by J. S. Morin
“When Carl says,” Esper replied with a smile at the captain. “He’s in charge.”
# # #
The deck of the cargo floor lurched under everyone’s feet. Esper stumbled, catching herself against the handrail for the stairs. Tanny seemed prepared for the rough ride and just shifted her balance. Mort fell onto his backside and hit his elbow on the steel floor.
“Blast that boy!” Mort said. “This is why we never let him fly. Off to battle forces unknown and I’m going to die in transit.”
“We know all about the forces we’re—” Tanny said.
“They’ve got a wizard,” Mort snarled, clambering to his feet. He wore his black robes and a heavy silver pendant that hung from his neck proclaiming his once-esteemed position in the Convocation. His staff lay just out of reach. “Might be there’s more than one. Irindi isn’t a name I know, so either she’s an up-and-comer or some cut-rate piker, selling herself to this dunce-cap outfit. Either way, I’d like to survive to find out. Can one of your ladies go up there and wring his neck? A little air-loss might calm his flying to non-fatal levels.”
Roddy came in from the engine room, dragging the crate of disintegrator rifles. The ship lurched again, but the laaku seemed unbothered as everyone else braced themselves or hung on to something solid.
Tanny lunged for the comm panel. “You trying to kill us down here?” she shouted.
“We don’t know if they have aerial drones, patrol craft, sensor towers … I’m keeping us below the tree line,” Carl replied over the comm.
“You mean ‘just above,’ right?” Tanny asked.
“Nope,” Carl replied. “I’ve got the forward shields cranked up just in case, but we’re sub-canopy. Now, if you don’t mind, this isn’t easy.”
“I used to wonder how bad he could be,” Esper said to Tanny. “Now I see why you’re the pilot.”
“I should have flown the approach,” Tanny muttered. “Let Ace Kill’em’all fly us out.”
The comm echoed through the hold. “We’re coming up on the facility. Hang on.”
Esper clung to the railing for dear life. If Carl only saw fit to warn them now, she could scarcely imagine what he might be planning. The Mobius swung around, and Esper’s arms felt like they would be wrenched from their sockets. Her feet lifted from the ground, and the crate of weapons slid across the floor, Roddy in tow.
The cargo bay door opened and a rush of humid jungle air blew in. Outside, there was one of the menagerie’s glassteel tunnels with a hole large enough to fly one of the facility’s shuttles through. Branches cracked and snapped, and leaves shushed against the hull as Carl backed them toward the hole. Mriy sprinted through the door from the common room, no longer needed in the gun turret. She vaulted the railing and landed in a crouch beside Esper.
Tanny grabbed a disintegrator from the crate and slung it over her shoulder by the strap. She took another and tossed it to Mriy, who snatched the weapon from the air and did likewise. Another flew to the azrin and she handed it to Esper. Given the way the two of them handled the rifles, she expected it to be lightweight, but the unexpected heft nearly caused her to drop it.
“Lord, these things weigh nothing,” Tanny said, shaking her head as she tossed Mriy a second rifle and took another in hand for herself. “I wonder what they make these out of.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Esper asked. “This thing must be ten kilos!”
“Proprietary polymerized carbon steel,” said Roddy, “And they’re eleven point two two kilos apiece without the power packs.” He took the last disintegrator rifle and gave Esper a cockeyed glance. “You’re as bad as Carl whining about your flabby human muscles.”
“Helmets on,” Tanny said. “Enough chatter. Comms open and keep it business.”
“Yes ma’am,” Esper replied. She was already wearing her ablative armor suit and feeling like she was at a costume ball. Who was this woman in her boots, carrying a disintegrator rifle and being admonished about comm chatter? Putting her EV helmet on only amplified the effect. The world on the other side was just a vivid holo-game. With one exception. “I’ve never shot anyone.”
“First time for everything,” Roddy replied.
“I won’t.”
“You shouldn’t need to,” Tanny replied. “We want showy and explosive. They need a reason to surrender.”
“The deaths of comrades would do best,” Mriy added.
