by Ste Sharp
‘And your name?’ Falen asked.
‘John,’ he replied. ‘John Greene.’ He thought about offering a hand to shake but kept his good hand to himself.
‘That’s an interesting weapon you have there, John,’ Falen said. ‘Most weapons are confiscated.’
‘Well, I can’t go anywhere without it.’ John lifted his gun-arm up to show it in the dull light, noticing it had changed once more. He could still feel the chamber inside, but the barrel of the gun looked thicker, and if he squinted he was sure he could see three lines running towards the tip.
‘They confiscated mine,’ Falen replied and held a burned stump for John to see.
He gagged. ‘Looks nasty,’ he said, unable to tear his eyes away from the dark grey arm, which looked half-Lutamek, half-Brakari.
‘I think they have a thing against female soldiers,’ Falen said.
‘Really?’ John said. ‘I haven’t seen many female fighters around.’
‘Some species more than others,’ Falen replied. ‘But the Ascent are governed by males, so…’
John wanted to know more about the Ascent, about what they had in store for him and how he could find the rest of his army, but his head felt weary. He stared at his pallet and an odd thought came to him.
‘You said it’s a desert out there,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘No plants to eat?’
‘No.’
‘So where did this wood come from?’ he asked and tapped his pallet with the tip of his gun.
‘That’s not wood,’ Falen replied.
John felt the rough texture again with his good hand.
‘It’s made of bones.’
*
When John woke again his bladder was ready to burst.
Ignoring the swaying floor and his pounding head, he stumbled to the nearest corner of the room, unbuttoned his flies and felt a sharp nudge on his shoulder that turned him against the other wall. Urine streamed until, with a sigh, he finished, struggled to button up one-handed and sat back on his pallet.
‘Last time you pissed in the trough,’ Falen’s rough voice said.
Her bony claw of a hand had shoved him in the right direction.
‘Thanks,’ he whispered and leaned down to scoop some foul water for his mouth.
‘The pills they gave you stopped the motions for a few days,’ Falen said. ‘Stops the hunger too.’
‘Right,’ John said, feeling less dizzy, so scooped up more water.
The light through the grey rectangle was growing stronger – either that or John’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark – so he could see Falen’s outline now: four long legs and two thicker arms shone a gunboat grey, while her torso and head looked like artillery shells. Falen lowered her bullet-shaped head away from the wall to where John could see her four black eyes, which focussed on him. He tried to make sense of the knobbly rings and circles which made up Falen’s skin: swirls within swirls, never-ending swirls.
‘Now we have seen each other,’ Falen’s voice rasped and John saw the drill-like teeth lining her mouth, ‘I trust you. We should make plans.’
‘What?’ John moved back onto his pallet, ignoring the fact it was made from some huge soldiers’ remains. ‘Trust? You said everyone was only out for themselves.’
‘True,’ Falen replied. ‘And I trust you would kill me if it meant saving your life. I also trust you would do anything to get out of here and to find your comrades, so I trust you want to listen to me when I tell you I know a way out of here?’
‘You could be lying,’ John said. ‘Or a mole… a trap… someone trying to get me to talk.’
‘Believe me, if the Ascent wanted information out of you, they would have had it by now.’
John looked at his arm and remembered how the Lutamek had collected information on every soldier: age; skills; mutations. ‘They need my arm,’ he said softly.
‘Possibly,’ Falen replied. ‘But they need you with it or they would have ripped it off.’
John shivered and felt his metal leg wobble. That was Lutamek, he thought. Did they have any control over it? He felt the urge to pull it off his stump and smash it on the wall, but he needed it desperately. It felt like part of him now. Whole.
A sudden thought came to him and John shifted his position to look around from wall to wall.
‘There’s no door,’ he said.
Falen gestured up, and John saw that the roof, some ten feet above him, was made from a thick material. Spots of light dotted it like lines of stars where strips had been roughly sewn together.
