The Promenade scrolled by. Stacks of converted shipping containers whizzed by on the left. The gold marketplace, with its tents and stalls and merchants and customers and thieves, zipped by on our right. It was a quiet morning, like Anton had said. Creatures moved to and fro, business was conducted, and the few altercations that erupted were brief and only mildly violent.
We approached the docking concourse. Anton turned onto the main thoroughfare that ran by it, reducing his speed to compensate for the increased congestion in the area.
“You look better than you did the last time I saw you. I take it that the McKellen job was a success,” Anton said.
“No. The kid’s still missing. I’m pretty sure she’s not in the spaceport,” I said.
“Are you planning on going Outside?”
“Yup.”
“That’s why you were going to the gold marketplace... to get gear and supplies,” Anton said.
“You’re a perceptive fellow.”
“Don’t die out there.”
“Aw... that’s sweet. You’re going to make me blush,” I said.
Anton shook his head. “You always have to be an asshole. Excuse me for only having two friends from back in the day. That’s twice as many as you’ve got, by the way.”
“Relax, brother,” I said. “I’ll be fine. One nice thing about Outside is that you can see danger coming a mile away. I’ve got a better chance of getting blown away by walking into Evelin’s again.”
Anton threw me a sharp look. “What do you mean ‘again’? Please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with that pink marketplace clusterfuck a couple weeks ago.”
“No. Of course not. I’ve just heard that Evelin’s hammangs have been on edge lately,” I said. I trusted Anton. He was probably the only creature in the galaxy I could say that about. But, I figured, the less people that knew about my involvement, the better.
“Yes. They certainly have been on edge and I can’t say that I blame them.” Anton gave me another suspicious glance. He looked like he was about to say more... but then the radio on the cart’s dashboard crackled to life.
“Mayday! Mayday! Any deputies on the Promenade, we need backup at the Big Staircase!” said a human voice from the speaker. The sound of a lot of weapons fire could be heard in the background... the quacking-farts of energy rifles, the rapid thunder of chemically-propelled projectiles, and the baritone thwumps of magnetically-propelled projectiles. Whatever shitstorm Anton’s deputies had blundered into sounded like a big one.
Anton seized the microphone. “This is Sheriff Kabamas! I’m on my way!” he bellowed into it. He turned to me. “Hey, do you want to see a gunfight?”
“No,” I said.
“Too bad,” he said. He hit the siren, stomped on the gas, and we sped off down the Promenade.
The scenery became a blur. The mob of bodies at the docking concourse appeared on my right and was gone an instant later. Anton drove like a madman, swerving and braking and skidding and gunning it again to avoid the pedestrians that swarmed all around us like walking locusts. His years of experience at hauling-ass around the Promenade paid off. The cart never jolted from any sudden impacts nor did it jump over any living speedbumps.
We passed the spaceship service area. The crowd thinned out. Anton was able to speed up without the constant bobbing and weaving cutting into his momentum. I caught a blurry glimpse of workshops, fuel-dispensing machinery, and weight-handling equipment, then Anton cut a sharp left into the shipping container maze.
Anton knew the maze better than I ever would. He took lefts and rights and rights and lefts, seemingly without thought. The stacks towered on either side of us. We raced down gargantuan steel hallways with walls a hundred feet high. We turned down passages that I had never seen before and came out in places that looked exactly the same as those we had just passed. I completely lost track of our progress.
Then we were out. Anton made a sharp right, sped down another steel corridor, and the stacks abruptly ended. The cart roared into an open area that I instantly recognized. It was the area at the end of the main thoroughfare that led to the main gate. The area was normally overflowing with creatures. It was deserted now. I had just enough time to notice how strange it looked without its usual infestation of sentient creatures and then my attention was seized by the battle that had cleared the area.
The Big Staircase was dead ahead. It poked through the floor of the Promenade like a Titan’s corkscrew. Two groups of combatants faced each other from opposite sides of the massive hole.
