by Stephen Hunt
‘Back downside with you!’ yelled Arto, ‘too near the surface, here, too much light for you!’ He began chanting to his mine spirits, hollow gods to put your trust in when faced with such as this.
A ring of albino eyes surrounding the monster’s head quivered, lizard-like irises narrowing against our blinding luminous spears. Its huge abdomen shook fit to collapse the tunnel as its slide towards us faltered and slowed.
Simenon began to lose his nerve, stumbling a few steps back, almost dropping his lamp, but Arto bellowed, ‘No! Hold. It will charge us should the light appear to diminish! Flee and you’re finished!’
‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,’ snarled Mozart. He upped the light output on his visor, a fourth lighthouse made mobile as he attacked first. The skeg mole bellowed again. A natural reaction to being kamikaze-charged by something it regarded as food inside its ecosystem. In retrospect, a tactical error, as Moz reached its quivering head and punched straight down inside its gullet with his right arm.
Master Jagg spluttered in shock at being treated to this outlandish circus trick, but then, he didn’t recognise the ensuing muffled whirring noise as I did. Mozart had converted his right fist into a rotating blade, and the skeg mole discovered that wearing armour on your exterior wasn’t quite as successful a defence when you had a diamond-sharp paddle blade agitator spinning at 600 RPM through the length of your vital organs.
‘Have some!’ Moz yelled as he continued smashing his left fist into the monster’s head, the choking beast clawing uselessly at the tunnel with multiple legs as it tried to spit out Mozart’s unappetizing limb disembowelling a tonne of guts from the inside out.
Master Skeg Mole shuddered into deathly stillness as Mozart stopped trying to rip the pyramid-shaped cutting beak off its bulbous head. Moz carefully withdrew his right arm, fingers and fist reconfigured back to normal operating mode once more, examining the acid-damp gore slicking his arm’s surface with some disgust.
‘Now I have seen everything,’ whistled our guide. ‘Don’t look much, but that’s a shovel with a sharp blade right there. You ever wish to sell your ruster, Master Roxley, I reckon we’ll make fine use of such a chuff brute inside our mines.’
‘Perhaps before I leave Hexator,’ I teased my mechanical friend. ‘He’ll doubtless prove a trifle rough for polite company on board the foldship waiting above.’
Of course, the truth was that the fine foldship You Can’t Prove It Was Us wouldn’t let Moz within a long light-year of her chambers and corridors. Not even confined on board my Exy, limpet-docked to the foldship’s hull. For that matter, not even tied at the end of a cable in vacuum’s icy void and keel-hauled on the float behind the foldship.
‘Mugging me right off,’ muttered the robot. ‘A few others around here who’d benefit from having their tongues pulled out.’
Simenon gazed on Mozart with newfound respect. Of course, by taking a spear through the chest the lad had missed the best of the robot’s performance against the Ferals. No, mugging off Mozart was never a safe course of action. For humans, foldships or skeg moles.
We recommenced our subterranean odyssey until we reached as strange a sight as I’d ever seen or expected to find underground. A series of linked chapels and a fine-sized feasting chamber carved straight out of the rock. A monumental devotion of labour and time to create such a curiosity down here so far from Hexator’s surface. We had reached a region of salt rock where every wall was filled with carvings, scenes of Hebateen’s miners at work, as well as far more ancient sculptures which had to be the community’s lost life on their mining moon. Then I realised. Habur Mell, their hollow underground spirit, was a corruption of Habbmil, the actual God of Voidsmen, the Vacuum and the Spacer’s True Sun.
‘This is Habur Mell’s Chapel,’ explained Arto. Carbide lamps were set in the wall and our guide walked between them, sparking the chapel rooms and feasting chamber into illumination. ‘Darkness above and darkness below,’ Arto Jagg chanted each time he lit a lamp. ‘The Mine Master told me this is where the Lords Derechor will meet you.’ Our guide indicated an atrium chamber in front of the chapel, a dozen tunnels branching out towards the mine’s furthest reaches. ‘These passages lead to the deep mines. Sentries will be posted close, in whichever tunnels the warriors used to find the nest. Stay here. I’ll check each spoke out and return with their Lordships.’
‘It seems oddly damp in here,’ I pointed out.