Esper closed her eyes. “Please Lord, don’t let this end in bloodshed.” She had whispered it, but the sensitive mic in her comm broadcast it.
“These things don’t shed blood,” said Roddy. It wasn’t what she needed to hear.
The Mobius hit the ground with a gentle thud, cargo bay ramp pointed right into the ragged, still-smoldering hole in the glassteel tube.
Tanny made a beckoning hand signal. “Let’s move.”
# # #
Mort stood and watched them go. Tanny and Mriy toting spare weapons like they were children’s toys, Esper struggling to keep pace even at the outset while lugging hers. Roddy took up the rear. Mort hoped that the laaku was going to look after her. There was neither the time nor the manpower to spare, or he’d have done so himself.
He set a leisurely pace. Just before entering the mountain, he cast a glance over his shoulder on the off chance there was a creature worth seeing out in the jungle. Carl had forewarned him that he wasn’t setting the ship down anywhere near where dinosaurs might be, and Mort begrudgingly acknowledged the wisdom in that.
The butt of his staff echoed in the empty corridors, much louder to his ears than the distant booted feet of the rest of the crew. He fished a folded piece of paper from his pocket and tucked the staff under his arm. It bore a map of the facility, transcribed from the holo-viewer image by Tanny. It was light on detail, but covered his intended route to the heart of the mountain. Mort bitterly wondered whether its scant detail was intended to discourage him from wandering or just because Tanny was lazy. In either eventuality, he disapproved.
It wasn’t long before his path diverged from the route already taken by Tanny and company. Personnel that had scattered before the oncoming rush of would-be and former soldiers had left those corridors empty, but now Mort was going to have to clear his own path.
A pair of workers rounded a corner into his path, and slumped to the floor before raising any alarm. They were distracted, surprised, easy prey to fall into slumber at Mort’s silent suggestion. Until things got scratchy in the under-britches, Mort was willing to give Esper’s don’t-blow-up-the-mountain plan a try, even the part about not killing slaving bastards in the process. He had to admit, sleeping mechanics didn’t raise a stench like burning ones would have. Quieter, too.
With his hand-drawn map in one hand, staff of Earth-hewn wood in the other, he must truly have been a sight. If anyone managed to get close enough to engage him in conversation, Mort resolved to grumble about crusaders and ask directions to Babylon … or perhaps Atlantis. This warren of ultra-modern tech was no fit place for a wizard.
A wall blocked his path. It had neither sprung from nothingness, nor moved into place by any scientific means he was able to notice. It was just there when he arrived, stubbornly disagreeing with the map in Mort’s hands. He growled a few syllables of the ancient tongue of angels and devils, leveling his staff at the offending barrier. A gout of flame poured forth, and the stone glowed and turned molten. A metal support beam caught in the blast boiled away to smoke and soot. When a minute and more passed, the universe suggested that perhaps enough fire had flowed at Mort’s beckon and he let off with a gasp for breath. He had carved a deep pocket into the rock, but the promised network of corridors beyond did not manifest.
With a frown and a glance to either side to make sure no one was observing him, Mort turned the map ninety degrees and retraced his last several turns. When he resumed his trek, the corridors did a better job of playing along with the map, and he found his confidence growing as he drew ever nearer the power thingamaj
ig he was supposed to disable. With every pace, he pounded the end of his staff against the smooth rock of the man-smoothed tunnel, announcing his approach.
“Warning. Intruder alert. Warning. Intruder alert …” a voice blared from the echoic depths of the warren, unseen and cowering. It kept repeating, along with a honking noise that grated on Mort’s nerves.
“Shut the hell up!” he shouted down the hall behind him, his best guess as to where the voice and horn originated. “I’m right here, you plastic-sniffing atom-worshipers! Come and get me.”
“Blasted racket,” he muttered to himself. “How’s a fellow supposed to feel wizardly when he’s got some inane computer yammering over a squawking flock of electric geese?”