Two sheriff carts were on one side. One was on fire. Two human corpses were sprawled on the ground beside it. The other cart was a couple yards away. Two deputies were crouched behind it. They both had energy rifles gripped in their hands, but they were not firing. A barrage of weapons fire had them pinned down.
There was a shitload of kabebes on the other side of the Big Staircase. There were at least twenty of the dirty, prickly, little fuckers. Most of them had small magnetically-propelled projectile weapons. The guns would have been pistols for most creatures but the kabebes had rigged them with tiny stocks and were using them like rifles, covering the general area of the deputies with a hailstorm of poorly-placed rounds. They had ten giant rats with them. Half of the rats had large brown sacks, probably filled with fuel ore, slung across their backs. The other rats were equipped with harnesses that supported gun turrets. There were chemically-propelled projectile machineguns mounted on the turrets. A kabebe stood on the back of each gun-rat, firing weapons that were longer than they were tall, pumping five unrelenting streams of high-velocity death at the cart the two remaining deputies were using as cover.
Anton drove straight at the kabebe death-squad.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted.
“Grab the wheel!” Anton shouted back.
“What?”
“Grab the wheel! Keep us pointed right at them!”
I did not have time to respond. He took his hands off the wheel and twisted around to reach behind his seat, keeping the gas pedal pressed down to the floorboards. I lurched over and caught hold of the wheel with one hand, reaching into my coat for my revolver with the other. The cart zoomed right toward the middle of the pack of gun-toting midget pincushions.
Anton pulled his energy rifle out from behind his seat. He turned back toward the kabebes and opened fire. Bolts of bright white light streaked across the Promenade. Anton had been a marksman back in the day and he had not lost his touch. Every shot he took found a target. The kabebes were so small that the energy bolts did not simply burn through them... they tore the little fuckers apart. The bolts vaporized their tiny torsos, sending arms, legs, and quills flying in all directions. The onslaught caught them completely off-guard. Panic rippled through their ranks as tiny explosions of quills and limbs popped off all over. Our cart tore across the Promenade, on a collision course with the kabebes, spewing death all along the way. The kabebes had lost all sense of direction, were scurrying about every which way, when we plowed into them.
We slammed into the pack. I stopped reaching for my gun and grabbed the wheel with both hands, straining to keep us from losing control. Anton made no move to help me. He kept right on shooting, twisting in his seat to obtain targets as we pushed into the middle of the pack. The cart jolted and the wheel tried to wrench itself from my grasp as we struck a giant rat. Hot, stinking rat blood spattered my face. The kabebe that had been on its back somersaulted through the air, narrowly avoiding skewering my head as it flew past. The cart shook and bounced like we were at the epicenter of a localized earthquake. Kabebes and rats flew like bowling pins hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. Our engine roared like a grindle with hemorrhoids riding a bicycle over rocky ground. We forced our way through the pack, leaving a trail of carnage in our wake.
We broke through to the other side. The cart hit open ground, leaving more than half of the kabebes scorched, bloodied, and flattened behind us. But Anton was not done yet. He sla
mmed his foot on the brakes. The wheels locked and the cart skidded for a dozen feet, tires screeching, leaving two dark skid marks on the Promenade floor. I wrestled with the steering wheel... Anton still had both hands on his rifle... and eventually we came to a stop.
Anton was out of his seat the instant we stopped moving. He spun back toward the kabebes and resumed firing. I reached for my revolver, intent on helping my friend with his killing, but it was unnecessary. I heard two more energy rifles open up behind me. The remaining deputies had left their cover and were blasting away at the pack. In less than a minute, it was all over.
I walked over to where Anton stood with his deputies. The place was a disaster area. No corpses were whole. Tiny arms, tiny legs, tiny heads, and tiny guns were strewn everywhere. A dusting of fine brownish quills coated everything. Big chunks of giant rat were intermingled among the remains of their handlers. All of the pieces were charred. Some were still smoking. A thick aroma of carbon hung heavy in the air. A milder odor floated under the carbon smell. It was both meaty and earthy at the same time, like a hunk of beef rubbed with dirt and then grilled over some burning rags. As long as I live, I will never forget the scent of fresh-cooked kabebe and giant rat casserole.
