by Sean Allen
She jumped. The barrels of the preacher’s guns glowed red as the portmaster mashed the triggers back to their stops. The slides on each big cannon snapped back and forth and spent casings turned the staircase into a glittering fountain of golden metal. An arc of bullets cut past the tip of Dezmara’s left boot as she pulled her legs up toward her torso. The portmaster had overcompensated and aimed too low. It looked like Dezmara’s luck was going to hold out just a little while longer.
She was still howling her attack cry through the kranos as she flew through the air. Dezmara spun the blades forward in her hands and then viciously swooped them across her body in opposing directions—the right weapon slicing down and the left upward. She felt the slightest resistance in the handles as the blades met the hardened outer casings of the preacher’s arms and then the scythes sliced cleanly through in a spray of fluid. Severed pins, sliced springs and sheared cogs joined the preacher’s severed limbs, still loosely clutching the machine guns, as they spilled onto the stairway and tumbled to the plaza. With her arms wrapped tightly across her chest and the blades curled to each side, Dezmara somersaulted over the defanged preacher-bot and into the tunnel behind him. To minimize the pain to her injured leg and ribs, Dezmara allowed her momentum to continue forward as she hit the ground and she launched into a dive-roll, whipping the blades back along her forearms so she could use her closed fists to guide her head to the ground. She stood with her arms slightly bowed out to her sides and her chest heaving from exertion. Now that her attack was completed, the pain in her leg returned and the cavern began to spin. Her coat was ruined thanks to the preacher’s gunfire, but she’d be damned if she was going to cut it to pieces to stem the flow of blood from her thigh.
She turned and walked casually toward the back of the amputated bot as it spun quickly around to face her. The only thing it could do now was attempt to run her down, but it sat idly at the edge of the stairway and didn’t move. Dezmara knew the portmaster was watching from a camera mounted somewhere in the plaza, and she assumed that since the machine wasn’t charging her, he had something to say. She stepped up on the sloped track and walked forward until the kranos was level with the preacher’s shattered, empty eye. She twirled her right blade forward and was poised to strike when the bot spoke.
“You’ll pay dearly for destroying the preacher!” the portmaster’s voice growled through the three dark slits on the machine’s wedged face. Dezmara slashed downward then across and returned her blade to its sheath, but the sardonic speech continued. “You think you’ve won? You have nowhere to go, Ghost! I’ll hunt you down and kill you, and everyone in the universe will know that I defeated the mighty Ghost. You will die on Luxon!” The portmaster let out a guttural laugh and Dezmara could almost see the torso of his mechanical puppet shake as he roared somewhere on the other end of the com unit. Dezmara kept quiet as she pulled the black strips she had cut from the preacher’s coat tightly around her leg and then tied them off. The pressure hurt like hell, but the portmaster’s egomaniacal cackle made her mad enough that she didn’t care. Now that the wounds on her leg had been taken care of, Dezmara unsheathed her right blade again, spun it forward in her hand, and sliced the air in front her with a swish before returning the weapon to its hold in one swift move.
The preacher fell silent as the portmaster stared through his camera for the resulting damage from Dezmara’s blow, but nothing happened. The machine erupted into another bout of laughter as she hopped off the side of the tread. She clapped her hand over her ribs and let out a small grunt of discomfort as she landed and headed for the stairs. She was in a considerable amount of pain; her helmet was gouged and scratched, her flight suit torn and her jacket riddled with holes, but she was smiling from ear to ear beneath the kranos. She had made it down five steps when the laughter stopped abruptly, followed by a heavy clank on the stairs behind her. Dezmara continued her controlled march as the head of the preacher-bot wheeled by, pinging and clunking as it hopped and turned end over end and sped down toward the plaza. She held up her hand so the cameras were certain to see it clearly and extended her middle finger as the head was passing; and then she let out a painful, but very satisfying, laugh of her own.
