“No,” he said to his father, calmer and more determined than he felt. “I’m done listening to you. Jack’s right, I should have stood up to you ages ago.”
“This is your last warning. If you come one more mile…”
The sky around Padget suddenly erupted with bright flashes of flame as a thousand intergalactic rockets rained down upon him.
“You don’t get it,” said Padget, shrugging off the explosions. “This ship is indestructible. You don’t stand a chance. You never did. I…”
“I’m sorry, Padget, you’re right.”
“I… I am?”
“It’s just that with all the politics on Paldovia and all the other Direktors’ schemes I have to appear tough, resilient… merciless.”
“You took away my birthright! You disowned me and made Egbert your heir.”
“I did what I had to do. For the family business, for our honour. The other Konsortiums would have crushed us, taken us over. You couldn’t be trusted, but now you’ve grown strong, resourceful. Your spaceship is proof enough of that. We should talk… discuss this.”
“But…” Don’t forget the plan – Jack’s plan – the only one that matters, his idea to end all this.
“I’ll give you the deeds to the palace, make you the official heir again.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course… for my number one son.”
“But what about Egbert? What will you do with him?”
“Whatever I like. No one is in a position to challenge my authority.”
“But how do I know I can trust you after all you’ve done?”
“Look, just power down your engines and land your spaceship. We can thrash out the details later.”
“Okay, but if you’re lying…”
“I’d never lie to a Paldovian. I am after all a man of honour… of commerce.”
Padget swooped low over a rippling blue lake, landing his spaceship next to the shining walls of his father’s compound.
Only a Direktor would dare to make his walls out of pure diamond, he thought, as he plodded through the one hundred foot high gates. They screeched shut with a violent clang, blocking his view of the spaceship and engulfing him in shadow. It seemed colder on the inside, more uncertain. Had he made the wrong decision? He looked-up at the shimmering spires and shivered. This was going to be a lot harder than he thought.
Chapter Seventeen: Into Darkness
Kat moved like a ghost up the rock face, feeling for the rock, becoming one with it. Up above a trio of bright lights shot out across the pitch-black canvass, before fizzing away into nothing.
Pushing the shooting stars from her mind, Kat looked-up again at the slab of rock, her space-lens’ examining every potential hiding space.
Suddenly the rock exploded with movement as a fist-sized head on a rope-like body leapt out of the shadows, jaws widened in anticipation.
In one rhythmic blur she spun around – her space pistol appearing in her hand as she did so – and fired. A red beam of light shot out from the muzzle of her gun, slicing the top of the cave snake’s head off, its smoking carcass writhing down to the ground below.
Then another jutted out from the wall, this one as big as one of Earth’s anaconda’s, only for her to lunge to another ledge, before twirling round and filling its bloated belly with fire. A thousand tiny shadows squealed from the molten gash in its belly, wriggling towards her across the rock. A burst of flame and they were sizzling in their thousands.
She moved on, dispatching anything that lunged out at her and even those that didn’t. She was an angel of death in a land of death. There would be no mercy now.
After an hour of climbing she pulled herself onto a jagged ledge and looked at the landscape around her. At the bottom of the peak was a wide, sprawling valley, the desiccated corpse of an abandoned city rotting away in its centre.
It looked dead, deserted, its ramshackle streets silent except for the occasional pounding of falling masonry and scraping metal. Kat shuddered and moved on, her hawk-like eyes scanning the shadows for signs of movement, fingers tightening around the handle of her space pistol.
She was about half a mile from the outskirts of the city when she heard something sharp scraping against stone. Making as little noise as possible she crept towards the sound, her night-vision bathing everything in an eerie blue glow.
She hadn’t walked more than a few feet when she saw a large black shadow slumped over an object on the floor. She crept towards it as silent as death.
Closer now. Much closer. Heart beating fast.
She was almost on it when it spun around, revealing a cracked, eyeless skull and a mouthful of razor-sharp daggers.