“What the hell happened?” Anton said, looking back and forth between his deputies and the surrounding carnage.
“The little fuckers attacked without warning,” said one of the deputies, a female human who looked like she was in her early twenties. “We stopped the convoy and they just went nuts. Johnston and Keegan got blasted almost immediately.” She gestured toward the burning cart and the two dead deputies beside it.
“What did you stop them for?” Anton said.
“We thought it was kind of weird that they were heading down with full sacks,” the deputy said.
“They were on their way back down?” Anton said.
“The lead rat had just stepped onto the Big Staircase when we stopped them,” the deputy said.
My internal bullshit detector went into alarm-mode. Kabebes were bringing full loads from the Promenade down to their tunnels. That was odd... really odd. Not odd as in once-in-a-blue-moon... odd as in that-never-fucking-happened. Kabebes brought loads of fuel ore up to the refineries and they brought money and empty sacks down to their tunnels. There were certain things in life that could always be counted on. Fire was hot, gravity sucked, and kabebes brought sacks of crap up, not down... that was just the way things were.
I went over to one of the giant rat corpses that had a sack tied to its back. An energy bolt had cut it in half, burning straight through its midsection. The bolt had torn through the sack as well, but no fuel ore pebbles were leaking out. The hole in the sack was blackened and its edges had a part-charred/part-wet appearance that I had seen before. It looked like an energy wound that had not cauterized completely.
I opened the drawstring and pulled the sack open. Two small human feet poked out of the top.
“What the hell?” Anton said. “Dump that out.”
The deputies upended the sack. The body of a human child flopped out onto the Promenade floor. It was male, between eight and ten standard-years-old, and it had a gaping energy wound burned straight through its gut.
“They wouldn’t have been so jumpy if this was a legit sale,” I said.
“The kid wouldn’t have been hidden in a sack if this was a legit sale,” Anton said.
The four of us set about opening the sacks and dumping out their contents. When we were done, the bodies of five human children, four males and one female, were on the floor alongside the mutilated pieces of kabebe and rat. All of them were small, all appeared to be between the ages of seven and twelve, and all were dead... cut to shreds by the same crossfire that had killed their captors.
“What do you think they were going to use them for?” Anton said.
“Probably labor... but anything’s possible,” I said.
“You’ve been asking around on the labor market, right? Did you hear anything about this?”
“Not a fucking word. You?”
“People know that this isn’t the kind of shit I handle,” Anton said.
People did know that. So did I... but the distraction at my feet had caused me to forget momentarily. I was not distracted by the horror of seeing five dead kids. I had seen a lot of dead, kids and adults, both on this shithole planet and before I had come here. I was distracted by what the dead kids meant. First: they meant that I had made a mistake. Some people would have had to have known, or at least suspected, that kabebes were snatching kids. I had been so focused on talking to business creatures that I had neglected to talk to normal creatures. Second: they meant that I had not exhausted every possibility in the spaceport in my search for innocent, little Penny McKellen. There was one more avenue that I needed to investigate. Outside would have to wait.
Chapter 9
The way ahead was dim and narrow. The walls were barely a foot away on either side of me and the ceiling was just two feet above my head. The only lighting came from cheap, poorly-made glowglobes. They were installed along the length of the passageway, in no discernable order whatsoever. They were on the left wall and the right wall and the ceiling... once I even stepped over one installed on the floor. Their spacing was irregular and none were centered. A third were fully functional, a third were glowing weakly or flickering in their death throes, and a third were burned out completely. The shadows danced around me, growing long then short then long again, preventing my eyes from ever truly adjusting.
