Out of This World

by Chris Wooding

  “Yes!”

  “All right,” said Mazzy. “Let’s go.”

  “Er,” said Gradius. “No, I just meant me.”

  “You’re going up against General Kara?” Mazzy said fiercely. “Then I’m coming. It was her who led the invasion against my planet, against her own people. Her fault my parents were enslaved. You’re not leaving me behind!”

  “Me, either!” said Thomas eagerly.

  They all looked at Jack, and in that moment Jack realized what he needed to do. Mom and Dad had trained him for this. His whole purpose in life was to be some sort of hero, even if he was terrible at it. To turn away from that would be letting them both down, and he wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t. Androids or not, they’d raised him and given their lives for him. He had to make that sacrifice worth something.

  “I’m in,” he said firmly.

  “Look, I appreciate the enthusiasm, but this is all wrong,” said Gradius. “I work alone. I can’t be dragging you three around with me. We’re going into the heart of enemy territory. Do you know how dangerous it will b—”

  “Yadda, yadda, yadda,” said Mazzy, making a blah-blah duck beak with her hand. “I have the coordinates. If you want to go through that rift gate, you take us with you. End of discussion.”

  Gradius stared at her in amazement, then looked at Jack. “Is she always like this?” he asked.

  “Mostly,” said Jack.

  Gradius sighed. “Then I suppose I have no choice. Come on, then. Into the gunship.”

  “Yesss! ” said Thomas, fist-pumping the air.

  Going through a rift gate felt unpleasantly like being put through a pasta maker. Jack felt himself squashed and squeezed, and the very air around him seemed to stretch. Then everything snapped back into place, and there was just the three of them in the back of the gunship, with the lights down dim and the engines humming all around them.

  “Are we there yet?” Thomas asked, looking slightly nauseous.

  “Why don’t we find out?” said Jack, and he pulled open the sliding door in the side of the aircraft and looked out over a new world.

  In the distance, colossal four-winged birds flapped their way through velvet evening skies. Below them lay a sprawling, cracked land of canyons and gorges, where forests of colorful, alien trees covered the mountainsides. Beyond the horizon, an enormous blue planet was rising, tilted at an angle and surrounded by glistening rings that reached high into the sky.

  “The thirteenth planet,” Mazzy breathed.

  “So I suppose this must be a moon?” Thomas ventured. He had crept to the edge and was peering down at a huge temple complex far below, ruined now and overgrown.

  “The home of the Drax,” said Mazzy. “Or it was, once. Now it’s just— Whoa! ”

  She stumbled back from the doorway as an enormous flying battleship slid across their field of vision, blocking their view. It was a grimy wall of cannons and oily pistons pumping up and down, and it seethed black smoke from its vents.

  “That’s a Mechanic battleship!” Mazzy almost screamed.

  They stared in terror as the massive war machine loomed alongside the tiny gunship. The stink of it wafted over them, the stench of burning grease and toxic fumes. It was carrying enough firepower to destroy them a hundred times over. Any moment now they expected it to open fire and blast them out of the sky.

  But it didn’t. Ranks of guns passed them by, but none of them fired. The battleship hung there in the air but did nothing.

  “Why haven’t we been blown up yet?” Thomas asked quietly.

  “I don’t think they’ve seen us,” Jack said.

  “But, um, we’re right here,” Thomas replied, puzzled.

  Mazzy was wearing an amazed expression. “We’re cloaked. We’re invisible.”

  “Like how the Epsilon was invisible when you were in the forest!” Thomas said.

  “Yes, but that was when we were still. You can cloak an aircraft when it’s not moving. But to cloak one that’s flying through the air …” She whistled. “He did say it was built for stealth. Whoever the Hexagram are, they’ve got some serious tech.”

  They flew onward, keeping a steady pace. Behind the first battleship was a second, bristling with weapons. They were guards, ready to destroy anyone who came through the rift gate without permission. Gradius’s gunship flew right past them, unnoticed.