It leapt towards her, claws scratching at her eyes, teeth snapping for her throat.
And then it was falling to the ground, its head exploding in a miasma of brains, germs and blood, the round from her space pistol punching through its forehead, obliterating the wall behind it.
She looked down at what it had been hiding, only to see a similarly elongated head on a thin, bony body, its stomach and chest covered in toothmarks. Another mute.
She was about to walk away when it sprung at her feet, teeth gnashing, its eyeless sockets hungry for blood.
She jumped backwards, only for her heels to snag on something behind her. Before she knew what was happening she was tumbling to the ground, her space pistol springing from her fingertips as her elbow banged against something cold and hard. She was about to pick up her pistol, only for her ankle to flash with pain as the mute locked onto her leg and squeezed. She felt the bone crack and splinter as the hardened calcium in its mouth tightened like a vice.
Kat cried out in agony, lunging desperately for her pistol, fingertips straining for purchase.
She found only rocks and gravel.
Suddenly her leg was on fire again, shin wracked with pain. The mute’s grip tightened.
Then she began to move. But not towards her space pistol, away from it. Rocks dug into her ribs and chest, skin scraped from her stomach. She stared at the dim speck of her pistol as it disappeared behind her. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be happening, not now, not after all that had happened to her, not after all she’d been through.
Anger surging through her like a flood, she thrust herself up onto her haunches, a flurry of blows raining down on its skull.
Crack, crack, crack.
Crack, crack, crack.
Knuckles bleeding now, bones shattered; fire everywhere. And tired, so so tired…
She hadn’t felt this helpless, since she’d been with… him. Even in the dark bowels of the earth, being eaten alive, she could still feel his hands, how they probed, how they touched, how they…
Shrieking, she brought her left knee crashing into the mute’s cheekbone, smashing it instantly. Still screaming, she battered its face again and again, deaf to the sounds of bones snapping and breaking.
The next thing she new a mulch of brains and skull fragments was slumped in her lap, its broken teeth curled up in one last angry grimace.
She was about to catch her breath when the night exploded with movement.
Kicking the carcass off her, she stumbled to her feet and hopped back the way she came, her ankle now a blazing inferno.
Shadows danced in the night, formless phantoms set on murder and dismemberment. She quickened her pace, pain lancing up and down her body like an out of control scalextric.
She could see her space pistol now. It was just a few feet away, next to a pile of rocks. But so were the mutes. And they were closing fast. She wasn’t going to make it. She was never going to see Padget again, or Jack or Vyleria…
Her fingertips curled round the trigger as the night exploded with terror.
She fired at everything and anything, shooting bullets, lasers and flame bombs as the army of the dead poured down upon her.
It was a massacre.
After she blasted the ones closest to her, she aimed at the rest. F
iring wantonly, indiscriminately. All for blood, all for him.
When she finally stopped shooting the landscape was a ruin of smoldering corpses, the night turned briefly into day. Blood, brains and eviscerated tissue glimmered in the half-light.
After treating her wounds with her holowatch, she turned towards the city as yet more mutes dashed from its walls in her direction.
She was going to enjoy this. She was going to enjoy this a lot.
Chapter Eighteen: Fight Club
Grunt’s spaceship descended like an eagle, the rippling sand dunes reflecting off its silver skin.
A heartbeat later and he’d transported down to the surface, re-appearing by the blasted trunks of some long-lost mountain range. A blast of hot air greeted him, a legion of sand trailing in its wake. Finally, a chance to do something on my own, to shine as bright as any star…
He looked up at his spaceship one last time, nestled in between a bank of fluffy white clouds; with a swipe of his hand it disappeared, one cloud amongst many. He turned around. The desert sprawled spider-like in every direction but one. Rising out of the east like an upturned chandelier was a glittering procession of stone and metal husks, surrounded by a wall of glass-like material. It had to be over twenty miles long and a hundred feet high at least.
