by Stephen Hunt
‘Dear God!’ said Noah. ‘If it had enough velocity, it’d be ignored – straight up into the trade winds, dragged out for millions of miles, maybe!’
‘And we’d be sitting pretty on it,’ said Carter. ‘From what I’ve heard, plenty of those rocks stay in the air, a navigation hazard to aircraft looking to save fuel at maximum altitude. Other rocks bomb into the sea. But either way, we’d have a transporter to reach the ground safe. One of the imperium’s neighbours would do for me. We can set down somewhere remote, swipe local clothes off a village clothes line to cover our slave brands, then head for any city big enough to have an airport where we can work passage on a merchant carrier. Even if we never see Weyland or the league again, we’ll be free. Free of this hell.’
‘That might work,’ said Noah, his voice growing excited.
‘It will,’ said Carter. ‘Alan, you’re a pilot, your skill should be worth plenty outside the imperium. When we reach a nation inside the guild system, I can find a librarian’s hold and convince its master that I’m one of their fellow-archive stuffers. They’ll help us fix our position relative to home. Show us the way back. We can do this!’
A frown creased Eshean’s features. ‘But Carter, a plan like that – we could have taken more people. We could have broken out with a dozen transporters full of prisoners!’
‘Hell,’ said Carter, ‘we could have taken the whole caboodle. And as soon as the Vandians catch on that one of their barracks is floating as empty in the sky as the ghost station, they’d realise the trick we pulled and send battleships chasing after rock in the air for a little target practice. This was only ever going to work with a single transporter, its crew’s bones believed to be scattered out here, covered in lava.’
‘You’re a hard bastard, Carter. We could have taken more people…’
‘That’s horseshit. Ditch your guilt right here – I could barely scrape together the four of you with the guts to try to escape.’
Deeli vigorously shook his head in agreement. ‘You’re right, you’re right. Someone would have informed on us. An overseer, a spy, a slave. The last escape attempt was ten years before you were taken. Fella worked in the repair bays, real cushy job too. Dug a passage out of the station that only he knew about. Put a glider together inside it. He was planning to fly onto the top of a supply ship at night, leap off its hull as it was approaching a Vandian city. The soldiers were waiting for him when he landed on its hull. Someone sold him out. One of us. Vandians staked him down in the hangar and brought in a torturer. We had to line up and watch. In shifts. Took him three days to die.’
‘What was his name?’ asked Carter.
Tears welled in Deeli’s eyes. ‘I don’t remember.’
Carter shook his head. Deeli was close to breaking. But perhaps that was okay, he had been here the longest of any slave. ‘Doesn’t matter. He was us, every one of us here. That’s all we need to remember.’
‘I have an extra canteen,’ said Deeli, tapping a bag. ‘Water mixed with mogo tuber. Strong dose, man. Die in minutes. We can take it if it looks like we’re going to be captured.’
‘Pour the water on the soil when we land,’ said Carter. ‘We’re not going to need it.’ He slipped the air mask over his face and hooded up.
Outside, the noise of the eruption grew louder and louder, their cave floor jouncing in the earth tremors until they had to extend their arms like frightened children and huddle together to stop themselves being tumbled around the cave. The supply crates they’d taken in for safe-keeping shook and clattered until Carter feared they were going to shatter. It was growing hotter, too, although he was too scared to sweat. Thick fumes began to fill the space, until Carter was almost sick with the rotten-egg stink, even through the respirator and silvery hood of his survival suit. He closed his eyes tight and focused on the regular click of his mask measuring out fresh doses of air. Might as well be ants caught under the hooves of a cattle stampede for all that they could do to influence their fates now.