She knew her moment of humor would be short lived as she surveyed each of the six doors in view of the kranos and the scores of people waiting to somehow get through them. The crowd was less frantic now that the gunfire had stopped, but there wasn’t a soul in Luxon’s fabled marketplace that didn’t want to run for the nearest ship in the dockyard and escape through the great gate. Throngs of travelers stretched out from the impenetrable doors like masses of writhing insects as they pushed, pulled and crawled over each other in hopes of getting out alive.
She tried to raise Simon again, just in case, but there was still no response. The kranos highlighted the door that led to dock six and promptly reminded Dezmara that it was virtually impregnable. A zoomed view of the key pad appeared with the information that there were literally millions of possible code combinations. “Dammit, Simon, where the hell are you? I can’t do this alone—I’m no hacker!” She was going to need another plan, and the only thing that came to mind was fighting through the rioting crowd and skewering the keypad with one of her blades; hoping it would short-circuit the combination. “C’mon, girl—that shit only works in cheesy action stories—this is the real world…but what else are you gonna do?”
She sighed heavily as she stepped over the lifeless bodies of the civilians the portmaster had killed with the preacher-bot. Swirls of blue, green, red, and black mixed together on the floor, and her boots sloshed on the ground as she jogged through the pools of blood. The sight was a grim reminder that the portmaster was still in control of the game and he intended to kill her in order to win. Dezmara didn’t know how he had found out that she was Human, and at the moment she couldn’t think too much about it—right now she had to get the hell out of Luxon with her life. It didn’t take long for Dezmara to cross the plaza and reach the wall of bodies backed up from each door and tangled together like a mass of dense, writhing weeds.
“This is hopeless,” she sighed. There was no way of getting through the crowd without using force, and she knew better than to try that—these people were like cornered animals and it was very likely that they would respond violently if she barged in and started shoving. She knew time was wasting and her heart raced faster as she looked over her shoulder at the wreckage of the preacher-bot. Dezmara wondered how long she would have to wait before the portmaster sent more of his goons to track her down and kill her; then six shapes bolted through the opening in Gamuun’s chest and started down the stairs.
“Dammit!” she cursed and then turned again to look at the crowd blocking the access to her ship. If only she had one more bullet left for the revolver, she could fire it into the air. That would make them scatter and she could hope that she wouldn’t be trampled in the hysteria. As it was, the blades would only be useful if she felt like slicing through several hundreds of mostly innocent people to get to a portal that she probably wouldn’t be able to open anyway. The situation was beginning to look bleak.
Avoiding gunfire from one enemy was difficult enough, but dodging bullets from six of them was impossible. She could dive into the crowd and try to disappear, but the portmaster had already proved he didn’t care who he killed in order to get to her, and she didn’t want innocent blood on her hands. It looked like the portmaster was right: she was going to die on Luxon, right here in the market. She spun around to face the rushing attackers and loosed the blades from their sheaths. If it was time to die, she wouldn’t fall without a fight. She felt the small sparks of animal energy shock her muscles again as her breathing became heavy, and her mind filtered out everything else around her except the battleground of the plaza and her oncoming foes.
The kranos detailed the powerful guns that each goon carried. She spun the blades into attack position and leaned forward, balanced on a razor’s edge, ready to launch herself into a d
ead sprint and speed to her end; then she heard a soft noise drift through her barrier of concentration. It was distant and it hardly registered against the intensity of her focus at first, but it steadily beckoned for her to return. It was a pleasant sound, like a beautiful harmony hummed on a warm autumn day in a peaceful place, and it occurred to Dezmara that a sound like that didn’t belong here in Luxon; certainly not in the present situation. And just like that, her rational mind took over and she stumbled forward—shaking off her war daze and turning to find Lilietha tugging gently at the tatters of her flight jacket.
“Ghost,” she said calmly, “come with me.”
