Night Raiders

by James David Victor

  “What is it?” Anders asked, moving to the porthole himself as Dalia and Jake shuffled in.

  The glass of the porthole was thick and laced with both interior and exterior veins of metal. Over the centuries, it had taken on a somewhat opaque quality, distorting the image around the exterior rim of the window.

  But it was still good enough for Anders to see what had so upset Patch.

  Their service-room airlock sat at the top of a vast hall, and it was filled with Night Raiders.

  11

  Death Palace

  “I’m just going to put this out there,” Anders heard Jake murmur from behind them. “But whatever is on the other side of that door doesn’t sound all that great.”

  The kid’s not wrong, Anders thought. In fact, he was thinking that ‘all that great’ could be replaced with ‘totally fracking apocalyptic.’

  The hall below them was roughly the shape of a half-circle with a domed roof, near the top of which their small service airlock box sat.

  “It must have been a hangar bay once.” Anders recognized the general layout. Although many centuries out of date, the basic logistics of storing and launching a flight of spacecraft hadn’t really changed.

  They were nearer the ‘flat’ side of the half-circular hall, and the ‘rounded’ edge had several vast bulkhead doors like overlapping petals, which presumably would allow whatever craft had once sat in there to launch, seven at a time. Their room was at the top of a steel girder construction that looked as though it might have once housed a lift but had long since lost all useful components to the scavengers.

  We could climb down the girders. Anders winced. Or…

  The only other option was a steel gantry, suspended from the roof that crossed the entire length of the hangar bay, meeting another at right angles. Both gantries eventually made it to their walls, where more porthole-doors sat.

  We could climb out and try to sneak across above the heads of the raiders, Anders thought. That way had to be better than climbing down and mingling.

  Looking down, it was clear that the crowd below was not the sort to accept strangers into their midst. The Night Raiders had filled the floor of the hall, and appeared as a seething mass of laughing, shouting, fighting bodies. In several places, this tide of insanity rose as some had found perches or seats or perhaps even discarded spacecraft to clamber atop to try to get a better look at the strange proceedings.

  There was a cleared space near the back of the hangar, and Anders saw a line of actual flaming torches—which was insane in a contained environment that would doubtless need to conserve its oxygen—on tall stands interspersed with heavy-looking, square sorts of raiders. Each and every one of them had their hands on some kind of weapon. These men and women were clearly guards of some kind, keeping the roughly circular space behind them free of the crowd’s excesses.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. The drumming was loud, and Anders saw that it was coming from a large bronze bell in the center of the cleared space, and if his perspective was anything to go by, then it had to be several times the size of a human.

  The bell was being struck by a distant figure in lurid red and black clothes, using a piece of metal girder like a mallet. The sound was heavy, but also thick and muffled, as inside this upturned bell there blazed a brilliant bonfire.

  A bonfire!? In space? Anders shook his head. Maybe these Night Raiders were even crazier than Patch had let on. Anders saw it spewing a greasy black smoke to collect high in the ceiling, where he knew that it wouldn’t disperse easily, and its heavy, noxious particles would circulate for a long time through whatever haphazard air-pumping system this place had.

  Do they just not care about their health? he wondered, before his question was answered.

  The bell ringer had stopped hammering the bonfire bell and had thrown the makeshift mallet to the ground, then started hollering and exhorting the crowd. “I can’t hear what they’re saying,” Anders grumbled as he relayed the sight back to the others. The heavy airlock door diminished the sound to a muffled murmur.

  “Sir, would you like me to lipread by activating your node’s scanning function?” Moriarty asked helpfully.

  “Yes, do,” Anders said, and suddenly, the voice of Moriarty overlaid the otherwise mumbling vision before him. It was a strange combination for Anders, hearing his trusted machine ally speak the words of the enemy.

  “…and so, that is why I am not worried at all!” the voice of Moriarty said, before adding, “And then a laugh, sir. Do you wish me to translate those too?”

