In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  His sister angled around, hearing his shout, then shoved her way through the scrum of bodies to throw herself into his arms. Duncan was overwhelmed with loathing for their captors as he caressed the scarred brand burnt into her shoulder. Thank God. I never thought I would see you again.

  ‘Duncan! When I saw people jumping from the gantry back there, I was so—’

  ‘I’ll never jump, and nor will you. We’re still Landors. No brand on our skin’s going to change who we are.’

  ‘Thinking like that will get you killed,’ said Willow. ‘We need to keep our mouths shut and our heads down, until we learn what this means for us. Our name’s as useless to us as our family’s money this far from home.’

  The metal deck under their sandals started to vibrate as the flying cage disengaged from the prodigious warship. With the rotors’ whine below growing louder, the transporter dipped from side to side, sending slaves sliding against each other. Only the density at which prisoners had been packed inside stopped Duncan and his sister tumbling to the floor. The two of them reached the craft’s mesh wall, clutching tight to the wire and trying to work out where they had ended up.

  Duncan held onto Willow’s hand; so tight it began to go white. ‘You stay close to me. Whatever happens now.’

  ‘We’re going to end up on a slave block, probably sold to different owners.’ She sounded panicked at the notion of being separated from him.

  His heart ached. So powerless. Sweet saints, just keep us together, that’s all I ask. I can bear this as long as I’m around to protect her. ‘I think we’ve both got the same owner,’ said Duncan, feeling the brand on his arm. ‘And it’s that woman with the whip, the princess… Helrena Skar.’

  ‘The bitch! She nearly blinded Carter.’

  ‘Only after she pulled the two of us out from the skels’ execution cell. She was making the point in front of her people that saving us wasn’t an act of weakness.’

  ‘We’re not animals, Duncan.’

  ‘I figure we’ve been traded like beasts. But for what work, that’s the question? When the princess was talking to the slave master, I thought I heard her say something about a mine.’

  ‘A mine? I thought there was nothing left to dig out of the earth?’ said Willow. ‘Out in the Burn they use slaves for everything. Farming, working in mills, serving inside a house. It’s a sign of status; the more slaves you keep, the grander a warlord you are.’

  ‘We’ve been heading south, not over the ocean,’ said Duncan. ‘I always thought the southern nations were said to be more civilised than Weyland, not less.’ He grabbed the mesh and hauled himself higher, catching a glimpse of the vast warship rising away behind them. Then the transporter entered a bank of haze, nothing visible through the murk. Above, the sun was just visible as a blurry orb of light through the vapour. ‘We’re still flying high. Feel how light we are. And that sun! It’s like standing next to a blacksmith’s forge in the middle of the summer. My skin’s prickling, even in the fog.’

  ‘We’re off the map,’ said Willow. ‘The speed that vessel must have been travelling. How far have we come?’

  ‘Far-called,’ agreed Duncan, ‘that’s what we are.’

  ‘Well, they must be every bit as rich down south as the records suggest,’ said Willow. ‘The size of that warship. The cost of producing such a monster would bankrupt the kingdom, even if we had the science to put one together…’

  ‘If you’d told me you’d seen that steel monster before we were taken, I’d have called you a liar.’

  Below them the haze turned thinner for a second, allowing Duncan to catch sight of a dark, cracked landscape as empty and featureless as a desert. The ground lay in shadow as it pushed up towards a fiery red surface, all steam and fury, the outline of a lake of immense size… a reservoir filled with undulating magma rather than water.

  Duncan whistled in amazement. ‘What the hell was that?’

  Willow pulled back from the transporter’s mesh side, shocked by what she had seen. ‘I think it was a volcano.’

  Duncan felt a moment of doubt. Have we travelled east across the ocean after all? ‘That’s the way I’ve heard the Burn described down there… empty and barren. Pools of fire as big as lakes.’

  ‘It can’t be the Burn,’ said Willow. ‘We’ve travelled thousands of times further than an ocean crossing. That’s what those pits of liquid we were imprisoned inside were for, I think. To cushion the pressure of extreme acceleration. The speeds we’ve been travelling at, we could have navigated half the world.’

