Still, not that he was complaining. He had a job to do, and that job was shaping up to be much easier than he’d expected. He shut one eye and took aim at the furthest tank. “Boom,” he said.
And then, he fired.
Riley sensed the way the rock ahead of her changed and knew she was there. There were a few feet of hard-packed rubble and soil ahead, then beyond that, a wall. This could’ve been a problem, were it not for the fact the wall was made of stone. While a stone wall was still definitely a problem, it wasn’t a problem for her, and that, she felt, was the main thing.
It took her a couple of seconds to reach the wall, then a minute or so of jogging on the spot to get herself psyched up for what came next. This was mostly because she didn’t really know what came next, exactly. She suspected it would be exciting. Just not necessarily in a good way.
The countdown on her visor was pretty much where it was meant to be—at least, from what she could gather—but she wasted a few more seconds adjusting her hat and taking a series of deep breaths.
She coughed violently, choking on the dust.
“Bad move. Big mistake,” she wheezed. “Won’t be doing that again.”
The countdown on her visor reached the symbol she felt was probably zero. Raising her hands, Riley gritted her teeth, narrowed her eyes, and then almost exploded with the effort of holding in another coughing fit.
“It’s showtime,” she said, filling it with all the drama and gravitas she could muster.
Then she neatly unfolded the bricks of the wall in front of her, poked her head through to check if the coast was clear, and quietly slipped inside.
She emerged through the wall roughly eight feet above a metal walkway and manipulated the masonry blocks until they formed a staircase for her to walk down.
That done, she spent a few seconds trying to slot them all back into the wall, before discovering she couldn’t quite manage to get them all to fit again.
“Oh, come on,” she grumbled. “First brick there. Second brick there. Or is it there?”
“Rhoomanshka!”
Riley froze, the wall above her still partly assembled. She had no idea what had just been said, but she was confident it was nothing complimentary. The coast, it seemed, was no longer clear.
“Buurakta rhoomanshka. Bup! Bup!”
Raising her hands, Riley shuffled in the direction of the sound. A smaller version of Hath stood about thirty feet along the walkway, a pistol-sized gun clutched in both trembling hands.
“Robak! Bup!”
“Uh, hi,” said Riley. She smiled awkwardly. “This, um, this isn’t what it looks like. And also, sorry in advance.”
She twitched a finger. A brick whistled through the air and slammed into the man’s chest before he could fire off a shot. The impact knocked him off his feet and he hit the walkway with enough force to bounce him halfway back onto his feet again.
When he crashed down for the second time, he was unconscious. Possibly dead, although Riley hoped not. She felt bad enough about whanging him with a brick as it was.
“You’re going to shake that right off,” she whispered as she stepped over his inanimate body. “Seriously, you’ll be up and about in no time. We’ll laugh about this one day. Or, you know, hug each other and cry.”
Giving him a final wave, she scurried on along the walkway. It was old and a little feeble-looking. While she couldn’t see any specific rust, it still managed to give the impression that it was rife with the stuff, and Riley felt that the sooner she got off it, the better.
A set of mesh-like metal steps led her to the smooth tiled floor of what looked like some kind of dining area. It could best be described as ‘functional’ with twelve stainless steel style tables all fixed to the floor, and twenty-four similar looking benches bolted down beside them. A layer of dust covered all but two of the tables. A couple of tall, bronze-colored mugs sat on each table, all four of them dented and badly scuffed like they’d been kicked around on the floor a few thousand times.
There were no video cameras, as far as Riley could tell, although she wasn’t really sure what an alien video camera would look like, so she couldn’t be sure.
“Daryl? Can you hear me?” she asked, but there was no reply from the earpiece the meat suit had left in her ear.
After shaking a fist at the thick stone ceiling high overhead and cursing it for its transmission-blocking properties, Riley glanced between the two doors ahead of her. They stood close together, but on opposite walls. Both were slightly ajar, suggesting neither one would lead her directly to the prison area. Not unless security was very relaxed around here, and that didn’t sound like this World Killer guy’s schtick at all.
“So, if I was a bad guy, where would I keep my prisoners?” she wondered.
She looked at the door on the left.
Then she looked at the door on the right.
Then she looked down at the floor and felt a twinge from the rock below the tiles.
“Aha!”
The floor rumbled just ahead of her, flipping several tiles into the air. From one of the half-open doors, she heard panicked shouts. A quick wave of her hand brought the ceiling down in front of that doorway, blocking it off.
There was a groan, not unlike the sound of ancient trees swaying in the wind. The floor parted, revealing a deep pit below. Yellow light flickered and danced down at the bottom, sending the shadows of six figures writhing and dancing across the walls.
Riley allowed herself a grim smile. This had been easier than she thought.
“I mean, sure, I still have to get them out,” she said aloud. “But still. Yay me!”
The drop into the pit was easily sixty feet, probably more. There were, as far as she could work out, no visible means of getting down there. That could be a problem.
She thought about floating a chunk of masonry and trying to jump onto it, but the thought then immediately cut to a close-up of her gravestone, with ‘Plunged to her death in an alien prison’ etched into the stone, so she dismissed it.
