Death Drop (The D-Evolution)

by Sean Allen

  She heard the city engineers had discovered particularly rich tolocnium deposits, and Trillis had been drifting off the southern end of the Adronos Field for several months now. Being a runner put you in a good position to hear all sorts of things—especially when it came to Trillis—and since Dezmara’s life revolved around snooping for information on Humans, she heard a lot. The problem was that sometimes the information she heard was either completely fabricated or out of date, and she couldn’t help but hold her breath as she approached the gliding belt of silent stones. The small curl of black hair resting on her forehead fluttered as Dezmara cracked her lips to one side and let the air escape from her lungs in relief. Trillis was floating directly ahead of her on the opposite side of the field, and she throttled back the longboat to size up the task ahead of her.

  She had never seen it before—there had been no need to go there until now—and the sheer immensity of Trillis was unbelievable. Its two halves were wide open, opposing city spacelines spiking at each other like disfigured teeth on a grotesquely stretched mouth. The tubes circling the hub were moving methodically over the asteroid belt, plucking the minor planets with the most dense tolocnium deposits from the hovering sea of rock, like the tentacles of a gargantuan beast picking the sweetest meat from its helpless quarry. Dezmara watched with keen interest as a door at the end of one of the tubes opened and several protrusions slowly emerged from inside. Giant latticed fingers flexed from the bore and extended on enormous, sprocketed joints driven by heavy chains. Dezmara could almost smell the feet-deep deposits of oil and dirt caked around each cog as the blackened links marched single-file around the spinning teeth. Ribbed sections on the underside of each digit, marred by the gritty exterior of asteroids and years of use, flashed silver in the faint starglow before clamping down on a massive rock and slowly retreating back inside the tube. “That’s it,” Dezmara said. “That’s the way in.”

  She tightened her harness and throttled up slowly, carefully picking her way through the boulders. Her angles of approach were deliberate as she swayed, weaved, and hovered like a mosquito stalking an iron mammoth. Dezmara had guessed correctly which rock was going to be pulled next from the field and transferred to the refinery. It was the biggest in a dense cluster of asteroids that drifted lazily toward the tube, and large, dull flecks of golden ore could easily be seen on its pocked and craggy surface. She waited for the tubers—the pilots in charge of operating the tubes from inside the hub—to commit, and as the monstrous fingers crept slowly from the hollow darkness of their cannulic sheath, Dezmara aimed for the center of the asteroid and accelerated hard.

  She didn’t know whether the tubers would be able to distinguish a ship the size of the longboat flying among the millions of boulders and smaller debris, but Dezmara wasn’t taking any chances. The big rock being clamped and hauled back inside the city was completely shielding her from view of the hub as she engaged the landing skids.

  The asteroid filled her view as she continued to charge. Dezmara spun the helm to the left as a rogue boulder arced across her path, and the longboat danced away at the last second. The backdrop of the stone she was trying desperately to get to was making it hard to see anything else of the same color—which happened to be everything inside the Adronos Field. The immensity of the mechanical claw made it look like it was moving slowly, but the readout in front of her was telling a different story. It was retracting quickly, and if Dezmara didn’t do something fast, her cover would disappear and she might lose her only chance to get inside the city walls.

  Blue glowing numbers hovered in thin air beside her and marked the distance to her target. She was in the final stages of her maneuver and there was no turning back. If another asteroid came at her, she wouldn’t be able to get out of the way. Ten meters. Five meters. One meter.

  Dezmara wrenched the throttle back and cranked the engines straight up on their swivels. The bow of the longboat swept up in a smooth curve as she feathered the accelerators. The landing skids kissed the surface of the boulder, and Dezmara jabbed her finger into the glowing ether beside her. Smoky, blue ripples fanned out from her finger tip as four loud booms shook the hull.

  Zuuuuurrrt-zuuuuurrrt-zuuuuurrrt-zuuuuurrrt!