  Duncan fought to hold down his misery. The terrible realisation that they would never see the fields and forests of home again. I have to keep strong, for Willow if no one else. Wrapped inside the haze the transporter suddenly banked. A wall of rock climbed up to meet them, the craft’s engines roaring as the pilot gunned the rotors and sent them diving below the ledge. Duncan’s first thought was that this was a mountain peak, spearing into the clouds, but they kept flying. He was mistaken. This was something far more bizarre. We’re passing underneath it! Duncan noted the rock had been studded with the black oblongs of antigravity stones. This was a vast chunk of ground, kept aloft high above the land by artificial means, a castle in the sky. What bizarre manner of people had taken the Weylanders as their property? Warships that could power across the sky at crushing velocities, a nation which could keep an island of rock hovering above the ground for its amusement? The transporter followed the curve of the stone, twisting and slowing, hovering in the air for a second, then launching forward towards a hangar cut into the rock’s side. Skids unfolded from the bottom of the craft. It touched down on a flat bare surface, a cavern lit by crackling electrical lights. Other transporters settled next to theirs, the whole hangar filling with a squadron of mobile slave pens. Wind from the craft stilled as their propellers slowed to a halt. A group of slaves appeared at one of the hangar’s cave-like entrances; a man in front, old and wizened and holding a walking stick. Duncan was struck by the slave’s appearance, like a biblical prophet, a saint come to lead them to a promised land. Except, a voice whispered inside him, you know this place will be the opposite of that.

  The old slave’s tired voice boomed out, echoed and repeated by speakers around the hangar. ‘My name is Thomas Gale. This is where your new life begins. Follow me to the assembly hall and I will tell you how to survive here.’

  At the rear of the transporter, its bow swivelled down onto the rock floor, becoming a ramp. Northhaven’s stunned and disoriented masses followed the other slaves into a rock-hewn tunnel, unadorned except for circular lights flickering and casting a wan illumination over the gloom. They were led into the assembly hall, a high-ceilinged chamber cut out of stone, its floor flat and smooth. Thomas Gale waited at the far end, raised on a granite platform. When he spoke, his voice carried over the heads of hundreds of prisoners gathered in front of him. ‘You are the property of Princess Helrena Skar and the mining of rocks similar to this one is how you will fulfil your duty to the Vandian Imperium that has enslaved you. This rock you stand inside is Station Forty-three. It’s mined-out, but acts as our base of operations. This will be your home until you die. Such rocks are ejected during the eruptions of the stratovolcano, the monster you will have glimpsed below on your flight over here. Your work is to capture ore-bearing rocks, stabilise them, mine them, and when they are mined out, send their remains to the ground below. How effectively you do this will determine if you are fed, and how well. It is hard, dangerous work. Later on today, experienced slaves will be transported here to begin your training in everything that you need to survive in the sky mines. Those who complete their training satisfactorily will eat. Learn well. Learn fast. Questions?’

  ‘Where are the guards?’ someone shouted out. Duncan tried to locate the voice, but it was impossible inside the echoing cavern. It had sounded suspiciously like Carter Carnehan.