I could not see the kabebe but I could hear it. It scurried down the passage up ahead of me, cheeping and clicking to itself with every tiny step. Sometimes it was loud enough for my translator implant to pick up and decipher. The general theme of its rantings amounted to: The fucking sheriff fucking killed our motherfucking convoy.
The kabebe had been chattering to itself in this manner since I had first stumbled across it near the top of the Big Staircase. The levels just beneath the Promenade were nearly as congested as the Promenade itself. Strangely enough, it was this congestion that made the kabebe so easy to spot. I saw what appeared to be a gap in a mob that was usually packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Then I saw that the gap was moving. It did not take a warp-drive engineer to figure out that the gap was caused by a sentient creature that the other commuters did not want to rub up against. I got close enough to catch a glimpse of the eighteen-inch-tall walking puncture-wound waiting to happen, heard its personal obscenity-laced rant, realized it was a member of the same clan of kabebes as those in the convoy, and followed it down the Big Staircase... through the wide spaces and chaotic mobs of the upper levels, past the bookshelf-like structure and semi-orderly population of the spaceport midsection and into the narrow passageways and apparent desolation of the lower levels.
The passageway swerved and zigzagged. It never ran straight for more than fifty feet before it hooked to one side or the other. It was impossible to tell how far it went. I had no idea where it led. I had never been this deep before. The lowest levels of the spaceport had been drilled way back when large-scale fuel ore mining was still done here. Those operations had ended standard-centuries ago. Now, the only creatures that came down here were workers on water well or waste reclamation crews... or kabebes, of course.
I moved forward, trying to hit a happy medium between speed and caution. I counted glowglobes to try to track my progress but I quickly realized that was a futile enterprise. The passage seemed to go on forever. I knew that it had to lead to something although I had no idea what that something might be. For all I knew, the kabebe could have been leading me into an ambush of tiny firearms and razor-sharp quills. It had been known to happen. I kept going regardless of the unknown. I had a job to do.
The shadows changed. They still danced and flickered across the walls to either side of me but now I saw them playing across something that spanned the width of the passageway up ahead. It looked like the passageway ran straight into a wall... but that could not be
right. Even in the tricky, wavering light, I would have seen the kabebe if it had come back my way. I stopped and listened. No obscenity-laced cheeping and clicking reached my ears.
I broke into a jog. The light got even more erratic as the glowglobes zipped past. My shadow ran with me... moving from behind to in front of me, sometimes on my left, sometimes on my right, sometimes on both sides at the same time, jumping all around me like I was a schizophrenic sundial. I focused on the way ahead, ignoring the lightshow, not allowing myself to be distracted in case the kabebe was waiting to jump me.
I neared the end of the passageway. It did indeed run straight into a wall but, like most things in the spaceport, there was more to it than what it seemed at first glance. The passageway opened up to the left. I stepped into a large circular chamber, over a hundred feet in diameter. The ceiling of the chamber curved up in a dome that was twice my height at its apex. Ancient mining equipment was strewn across the chamber. They were towering hunks of wheels, scoops, and drills that had once been shiny steel but were now decrepit piles of dirt and rust. I realized that I was looking at a collection of antiques. The equipment dated back centuries, to when large creatures had mined the ground beneath the spaceport. They had probably been left here to rot because it had been cheaper to buy new machinery than it would have been to relocate this stuff to the mining villages Outside.
I moved among the mining machines. My eyes darted back and forth in search of the kabebe. My hand was inside my trenchcoat, clenched on the grip of my revolver. It was brutally hot in the chamber. Sweat pumped out of my pores. The lower levels had shitty ventilation to begin with and, in this dead end, it was almost nonexistent. The threat of a possible walking ball of knives lurking amidst the machinery seemed to make it worse. I could feel droplets of liquid pouring down my body. My clothes were saturated with it. Streams of moisture oozed out of the sweatband on my hat and coursed down my face. I did not try to wipe it away. It would have been a constant activity and I could not afford the distraction. I squinted past a curtain of stinging sweat and kept moving forward.
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