She could always transform the meat suit into that battle armor with the jet boots, but that same image of the gravestone popped into her head again, only with the word ‘plunged’ scored out and replaced with the word ‘rocketed’.
There had to be some sort of way down, she knew, but it was entirely possible that it was on the other side of a door currently blocked by rocks and, beyond that, armed guards. Ideally, she didn’t want to hurt anyone else, so that ruled out door number one. Door number two might be a better option, but then again, it might just lead to a storage closet for all she knew.
She decided to try it.
It led to a storage closet.
“Bum,” Riley whispered.
Peering down into the pit gave her a bird’s eye view of six metal domes. Yellow light spilled out around each of them, and the way it crackled and shimmered suggested some sort of forcefield.
The floor of the pit looked to be made of the same rough rock as elsewhere in the facility, though. It was a long way away, but maybe…
Riley lay on the floor so her head and one arm stuck over the edge of the hole. Slowly, she extended a hand in the direction of the first domed cell. She could feel someone in there, their footsteps scuffing against the stone floor.
“Well, you can bring a horse to Muhammad, but you can’t… something about a mountain,” she said. She considered this for a moment, trying to recall the actual saying, then shrugged. “I know what I was aiming for.”
Then Riley concentrated like she’d never concentrated before, and the ground beneath the cell rumbled as if it were alive.
Twenty-Seven
Daryl crept between two enormous stacks of machinery, the purposes of which he couldn’t even begin to guess at.
He’d been prepared for a fight, but the complex seemed to be completely automated. He’d had Yufo run scans as he’d glided overhead on the battle armor’s auxiliary thrusters, and other than a few rat-sized desert creatures, t
he ship hadn’t picked up any life signs.
Daryl had passed the rest of the descent by learning a third of Hath’s native language—again, with the help of Yufo. It had seemed bewilderingly complex for the first few seconds, but his brain had expanded to make sense of it all after that, and now it was just a case of memorizing the trickier words. He’d be the first to admit that his pronunciation was probably way off, but it wasn’t bad for three minutes’ work.
Despite the sensor sweep having come up blank, and all visible signs pointing to it having been correct, Daryl wasn’t taking any chances. He tiptoed between the machinery stacks, weaving his way carefully toward the terminal Yufo was guiding him to.
“Hey!”
Daryl spun, raising his fists before he realized the voice had come from inside his helmet. “You done yet?” Ash demanded. Daryl felt himself bristle in irritation at Ash’s tone.
“No. Not yet.”
“What’s taking so long? I’m done here,” Ash said.
“Because you rushed in,” Daryl hissed. “You went before the countdown.”
“Yeah, yeah. So what? It’s done. I took out the tanks, for all that there were of them.”
Daryl hesitated. “What?”
“I took out the tanks. Like a goddamned champ.”
“No. I mean… What did you say? There weren’t many?”
“Not enough that I couldn’t take care of them,” Ash said, and Daryl could practically hear the guy’s chest puffing out.
“Enough for a world invasion?” Daryl asked.
Ash snorted. “Barely enough for a Rhode Island invasion.”
“I don’t know what that is,” said Daryl.
“It’s a State. Seriously, you’ve never heard of Rhode Island?” asked Ash, sounding positively appalled by this. “How can you not have heard of Rhode Island?”
“Have you ever heard of East Sussex?” Daryl spat back.
Annoyingly, his supercharged brain had now dragged a whole plethora of information about Rhode Island up from the darkest corners of his memory, but there was no way he was telling Ash that.
Besides, there were more pressing issues.
“Why weren’t there more tanks?” Daryl wondered. “It’s supposed to be an invasion force.”
“I guess Hath’s intel was wrong,” said Ash. He said it with the tone of someone who had, until that moment, thought everything was going great, but was now slowly coming to realize that it very probably wasn’t. “They must be somewhere else.”
“Damn. OK,” said Daryl. “I’ll try to get in touch with Hath and tell him.”
“Tell me what?” asked Hath, his voice suddenly booming in Daryl’s ear.
“Jesus!” Daryl yelped.
“Tell me ‘Jesus’?”
“What? No,” Daryl replied. “Tell you about the tanks.”
There was a pause. “What about them?”
“Tell him, Ash,” said Daryl.
Ash didn’t.
“I excluded him from the conversation,” Hath explained.
“Oh. Why?” asked Daryl. “I mean, not that I’m necessarily complaining.”
“I excluded Ash Stone in the interests of brevity, as time is against us,” Hath said. “I see now that this was a mistake. What about the tanks?”
“There weren’t many of them,” Daryl said. “Not enough for an invasion force.”
“I see,” said Hath. He considered this for a few seconds. “Troubling, but not our priority. You must disarm the transport system. Are you at the terminal?”
Daryl leaned out from between the stacks of machinery, looked around to make sure nobody was around, then speed-walked over to the bank of screens marked on the HUD of his visor.
“I am now,” he said, studying the lines of data and myriad of options on each of the screens. “Wow. It’s complex.”
“It is, but do not worry, Daryl Elliot. The ship will begin transmitting instructions. Follow the steps as they appear on your visor.”
