Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains (11 page)

What industrial beauty he found though, was
marred by black-hulled Iron warships, scores of them clustered
along the multi-leveled airdocks, with dozens more drifting in and
out from the blanket of low-lying clouds overhead; themselves
stained in halos of crimson from the color-tinted atmium cores
employed by those airships. From every building waved Iron flags,
and combined with the glow of corrupt atmium, offered the only
splash of color in a world seemingly turned to monochromatic shades
of black and white. Here and there, on the multitude of outreaching
platforms, grounds troops marched in orderly processions along the
parade grounds, while in other places rows of machinery stood in
geometric patterns. Drish spotted four-legged assault machines,
like the ones patrolling the streets of Throne, and massive siege
hulks, like those that had leveled the slums. He found tread-rovers
and rotorcopters, and bi-fighters, and all of them gathered in
waiting for the next call to war.

Looking out over all that hardware had Drish
more certain than ever that he’d made the right choice. Surrender
was the only thing left to the Candaran species in light of all
this Hierarch domination.

“Hurry up,” grumbled Bar, having shed his
own disguise to stand with his arms folded over the chest of his
shaggy coat. He stood with his back to the city outside, almost as
if refusing to acknowledge the truth.

Drish was just finishing up with his jacket
when the elevator came screeching to a halt about twelve-meters
above the structure below.

“They must have cut the power to the
elevators,” Abigail blurted in the relative quiet that fell over
the booth, and she anxiously slamming a hand against the caged
wall. “We’re trapped!”

“Nay, lass,” said Bar, before giving Fen a
quick nod.

“And just how do—” Drish began, but was
stopped short when the two pirates grabbed hold of the elevator’s
caged doors. Together they pulled. Metal groaned and then snapped
and the doors sprang apart. They were still trapped in the shaft
however, and the noble stood with condescending satisfaction in
light of their failure. There was still nowhere to escape to. They
were well above the building below, and the shaft held them trapped
now more than ever, that is, until Bar braced himself against the
elevator’s sidewall and kicked out the glass. With a crash, shards
went tumbled out into the blustery winds, even as cold air came
pouring into the elevator, smelling of bilge-oil smoke and wet
rock.

“Problem solved.” Bar flashed a toothy grin
in satisfaction.

“Is it,” countered Drish while observing the
span of height still separating them from the roof-landing
below.

Captain Bazzon replied with a scoff before
turning to his young accomplice. “Fen, the rope if you will.”

“The rope,” asked the Hierarch dumbly.

Bar’s face darkened beneath the raised
hackles of his read hair. “Yes the rope! The one that I
specifically told you to grab before we left the skiff.”

“Oh…yeah,” Fen scratched at the stubble over
his right ear, “yeah about that, Cap, figured it was more trouble
than it was worth, so….I just left it behind.”

Confounded, Bar slapped a meaty hand against
his forehead, and slowly shook his head.

“And Arvis always spoke so highly of you,”
teased Abigail, before she hauled up and kicked out the elevator’s
control panel. From amongst the wreckage, she reached in and
grabbed hold of the main wiring, pulling until she’d managed a
length nearly ten meters long. When she shouldn’t tug out anymore
she shrugged apologetically. “Guess that’ll have to do. Hope you
don’t have weak bones.”

“My knees could be in better shape,”
grumbled Bar. “But good job, Abby, you’ve given us a shot, so
here’s how we’re going to do this. Fen, you go first, Abigail next,
then Drish, and finally I’ll follow up the rear.”

“What’s the destination, Cap?”

“Same as it’s always been, Fen; the secret
access tunnel. Now let’s move before they muster up the troops, and
in a bad way for us.”

Drish waited patiently as Fen and then Abby
slip gracefully through the narrow opening and shimmied down the
electrical wire, but when it came to his turn, the noble froze.
“It’s too high,” he whispered with a resistant shudder, “I can’t
make it.”

“You can and you will, Drish.” The captain
grabbed a length of wiring and placed it in the noble’s trembling
hands. “I suggest you grip tightly…and oh, I’m sorry in advance for
the rope burns you’re about it get. It’s going to sting like
nothing else.” Bar flashed him a wicked grin.

“What do you—”

From behind Drish felt a shove, and suddenly
he was tumbling out the elevator’s opening, though still managing
to keep a toe-hold on the floor while the rest of his body
stretched out over open sky.