  ‘Ah yes,’ smiled Thomas Gale. ‘Thoughts of escape. I remember those. The stratovolcano we ho
ver above is nearly seventeen miles high and four hundred miles in width. You will find a further thousand miles of dead zone surrounds us; where life is rendered impossible by poison gas venting from the volcano, pyroclastic flows and the rain of fire and rubble. Beyond the dead zone you will find two hundred thousand miles of the Vandian motherland. On foot, even unaccosted, you will die of old age before you are ever clear of the imperium. Beyond the empire lie countless thousands of countries that are completely dependent on the imperium for the metals and resources that sustain their civilisations. In all those endless miles, the penalty for aiding—’ he tapped the brand burnt on his shoulder ‘—an escaped slave is execution. The rewards for handing in escaped slaves are substantial… dead or alive.’ He gazed across the mob. ‘Do not misunderstand me. There are legions of heavily armed Vandians patrolling the sky mines’ perimeter. But they are stationed on the edge of the dead zone to shoot local thieves attempting to steal residual ore-falls. The legions of Vandia will happily kill you if they discover you trying to escape, but it’s a lot less effort to simply halt food and water supplies to disobedient slaves. You require two gallons of water a day merely to survive here. So you need to learn your place… the imperium has a caste system. All slaves are part of the fourth caste, hostile. Each caste has three levels – lower, middle and upper. You all start your service as lower-hostile. I’m middle-hostile. Upper-hostiles are the favoured house slaves you see trotting behind a Vandian. Work hard and survive and you might one day be promoted to middle-hostile. Anyone in a higher caste can order anyone in a lower caste demoted or executed without any more justification than their say-so, so never piss off a Vandian.’ His voice grew serious. ‘Those are the imperium’s rules. Here in the sky mines, on this station, we slaves have our own rules. If you steal another slave’s clothes or possessions, you’ll be beaten to within an inch of your life. If you steal another miner’s food or water, you’ll be thrown off the rock. Any slave who tries to murder or rape a fellow slave, likewise. Trust me, the stations that don’t have those rules aren’t places you want to land up. Follow the maintenance staff to a dormitory. If you have kin or friends among you, you can arrange to swap bunks to be with them. Having something to live for will help keep you alive. And staying alive will help us meet our quotas.’

  ‘Sounds like there’s not much apart from working hard and obeying orders that won’t see us executed,’ whispered Willow.

  ‘It’s a good thing our old man’s not here,’ said Duncan. ‘He might get ideas about rearranging the common law for the tenant farmers.’

  Willow glared at him. ‘Don’t you dare make light of this. The way these Vandians keep slaves is pure evil. Their nation has so much, yet they treat people like chattels. As backward as the league may be in comparison to these people’s science, our frigates carry orders to chase slavers across every point of the compass rather than let them ply their trade in sight of our shores. You ask yourself, who are the barbarians and which is the civilised nation?’

  The meeting chamber emptied, the prisoners marched out a hundred at a time, green-shirted slaves leading Duncan and Willow through the warren of stone corridors – identical; each new passage only differentiated by the numbers painted on its walls. Duncan made sure his sister stayed close to his side at all times, as though taking his eyes off Willow for a second might cause her to disappear. No, it makes sense for families to be kept together. Less likely to run. More likely to look out for each other and work for these pigs. It’s the ones with no one and nothing to live for that were throwing themselves to their deaths back on that warship.

  ‘So, I guess these passages used to be mine tunnels,’ said Duncan. ‘They look like the works that our old man financed that time on the border of Rodal. Do you remember? Up in the mountains…’

  ‘Hard to forget,’ said Willow. ‘It was the only time the house lost serious money on a venture.’

  Duncan nodded. People had lived in the world for so long there were no minerals left to mine, no fresh seams of resources to be found anywhere. No metals, no oil, no coal anywhere near the kingdom. These sky mines were a far cry from what Duncan had experienced in the Rodalian hinterlands. Engineers begging their sceptical father for more money and extra time to dig further and deeper, despite the fact that the tunnels and shafts were already at a depth where the additional gravity was like having to carry twice your natural weight with every step. Miners emerging exhausted and empty handed with nothing to show for their labours except the shovels and picks that they had gone down with.

  ‘When you dig a mine it’s always you who gets shafted.’

  ‘Maybe for us back home, but not here, though,’ said Willow. ‘That stratovolcano must be throwing out ore from the bubbling core of the world, deeper than any mine works can reach.’

  ‘God,’ said Duncan. ‘No wonder Vandia has the steel to build that warship. They must be the richest country in the world.’ He had to marvel at their ingenuity, wicked though it was. Vandia had even tap­ped the perfect resource to undertake the backbreaking, dangerous labour of working the sky mines. Slaves. Well, what was the point of being rich if you had to do the hard work yourself?