Arto indicated a tunnel on the right. ‘That leads to a cavern with a deep underground lake. Don’t go dipping in its waters while I’m away.’
Perish the thought. I even took sonic showers on my ship rather than the wet kind.
‘Do the skeg moles use it as a watering hole, Master Jagg?’ asked Simenon.
‘No, they get eaten by what’s in the lake if they try.’
Simenon didn’t seem happy with the idea of being abandoned. ‘What if skeg moles dig through here?’
Arto pointed to the lamps. ‘They don’t like large open spaces or light, young journeyman. You should be fine.’ He passed Simenon his belt of charges. ‘Here we go, you keep these in case you need to blast your way out of a rockfall.’
Simenon hung them across a salt rock altar, almost an offering to the local spirits. ‘What if you need them to break free?’
‘I’ll use the sentries’.’
It was a kind gesture. Simenon still wasn’t happy with the should he’d heard in our guide’s reassurances, but the lad watched Arto leave us all the same. ‘What if Master Jagg dies out there? How will we ever find our way back to the surface?’
‘What, you didn’t memorize all the tunnels and shafts on the way down?’ Moz teased the boy. ‘How clever was that?’
‘Let’s plan for the worst but pray for the best,’ I suggested.
I didn’t tell Simenon that I’d also committed every twist and turn to memory, using my m-brain’s engineering models for tunnel construction to fill in adjacent passages we hadn’t traversed. I guessed he wouldn’t feel any better made aware of the many inadequacies of unaugmented humanity.
Mozart gazed around at the elaborate salt rock carvings. ‘What about this, then … Habbmil?’
I nodded. ‘I was just thinking the same thing. What do you bet the miners assemble here once a year for an annual feast in memory of their fallen?’
Moz snorted. ‘Might as well be praying to some made-up rock spirit. Old Habbmil’s got cold void for arteries. You’d have more luck squeezing blood out of a stone than gaining favours from that bugger.’
***
A couple of weary-looking warriors returned with Arto Jagg later. We met them in the atrium chamber. The fighters wore leather overalls like a pair of blacksmiths, but it wasn’t an anvil’s weight they bore between them. One struggled with a large copper tank strapped against his spine and the other wielded a spear-like arrangement with a bulbous metal head, said device connected by a hose dangling from his comrade’s tank. A flame-squirt. Just the weapon to give agitated skeg moles pause for thought. Their bandoleer belts crossed with blasting charges almost seemed superfluous.
‘Our Lord Zane Derechor follows,’ said the warrior swaying under the fuel’s weight.
‘Hard culling by the sounds of it this time,’ said Arto. ‘The nest holds two matriarchs. Double the amount of sleeping chambers. Skeg moles were looking for a fight before we showed up. Too many of the buggers to make for a stable pecking order.’
‘What of his lordship’s brother?’ I asked.
I didn’t comment on the irony of the two Derechors forced to fight twin skeg mole matriarchs. Fate often exhibits the blackest sense of humour.
‘Up here within an hour,’ said Arto. ‘Old Sarlee is supervising the burn of another nursery chamber his scouts came across.’
Well, better we start the interview with at least one of the twins in attendance.
I was still running through the lengthy list of pertinent questions I had conjured for the Lords Derechor when I felt a dul
l thud, our rough rock floor shaking. What was that? I caught the patter of gunfire in the distance, shouts and screams of panicked miners, warriors cursing. Damn these tunnels and shafts, they made echoes of everything; playing games with sounds that made me little wiser if trouble was visiting the space next door or excavations a league away.
‘Someone sealing a tunnel?’ pondered Arto.
‘Thought we’d got the worst of ‘em by now,’ said the warrior carrying the flame-squirt’s nozzle spear. The two house fighters began setting their weapon up, ready to spray burning hell over any skeg mole that intruded.
More thuds and rattles, seemingly drifting in from everywhere at once.
‘Let’s see what I can see!’ growled Moz, sprinting towards the passage Arto and the warriors had emerged from. ‘Stay here!’
‘That ruster’s crazy,’ growled one of the warriors.
‘It’s an unlucky skeg mole that runs into him,’ said Arto.
He didn’t know the half of it, yet.