“You son of a—”

But the noble’s words died a fast death when
Bar kicked the man’s feet out from under him, sending Drish
swinging into the air; that is, before his full weight dragged him
down along the wire. In the terrorizing exhilaration of falling,
the noble didn’t feel the flesh on his hands being stripped away,
but he did feel the wire come to an abrupt end; felt as his blood
slickened hands clung to nothing while he freefell two more
meters.

Drish slammed down onto the roof with enough
force to dent the metal. His knees also buckled as he hit, pitching
him forward to crash into Abigail, and together the pair toppled
into a heap. Somehow in the landing, Drish managed to end up on the
bottom; to stare up into the intoxicating saffron eyes of his
female rescuer. They were just centimeters away. He could smell the
mint on her breath too, and then he suddenly became cognoscente of
her full weight pressing down on him. The feel of her softness made
the noble turn a brilliant shade of red.

“I…um…sorry,” he stammered while she just
smiled down at him. It almost seemed as if her face lowered towards
his; like their lips were destined to touch; but then Bar slammed
down next to them, punching a hole straight through the corrugated
metal.

The pirate’s moans of pain had Abigail up
and at the hole in an instant. “Are you alright,” she called down
to the twilight he’d fallen into.

“Just wounded my pride’s all,” Bar groaned
from below. “Think something broke my fall…might have been a
someone actually. But at least we’ve got a way into the morgue
now.”

One by one, the party dropped in next to
Bar, finding that his landing had been broken by a corpse on a
gurney, left waiting at the door to the cold storage room.

Fen instantly burst into gleeful laughter,
until someone screaming from down at the end of the hallway cut him
off. Both Drish and Abigail turned in unison to find a red-faced
Hierarch orderly pointing down at them, until Fen whipped out his
pistol and fired. The sharp bark in a confined space was deafening,
and Drish flinched in violent revolt, while the orderly fell dead
to the ground with a hole punched neatly through his forehead.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing!”
roared Bar.

“Idiot child,” Drish snarled through the
high-pitched buzzing in his ears. “What sort of moron fires off a
gun in an enclosed space…Who even gave you a gun?”

“Everyone in the damn port probably heard
that,” finished Bar as he forced Fen’s readied gun barrel down, so
it was pointing safely at the tiled floor.

“Sorry, Cap,” apologized the young Hierarch.
“I didn’t have much of a—”

A soldier suddenly appeared over the
orderly’s body, checking the vitals, but before he’d had a chance
to look down the hall towards them, Fen shot him down as well, and
after that, Bar looked absolutely incredulous, but all he could do
was shake his head in disbelief as the teenager shrugged.

“Instinct,” dismissed the Hierarch as though
that were enough of a reason.

Knowing the damage was done, Bar lead them,
running, towards the doors at the hall’s end.

“Come along, Mr. Larken,” urged Abby
playfully, nudging him in the ribs as she skipped passed.

Watching her go, Drish realized he’d follow
her anywhere.

By the time they reached the morgue the
buzzing in Drish’s ears had relented to a dull whine, replaced by
the shrill blat of the hospital’s alarm, but as they reached the
stainless steel double-doors, the clap of a gunshot joined it in
chorus, punching a hole straight through the metal. Another clap
rang true immediately after and pulverized a tile on the wall next
to Drish’s head, and when he ventured a glance back, he discovered
a whole squad of Hierarch soldiers in pursuit, with their rifles
raised at the ready.

Drish could only laugh in the face of
impending death, but then Bar had him around the chest, and
together they were barreling through the doors.

Gunfire followed.

“Get ahold of yourself,” growled Bar as they
took cover behind a tiled sink basin, built right into the center
of the room. Drish hunkered in next to the pirate as the bullets
zinged by and ricocheted off the tiles and stainless steel
fixtures, and a feeling of profound weariness took hold, until he
noticed Abigail was nowhere to be found.

Where is she,
he wondered in a
panic.

