The Tin Soldiers (Final Dawn, Book 5)

by T W M Ashford

  “Nice work.” Rogan pressed the Return key with an expression of satisfaction. “I think I’ve aligned the dishes to reach Monzeich. Using them to boost our own signal, we should be able to reach Adi now.”

  She paused while she attempted to make contact with the Adeona.

  “Adi!” she said brightly. Jack relaxed. “Can you hear us—”

  Rogan listened to the Adeona’s reply. Jack wished she would relay Adi’s message through her speakers for him to hear, too.

  “Yes, I know,” Rogan said. “We should have… Didn’t have time…”

  Rogan looked over at Jack, who shot up an eyebrow.

  “No, it wasn’t his idea, actually. Look, we don’t have time to explain everything. We need you to come to these coordinates and pick us up. Discreetly. And send a message to Kansas – some pirate cult has stolen a bunch of LX-14s from that factory he sent us to. If the Ministry’s quick, they might still find them here.”

  More silence as Rogan listened to Adi’s reply.

  “Okay, that’s fine. Be safe.”

  She disconnected the call.

  “Adi sounds annoyed,” said Jack, a little smug.

  “Yes, she is a bit. But she’s also on her way. Her skip drive is a lot faster than those on the freighters, but it’ll still be a couple of hours before she gets here.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” Tuner asked.

  “Take a long walk in the opposite direction to the base,” Jack suggested. “Find Adi a secluded place to land. I’m sure this rock has plenty to choose from.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Rogan nodded. “Let’s head back out and make sure Klik hasn’t found a way to blow up the whole base in our absence.”

  She carefully cracked the door ajar and peered outside. Jack glanced back at the old-fashioned star map on the table. It looked important, regardless of whether Rogan was interested in it or not. He quickly folded it up into a small square and stuffed it into one of the pockets of his spacesuit before following the two automata out the door.

  They spotted Klik crouching behind the next building over. She erratically waved them over.

  “Where is everyone?” Jack asked. Aside from a couple of acolytes tasked with bringing the LX-14s online, the whole compound was eerily deserted.

  “There was a weird chiming noise not long after you guys went inside the comm station,” she replied. “Then everyone suddenly stopped what they were doing and went in… well, that.”

  Jack looked where Klik was pointing and all the blood ran out of his face. Deep in the far recesses of the crater was an enormous gothic cathedral. Twisted spires of stone; buttresses like black rib cages. It was the only thing in the asteroid’s colossal pock-mark not lit up by the giant floodlights. Jack likened it to waking up in a dark bedroom and, as your eyes minutely adjust to the gloom, noticing a figure standing motionless in the corner – invisible before, but now impossible to ignore.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that’s where the Archimandrite hangs out,” he said. “Impressive. Terrifying, but impressive.”

  “Yes,” said Tuner, equally awestruck. “We should probably go pay it a visit.”

  “Wait, what?” Jack wrenched his gaze away. “No! We’re home free, for God’s sake! Adi is on her way right now!”

  “She won’t be here for hours,” said Rogan, “and we’re still none the wiser as to why they stole from Cyclone Manufacturing in the first place. There are much easier ways to get automata. Don’t worry, Jack. It’s not like anyone’s around to see us, anyway.”

  “No, because they all went inside there!”

  “I don’t see the harm in just taking a look,” said Klik, shrugging.

  “Oh, you don’t see the harm in cutting someone’s arm off if it means an extra five minutes spent outside your quarters,” sighed Jack. “Fine. For the sake of peace in the galaxy, we can ‘take a look’. But five minutes, that’s all. We don’t want to be nosing around when all those acolytes come back out. We’re missing our window to escape as it is.”

  Rogan smiled politely.

  “Of course. And we wouldn’t want to stand in the way of you running away now, would we?”

  Klik laughed. Jack grumbled to himself.

  He was starting to think they were doing all this quite deliberately – maybe to prove a point about his belligerently selfish behaviour in the past, or simply to wind him up.