Simenon gazed fretfully at Master Jagg. ‘Should we lay charges here, like you spoke of – just in case?’
Arto shook his head. ‘Not inside the chapel. Hundreds of our people are still downside in the deeps. Charges are for shutting the front door on skeggies, not the back door on your own.’
Another series of booming explosions, louder this time, the atrium chamber’s ceiling showering us with gray rock dust.
Arto looked puzzled. ‘They’re too strong. Too near. I think—’
His thoughts were denied us by another detonation, a real cave-shaker, this time. I dropped to my knees, about to stand up when an obelisk the size of a tower slid dislodged from the ceiling. I was still calculating which direction to leap to safety when it battered across one of the warriors, the fighter with the fuel tank. It was hard to say whether it was the detonation of the flame-squirt’s propellant which set off his blasting charges or the other way around. My suit stiffened, its fabric reacting instantaneously under emergency protocol. I managed to absorb most of the expanding fireball heading for Simenon and Arto. Hurled through the air by the blast-wave, I dimly registered a secondary detonation, the second warrior’s charges roaring with dynamite anger. All three of us blown out of the collapsing atrium. Flung inside the chapel. I struck the chapel’s floor hard, rolling six times before shedding enough momentum to stop.
Moaning, I pulled myself to my feet. I heard a whine from my suit as the energy it had absorbed but hadn’t been able to convert into my crash-field bled out. My arms started steaming inside the febrile air. Arto Jagg’s flight had been halted by a large rock-salt sculpture of an asteroid miner heroically posed on a sphere. Our guide’s chest fluttered with shallow pulls of his lungs, so he was at least alive. Thank the gods. Simenon lifted himself off the floor, face bruised, clothes bloody and blackened, but still among the living. There was something admirably elastic about the gangly youth; he almost demanded to be bounced off hard surfaces.
‘You’re smoking,’ coughed Simenon, rubbing soot out of his eyes.
‘By Modd, you’re right, I am.’
I turned to gaze at our still crumpling atrium. Mozart! The passage he’d sprinted into lay completely blocked. Enough to bury Moz?
Let’s plan for the worst but pray for the best, my own words mocked me. If my friend was finished, we were about to join him. The shaking hadn’t stopped. It grew more violent. Pieces of chapel ceiling rained down around us. Mozart’s design tolerances meant he could survive a hell of a lot more than me. Even a stealth suit wasn’t going to save Sweet William or his friends from a thousand tonnes of sharp rubble and an oxygen diet for the foreseeable future.
Deep-rock formation gas pocket fractures igniting under blast pressure, warned my m-brain. Evacuate.
Yes, I had noticed, I ordered the augmented portion of my sentience to stop distracting me.
Simenon wobbled uncertainly towards the altar where Arto’s belt of blasting charges hung. I dashed over to him in time to stop him seizing the belt. ‘We can’t blast ourselves free of this, Simenon.’
He rubbed his head with both hands, blinking away the swelling dust cloud. ‘No, we’re going to be buried alive!’
‘Not today.’ I tried to stay calm for his sake, glanding an anxiolytics package. I lifted the rolled-up prayer mat out of the lad’s backpack even as shards of rock rained down around us.
‘How can you pray now, Master Roxley?’
‘Carry the good Arto Jagg over here. We already have our gift from the gods.’ Varnus’s blessed vision; I had thought it a fancy at the time. ‘Ah, sweet Jia,’ I whispered. Sweet Goddess of Loaded Dice, Fair Dealing and the Dreams of Flight.
Simenon returned, dragging our guide’s unconscious weight as well as he could. I laid out the fractal mat, setting it to accept vocal commands and m-brain sync.
Circuits glowed into life. I tried not to lose myself in its shifting patterns. You could easily be hypnotized by a fractal mat’s weird beauty. ‘Tandem mode, activate.’
The mat’s width began shrinking even as its length began to extend in short rippling bursts.
‘But we’re not praying!’ Simenon gagged inside the swirling dust cloud.
‘None needed. Our mat’s previous owner is the practical type,’ I coughed, watching the repulse field activate; the mat rose to hover a foot off the rock floor. All the Humanitum’s denizens along the Scheherazade Rim were pragmatic people. If they were going to carry something as unwieldy as a prayer mat around with them, they were surely going to make its inconvenience worthwhile in other ways.