  Anders could see the bell-ringing man double over onto his hands and knees as he guffawed at his own joke. The idea of hearing Moriarty attempt to laugh was uncomfortable, if not downright terrifying. “No, just translate his speech,” Anders said quickly.

  “As you see fit, sir,” Moriarty said, before launching into a more exuberant tone. “…to bring on the first challenger to the Death Palace!” roared the bell ringer, in Moriarty’s voice.

  “No, I can say this certainly doesn’t sound good.” Anders looked on in horror. The crowd, however, appeared to love it. The policeman watched with a rising sense of disgust as they pushed and shoved, and their clamor was so great that he could feel the vibrations through his boots. Back when Anders’s beat had been the crowded streets of New Gate City in the Hecta System, he would observe far smaller crowds getting similarly rowdy, particularly before the Challenge, every few years.

  It never boded well for anyone.

  But now, someone had broken free from the crowd and the heavy-set guards clustered around the challenger for a moment. It was a man—a very large man—wearing a ridiculous part-plate suit that exposed bare flesh.

  The crowd convulsed again, surging forward to watch the spectacle about to play out before of them.

  “For what we are about to receive, let us be truly thankful!” the bell ringer shouted via Moriarty.

  “August!” called the bell ringer, whom Anders now took to be the leader—or at least the spokesperson—of the Night Raiders. He was pointing at one of the guards, who immediately raised his arms defiantly, and Anders saw him give a defiant yell. The crowd of scavengers appeared to jump and applaud this turn, although Anders had no idea why.

  The guard ‘August’ wasn’t as stocky, as tall, or as well-built as the challenger, but he moved with confident authority up to the fire-brimmed bell while the challenger was still walking the line of guards, exhorting the crowd to ever greater feats of adoration.

  If this is what I think it is, my money’s on August. Anders squinted as he watched what he was sure would be a fight.

  Finally, the challenger moved across to the other side of the bell, with the bell ringer in between them.

  “Contestants, do you both accept your sacred duty?” the bell ringer roared.

  The crowd was stamping and jumping, but Anders presumed that they had.

  “Do you accept that only one of you can win? No hesitation? No mercy?” Moriarty once again translated, and the crowd once again went wild.

  “Then prepare yourselves!” The bell ringer stepped back, and Anders watched the two about-to-be fighters remove their armor and utility belts and all possessions before standing straight-backed with their chins up.

  More of the heavyset guards arrived, carrying what looked to be the glint of longswords.

  Swords!? They are actually going to fight with swords!? Anders shook his head in incredulity. But these blades weren’t the fine sorts of cavalry sabers that some of the Golden Throne elite might wear as a part of their dress uniforms. They were instead oddly serrated, misshapen, and massive.

  They’ve been cut out of bits of wreckage, Anders realized, before he saw the guards carrying the weapons plunge the weapons over the lip of the bell and into the burning bonfire itself. It was then that Anders realized that the guards were wearing heavy leather-style gloves.

  “No…” Anders shook his head. He didn’t want to watch this, and what was more, the policeman inside of
him knew that he didn’t need to watch this. “Patch?” He turned to the Voider. “What are your scans saying about your field ansible?”

  Patch whistled and clicked his strange Voider tongue, making gestures in the air as he activated his node. “Dead ahead, and down.” He nodded the way that they had to go.

  Just our luck. Anders groaned, looking at his team. Dalia, Patch, and Jake looked back at him with the fierce glint of determination in their eyes. Each of them has been through a personal hell because of the Eternal Empress, Anders reminded himself. That was what was driving them.

  They are ready, he thought grimly. “On me,” he said. “And if anything happens to any one of us, the rest keep moving forward to the goal. Everyone clear?” He looked at each one in turn as he put his hand on the wheel-lock of the door.

  One by one, they all nodded. They knew what he was saying: this mission was bigger than any of them individually, and they couldn’t afford desperate heroics.

