by Peter Nealen
21
That central column seemed farther away than it should have been. Gaumarus briefly wondered if there wasn’t some strange, reality-warping quality to the M’tait tech. Could the inside of the ship be somehow larger than the outside? But that was impossible; it had to simply be the psychological effect of the darkness and the tangible fear engendered by the M’tait themselves.
The formation stayed in a tight knot around Xanar Dak. In any other place, at any other time, it would have been strange to try to stay so close to a nuclear weapon. But in that gloomy, echoing chamber, it seemed normal and logical.
Kan Tur reached the column first. Gaumarus couldn’t see much more than shadows and vague shapes, even with his helmet’s light enhancement turned all the way up. Even so, he didn’t want to turn the integral light installed in the powergun’s foregrip on, not until there was no other choice.
He wasn’t sure if that was because of fear of being exposed, or fear of what that light might reveal.
Kan Tur seemed to be feeling around the side of the column with one hand. There didn’t seem to be anything that looked like a switch or a control panel. In fact, there wasn’t anything on the column that looked technological at all.
He must have finally triggered something, because there was suddenly an opening, gaping darker than the surrounding dimness, right in front of him. The Knight leveled his powergun and peered inside.
After a moment, light flared in the darkness. Kan Tur had lit his weapon lamp. Bright white light played over the column and the passage leading into it. There were a few hissed warnings and demands that it be put out, but he ignored them.
There seemed to be a shaft running up and down through the center of the column, a gaping void running through the center of the ship. Kan Tur leaned out, shining the light up and down before extinguishing it and turning back to the rest.
“It looks like a lift shaft,” he said, his exterior speakers pitched low enough that his voice was barely audible. “But there is no lift car that I can see. There might be more of the hand and foot holds that we used to get up here, though.”
“If they don’t use lifts to get down to the ground, they might not use them within the ship either,” Xanar Dak mused.
“This is all very enlightening,” Gaumarus said, somewhat surprised to hear his own voice speaking. But standing there in the vast chamber, surrounded by nearly impenetrable darkness that could start vomiting forth M’tait horrors at any moment, he was feeling a tightness in his chest that was a half a step from full-blown terror. He wanted to get off that ship and as far away from it as possible. But he wasn’t panicking. Instead, he found he was determined to finish the mission as quickly as they could. “But it isn’t getting us any closer to planting that bomb and getting away from this nightmare of a ship.”
Kan Tur glanced over at him. “True enough, friend Gaumarus,” he said. “There is no way to secure a line here, at least that we can be sure won’t bring some defensive technology into play. So, every step will be on each climber.” If it was possible, there seemed to be a sardonic note in his translated voice. “Try not to fall.”
Slinging his powergun on his back, he turned and crouched down, gripping the sides of the opening with his gauntleted hands and kicking at the inside of the shaft, searching for a foothold.
When none of the rest seemed to be in a hurry to join Kan Tur on the descent, Xanar Dak stepped forward, the bomb on his back bulking large in the dimness, making him look like some grotesque hunchback. Taking a deep breath, Gaumarus stepped forward and put a hand on the Knight’s arm.
“You shouldn’t be second,” he said. “We need more guns between that bomb and any resistance the M’tait suddenly put up. If you go down before we can plant that thing, this has all been for nothing.” He gulped, hoping it wasn’t obvious in the dark. “I’ll go.”
He didn’t look around; he couldn’t see details of the expressions behind face shields and helmet visors anyway, and he knew that if he didn’t step into that breach in the next few seconds, he was never going to have the courage to do it at all. He slung his own powergun across his back and followed Kan Tur.
He was immediately wreathed in inky darkness. It was as if, as soon as he dropped below the level of the chamber’s deck, any of the outside glow that had made it to the column was shut off. Maybe the light was just too weak, maybe the dark material of the column and the shaft within simply drank too much of the reflection to scatter enough light to see. But it was like going blind. He had to grope for every hand and foothold, straining his ears to hear Kan Tur below him, hoping that he wasn’t about to step on the Knight, or worse, fall on his head.
