Kraken Orbital (27 page)

I grip it
tight with both hands and though
t very
briefly of the last time I had held one. When I beat my old boss
down into the dirt. I tried to capture the aggression of that
moment and multiply it by the frustration in my heart. Multiply it
by the fact I want to save her and I can’t. That I want to save
myself and I can’t. That I miss Kolt want him back. I took the axe
and let it speak for me.

I howl
without knowing and let the rage burn through me. Let the fact we
were doomed control me and fulfill me. The blade of the axe
crunches into the chest of the beast and blood
gushes from the open wound I had created. It showers over my face
and tastes like warm iron. It’s nice. Warming and
nourishing.

Lucy
t
akes to booting it over and over, trying
as hard as she can to dislodge it from it’s perch on the window.
The creature, pale and yellow, howls and groans as it loses more
and more blood. I’m not stopping. Next shot of my axe I make for
it’s lowered beak. It splinters across the carriage like a broken
tree trunk.

‘
It’s claws!’
Lucy shout
s through powerful breaths and
between aggressive kicks. I raise the axe up as high as I can and
slam it down onto the clenched talons that held the ancient bird
onto it’s housing in the carriage. That does it. It lets go and
plummets with further ear splitting howls.

I quickly
count five more swirling and gliding around the tunnel.
We
’re getting really close to the blast
door ahead, that would hopefully open automatically and allow us
entry into the next section of the ship. That makes the fighting
seem more intense. An added sense of urgency spurs us on to keep
hitting out at them.

Make that
four. Lucy, once her laser weapons had cooled,
blast
s another out of the sky. I trust
her to cover me and keep herself safe at the same time. So I drop
my axe and fall to the floor. I brush shards of glass out of the
way as I search frantically for the engine bay beneath the
carriages. There has to be something in there. Something
combustible. I cut my hands really badly but don’t care. I’m pumped
with adrenaline and just need to get the job done. I’ll worry about
it later.

I finally
brush enough of the glass away to find the blood
soaked carpet. I use the tip of the axe to make a long
incision in the thin material and start ripping at the edges of it.
I pull the carpet right up and fold in aside. There’s a hatch right
beneath me but it’s bolted securely down. I try the axe but there’s
not enough of a gap to prize it open.

‘
Lucy!’ I
yell instinctively. She ca
tches on fast
and I turn away just a little. I trust her perfect aim. She fires a
single shot into the corner of the square shaped hatch and that
succeeded in frying the bolt in that area. That would be enough to
get it open. She turns back around and continues her barrage of
fire at the encircling monsters without even saying a word to me.
It’s really easy to be impressed by her.

I
t
ake the axe one more time and make a
quick count. Lucy has shot down at least another two. That will
leave at least two more unless more have gotten in. The axe makes
contact with the underside of the hatch and I pull with every tiny
bit of strength that I have left. It finally dislodges with a heavy
scrape and I use my free hand to pull it open
completely.

‘
Good luck!’
Lucy shout
s but still doesn’t turn
around. She must have highly attuned senses and must have figured
out what I was trying to do. I’m not sure where the thought is
coming from or why it’s so persistent, I just know somewhere deep
down that those blast doors just weren’t going to open!

The engine
bay
is small and cramped with no space to
work. I know the thing is likely electrical but that would have
been powered by the first generation hyper drive, or at least a
second generator attached to it somehow. But it’s still working
right now, despite the fact the hyper drive had died hundreds of
years ago. I saw the shell of it myself. I know the ship is robust
and hearty but this is really taking the biscuit quite frankly. The
flooded hall happened because an old system had only just now
finally died. Something is keeping this train moving and my money
is on a secondary diesel engine.

And there it
is. Chugging away at the front of the engine bay. I can hear it’s
deep and tantalizing rumble and smell the fumes coming from it.
There it is again. The old world, the dependable old world, meeting
head on with the new. And this ship is a model to it as
always.

I
’m crouched down as low as I can
get just to fit in the tiny crawlspace. Beneath me is another hatch
but this one is bigger and screws open easily. That would lead down
into the tunnel so no need to open it. I turn around on the spot to
be met head on with a selection of two barrels. Big old looking oil
drums. I guess that must be the heavy oil that is keeping this
ancient engine pumping. And I know that it burns.

‘
How’s it
going up there?’ I yell
to Lucy and pop
my head back out of the hatch. The smell hits me right away. It was
the burning and charred metal from the housing she had blasted
away.

‘I count two more.’ She must have had a brief
break in their offensive because she tuned to face me for the first
time in a while. That must mean she knows it’s safe to do so.

‘Help me with
these?’ I ask her and she comes running. I heave the first barrel
with all my strength, restricted as it is in the tight and narrow,
fume filled space. She holsters her weapons and lays flat on her
chest against the floor. She helps me all she can and we finally
lever the first rounded barrel out of the narrow hatch. But she has
taken too long. Her scream fills me with dread and instant
pain.

‘
Lucy!’ I
shout
as she is slowly dragged away by
another of the flying dinosaurs that had found it’s way into the
carriage. I can only just see that it has her by the leg. Her boot
is protecting her but it had still broken the skin. She’s bleeding
and is tearing up in front of me. I fight the reaction to grab for
her flailing hands and try to pull her back to me. I know that
won’t work.

There
’s no chance I can out arm
wrestle a dinosaur of that size and strength. I leap from the
hatch, grab for my axe and push my way past the beast’s huge wings
and to it’s beak. I stretch up tall, and slam down into it with all
the force of my body weight. It splinters into two and cracks right
down the centre. It frees Lucy and she darts away like a scared
child. That’s not like her one bit. She tucks her legs into her
arms and weeps uncontrollably.

