It took me a second to realise what Pierre was pointing at. High up, only a few inches above the mountain’s peak, was a steel block that stood out from all the rest. If I squinted I could make out a fine line running down its middle. No grate darkened its centre. Unlike the rest, this panel was not a panel, but a door.
‘There’s a control panel just to the left of it,’ said Pierre, once it was clear I’d caught up. ‘For emergencies, that sort of thing. If this place weren’t full of trash you’d be able to see a maintenance ladder on the far wall leading up there. Or you would if it hadn’t rusted off. I’m guessing it was there so engineers could shut everything down and get back out if the crushing process kicked off while they were going about their checks.’
‘Which would make sense back when Port Iridium was actually a mining station,’ I replied, swatting a fly away from my face. ‘But by the sounds of things the Na’riim use it as a prison as much as they do a tip. You sure they wouldn’t have had the buttons disabled?’
Pierre was unusually quiet for a moment.
‘Well there’s only one way to find out,’ he said, stomping up the slope of the mountain like an indignant explorer.
I tried to sigh without drawing breath and failed. Coughing and gagging, I followed Pierre through the groove he’d left carved in the trash behind him.
Gaining perspective, I realised I was wrong to describe it as a mountain. It was no more a mountain than it was a pyramid, or a tower, or even a hill. What it was, was a ramp. It started as only a few sodden inches where we’d passed through the crack and rose steadily to the point where it could lap the bottom of the door on the opposite side, nearly one hundred metres higher. It looked like the aftermath of a particularly rotten avalanche.
It wasn’t an easy climb. With each step my shoes would plunge so deep into the muck that I could feel the trash tickling the inside of my trousers. I’d fall and scratch my palms against charred scraps of plastic. At one point Pierre slipped on a pile of papers that had melded into a wet mush, and a globule of it splattered against the side of my face. I didn’t bring it up. I just shivered, wiped it off and carried on.
When I was about halfway up, an entire section of the slope crumbled away. Again I was reminded of an avalanche crashing down a mountainside, demolishing the trees in its way. A terrible rumbling accompanied it. I stood there, frozen, my arms stretched out wide for balance, sure that the ground beneath my own feet would give way.
It didn’t. But the rumbling didn’t stop, either.
‘Er… Pierre?’ I said, nervously resuming my trek after him. ‘Do you feel that?’
‘Just keep climbing,’ he replied, out of breath.
I hurried after him. ‘You bloody idiot!’ I shouted. ‘You told me they never bother to empty the trash. Now look what’s going to happen. We’re going to get crushed!’
‘Nobody’s getting crushed,’ snapped Pierre, scampering up towards the door. He was pulling away from me. ‘Just hurry up and, er… don’t look down.’
What did he expect me to do?
The walls weren’t closing in, and neither were the floor and ceiling. Everything around us looked very static, in fact - even the ramp, save for a few pieces of scrap that tumbled down as a result of the vibrations. But there was something about those grates in each of the panels that perturbed me - the way the trash around them twitched and danced away as if blown by a summer breeze…
I felt a drop of sweat trickle down the inside of my arm.
‘This isn’t a trash compactor, you moron,’ I shouted. ‘It’s a goddamn furnace!’
Fire roared out from the grates on the panels closest to the ground. The air in the room immediately jumped by five, maybe ten degrees. The trash nearest the grates curled to a flaming crisp before disintegrating into ash.
‘Okay, maybe this wasn’t my smartest idea,’ yelled Pierre from near the top of the slope. ‘Run!’
Considering that I was closer to its top than its bottom, and more importantly the bottom was where all the flames were, I had no choice but to climb further up the very mountain which was beginning to set alight. Pierre was up at the door now. One hand was holding onto the broken, rusty ladder, the other was beckoning for me to hurry. But the faster I tried to climb, the deeper my feet sunk into the trash and the quicker I seemed to slip.
Fire burst from the second tier of grates. The temperature leapt another half-dozen degrees.