  Either way, it was working.

  10

  The Crackle of Roots

  The black cathedral loomed over them, its shadowed stone blending seamlessly with the star-swept cosmos above. Jack shuddered. It was like standing at the foot of Dracula’s castle.

  Fifteen months ago he would have scoffed at the idea of vampires existing. After everything the galaxy had thrown at him since, he wasn’t quite so sure anymore. The doors of reality had been thrown wide open, and now there was no closing them.

  Not that he would ever seriously entertain such a notion, of course. He just couldn’t entirely rule it out, either.

  “I think this is probably close enough,” he said, no longer worried if the others saw him as a coward. Right now he was a coward, and proud of it. “Let’s hurry along. We’ve seen all there is to see.”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” said Rogan, grabbing his arm and marching him towards the stronghold with the rest of them.

  As they approached the threshold of its open doorway, Jack realised that the cathedral was not built from stone as he first thought, but metal – thick, black metal of the calibre one might expect to find on the hull of a battlecruiser. Apparently the Archimandrite expected his place of worship to come under attack sooner or later. He probably hadn’t counted on that assault coming in the shape of two automata, a teenage insect and a severely anxious British male, however.

  And there was something about the metal – so cold, so electric, and yet so organic – that seemed familiar, somehow. If only he could put his finger on it…

  It must have had some pretty hefty foundations, too. Jack noticed that the cathedral didn’t so much sit upon the asteroid as in it. Craggy rock rose up around the foot of the walls as if the building had gone crashing through the surface.

  He turned his attention upwards as they stepped across the threshold. There were no doors of which to speak, only the blocky teeth of a blast shield jutting out from the ceiling above his head and a row of large docking slots beneath his feet. This castle had a the spacefaring equivalent of a goddamn portcullis – just one ready to withstand a nuclear bomb rather than anything so meagre as a medieval battering ram.

  Unbeknownst to Jack, his hands began to shake.

  A wide chamber greeted them inside. Its high ceiling was supported by countless rows of narrow, classical pillars that reached up endlessly into shadow. The flames of torches flickered along their length. Though the construction appeared to consist of the same unnerving black metal as everything else, the hall pulsed with a haunting crimson light. Jack suspected he’d catch a strong whiff of damp and incense if he dared risk switching off his air filters.

  There were no acolytes to be seen.

  But there were voices to be heard ahead.

  Much to Jack’s disappointment, Rogan continued to lead their group towards them. Though the emptiness beyond the pillars appeared endless – as did the pillars themselves, in fact – the gaps between each began to fill with sculptures of alien planets and statues of ancient figures, grey in material but painted scarlet by the throbbing light. One of these statues depicted the Archimandrite himself. It was a very flattering likeness.

  “Are you sure you don’t recall the First Diakonos from any of the files you’ve ever accessed, Rogan?” Tuner asked nervously over comms. “It would be good to know who or what they worship – besides the Archimandrite, apparently.”

  “I told you, I’ve never come across anything about their order before,” she replied sharply. “It’s a big galaxy. I can’t be expected to remember every god people cho
ose to believe in.”

  “Not even the really weird ones?” asked Klik.

  “I got built by a regular mortal,” Rogan replied, deadpan. “Every god sounds weird to me.”

  “Shh!” Jack pleaded with them for quiet. “For heaven’s sake, stop talking so loudly. They’re going to hear us.”

  “Who are?” asked Tuner.

  Jack rose a finger to his lips and then, slowly, pointed that same finger gingerly forwards.

  A second ago, the chamber had stretched infinitely onwards. Now the interior of a grand cathedral lay directly before them, surrounded by floating, ethereal candelabra and billowing, black banners. It was as if the nave had materialised while they were distracted in conversation, and now, shooting a panicked glance over his shoulder, Jack realised they’d barely made any progress into the chamber at all. The light from the crater’s floodlights radiated through the open doorway barely a hundred metres behind them.

  Okay. Now he really had the creeps.