A glowing rectangle superimposed itself over one of the symbols on the leftmost screen. It moved when Daryl turned his head, then resettled back in its original position again. The symbol was not one Daryl had seen before, but he got the general idea.
“Do I press it?”
“You do.”
Daryl pressed it. All the screens went dark.
“Uh, I think I did something wrong,” he said.
“Wait.”
The screens returned, this time with lines of data that were entirely different from those that had been there previously. Despite his growing grasp of the language, Daryl couldn’t understand any of it, and guessed it was computer code, as opposed to actual text.
“What now?” he asked.
“Follow the steps,” said Hath. There was a sound not unlike a scream in the background. “I must go.”
“Wait! Hath? Hath?” said Daryl, keeping his voice low despite his urge to shout. There was no reply from inside the helmet, just the insistent blinking of a light floating above another of the touch-screen buttons.
A keyboard slid out of the console with such ferocity Daryl leaped back into a fighting stance. At least, he guessed it was a keyboard. It had something not unlike keys on it, although they were much smaller than standard QWERTY keys and triangular shaped. There were also—Daryl counted below his breath for a moment—just under eight hundred of them, and none of them made any sense.
As he approached the keyboard, lights danced across his visor, indicating keys. Each light appeared for a fraction of a second, before being replaced by the next one.
“Wait, wait, go back,” he protested.
The light show stopped. Daryl tapped himself on the shoulder and instructed the suit to lose the gloves. He gave his newly freed fingers a flex, then cracked his knuckles.
“OK, I’m ready,” he said. And, as the light show restarted, he began to type.
Once she’d got the hang of lifting the first couple of cells, Riley had rattled through the rest in no time. Each one had risen on a column of stone, passed through a circular gap she’d created in the floor above it, then stopped when it plugged the hole.
As a result, she was now surrounded by six cells, each one still fully intact, just one story higher than they all had been. Six figures stood in the cells, watching her with a mix of amazement and suspicion. They looked like they would have been imposing once, but their time in confinement had stooped their shoulders and bent their backs, and it looked like they were struggling to stay on their feet. Quite what Hath thought these guys were going to do to help, she wasn’t sure, but he’d seemed pretty keen to get them out.
“Now, how do I get you out?” she wondered, pacing around one of the cells.
The ring of light around each cell was being projected by four devices built into the base. She searched a couple of them for any sign of a power switch, but came up blank.
Cupping her hands around her mouth she shouted into the cell beside her. “Any ideas?”
“Coomro ba,” said the man inside. His voice was clear and loud, like there was nothing between them.
“Coomro ba, huh?” said Riley, nodding. “Right. Coomra ba.”
She regarded the projector again, puffed out her cheeks, rolled her tongue around inside her mouth, squatted down, stood up again, crossed her arms, then shrugged. “Ah, screw it,” she said, and a chunk of masonry spat from the ground. It smashed into the metal like a cannonball, bending it in its housing and denting its back.
Inside the cell, the prisoner took a step back as the wall of light warped toward him. “Sorry, let me try again,” Riley said, giving him a thumbs up—a signal she hoped was pretty universal in its translation.
A second rock battered against the projector. This time, the wall of light flickered for a moment. When it stopped, one-quarter of it had vanished, leaving a clear doorway for the prisoner inside to exit by.
He stared at the opening in wonder for a moment, then hobbled out, keeping a close eye on Riley.
“Uh, hi!” she said, giving him a wave. “I’m with Hath. He sent me to rescue you.”
The prisoner’s vast expanse of forehead furrowed. “Trowka amsam Hath?”
“Hath!” said Riley. She tapped herself on the chest. “Hath friend. Get it? OK! Me and Hath?” she linked her pinkies together. “We’re tight. You know, ish. Tight-ish.”
She tried the thumbs up again, and this time made it a double. “Haha. OK. You have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”
“Ornstko roobus turrem ta,” the prisoner said, gesturing frantically to the other cells. “Bup! Bup!”
“Alright, alright, I’m bupping,” Riley told him. She turned, muttering under her breath. “A ‘thank you’ wouldn’t go amiss. You know, unless you already said it in an alien language, in which case, you’re very welcome. Now, let’s get your friends out of there.”
The landslide she’d created over the door rumbled, making pebbles clatter down its slope.
“Otherwise we’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
Daryl stared at the screen of text in front of him. It was definitely computer code, he could see that now, but the intricacies of it still eluded him.
“Yufo, can you translate this for me?” he asked.
“Information classified,” Yufo replied. “Please follow instructions.”
“Right. It’s just… I don’t think this does what we want it to do,” Daryl explained. “I could be wrong, but… I don’t know. I’m supposed to be disabling the transport beams, but I think this is connected to lots of other systems, too. I’m not sure, but I think it’s going to power some of them up, not down.”
“Information classified,” said Yufo. “Please follow instructions.”
“I’d better ask Hath,” Daryl said. “Hath? Hath, can you hear me?”
There was silence for a while, then: “Please follow instructions.”
World Killer: A Sci-Fi Action Adventure Novel Page 18