by Chris Turner
A familiar crackle of static burst from the wall. “Bravo, heroes!” They all whirled. The sounds of clapping and hooting came from the background echo of a tinny speaker. “Well played! An alliance! Such a clever idea. And weapons to boot. An uneasy alliance in the best of cases.”
“Close your yap, Drek!” called Sket, whirling about, eyes darting about for the hidden speaker.
Star’s fingers curled into claws. Her head twisted round, searching for the source of the hated voice. The attackers halted in midstep, frozen in dread.
“You see, Drek, so begins the new phase in this program,” asserted Beardly, “just as I predicted. The outlanders will have to watch their backs. Clever outlanders! Treachery abounds in these tunnels! Runs thick as spider webs. Watch your back, people. Hee hee!”
“’Tis a wretched day when we have to listen to your drivel,” growled Sket.
Beardly’s cackling and distorted curses blasted from the loudspeaker.
While Miko choked back his contempt, Star’s sharp eyes darted to a glint of chrome hanging behind some pipes and she raged over, slashing out, smashing the faceplate to bits.
The mutant’s shrill echo died in a shower of sparks.
“Good riddance,” said Miko.
“Little fool,” hissed Sket in Star’s ear. “Now Drek and Beardly’ll come after us, and have a reason to kill us with their beastly thralls!”
“I don’t care,” she panted, her lungs pumping, with a feral gleam in her eyes, not quite sane. “I’m sick of those two baboons spying on us. We need to blind them to our strategies. It sickens me to be part of their film anyways. ’Tis you who are the fool!”
“Quit arguing,” complained Fenli. “Time’s wasting, as Sket is ever keen to point out.”
The new company trudged on in silence, distrusting every shadow and leaping rat that lurched out in their path. So far, no treachery had played itself out, but Miko wouldn’t put it past these three new rogues to attack, especially if more of their cronies showed up to even the odds. Nor would it be the last of the disturbing outbursts from B & D.
* * *
It was impossible to judge time in these crypt-like depths. But perhaps two hours later, the rock walls narrowed and met at a metal barrier, a grid-like mesh that rose from floor to ceiling. The company halted, gazing in apprehension, eyes roving about the shadows. The hum had increased, an incessant throb. The barrier-mesh was buckled at its lowest point as if from a bomb blast, but it had been repaired recently. Fresh silver weld beads lined the broken bars.
Sket frowned. “Weird. Methinks B & D honoured his promise, but someone patched it up.” He looked up, peering suspiciously through the holes in the grid. Only dim shadows reigned and silence. “Anyways, we have this.” The smuggler hoisted the portable blowtorch with a sardonic grin. Carefully, he began heating the lower metal to a red glare with a skilled hand. When they were orange hot, he kicked the bars with his heel, ignoring the smoke that billowed from the sizzling, odorous burnt leather. Soon he had peeled back a small crawlspace that they all could clamber through one by one.
Fenli peered around, eyes wide as an owl. “So, this is what keeps the unwanteds from the city of Skullrox?”
Sket hooked the torch in his belt and sliced a hand across his neck, finger to his lips, indicating silence.
They crept forward. Miko peered into a cavernous hall. The space was wider and taller than anything he had seen thus far.
The distant hum of generators infected the silence with a pregnant chill. Miko heard turbines, low electric engines, transformers or distant fusars.
Apart from the low hum, everything was all too quiet. A faint sinister blue glow permeated the spaces and peeked from somewhere far beyond the jumble of shadowy shapes and crate-like forms in the foreground.
They proceeded with utmost caution. Sket urged Fenli and Miko to toss their extra weapons to the new recruits.
Star scowled.
Miko and Fenli fell in behind; Star, Usk and the three others were last to tread, hunched and grim-faced and weapons bared. The whites of Sket’s eyes glinted. The smuggler’s gaze flicked every which way, looking for traps, danger and death.
The floor, as they saw it, was a litter of fallen machinery. Also bodies. Amongst the twisted metal and rock reposed desiccated, burned and blackened corpses, as if a vicious battle had been fought here. Pale bones peeked through the charred flesh, doubtless victims of a prior ‘race’. Fenli kicked a spread-eagled corpse, and it all but disintegrated upon impact.
