The First Book of Ore: The Foundry's Edge

by Cameron Baity

  Dollop was more certain of this than anything he had ever felt before. It radiated with a brilliant clarity brighter than the murderous crucible below.

  He had found his function. Now was not his time to go.

  His container was almost above the furnace. He popped off his forearms and jammed them through the diamond-shaped gaps, where they linked to his waiting hands. In a flash, he disassembled pieces of his slender arms and legs, fit them through the drain holes, and then reconstructed himself outside the bin. With trembling focus, he split his torso and head into smaller chunks. It was a bewildering feeling, some of his segments so sensitive that he got woozy just handling them. But he pictured himself as fluid, vesper spilling through the grate. His connections loosened and released, and his body let go.

  Yet it wasn’t enough—his last pieces were too big to fit. The solution presented itself with tranquil simplicity. Hanging below the container, his parts stretched out, forming a long chain of limbs. Despite the separation and irregularity of his form, he felt an astonishing wholeness, an innate understanding of where every bit of his modular body was in space.

  There was a squeal, then a bang as the latch released.

  The bottom dropped away.

  Dollop plummeted, weightless. Tons of scrap shoved and bashed against him. He fell toward the furnace’s molten heart. His eyes closed, but not out of fear. He honed in on every section, fully aware of himself. Parts tumbled through space. His long chain of limbs reached out to grab falling segments, summoning himself back together through the tide of trash.

  He reassembled himself, complete and clinging to the outside of the bin. Dollop was an unrecognizable, jumbled assembly. Sections of his chest stuck to his feet, and bits of head joined to his rear end like doll pieces glued at random. Holding fast to the grate, he swung loosely from the hinged bottom as the container unloaded junk into the bubbling brew.

  Before he could rejoice, an eruption splashed up. Scalding metal droplets sprayed Dollop, searing his soft metal flesh. He cried out. Excruciating pain shook him. The agony was so sudden that he nearly lost his grip.

  But still he held on, shortening his chain of body parts to avoid any more molten backsplash. His mind reeled from the burns scattered across his body. The bottom of the bin swept up and snapped closed. He dangled beneath while it reversed on its cable pathway, the scorching air growing cooler as he was carried away from the furnace.

  The empty container moved fast and plunged back into its shadowy recess in the wall. He let go and dropped down a few feet to the floor of the niche, crumpling into a misshapen ball as the deathtrap clattered off. The air shook with a cascading roar as tons of scrap began to refill the container. Dollop huddled for a moment, rocking back and forth. He caressed his wounds, bright spatters of hardened silver dotting his chest, shoulder, and the back of one leg. He prodded gently at his scars and winced at the pain.

  The snarl of machines and a clamor of activity drew his attention. He crept to the edge of the tunnel and looked down. Lit by the rivers of fire, an army of Watchmen workers in shiny protective suits labored over the troughs of liquefied metal. They poured the molten scrap into molds to create beams, sheets, and ingots. There were hundreds of pallets piled high with gleaming, symmetrical stacks of brand new metal.

  The Foundry had turned Kallorax’s furnace into a smelting factory.

  Far to the right, he spied cargo trains speeding about, whisking the metal shipments away through busy tunnels. It was some sort of shipping zone, bustling with workers, but it looked like a way out.

  Dollop began his descent to the factory floor, extending in a long chain of parts again, hoping that the Watchmen were too consumed with their jobs to notice. His wounds still flared, but he gritted his teeth and swallowed down the pain, focusing on the task at hand.

  He was alive.

  He had invoked the name of the Ona, and Makina had spared him. She had given him a second chance, and he would not fail Her.

  He was going to find his friends and escape the Citadel.

  “Pr-praise the gears,” he said, beaming in triumph.

  Distant rumbles. Heavy clangs like a battering ram. The Foundry was forcing their way into the detainment block.

  The Covenant team, bathed in the red glow of the emergency lights, stalked down the curved corridor. Phoebe stayed close to her father, who carried his Dervish rifle at the ready. It was strange to see a weapon in her gentle father’s hands, but he held it expertly. There was so much about him she didn’t know, so many secrets he had kept from her.

