The Gang of Legend

by Robert J. Crane

  “So we’re just waiting here?” asked Carson. “Until Mr. Borrick arrives?”

  “We could make our way to the upper levels,” said Tyran. He waved toward the opposite end of the parking bay. A rock wall loomed, carved out perfectly square. A round pad sat upon a small plinth, raised above ground level by four steps. A shaft of pale blue light encircled it, jerking upward and receding somewhere high above.

  I traced its path. “Where does it go?”

  “To the keygate,” said Tyran. “Or quite close to it, anyway.”

  Heidi lifted an eyebrow. “Your drones found this out?”

  “You think I just sent robots to do all the exploring?” Tyran chortled, a self-satisfied laugh. “Oh no, dear girl. We have scouted this place extensively.”

  “In the past couple of months?” I asked.

  “Long before that.” Setting off toward the glowing pad, he waved us all to follow. He went on, “Unlike many Seekers in your community, I don’t just flit from place to place, hopping blindly and hoping for the best. I did my research into this Brynn Overson fellow, his questline—and, where possible, into locating all the possible arena locations I could. That way—” he stepped up the first of the stairs “—when I ventured into this world, to carve out my name in the wall of glory—”

  “Don’t do it,” Heidi muttered. “Don’t mix the metaphor.”

  “—I would be poised to accelerate my track to the top. You see?”

  “So you know where Brynn Overson’s crypt actually is?” Manny asked.

  Tyran reached the top of the steps. He turned back, and grinned. “All in good time, my lad. Now then—I’ll see you up there, hmm?” And he stepped backward, through the shaft of pale blue light and onto the landing pad—and was whisked up through the air, shooting along the shaft and disappearing in an instant.

  I gaped. “Where’d he go?”

  Commander Greco said, “The peaks are navigated by a series of anti-gravity transport tubes.”

  “But … there’s no tube,” said Carson nervously. “It’s just air. What if he falls out?”

  “You won’t,” said Greco. “Not if you remain very still.”

  Carson cleared his throat. Head thrown back, he followed the tube of light up the mountain, past where it curved away and disappeared. “I don’t like this.”

  “It’ll be okay,” said Manny.

  “There must be some other way up.”

  “There isn’t,” said Greco apologetically. “If the Velocity climbs any closer to the upper levels, the anti-aircraft guns will blow us out of the sky.”

  Carson swallowed hard. “You’re sure? They could just be for show.”

  “They’re not.”

  There was a faint zip sound, and Tyran reappeared on the platform in a flash of gold.

  “Bit of a hold-up, is there?” he asked, looking quizzically between us.

  “No,” I said. “We’ll be right there.”

  “My father isn’t there, is he?” asked Borrick.

  Tyran shook his head. “Empty, for now.”

  “Maybe we should just wait until Preston arrives,” said Carson cautiously. “I mean, we might need to nip back to the Velocity for a bite to eat—or…” Speaking quicker—he’d obviously cottoned onto something he was determined to follow through with—he went on, “What if he just waits years? You know, to try to catch us all off-guard, when things have died down, and we’ve forgotten?”

  “My mother’s problems are now, Carson,” said Borrick, with a hint of frustration. “He’s not going to wait.”

  “Besides,” I put in, “if he’s waiting, that would mean he’s going to try to catch us off-guard. He needs this key to get in here, remember? And he needs all the items in the questline. Waiting doesn’t mean waiting for the day Daddy Borrick picks up the phone and says, ‘Hey, I’m ready to do this thing now.’ He’ll try to get the rest of the artifacts off of us, by whatever means necessary.”

  Carson looked nervously back and forth between us. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he cleared his throat. Sweat had slicked his nose, sent his glasses sliding down it.

  “My father is coming here,” said Alain. “He is coming here right now—just like he did with the last key. We have to do this.”

  “But … but your mother …”

  “Carson,” I said, reaching out to grip his wrist, to steady him—to be a human anchor for him, since his manbag appeared to have failed. “This is going to be okay. We’ll go through together, all right?”