Where are you hiding, Xylem? Why haven’t you or the Xenti shown yourself? Is this a trap, payback for marooning you here?
When he arrived outside the wall’s perimeter he expected that he would have to input some impossibly hard password to gain entry. In the event all he needed to do was step through one of the many broken panes of glass. The whole thing was riddled with holes and other signs of disrepair. Some were almost twice as large as he was. It looked like it hadn’t been maintained in a millennium, perhaps longer. What its original purpose was he had no idea.
Grunt looked-up at the city now in front of him. The upturned chandelier had now become some kind of giant bird’s nest, with spikes, prongs and columns of stone sticking out everywhere. Nothing moved. The only sound was the hot, desert wind shrieking amongst the broken, twisted shells of the buildings. It was a tomb.
He hadn’t walked far when he saw his first downed fighter. At first, he wasn’t sure if it was Xenti or not, but then he saw the pilot sticking out of the side, melded into the metal. He’d recognise that insect-like face anywhere, even if it did now resemble some kind of molten candle. What kind of weapon could do that to a person? The Scourge?
He turned around half-expecting to see a horde of dreadnuts come pouring out of the buildings, all teeth and fire and fury, but nothing happened. All he saw were bodies. The dilapidated streets were littered with them. Each bore the scars of battle, some had been chopped in half, others obliterated, their molten corpses looking like pools of congealed vomit. Elsewhere, buildings lay in ruins, pulverised from the air. What had happened here?
Grunt kept on moving, the procession of death continuing for miles and miles, at each step expecting an attack that never came, until a few hours later he stepped back out onto the hot, baking sands, the mid-day sun now stronger than ever. Had all the Xenti died or were they in hiding somewhere?
Grunt was about to go back into the city and check some of the other quarters when he saw a dead Xenti soldier, minus its head, at the edge of the giant glass wall. He was just about to inspect the corpse when he saw another body – this one missing its legs – on the other side of the barrier, with what looked like a huge black eagle gnawing away at a jagged hole in its armour. It glared at him for a second, its one good eye regarding him as a spider might a fly, before flying off in the direction of some distant sand dunes, its huge black shadow passing over other half-eaten bodies. There had to be hundreds in all, thousands. The trail led back out into the desert, how far he didn’t know.
With a swipe of his holo-watch a huge V-shaped wing descended over him, his body held into place by invisible wires. He rose up and glided over the desert, following the twisting sand dunes as they stretched into the horizon like a great yellow sea, their grisly load decreasing the further he went.
The procession of bodies ended on a broad, wind-scathed plain, its surface featureless except for a smattering of shattered rocks and a thin sliver of water too narrow to be even called a river.
Grunt landed his space glider and turned the last corpse over. Half its face was covered by some kind of pus-filled beetle-larvae that scurried away with the first hint of a shadow. For once the sight didn’t make him hungry. Judging by its emaciated cheeks the Xenti soldier had died of hunger or thirst or both. There were also a few burn marks on its back that had cut straight through its armour to its skin. What weapon could do such a thing?
Grunt scanned the blasted landscape around him. The sun was at its zenith; everywhere he looked heat rose in shimmering columns of steam. The temperature was well above fifty degrees now, but he didn’t feel in the slightest bit hot, if anything he felt cold. When I get back I’ll have to adjust the heat settings on my spacesuit, he thought as he scanned the horizon for other signs of the Xenti. I don’t want to turn into an iceberg…
But no matter how many times he zoomed in on the banks of sand and the bare, silty rivers he couldn’t find the Xenti anywhere. They had vanished. Either that or they are all dead, he thought, turning back to look at the long line of death behind him. But when Jack dropped Xylem and his soldiers off there were tens of thousands of Xenti here, maybe more, so where have they all gone to?
