Submantle- The Alpha Key

by Patrick Lane

Thaawump! The delve-train rolled wildly to port as an explosion ripped through the hull. Flashing alarms screamed that the starboard engine was either incapacitated or destroyed, leaving them at the mercy of the dreadnaught.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dysuss Dripvein looked at the holo-viewer in disgust. He had been outwitted by a pair of Rangers. It was almost enough to make him unsheathe the zeal-mallet and smash something. Almost.

  Scotty Slatearm, slagg him.

  “Begin the retrieval process,” he ordered. “Not one pod left behind. And target the delve-train for destruction.”

  Rassack, the bridge commander, spun around on his chair. “Sir, with the damage they’ve sustained they won’t get far. The frigates managed to attach a tracking beacon to the train’s hull.”

  All the holo-viewers winked out and a single displacement image of the delve-train appeared in the middle of the bridge. Its right-side engine was badly damaged, causing it to list terribly to one side. Russack was right, they wouldn’t make it far. Blaze the man for questioning him in front of the crew though, he would have to deal with him later.

  He made a quick calculation, he had almost forgotten about the trackers. It was something he wasn’t accustomed to using yet. They hadn’t been seen for millennia due to the Jax Scourge. Their signals had been known to attract the attention of the virus and could create horrific explosions for both the tracker and the tracked. But with The Quantum’s help that had all changed.

  Let the delve-train try that neat trick of delve-skipping to avoid detection, it would gain them naught.

  He tuned to the communications officer and ordered, “Let them flee then. Contact the squad at Harkenwell. Order the capture of Scott Slatearm if they try to dock there for repairs. The time for secrecy has past. The rest of the crew, including the beasts, should be considered expendable. We can ill afford any more casualties.”

  “Yes sir,” came the brisk reply.

  “And Russack, I need you personally to go to the storage bays and wake our friend Runion. He and his creatures may have some work to do if the Rangers decide to flee into the Helix.”

  Russack blanched at that, and Dysuss almost smiled. That should teach the man to question his orders.

  He returned his attention to the holo-viewers as their images returned to normal. One of them displayed their dreadnaught as it deployed a mechanical arm after the closest frigate. Several retrieval tethers shot out from it’s broadside, slicing through the mantle to latch onto damaged vessels. At the same time, the limpet mine net began collapsing back on itself, creating half a dozen nodes on the holo-viewer that the dreadnaught could drop down to for collection once the crews were safe.

  “Sir?” the Sakurian said from his side. “Incoming communication from Monitor Schrill.”

  “Send it to my ready room,” Dysuss ordered, standing up from his chair. “Continue the rescue and no interruptions.”

  He entered the spacious chamber to the side of the bridge that served as a private office and living quarters. The cabin had its own holo-viewer and communications station adjoining his work desk.

  He activated the communications console. “Commander Dripvein?” came the gurgling voice of Monitor Schrill. “I have been monitoring your progress. It seems our prey has eluded us? Yes?”

  “Yes Sir,” Dysuss replied, seeing no reason to hide the truth. “Commander Slatearm is proving just as resourceful as our records indicated. A second dreadnaught may not have been amiss in attaining his capture.”

  “You are tempted to obliterate his craft? Yes?” Said the Monitor’s voice, catching Dysuss by surprise. “After all, your daughter, let me think… Cintressa? Yes? Was flushed from an airlock into the mantle while trying to board a Ranger train? Yes?”

  “Sir, yes sir, sorely tempted sir,” Dysuss replied, his throat catching as he spoke the words.

  “Many here on our council would see you removed from such a delicate post, Dripvein. Your obedience to the Quantum is coming into conflict with your grief. Some have even mentioned reconditioning, to remove the Quantum’s tactical knowledge and replace it with an emotional memory instead.” The Monitor spoke without even a hint of anger or frustration. If anything, Dysuss felt like a child being reprimanded for playing in the hydro-fountains by a parent.

  No, Dysuss railed inside, a hand subconsciously reaching up to caress the hard-earned glyphs along his jaw. He refused to be turned into one of the base workers, doting on the Monitors and superiors, the Elites, relegated to maintaining a base of operations. “I am under control, I can and will hold my anger in check until the Quantum’s work is complete.” He maintained a level tone as he spoke.

  “Thank you, Dripvein,” the Monitor replied. “However, your failure to produce a Key has forced a compromise between myself and the strategic council.”

  “Sir?” Dysuss asked, not daring to say more.

  “A Stillness and his minder will be deployed to rendezvous with your ship. Let’s just say he will be there for the protection of the Quantum’s interest and leave it at that. Yes?”

  The blood ran from Dysuss’s face. A Stillness? The realization shocked him. He’d heard whispers that the council had recovered some of the augmentation chambers from the armories at Hellstamp Helix, but a Stillness? He remembered a line from one of the bedtime stories he’d heard as child.

  The Stillness, in their name lies a promise, in their wake lies their name.

  “I look forward to it, sir,” he lied, even as part of him tried in vain not to care.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The dreadnaught’s mine had done its job—the train was lurching wildly and Nifty struggled for control.

