In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

‘Wash me,’ yelled Kerge, standing in the centre of the bed of corpses, his voice strangled and pained. ‘Water!’

  Carter grabbed the ring of canteens under the equipment bench, throwing one apiece to Duncan and Owen as he tore a cork out and tossed its contents across the gask. Uncomprehending, the other two did the same, Kerge’s wild trembling body calming as he was soaked.

  Owen watched the gask sink to his knees, moaning and whispering to himself. ‘Saints’ blood! What was that?’

  I guess father was right. ‘An angry gask,’ said Carter, watching the twisted young man wailing with some degree of sympathy. It wasn’t his fault – it was these fools’. ‘Pain makes gasks sweat something that sends them into a killing fury. Kerge needs water to wash it away and regain control.’

  ‘I thought the forest nation were peaceful,’ said Owen. ‘Good with machines and—’

  Anna’s transporter banked steeply and the four of them nearly spilled off their feet. They were still being pursued. Carter unlocked the rear door of the transporter’s cage, careful he wasn’t thrown out into the sky. ‘Toss the bodies over the side.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ wailed Kerge as he helped to drag his victims towards the craft’s open rear. ‘This is shameful.’

  ‘This is just survival,’ Carter gently told the twisted man, hauling a dead slave towards the back. ‘I reckon they would have pulled out every spine you’ve got, along with our teeth, to find out where our ground sensors are hidden.’

  ‘They have made a beast of me! They have made beasts of us all.’

  ‘I’ve seen cattle face down a wolf when their calves were threatened,’ said Duncan. ‘That’s just the way it is. You saved us all, Kerge. Think on that, if you have to dwell on something.’

  ‘Don’t speak of this,’ Owen told the other two men, assisting Carter and Duncan in lightening the transporter’s load. ‘Not to anyone back on the station. He’s the only gask the Vandians have taken. If they find out what he can do…’

  Carter saw the problem. The imperium didn’t even allow their slaves metal axe heads to fight with. The Vandians would have their own solution for Kerge, and it wouldn’t be anything good for their friend. With the last of the attackers’ corpses jettisoned, Carter was locking the transporter’s door when he heard a cannon-loud crack, then a second and a third report. His eyes darted around the sky, trying to locate the pair of dodging enemy transporters – but they were still weaving in and out behind Anna’s tail. Neither had the ordinance to account for the cannonade. As Carter looked on, humid clouds of vapour around them began to be punched through by black, bird-sized projectiles, hot steaming trails of smoke scratched behind each dart.

  ‘Brace!’ screamed Anna. ‘Brace for shield flying!’

  Carter had just processed their pilot’s words when the deck began to slide underneath him.

  ‘Grab the benches!’ yelled Owen.

  Carter and the others followed Owen’s example, arresting their slide as the vehicle’s angle of inclination increased. The transporter engine’s pitch changed; two of the rotors slowed, the remaining pair screeching angrily as they spun fast, close to burning out. Around them, the thick cloaking clouds of vapour were split by hundreds of flying pieces of rock. Most no bigger than coins, all burning white hot, bigger pieces crackling as they punched past.

  ‘It’s a proto-eruption,’ yelled Owen. ‘Hold on tight. We’re flying the transporter like a shield all the way back home.’

  ‘Saints,’ whispered Carter, digging his feet into the bench opposite and tightening his hold as the craft’s deck sloped even steeper.

  ‘Lucky,’ called Owen through clenched teeth. ‘If those dogs hadn’t chased us off, we might have been too close to the stratovolcano to survive this.’

  Yes, lucky. I guess this is what luck feels like, when you’re a slave.

  To the side, Carter saw the two enemy transporters angling away, heading for the safety of their own territory. The pattering of rocks against the underside of his vehicle grew louder, heavier, turning from a hail into an angry, blazing mad hammering. Off in the corner of the sky, Carter watched the nearest of the enemy transporters dip into a spin, smoke and flame pumping from the rear of the craft. Then, suddenly, the flames leapt higher and brighter, engulfing the transporter, tiny burning figures tumbling off the rear of the platform as though it was no more than a tree shedding leaves in autumn, before the craft was lost inside the thick cloud cover.

  ‘Fuel feed holed,’ said Owen. ‘It’s pumping out flammables like a cut artery.’