  Anders remembered a truism from his time at the MPB: You don’t need to be brave; you just need to know how to do your job, and how to do it well. Anders took a deep breath, then turned the wheel-lock—

  Which creaked with a terrible shrieking sound.

  Frack! Anders froze.

  But the reverberations of the distant crowd continued coming up through the soles of his boots. The Night Raiders below hadn’t heard them over their own din.

  Thank the stars, Anders breathed, turning the protesting wheel once more and stepping out onto the suspended gantry, twenty feet or so above a horde of people who would kill him as soon as they noticed him.

  Here goes nothing.

  12

  Gantry

  It was hard for Anders not to be extremely aware of the peril of his situation, especially as the mesh gantry beneath his feet creaked and swayed alarmingly.

  How old are these catwalks? The man froze and gripped the railings. He didn’t actually want to know the answer to his question, but his treacherous mind supplied it anyway—at least four centuries. Maybe five.

  The gantry was essentially a suspended bridge, held up by ridiculously thin-looking chains, all with bent or broken links somewhere in their line. Luckily, however, there were lots of them.

  Some twenty or more feet below were the great unwashed, greasy, shaved, sculpted, bald or else helmeted heads of the Night Raider throng. The sound of their bloodlust, in the form of catcalls and whoops, would have been deafening if Anders’s suit didn’t have automatic noise reduction.

  “Damn savages,” Patch muttered behind him. He appeared more comfortable walking the gantry, perhaps not at being above a few hundred murderous Night Raiders, but Anders reckoned it was because the Voider must be used to a fair bit of scavenging in dangerous environments. Behind Patch was Jake, wide-eyed and not able to take his hands off of the railings at all. Bringing up the rear came Dalia, who also didn’t look too perturbed by their predicament.

  “Only three meals,” Anders muttered over their suit-to-suit channel, in response to Patch’s comment.

  “Huh?” the young Voider asked.

  Anders shook his head, trying to focus on the task at hand. “Oh, it’s an old saying, but one that we keep alive at the MPB,” he said dismissively. “Civilization is only three square meals away from collapse. I can’t remember who said it, but if you’ve worked a double graveyard shift in any throne city, then I bet you’d agree.”

  Anders didn’t think that the people below were savages, or lunatics. Perhaps some of them were. Perhaps all of Patch’s spooky talk about ‘the dark’ of the Void was true, but Anders also knew how groups of people acted and reacted when you took away all higher purpose. Integrity, nobility, honor, loyalty, it all meant nothing to those with nothing left.

  Just like down there. He forgot to stop his eyes from peering down between the mesh, just in time to see the two scrapyard swords brought out from the bonfire by the heavy leather gauntlets of the guards.

  Each of the unique swords were long, almost a meter, by Anders’s reckoning. And their last third was now a cheery, steaming red where the flames had superheated it.

  “Dear god…” Anders frowned as he saw the guards place the swords on the ground between the two combatants, then strip off their leather gloves and hand them to the would-be fighters.

  It was hard for the officer to take his eyes from the horror of what was about to happen. He knew that there was no earthly need for those swords to be heated so much that they smoldered. It was purely for theater.

  “Fight!” the bell ringer roared in glee.

  Anders saw both men—the guard ‘August’ and the heavyset challenger from the floor—race to the nearest sword.

  Anders looked away. He didn’t want to spend his attention on it. “Come on!” he hissed at the others, who were also looking.

  Anders took a step, and the bridge wobbled, but it held. He took another step, as the crowd of Night Raiders below took on a hushed, almost reverential tone. Another step, faster and more confident this time, as he heard the hiss and grunt of male voices. He wondered if the solid-metal swords were hot enough to be felt through the gloves.

  Clang! The first blows were exchanged, and suddenly, the Night Raider crowd was roaring once more, shouting and accusing and praising the men as they fought.

  Now is our best chance, Anders thought. He had no idea how long the fight would last, and the Night Raiders’ attention was rapt. He started to speed up his pace, almost breaking into a trot.