“Lilly, get the hell out of here”
“We don’t have much time and you’re not listening again,” the little girl said sternly. “Now follow me.” Lilietha stared at her with unblinking, oval eyes and held out two long, blue fingers. Dezmara hesitated for a moment and then quickly slid her blades to their catches before taking Lilietha’s spindly digits and hurrying after her. “Stay down!” Lilietha cried as she tugged on Dezmara’s arm, and they banged into the outer perimeter of the crowd. Dezmara squatted as low as she could and the muscles in her legs, not to mention the wounds, burned as she and the little girl wound quickly through the shuffling bodies. Aside from throwing a few strategically placed elbows and bumping several crazed marketgoers out of their path with her shoulders, they were making their way rather quickly. Dezmara was impressed: she would never have thought that getting lower to the ground might help her navigate through the mob. Dezmara’s mind raced as she tried to figure out how Lilietha could possibly help her or where they were going. She was about to stand up, pull her to a stop, and ask just what was going on when they broke into a small clearing. They were behind the statue where Lilietha had had her blanket of goods when Dezmara first arrived. Lilietha stopped where the giant’s back foot met the wall and smiled up at her.
“Lil, what the hell’s going on? Why’d you take me back here?”
Lilietha let out a small giggle and shook her head. “What do you see, Ghost?” she asked as she looked at the statue’s enormous foot.
“Kid, I don’t have time for games! These people’ll kill anyone to find me and they’re headed into the crowd right now!”
Lilietha was still smiling warmly as she continued to stare at the wall while Dezmara gave her panicked lecture.
“I’ve gotta get outta” Dezmara stopped suddenly and craned her neck forward as she peered into the dark space between the wall and the arch of the Triniton’s foot. There was enough space to slide in sideways and Dezmara keyed up the dark-vision on the kranos to reveal a small door. There it was—her way out!
“That gizmo sure is neat,” Lilietha said while pointing a suction-disked finger at the kranos, “but you still have to remember to look with your eyes, Ghost!”
Dezmara’s heart jumped and an uncontrollable smile pulled her lips back. She wanted to reach down, scoop up the strange, blue little girl, and hug her, but before she could turn from the dark space, the kranos identified a keypad similar to the other doors leading to the dockyard. There was no way she could crack the code without Simon and the Ghost’s mainframe computer. She was in the same exact spot: trapped with the portmaster’s bloodthirsty henchmen close behind, except this time she was out in the open.
“Lilietha, I can’t break the code on this door, and now we’re in the open,” she said with a hint of sadness. “I’m sure the portmaster’s seen you helping me…you have to run back into the crowd and hide and soon as I’m…as soon as this is over and the doors are open, you have to get out—I don’t know how, but you have to leave Luxon!”
Lilietha let out another giggle. “Ghost, the portmaster’s cameras can’t see us where we’re standing, that’s why I set up my blanket here. And the code to the door is 1967TB.”
If she could have seen the look on Dezmara’s face it would have matched the kranos perfectly—large round eyes and a small mouth that fell slightly open in complete amazement. “How did you? What is this door, and how’d you?”
“There are doors and passages all over the station. You probably saw a couple in Buego’s and didn’t know it. The portmaster uses them to sneak up on people and steal things from ships in the dockyard, so be careful—he could be watching.”
“How’d you know the combination?” Dezmara asked with awe.
“I heard a couple of the pickpockets talking about it after you went to The Boneyard.”
“They didn’t happen to mention the code to the great gate too, did they?”
“Sorry, Ghost,” she said and shrugged her little shoulders.
“Thanks, Lil. You saved my a I mean…you’re a life saver, kid.” Dezmara paused for a moment and she felt something overwhelm her that she had never felt. Before she had given it any thought, she blurted out the first thing that came to her, “Lil, do you wanna come with me?”
“Thanks, Ghost, but I belong in Luxon. Maybe one day we’ll meet again when you’re not so busy and we can play together.” She smiled her warm smile and Dezmara found herself wondering what a little girl would do while she burned around the universe searching for Humans and found trouble around every star. She had enough problems keeping the peace between Simon and Diodojo.