‘
Hey! Snap
out of it!’ That
’s cruel but I swear it
needs to be. Not that it worked. She didn’t even look back up. I’m
worried about her a lot but I need to take the reins. Maybe I can
save her after all. I swing the axe one last time and strike the
monster at it’s eyes. More shrieks, howls and blood fills the air.
The copious red blood spews from it’s wounds as a mist first then a
river later. I dart back to the barrel full of volatile diesel and
tip it over. I didn’t mean to spill it but it doesn’t matter. I can
see, through all of the chaos and death, that blast door is getting
closer and showing no sign at all of moving even a
little.

I heave at
the barrel and roll it to the stumbling
dinosaur in front of me. It’s heavy and I can only hope it
will be heavy enough to dislodge it’s talons from the window
frame.

‘Lucy!’ I
scream at her even louder than before. ‘Gun! Now!’ She just about
wakes from her panic and tosses one of them to me. Time for one
hell of a stunt. I fire at the barrel as it rolls closer and closer
to the beast ahead. The flames start rippling and licking at the
barrel at first but it blows right at the correct time. It rips
through the monster, tears it apart and rocks the chamber of the
train from side to side. But it starts burning back towards us,
alighting the pieces I had carelessly spilled on the
way!

‘
What are you
doing?’ Lucy finally st
ands and jogs over
to me. I point at the ever encroaching door ahead of us in the
tunnel. I don’t need to add anything else. I dart, instead, back to
the hatch in the floor and start pulling at the next barrel.
There’s at least one more of those beasts out there and the same
trick was never going to work again.

‘
Help me!’ I
scream at her, throwing my axe back on the floor as the final
flying beast slam
s against the carriage
and perches as the others had in the window. Lucy doesn’t hesitate
this time. She starts pulling at the barrel and we manage to ease
it out of the gap. She looks at me like I’m mad when I start
unscrewing the cap on the head of the barrel.

‘
Are
you
insane? You’ll blow us all to hell!’
She screams right in my ear over the noise of the stumbling
dinosaur that scratches ever closer to us.

‘No! We’re
jumping!’ I point down to the hatch in the floor of the engine bay
below. She almost protested but didn’t. It’s nice that she trusts
me too. Nice, so I thought, but also a burden if I have to be
honest. She, without having to be told, starts unscrewing the bolts
and finally releases the hatch from the open housing. She must have
dropped it down because I hear a clash a few moments later. I’m too
busy smothering the carriage in diesel. It catches fire quickly
alongside the flames I had already caused and I finally lose my new
found nerve. Time to get out. Right now!

Lucy waited
for me in the engine bay.
I remember my
axe. I take it from the floor and toss it through the open shaft
and down into the tunnel below. That might come in handy any number
of times and in any number of different ways. I duck down into the
hatch and lower myself down the newly opened access point and out
into the cold of the tunnel. It isn’t that far to the ground. At
least so it looked from where I was. I grip the side of the hatch
as tightly as possible and look up to Lucy’s desperate
face.

‘
Climb down
me!’ I ke
ep flexing my fingers to keep
the blood pumping as she starts lowering herself over me. Lucy
drops down and grips the other side of the hatch before turning and
taking hold of my shoulders. I had her full weight resting on me
with her legs wrapped around mine. She starts snaking her way down,
gripping onto whatever loose bit of my armor she can get a hold of.
Finally she is hanging right off my feet. I dare to glance ahead.
We only have moments before the crash!

‘Jump!’ I
yell and she lets go. I wait only a moment to let her get clear and
let go too.

The
impact
shivers through my spine the
second my legs touch the floor. I instinctively roll but
accidentally hurl myself into Lucy. She looks okay but I throw my
arms over her and pull her into a small groove at the bottom of the
tunnel. It’s hollowed out in the base of the tunnel and will
protect us if the train falls from it’s tracks. I tuck her head
under my shoulders and make sure my entire body covers
hers.

The explosion
t
ears through the blast door. The sound
is like nothing I have ever heard before. The metal tears like
paper and the door screeches open as the train, as predicted, falls
down into the tunnel. The gap we had crawled into shields us from
the blow but not from the heat of the fire. Then silence. Nothing
but the ringing in my ears. We made it. No sense sticking around
though. I didn’t want to barely survive the dinosaurs, the
explosion too, only to die in the resulting fire.

Chapter 19

Rest

I let Lucy
crawl out first. I pretend that it’s because I’m a gentleman. But
it’s not. It’s because my back is nearly snapped in half. The pain
is
burning all around me. Bouncing from
the tip of my toes and all the way up to the front of my skull and
back again. I suck it up yet again and crawl out after her. By the
time I make it from out underneath the train, she is already out of
the crawlspace and holding out her hands to help me up. I take them
with my breath held. She pulls so hard my back cracks really
loudly. Even she hears it.

‘
Are you
okay?’ She asks and holds me once I’m up and out of the gap. She
speaks softly in the new found silence. Just like before. It
melts my heart right away and I slump over her
shoulder.

‘Your back
again?’ She starts to rub her hands around the base of my spine. I
tell her it’s helping but I lied.

I really
don’t want to but I pull away. I have to walk it off. She doesn’t
look offended so I don’t say anything. I just r
un my hand down her arm and all the way until we touch
finger tips as I walk away. The agony burns through my legs with
every step but I swear I’m not going down.
How many times am I going to fall like this?
It’s just plain unlucky. Or so I tell
myself.

The tunnel is
still reasonably well lit. The lights behind us are still intact
but the exploding train wiped out all of the ones nearer to the
door.
At least the door was wiped out too
though so we have a way out of the tunnel without having to
backtrack. I can’t see any cracks in the hull of the ship though.
And I can’t see any more of the flying dinosaurs either. I think we
might be safe. And I have an idea on how to lift our spirits and
generally make the two of us feel a little better.