“No black box,” the Scrap Rat snarled. Jack’s humour vanished. On second thought, its teeth did look remarkably sharp. “Not for sale.”
“Not for…? Hang on. Do you have the box or not?”
The Scrap Rat gave Jack a sharp kick on the shin and fished out a miniature taser from the pocket of its overalls. Blue bolts of electricity sparked from its two sharp tips.
“No box! Not for sale!” It pointed to its ears with its free hand. “I hear you yabbin’. No money, scrounger!”
“Okay, okay!” Jack backed away with his hands in the air. “Don’t worry, we’re leaving!”
The rat jabbed its taser towards Jack one final time and then scampered back inside the garage. Jack let out a sigh of relief.
“Perhaps there was some harm in asking,” he said, shaking his head. “Little bugger could have scratched up my spacesuit.”
“Their brains might not be all that sharp, but I guess their hearing is.” Klik kicked her heels. “Sorry.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it. We knew asking for the box outright was a long shot anyway.”
“So, what now? We can’t take it by force, and even if we could, the Ministry would have our heads.”
It was a good question. What now? Aside from the crane – which could have easily been on autopilot – the two of them stood alone in the garage dump. Well, not entirely alone. Jack could have sworn he saw something unsanitary slithering amongst the cruiser wreckages.
“Let’s take a closer look,” he said, creeping towards the open door.
Klik grabbed his arm.
“They’ll see us!” she hissed.
“So? What are they going to do? Bite my ankles?”
They peered around the grubby wall of the garage. What Jack saw inside reminded him of his time back in the pit, welding together Earth’s fleet of scrappy fighter jets and drop ships. It might have looked like paradise to an engineer… but Jack, despite what the title of his old job suggested, had never been much of toolsmith.
Dozens of vehicle chassis hung from the ceiling, groaning against their thick, metal chains. Others were raised on stacks so that the Scrap Rats could work underneath them. Some were stripped of valuable parts; in newer models, the engines were swapped out for cheaper, older and less reliable units, presumably so they could be sold on to unsuspecting (or at least desperately poor) buyers. Sparks flew across workstations like fiery rainbows as personal cruisers were sliced in half and their less dented parts stitched back together into cut-and-shut deathtraps. Pools of molten metal, fuelled by the heaps of trash and scrap being continually fed along the conveyor belts from outside, bubbled like volcanic lava beneath the chimney spires and trickled down narrow, rickety channels suspended above the Scrap Rats’ heads to fill grand, industrial forges set into the garage floor.
“I can’t see the Black Arrow anywhere,” said Jack, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Not that I can see much of anything thanks to all this heat haze.”
Klik squinted past him without any greater success.
“What does this thing even look like? The ship, I mean. Not the box.”
“Small. Two seater. Probably quite flashy.” Jack shrugged. “I don’t think the name Black Arrow is all that abstract, to be honest. It’ll be black and shaped a little bit like an arrowhead.”
“Presuming that it hasn’t been dismantled into a thousand separate pieces, of course,” Klik moaned. “This mysterious box included. Gods, I can’t wear this mask in this heat anymore. Sorry.”
She unclipped the mask from her face and flexed the thin mandibles that grew from either side of her mouth. Rain streamed down her insectoid face. Jack went to protest, then thought better of it. What difference did her anonymity make anymore? It wasn’t as if these junkyard Rats would know the daughter of a Krettelian resistance leader if they saw one.
Hopefully.
“This is useless,” Jack sighed. “Even if I could spot the ship amongst all that hot madness, which I can’t, there’s no way of getting inside without them all noticing me. There has to be another way in.”
“What about up there?” said Klik, squinting through the neon-streaked rain. Jack followed her gaze to the rooftop and remembered the dirt-coated skylights he’d seen before.
“Perfect. Now all I’ve got to do is find a way up there…”
They followed the exterior wall of the garage around to the side, pausing only briefly to allow the yellow maw of the crane to take another greedy bite from a neighbouring junk-mountain. Jack broke into a confident grin as they rounded the corner.