  “Scrap!” cursed Scotty, “I thought luck was with us and we’d made it through cleanly.”

  “We’ll make it! We’ll make it!!” Nifty yelled back, struggling to level the craft and steer away from the mine field. “But with only two engines left, we’re in no shape to outrun the dreadnaught.”

  “Don’t worry about that anymore,” said Scotty. He unfastened his harness, leaned forward to expand the holo-image. “They’ve called off their attack. They have nearly twelve defunct frigates to rescue. See for yourself! That’s twenty-four men to sacrifice for one delve-train. Unless their commander is a true savage then it’s not bloody likely.”

  The frigates were in disarray, drifting about chaotically; most were now heading up, towards the crust. The dreadnaught had already changed course to intercept the closest one, deploying a mechanical arm to retrieve the stricken craft.

  “Good! That should keep them busy for a while, and no doubt they’ll want to collect the unused limpet mines. They’re too valuable to be left behind,” Nifty remarked as they cleared the edge of the mine field, and the train limped its way back to the Helix.

  Scotty began scrawling in his notebook again, and paused to study the receding dreadnaught, chewing on the end of his pencil. “Well, we can’t go to Harkenwell now,” he noted with frustration, snapping the book shut. “That wasn’t a random rover attack. It was a calculated deployment of resources with the precision of a military operation. We’re lucky we’re not on the receiving end of a departing salvo. They must really want us alive.”

  Nifty had assumed the same, but still winced as Scotty confirmed his suspicions. “You think they’ll be monitoring the libraries? Why?” he questioned, struggling to keep the train steady. The damaged engine was causing her to veer sharply to the left, and he was beginning to suspect that the explosion may have jammed one of the rudders in place.

  “There’ll be time for answers later,” replied Scotty impatiently, taking a moment to check on the train’s systems. “We need to alert Rocktower as soon as we’re able. These Keys are obviously more important than we suspected. We have to stay on task and find them before this riffraff does. Damaged train or not. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Nifty replied, continuing to assess the rudder’s damage through the control levers.

  “That chat with Doon
left me wondering,” Scotty began, before pausing. With measured words he then asked, “With Harkenwell no longer an option, wouldn’t it be best to examine the keyhole before looking for the Key?”

  “Now? Visit Terraport’s machine room? With the dreadnaught still here?”

  Scotty inspected the image of the dreadnaught for a moment, then turned back to Nifty, “Indeed, with power rods the size of blaze-haulers. Even the colonizing team’s engineers won't enter those rooms willingly, so we’d be on our own.”

  For a moment, Nifty forgot about the rapidly receding vessel. A wave of anxiety washed over him. His last encounter with a corrupted power core had not ended well. The idea of being anywhere near the five-thousand-year old Helix engines, especially without a topsider human engineer, or an Alexandria cube to temporarily neutralize residual traces of the Jax virus, did not sit well with him, not well at all.

  “You know me, I’m hardly about to say no,” Nifty said, hoping that Scotty would not sense the uncertainty behind his calmly spoken words. “Besides, I’d like to see Lulu’s face when she realizes a pair of mining specialists turned up with the Key,” he finished, forcing a smile.

  “Good,” replied Scotty. “We need to shut off the slip-shield again. It may be occupied, but you can bet that the dreadnaught will still be tracking our signature. Besides, we didn’t come nearly halfway under this blasted continent to turn back now.”

  Nifty wanted to protest that the train was in no shape for another delve-skip, not at nearly a hundred miles from the top of the Helix. But he just shook his head in resignation. Scotty was right, they’d wasted enough time already, and he wasn’t about to let the bounty slip through his fingers over something as trifling as a jammed rudder blade or missing engine.

  Scotty buckled himself in and switched the slip-shield off, initiating a harrowing journey up through the mantle; a long, difficult ride that amounted to Nifty fighting the control levers the entire way until his arms and shoulders burned with exhaustion. Practice or not, this wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind when Scotty had first suggested a delve-skip.

  As they neared the crust Scotty focused the display on the entrances to the Gears. Something in the old Ranger’s movement brought a realization slamming home with Nifty. “We were going to the Gears this whole time weren’t we? Why didn’t you just say so from the start?”

  Scotty didn’t appear guilty, but instead sounded impressed as he said, “The plan was always to visit the libraries but this seemed like the safest of the Gears to visit. Not only that, you removed a Harkenwell brief from the council archives before we left Rocktower, right?”

  “Yes, of course, a destination assay is standard procedure,” Nifty replied. Then it dawned on him. “Dross lode! Was someone tracking me? Am I the reason that dreadnaught was waiting for us?"

  “No. I’m the reason that dreadnaught was waiting, or so I’m beginning to suspect,” Scotty said, wearing a rueful smile and tapping his temple with his index finger. “Possibly to get whatever they think is rolling around in this old brain of mine.

  Other than Doon, who warned me to take precautions, I never mentioned our destination to anyone. But after what just happened, we know that the enemy, whoever they may be, desperately wants to keep the Keys’ whereabouts a secret.”