  As many as fifty robed acolytes stood in rows facing the altar up front. They reminded Jack of village churchgoers listening expectantly to their vicar – all they needed to complete the picture were some cardigans and wooden pews. The Archimandrite was preaching to them, and his audience was rapt.

  Jack and the others hastily crept behind the rearmost pillars and listened.

  “My fellow believers.” The Archimandrite’s raspy voice boomed through the hall. Stretching his lanky white arms out wide, he resembled a scarecrow more than ever. “The time for reckoning draws close. The Great Cleanse is almost upon us.”

  The hooded acolytes before him tittered in excitement. Somewhere deep in the hall, a bell softly chimed.

  “Can you not feel the heat of the flames already?” the Archimandrite continued, his voice rising in tandem with his clenched fists. The necklaces of teeth and bone around his neck jostled against one another. “Can you not hear the crackle as roots begin to grow?”

  The fervour in the sunken chapel grew even louder. The acolytes were turning to one another, screeching to one another, the collective anthropomorphism of a suspension cable stretched close to breaking point.

  The Archimandrite unclenched his fists, splayed his crooked fingers out like rakes, and raised his predatory head toward the heavens.

  “For too long, this galaxy has been plagued by rot… plagued by parasites. The soil is dead, my friends. It bears no flowers. The lice have had their fill. But our work is almost complete, my brothers and sisters. Oh, yes! Soon the litter shall be clear and the soil fertile once more. From the ashes of fire, the forest will rise again!”

  “Hold on a bloody second,” said Jack, getting everyone to huddle close. His throat felt wrung dry. “I knew I’d heard all this talk about fires and forests somewhere before. Do you remember Minister Keeto, Klik?”

  “What, the Oortilian who paid someone to kill us? Who I had to physically torture so we could save the lives of the Grand Ministers? Who then threw herself through a casino window to her death?” Klik scoffed. “No, doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Am I missing something?” asked Tuner, confused.

  “Ah, right, you weren’t there,” said Jack, nodding. “This all happened while you were, erm, dismantled. Rogan had taken you back to Detri, and Klik and I were trying to convince the Ministry to stop Charon. Yeah, I know,” he added, noticing the expression on Rogan’s face. “Fat lot of good that did. We ended up confronting Keeto in her apartment, where she admitted working with him. And that’s when she said it. ‘We want a cleansing, we want rebirth,’ or something similarly mental. She must have belonged to the Order of the First Diakonos, too.”

  “Joining the Ministry didn’t involve much of a costume change,” Klik said with a sneer. “That was lucky for her.”

  “Well, it certainly seems like this Order has a lot of tentacles where it shouldn’t,” Rogan admitted to Jack. “You may well be right.”

  “Be quiet,” Tuner hissed at them. “I can’t hear what the Archimandrite’s saying. It might be important.”

  “Not as important as getting out of here right this minute,” said Jack. “Come on, Rogan. Enough is enough.”

  “Jack’s right,” said Rogan. Even she looked freaked out by the pious ensemble. “We’re not getting anywhere listening to this nonsense. Let’s leave before any of them realise we’re here.”

  “Finally,” said Jack, tip-toeing out from behind the pillar.

  “…and this time,” the Archimandrite continued, “nobody will stop us. Not even you, Jack Bishop.”

  Jack froze. Sluggishly, as if his neck was trapped inside a plaster cast, he turned back around to face the pulpit. All of the acolytes stared back at him, mad grins painted across their faces.

  “Oh, yes.” The Archimandrite once again raised an accusatory finger towards the intruders, just as he had back in the factory. Only this time, he was smiling. “We know all about your exploits, Mr. Bishop. But you cannot stop their will. Not this time.”

  “Yeah,” said Klik, dragging out the word so that it occupied three separate syllables. Her mandibles twitched. “I think we should be on our way.”

  A thunderclap went off beneath their feet. The whole chamber began to shake. And still the acolytes stood motionless inside the nave, grinning expectantly.

  “The cathedral’s coming down,” said Jack, snapping out of his stupor. “Move!”