Carter inspected the camouflage netting he had dragged off the transporter while Noah, Eshean and Deeli emptied the cave of the supplies they’d stored, rapidly refilling the craft. Every surface was coated in dust, although strangely, the standing circle seemed to be clear of a powder layer, as though there was some invisible shield protecting it. Sections of netting had been eaten away by the eruption, its camouflage surface left littered with black rock residue. Carter tipped the rubble out onto the slope. The netting was intact enough to deploy a second time. And more importantly, their transporter still looked operational enough to take to the air. Alan checked the engine and rotors over as fast as he could while calling it through. Their craft had to survive a race through the centre of the storm of ejecta-mass and come through undamaged enough to land and take off one last time. Waiting on the ground had given Carter a too-close-for-comfort insight into when an eruption started to lose force – far more precise than being holed up in the station and waiting for the storm to abate. Carter wouldn’t recommend it as a way of getting the jump on the other sky miners. Not even to his worst enemy. He had sat hunkered down inside the cave for more than five hours, every minute of that time spent anticipating his end. Now he was out in the open again, shaking from exhaustion and excitement and fear. One last stake to fight over. And the next rock is going to be all yours.
‘She’s air-worthy,’ announced Alan, climbing into the pilot’s seat up front.
Carter swung himself onto the crew cage at the back, stowing the camo cover. ‘Then the air is where we need to be.’
Noah laughed, joining Eshean and Deeli on the craft’s seating. ‘What do you think they’ll say in Northhaven, if they see us walking back through the gates?’
‘Where’s everyone else?’ muttered Eshean.
Carter blinked in surprise. In truth, the idea of escaping from the sky mines had been his obsession for so long – the only thing he had been able to think about – he’d never even considered what life might be like back in Weyland. ‘Everyone I cared about back home is dead.’ And what about the people back on the station? nagged the voice. He ignored it. Hadn’t the other slaves had their chance? ‘I don’t think I’ll go back. I was planning to sign up as a sailor and see the world. Maybe I’ll just start from this end of the world.’
‘I want to go back,’ said Noah. ‘See if my folks were left alive after the raid. If they are, they deserve to know that I didn’t die as a slave out in the middle of the beyond.’
‘I’ll travel with you,’ said Eshean. ‘As big as the world is, there’ll never be a country like Weyland or a town like Northhaven. I don’t know how welcome we’ll be, though, outside of our kin. Our faces are going to remind folks about a disaster that’ll be long forgotten by the time we arrive back.’
Carter tried to imagine what it might be like returning to work at the librarian’s hold in the valley, settling down to the suffocating routine that had driven him insane with boredom. And that was before he’d watched his family massacred, the town burnt – a forced witness to every pointless death in the slave pens and the sky mines. He wasn’t the same man, now. Home had been taken from him. Forever.
‘What about you, Deeli?’ asked Carter.
The rake-thin old hand shook his head, dejectedly. ‘I can’t go home, man. I wasn’t grabbed up in a raid, like you. My nation sells its convicts to the skels. My farm went bust in the great drought – my wife and sons passed slow from starvation and exhaustion ploughing our bare, dry fields, day after day. Didn’t see much point in working on after they died. I was thrown in debtors’ prison until my own mayor marched me to the auction block. If I travelled home, it would be a week or two before someone recognised me. They’d lock me up again and sell me to the first slaver that landed.’
‘You can ship out with me,’ said Carter. He began setting up the surveying equipment in the rear. Everything they would need to find a rock that was small, fast and as empty as a slave’s stomach without a claim to work.
‘I don’t want to go on the road. Just land us somewhere green and far from the imperium’s reach,’ said Deeli. ‘I haven’t got long left, now, I know that. My lungs’ insides are as black as this volcano. I want to die watching butterflies chase each other over the meadows. Not sweating inside the sky mines until my corpse is tipped out on top of this never-ending bone-pile.’
‘You’re an easy man to please,’ said Carter.
‘The sky stole my life,’ said Deeli. ‘I want my death to belong to me. I’ll be the wild man of the woods, eating berries and snaring rabbits, for as long as my body holds out.’
Below them, the rotors spun into life, a blast of choking dust blown out from below the transporter. ‘Hold on tight back there,’ called Alan. ‘I’ll be pushing the engine hard to get into the mix before any of the other houses’ scouts.’
‘Let’s do it,’ said Carter. He leaned in close to the cockpit at the front, raising his voice above the roar of the engines. ‘How about you, Mister Ferris? Planning on heading to Weyland, travelling back east to the lakes?’