  Nifty exhaled slowly. Though he had hoped for some action, he was beginning to think they were getting a bit out of their depth. “Slagg…so much for a simple artifact retrieval,” he mused. “Let’s just do this and get out of here.” Straightening himself in the chair, Nifty quashed his doubts – We've got this, he told himself. “That dreadnaught looked like it was large enough to have a communications hub, and once they find out we’re not in Harkenwell, it won't take long for their shrewd commander to figure out our whereabouts.”

  “Agreed,” said Scotty, as he studied the navigation display. “Now, how are we going to solve the problem of you flopping this train about like a mackerel on a fish hook?” He grinned. “Once we near the tunnels if we’re not careful, we’ll get wedged in at the entrance.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Nifty leant forwards and used his weight to combat the bucking levers, but their ascending speed had now increased so dramatically that his confidence began to falter; he’d miscalculated, they weren't forging ahead fast enough to reach the pools without slamming into the crust first.

  “Come on, work,” he pleaded, coaxing as much speed from the control-levers as he could, while resisting the child-like urge to rock back and forth in his seat to give her more speed.

  Scotty reached forward and hastily began to purge the central ballasts. “Just stay the course,” He boomed over the clamor; though even as he spoke Scotty probably realized that the purge was too late. “We may leave the crust with a few new scratches, but we’ll make it. Push forward!”

  Nifty hunched his shoulders, bracing himself against his chair. With a shuddering screech of stone against metal, the top of the train slammed into the crust. The delve-train gouged and scraped its way along the crust—the jagged rock scarcely hindering the locomotive as its powerful engines drove it onward.

  It finally surged forward up into the entry passage, accelerating in fits and starts through the mile-and-a-half tunnel before finally bursting out of the searing magma— airborne for an instant—and then slamming onto the docking platform at the outer edge of the Terraport Gears.

  “Neatly done, young man, I doubt your mother could have done better,” praised Scotty, as the train shuddered to a halt. “Eos probably picked up some more dross-magnets along the way, but they don’t seem to be hindering her functions too much.” He smiled. “Reminds me of something I might have chanced as a younger man.”

  “We should try that more often,” Nifty replied, his hands still shaking. “That was fun!”

  Scotty puffed disapprovingly through his mustache, “Not bloody likely! Now let’s finish up here and move out.”

  Taking a moment, Scotty checked over the warning lights and gauges to assess the delve-train’s damage. “We’ll have to deal with that jammed rudder before we leave, but that may have to wait until any built-up slag has cooled a mite.”

  Breathing deeply, Nifty just nodded. From the back, they could hear the dull grinding of the exhaust stacks as they rose from the roof of the train with a hiss, almost as if the great vessel was breathing a sigh of relief.

  “It is highly doubtful that we’ll see anyone,” began Scotty, undoing his harness. “The alarms haven’t gone off in Terraport, and we’ve both met enough shield patrols in our time to know they give the Gears a very wide berth unless there is a reason to attend. If we alert them to the presence of the dreadnaught then we’ll lose our opportunity to observe the machine room controls. Bit of a slagging dilemma I would say.”

  Nifty nodded in agreement. He was thankful that Scotty had chosen Terraport rather than Hellstamp, as the bastion Helix nearest Rocktower was a place that only those with a death wish visited.

  Scotty cleared his throat, rousing Nifty from his thoughts. “I don’t think I need to remind you that, since this is a covert mission, we have a certain amount of latitude regarding anything that may compromise its secrecy. We’ll have to sneak into the service area outside the engine rooms.”

  Well, well, well, thought Nifty, the rush from the delve-skip fading. He put thoughts of the dreadnaught and the dangers of the engine room aside and circled back to the conversation he was having with Scotty earlier, before all the ‘excitement’. With this additional ‘bending of the rules’, he decided to abandon his earlier attempts at subtlety and be forthright in his approach.

  He regarded Scotty for a long moment, and began awkwardly, “Well, how about this. If we get to the engine rooms, and make a significant discovery which shortens the mission, let’s make a quick detour to Ragnatex on our way back,” he proposed. He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a small envelope containing a neatly-folded holo-scan of a tea set and held it out for inspection.

>   “It’s for my mum. Her birthday is coming up, and she’s always wanted one of these Humsong tea sets. We only seem to get the dregs at Rocktower markets, and she’ll be beside herself if I get the chance to choose directly from a Song potter.”

  Scotty stared at him in disbelief. “As I said before, no!” There was no ambiguity in his tone and it left no room for discussion.

  “What about the delve-train? We’ll never make it home in this condition and we can report to headquarters from there!” pleaded Nifty, feigning desperation. He admonished himself for his impatience, knowing he should have waited until Scotty had calmed down from the run-in with the dreadnaught.

  “We are not gallivanting about, looking for knickknacks for your mum,” he said. “She’s a lovely woman,” he added, clearly wanting to avoid causing offense, “and I’m sure it’s a lovely tea set, but this is not a mission where we can spare time for a side-trip to look for trifles. Really, lad, you must start taking these tasks more seriously, especially if you’re going to be applying for your upgrade.” He responded to Nifty’s exasperated gaze with an undisguised grin.