  Those sky miners had been coming after Carter and the rest of his party, looking to murder the Weylanders in a cold-blooded ambush. Still, he couldn’t find any pleasure in their fate. What choice did the slaves have? Back home they might have been labourers, mill workers or shopkeepers. Here, they were merely meat to advance the ambitions of their Vandian masters. A mangled whine sounded from below, an abrupt shaking, and then Carter’s craft started to shudder under his sandals.

  Duncan Landor twisted around to try and locate the vibration’s source. ‘Is that—?’

  ‘Propeller blown,’ Owen called. ‘Burnt out, or holed by ejecta mass.’

  The air was becoming increasingly inhospitable. The ubiquitous smog giving way to a hot, burning dust, stinging every piece of Carter’s exposed skin, clinging to his branded shoulder and scorching like hell. Anna Kurtain’s comments about how Carter had arrived to look after the pilot floated back into his head. She was going to save them all, with her flying; either that or send them all crashing towards the ground, where Carter’s present difficulties weren’t going to matter a whole lot anymore. Carter was nearly blinded by a steaming chunk of ejecta mass twice as large as their transporter. Passing yards from the craft on their port side, the rock’s surface whistled with escaping gases as it creaked and cooled in the air. It was followed by a drumbeat of smaller rocks against their slanted hull, the dying scream of one of their remaining rotors chasing the sound of the volley. Carter’s aerial platform started seesawing violently from side to side. He dug his feet and hands in deeper on the rapidly failing transporter. ‘Can we fly on two rotors?’

  ‘We can crash gracefully,’ said Owen.

  ‘There!’ shouted Duncan.

  Below them, the clouds had cleared enough to reveal the station’s roof, marker flags whipping around from the turbulence of the eruption. There was something docked in its lee – a Vandian warship, smaller than the Primacy of the Sky, but still close to the width of the station she was attached to. Carter just caught Anna’s words over the whining pitch of their last two propellers. ‘Not – enough control – to land – in the – hangar – we’ll ditch – on top.’

  Corkscrewing towards the station, the four passengers were whip­ped around. Hanging on desperately for dear life, Carter tried to keep the contents of his stomach down as they spun crazily, lashed at by the eruption’s opening salvo, the tiny craft aiming for the rapidly closing-in wall of rock. Ramming the station was their only chance. A miss would launch them into the magma-tossed inferno below.

  The maintenance train rattled above the rails at a fair old speed. Jacob, Sheplar and Khow had uncoupled the third car, leaving it behind with a small fortune in iron rails and repair equipment. They sped forward at a rapid clip; an engine car capable of dragging an entire train pulling just a single carriage. Forests that stretched to the horizon surrounded them on either side, the dark rise of a basalt mesa hiding the sinking sun. Khow had been able to get the engine car moving. The gask had climbed into the train’s cab, running his fingers over the dials, levers and control wheels and firing up the engine. Before they left, Khow had helped Jacob and Sheplar push a spare antigravity stone from the maintenance flatbed into the carriage. He had activated it, leaving it floating above the floor. After a few minutes it had grown as cold as winter ice on a lake, as Khow had known it would with no load to tax it. They’d laid Wiggins’ corpse on its flat surface, the constable stretched out, his arms crossed
by Jacob as if the policeman were the main attraction at an open casket funeral. Jacob could hardly bear to step in the back and sit with the body, with the guilt that he felt about the constable’s death. The old man would be alive if we had followed his instincts. Jacob tried to set his remorse aside. Khow had his prayer mat unrolled, a rough bamboo oblong embroidered with odd-looking flowers nested inside each other. He was on his knees fiddling with his calculator. Three times a day, as regular as clockwork.

  ‘You know,’ said Jacob. ‘In my time I’ve seen travellers come into town with religions that pray to the north, the east, the south and west. But I swear, I’ve never seen you go to your knees in the same direction twice. Is that all part of worshipping chance?’

  ‘It is not chance I bow to, manling Jacob. It is the great fractal tree, from which all branches flow. And the direction I face is the true direction of the universe. We are all required to move towards our true direction.’

  ‘Maybe we are, at that.’