‘Why not,’ said the pilot. ‘I’ll have to do something with all the time I have… now I won’t be chasing rocks, ferrying hitters and blasting tunnels!’
‘One last chase, first,’ laughed Carter. ‘And you’ll find I’m not half as fussy as the princess when it comes to staking a claim.’
Alan reached for his air mask and the rest of them followed suit. Their transporter rocked in the air after it lifted away from the slopes, passing through thick black clouds rolling down the volcano in waves. They still wore their silver survival suits, useful protection against the burning gases the craft sliced through; vapour full of dust that bit like a sandstorm boiled white-hot inside a kettle. Alan used the mass of the stratovolcano’s slopes to help push them into the open skies. Something about the heat of the recent eruption seemed to have thinned the air, making the ungainly transporter even harder to fly. But transporters were built as primitive aerial packhorses, not a flying wing of the Rodalian skyguard. Then they were free of the slopes, riding the sky proper, a rain of ejecta-mass rattling against the cage’s roof. The rain wasn’t falling, though, it was still rising, and they were chasing it up, gaining altitude at a steep angle. Carter wiped dust off his air mask’s visor, gazing out of the cage’s sides. The powerful outgassing from the stratovolcano had left a doughnut-shaped shockwave… a rolling, expanding cloud-front arrowing towards the heavens. It was being filled in by steaming vapour from the sides, but at the moment, he had been given a clear view that few sky miners would have seen. Rocks, thousands of them, small and large and every shape imaginable, lifting towards a distant blue circle of sky. Fairly soon the claims would be cloaked with steam. The vapour filled by transporters from the sky mines, craft wheeling and jostling for position. Shortly, slaves would be murdering each for the largest, most valuable rocks. Maybe Duncan would be among the fighters, Owen and Kerge too. Too bad for them; but faint hearts don’t win freedom.
Carter’s eyes flicked down towards the dead zone. The barren bone-scattered land was masked by outgassing from the stratovolcano, as was the hoary old smoker’s interior, but he suddenly caught a silvery glint from below. Something slipping through the smouldering cover like a shark… a steel-hulled predator. ‘Vandian patrol ship!’ yelled Carter. ‘Coming up below our rotors.’
‘I see it!’ called Alan. ‘Flying at six o’clock’
‘What the hell is it doing here?’ shouted Carter. ‘They should be sweeping the dead zone for mineral poachers, not passing through unstaked sky ten minutes before their slaves start swinging clubs at each other.’
‘We have to keep on making for the rock-storm,’ said Noah. ‘As far as they’re concerned, we’re just a scout pushed out desperately early, searching for a stake for a hungry station.’
‘Noah’s right,’ said Carter. ‘Hell, we can wave at them as they fly past. They can’t read minds. And we are searching for a stake. Nobody as eager as us in the air!’
His words were hopeful but his heart sank. He didn’t believe in coincidences, and his mind was racing with all the ways this escape attempt could have gone wrong. What could have given us away? Carter searched the clouds below. The patrol ship had vanished from sight, but then, the incredible speed those things could move at, it could be anywhere in the air. The roar of its engine was masked by the greater thunder emanating from the rumbling monster below.
‘I think it’s gone,’ said Eshean. ‘I can’t see it anymore.’
‘Did any of you tell anybody back on the station about this?’ said Carter. ‘Sound someone out who showed a little too much interest… but then didn’t want to sign up with us?’
Deeli angrily shook his head. ‘I didn’t tell anybody, man. I barely trusted you when you approached me, in case you were setting up a phoney escape; a loyalty test to earn you a reward for handing me in. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened on the station.’
‘No one’s talked,’ said Noah. ‘We set this up real quiet.’
‘Paper trail is covered, too,’ said Deeli. ‘Every piece of kit we’ve taken with us was allocated to genuine mining gangs months ago. Nothing to be missed.’
Carter frowned. ‘Then why the hell is that patrol ship nosing around here now? Risking clogging their fancy engines in this almighty turd-storm? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Maybe the station’s worried we crashed during the eruption?’ said Eshean. ‘Our radio room could have sent for them?’