A light blazed above him, and more hissed protests came from the rest. He heard Verheyen’s voice echo faintly through the shaft. “If any of them are aboard, I’m sure they already know we’re here,” the sergeant whispered back. “This is the M’tait we’re talking about. I’d rather see them coming, myself.”
With a lit hand lamp dangling from his flak vest, Verheyen began to descend. In the swaying cone of illumination, Gaumarus could see a little bit more.
Kan Tur was already some distance below him, moving more quickly and surely than he was. With the light from Verheyen’s lamp though, he could start to catch up.
His hurry almost cost him his life. His boot suddenly slipped, and he found himself dangling by one hand and one foot, he didn’t know how many dozens of meters above the bottom of the shaft. He swung out over empty space, his powergun swaying on its sling across his back and hammering its muzzle into the back of his knee.
For a second, he was sure he was going to fall. The handhold felt slick under his fingers, as hard as he tried to grip it. But he swung his flailing arm back toward the wall and slammed into it, almost knocking the wind out of himself. He scrabbled for purchase and found another handhold, clinging to it, flattening himself against the sheer face of the inside of the shaft as he gasped for breath.
As he did so, he thought for just a moment that he could feel something inside the wall, some thrum of power. Power, or unnatural life. It didn’t feel like rock; it felt more as if it was a living thing, a vast predator that might have just noticed him. He huddled there against the inside wall of the shaft, shaking and gasping.
But he couldn’t stay there forever. “Pell?” Verheyen whispered above him. “Are you all right?” One of the indig—it might have been Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff—paused to check on him in the middle of scuttling headfirst down the wall.
Forcing back the wave of near-panic, he nodded. “I’m fine,” he said, starting to search for the next step down. He wasn’t, but he forced himself to forget the horror he’d just endured. They had to plant that bomb. That was all that mattered. He continued down.
“Watch your step,” Kan Tur said from below him. Looking down, trying to make sense of the weirdly moving patches of light and shadow from Verheyen’s light, Gaumarus saw that the Knight was standing on an irregular, sloped floor, with a jagged peak in the center. There didn’t seem to be a flat spot anywhere. “There aren’t any holds for the last three meters.”
Gaumarus felt around for several seconds before taking the Knight at his word and dropping the rest of the way. He had hoped to land somewhat gracefully, but that irregular floor slipped away under his boots and he landed in a heap, the powergun clattering against the stony material.
“Is this the drive chamber?” he asked in a hushed whisper. “I didn’t see any other openings on the way down.”
“Nor did I,” Kan Tur said, looking around. “Perhaps we simply don’t know the correct method to open them.”
The bottom of the shaft was as narrow as the rest of it, but that still left plenty of room for all of them to stand. The sheer size of the ship was daunting, even if it hadn’t already been cloaked in the M’tait’s aura of dread.
At first, it seemed that the only light came from Verheyen’s hand lamp, but after a while, Gaumarus thought he started to see a
vague, bloody glow coming from high above, somewhere near the top of the shaft. It was a light that illuminated nothing, but only managed to make him feel exposed, as if a single, luridly glowing eye was staring down at them.
“What do we do now?” one of the other Provenians asked. The man sounded like he was barely holding his fear and terror back from overwhelming him.
“We plant the bomb,” Xanar Dak said. “We could spend forever trying to find the power plant in this leviathan. I don’t know why the defenses haven’t woken up yet, but I am sure it is only a matter of time.”
“Maybe there are none,” Morav Dun said, the first he had spoken since they had reached the Huntership. “Maybe they have no need of them. Who could possibly do any harm to the apex predator of the galaxy?”
All eyes turned to the Knight Subcommander. The flat tones of his translator notwithstanding, there was something eerily disquieting about his words. Almost as if they were not his own. Weapons shifted in a few hands.
It was then that Gaumarus started to notice just how quiet it was down at the bottom of that awful pit. Every sound, every shift of position, seemed muted. And with the quiet came a terrible pressure on his mind. He found that his shoulders were hunched, as if waiting for a blow.
