by Andy Remic
“Good. At last. Now you’re talking. Outside, there’s a military film crew, Chorzaranalista wants us to make a... documentary. A film. About Greenstar. About the pollution they have wrought. She wants us to head for the Greenstar Factory Hub - and film it.”
“We can do that.”
“And Chorzaranalista wants you to write a poem about it.”
Svool stared at her, eyes narrowing. “Are you taking the piss?”
“Noo-oo,” she said, softly. “If you write a poem, and recite it in front of the Greenstar Factory, you’ll hit the news big time. You will get us more coverage across Manna than if somebody nuked a planet. It will make everybody take notice. Your fame will make the Shamans take notice. Then, everybody will have to sit up and watch and fucking do something to halt this aberration! Don’t you see, Svool? In the past, you’ve always used your skills for the purposes of entertainment. This time, you can actually do something to help. Something worthwhile. Something that will change people’s lives. Change the galaxy. Something that will make a difference, my friend.”
Svool considered this. If you do it, and it doesn’t work, then your reputation will be ruined. You will have sold out, used your wonderful God-given poetry, your genius, for something that flopped. And as any entertainer knows, with a big flop resting across your shoulders like some huge and terrible turd, well, that’s the kiss of death for any poet of perfection. Svool started to imagine a million scenarios where he lost his ability to be a poet; to perform; to change the world using personification. Hot-damn-and-bloody-buggery! What can I do? What shall I do? He eyed Lumar, and licked his lips. What must I do? For the good of the planet, the people, and the whole Galaxy of Manna?
Svool coughed. Quietly, he forced out the word, “Okay.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Yes.”
“Well done that man! So the guilt of Amaranth’s terrible predicament finally got to you, eh? To put your entire career on the line, your entire reputation as the Poet Master, your entire world and history! Wow. That’s some sacrifice, Svoolzard Koolimax.” She kept a perfectly straight face.
“I’m not doing it for Amaranth,” said Svool. His gaze had become intense.
Lumar was looking down, checking her pistols. “What?”
And then he spoke, and it all came out fast, all came in a rush as if the TWAT and SPUNK had taken hold of his brain and riddled his mind with mental diarrhoea. “I didn’t do it for Amaranth, Lumar, because all I can ever think about is you, and all I ever dream about is you, and all I ever want is you, and you can laugh and mock me but I don’t care, because I’m in love with you, Lumar, in love with every little smile and gesture and movement, and I know what you think, you think I’m a sexual athlete, but that isn’t anything to do with this, it’s not about sex, it’s about wanting to be with you, and spend the rest of my life with you, and when we get out of this shit, I’m going to use all my wealth, and all my contacts and all my personal mercenary warriors, to head to your homeworld and find these dastardly kroon ganga gangs, and we’ll find and rescue your sister, and kill all the bad kroona mafia, and you’ll never have to worry about anything ever again.”
He stopped abruptly, and realised he was staring at his feet. His feet were naked and cold. Svool realised he was shivering, quite violently, but it had nothing to do with the cold.
He looked up, a quick movement.
Lumar was staring at him, her mouth open, tongue flickering.
He looked down again.
There came a long, long pause.
Outside, heavy military engines were revving. Sergeant Hardspore probably wanted to be on his way. After all, there were heroic things to do and machine guns to fire and bad guys to blast.
Lumar gave a little cough. “You mean that?”
“Yes. All of it.”
“And... about rescuing my sister?”
“Yes. We’ll find her. We’ll snatch her from the claws of those nasty mafia gangster people.”
Lumar stepped closer. Svool could smell her scent, and it was an intoxicant cutting through his own rancid perfume. She looked deep into his eyes, and he felt himself lost to her, lost to her magic. It was like she had cast a spell on him, and the magic ripped out his brain and spinal column and beat him savagely over the head with them.
“I love you,” he said, speaking the words he once used to mock, as he left award ceremony parties with five girls on each arm, laughing and saying he would never, ever utter such a platitude...
Lumar kissed him. It was a good kiss. Like no kiss Svool had ever experienced.
“Come on,” she said, finally. “We have a lot to do, and time is running out.”
“Time until what?”
“Until Chorzaranalista tries to destroy the Greenstar Factory Hub.”
~ * ~
JENNY FOUND HERSELF ducking involuntarily, although to be caught in the direct blast of an E3 Accelerator would compress a person to the size of a bucket. Instead, Jenny, along with Zanzibar, Meat Cleaver and Nanny, were all picked up and accelerated down the single train carriage, where they connected with the forward bulkhead, leaving dents in the alloy, and all landed in a crumpled heap. The rear of the train bent and twisted and screamed, a huge section disintegrating as flowers of sharpened alloy splinters twisted and folded around themselves, chasing the ECO terrorists for half the length of the carriage...
But the train was powered from the front, and despite losing three sets of rear wheels and a twenty-foot stretch of compartment, the train carried on, pushed and accelerated down the tunnel by the force of the E3 blast. It was the train’s momentum which saved it. If it hadn’t already been in motion when the weapon struck it, it would have been slammed and crushed into oblivion...