‘And the kind empire risks its people’s lives to help stranded slaves? Maybe they’re transporting a suckling pig roast to us, with a crew of dancing girls to serve food and kiss our burnt knees better. Nobody on the station should be thinking about a missing crew until the princess has herself a second shiny new stake tethered next to her first. I don’t like this.’
Carter liked ducking as the Vandian patrol ship shot overhead even less. The noise of its passage left his ears ringing so badly he could hardly hear the others’ yells of surprise. Alan pulled the transporter to the side, heading for a roll of thick dark cloud, the transporter shaking in the patrol ship’s shock wake. Behind them, the ship came roaring back, slowing and hovering on towers of flames as engines on its flank angled and held it suspended there like a hunting hawk. The patrol vessel was an ugly long elongated tube of shiny silver steel, the pilots’ silhouettes just visible through the light of the bridge’s windows on its prow. The lines of its streamlined hull were broken by the shape of a cannon turret, four barrels rotating towards them. Just as black cloud swallowed the transporter, the hovering patrol ship’s gun starting banging shells after them, a rapid thud-thud-thud faster than any man could work the lever on a rifle. Carter didn’t hear the shells whizzing past, but the scream of tearing metal from the engine housing below their craft was unmistakable, as was their sudden pitch downwards. Black clouds rushed past, the transporter corkscrewing as Alan fought for control; the party thrown about in the back, desperately clinging to seats and cage sides as the transporter gained speed. Every man was yelling and shouting, Carter’s fear added to theirs. Licks of fire climbed up the back of the transporter, a streaming tail of flames from their engines. Haemorrhaging brown fuel that reeked as badly as the poisonous gas surrounding them. Nothing Carter could do but hang on, vowing that if he survived, whoever had betrayed them was going to pay for this with their life. A wrenching noise and an engine assembly came twisting past in the open air, sheared off by shell damage. Then a fierce buzzing. One of their rotors must have cleared after shrugging away the mangled mess. We have lift again. Carter was pushed back into the cage wall as the transporter pulled up. Alan yelled in front, screaming at his flight stick as if he could urge it to greater labours. For a moment Carter allowed himself to believe they were going to make it. If they could lose the patrol ship… he had only shared the final piece of his escape plan inside the cave… hitching a l
ift on a barren rock from the eruption. The Vandians wouldn’t know his escape route was straight up and out, not attempting to flee the dead zone in the transporter. Carter could feel from the increasing gravity how close they were to the ground, and then they were fed rock, right into the craft’s nose as the slope burst through the mist and met the corkscrewing transporter. Its hull rolled, Carter smashed around, striking bodies and metal. Suddenly he rolled free, hard surface burning through his survival suit. He spun out the worst of the momentum until he collided with a rocky outcrop, smashing his spine into it, leaving him gasping and stunned. Hot, hot. Where have we come down? A roar sounded from the sky as loud as anything he’d ever heard, passing as quickly as it appeared. Their crash site had just been overflown by the patrol ship. Carter found it hard to breathe, until he realised his air mask had become dislodged. He pushed the respirator back around his mouth, holding it in place through the silvery fabric of the survival suit. Staggering to his feet, Carter had trouble locating the transporter until he spotted it behind him, lying on its side, bent and smashed and smoking from its mangled engines. Up above, he could see sky and slope mixed through the fumes and ash-fall coming down like rain, and with a start he realised where they had come down… they were stranded close to the lip of the crater. A minute climbing the slope, and he could stare straight down into the heart of the beast. Carter limped over towards the downed craft, seeing Noah emerge from the back, Eshean leaning against him. From the state of Eshean’s left leg, unnaturally bent at an angle no man should be able to bear, Carter knew that a quick amputation was the only chance of survival the Weylander had left. Deeli had been thrown clear of the craft, same as Carter, the man trying to get to his feet. He moved forward to get a look into the cockpit at the front. Crushed and destroyed. Carter turned his face away in shock and went back towards Deeli. There wasn’t enough of Alan left to fill a casket at the front of a church. Weren’t exactly aiming to take us alive. At least I know that none of us down here is the son-of-a-bitch traitor who whistled on our scheme.