  Jack watched them dwindle into the distance. So the Mechanics were here, on the thirteenth planet. He remembered the sketches he had made back on Earth, terrifying creatures that were half metal and half flesh, and wondered what he had gotten himself into.

  The land became poisoned and foul as they flew toward their destination, and the forests withered and died and finally disappeared altogether. By the time they set down, in a hollow near the edge of a plunging cliff, the air smelled like rotten eggs and the horizon was blurred by a yellowish haze. Gradius clambered out of the cockpit and met them as they emerged. He was wearing a sword in a sheath on his back, and he carried a pair of blasters in holsters.

  “We go on foot from here,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” Thomas asked.

  Gradius walked to the edge of the cliff and pointed down. “There,” he said.

  They joined him and saw below them a blasted landscape scarred by half a dozen open-cast mines, great holes in the earth with stepped sides. Diggers scraped at the rock, and six-wheeled trucks rumbled up the ramps between the levels. In the midst of the mines was a facility of some kind, a mass of chimneys and pipes and spiked fences, surrounded by junkyards. Vats of acid bubbled and steamed, furnaces glowed with heat, and rattling conveyor belts carried bits and pieces from building to building. A dirty haze hung close to the ground, and it was hard to see the workers who moved in the yards, but Jack could see enough to tell that they walked jerkily and seemed strangely misshapen. He didn’t want to see them any closer.

  “The gunship’s sensors picked this place up as soon as we arrived,” said Gradius. “Hard to hide that much pollution.”

  “What are they doing here?” Jack asked, aghast.

  Mazzy’s face had gone grim. “What they always do,” she said. “What they did to my home planet. They kill the soil, they foul up the air, they strip every last thing they can use … and they build more machines.”

  “This is what they’ll do to the whole of the Nexus, unless we can stop them,” said Gradius.

  “Wait a minute,” said Thomas. “Isn’t Earth in the Nexus?”

  “Barely,” said Mazzy. “But, yeah, they’ll get you, too, in the end.”

  “Let’s get down there, then,” said Jack grimly. “Nobody messes with Earth.”

  They made their way down from the cliffs and approached the facility via a dried-up riverbed that zigzagged along the cracked and lifeless plain. Drifting clouds of exhaust smoke and piles of junk made it easy to remain unobserved. They spotted things prowling in the distance between the junk heaps, tall, four-legged creatures with huge jaws and lumbering, oddly shaped giants, but they were only dim shapes in the murk.

  The facility was surrounded by a tall fence of solid metal, bristling with rusty spikes. They followed it around till they came to a small side gate, but the gate was shut and locked.

  “There’s a keypad,” said Gradius. “It needs a passcode.”

  “Well, how do we get in?”

  Gradius was digging in the pockets of his pants. “I should be able to use my decoder …”

  Mazzy snorted and pushed past him. She pulled out the data cable from her wrist and plugged it into the side of the box. The numbers blinked frantically, and then the gate clicked open. “I am a decoder,” she said.

  Gradius stared at her in admiration. “I’m glad you came, after all,” he said.

  “Just get me to a terminal,” she said. “If there’s anything about Firehawk in their system, I’ll find it.”

  There were guards inside, but Gradius was a pro at dodging guards. Somehow he always seemed to know when the
y were coming around the corner and took the group another way or found them a niche to hide in till the danger had passed.

  “I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said, by way of explanation.

  Jack was glad of it. It was the first time he had seen Mechanics up close, and they made him sick with fear. They were horrible ogres of grimy iron and pasty white flesh, like something out of a nightmare. There was just enough left of them to be recognizable as human; the rest was pipes and pumps and gears, whirring mechanical eyes and metal claws and metal jaws.

  “Is that what’ll happen to us if they catch us?” Thomas whimpered.

  “If you’re lucky,” said Mazzy.

  They went deeper into the facility, surrounded by the sounds of clanking and grinding and gasps of steam. Jack stuck close to Thomas, who seemed like he was ready to bolt at any moment. When Thomas looked to him for reassurance, Jack gave him a confident smile. Being brave for someone else’s sake was easier than being brave on your own.