  The ratcheting vibrations of the screw-head grapples Dezmara fired into the asteroid hummed up their cables, through the hull, and into the pilothouse. She killed the engines and then sighed loudly. All she had to do now was ride the conveyor into the hub, get out of her ship and slip into the city without being noticed, find Fellini, bypass who-knows-what security measures without any technical backup, rescue Simon and Doj, steal another ship, and get out of a place that doesn’t allow anyone to leave. “Simple,” she thought as she glided silently into the tube.

  Dezmara didn’t see the outer door close behind her. She was facing straight up, strapped into the contoured, full-body brace that supported her from head to toe as she stood at the helm. The mechanical fingers gripping the asteroid she was hitching a ride on were mounted just inside the door, and as they drew inside the tube, the first two digits on each latticed frame locked into place and swung perpendicular to the walls. The ribbed plates of metal on the topmost section swiveled back on hinged joints to stay in contact with the sample as the fingers held it squarely in the center of the bore. “I wonder how long the ride will take?” she thought as she waited for the sounds of the conveyor to whir below her.

  A low hum filled the tube and Dezmara smiled. Her plan was working brilliantly so far. She slid the kranos over her head, and as the display flashed on, her smile faded—something was wrong. The longboat trembled as the groaning of stressed metal joined the rising thrum of the conveyor. The trembling exploded into teeth-rattling convulsions and the bore filled with the terrifying sound of an entire ocean heaving its mass into the air and speeding down to crush the tiny ship. The fingers holding the asteroid in place were straining against their chained joints and just as they collapsed, Dezmara realized her grave mistake. The asteroids weren’t moved to the refinery by conveyor: they were sent spinning and crashing up the tube like vacuum propelled, unshackled wrecking balls. She was hopelessly tethered to the implement of her doom, chained to a front row seat in the theater of her own destruction, and Dezmara had locked the manacles herself.

  The humming outside of the ship roared to an unbearable volume, and Dezmara reached her hand up toward the side of the kranos to block it out, but her arm flailed wildly through the air as the asteroid slammed into the sides of the tube and tumbled on every axis. She finally managed to reach the noise canceling controls on her helmet, but the silence was almost as agonizing as the booming outside the hull. Her mind screamed curses and warnings as it projected gruesome action footage of her fragile body being crushed between the hull of the longboat as it collapsed like a tin can. All it would take was for the boulder to strike the tube a certain way and—WHAM!—Dezmara’s soft innards would lubricate the inside of the ship like jelly between two pieces of flattened bread.

  The endless impacts jarred her bones, and each one spun the rock in a different direction. The changes in acceleration whipped her against the harness without warning and with such tremendous force, Dezmara was sure she could feel her limbs and neck start to tear away from her torso. The bore was lighted—probably so it could be seen on a dusty monitor somewhere in the hub in case of a malfunction, but otherwise ignored—and the flash of the dull yellow orbs passing the viewing panes streaked across the backs of her eyelids like she was a dizzy drunk who had stared too long at the sun. The crashing and spinning was frapping her body, and an uncontrollable wail bubbled up from her gut and seeped through her clenched teeth.

  “It has to end!” she thought. “It has to end—I need it to end!” Dezmara didn’t know how much more she could take, and just as she was thinking that being crushed inside the bore would be quick and painless, the asteroid rolled over and she caught a brief glimpse of something other than the smooth, dark walls of the pipe. Her pleas had been hear
d. The ride up the tube was going to end, all right. The asteroid was going to slam full speed into a huge spike, and the cruel gods of fate and physics were directing the boulder in just the right way so that the massive prong might skewer the longboat. As Dezmara glimpsed the protrusion, she couldn’t help but wonder if her entire assault on Trillis was being watched throughout the city on giant screens with a small fortune in tolocs waiting to be won or lost based on this very moment. Whatever her odds were, they weren’t good.