A vertical stream of endless imperial bullets whizzed
and pinged off the basin tilework Bar and Drish had taken cover
behind, sending bits of shrapnel raining down, and keeping the
fugitive noble’s butt planted firmly in place; while next to him,
the gruff pirate captain returned fire. Grim faced, Bar squeezed
off the revolver’s trigger, launching one percussive shot after
another to rattle the noble’s brain, but Drish didn’t care. He just
needed to find Abigail. Desperately he scanned the room, daring,
even, to poke his head out past the safety of his sink to see
beyond the others that lined the chamber’s center; all the way to
the room’s end. On his left, he found rows of stainless-steel
morgue lockers, and to the right, a narrow strip of sunlight
pouring down through a bank of high-set basement-style windows.
There, crouched beneath the smoky debris and drifting dust motes,
he spotted Abigail, and a sigh of relief escaped the noble’s lips.
She was still alive, using a gurney as cover, while what light
pouring down from the overhead windows cast her aglow. With her
hair highlighted to flaxen and her skin warmed to honey, she
reminded Drish of the pantheon goddesses of love; of Allura
herself; and the one his grandmother had specifically taught him to
be mindful of.

“I’ll not have you succumb to a pretty face
like your father did, grandson,” explained the Baroness Estonia
Gernell-Larken on the day Drish had reached the rite of puberty. “I
can’t bear the thought of our noble family’s bloodline being
diluted any further. So be not tempted by the spawns of Allura, no
matter how enticing they may be. Remember, we are followers of
Yolanda, Drish, and Yolanda preaches order and reason; not the
chaos of passions. Such pursuits are for the peasantry, but for us;
it will only bring strife and ruin. You need only look to your
father’s example, to see that. His love for your lowborn mother
drove him away from us; might have ended the noble-line right then
and there if not for divine providence. Oh, if only your mother and
father stuck to their perspective stations, then maybe the King of
the Gods might not have seen fit to punish them as he did. But they
did not, and it was your mother who paid for their sins, with her
life while giving birth to you. So let that be the reminder you
need when considering your passions. Order, and the rule of law,
grandson; that’s the Larken way.”

Drish wanted to be mindful of his
grandmother’s warning, but seeing Abigail left him full of doubt.
He wanted to rush out and protect her, but he could only watch in
dreadful anticipation in the danger of their predicament. They were
trapped, and on Port Armageddon no less. Capture wasn’t a
possibility, it was a certainty, and if Bar kept firing back, they
would only be killed in the process. So Drish readied his throat to
roar out a surrender, when he noticed Abigail readying herself to
bolt from cover.

“Abby, no,” he yelled instead, but it was
too late to stop her; she was already running; and the bullet’s
followed. Tile readily exploded under her scrambling feet, while
wood from the overhead joists tumbled down in torrents to stick in
her hair. When she neared the room’s opposite side, she went to her
knees and skidded the rest of the way, to slam into the stainless
steel morgue lockers with her shoulder. She had made it that far,
yet now there was nothing to shield her.

“Run,” Drish tried to urge her, but she was
fumbling with a locker door instead, trying to pull it open while
gunshots punched through the metal around her.
What is she
doing?
The noble was exasperated.
There’s nothing but dead
bodies in there, and soon to be out here, if she doesn’t take
cover.
And then the door swung open.

It took the aristocrat a moment to
understand what he was looking at within. Where he’d expected
darkness and a slab housing a body, he instead found soft
torchlight guttering from somewhere too deep to be real. It defied
reason until it dawned on him.
It’s a tunnel!

“Come on,” urged Abigail, motioning with big
arm movements in order to draw their attention. Fen was the first
to scramble towards escape, displaying all the grace of a headless
chicken when he came popping out from behind an autopsy table in a
whirlwind of gangly teenage limbs.

“You’re next, Mr. Larken,” ordered Bar
Bazzon from beside the noble, before he gave Drish a rough shove,
and sent him stumbling towards the lockers, whether he wanted to or
not.

Drish, however, managed only a few staggered
steps before he faltered out in the open, torn between moving
forward, through danger, or retreating back to safety. In that
fleeting moment, he caught sight of Graye, standing out amongst a
cluster of imperials at the rim of the ruined doors. The officer’s
legendarily calm had crumbled to twisted red outrage, blasting
angry orders to the surrounding troopers as rapidly as they fired
off their rifles. Again, Drish felt a shove to his back, herding
him forward, where he fell to his hands and knees at the threshold
to the locker. After that, it seemed an easy decision for him to
scramble in after Fen.