“Thank goodness these Rats don’t throw a good ship away,” said Klik, grimacing. “Or a crap one, it seems.”
Wedged between the outer fence and the side of the garage was a tower of burnt out patrol cruisers and speeders – the types of small, personal craft most commonly used to travel across cities rather than from system to system. Their insides had been gouged entirely. Only their charred metal shells remained.
“We’re going to climb up that?” asked Klik.
“I am, yes. You’re going to stay down here and keep watch.”
“What? How’s that fair?”
“I know. I wish I got to stand around in the cold rather than climb into a furnace full of angry rats.”
Klik crossed her arms and glared at him.
“I’ll be quicker if I go by myself,” Jack insisted. “And we’ll get spotted if we both go. What’s the proverb? If you want to go fast, go alone.”
“And if you want to keep breathing, go with somebody else,” replied Klik. “Yeah, we’ve got a similar saying back home.”
“Just trust me, okay?” Jack started climbing. “I’ll holler if I need help.”
It didn’t take long for Jack to regret his decision. The brittle metalwork creaked and buckled under his boots, and every now and then the tower, despite being wedged against the wall of the garage, would tremble as if only a moment away from collapsing. Each time he pulled himself up onto the hood of a ship, his hands came back covered in black, metallic filings.
The smoke got worse the higher he went. He held his breath and wished he’d borrowed Klik’s mask for the climb. He could have tossed it back down to her once he was done with it.
The edge of the rooftop was only a foot or two away. Jack inched to the very lip of the second-highest vehicle and, ignoring the drunken way the whole tower had started to list under his weight, stepped across without incident. After leaping to the Adeona from the top of the Meratyk tower back on Paryx, heights didn’t terrify him half as much as they used to.
He shot Klik a thumbs-up. She moodily waved him on.
Broken bottles, rotten fruit and empty rifle rounds littered the filthy rooftop. A pair of cheap stools lay on their side behind one of the neon signs, which, facing outwards towards the mountains of junk, left parts of the rooftop in near-total darkness. The only light came from the flames that burst from the chimneys and the weak glow struggling to break through the film of dirt smothering the skylight windows.
Jack tried to wipe the glass clear, but soon realised there was as much muck on the inside of the skylight as there was from soot falling like black snow from the chimneys. He ran his hand along the edge of the window until he found the hinges. They were old and one bad day away from snapping, but with a grunt of effort he managed to pull the window open.
He turned his head and gasped as a pocket of hot air billowed out. Christ almighty, it was scorching in there. Once the initial blast subsided and it no longer stung his eyes to open them, he crouched down beside the skylight and took a proper look inside.
The scraggly little mechanics lived up to their namesake – it really was like a rat nest in there. Thirty, maybe as many as forty of them in total, all busying themselves on different ships, syphoning skip drives or, in one case, fiddling around with the insides of what Jack hoped was a maintenance drone and not a rudimentary automata. None of them stopped for so much as a tea break.<
br />
Jack swore under his breath. There was barely enough room between the workers to walk, let alone for him to search the place, steal the box and then get back out without being mobbed by the angry little tykes.
Then, just as he was ready to give up and try yet another approach, he saw it right at the back of the garage. The Black Arrow… or something that closely matched its description, at least. It was almost in one piece. Its domed windscreen lay resting against its flank and the landing gear had been partially dismantled, but otherwise it hadn’t been touched. Yet. The seats were still where they were supposed to be, much to Jack’s relief. So long as they were intact, he supposed that was all that really mattered.
Now to get down there.
A chunky ventilation duct ran a few feet beneath the opening of the skylight. It culminated in a circular fan shaft sticking up on the other side of the rooftop, but Jack had no intention of crawling inside and getting cooked like a microwave ready-meal. It looked stable enough… but, given the spiderwebs hanging off it like a bride’s wedding veil, it also looked as if no weight had been put on it in decades.