“Morav Dun,” Kan Tur said, “mind yourself. You are a Knight of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster. We do not crumple in the face of the enemy.”
Morav Dun laughed suddenly, the sound a distorted, filtered bark empty of any humor. “You always were naïve, Kan Tur,” he said. “Are you still so wedded to the heroic humbug spouted at the Order’s Councils that you cannot see the truth? We are in the belly of the beast, and it has just closed its jaws.” He pointed above. “All they must do is close us in and we are dead. And what madness brought us to this pass? What made us think that such a puny thing as this little thermonuclear detonator could harm one of these ships?”
“What madness, then, brought you along with us, Morav Dun?” Gaumarus asked. “If this was doomed to failure, then why are you here?” He was surprised to find himself as calm as he was. But he was clearly holding himself together better than the Knight Subcommander.
“I don’t know!” Morav Dun shouted. “Maybe I went mad too, at least for a moment. Maybe I let myself forget what we were up against! I should have let you fools run to your deaths.”
“Well then, we have little to lose, don’t we, Morav Dun?” Xanar Dak said, as he carefully drew the pack with the nuke off his back. “If we are going to die here, shall we not do as much damage as possible in the dying?”
“I have no intention of dying in the guts of a Huntership for the sake of a miserable fringe world!” Morav Dun all but screamed, his voice almost overriding his translator. His powergun came up. At the same instant, half a dozen other weapons swung to cover him. “If you arm that thing, we are lost!”
“Listen to yourself, Morav Dun,” Kan Tur said. “A moment ago, you were without hope. We have come too far to turn back now. And Xanar Dak is right. We have nothing more to lose.”
Gaumarus had his own powergun pointed at Morav Dun by then. He wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, but the horrible pressure on his mind seemed to be getting worse.
Morav Dun was shaking. His tremors were becoming increasingly violent, his powergun’s muzzle wobbling alarmingly. He suddenly screamed, a loud, echoing blast of pure animal terror, bringing the powergun up to point it at Xanar Dak.
And Gaumarus shot him.
The thunderclap inside that narrow space was almost enough to drive him to his knees. The flash of the powergun bolt was so intense that for a second, he thought he’d been struck blind. He almost forgot, for an instant, that he had fired the shot.
When he could see again, Morav Dun was lying crumpled on the floor of the shaft, a fist-sized smoking hole still glowing with waste heat punched through his breastplate. The rumbling echoes of the shot were still traveling up and down the center of the ship.
“That tears it,” Xanar Dak said, turning to the nuke. “We have no time left.”
A deeper, more resonant version of the assonant, distorted shriek that Gaumarus had heard come from the M’tait shook the Huntership.
And easily a dozen openings creaked open all around the shaft, scattered from top to bottom.
Gaumarus pointed his powergun up, searching the gloom for the slayers that were sure to come. If they were lucky, he realized, it would be slayers. All the M’tait really needed to do was send a heavy down the shaft and they would be finished quickly.
But the monsters from outer space never seemed content to finish their prey quickly. It wasn’t slayers or heavies that popped out and started descending the walls of the shaft.
At first, it was simply too dark to see what they were. All that he could hear was a rustling sound and see a wave of movement in the dimness. Then Verheyen fired, and in that lightning-bolt flash, he could see.
There was a horde of M’tait constructs, smaller things, like seven-limbed monkeys with blade-shaped M’tait heads, coming down the wall. They didn’t seem to have ranged weapons at all, but only vicious claws at the end of coiling limbs.
Indig repeaters boomed, and the shaft was suddenly filled with the brilliant flashes and deafening thunderclaps of powergun bolts. Xanar Dak fired three shots, blasting three of the monkey-things to glowing shards in less than two seconds before turning back toward the bomb and starting the detonator sequence.
