.”

  “We’ve been prepped and ready for hours, Jack. How close are you?”

  “Yeah, about that. You’re going to have to come to us.”

  “What?”

  Rogan commandeered the channel. Being an automata, she wasn’t the slightest bit out of breath.

  “Adi, are you there?”

  “Yes, Rogan?” replied the Adeona, her voice as bright and relaxed as ever. The higher they climbed, the greater the clarity of the signal grew.

  “There should be some maps of Ankhir on your servers. Can you find them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look for a ‘Meratyk Tower’ right in the middle of the city. Old historical site. Quite tall. How quickly can you get there?”

  “One minute and fifteen seconds, if the skies are clear.”

  “Good. See you there.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Brackitt cut back in. “Are you—”

  The Adeona cut him off.

  Jack forced himself to keep running despite the pain in his legs. The others couldn’t be too far ahead. If they survived this, he was definitely going to look into having a gymnasium installed on the ship.

  He stopped so abruptly upon reaching the next floor that he almost lost his balance. His blood ran cold. A burly Mansa guard stood in the archway, holding Klik up in the air by her neck. She was fighting to breathe.

  Jack barrelled into the guard and elbowed him in the ribs. He exhaled sharply, doubled over, and dropped Klik onto the hard stone floor. Jack stuck his leg out. Klik shoved the guard over it, sending him tumbling down the stairs into the path of his furious colleagues coming up the other way.

  “I had it under control,” gasped Klik, massaging her neck as the two of them got running again.

  “Clearly!”

  Soon the stairwell was flooded with a different kind of light, one less the colour of royalty and blood. At its very top was a door. Its fragile lock appeared to have been punched open already.

  They pushed through it into a wall of daylight.

  “This damn planet,” yelled Jack, shielding his eyes. “How is it morning again already?”

  Rogan and Tuner stood in the middle of the flat, open rooftop, frantically searching the skies. Down below, the city was only just waking up.

  “Erm, where’s the ship?” asked Tuner.

  Voices carried up from inside the tower. Rogan marched back to the doorway and punched the lock so hard that the metal buckled. Nobody would be opening that door again in a hurry.

  “She should be here by now,” she replied.

  There was no barrier running around the perimeter of the meagre rooftop. Jack peered over the edge and his boot sent a pebble tumbling to the ground a hundred or so metres below. He jerked backwards just as a loud thumping sound started up on the other side of the door.

  “We probably could have planned this better,” he said, offering everybody a weak smile.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said a spritely voice inside his helmet.

  The Adeona rocketed out from behind one of the colossal golden pillars floating above the city, the morning air behind her thrusters shimmering in a haze. She banked hard left and then decelerated, coming to a stop only metres from the tower’s peak.

  The airlock along her flank slid open. Brackitt stood in the doorway.

  “Don’t just stand there,” he shouted over the roar of the Adeona’s engines. “Get on!”

  The banging at the stairwell door grew only louder. Rogan grabbed Tuner once more, paused for a millisecond to calculate her trajectory, and then cleared the jump with ease. Brackitt patted her triumphantly on the back as she entered. After a moment’s hesitation, Klik followed. Her insectoid frame made light work of the short distance, and then she too was safe.

  Jack was left alone on the rooftop. He slowly approached the edge. The longer he spent looking at it, the wider the gap between him and the Adeona became.

  “It’s too far.” He shook his head and backed away towards the door. “I’ll never make it.”

  “Yes, you will.” Rogan returned to the airlock door and beckoned him back over. “Trust me.”

  A searing red spot blossomed on the door behind him where Rogan had punched the metal inwards. The Mansa were using the plasma of their pikes to cut through it.

  Screw it. He was dead either way.

  His heart racing, his vi
sion tunnelling into blackness, Jack sprinted to the tower’s edge and leapt, his hand outstretched towards the lip of the airlock.

  He missed.

  Rogan reached out and grabbed his arm before he could fall beneath the ship. Jack swung at the end of her grasp as the Adeona pulled away from the tower, screaming as they went, his legs dangling over a hundred-plus metres of empty, terrifying air.

  She pulled him up. He crawled onto the metal floor of the airlock and lay on his back, coughing from the exertion. The Adeona slid her airlock shut just as the guards burst through the smouldering stairwell door and took aim. Their plasma barrage thundered against her hull.

  “Everyone upstairs,” said Rogan. “Now!”

  “Thank you,” said Jack, as she pulled him roughly to his feet. “For saving me once again.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. The entire Mansa Empire wants us dead. I’ve bought you a few minutes at best.”

  16

  Escape From Paryx

  The Adeona didn’t wait for anyone to get seated before swinging her thrusters upwards. This would have been less of a problem had they been off-world, where gravity could be simulated and the sense of “up” was relative.

  On-world, this meant that “down” quickly changed from the floor beneath Jack’s feet to the walls at the rear of the ship. He activated his mag boots and climbed up the central corridor towards the cockpit, pulling himself up by the shutters and doorways.

  Everyone strapped themselves into their chairs as soon as they got inside. Jack reached for the joystick, then thought better of it.

  “What am I doing?” He sat back and cupped his hands over his mouth. You don’t need me getting in the way.”

  “Best to let me handle this,” said the ship. She sounded as if she was concentrating.

  “How is this city so flipping tall?” asked Brackitt, leaning forward in his co-pilot chair to peer out the windows.

  Even though the Adeona’s thrusters built as much speed and power as they could muster within Paryx’s field of gravity, the immense golden skyscrapers still floated for miles above. The ship rose through them in a winding helix pattern. Civilian cruisers were relatively rare in Ankhir’s airspace, yet a few still had to make hard turns to avoid the Adeona’s desperate ascent.