  Ping! Suddenly, the gantry swayed violently to one side as one of the chains ahead of them broke, the added swinging causing too much pressure for the already bent links.

  Frack! Anders grabbed the railings once more, his heart almost stopping in panic. The very last thing he wanted to do was to get dumped into the middle of a fight between two angry men with burning swords!

  “Lieutenant—” Dalia hissed over the suit-to-suit communicator. He didn’t have to ask why. They were barely even halfway yet!

  “Keep going,” Anders said, taking a wider, slower step this time, and the swaying gantry bridge held.

  Clang! More clashes of metal below, and an appraising ‘woooo’ from the crowd.

  It wasn’t far to the mid-point, Anders saw, which was where there was a T-junction as another gantry joined up to this one and swept to the nearer wall at a right angle to their path. The midpoint might have more structural stability, Anders guessed, although he had no idea if he was correct or not. But there have to be more metal supporting structures, right? he told himself, as he took another step, and another.

  Ping! Another chain broke, this time behind them.

  “Dalia?” he half-turned and hissed, to see her glaring back at him.

  “Keep. Going!” she said.

  She was right. The sounds of the battle below continued, and now became mixed with the grunts and snarls of exertion, frustration, or pain. Anders took two more steps, and another.

  Ping-ping! This time, two of the chains broke from behind Dalia.

  “There’s too much movement on this section,” Anders breathed, suddenly making a choice. He half-jogged, half-ran forward and in response, the bridge started to rock and sway violently from side to side.

  But he quickly reached the intersection, stepping off and onto the right-hand gantry bridge, so that an entirely new section of the metal would take his weight and the others would be freer to move.

  “Anders!” It was Jake, in the middle, slipping with the rocking motion and hitting his knees on the gantry floor. Panic swept through the marrow of Anders’s bones like someone had filled them with ice-water.

  “I got you.” Dalia had calmly scooped him up by the back of his suit and hauled him one-handed to his feet. Anders didn’t realize that the Ilythian ‘elves’ were that strong, but apparently, they were.

  “Boss?” Patch skidded to a halt in the center of the T-Junction.

  “You’re the one who built the jammer, and it’s your scanner,” Anders s
aid, nodding for him to continue. “Get to the other side, now.”

  “But you said we couldn’t stop or pause,” Patch frowned, which was true.

  “So I lied! Now go!” Anders snapped. Back in the service airlock that they had emerged from, he had been under the impression that he was determined enough to keep on going, and that the mission mattered more than any of them.

  That was still true, but the last two decades of MPB work and training were a hard thing to forget in a crisis. Anders had to be the one who went last, and who took on the risk of the bridge collapsing. It was what he was trained to do.

  “Sir?” Jake appeared in front of him.

  Ping! Another chain left its seating behind Dalia.

  “Go. After Patch now, lad.” Anders pushed him gently onward.

  Dalia was right behind him, and he could see her scowl behind her faceplate as she regarded him. “I’m quicker than you, human,” she said sternly.

  “Beauty before brains,” Anders said with a wry smile.

  “I have both,” Dalia said in such a deadpan voice that Anders didn’t know if she was being serious or not. Either way, she’s probably right, he thought. “Just go! I got this!” he said as the sound of clashing swords below seemed to be coming faster, with less time in between.

  Dalia blinked and said nothing as she hurried after Jake. Anders could see that Patch was nearly at the distant porthole door already. The three infiltrators were pretty evenly spaced out on the final section of the gantry bridge. Not putting too much weight on any one chain. Anders nodded. He waited another breath.

  Clang! “Argh!” A sudden howl of pain from below.

  Anders made his move, following the others.

  Ping! The sound of breaking links behind him continued, but it was shielded by the roar of the crowds and the jubilant shout from the bell-ringing cult leader of the Night Raiders.

  “And ladies and gentlemen! WE HAVE A WINNER!”