  It felt cooler inside the station than it had been outside on the transporters, but the heat still weighed down oppressively. Duncan’s tunic was soaked with sweat by the time they reached their dormitory – a large featureless oblong of a chamber, fifty cots on either side, iron beds with mattresses cut from some soft cork-like substance, no sheets or blankets or pillows. There were hollows in the wall with spigots and a foot pedal to release a stream of drinking water. Duncan and Willow took a turn at the nearest tap, slaking their thirst. The sky miner in charge of the dormitory was a man called Cannelle Ram, hailing from a country called Attijaf that Duncan had never heard of before meeting the man. He bore a calm, learned expression. As head of the dormitory, his advice to the new slaves was simply to learn what they could until their work assignments came down, duties to be allocated based on their previous trades. Their tutors were to be fellow slaves who had survived long enough to be counted old hands in the techniques of sky mining. Cannelle Ram began the task by calling for silence. He approached a blackboard where teams and quota numbers had been chalked up for the previous occupants of the station. He rubbed out the numbers and outlined the basics of sky mining for the new slaves.

  ‘Okay, all you greenhorns, listen up. Stratovolcanic eruptions are graded into seven levels of significance. Anything above a level three discharges material large enough for us to mine. Rocks are ejected at high velocity. Where an initial assessment of a rock shows promise, we intercept it with transporters, slow it down and attach antigravity stones to stabilise it at a neutral buoyancy. Then we land prospectors on top to confirm our initial appraisal, locate mineral veins and calculate where shafts and tunnels can be safely dug without causing fatal fracturing. Everything that follows is raw, backbreaking work.’

  ‘Why not let the rock land and mine it on the ground?’ Willow asked.

  ‘An intelligent question,’ said Ram. ‘Princess Helrena is the owner of more than just our sorry hides. She holds title to a sky mining territory, a sector of the firmament where she controls the imperial licence to mine what she stakes. There are similar territories on the ground that belong to rival nobles; minor houses, because surface mineral fall is not as valuable… all the ground worms are doing most of the time is panning dust-rain. They receive little, because, with the volcano left to its own devices, eruptions push ejecta mass higher than the sky mines can operate, where the sun’s hot enough to melt rocks, gravity so light the rocks can stay up there for months. There’s high-altitude cross winds fierce enough to drag them millions of miles, landing them somewhere other than Vandia. The empire will not allow that to happen, which is why we intercept ore-bearing rocks first. The imperium’s monopoly on metals is what keeps them wealthy. Rich enough to pay for nations to act as the empire’s lackeys and enforcers, rich enough to buy slaves to work the ro
cks. A mono­poly that allows the imperium to turn off the spigot of resources to any neighbour who might be tempted to try and seize control of the stratovolcano. The sky mines are Vandia. Without them, the imperium would be nothing. This is the original source of trade metals that reached you with the caravans and the travellers and the peddlers. The iron you haggled over back home left the empire centuries ago, acquiring scarcity value with every mile travelled away from the sky mines.’

  ‘What if we refuse to work?’ asked Duncan. ‘Demand freedom in return for our labours?’

  ‘A dangerous question,’ said Ram. He drew out a circle, sketching a smaller one inside, and then bisected the outer ring into twenty different segments. ‘A high-ranking member of the imperial family, one of the celestial-upper caste, controls each of these sky mines. Our territory is this one here—’ he filled in one of the sections, ‘—but the princess is one of many children. The imperium’s emperor is a mad old goat called Jaelis Skar who keeps a harem of hundreds of wives and thousands of feuding offspring. His children’s relationships mirror those of Vandian society – they loathe each other; they compete with each other; they plot and scheme against each other. Not a single mining force, but twenty separate ones. If our station stopped working we would be abandoned to die of thirst, while the sky mines of the princess’s siblings worked on, no doubt clashing to see how they could turn Helrena’s woes to their own advantage. The Vandian caste system, the slaves, the power, it is a web of internecine loyalties, shifting alliances and infighting. Everything designed to keep the emperor secure at the apex of Vandia, with the imperium at the apex of all nations. Vandia is power without limit and she maintains her grip with ruthlessness and cruelty. If that ruthlessness ever fails, Vandia is surrounded by nations who have endured millennia of subjugation, countries who would gladly step into the breach and assume the imperium’s mantle. It has happened in the past. Once the skels controlled the stratovolcano’s resources. Now they are little more than itinerant nomads and paid lackeys of the conquerors who overthrew their rule. History has many lessons to teach, and few of them are gentle.’