‘We’re in a pit,’ Falen said. ‘And the only way out is up.’
John felt his shoulders slump. His grandfather’s voice came to him, as it did when he felt weak: Get up boy! Grow some muscle, show some backbone and fight! The harsh tones melted away and John pictured the old man’s eyes. Desperate eyes, John knew that now. Eyes that had foreseen John’s future on the battlefield. The old man had known war was coming and had forced him to toughen up. John wondered if his grandfather had lived long enough to be around while Joe was growing up, and if he’d been as harsh with him? Joe had gone to war too. Had being an orphan toughened him up? Given him a strong will and determination that could have saved his life in battle?
John would never know.
Rosie’s voice came to him, no words, just her tone, her delight and wonder at seeing new things and her endless positivity. Nothing was all bad. Every cloud had a silver lining, she used to say.
What a great mother she would have made.
John sniffed and looked at Falen.
‘Alright then,’ he said, with thoughts of Millok, realising this was the second time he’d been captured and given himself into the hands of an alien. ‘I’m ready to hear what you say, but first…’ He paused, not knowing how to explain.
‘Yes, human.’
‘First, I want to know about the worlds out there.’ He nodded up at the skin roof. ‘Not the Ascent and whatever they’ve built here, but about the real worlds. The planets and people of our galaxy.’
*
Even in the gloom of the pit, John could sense the light failing. Falen had been talking for hours. While she talked, John had traced his fingers over the carvings in the mud wall of their prison and tried to make sense of them in the poor light. Were the prisoners who carved these long dead? As Falen described bizarre creatures and dangerous soldiers, John linked them to the swirls and patterns scored in the mud: parallel lines he thought were a warrior’s name; triangular marks which must have been made by a type of claw; a set of three dots around a circle.
John let the conversation die down then asked, ‘Do we get food?’
‘In the morning,’ Falen replied. ‘It won’t taste good, but it will keep you alive.’
‘Right.’
‘We should sleep now,’ Falen said, and John realised her injury must have taken a toll of her.
John tried to make himself comfortable on the dry slab of bone he had for a bed. When he closed his eyes he saw the swirls on Falen’s face and could still hear her voice. Images of the galaxy came to him – the spinning fog of stars the Lutamek had shown them – and he tried to make sense of what Falen had explained.
The galaxy was full of what Falen had called sentient species. Aliens, thinking creatures, like humans, who had evolved over millions of years. Again and again, life had sprung up across the galaxy. John didn’t understand when she talked of comet dust and basic proteins and, when he mentioned God, Falen had been quick with her response: religions were as varied as the peoples of the galaxy and caused many wars.
As she explained more, it was clear that humans were a tiny part of a range of societies of which Falen admitted she only knew a fraction. Compared with Earth, the Drauw’s planetary system was closer to the galactic centre, where the stars were closer and civilisations lived in close proximity. Their territory encompassed a few star systems either side of an SJ point, which, from Falen’s description, s
ounded like a kind of doorway in space that allowed them to travel further, quicker. The Drauw had become proficient traders with several surrounding empires, including the Scarpinelloss, who John remembered had defeated the Brakari in their first battle, alongside the Ladrof. The Drauw trading network had collapsed though, Falen had explained, when civil war erupted on her home planet. That was where she had been fighting when she was taken from battle, in a flash of light, just like everyone else on the disc.
‘So you travelled in space?’ John asked.
‘I spent most of my adult life on my home planet,’ Falen replied, ‘but as a species, yes.’
‘Then why didn’t you find the ships?’ John asked.
‘Which ships?’
‘The ones that brought us here,’ John said, fighting his tiredness – he knew this was important. ‘If you had ships in space, why didn’t you find them?’
Falen was silent for a while before answering. ‘I don’t know.’
‘From what the Lutamek said, we were taken from our home planets and brought here, but they must have been in orbit for thousands of years picking us off one by one.’