Fenli gave a low whistle. “Somebody held a grudge here.”
The equipment complex ahead was impassable. Sket and the others grimaced.
Fenli’s eyes turned upward to the dim cobwebbed ceiling. He pulled himself up a fallen gear box, leaping onto the half-mangled catwalk that rose the extent of the hall, high overhead, and began to explore the upper works of the mysterious machinery.
Miko followed Fenli’s lead and helped Star and the others up the precarious scaffolding that curved along the wall and down the hall. A precarious route, Miko thought, yet it allowed passage above and beyond the inaccessible jumble.
Below them the ruin of metal and bodies went on for several hundred yards. A deathly pall hung over this wreckage, also a faint reek of decayed flesh, causing a prickling chill to flutter up Miko’s spine. Even the hum seemed to guard a sinister overtone. The underground depot or plant, whatever it was, was huge. It must have taken years to carve it or blast it out of the mountains of rock. Protected at least, thought Miko. But why here?
The walkway ended abruptly. A shattered ruin of dangling metal hung near to floor level. They descended hand over hand down the twisted steel, then dropped the final twelve feet down to floor level, looking back upon the spooky graveyard that felt like an ancient crypt.
To either side ranged side tunnels, or equipment storage areas—but they were too dimly lit to tell.
The first traces of tall, whirring machines made themselves known. These upright engines worked constantly, turbines flushing water through a series of massive pipes, bubbling the water to the summit, five times a man’s height. Dim service lights illuminated the area, casting a faint bluish glow, with a crackle of electric sparks and flicker of faulty bulbs adding to the otherwordly ambience.
“Some kind of mixing station,” murmured Miko.
“A purification centre,” whispered Sket.
Then came a clink. One of the outcasts had dropped his weapon.
“You idiot!” hissed Sket, striking the rat-faced man in the mouth and rounding on the others in distaste. He whirled. A pair of yellow-eyes glowed in the distance. The twin pinpricks grew brighter, coming closer. “Look at what you’ve stirred up.”
The flutter of mechanical wings came whooshing out of the shadows, wings of iridescent colour that caused Miko to freeze in his tracks.
“Not us, chief,” crowed rat-face Grema, wiping the blood from his lip. “Those beasties would have scouted us out without any of our help!”
Two of the mechanical birds swooped low like hawks and flew off down the corridor, huge things as high as a man’s shoulder. Their wingtips almost touched the debris on the cement floor. Two more came soaring on the other’s tail.
Almost at once Miko knew that these robots were designed for slaughter. They guarded the pipes and the air filtration system from intruders like them. There were no militia human guards to be seen.
“Shit! These horrors weren’t here the last time I was here,” growled Sket.
“That’s because you’re a wee bit out of date, chief,” sneered Grema.
The birds doubled back to attack, the latter two fleeing off to guard the rift in the mesh. Miko saw one of the devils up close and he gasped as Sket reeled.
“Hawkbots! Mother of Meru, I should have known! Service bots to repair the pipe, report breaks and repel intruders.”
“Don’t let them see you!” cried Star.
“Kinda hard, don’t you think?” hissed Fenli be
tween his teeth. He drew his mace.
It dawned on Miko that these must have been the Skull Rocs that the nomad chief at the unwanteds’ camp was raving about.
“Hee, hee,” came Beardly’s titter over a hidden loudspeaker. “Time for some fun! Good luck, heroes. This is where your trials begin. Remember our bet. Usk, you’d better not die!”
The fugitives raced for cover to the storage alcoves. A silver-streamed hawk swooped, radiating lethal beams from its eyes.
A golden ray seared a command post equipped with holo screen and touchpad near Star, knocking her off balance. She reeled back in terror. Miko pulled her up, shoved her away before a companion beast sent a ray to scorch her hide. Another hideous metallic fowl with an owl face and razor beak banked sharply and its twitching talons knocked Sket flying. He bashed into Usk, who narrowly avoided steel claws reaching for his insect head.
“Get down!” cried Miko. “The repository. Make for it! The thing can’t fly in there.”