The shaft had turned into a pulsating hell as men fired as fast as their powerguns could cycle. Brilliant blue-white and gold-white bolts flashed like strobes and thunder rolled in a continuous, reverberating cacophony that came to have a physical impact all its own as it bounced the length of the seven-hundred-meter tube. Glowing bits of biomechanoids and shards of the ship’s very fabric rained down on the defenders.
But however brutal and concentrated their fire, there were just too many of the things. One dropped onto one of the Provenian soldiers and nearly decapitated him with three swipes of its scissoring claws. Another two fell onto one of the indig and pulled him apart.
Gaumarus wasn’t even aiming by then. He was in survival mode, simply pointing the powergun up at the walls and holding down the trigger. The heat dispersal fins around the barrel were already starting to glow, and the air stank of hot metal and ozone, overpowering the strange, alien smells of the ship itself. The temperature in the shaft was starting to mount. His entire awareness was swamped by flickering still images in the dark, images of horror and violent death.
Xanar Dak’s voice suddenly boomed in the confined space of the shaft, amplified enough to be heard even over the roar of weapons fire. “Kan Tur! Take the rest and get out if you can! I will stay and make sure it is finished!”
Gaumarus couldn’t hear Kan Tur’s reply, but a moment later, a gauntleted hand was gripping him by the arm and propelling him toward the side. “The wall opened up, there!” Kan Tur thundered, pointing. “Go!”
Gaumarus looked around for Verheyen. The sergeant was still on his feet, one of the few. “Verheyen!” he screamed, but Kan Tur was pushing him toward the opening.
“He’ll make it! Go!” The Knight kept them moving. They had no time to linger.
Struggling to maintain his footing on the strange uneven floor, Gaumarus surged toward the opening. He didn’t know if it was even an escape route; for all he knew, they were far enough down that they were actually underground. If there was a passage through that opening, it might only lead into the vitrified soil the Huntership had embedded itself in.
But to stay was to die, so he dove through the oddly-shaped portal. Verheyen nearly stumbled and fell on top of him as Kan Tur propelled him through the opening, followed by Chauwens, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff, two more indig, and finally Kan Tur himself.
“Keep moving,” Kan Tur barked. Gaumarus didn’t need any further prompting.
His powergun in his shoulder, he started following the passage. Secrecy was no longer even a trifling concern;
he flicked on his weapon light and followed the bright cone of illumination as he started down the passage.
It looked almost like a lava tube, but the walls still throbbed with that strange, almost living vibration that he’d sensed since first boarding the Huntership. It struck him, even as the weapons fire behind them died away, that he had yet to see anything that looked mechanical aboard the ship at all. It was almost as if all M’tait tech was somehow solid-state, operating at a molecular level within the stone-like material it was built from.
The tunnel only led downward, coming to another huge, bell-shaped chamber after a short distance. Gaumarus paused at the lip of the tunnel, shining his light downward, trying to see what he was getting into.
The chamber was lined with several more openings, but was otherwise empty. It gaped below, dark and forbidding. There was no way up except back the way they’d come.
And that was clearly not an option. More powergun fire crackled and thundered behind them as Kan Tur blasted several more of the monkey-things.
One of the indig brushed past Gaumarus, peering down. Then, without a sound, the indig dropped into the chamber below.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff came alongside Gaumarus, and signed to him quickly. [If there is a way out, we can burrow,] he said. [We have tools and charges for it. If we can get far enough, we can collapse the tunnel behind us and bury ourselves for protection against the blast.]
Gaumarus wanted to explain that it might not be nearly enough, if the thermonuclear weapon did manage to destroy the Huntership. But, he realized, there wasn’t time for such an explanation. There wasn’t even time for him to properly translate it into the sign language in his own head. And if there was even a scant chance that the plan would work, it was more of a chance than they had there, in the middle of a tunnel aboard what they hoped was a doomed Huntership.
So he just nodded, and together, the two of them stepped off onto the slope below them, starting to slide down toward the bottom as soon as they did. The inside of the chamber, unlike the tunnel they’d just left or the shaft they’d descended to where Xanar Dak was making his last stand, was as smooth as glass.