  The rock passed from the tube into a circular room with a large, armored cylinder at its center, where the chisel-pin was mounted. The dented and gouged plating around the shaft reached from the ceiling down past the spike and stopped well short of the floor to reveal a corkscrew with broad shelves that flared upward to catch the huge pieces of fractured stone as it twisted. The floor was slanted down, with a hole in the center to allow the shaft to pass through, and the ceiling had a similar opening hidden beneath the armor casing.

  The longboat missed the spike by a few feet. Luckily, Dezmara still had the mute button depressed on the kranos: the horrible crash of the asteroid smashing into the chisel-pin would have made her ears bleed. The force of the concussion ripped the breath from her chest and starbursts exploded in her vision. The longboat jostled hard, creaking and groaning as the rock cracked beneath its keel and fell away—jerking the thick, portside grappling cables from the hull like they were nothing more than cheap twine.

  Dezmara was still attached to a large piece of asteroid, and as she tumbled through the air toward the convex floor, she wondered how many more times she could cheat death. The chamber was enormous and it seemed to take forever to fall from the pin. Dezmara thought of Simon and Diodojo somewhere in the depths of Trillis, and she hoped with every bone in her body she would live to see them again. At that moment, if they even existed, Dezmara would have traded every single Human in the universe to be with her friends again; and then the wheelhouse of the longboat collapsed on her with a banshee shriek of distorted metal and broken glass, and everything went dark.

  ***

  The extraction mechanism in the center of the hub was a simple but effective device. Fragmented chunks of asteroid fell from the chisel-pin to the floor, where gravity worked to deliver them to the blades of the screw. The armored sheath surrounding the upper portion of the machine was tiered, and its sections extended down to enclose the pile of rubble and keep it from spilling over the sides as the auger twirled its demolisher’s dance. High above, through the ceiling and towering over the next chamber, was the motor that drove the contraption and hauled the ore up to the rail cars to be towed away and hammered into smaller pieces by the Gamoratta’s slaves.

  The motor car had a sleek shape with several rows of lights on every side that struggled to burn through the film of dirt that crowded their lenses like a swarm of gritty insects. Its sides, bottom and top were made of thick alloy that had been carefully riveted in place at the seams, and the resulting grid of perfect nodules emblematized its industrial purpose. The machine was fixed laterally by two rectangular expanses of lattice that stretched from its undercarriage and beyond its sides. Two giant cogs sat in a machined slot at the end of each brace and meshed with notched tracks that lined both sides of the room like ancient tribal markings in a metallic cave. A smaller diameter sprocket was welded to each wheel and extended from their centers like toothy crowns, but these were not royal adornments for the potentate pieces of the operation; they were yokes for the master’s tether. The tines of the outer discs spiked out from between monstrous chain links that ran parallel to the lattice work and back under the motor car where fuel and fire commanded them to circle.

  The engine was a foreboding-looking contrivance with thick tubes of dark, riveted metal bending at right angles from its cast body like upraised arms punching through the roof of the motor car. Wires looped and curled from piston banks and charge splitters as unruly and tangled as hairs on a wild animal. The transmission had two gears, forward and reverse, and was mated to the bottom of the engine and tapered through the floor of the motor car, where it splined into the top of the auger. The outer diameter of the screw was notched with cogs that meshed perfectly with two vertical gears mounted to the lattice on either side and identical to the ones pressed into the walls.

  Jets of exhaust flame licked the haze above the roof as combustion-fired pistons spun metal shafts inside slickened bearings. Horizontal rotation of the screw was transferred into lateral energy through the gears of the cogs, and as the auger turned, the massive noduled wheels at the end of the lattice crept down the walls. The engine chugged and rumbled; chunks of asteroid poured onto a giant, sloped collar around the screw like thousands of angry ants from their mound as the whole apparatus descended, churning the rocks to the surface. An angled, spiraling cute encircled the collar and the fragments of ore tumbled around its tight curves, through its wide, flaring mouth, and crashed into the bed of a gigantic rail car. The whole contraption—twirling auger, cogged wheels on latticed arms driven by spinning chains, streamlined motor car with flames shooting from its top, the collar with spiraling chute, all of it—combined to form what looked like a vicious creature spawned in a galaxy completely run by machines.