  He gawped at me. He wanted to say no, desperately, I could see it in his face.

  “I just …” he stammered. “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to get my life back on track.”

  “I know,” I said. “You will. If that’s what you want, then you will. I promise.”

  Did he expect a lie there? Perhaps—and that stung, a little, even if I deserved it: I’d forced Carson into a lot, I realized in hindsight, dragged him along when he was patently, obviously unhappy to be dragged—and I knew it, in that very moment, too.

  I was sincere here though. Yes, we’d sought him out at the beginning of this—and once again, he found himself dragged along on another mission, despite making his disagreements clear. But if Carson really, truly wanted to be free of all of this—to be free of me, and Heidi, and Manny and Bub and Tyran and Alain Borrick—then I was not going to stop him.

  I needed him to know that.

  And maybe he saw it in my eyes—maybe. He nodded, anyway, after a long moment. “Okay,” he whispered.

  I squeezed his wrist. “Thank you, Carson.” Looking over my shoulder to the steps, and the tube of pale light arcing overhead, I said, “You ready for this?”

  Carson swallowed. “We’re going together?”

  “I promise. I’ll be right next to you.”

  He glanced toward Heidi. She bit her bottom lip, arms folded. Lines shadowed her forehead, lines that were tinged with crimson, and which must’ve hurt alongside the tape and delicate stitches Fiennes had sewn in to stem her bleeding.

  “You’ve got this,” she said.

  Carson nodded. “Okay.” A last look back at the Velocity, parked and awaiting us, a skeleton crew remaining onboard while the rest of us moved onward. Perhaps a last thought went out to it; he could shake it off and run back to the ship, just wait for the rest of us to be done, and avoid this apparent death trap completely.

  But he did not. Instead, he said a third and final, “Okay”—and together, we stepped up the first of the four stairs leading to the anti-gravity transport pad.

  Tyran’s face broke in a grin—a genuine grin, not one of the usual model-esque smiles he slapped on, like he was hawking the latest ware he’d been sponsored by. “Bravo, lad! Bravo!”

  Commander Greco agreed. “Well done, Mr. Yates.” He clapped; and as we clambered up, the rest of Tyran’s men clapped with him, more piling in as we climbed the second step, the third, and then the fourth to a resounding round of ovation from everyone gathered below—

  We turned.

  Carson took it in with an awed look.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Go on, lad!” cheered Tyran.

  “Yeah!” added in one of his men, someone whose name I’d probably heard but couldn’t pick out off the top of my head—it really was very much like looking at a horde of clones, from up here. Whoever he was, he cupped his hands around his mouth, like he was hollering from the seats of a football stadium, hooting for his favorite player. “You can do it!”

  “You’ve got this!”

  “Go, Carson!”

  Bub rumbled, “You can do it, the Mr. Yates!”

  Heidi had a peculiar expression on her face. Half perturbed—if this were happening to any other person, she would most certainly be rolling her eyes right now—yet there was pride there too—and maybe a little envy?

  She stepped forward, eyes shining at Carson.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “I believe in you.”

  H
e nodded. “Th-thanks.”

  “Ready?” I asked. “On three. One … two …”

  Several things happened at once.

  First: I said, “Three.”

  At the same moment, Carson’s face fell. Angled toward Heidi, and therefore the parking bay, he had a clear view of the Harsterran skies. I twisted to follow his gaze—and saw, growing steadily beyond the Velocity, another ship—a bulbous, fat, pufferfish-like vehicle with a single humming engine carving its path out of Storm Jericho, and toward us.

  I opened my mouth—

  We’d already begun to move though. So my foot touched the anti-gravity pad, Carson’s following a hair’s breadth later.