Falen sounded quieter than before. ‘We failed to register them.’
She was clearly ashamed, so John had let it go, but he wondered if any other species had managed to detect a ship and follow it to the disc? He took in a deep breath as he felt sleep taking him.
John was building a picture of the new galactic world which included the other species Falen had met: Korax, Greems, Stur-Morches and Rassums. Each was completely different to the rest, as were the Lutamek and Sorean, he thought. Insectoids, androids and humanoids. All air-breathers, all had been taken from their home planet and, despite the thousands of years of development and space travel, nobody knew who had brought them here or why.
Thoughts blurred in John’s head as he slipped away, but a new, stubborn thought remained.
The Scarpinelloss.
Falen had mentioned them, and the Lutamek had said the domes were placed across the disc according to where the species were located in the galaxy. He had little trust in the Lutamek after they’d turned on his allies, but the theory made sense. If that was true, Falen’s home planet must have been near the Scarpinelloss, which meant she would have been in the same dome as them.
It didn’t add up. Falen was hiding something.
*
A shaft of white light woke John and he had a bullet spinning in his gun-arm’s chamber in a second, aimed at the roof.
‘Relax.’ Falen’s voice sounded less muffled.
The skin roof of their pit had been peeled off, allowing sunlight to pour in.
In the brilliant light he could see Falen in all her alien glory: her face of a thousand tiny swirls and her six long grey limbs splayed out like she’d been dropped from a great height.
John looked up as a leather bucket descended on a frayed rope. Beyond were two, lumpy silhouettes. The bucket tipped its multicoloured contents onto the floor and was quickly hoisted back up. The cover was slapped back over, returning John and Falen to near darkness, and leaving John with the silhouettes imprinted on his eyes.
‘Eat,’ Falen said and flicked a pink spongy cube at him.
John picked it up and turned it over in his good hand. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Thoraxian pears. It’s protein. Some minerals. You’ll need it.’
‘Why?’ John asked. ‘What do they plan to do with us?’
‘What do you remember of this place?’ she asked as she nibbled the edges of her cube with her needle-like teeth.
John smelled the cube and bit a corner off. Fishy, he thought, but not bad. He sat back to think as he chewed. ‘I remember lots of domes,’ he said, ‘and red fields… then small buildings and the tower, that’s it.’ A memory of men dressed in white, playing cricket came back to John and, not for the first time, he wondered if this was another trick of the Frarex.
No, he thought, this was too real. Too dirty.
‘The red fields are where the food comes from,’ Falen said. ‘Few plants are grown and, with such a need for protein, the Ascent devised a way to farm the larvae of a flying insect–’
‘What?’ John sat forward and stared at the food in his hand. ‘Bugs?’
‘They photosynthesise sunlight and eat the soil. They just need water which they collect in hydro traps.’
John remembered the huge rings in the desert, like immense bubble blowers. ‘So the Ascent have a whole system working here? Do they have money?’ he asked.
‘In a way,’ Falen replied. ‘They have a trading system at least.’
‘How long have they been here?’
‘You said you didn’t want to know about the Ascent,’ Falen replied.
‘I think I’ll need to know,’ John said with a glance at the roof before he cautiously nibbled the blended maggot cube.
‘Firstly, the Ascent aren’t one species.’
John stayed silent, filtering the Drauw’s words more carefully now he knew she was hiding something.
‘Nobody knows the first species to win freedom from their dome,’ Falen’s voice fell into the easy rhythm it had had the previous day, ‘or how long ago. But all victors drift to the centre of the disc eventually, drawn by the tower.’
John pictured the needle-like shaft of diamond which pierced the sky above the cluster of domes: one of the first things he had seen when they had left their dome.
‘With no way off the disc, the number of victors grew,’ Falen continued, ‘and with resources scarce, factions arose, controlling the sections of land surrounding the tower. One of these called themselves the Ascent.’
‘Why?’ John asked.