Well, it was only a twenty foot drop if he was wrong. If his suit didn’t absorb the impact from the fall, he’d probably only break his legs before the rats started zapping him with their tasers and taking little bites out of him. Nothing to worry about.
Gripping the frame of the skylight tight, Jack lowered himself feet-first onto the ventilation duct. Only once he was certain the entire vent system wouldn’t collapse beneath his feet – the panel made a quiet boing sound as it sagged ever so slightly – did he dare let go.
His back hunched, his arms stretched out for balance, Jack followed the vent around towards the back of the garage.
If the workshop hadn’t been so insanely busy, he would have been noticed for sure. Even moving slowly, Jack could hear the metal sheets of the vent buckling and unbuckling as he inched across it. But the relentless swell of welding, sawing, grinding and drilling drowned out the sound of his progress, and all of the Scrap Rats were far too busy working to look up. He wasn’t entirely sure what he – or they, for that matter – would do if they did.
After a few tense minutes he reached the bay in which the Black Arrow was kept. The whole garage was open-plan, but enough tool benches, cabinets, spools of iron chains, gas tanks and mobile staircases lay scattered around to create the illusion that the bay was sectioned off from everything else. And even better – none of the Scrap Rats were currently working on it.
Jack couldn’t see an easy way down so, sweating profusely, he lowered himself off the edge of the vent and dropped onto one of the benches below. Something resembling a spanner clattered to the concrete floor. Jack froze in panic… but nobody seemed to notice.
Staying crouched – not that he suspected the diminutive Rats could see over the top of all the equipment anyway – he hurried over to the impounded ship.
Her paintwork was scratched. Jack guessed this was the doing of whoever had dragged the Black Arrow back to Kapamentis; he couldn’t imagine Ode allowing so much as a speck of sand or dirt to spoil the polished sheen of her hull. Both her regular engine and compact skip-drive had been drained of fuel and somnium. Her mines and miniature torpedos were missing – presumably sold off already.
Jack climbed onto one of the runners holding up the ship and peeked into the cockpit. There were two seats, but the passenger was forced to sit behind the pilot like in a fighter jet. That made things easier. If Ode had a secret compartment hidden beneath his seat, it would almost certainly be the one up front.
He gave the chair a shake. It rattled but stayed put. Frantically on the lookout for any Scrap Rats wandering his way, Jack tried every knob and switch around the base of the seat to no avail… until he found the one tiny lever down the side that allowed the position of the seat to be adjusted. He slid it backwards. There, set into the floor where the front of the pilot’s chair had been, was an unassuming rectangular panel.
He tried to prise it open with his fingers and succeeded only in bending one of his nails back.
“Goddammit,” he whispered, sucking the injured digit. It tasted foul from all the rust and dirt.
Jack hurried back to the tool bench. He picked up the device that looked like a spanner from the floor. Shaking his head and placing the spanner back on the desk, he grabbed a chisel instead.
A pair of Scrap Rats scampered past the Black Arrow’s bay on all fours. Jack paused, sweat dripping off his forehead onto the baking concrete floor, breathing in gasoline-soaked air that made him want to break into great hacking coughs, until it was safe to move again.
He climbed back into the ship’s cockpit and, flicking his lank, sweaty hair away from his eyes, jammed the chisel into the crack between the panel and the rest of the ship’s floor. Now matter how much he strained, it still wouldn’t shift even a millimetre.
Is it mag-locked? Jack wondered in a growing panic as he applied even more pressure. The chisel felt about ready to snap in half. What if the ship was set to automatically lock the compartment shut when its power source was removed, and now, without its battery, he’d never get—
He banged his hand against the floor of the ship as the chisel slipped under the crack. The panel popped open. Jack threw the chisel into the dark recesses beneath the dashboard and wrenched the rest of the metal plate free.