Fenli made it there first and hunched wide-eyed, panting and cursing. A hawkbot landed nearby. With a shrill, electronic squawk, it clacked toward him. Fenli fled back out into the open, hunching low, dodging slanting rays.
Three machines now buzzed low after Miko. Caught in open ground, he and the others were sitting ducks, amidst flashing rays and twitching talons reaching out to grab them and pull them to their doom.
Tosud was lifted up by the shoulders, smashed hard into the rock wall. The man slid to the ground motionless, his neck broken. The metallic monster pounced on him and tore his head off and tossed it aside with its great beak.
Berlast loosed a vengeful cry and launched himself at the metal beast. Sket tripped him, leaped forward and drew him back. “You fool! Do you want to die?”
Miko, who had been studying the thing’s functioning, thought back to his battle with the scorpion-bot on the locust vessel and thrust rocks into their hands. “Quick, these may interfere with their guidance systems. One of you throw your weapon, anything stone or metal near it. Distract the thing. Me and Sket will club it down. Come on, Sket! Hurry!”
The nearest hawkbot banked to attack Star and Usk. Star, frightened out of her mind, tossed her knife—with regret. It clattered near a fresh-landing hawk. Wings outstretched, it took small steps, crouching on its glittering talons, beak prodding it. The bot’s head pivoted sharply as the clinking metal of Usk’s spare dagger rolled near its feet. Its plated sensors scanned the offensive object. A quick yellow energy heat ray flared to melt the blade to oblivion, as if it had never been.
The rocks Miko hurled merely bounced off the shielded plates like ping-pong balls. Fenli, relieved that his stalking bot had taken to the air again, was afraid to pull the pin of the device at his hip, so he stood stock still, gripping the explosive in an indecisive palm.
Miko gave a fierce yell and charged boldly, smashing his dagger’s point into the landed hawkbot’s eye. Its neck, made of gleaming metallic plates, rotated and its eyes cold as death, peered at Miko with clinical dispassion. A blaze of blue sparks spewed out of its damaged eye socket.
Wincing, blinking under the intense glare, Miko slashed, twisted, crouching like a hare, slashed again.
Sket sidestepped a random ray. He crashed his full body weight into the creature’s legs, toppling it, as the breath wheezed out of his lungs. Usk ran in as fast as he could to ram a pincer into the bot’s skull, his other pincer clacking away, ready to clip its sensitory navigation system.
Grema and Berlast were cut off from the others, in open view. They ran amok, dodging fire rays and the razor-sharp beaks and talons of the third bird.
Fenli finally overcame his fear and hesitation, and bulled his way forward with a frustrated battle roar, tossing the grenade to rat face who had but seconds to live before talons ripped into his back.
Rat-face Grema did not hesitate to snatch up the grenade. With a vicious grin, he pulled the pin and tossed it without compunction, running away as he did so. A whooshing flare rocked the chamber, the blast knocking him and Berlast sprawling headlong to the ground.
Miko whirled and charged in to smash the bot’s head, blinding it.
The bot righted itself, hopped madly about, spraying fire from its damaged eyes every which way. It went haywire, smacking against the walls again, completely short-circuiting itself, finally to lie in a sparking, disoriented heap in the middle of the wreckage-strewn corridor.
Miko ran out to drag the two outcasts to safety. Choking on clouds of dust, he stumbled his way through the debris, hauling each by an arm. When the dust finally cleared, the hawkbots were no more, but only smoking ruins spread in pieces amidst the litter of wreckage. Usk ran in to clip the last twitching hawkbot’s navigation-aerials.
The survivors had more respect for Usk after that encounter.
Miko’s breath came out in ragged gasps. He saw the five dust-smeared survivors wince and groan.
Sket panted, “Signals sent from the bot’s navigational systems will alert the Skullroxers to our location.”
“That’s bad, Sket, very bad,” said Miko.
“They may not know where we’re heading,” insisted Star hopefully.
Fenli scoffed. “Where else would we be going?”
“Let’s move,” growled Sket. “We’re in for a shit storm. Who knows how many more of those flying rustbuckets are lurking about.”
IX
They approached the first of the massive pipes rising from the lake—intake pipes, three running side by side, pumping dark, untreated water to the purification tanks.