  As they were passing a doorway, Gradius, who was leading the way, suddenly froze. “Back! Back!” he hissed, and he hurried them into a hiding place between two huge vertical pipes a moment before the door screeched open and two people emerged.

  “I’m leaving you in charge, Vardis. The Colonel wants to see me immediately,” said a woman’s voice. The two of them stopped in the corridor, just out of sight.

  “You can’t go now!” Vardis said. The voice was an electronic croak, filtered through a mask.

  “The Colonel wants me to be the face of the broadcast they’re going to make across the Nexus,” she said.

  “But the Firehawk is due to launch at dawn.”

  “Exactly. Which is why I must be on Braxis Prime, ready to broadcast to our enemies, to show them the unstoppable power of our new weapon. No doubt you can handle things without me. It’s all automated, anyway.”

  “General Kara, I think this is a mistake,” said Vardis. Jack, who was squeezed up close to Mazzy, felt her go rigid at the mention of that name. Her jaw went tight with rage.

  “Tell that to the Colonel,” said Kara. “Don’t worry. Nothing will go wrong. By the time they see it coming, it will be too late.”

  Jack threw his arms around Mazzy as she tried to lunge out from their hiding place. Gradius, seeing the danger, clamped a hand over her mouth. Together they held her as she fought against them. Only the pounding din of the facility prevented their struggle from being heard.

  “I’ll see you afterward, Vardis,” said Kara, and she walked off down the corridor. Vardis went the other way. Through a gap in the pipes, Jack caught a brief glimpse of him as he passed, dressed all in black, his face a mirrored mask. For an instant, Jack saw his own face reflected there. But Vardis passed by without seeing them, turned a corner, and was gone. Only then did they let Mazzy go.

  “That was her!” Mazzy snapped. “The woman who betrayed my planet! That might have been my only chance!”

  “To do what?” Jack said. “Get us all killed?”

  “She cost me my parents!” Mazzy raged. “I can’t let her get away with that!”

  “Then we’ll get her, okay? We’ll get her somehow. But not now.”

  “You heard her,” said Gradius. “The Firehawk launches at dawn. And it’s some kind of weapon. We have to stop them.”

  Mazzy swore under her breath. “All right,” she said through gritted teeth. “Kara can wait.”

  Jack warily released her. “Why don’t we see what they were doing in that room, huh?”

  They slipped out from their hiding place and opened the door that Kara and Vardis had emerged from. Inside was a room with several large screens. Lined up in seats along the edges, working at consoles, were a dozen spindly robots that looked like they had been assembled from broken-down tractors and bits you might find in the back of the garage. They jerked back and forth in their seats, tiny heads bobbing awkwardly on their necks as their fingers stabbed stiffly at the controls.

  “Jackpot,” said Gradius. “There must be something here you can plug into, Mazzy?”

  “Er, what about them?” asked Thomas, eyeing the robots.

  “Drones,” said Mazzy distastefully as she walked into the room. “Don’t worry. They’re too stupid to recognize us.” She found an unoccupied screen and plugged in the data cable from her wrist. Information began scrolling across her eyes. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Jack watched the drones nervously, tapping his feet. At any moment he expected them to lurch to their feet and attack, but they just ignored him. Thomas looked restless. Jack could tell he wanted to go and fiddle with something.

  “Don’t,” he warned.

  Thomas huffed. Eager for distraction, he turned his attention to Gradius. “Hey,” he said. “So who’s the Colonel? Is he like the leader of the Mechanics?”

  “The Kernel. And yes.”

  “The Colonel, that’s what I said.”

  “Kernel. With a K. Like in a nut. It means the central and most important part of something.”

  “How could you tell I was spelling it wrong? They’re pronounced exactly the same.”

  “I just knew.”

  “Oh. All right, then: the Kernel. Who’s he?”