Definitely no going back down now. The whole floor was in flames, and through them I could see the floor beneath the rubbish. More grates. And through those grates the cinders fell. The mountain was shaking, sinking. With every second more of the trash was consumed by the fire and with every second the door drew an inch further from the trash’s peak.
I pushed myself onwards, scrambling for purchase. I grabbed hold of things the feel of which I wish I could forget. Pierre’s hand wasn’t beckoning me on anymore; it was stretched as far out towards me as he could manage without falling off the ladder.
‘For crying out loud, jump!’ shouted Pierre, as the third row of panels started warming up.
I don’t know what my foot found, but it was solid. Maybe it was a mannequin head, maybe it was a refrigerator door. Whatever it was, I launched off it like a flea (albeit one that’s middle-aged and ripening around the waistline).
Pierre caught me roughly by the arm. With a laboured expletive he pulled me over to the ladder. I clung to it the way a baby koala clings to its mother.
‘Thank you,’ I gasped, watching as the trash mountain burned and sank further into the pit. The air was so hot it singed my throat. ‘Now get us out of here.’
‘Yeah, that’s where we might have a problem.’ Pierre’s face glistened with sweat. ‘The emergency controls aren’t working.’
I watched him hammer at the various dials, knobs and burnt-out buttons in stunned disbelief. Nothing was happening.
‘So what do we do now, then?’ I shouted, wrapping my arms tighter around the ladder’s rungs. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t have brought us into a giant trash inferno without some sort of Plan B, would you?’
‘Of course not,’ he muttered. More buttons were pressed and dials turned without much effect. ‘Just give me a moment, okay…?’
Even the top half of the rubbish was on fire now. I could smell burning rubber. I’m pretty sure the soles of my shoes were dripping away from my feet.
‘Do something, Pierre!’
Suddenly the roar of the generator died and the fires were sucked back into the furnace grates. Everything came to a spluttering stop. What little trash remained was left in a smouldering, sizzling heap below us. Most of the floor was exposed as a fine grill through which ash continued to fall like rain.
‘What happened?’ I asked, hanging onto the ladder and looking up at a bemused Pierre. ‘Did you stop it? What did you press?’
‘I’m not sure,’ replied Pierre, each of his words doused in doubt, ‘but I don’t think it was me…’
The door beside us shot open with a brief hiss. Standing in front of the sudden square of light was a dark and angry silhouette, pointing a big and angrier-looking rifle right at us. The silhouette grunted.
‘Why, what good timing!’ said Pierre, beaming a nervous smile at the figure. ‘Now that you’re here, I don’t suppose you’d like to take us to see Kellogg Durant?’
Chapter Four
The first guard kept a solemn watch on us by the grubby furnace doors while he waited for his colleague to come and assist. Pierre and I stood in silence, our hands clasped in front of us, trying to avoid his stare.
The Na’riim weren’t half as ugly as I’d expected. I know that sounds kind of harsh, and not really the sort of prejudice one should adopt before entering into any sort of inter-species dialogue, but after venturing through the market I’d come to assume that near enough every alien had skin like a scarab beetle and eyes like dinner plates. There was a certain grace to the Na’riim, even when they were covered in rusty armour
and holding plasma rifles with barrels big enough to take my head off.
This one had skin of a perfect, shimmering silver. The irises of his eyes - only a little larger and more beautiful than a human’s - were an equally idyllic shade of blue. His build was slim and elegant, and his height would probably have been similar to my own if he hadn’t had a neck about twelve inches in length. As such, he towered above me at a little over seven feet tall. He had a pair of tiny nostrils but no real nose of which to speak. His ears were in the usual places, but his were only slits a couple of inches long. He had no hair on his head - the armour made it hard to tell, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say members of his species were bald all over - but along his skull ran two parallel ridges of bone. These rows of stumpy, skin-covered lumps looked like a pair of modest crests to me, and at the back of the creature’s head they developed into dangling, fleshy tendrils that reached all the way down to his shoulders. As one might style one’s hair, these two tendrils had been decorated with beads and feathers.