  The moment we touched it, we were whisked up. The air whipped by—I had the sensation of being stretched, like an old Looney Tunes character—the mountain streaked past, the pair of us curving around, enveloped in the shaft of pale blue light—

  We landed on the opposing pad after no more than a second’s travel. Set below a vast anti-aircraft gun built into the mountainside, it occupied a carved-out square in the rock, much smaller than the landing bay but still substantial enough to arrange all of us on it with room to spare. A door, ten feet tall and four wide, was cut into the stone, with two circular holes inset—the keygate.

  It was the least of our concerns right now.

  “Get out of the way,” I said, pulling Carson down this plinth’s steps. “They’ll be coming in a second.”

  Carson staggered down, manbag flapping wildly. He hung onto the strap to attempt to still it. “Did you see …?” he panted.

  I nodded grimly. “Yeah, I saw,” I said, thinking of that dark metal blot streaking through the sky. “Daddy Borrick is here.”

  25

  Heidi was the next to arrive.

  “He's coming,” she said quickly, jumping down to meet us.

  “We saw,” I said.

  Tyran appeared next, preceded by that quiet zipping noise, kind of like a sci-fi movie gun, the whine turned down to a whisper. He stepped off the platform and jogged down the steps to me. His composed expression was gone, likewise the joy he’d just displayed on watching Carson succeed in overcoming his fears of the gravity chute. Instead he looked harried, his lips tight and his eyebrows cast down low.

  “Get back,” he said. “Quick.”

  We staggered backward quickly—

  The air filled with zip sounds, all coming one after another. Manny appeared, then Borrick and Bub closely afterward.

  “Move,” Manny ordered, guiding Borrick down the steps with a hand on the elbow. Borrick frowned, but held back from biting off—whatever it was he was tempted to say.

  They descended two stairs, Bub just the one—

  Then the crew of the Velocity came. Arriving in twos and threes, they flooded out of the gravity chute, landing on the platform and hurrying down the steps. Quickly this small area was crowded—or it seemed to be in the sudden chaotic jumble.

  “Get back,” ordered Tyran. “Against the walls!”

  The men obeyed, shifting into lines against the edges of the landing pad below the anti-aircraft gun. There must be two or three dozen of them, all together.

  Commander Greco was the last to arrive. He came by himself, having evidently remained on the landing pad until all the crew had passed through the gravity chute.

  “Sitrep,” said Tyran.

  “Velocity has commenced withdrawal process, and will recede to a clearance of two klicks from the Peaks. Unknown ship has not turned focus onto the Velocity, and instead appears to be approaching the landing pad. Velocity is primed to open fire should the situation change.”

  Tyran nodded. “Thank you.”

  I stepped to the edge of this nook carved into the mountainside and peered out. Unfortunately, there was no way of seeing the landing pad we’d arrived by. Another lay farther down below us, on the slope of the same mountain we presently occupied. However, the gravity chute had hooked a curve around one of the peaks as it rose from our pad, depositing us somewhere facing entirely the wrong direction to oversee what was going on below.

  If Preston Borrick’s ship should attack the Velocity, we wouldn’t know about it. Not from here.

  And we likewise would not know when Preston Borrick took the chute up here. He would just appear, with a high-pitched, whisper of a zip.

  And then the show would get started.

  We waited in quiet, Tyran’s men arrayed and watching the chute. Their swords were sheathed at their hips. The front line gripped the handles tight, but did not yet unleash them.

  “You know,” said Heidi, “you could just stand by the chute, and cut Daddy Borrick’s head off the moment he steps through. Take the key for yourself; eliminate the threat.”

  Alain frowned at her. “Thank you for suggesting to Burnton he kill my father.”

  “He’d deserve it,” said Heidi.

  “We do not resort to such low means,” said Tyran, cutting the conversation to an end.

  Breath held, we waited. I peered still, around the edge, my eyes tracking the curve of the gravity chute. It wasn’t much warning, but it was some.

  The speed at which it propelled people across the mountain range, though, I doubted I could do much more than open my mouth to shut off a warning before Preston actually landed before us.