  Orei led the five mehkans in a tight formation on the ground while the chraida and the mysterious Grim Reaper figure scouted above like falcons, invisible and silent. The Covenant commander held up a hand, and they flattened against the wall to hide from enemies who might be lurking around the blind curve ahead. The rings and sliders on her arms ticked out some sort of calculation. Satisfied the coast was clear, Orei gestured for them to proceed.

  The corridor opened into a hexagonal distribution hub where six hallways converged. It was an expansive cave populated with towering stacks of steel crates and racks loaded with supplies. There were blocks of massive batteries, organized tanks of pressurized gas, and tire-size spools of conduit. A fleet of Mini-lifts was parked inside docks in the walls.

  The Covenant team spread out with practiced precision to secure the hub. The gecko mehkan named Korluth scuttled atop a stack of trunks, splaying his long beak into a pronged radar dish to scan the area. He gurgled a report and gestured to a corridor on the opposite side of the chamber.

  That must lead to Micah, Phoebe realized with a rush.

  Orei barked orders, and the team swept toward their destination, slinking and swinging, lumbering and running.

  Suddenly, the commander tensed, sliders on her apparatus in a frenzy. They all froze, awaiting her command.

  “Back!” she snapped. “Twenty-two puppets. Incoming!”

  She hurled Jules and Phoebe out of the way as the Covenant warriors dove for safety. A whistling torrent of muted gunfire came at them, storming out from the corridor that led to Micah. Orei issued orders to a tumorous hunchback mehkan with spindly arms that reached the ground. Jules pulled Phoebe behind the cover of a giant crate. An explosion pounded the air.

  She felt the hot, concussive whack of wind. Her ears rang, and her vision rippled. She braved a glance just as the hunchback mehkan ripped a seeping growth off its own bulbous body. The thing wriggled in his hand and bleated as the warrior bit down on it. With a snap of its arm, the mehkan hurled the blob at the squadron of Watchmen spilling from the corridor. Another blinding detonation, so hot it burned blue. She saw a couple of enemy soldiers disintegrate, their pieces blasting apart in every direction.

  The hunchback was covered in living grenades.

  “Stay,” Orei ordered Phoebe and Jules, forcing them back.

  Rifle fire hissed at Orei, but the rings of her body twirled and parted, and the bullets flew harmlessly through the gaps. She spun away to command her team, and Jules provided cover with a burst of whistling rounds from his gun.

  With a fearsome bellow, the huge crane claw mehkan called Entakhai charged the Watchmen, his I-beam arms held up as a shield. They peppered him with bullets, but he was too fast. Entakhai collided with a pair of soldiers, smashing them against the wall like a bulldozer. He grabbed another with his one good hand and crushed it as if it were made of papier-mâché, and then launched the broken body at the other attackers.

  In the blue blast of another explosion, Phoebe saw the enemy flood in. There were so many of them, their silent guns whirling with deadly fire. Bullets ricocheted and clattered everywhere. Phoebe covered her head with her arms, trying desperately to blink away the flare patterns from her eyes.

  The Grim Reaper mehkan fell like a shadow, enveloping a Watchman with its cloaklike body. Its muscular membrane thra
shed violently, and then the creature bounded back up into the darkness on javelin spring legs, leaving its victim a twitching, perforated mess. Cable strands whisked down as the chraida lassoed rifles out of the hands of Watchmen and scurried around the grid overhead to draw away enemy fire.

  Reeking smoke from the hunchback’s explosions filled the chamber, stinging Phoebe’s eyes and burning her throat. She couldn’t make out what was happening in the skirmish, but she could hear far-off jarring booms that shook the walls as the Foundry tried to break in.

  And something else. Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack. Hazy silhouettes marched through the smoke in another corridor. They were being surrounded.

  “Behind you!” Phoebe cried at the top of her lungs.

  She pulled her father down as a barrage of bullets hammered the crate that hid them. He took her hand, and they fled for better cover.