An enormous snake of a conduit as high as a man, painted red, trailed from the gloom of a tunnel farther ahead, and seemed to feed a series of translucent pipes that ran up the wall, multicoloured and bearing turbid liquids. Before the wall, the main pipe’s housing converted to glass to reveal the contents of the water, slightly blue-green as it roiled down the tube. A great ship’s water turbine drew the water toward the end, with its metal fans dicing any sea creatures wallowing within the pipe. Miko guessed these powerful turbines pumped the dark, gummy water up from the lake across the desert to the barren underground cavern in which they stood.
To either side stood air tubes, monitoring the flux, with metered valves to control the mix. A console at floor level was connected to the air tubes and peppered with dozens of dials and switches, lights and controls. The main filtration centre of Demen’s public works was complex.
“Well,” said Fenli, “if we’re supposed to sabotage the system, here’s our chance. I don’t doubt those red warning dials and control knobs regulate the air and water supply to the city.”
Miko rubbed his nose. “I don’t care to kill the Skullroxers.”
“Nor I, but—”
The tramp of men’s boots pounded across the catwalks.
“The enemy is here!” hissed Sket. “Quick, to shelter!”
“What about the tunnel ahead?” demanded Miko.
“That tunnel ends in a stone wall. A dead end.”
The groan of straining supports continued to ring in full force, now revealing ragged forms.
“Shit! I can’t believe they’ve caught up to us already,” cursed Sket. His eyes darted longingly down a tunnel from where the main water pipe ran. “End of the line. As I said, only a stone wall there.”
“Then we’re done for. B & D lied,” said Miko.
“Of course he did. It’s all sport to him.”
“Bastard,” croaked Miko.
“That’s unkind,” came a baritone drawl from a speaker.
“Kill your own Skullroxers, you damn mutant!” croaked Sket.
Drek’s voice came booming from behind the pipes. “Finish your mission, or die! I will make personal surety of it.”
“Or what, you hermaphroditic freak?” taunted Fenli. He readied his mace.
Miko’s heart jumped to his throat. Murlag, Jingin and a dozen others came clambering down the catwalks, dropping to the floor like monkeys, weapons flashing in their gr
imy hands.
“You’re dead men!” cried Jingin, the only one with an air gun.
Fenli jeered back, “Take us if you can.”
Miko had no time to think. He parried a tall bearded aggressor and swept back, arms locked on the wrist of his foe who wielded a jagged pipe. Miko bent the man’s head to a pressure release valve capped with a silver funnel. He smashed down hard, tripping the valve with his elbow.
A hiss of hot steam gushed out and sprayed the man’s face, melting his features in a bubbling pool of frothing liquid.
Miko jerked backward to defend against other grinning cutthroats who sprang at him with knives and staves.
Murlag pushed forth through the fray, his dark grey eyes flashing and his fierce gaze sizing up the ragtag opposition that faced him. “So, it’s true Myx failed to dispose of you vermin. Grema, you fight with these cast-offs?”
The mutant stammered. “We had no choice, Murlag. It was either s-surrender or die at the hands—”
“Then die!” He smashed down his club, making bloody ruin of Grema’s face.
Berlast reeled back, appalled at the carnage to his friend. Bravely, he charged the leader and Murlag grimly strode to greet him.
While Murlag’s ragtag followers rushed to dispose of the fugitives, Jingin, seeking glory and recompense, jumped up on a command platform, hacking at the air-mixture controls like a madman. He had obviously been sent to oversee the operations, mop up the mess, if need be. His expression was one of savagery and triumph. He wrenched the dials, adding mixtures of ozium, nitrogen and xesia in lethal quantities, lowering the carcinogenic restrainers and buffer gases to near zero, chuckling as he did so. “I hope you’re watching this, you sadistic ape!” he yelled into his earset.
“I am,” Drek said over the receiver, “and I urge you to filter your language. I have ears.”
Torn with indecision between helping his friends or stopping Jingin’s abominable handiwork, Miko clambered upon the platform and prepared to face him. He couldn’t allow all the innocent Skullroxers to die because of one man’s twisted vision. Drek’s plan for vengeance and genocide went beyond insanity.