Would I be surprised to discover his species had evolved along the shallows of some picturesque ocean planet? Not in the slightest.
His colleague arrived about a minute or so after we’d clambered out of Pierre’s fiery shortcut. The two aliens spoke in their own language for a bit. Their snappy words seemed to include a lot of chiks and chaks. Then they turned their attention back to us.
‘Come this way,’ said the first guard, in English.
We followed him down corridor after corridor. The other guard followed behind us. The walls seemed familiar and yet utterly different, if that makes any sense at all. They were built using the same tarnished and uncomfortable metalwork as the rest of the space station, but the furious, hissing pipes were hidden out of sight and efforts had been made to spruce up the place, as challenging a task as that must have been for the designer. There were a series of scuffed red carpets running beneath our feet, and here and there wooden planks had been installed along the walls. The closer we got to where our guards were leading us, the nicer the attempts at decor became.
It was hard to believe we were only a few walls away from where all those poor homeless and hopeless souls had built their shacks and tents. Then I remembered that we’d climbed up a good few storeys on that trash pile. A lot can happen between floors.
Just before we arrived at a large, electronically-sealed security door, we passed a window on our right. It looked into a small and brightly lit room. There was barely enough space inside for a table, but neither of the room’s two occupants seemed to care all that much. They were absorbed in some sort of card game (the cards seemed to vary in size and shape - one was a square, another a dodecahedron), only lifting their eyes from their hands in order to pour themselves a drink from a brown bottle sitting on the table beside them.
I recognised one of the species - she also belonged to the Na’riim. The feathered tendrils on the back of her head grew much longer and in greater number than those of her male counterparts. They billowed down the length of her spine and over the swell of her breasts like the tentacles of a jellyfish swaying in the ocean current. Her dark eyes were even more mesmerising than those of our guards. Her armour was much the same.
The other species was a mystery to me, and quite a frightening mystery at that. It was shorter than the Na’riim by a couple of feet, and wore a thick, battered spacesuit that gave it a somewhat stout but muscular appearance. I presumed it to be a he, but admittedly I didn’t have a lot to base that assumption on. He had three claws of scarred ivory on each weathered, leather hand. What I first guessed was a terrifying war mask I quickly realised was the creature’s actual face. It was a bony carapace, sort of like the skull of a ram only with a flatter, more human shape. Two white horns curled upwards from his temples. He had eyes but they were dark and hidden by the shadows of his haunting sockets. As faces went, it was like looking at a living skeleton.
‘That’s a Skrellik warrior,’ whispered Pierre as we came to a stop outside the security door. The guard behind us grunted for quiet.
The first guard pressed a code into the control panel beside the door. A grainy, static outline of a face burst onto the cathode-ray tube screen above it.
‘Two guests for Ty-Ren Yoop,’ our guard announced, turning around to face us. The picture crackled and rolled. ‘Found them crawling up the inside of the dump.’
‘I thought we were going to see that Kellogg Durant guy?’ I whispered to Pierre. He shrugged, resigned.
A series of snappy clicking sounds came from the face in the screen. The guard turned around to face us once more, and sniffed.
‘No, they could smell worse,’ he said.
With a sudden whirr the metal door split diagonally down the middle, and each half slid apart. There was a large hall waiting for us on the other side, along with three more Na’riim blocking our path, and three more behind them.
They looked angry. But as our guards led us forward, they stepped aside.
If the corridors outside looked as if they belonged with the rest of Port Iridium, the Na’riim central chamber didn’t. What metalwork there was had been hidden behind columns of marble stone, rows upon rows of oak panelling, and silk banners as blue as their species’ irises. The floor was carpeted with a soft, white, high-tech plastic that left no echo under our feet, and from the wooden ceiling - a good two storeys above our heads - hung orbs of a strangely tranquil light, which sent sky blue shadows dancing across our path the way light shimmers in patterns across the ocean floor.
When I saw the figure sitting before us at the hall’s end I gulped, and it felt like swallowing sandpaper.