  Orei heard her warning. At the commander’s order, a mehkan with folded forelegs like a praying mantis skittered over to a massive shelving unit. Its serrated limbs buzzed like chain saws, and the creature hacked through stout supports. With a tremendous crash, the loaded shelves toppled on the wave of Watchmen. The mantis mehkan spun into their ranks in a shredding cyclone.

  Phoebe and her father dove for shelter behind a Mini-lift. They were outnumbered, pinned in this hub and assaulted from all sides. Jules tried to take aim, but it was impossible to find a clear target in the chaos.

  With a series of deafening detonations, the hunchback mehkan collapsed a corridor onto a squadron of emerging Watchmen. A lumbering Covenant warrior covered in shaggy steel wool, one of his arms massively oversize, charged into combat. The beast swung its colossal limb, and its bulky fingers, tethered by lengths of chain, shot out like a bludgeoning flail. Its bashing attacks scattered Foundry soldiers, wrapping around their legs and yanking them off their feet. Weaving through its comrade’s chains, the Grim Reaper mehkan impaled a Watchman with its spear legs. Then it used the victim as a springboard to vault at another, blinding him with its smothering membrane.

  Through the smoke, Phoebe saw the chain saw mantis mehkan stagger back and petrify as it was riddled by a wave of lethal white bonding rounds.

  Orei toppled a crate of long gas tanks. She measured them quickly with her shifting apparatus, adjusted their positions, and then swiped off the ends with a slash of her scythes. The canisters screamed off with a hissing wail, blasting into the advancing forces like torpedoes.

  A Watchman grabbed Phoebe from behind. Jules hammered it with the butt of his rifle. She screamed and fought as the soldier reared back to strike her dead. But a cluster of silvery bolts cracked through its face shield.

  Korluth appeared and spat another shard from his beak, piercing the Foundry soldier. Then a cable looped around the Watchman’s neck, and he was yanked into the rafters to be dispatched by the watchful chraida. Motioning urgently, Korluth led Phoebe and her father forward. They followed his slinking form through smoke, bullets, and blue explosions. The black swoop of the Grim Reaper mehkan fluttered overhead.

  Finally, they reached the corridor that led to Micah. Behind them, the Covenant team was still battling furiously, trying to keep this path clear. Among a ravaged pile of Watchman carcasses, Entakhai lay dying, his body splattered with crystallized chemical ammunition. Orei and Korluth stood beside him, their fists clenched over their dynamos.

  “He rusts for you, bleeders,” Orei said. “Pay respect.”

  More death. More loss. And this time, Phoebe was to blame. If it weren’t for her, they would have escaped the Citadel by now.

  “No. But…but we—” she tried to explain.

  “Thank you, Entakhai,” her father said.

  Phoebe stared into the mehkan’s vacant, glassy black eyes.

  “Pr-praise the gears,” she said, soft and unsure.

  The mehkans looked at her strangely. Entakhai flashed his gnashing bolt teeth, streaked with oily black blood, though she couldn’t tell whether it was a smile or a sneer. Orei murmured something to Korluth in Rattletrap, and the two of them raced deeper into the corridor, followed by Jules and Phoebe. As the battle raged behind them, she wondered what would happen to the rest of the Covenant team. All she knew was Micah and Dollop needed her.

  Phoebe would save them. She had to.

  The throne room erupted in applause. Goodwin stood ramrod straight with a winning smile on his face, arms folded across his ample chest.

  “Thank you. No need for that,” the Chairman said to the staff at their workstations. “We are all just doing our jobs.”

  He had been right all along. There was, in fact, a secret team of intruders trying to sneak into the Armory on Level Three. His hunch had enabled their forces to intercept before the enemy could breach the final security seals. Now the creatures were surrounded, and it was only a matter of time before they were eliminated. Goodwin breathed a little easier.

  “Patch me in to Kaspar,” he called out.

  “I propose we reduce privilege to the access codes,” a military executive said. “Re-encrypt them on a daily basis.”

  “Agreed. This was too close a call,” another concurred.

  An operator called out, “He’s not responding, sir.”

  Goodwin’s smile slipped. “Get me Captain Eldridge.”