Grunt was just about to turn around and investigate other possible escape routes out of the city when he saw something shimmering beside a stray white cloud a few miles away. At first, he thought that he was seeing things, that it was another cloud or else a bird, but then he saw it again, the sun’s sharp rays glinting off what looked like a roof or a spire of some kind.
Grunt activated his glider again and hummed over the desert like an alien dragonfly, before he folded up his wings mid-flight, and landed next to a rugged pile of rocks. If he’d timed his flight perfectly he should be right next to whatever it was he’d seen earlier, but all he saw was the flat, brown pancake of the plain, the same featureless blue sky and the two bony rivers that were doing their best not to evaporate themselves into extinction. That and his own giant reflection staring back at him.
Grunt walked towards the mirror and reached out his hand. The surface shimmered like someone had thrown a pebble into a lake, huge ripples soaring upwards and outwards for hundreds of feet. It felt like some kind of intergalactic silk, only this variety was stronger, more durable, more elastic. Suddenly it gripped his hand, then his wrist, coursing up his arm like a python. He tried to yank his arm free. Nothing happened. He tried again. Same result. He felt like he was grappling with a tiger or an Olympic wrestler or both. The silver tide gushed over his rapidly beating chest, then his neck, his face, then his eyes. He was suffocating, drowning. The last beat of his heart never came.
Chapter Nineteen: Interrogation
A punch to the gut ripped Jack awake.
His eyes darted around in the darkness like a moth searching for a flame.
Something sharp and hard impacted upon his ribs, then his chest; one of his teeth ricocheted across a floor he couldn’t see. Blood gushed from his mouth like a river.
More blows followed, their anger unrelenting.
“Why aren’t you crying?” asked a voice. It sounded cold, unforgiving, like a butcher asking a mewling lamb to be quiet. “Why aren’t you begging for mercy? Can’t you see that you’re doomed?”
“Ros? Is that you? What are you doing? What’s going on?”
“What I should’ve done ages ago,” said Ros, his pale grey head and almond black eyes appearing in front of Jack’s face. He looked like some kind of murderous demon with his fangs fully extended. “What I should’ve done when I first came aboard the spaceship.”
Jack grunted from another punch to his gut, then his ears blazed with fire, then his nose. He was being beaten to death, tortured.
&nb
sp; “What’s happened to you Ros? We were friends - me, you, Grunt, Vyleria, Kat, even Padget; we were a space family.”
“That’s because he’s seen the light, or should I say darkness,” said another voice. It sounded flat, neutral, the words spoken like a scientist wields his scalpel.
“What do you mean?” asked Jack, spinning round.
“Exactly that,” chimed the voice again. “Ros has come home, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“To his people, to his kin. He should never have left, never have been tempted by the oil slick of humanity.”
“But…”
Jack winced in pain as something sharp ripped down the side of his head. Warm liquid dripped from his chin.
“You’re like the rest of your kind. Noisy, impulsive, rude. We should’ve launched the Reckoning eons ago. It would’ve been a mercy.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
The other side of Jack’s face erupted with fire as a fistful of claws sheered through his skin. More blood followed, pooling on his chest.
“We will have to teach you respect,” said the voice. “All of you.”
“Vyleria, Gaz, Jorge, where are they? I swear if you’ve hurt them…”
More claws, more blood.
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll…”
Jack felt a massive weight like a sledgehammer thrust into his chest. He couldn’t breathe, his chest bone was going to crack, shatter. He was choking, dying.
Then just as he was about to pass out the force dissipated, leaving him gasping for breath on the floor.
“Rebellious. Just as I expected. But you’ll learn respect. You all will. In time.”
Jack looked-up (he hadn’t realised that he was on his knees) into a grey face hewn from stone, two black slits looking straight down at him. They looked cold, murderous, primed for mayhem and violence.
“I dare say that in time you will make a good dog.” His teeth looked like they were taken straight from a piranha’s mouth; his cheekbones were like chisels. “I shall work on you myself.”
Jack Strong: Dark Matter Page 8