  Of course, the drill didn’t run on its own. An engineer sat at the controls in front of the engine and stared through dirt-smeared viewing panes in the floor at the cascade of boulders spilling from the opening far below him. Even with the enhanced view of the action on the screen next to him, the overworked slave didn’t see the strange, crumpled form of a ship slide down the chute and slam into the pile of debris already deposited in the rail car. He was lulled into a stupor from tedious work and the droning of mechanizations.

  ***

  Dezmara could tell she was moving when she came to. The roof of the longboat was crushed to within inches of her head, and she struggled to reach the audio controls on the side of the kranos. Sound flooded back to her ears when she touched the button, and the high-pitched whisper of metal gliding across metal told her she was on a train of some sort. Dezmara knew the longboat had ended up on its side by the way her harness pulled at her body, and she had a feeling the door to the wheelhouse was impassable, but she engaged the dark-vision on her helmet and looked to the portal anyway.

  The hull had caved in from bow to stern on the port side of the ship. The door was ripped from its hinges, and in its place was the tip of an enormous boulder. “Okay,” she said, “not gettin’ out that way.” Dezmara slowly scanned the area around her, and she hadn’t gotten very far when the kranos flashed and highlighted a rectangular patch on the deck just off to her left. She put one hand against the bashed-in hull to steady herself and unbuckled her harness with the other. Dezmara scooted over the space between the crushed wall and the deck with her hands behind her on one side and her feet on the other until she reached the panel in question. “Thank god for maintenance access!” she said as she gripped the flush-mounted handle and lifted up.

  The latch on the access panel released with an easy click, and the door swung back on its hinges without so much as a squeak. Present condition of the longboat notwithstanding, Rilek struck Dezmara as the type of sailor who kept all of his gear ship-shape, and she was certain the area below deck would be free of clutter as long as the crash hadn’t dislodged anything. She ducked into the tunnel and crawled several feet to a T-junction where she continued to her left toward the bow. Everything was as she expected: gear stowed in neat storage compartments—half of them now supporting her as she shuffled on her hands and knees—which were latched tight to make way. Halfway down the maintenance passage, the kranos detected another panel to her left. This one was round with a heavy wheel-lock at its center, and based on its position, it was exactly what Dezmara was looking for.

  The lock spun freely and two arms connected to the wheel pulled away from the edges of the portal. Dezmara pushed on the hatch but it didn’t budge. She pushed harder, leaning into the door until the tr
eads on her boots lost their traction and slid down the inside of the tunnel. “Dammit!” she shouted and then gathered her legs under her for another go. She put one forearm on the door itself and gripped the wheel-lock in the other hand and gave one big, explosive heave. SCRAPE!

  The portal budged open a few inches, and she set her vision back to normal to get a different look. A dull, brownish light crept through the crack and the glistening whine of wheels on rails sharpened. Dezmara kept pushing on the door until, finally, there was enough room for her to squeeze through. She shimmied through the opening and got to her feet. She could see now why the hatch gave her so much trouble.

  Dezmara was standing on the sloping face of a tan-colored fragment of asteroid that was surrounded by towering mounds of its own pieces. Smooth brown faces of rock cut sharply into jagged edges where the once proud minor planet had been split apart. Two boulders piled on top of the longboat had come to rest in just the right position to partially block the hatch in the bow. She was out in the open in a valley surrounded by loose piles of lithoids hundreds of feet high that were held in place only by gravity. “This looks like an accident waiting to happen,” she said as she looked nervously up at the shaking stone mammoths before picking a line and dashing away from the decimated longboat.

  Dezmara bounced between the crevasses, clambering up rocks as chunks of debris and dust fell everywhere around her. She was charged with hope and anger, and her hands and feet moved nimbly over the stone as she sped upward. When she crested the top, Dezmara crouched low in the wind to catch her breath and take in her surroundings.