‘They’re named after the message–’
A rustle above made John look up as the roof skin was peeled back again. He raised his gun-arm to shade his eyes and squinted to make out shapes moving on the lip of the pit.
‘Time to see if you can pick the lock,’ a deep voice bellowed, followed by laughter.
A dark, square shape descended, heading straight for John, who shuffled into the corner as fast as he could.
‘Bugger off!’ he shouted.
‘Come on,’ the voice replied as the square transformed into a giant hand, moving in to grab John.
‘You can’t fight them, John,’ Falen said.
John sneered and spun a snub-nosed bullet to blast the hand away, but he knew it would be another waste of his bone and metal.
‘Go down fighting!’ His grandfather’s voice rang in his ears, and he fired the bullet, only to find it popped out impotently.
Something in his gun-arm felt different. He stared at the smoking muzzle as the giant hand gripped him around the chest and dragged him out of the pit. He looked down at Falen, who seemed tiny now.
‘What was the message?’ John shouted, ‘the one they’re named after?’
‘If you’re going to the lock,’ Falen shouted back, ‘you’ll see it for yourself!’
Chapter 11
Samas punched the granite wall with his rock-fist and felt the satisfying crunch as the stone cracked and crumbled, falling to his feet. One more punch, he thought, and stretched the muscles in his shoulder. The clay covering Li had fused onto his broken arm might be harder than any natural substance, but the parts of Samas’ body outside the rock – his biceps, shoulders and chest – were unenhanced and he could feel it.
‘I’m done,’ he whispered to Rar-kin, his Sorean partner, who shuffled in to clean up the debris.
Samas squinted to see in the poor light, then dropped to sit on a rock and dipped his crudely carved stone cup into an equally crude bucket which had collected water dripping off a long stalactite.
‘Remember, that liquid is condensed sweat and breath from scores of different species,’ Rar-kin said in an almost-happy voice as it swept the rock chippings away.
Samas wondered if punching Rar-kin into the rock would soften the repetitive blows but shook the irritating thought awa
y. ‘Do you have any better suggestions?’ he asked. ‘That mud they give us tastes of metal and faeces.’
‘That’s because it is mostly—’
‘Yes,’ Samas cut Rar-kin off, ‘I get it.’
He let his head drop, closed his eyes and drew his breath deeply. He couldn’t smell it now, but when they’d first descended into the mines, all he could smell was the rank odour of decay and death. According to older miners, the masters had only agreed to ventilate the shafts after three Greems had died in a cloud of their own waste, so it could have been worse.
‘If we resume at a ten-degree angle,’ Rar-kin spoke between pickaxe swings as it chipped away at the wall Samas had been demolishing, ‘we will increase our efficiency.’
Samas felt sorry for the small, furred creature. Rar-kin was putting every ounce of energy into the project – mind and body – as though it were its own master plan, yet one smash from Samas’ rock-fist was the equivalent to half an hour of the Sorean’s pickaxe chippings. Samas sensed Rar-kin knew that too but carried on.
‘Ten degrees then?’ Samas replied, feigning interest.
The masters hadn’t even told him what they were after. Metal ore for weapons? Digging for a water source? Or hidden treasure? Samas couldn’t remember what the mine guards had told him; he’d been in shock at regaining consciousness after the Lutamek’s blue net had descended. He’d been given a brief look at the makeshift city which leaned in the shadow of the immense tower, at the centre of this world, then they were led below ground, into the dark.
He sighed. Half his army were missing, every human miner had had their head shaved and the Lutamek were nowhere to be seen. They’d been sent straight into the dark pits, told to dig down, and after the first Sorean who asked why was beheaded, Samas had kept his questions to himself. Still, with Rar-kin’s mathematical abilities and his enhanced fist, in the days they’d been here their zigzag shaft had delved deeper than any other pit.
‘I’m going up for food,’ Samas said and clambered up the ladder of finger- and toeholds he’d clawed into the shaft wall.