Inside was a small black box, just as Ichor had described. He carefully lifted it out of the secret compartment. The dark wood had been intricately carved, as well as sanded, treated and polished. Four little bronze feet stuck out the bottom. From the look of it, whatever was hidden inside had to be worth a fortune. He tried opening it to find out, but it was locked. There was a keyhole set into its front, but no sign of any key in the hole or anywhere else in the ship.
Oh well. Ichor had only sent him for the box. She hadn’t asked for a way to open it.
Jack was about to hop out of the cockpit and make a run for the garage entrance when he heard the rapid, squirrelly voices of Scrap Rats draw close. He hurriedly lay down on his side – a tight fit, even with the pilot seat pushed back – and waited for these Rats to pass like the others.
“Get screen fixed on schooner in Bay Twelve,” snapped the foreman to whom Jack had spoken outside. “Remove thrusters. Pull out drives and cores. Scrap the rest.”
Jack grimaced and clutched the box to his chest. Of course they would start work on the Black Arrow now. Everett Reeves was somewhere out in the cosmos preparing to set off an artificial black hole, and here he was stuck inside some Scrap Rat mechanic’s next pet project. He didn’t have time for this!
Small, clawed footsteps patted across the concrete beside the cockpit. Then a deafening drilling sound started up towards the rear of the Black Arrow as the Rat began sheering the thrusters free from the rest of the ship. Sparks leapt up like a Las Vegas fountain.
Could he climb out of the cockpit without it noticing? Jack wasn’t sure. But he could hardly wait until they tore the whole hull apart before making his move, either.
It was tempting, though. Unless one of the Rats happened to climb up into the cockpit, none of them were tall enough to accidentally see him.
Still, he had a madman to stop.
Jack gritted his teeth and was about to make a dashing leap from the ship when the Scrap Rat’s saw suddenly switched off. So did most of the equipment in the garage, in fact. In the relative calm left in their wake, Jack heard a lot of angry yapping and panicked running… including from the Rat assigned to the Black Arrow. He slowly poked his head above the lip of the cockpit.
Something big was going down outside.
Certain that he was alone in the bay again, Jack climbed out of the ship and, with his arm still wrapped tight around the fancy black box, followed the commotion. Only a few Scrap Rats remained inside the garage – given that they hadn’t been distracted from their work by the events outside, Jack guessed they were unlikely to pay him much attention either.
“Bloody hell, Klik,” he whispered to himself. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
At some point during his heist, Klik had decided to take the Scrap Rats’ newly purchased hoverbike for a joyride. Well, the ride didn’t look particularly joyful to Jack. The banged-up relic’s singular thruster kept cutting in and out, belching plumes of black smoke and jerking back and forth like a rodeo bull. Still, Klik seemed to be getting the hang of it… presuming she intended to bulldoze her way up and down the junk mountains, that is.
The Scrap Rats were gathered around the foot of her current summit, screeching and waving their tools in indignation. Klik must have spotted Jack, because she rocketed back down through the crowd and brought the bike to a clumsy stop beside his hiding place.
“You were taking a while,” said Klik. She struggled to keep the hoverbike from falling over. “Thought you could use a diversion.”
“Sure.” Jack climbed up behind her and almost slipped off the other side. He grabbed Klik around the waist. “And I bet it had nothing to do with you getting bored having to wait out here for me.”
“Is this it?” she asked, staring at the fancy black box in her lap. “Nice one! Thought it would be bigger, though.”
“Can we discuss the personal taste of bounty hunters later, please?”
The Scrap Rats charged towards them, their sharp teeth bared and sparking tasers held aloft. Klik revved the hoverbike’s engine.
“Hold on tight!”
Jack did hold on tight – to Ode’s black box, to Klik, and to the hope he wasn’t too late to stop Everett from destroying yet another star system.
15
A Deal’s a Deal
Jack slammed the black box down on Ichor’s desk.
A Dark Horizon (Final Dawn, Book 3) Page 11