“Yeah,” Dezmara said, “if I make it outta here, I’ll definitely be back. I have a complaint to register with the management.” Dezmara readied herself to jump into the arch of the statue’s foot when Lilietha stopped her.
“Ghost, remember—when you need protection,” she said and pointed to her forearm again. Dezmara had completely forgotten about the button on the vambrace and the purported protection it offered; but, given the discovery of the door and combination, she was willing to take Lilietha’s word for it.
“Right,” Dezmara said and then she paused. “Will you be okay?”
“I’m safe here. Go and find what you’re looking for.” Lilietha winked at Dezmara and then turned and walked back into the crowd.
Dezmara jumped into the crevice and faced the small doorway hidden in the shadows. The keypad beeped six times as she punched in the combination, and the door lurched backward with a hollow boom before grinding slowly to one side. The opening was small and Dezmara had to double over at the waist to squeeze through. Once inside, she found herself hunched over on a metal grate with a small down-ladder leading to a stone pathway like all the rest in Luxon. She slipped her arms over the steep rails and slid down to the ground without touching a single stair. The high-pitched ring of metal joined in harmony with the soft thud of her boots on the rock as she touched down and immediately unsheathed her blades. Much to her relief, the cave was big enough for her to stand, and she hit the ground running all out in the direction of the dockyard.
The dark-vision was still up in the kranos and it was scanning for cameras even though Dezmara had a hunch that the portmaster didn’t much care to see what was going on in his own secret passages. Even if the kranos did identify any cameras, it didn’t matter—this was the only way Dezmara had left to run. She saw several large cargo doors lining the walls of the bore as she sped past. She surmised that they were used for distributing goods to the different areas of the station—weapons to the armory, mechanical parts to the machine shop, and liquor to the store room in Buego’s. The channel ended at a portal similar in shape and size to the ones she had passed along the way, and fortunately, it didn’t require a code to exit.
She had no idea what was beyond the barrier, but based on the distance and direction she had run, she was somewhere below the dockyard. She repositioned her grip on the blades, took a deep breath, and then touched the sensor to open the bulwark. She crouched low against the side of the tunnel to present the smallest target possible as the portal slid open. A rush of warm, stale air sped from behind her, whipping the edges of her flight jacket briefly before fading into the cold emptiness that lay ahead. A metal grating, made in the same fashion as the platform at the entrance to the tunnel, only much larger, ext
ended several hundred yards in front of her. She was slowly standing up to look around when a familiar mark caught her eye. There, etched into the grating in front of her boots, was a large number six.
Vertical trusses with small spaces between them enclosed the platform, and a ceiling made of solid metal panels ran above her. Dezmara knew where she was the moment she saw it—she was on a smuggler’s platform that ran directly under dock six. Somewhere at the end were several hinged ceiling panels and a cargo elevator with a ladder or two that led right to the Ghost. The passage was perfectly disguised as part of the support structure of the dock and impossible to notice on approach to the landing pad.
“Sonofabitch!” The sight stoked Dezmara’s hatred for the portmaster, and she made her way down the platform as quickly as she could without making too much noise. The kranos identified a ladder ninety meters away on the left, and just as Dezmara decided to push herself for more speed, a blast of large caliber machine gun fire erupted on the deck above her.
“Simon!” she cried as she surged forward, ignoring the ache in her side and the burning in her leg. She jumped onto the ladder from several feet away and landed more than halfway up. The hinged tile over the ladder had been removed and lay open on the dock overhead as she glided upward from rung to rung. She stopped short of the opening and touched the side of the kranos. The right eye port telescoped outward and then the lens detached and snaked through the square opening on a silver, flexible tube ringed with dark grooves. The kranos buzzed as Dezmara rotated the extension for a complete view of the situation.