  ‘And this is not prayer, as such. It is mindful consideration,’ said Khow. ‘The fractal tree extends as myriad branches and we must carefully choose the branches we walk. Especially when the numbers are so against us.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Jacob. ‘That’s a pity. I figure we could do with a prayer or two. Just enough of Landor’s coins left to buy third-class passage at Talekhard; the troopers meant to be protecting us aiming to kill us… and our children are lost on the other side of beyond. But we’ve got the three saints standing behind us, the great fractal tree, and enough wind spirits to fill a Rodalian canyon.’

  ‘We have our minds,’ said Khow.

  ‘And we have our hands,’ said Sheplar, glancing at the twin guns belted around Jacob’s waist. ‘Where did those come from? The guardsmen?’

  ‘No. From a dead man,’ said Jacob. But how much longer will he stay dead? ‘As long as he needs to,’ a voice inside answered.

  ‘A dead man,’ said Sheplar. ‘This is not a simple matter. I realised as much when we discovered that peculiar radio device. I do not think it wise to trust anyone in Weyland to assist us with our mission from now on. No, I do not think so.’

  ‘Fight to win and only fight what you understand,’ said Jacob. ‘And hell, we were running away to start with, right?’ He held a pair of fingers up. ‘Two stops. One to bury Wiggins, when we spot the first Weyland border flag fluttering by the trackside. The second to ditch this maintenance train in a siding close to Talekhard. We’ll walk in and do our damnedest not to look like a country pastor, a mountain flier and a gask, right up until we’ve booked a flight south.’

  Khow finished his prayer, or whatever he called the mantra. ‘You have changed, manling. I don’t need to examine the numbers on my calculator to know this – I can see the hardness around your eyes.’

  ‘Maybe being tortured gives you a new perspective on life. Losing a good man like Wiggins.’

  ‘No, it is more than that. A priest must witness the passing and share the sorrows of many of his people. It is as if you are forgetting who you are.’

  No. Sadly, I think I’m just remembering. ‘My wife was my anchor, Khow. My son too.’

  ‘Perhaps that is why you want him back so greatly… why you need him.’

  ‘No, that’s love – that and the fact it’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘He will be your anchor again, manling. But you should remember your love more. Otherwise you will not be the one that reaches him. Not your boy’s father. It will be someone else entirely.’

  Jacob grunted. ‘Did you ever consider the irony, that God created men so all-fired dangerous as yours, only to make you such pacifists?’

  ‘Why else would God cover us with spines and swell our barbs with neurotoxins, if not to teach us to live in peace with each other?’

  ‘Maybe it’s your females who are the fierce ones. Is there a Mrs Khow back home, waiting to brain you with a saucepan if you don’t return with Kerge?’

  ‘More than my son’s mother mourns his loss,’ said Khow. ‘Kerge is significant to our people – mathematically significant. He carries a golden mean.’

  ‘You are talking of prophecy?’

  ‘The weight of his presence is greater than anyone elses in our nation. It has always been so, from the moment of his birth. Kerge is the pivot around which we will swivel.’

  ‘Well, we’re following in his wake, right enough.’ And glad I am for it.

  ‘Your fate was bound to Kerge when you assisted him in Northhaven,’ said Khow. ‘And now I am bound to you as my son’s journey is bound to your child’s. Always has it been so around Kerge, from his very youngest years. He is a strange attractor.’

  ‘I don’t know about signs and portents, but I’ve had a bellyful of random chance, and of what people turn into when they follows their lusts.’

  ‘Those weapons are not yours,’ said the gask, indicating Jacob’s brace of pistols. ‘You should lay them aside.’

  ‘They’re my spines,’ said Jacob. ‘Maybe they’re how God is going to test me, too.’ And maybe I’m going to need to get real prickly again, real fast.

  ‘I can see the Weyland border flags,’ said Sheplar, calling from the front of the engine car. ‘But there are other eyes out there…’

  Jacob moved to the window. His heart quickened inside his chest when he saw the mesa’s flat top lined with hundreds of mega-wolves, each the size of a warhorse and each bearing the tall silhouette of a rider. A vast echoing blast sounded as many of the figures raised curled horns to their mouths. The signal to attack? How quickly can those monsters run? How fast can we travel if we drop our rear carriage? Jacob bolted to the cab’s rear, grabbing a rifle leaned against the wall. ‘I don’t see any tree trunks cut down forward of us, and the rails look intact.’

  Khow pushed aside Jacob’s rifle. ‘They do not mean to attack, look.’