Mort emerged into what the map said was a maintenance hangar. There were vehicles of all sorts—or at least several sorts—scattered around, many in pieces. There were no people around at all. Probably seeking shelter from the noise, he reckoned. The echoing was more pronounced in the large empty space, but there also seemed to be additional sources of the noise.
While Mort was still puzzling out why anyone would want more of those gibbering voices besetting them, a side door opened and a squad of five guards poured through. “Throw down your weapons! Get on the ground!” their leader ordered. They leveled blaster rifles in Mort’s direction.
Mort scoffed and walked straight toward them. “I’m already on the ground, you mole-sighted ignoramus. And as for the—”
“Fire!” the air lit with blood red bolts of scientific energy, but the space around Mort distorted like a pane glass that had cooled as someone spun it. The bolts slowed and curved, struggling through heavy air and losing their way. They circled around Mort like flies until one by one they slammed into objects around the hangar.
“As for the other thing,” Mort continued. “I can’t throw down my weapon. I am the weapon.” Esper be damned, but those guards burned, and quickly. Mort could be a forgiving man, but with the strike of serving slavers already marked against their names, he was ill-inclined to extend further clemency when they tried to shoot him.
Mort wrinkled his nose as the map’s instructions took him out the door the guards had entered by, forcing him to pass through the worst of the smell. “Why do I always waste the grand, crowd-pleasing lines for the ones about to die?” he said through an improvised mask made of his robe’s sleeve. “Memoirs, I guess. Gotta write that down later.”
By how far he had come already, it should not have been much farther. Tanny had scratched a quick little scale in the corner, but she’d used kilometers, which was about as useful as telling Mort how many crow’s-flights it was. While Mort wasn’t opposed to miles or feet, he preferred Mortsteps when making his own maps.
On his route, he found himself passing through a room labeled Power Distribution. The door had crumpled like tin foil with the application of a bit of gravity, but the room itself gave him a chill. It was packed with coils and gadgets, wire and glass filaments. The whole room had a dull hum that carried up through the floor and right into Mort’s knees. Everywhere he looked were signs that warned of mortal peril. Even had Mort not grasped the English language, he would have known the hazards by the cartoons that accompanied the signs: thunderbolts striking men down, a struck-through flame, the skull and crossed femurs used by pirates and scientists alike. There was no telling what scientific powers his magic might unleash; it was worse than the engine room of the Mobius, which he had ventured into just once, and swore never to return. He crept through the room, clutching his staff before him in both hands.
Once through the hellish sci-scape, the rest of the way was easy. Two more deserted corridors, two more labels that checked against the signs along the way. Tanny’s map had its flaws, but oriented just right, it worked well enough. It brought him as far as a steel door wide enough for ten wizards to walk through abreast. Above in block letters it read: Main Power.
Mort glanced from map to sign and back again. “This must be the place,” he said to no one in particular, and stuffed the map into a pocket, heedless of crumpling it. A panel on the wall probably controlled the door, either holding it closed, awaiting orders to force it open, or prolonging its continued existence. Since two of his three options suggested that destroying the panel would allow him passage, Mort plied his magic against the controls.
He suggested in his head that it curl into a ball of twisted scrap, but it declined. He told the box that it was very, very heavy, and out to be collapsing under its own weight, but it seemed skeptical. Mort insisted aloud, in the ancient tongue, that it was grasped in the fist of demons, and it relented with a crunch and spray of sparks.
Mort scratched his chin and gave the panel a suspicious look. Not only had the door not opened for him—rotten luck with a two-in-three chance of working—but it should not have resisted him like that. Someone else was at work here, reinforcing the facility’s belief in its own existence. It was entirely likely that someone had headed him off, and was holed up inside the main power room, ready to ambush him.
“Mustn’t disappoint,” Mort muttered.
He chanted low and slowly in the language of creation, words predating mankind and even the creatures of the netherworld. It was a puzzle of logic that he put forth, a twisted, intentionally convoluted set of premises that would, upon their release, strike a fearsome blow upon the door’s belief system. By the point that Mort unleashed his syllogism of destruction, the door gave way and ceased its existence as anything more than dust and the memory of a once-mighty portal guardian.