  They sprinted back towards the blinding light of the entrance, their thunderous footsteps ricocheting like war drums through the empty hall. At least this time the chamber had the decency not to stretch on forever. The doorway was growing closer, Jack was sure of it…

  …but it was also growing smaller.

  The blast door was coming down. In a few seconds, they’d be trapped.

  “Just five minutes,” Jack gasped. “Because nobody’s ever got themselves killed in five minutes before, have they?”

  “Oh, shut up.” Rogan replied without breath. “We were only supposed to take a look.”

  “We did only take a look! And look where taking a look’s got us!”

  The blast door continued to grumble down towards its locking slots. Their group was only metres away, but it may as well have been a mile.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Jack wheezed.

  “Yes, we are!”

  Rogan shoved him forward so hard he went sprawling onto his front. He slid across the polished metal floor and was flung against the rocks outside. Rogan and Klik dived through the closing gap shortly after.

  Tuner tried crawling through on his metal belly. The bottom of the door was only a few feet away from crushing him flat.

  “Oh no,” he cried. “Not again!”

  Rogan plunged her arm through the gap and yanked Tuner clear just before the blast door crashed shut. A powerful gust of air punched past them. Jack staggered back onto his feet. It was a lot harder than it should have been; even now they were outside, the ground kept on shaking.

  He turned to run again, then stopped, his stomach somersaulting. But this time it wasn’t the stars that left him disoriented, however. The whole asteroid had gone topsy-turvy.

  “Erm, I don’t think the cathedral’s coming down, Jack.” Tuner backed away slowly. “I think it’s going up.”

  11

  Rock Bottom

  If there was one thing Jack knew for certain about cathedrals, it was that they stayed put. For hundreds of years, usually. They simply weren’t built for anything else.

  Apparently, this one was.

  The grey rock around their feet buckled and lurched. Cracks snaked outwards with the snap of lightning bolts. Fissures opened around the temple’s edge, waves of foundation sheered upwards, and shattered boulders came crumbling down.

  The cathedral was rising.

  But it didn’t look anything like a cathedral anymore – not from where Jack stood, at least. Now it was an armoured mountain piercing the starry cosmos with its dozen crooked peaks.

  “Sto
p gawping, you idiots!” Klik pushed Jack forward. “We’re gonna get roasted!”

  “What?” Jack came to his senses and got running. “It’s not like you see a flying building every day.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s all I saw back on Paryx. And the ones back home didn’t need thrusters for lift-off, either!”

  They sprinted towards the centre of the crater and the pre-fab huts of the cultists’ compound. Behind them, the surface of the asteroid continued to rupture as if a nuke had gone off beneath it. Wherever the lifeless rock had been headed before, the force was sure to push it drastically off-course.

  A huge cloud of hot dust suddenly blasted past them, knocking them all off their feet. Jack flailed through the air for a second before crashing into a dark cavity. Rolling onto his side, Jack gawped as a fiery maw opened inside the brown-grey fog. The mouth of the dragon yawned wider and wider, until it grew taller than even the dust cloud itself and was revealed to be the flames from the cathedral’s giant thrusters. Their slow yet furious burn was carrying the ship out of the asteroid’s meagre atmosphere.

  Strong arms hooked under his own. Jack raised his head just in time to see Rogan’s upside-down face before she lifted him upright again. As the dust began to settle, he spotted Tuner and Klik racing ahead without them.

  He didn’t know where the two of them hoped to end up, but they were headed straight for the few acolytes still left on the asteroid.

  Jack and Rogan chased after them, calling out for them to stop. Tuner froze instantly, having received the message from Rogan in the form of wireless binary. But even with the comm unit in her helmet, Klik simply couldn’t hear them. The sound of the Archimandrite’s starship taking off was just too loud.

  Luckily, none of the remaining cult members had noticed her yet. But on the other hand, the only weapon with which she could defend herself when they did was the blocky, barely-functional laser rifle she insisted on keeping with her.