  All along the ridge top, dog-riders raised spears with their right hand, then dipped them down in unison, their mounts joining the coyote wailing coming from the riders’ throats. The twisted riders struck their weapons fast against large round shields; the rhythm rising and falling eerily; plaintive, mournful, an ear-splitting beat of spears against shields.

  ‘Are they saluting us?’ asked Sheplar.

  Jacob clung suspiciously to his rifle. ‘They don’t even know who we are.’

  ‘Their song suggests otherwise,’ said Khow. ‘Can you not feel its power?’

  He could. Jacob could see the truth in the gask’s words. This inhuman hymn is for us; as little sense as that makes in the world.

  ‘Leave manling Wiggins’ body here,’ said Khow. ‘The dog-riders will bury him on the Weyland side of the border.’

  ‘They burn our people,’ said Jacob. ‘Mutilate our bodies.’

  ‘In the normal course of things, perhaps,’ said Khow. ‘But this is the way it is to be.’

  Khow slowed the train to a halt, and Sheplar and Jacob pushed the antigravity stone out of the rear carriage, leaving it hovering to the side of the track, stone and corpse both as cold as ice. Khow came to join them as the dog-riders passed down a switchback path along the ridge, a slow funeral pace as mega-wolves picked their way down from the heights.

  ‘We can stay and see him buried,’ said Khow. ‘We will be safe among them.’

  ‘I’ve buried enough good men in my life,’ said Jacob. ‘And I can surely hear Wiggins up there in paradise, the old man laughing his arse off at all of this foolishness.’ Jacob laid his hand on the antigravity stone’s freezing surface. ‘See you around, Stumpy.’ He removed the constable’s silver badge from his pocket and pinned it across his belt’s brown leather. ‘Let’s go.’

  By the time the train started rattling towards Talekhard again, the antigravity stone with Wiggins’ remains had been roped to two riders, pulling him sedately towards the border while the beasts formed up into a double line behind, the constable’s very own cavalry cortege. As the mounts came forward, they began a hyena-like chatteri
ng between each other. At a distance, you could almost mistake it for laughter.

  When the ground rose up to strike Anna’s transporter, it was as though the whole weight of the station had been picked up by a gargantuan hand and thrown full-pelt at Carter. There was a quickly stilled crack of splintering rotors; a screeching explosion of breaking metal, and then Carter was thrown sideways as the whole craft rolled over and over. A fleeting collision with Kerge’s body, before the rockface slammed into Carter, spitting him out to spin away from the velocity of the crash while a burning pain stabbed at his side. As Carter came to a stop he nearly passed out, but the burning hot rain scouring his face was enough to hold him back from unconsciousness. He tried to get to his feet, and was nearly failed by his body. Carter was gripped by a sudden desire to go to sleep, the heavy weight of tiredness ambushing him. Moaning in pain, he forced himself to his feet, rising up as though these were his first tentative steps. Their transporter had split into three sections. Anna Kurtain was in the open cockpit, struggling at an angle to release her belt and fall sideways. The young gask pulled himself away from the rock a couple of yards in front of Carter, moving to Owen who lay still. But of Duncan Landor there was no sign. It was as if the surface had swallowed the heir to Hawkland Park. Duncan couldn’t have been thrown into the sky, could he? The transporter had crash-landed near the centre of the station’s topside, too far from the edge to toss a man into the void. Carter stumbled towards the gask and Owen. He reached Owen a couple of seconds after Kerge, the gask turning the body over to inspect the man.

  ‘He is alive,’ gasped Kerge, ‘although bleeding badly from a scalp wound.’

  ‘Looks worse than it actually is,’ said Carter, gently pulling back the matted hair. He glanced towards the nearest air vent, a door in its side leading down into the station’s tunnelled-out heart. ‘Are you up to heaving him out of this storm?’

  The two of them levered Owen up onto Kerge’s shoulder. The gask shuffled forward with the man’s weight; Kerge limped badly himself, but he did the job without complaint. A hardy, noble young man for sure; however many twists in the spiral separated his people from the Weylander’s. You couldn’t ask for better man at your side. Carter crossed to Anna, beating at her belt, the locking mechanism holding her into the pilot’s seat and jammed by the crash. She was dangling off the floor, looking fairly trim for someone who had rammed them into the station with just two dying rotors left working.