Half the chapel to our left collapsed, ancient carvings smashed by a sudden onslaught of bedrock. Salt rock fragments swirled around the air making it near impossible to breathe.
I led by example, mounting the mat on the front. ‘Rest Arto behind me, you jump on the back holding him in place.’
The young lad goggled at me as though I was crazy. In so many ways, he has a good point. But Simenon battled against his absolute terror of entombment; he would have stood upside down and sung the Songs of Old Sol if I swore they’d be his salvation. I felt the mat dip as Arto’s weight fell against my spine, Simenon mounting the mat at the rear. Sections of cracking chapel smashed around us as loud as cannon fire.
‘Crash shield, maximum. Safety protocols, disengage. Route, augment-sync.’ I turned to call back to Simenon, ‘Hold on!’
Varnus’s worn prayer mat sped forward, shrugging falling rock off the invisible bubble of its crash field. Another series of blasts detonated behind us. Something too large to ignore striking Arto’s belt of charges, no doubt. Our mat started playing bizarre snatches of Tanbūra lyre music, alert sounds custom-set by Varnus. Too fast. Too many crash impacts. Too narrow. Yes, I bloody well am aware. I silenced its warnings. If I was going to die crushed by this dark world’s crumbling bedrock, I’d rather said end didn’t come to the tinkling accompaniment of samples from the Kitab al-Aghani.
Our reluctant fractal mat hurled forward while begging to stop, citing terminal flight hazards, which I overrode on a loop. Terminal would be if we slowed. Tunnel walls ruptured around us, Simenon yelling in terror, the passage to the surface lost in blackness apart from the crazy bumping light of my lantern.
Arto Jagg was the lucky one, here. If we faltered and died, he’d never feel the crushing embrace of collapsing earth and stone. Not waking was as good a way to die as any, given the circumstances.
Yes, I know every street on the Rim’s worlds has built-in inductive charging, electromagnetic fields invisibly transferring energy to millions of flight mats flitting about. And here we were, pushing through hell on residual power reserves only. Of course, the mat was going to tear itself apart converting mass to energy. I’d been praying for its failure to occur after we cleared the cave-in.
Simenon gripped our uncons
cious guide like a vice behind me, giving full vocal vent to his claustrophobic instincts now his darkest nightmare had come true. I might have joined him, but my mind was fully engaged directing our failing mat through this collapsing passage. Dust started to penetrate our protective bubble. The field surface was failing. I urged us faster. I could feel its overload through my clothes, the mat’s fractal surface growing too hot for comfort.
Suddenly we were clear of tumbling debris, tunnel supports holding, the stench of pressurized gas pockets faded to a bad egg stink. Our prayer mat made a yowling noise that might have been a sigh as it gave up the ghost, shuddered and slowed, nosing into the ground. There it lay, the beauty of shifting spatial circuits fading as its fractal scales lost recursive integrity. Jia’s bounty broken – our bodies, not quite.
‘We’re alive,’ panted Simenon. He shook, but not with cold. The lad didn’t seem able to stop trembling.
I gazed at the debris-blocked tunnel to our rear. It’s still holding. I picked up the blackened prayer mat, a reminder of what our journey had cost us.
I checked on Arto Jagg while I kept a beady eye on the timber supports stitching this tunnel together. Arto was fine; I would need to shoulder carry our guide the rest of the way. But what about …?
‘Mozart?’ trembled Simenon, echoing the direction of my thoughts.
‘We’ll see,’ I coughed. I prayed to Modd my robot friend could come out of this filthy mess alive. ‘Let’s climb top-side and summon a rescue party down here.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Corpses and comets.
I heard the echo of voices as the first group of miners neared the surface. I closed the prayer box and rose to my knees. I wasn’t optimistic. There were so many gods in the universe, but very few miracles.
‘What of the Lords Derechor?’ Jenelle Cairo asked the rescue party as they trudged from the mine entrance. All they carried with them were crushed bodies wrapped in canvas and grim sad faces.
‘Dead, everyone’s dead down there,’ coughed the lead miner, wiping a film of dust off his bruised cheeks.