She was Na’riim - that much I could tell from a quick and nervous glance. She was a beautiful silver like the rest of them, and just as slender, and just as tall. But to think I’d considered the rest of her species magnificent! This one wore more beads around her tendrils than you’d find on one of those annoying curtains in hippie emporiums, and from her crests bloomed a display of feathers that would have made a peacock blush. She wore armour, like everyone else… but hers was pristine, polished, as good a fit as a tailored suit and adorned with tiny, exquisite detailing. A tight, metal collar was wrapped around her neck; it changed colour as the light moved across it. The throne on which she sat looked as if it had been lifted straight from a medieval fantasy, only updated for the fashionable warlord of the eighty-first century BC.
To either side of her stood a guard, each armed with an even bigger and more imposing rifle than all the rest.
Ty-Ren Yoop leaned forwards in her chair and glared at us. Looking into her eyes was like trying to out-stare the sun; if you didn’t look away sooner or later, you were going to do yourself a mischief.
‘I know you,’ she sneered, pointing at Pierre.
Pierre stayed respectfully silent until one of the guards shoved him in the shoulder and commanded that he answer.
‘Erm, yes, Your Greatness,’ said Pierre. ‘You had me brought up here not too long ago, after some trouble down on the casino deck. You had me thrown into the trash pit.’
‘Ah, yes. And how, pray tell, did you find your way back into my chamber?’
‘By climbing up the trash pit, Your Greatness.’
There was a moment of silent contemplation from the Na’riim ruler.
‘Been there the whole time, have you?’ she eventually asked.
‘No, Your Greatness.’
‘Are you sure? Because I’d have great use for someone fireproof.’ She swivelled away from them in her throne. ‘Oh well. Throw them back into the pit, and make sure the furnace is already on this time.’
‘Wait! Wait!’ shouted Pierre as the numerous guards flanking us closed in, rifles at the ready. ‘We need to speak to Kellogg Durant - it’s a matter of universal importance! We’ll… we’ll trade for it!’
Ty-Ren Yoop held up a hand and the guards froze where they were standing - even those who hadn’t been looking at her. She turned back around to face us.<
br />
‘If speaking to him is so important,’ she said slowly, ‘then I expect you have something equally important to trade, correct?’
Pierre nodded to me and I reached into my trouser pocket. Every plasma rifle was suddenly pointed towards my face.
‘Slowly,’ commanded Ty-Ren Yoop, raising her head in cautious curiosity.
Centimetre by nervous centimetre I pulled the golden key out from my pocket. I couldn’t keep a good grip on it, my palm was so sweaty. It twinkled and sparkled under the swirling light of the orbs above.
‘A golden key bestowed only to those ordained by the Council,’ Pierre declared, describing it the way an auctioneer would introduce a priceless work of art. ‘I expect Your Greatness already knows its value.’
‘Oh, she does,’ Ty-Ren Yoop whispered in awe. She was leaning so far forward she was in danger of slipping off her throne. Her big blue eyes swam and glistened. ‘I haven’t seen one of those in a long, long time. The power to step from universe to universe not just in those rare places where they overlap, but through any door one wishes…’
She eyed Pierre carefully.
‘These are all but impossible to come by these days, and to give one away to someone not approved by the Council of Keys carries a severe penalty indeed. You must have one hell of a price on your head.’
Pierre shook the head in question. ‘Not at all, Your Greatness. We simply don’t need it where we’re going. And besides, I think the Council have bigger things to worry about.’
I suppressed an anxious smirk. If the story Pierre told me back in the bar was true, the value of the key was depreciating with every second that passed. Unless Ty-Ren Yoop fancied vacationing in worlds under Torri-Tau occupation, that is.
‘I wouldn’t know about that anymore,’ replied Ty-Ren, nodding to one of her guards. He stepped forward and snatched the key out of my hand. ‘But we have a deal, humans. You may speak to Kellogg Durant, if you wish… though I know not why you’d want to. The past has already happened, and the future… well, he seems to have grown awfully quiet about that as of late.’
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