The room beyond was mostly cavern, with a vast contraption of scientific metals at its center, stoppering the larval volcano and sucking at its veins. It was thrice his height and thrice that distance across, with umbilical pipes and wires webbing out to all sides, stretched well overhead. Were he alone, Mort might have balked at entering such a room, so infested with technology.
But there was a woman beyond. And Mort had his image to think of. Man might have thought better of many a crazy idea, had not woman been looking on with a skeptical eye. This woman was a businesslike sort, with a pudgy face and rounded shoulders, not the type of sorceress who bothered altering her looks with magic. She had her sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a staff of her own clutched in two hands. Mort might have taken her for a proper foe if not for two factors. The first was the gaping eyes that tried to cower behind that staff as if it were a bulwark. The other was the pipe clutched loosely in a half-gape jaw.
“Who … who are you?” she asked, taking a step back.
Mort opened his mouth to begin a speech, but stopped himself short. What was the point? “Listen, if I thought you were going to live out the minute, I might bother. But if you’ve got a name, I’ll pass it along to the Convocation so they can notify your next of kin. Of course … if you surrender, I might keep you around long enough to bother with introductions.”
The staff clattered from her hands.
He smiled with an admixture of disdain with reassurance that only a wizard can pull off properly. “I’m Mordecai The Brown. Pleased to meet you.”
She took another step back. “Irindi … Irindi Ciera Branson.” The look of fear did not wither.
“I see you’ve heard of me, Sorceress Branson. Now, if you’ll be so good as to show me how to shut this infernal thing off, I won’t have to erupt this volcano.”
# # #
Tanny pulled up short at a corner and peeked around, whipping her head back immediately. She held up a hand with three fingers raised. This was it. Esper was going to have real live people shooting at her. Not at a ship with her in it. Her.
“Throw down your weapons,” Tanny ordered. After a few seconds of silence, she poked the butt of her disintegrator around the corner and jerked it back. A volley of plasma bolts flew past, slamming into the far wall.
“You were warned,” Tanny said. She reached the business end of her weapon around the rocky edge of the hallway wall and squeezed the trigger. Esper had never seen
one fire before, but she had assumed it would make a loud fuzzy squirting noise like most blasters. It didn’t. A soothing hum emanated from the rifle, lasting just a few seconds until Tanny pulled back. “Now, throw down your weapons and come forward with your hands on your heads or you will be disintegrated.”
There was a scuffle of booted feet, but it grew fainter rather than approaching them. “I think they retreated,” Esper said.
“Come on,” said Tanny. “Stick to the plan. We can’t give chase.”
Esper followed as the squad scurried down the corridor like mice. Tanny slung the spent disintegrator rifle over her shoulder as she ran, readying her backup. Esper marveled at how effortless it appeared for Tanny. Esper’s own rifle was an anchor around her neck, the strap biting into the spot between her shoulder and neck; her arms were already too tired to keep holding it up.
“Warning. Intruder alert. Warning. Intruder alert …” a voice echoed down the corridors. Someone had raised a proper alarm, and it was accompanied by a klaxon that tried to impersonate a duck’s quack. Fortunately the EV helm muffled the worst of it.
“That fucking thing going to keep up the whole time?” Roddy asked. “I wouldn’t mind a side-trip to find the off switch.”
“Cut the chatter,” Tanny snapped. “We’re in for more company.”
“Bring them!” Mriy snarled.
“Next left,” said Tanny. “Double-time. Clock’s against us.”
“I thought we wanted … to scare them into … surrendering,” said Esper, huffing between words as she struggled to keep pace.
“That was plan A,” Tanny replied. “Plan B is to haul ass and get out with those hostages before we get overrun.”
Booted feet were closing in. Someone had come up a side tunnel behind them. Esper turned, but saw that Roddy was well ahead of her. The laaku was a ludicrous sight, hefting a gun nearly as large as he was. If any of the approaching guards with their little blaster pistols were amused, that impression was permanently wiped from their faces as Roddy pulled the trigger and swept a translucent green beam across them at head height.