  A thought struck me then. What if Preston Borrick came with weapons of his own? A gun of some sort, or an explosive? What if somehow he had a spell that could, I don’t know, make him impervious to damage for a short moment? If he pulled up here with a rocket launcher, having just activated the spell, he could blow all of us up in one fell swoop and eliminate his own challenge.

  I laughed nervously, inside. Really, Mira? A rocket launcher? Where would he even get something like that?

  The thought ‘Benson’s’ began to crystallize—

  Zip!

  My head jerked around, to the landing pad.

  Crimson-skinned lizard men unfurled. Spilling out one by one, they bowed low to the ground and slunk off the platform, down the steps. Rising again at the bottom, they extended their long bodies to seven feet of height. Cat-like yellow eyes peered out at us.

  A mouth opened to reveal fangs.

  Tyran held his ground, even as my friends staggered backward.

  “Who are you?” Tyran demanded.

  ZIP.

  Preston Borrick arrived on the platform.

  His lip curled.

  Stepping down, slowly, he joined the dozen lizard men who had preceded him. All arranged in a circle about the gravity chute, they glared, unblinking, at the rest of us. One had fixated on me, the first to have come from the gap. I fought back the urge to cower away from its height, its fangs, those eyes, and all the alarm bells it set off in my mind—these were like marachti, kind of like a more potent evolutionary cousin. And I’d seen marachti stab one of my best friends.

  “Well, well,” said Tyran. “Preston Borrick. I thought I would be seeing you here sooner or later.” His eyes swept over the crimson-scaled army Preston had brought with him. “And you come with friends.”

  “Those aren’t friends,” said Heidi. “Those are mercenaries.”

  Preston appraised her sidelong. “And what are you?”

  She opened her mouth, then clamped it shut.

  Preston’s gaze swept over me, my brother, past Carson. He paused on Bub, and the curl of his lip grew stronger still—and then he finally met the arrowed glare Alain directed to him.

  Preston sneered. “Still fraternizing with has-beens and wannabes. You have fallen far, Alain.”

  “You’ve gone mad, Father,” Alain countered. His voice was haggard, like he was fighting to hold back rage from spilling forth and overpowering him. “This mission you’re on—it’s not good for you.”

  Preston took an aggressive step forward. “After I do this, will you look your mother in the eye and say the same?” He scowled. “I do this for her. You seem to have forgotten that. Forgotten her.” His eyes swep
t us again. “Or has the company of losers and the exiled turned you against your own flesh and blood?”

  “Mother is gone.”

  “I can bring her back.”

  “And do what else, with your power?” Alain demanded. “You’re no fool, Father. You know what this would mean, if the rumors are true—and you believe them, don’t you?”

  “I will be a bringer of life,” said Preston.

  “And a taker-away of it, too,” said Manny.

  Preston’s fiery gaze flared. “If you believe that, then you would do best not to cross me, Brand.” He said the name like it was scum.

  “Take care how you speak to my friends,” said Tyran.

  Preston sneered at him, too, baring his teeth like a wildcat boxed into a corner.

  My breath caught. For the few tense, awful seconds this tableau drew out, I was convinced that Preston would give the order to his lizard creatures to set themselves upon us. And though Tyran’s crew were arranged as far from the action as they could be in this tennis-court-sized area, and would have the necessary warning to whip out their swords and throw into the battle, I was not convinced that I would have time to react. Nor would my friends—and nor would Tyran and Greco, who the lizards would leap onto and flay with their fangs and clawed, twisted fingers.

  But this did not come to pass.

  Instead, Preston reached into his cloak.

  Tyran gripped his sword. “I warn you …”

  Preston retrieved a circular object—the key, taken from the Apex, a shining orb that looked like a Christmas ornament.

  “Let’s do this,” Preston said.

  Tyran eyed him. “Gladly.”

  The two of them strode toward the door together. Separated by four feet or so, they were enough distance apart that neither could just reach out and pummel the other, or snatch their key. But Tyran could slip out his own sword and run it through Preston’s middle, if he wished.