  “It’s more like what,” said Gradius. He checked on Mazzy and the door, then decided he might as well tell the story. “Braxis Prime wasn’t always the home of the Mechanics. The Braxians were a race of engineers and mathematicians who were responsible for some of the greatest inventions in the Nexus. It was even rumored that they knew how to create antimatter, the most potent and dangerous source of energy ever known. Just a few pounds of that stuff could power a whole city for a hundred years, they said.” His face hardened. “Trouble is, they got a bit too fond of their own inventions. They decided that people weren’t much good at dealing with their own problems, so they built a giant artificial intelligence to run their planet for them. They called it the Kernel.”

  He produced a small scroll of thin, transparent material and pulled it out. It hardened immediately into an almost invisible screen. He tapped a few icons and then showed them a picture of a green-and-brown planet, a lot like Earth, except the continents were different shapes.

  “Braxis Prime, around the time the Kernel went online.”

  He tapped a button. Now large portions of the land had turned brown, and there were black clouds hanging over them.

  “This is two months after, just before they shut the rift gate and stopped anyone getting through to help.”

  He tapped again. Now all the lands were covered in brown. The seas had shrunk, and the planet was shrouded in murk. “This was taken from the last of the Braxian spy satellites before it went offline. As far as we know, the seas have gone now, too. The Braxians … well, you saw the guards. No doubt the planet’s population were all converted into something more … useful.”

  “What is that brown stuff?” Jack asked, appalled.

  “Machinery,” he said. “Machinery and junk. The whole planet is covered in it.”

  “And the Kernel is somewhere on that planet?”

  Gradius gave him a humorless smile. “You don’t get it. All that machinery, it’s like a giant network, tunneling into the earth, spreading over the whole of the world. The Kernel isn’t on the planet. It is the planet.”

  “Got something!” Mazzy said, pulling the cable out. It whizzed back into her wrist as she walked over to them. Jack could tell she was still angry about missing the chance to get to General Kara.

  “You found the Firehawk?” Gradius asked.

  “Maybe. There’s nothing on it in the system—it must be ultra-secret—but there’s a lot of traffic and deliveries going from this facility to a location just a little way from here. I tracked their GPS signals. I don’t know what’s there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s what we’re looking for.”

  “Good work!” said Gradius, giving her a brilliant smile. Jack wondered if he was capable of smiling like that. “Let’s go, then!”

/>   “Not yet. We have something to do here first.”

  “More important than saving the Nexus from whatever devastating weapon the Mechanics have cooked up?” Gradius asked testily.

  “Yep,” said Mazzy. “Looks like the Hunters caught the Epsilon, after all. Boston, Dunk, and Ilara are right here, in the cells down below. And we’re going to get them out.”

  Mazzy had plotted them a route through the facility down to the cells, taking them by lesser-used ways to avoid the guards. Locked doors had been opened to let them past, others jammed shut to prevent anyone from wandering into their path. Cameras watched them with glassy eyes, but they saw nothing: Mazzy had deactivated them all.

  “They must have captured them and brought them here,” said Mazzy. “I guess Scorch and the Changeling are in on the Mechanics’ plan, too.”

  “So the Hunters are here?” Thomas asked, sounding worried.

  “Probably.”

  The Hunters who killed my parents, Jack thought, and he wondered at how easily he’d slipped back into thinking of them as such, now that there was no alternative left. What did it matter what they were made of, in the end? Plenty of people with flesh-and-blood parents had a much worse time of it than he had.

  The news fired him up. He was eager to prove himself. All he had left of his life was the Earth he’d grown up on and the memory of his parents. He’d fight for both of them. You had to fight for something.

  “What happened to the Epsilon?” Jack asked.

  “It’s locked down in a dock nearby.” She tapped her head. “But I have the release code now.”

  “Why didn’t they just blow them out of the sky?” Gradius wondered.

  “Maybe they spared them because they thought they knew where the famous Gradius Clench might be found,” said Jack sourly. “After all, that’s why we’re all being hunted.”

  Gradius flashed him a grin. “Well, in that case I saved their lives, didn’t I?”

  Jack glared at his back as Gradius strode off ahead, humming to himself. Thomas tentatively offered his inhaler. Jack waved it away.

  Dad would have loved you, he thought bitterly at Gradius.