Vasta disappeared in the wreckage and noise.
Jenny groaned, opened her eyes, and patted herself down in a sudden panic, checking for lost limbs or massive wounds. She rolled herself off a groaning Zanzibar, who opened one dark eye and regarded her balefully.
“Yeah, you’re okay, lady. Because you used old Zanzibar, here, as a bloody cushion!”
“Sorry, Zanz.” She helped the large man up. He stretched himself, and checked all his joints were working. Then he rolled his neck, with a rattling succession of cracks.
“Ouch. That hurt.”
He peered suddenly out of the rear of the train, and then strode forward as Jenny helped up a complaining Meat Cleaver and a curiously focussed, narrow-eyed, teeth-clenched Nanny. She cocked her D4 shotgun and scowled out of the open, wind-whistling rear of the train.
“What a mess,” said Zanzibar, holding onto a sharp edge of torn, tortured alloy and leaning slightly into the train’s vacated exhaust. He glanced back at what remained of the train. “We were lucky not to get pulped!”
“Yeah,” grinned Jenny, uneasily. “I think Vasta wanted us turned into sushi!”
“Well, the bitch missed.”
The remainder of the group spent several minutes composing themselves, and made a point of not mentioning Bull’s sudden demise. There was no way he had survived the blast from Vasta. He was dead as a butchered pig on a chopping block.
Zanzibar returned to the front of the train, and using bolt-cutters from his backpack, broke into the pilot cabin. It was unmanned, but Zanz checked the controls, his eyes roving over the digital map.
“Found anything?” said Jenny, peering over his shoulder.
Zanzibar shifted out of the way. “Yeah. Check the map. You’ll see there’s about twenty stops between here and the Factory Hub; and what we really don’t want is other people trying to get on the train. And possibly alerting Greenstar that we’re on our way. What I suggest is...” - and his finger traced another network, in faded brown, on the scanner - “there.”
“What is it?”
“Emergency tunnels. We jump our wounded ship, here, and head in on foot. That way, there’s no easy way for them to see us coming. Last thing we need is arriving with all our guns bristling
to find a battalion of Greenstar bastards waiting for us. Capiche?”
“Okay. You suggest getting a bit closer? Then we can pull the emergency stop...”
“No. No emergency stop.” Zanzibar’s eyes were hooded and serious. “We’ll have to jump this one.”
Jenny nodded, and the remainder of her squad stood at the back of the damaged train as Zanzibar went back to the cockpit and, with a squeal of tearing steel, wrenched the train’s underground map from its bracket. He jogged back to Jenny, swaying in rhythm with the jostling train, and grinned at her.
She stood, hair whipping around her face, and pushed her SMKK onto her back. This was going to hurt, she knew it. But then, everything of worth in life required one to suffer just a little bit of pain. Right?
“We good?” said Zanzibar, and Nanny, Meat Cleaver and Jenny all nodded.
“Let’s do it,” said Jenny, and she leapt...
The world spun in a chaos. Surprisingly, it did not hurt. Not at the beginning, anyway. Curled in a ball, the whole world became a spinning, bouncing craziness, filled with black and red and bright flashes. Jenny had leapt at an angle, missing the rails, but just as she came to a halt, her boots thumped the wall of the tunnel and she lay for a moment, her body shocked into immobility, her brain rushing to catch up with the fact she’d jumped from the blasted rear of a fast-moving train...
The sudden deafening noise retreated in corrugated echoes, and Jenny could only hear her own fast breathing. Then the pain hit her, and despite her body-armour, it felt like she’d done ten rounds with a supercruiser heavyweight. Pain drummed down on her body, beat her from every angle. The world was suddenly a cold, dark place that smelled of burnt steel and old engine oil. She lay for a while, wondering what the fuck hit her, and then she remembered - and remembered Vasta with that damn E3 Accelerator. She rolled onto her side, and heard the sounds of Zanzibar and the others coming back to life. She reached out, touched the old blackened wall, and slowly dragged herself to her feet. She ached in places she didn’t know existed. She gritted her teeth, thought about her father, thought about his vision, and decided it was time to man up.
“Okay. Zanzibar, Meat, Nanny. You all okay?”
Coughing and muttered curses met her query. Zanz flicked on the light on his SMKK, and a narrow beam illuminated the track. It was old, filled with dirt, but the rails were polished bright silver. Often used.
“You got that scanner?” snapped Jenny.
“This way.” And Zanzibar led the way, all four ECO terrorists jogging, weapons at the ready, alone with their private thoughts. Thoughts of Sick Note, Flizz and Bull all meeting a nasty, violent end. Thoughts that this, in all reality, was their last mission. But if they could help bring down the Greenstar Factory Hub; well, that was a fitting note on which to leave this mortal realm.
They ran. Jenny’s bruised and battered muscles groaned at her. Meat Cleaver ran beside her, panting, a little out of shape.