  “Another intruder eliminated in the sublevel,” an executive announced, indicating the live feeds on-screen.

  “Eldridge here, sir,” replied a voice over the speakers.

  “Give your Com-Pak to Kaspar,” Goodwin said. “I must speak with him.”

  “He…he is not here, sir.”

  Goodwin’s nostrils flared. His flushed face settled into a hard mask, thick white brows hooding his icy eyes. The military executives watched him warily.

  “What is the status of the detainment block?” Goodwin reviewed the screen, deciphering the dark chaos of gunfire and explosions. A window winked out as another Watchman was deactivated, replaced instantaneously by another feed.

  “Three intruders down,” announced a coordinator.

  “Only three?”

  “They have assumed a defensive configuration near the passage leading to Sector Nine-D.”

  “About time,” Goodwin mused. “Fall back and let them get to the boy. Prepare to strike on my word. How long until the surrounding doors are open?”

  “Our technicians are still struggling with the override, sir. But they assure me they will—”

  “Dispatch the Titans.”

  “Sir?”

  “Take down the doors,” he said impatiently. “Get in there and stop them.”

  “Yes, Mr. Goodwin,” the coordinator responded. “Bringing Titans on line.”

  Goodwin studied the screen, which displayed a frozen image of two glowing white figures caught on a Watchman’s heat-sensitive optics like a pair of grainy ghosts—a man and a lanky girl. The Chairman narrowed his eyes.

  “James!” snarled a voice.

  He turned to look across the vast expanse of the throne room. There, storming in through the reinforced platinum doors, were the five representatives of the Board. Their unwelcome faces were sour.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Director Malcolm hollered.

  “We demand an explanation,” fumed Director Layton.

  Phoebe tried to keep up, but the red darkness, gauzy smoke, and the ringing in her ears made her feel like she was stumbling through a dream.

  She followed Orei, Korluth, and her father as they ran down the corridor, hurrying past intersecting hallways and Watchmen corpses blackened by the hunchback mehkan’s blasts. Her father took a fresh ammo clip from one of the soldiers’ belts and reloaded his Dervish rifle with practiced ease. As his weapon charged up with a low burring sound, its four barrels hissing into place, Phoebe considered taking one of the abandoned guns, then discarded the idea. Not
only did the rifles look too heavy for her, but she hadn’t the slightest clue how to use one, and now was not the time to learn.

  Shuddering blows shook the detainment block.

  Korluth led the way, his pronged radar dish flaring open to detect a signal. They entered a huge chamber where the mildewed air was filled with the muffled churn of water. The hair on Phoebe’s neck prickled. It was the same foul reek from the drowning tank that clung to her coveralls. How she hoped that Micah hadn’t suffered the same murderous depths.

  The room was a forest of color-coded pipes, layered so heavily that it obscured the ancient golden wall. The convoluted plumbing network ran up into the impenetrable darkness above and down through the floor below.

  “Nine-point-six ticks. Move,” called Orei as she directed them to a connecting passage beyond the blinking banks of an electronic control system.

  They navigated another series of tunnels and raced past adjacent corridors and chambers humming with machinery. The turret guns sagging limply from the overhead grid seemed like they might snap on at any second. Phoebe’s life felt like it hung by a hair. All she could do was keep up. And survive.

  Korluth diverted off the main corridor and descended down a channel that had a rugged decline, steps worn away by millennia.

  “No,” her father said, suddenly distraught. “Not in here.”

  She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but when the passage opened into a dismal cave, she knew. Her heart deflated.

  It was a relic that had remained untouched since the days of Kallorax. The only light was a red glow from the hallway reflecting off the walls, but it was enough to glimpse the gallery of horrors. Cruel hooks and knots of thorns hung from chains above moldering equipment that bristled with rusty blades. There were crushing cages, spiked chairs, and slabs fitted with barbed-wire manacles. The floor was stained black and pocked with circular drains.

  Stretching across the span of the back wall was a spiked sun, dangling with a sickening arsenal of implements that Phoebe was glad she couldn’t decipher.