“You need to lay off the beer, my friend.”
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem in the future, do you?” he said, grinning in the darkness.
“Maybe not,” she conceded.
“Up here. Another klick, then we can get off this main track before another train comes along and crushes us into fish paste.”
“Such a way with words,” said Nanny, voice more of a growl, shotgun in her hairy fists.
Zanzibar shrugged, and winced in pain. The jump from the battered train had hurt him, Jenny could see. Hurt him bad.
They ran on, through gloom which smelled of oil and metal and a seeping, invading stench. Like sewers; like toxic waste.
After a kilometre, Zanzibar signalled, and they found a narrow vertical space in the tunnel wall through which to crawl. It was perhaps thirty feet thick, narrow, and filled with cobwebs and bugs. They squeezed through, moaning, and standing on the other side, they found themselves in a disused tunnel. Zanzibar’s flashlight illuminated ancient rusting track, and up ahead, several huge pieces of old timber lying across the rails.
“What is this place?” said Meat Cleaver.
Jenny shrugged. “Probably their original underground line. Then, in the name of progress and updating, they built a new, dirtier, shittier one for larger, dirtier, shittier trains.” She smiled. “Whatever. At least this track is unused.”
As if on cue, a train flashed past the gap through which they’d just squeezed. A hot wind rushed across the squad, and Jenny closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in hot stinking air. It was like somebody rushing across her grave. It was a digital haunting, a vision of the future. A vision of a private Hell.
“Come on.”
“We’re going to die down here,” muttered Zanzibar, his eyes still staring at the gap, even though the train had gone. They’d been a minute from being crushed and pulped. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
“I can live with that, as long as we take those Greenstar bastards with us,” said Jenny, and set off, her own SMKK flashlight leading the way.
~ * ~
THEY’D BEEN TRAVELLING for a couple of hours, and time itself had lost its meaning. But they heard voices. Shouting. A muffled stomping of boots. Zanzibar held up a fist and they halted, killing their lights. They stood there, amidst broken lumps of wood and concrete, amongst rat droppings and cobwebs and old pools of oil, and listened...
More voices. All muffled. They sounded harsh and alien. Then, gradually, the voices faded and were gone.
“Trouble, you think?” said Zanzibar.
“Yes. I reckon that was our friend Vasta, attempting to hunt us down. Probably jumped up a few stops, found the empty train, then back-tracked down the tunnels, searching for us.”
“Do you think they’ll realise what we’re doing?” said Zanz.
Jenny gave a curt nod. “Just a matter of time. So let’s get on. Let’s get this done.”
They travelled for another hour, jogging on, faces streaked with dirt and sweat. Again Zanzibar called a halt. Flashlights bounced around the walls. Again, they heard a distant shout. This time, there was no muffling.
“They’re behind us,” said Jenny, softly.
Zanzibar nodded, and the squad increased their efforts, following the old line on the scanner in Zanzibar’s hands.
“We’re getting close,” he said, after a few minutes. “This track emerges into what I presume is a deserted station; it’s built pretty close to the new Greenstar Factory station, as far as I can see. There must be some form of access. If not, we’ll have to create one. We’ve got enough damn bombs.”
Jenny gave a nod, and they carried on, labouring now, limbs weary, minds growing sour. Jenny could see so many flaws in their plan, so many opportunities for them to be discovered, for them to be killed, she could no longer bring herself to turn them over in her head. What if Vasta had simply called ahead? What if Renazzi Lode and a thousand soldiers were waiting? Of course, they would be. Lode had said it herself. Come to the Greenstar Hub. We want to watch you die. But a part of Jenny still hoped they’d found a backdoor - then all they needed was some central control centre, or support struts, or access to fuel dumps - and BANG! Goodbye Greenstar Factory. After all, Zanzibar carried enough HighJ in his “special pack” to send a city skywards.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit and shit.”
“What is it, Jen?”
“This fucking place. Our fucking plan. We’re just too dumb to be doing this. What are our chances of success? Fucking minimal, is what. We’ve steamed ahead with an arsenal of weapons and not really thought this through. Even if we approach through the station, they’ll know we’re coming from that direction. Come on. Follow me.”
She led the way, and in a few minutes they emerged into the old, deserted underground station. They halted, waving their weapons about the station, then hoisted themselves up onto a fire-blackened, dusty platform. They searched the three small buildings they found there, each one empty except for overturned, rusting chairs, a smashed desk and some old cabinets
full of mouldy paperwork.
They stepped back out, onto the platform, boots thudding hollowly. “What now?” said Zanzibar.
Jenny pointed with her SMKK. Above one of the buildings was a ventilation shaft. “Get me up on that roof,” she said, and Zanzibar hoisted her up. Her fingers found a grip, and she hauled her legs over the edge; then, she reached down and pulled her three squad members up behind her.
Using her combat knife, Jenny prised off the grille. Behind it lay a dark shaft, containing piping and optic cables. She grinned back at Zanzibar. “Let’s do some exploring.”