“Here?” said Pippa. The hole was small, rectangular, and at knee height. A cool breeze eased from the shaft. Keenan nodded.
“You should find a ladder. Climb down.”
Pippa disappeared. Keenan gestured to Franco, who holstered his weapon, and with MPK grating against the metal wall, squeezed his barrelled belly into the cool descent.
Keenan dropped to a crouch and savoured the draught; then his head slammed up. The noise was loud now. Ahead, he saw it hurtling towards him, a block of metal mounted between the walls. It seemed to be spraying something before it as it howled down the corridor... something slick and clear.
Keenan squeezed into the aperture as the machine buzzed past inches from his fingers; thin oil coated his hands and the back of his head. Keenan shivered.
“Nice place,” he muttered, “efficient.”
“Every action of worth requires effort,” floated Franco’s disembodied philosophical meanderings from below. Franco sounded just a little bit too smug. Keenan scowled down into the gloom.
“You don’t say.” Grasping slick metal rungs, he eyed strange narrow slots behind each rung, almost like grooves, but deeper. He shrugged, and began his descent.
“Dead end.”
They’d been climbing down for nearly an hour. It seemed a very, very long way. Pippa had stopped, and shortly Franco and Keenan stood beside her. Her torch played about the dark walls; rust smeared in large patches, and the whole essence of the place seemed less cared for, more neglected.
“Where now?” said Franco.
“We have to wait,” said Keenan. He checked his weapons, and kneeling, tapped the floor. A hollow, reverberating sound echoed from the butt of his Techrim. Then, they heard... no, almost sensed
—
beyond the edge of hearing—a whine of subtle gears.
Pippa raised her eyebrows.
“Something’s not...” began Keenan, and the floor dropped away, unfolding swiftly in a series of triangular steel petals. They lunged for the ladder.
Keenan slammed the wall, hands closing on a metal rung, legs smashing against the rungs below and sending pain lancing up him. Franco bounced with his shoulder, turned, started to fall and with a mad grappling of blurred limbs managed to entwine one arm and one leg around the ladder. Pippa, however, hit the wall. She reached for the ladder, but it was beyond her grasp. She slid down the wall, down into darkness, teeth grinding as her hands frantically grasped at slick steel. Below, there was a thrashing sound: metal on metal, spinning, grinding, increasing from a standstill with the acceleration of a charging turbine. Pippa felt a scream well in her throat. Her hands, outstretched against the metal, encountered a flaw: a lip, a protuberance she couldn’t see in the gloom. Her fingers flexed, dug in and locked. Her legs banged the wall, hard. Her knees sent shockwaves of pain to her skull. Pippa released a long breath and looked up at the distant silhouettes of Keenan and Franco, and then down at what appeared to be spinning discs of metal. She blinked, and reappraised her position. They weren’t discs; they were blades.
“Holy Mother,” she whispered, and glared across at the ladder. It was too far to jump.
“Pippa!” bellowed Keenan, voice bouncing metallically. “You OK?”
“Just about,” she said, voice unnaturally quiet.
“What’s the sound?”
“Cutting blades,” shouted Pippa. “I recommend you don’t make a jump for it, or you’ll end up juiced.”
Clatters and bangs echoed down the chute as Keenan and Franco descended. Keenan stopped across from Pippa, looked over into her grey eyes and smiled. He reached out. “Come on, jump.”
She glanced down.
“If you miss me, Kee, I’m sushi.”
“I won’t miss,” he said.
“You’d better not. Or I’ll kill you!”
He grinned at her, face boyish. “Darling, if I let you drop then I’ll dive right in after you.”
Pippa leapt, hands grasping frantically for Keenan; he caught her, took her weight, and swung her up to him where she took a firm hold on the rungs. Face to face, chest to chest, with nowhere to move, they breathed one another’s sweetness.
“Have to stop meeting like this,” smiled Keenan.
“You’re messing with my head,” said Pippa.
Keenan nodded. He agreed. His life, his whole existence, felt like a tumbling confusion, but now, here, only one thing was for sure. He gazed into her eyes and saw the glint of light from wet lips, felt her taut coiled body pressed tight against his. And he wanted her, for a fleeting moment, more than life itself.
“This feels suspiciously like a trap,” said Franco. His voice echoed off into distant metal. “You say that fucker JuJu gave you directions? And timings for this huge arse-fuck of an internal puzzle? This rat maze? This hamster slaughter-house? Well, the big dumb Ket-i bastard stitched us up.”
“Maybe,” said Keenan.
Below, the discs—with tiny serrated contusions on their whining upper surfaces—spun faster and faster and faster, whirling in a blur that was still accelerating on a platter of noise; the piercing metallic shrieks increased, the
thrum
of the blades vibrating the very walls.
Above, high above, there was a
clunk.
Keenan saw Pippa’s eyes narrow. Franco, above him, glanced up. There was another, solid,
clunk.
“What is it, Franco?” snapped Keenan.
Franco strained his neck, squinting, mouth a tight line. There was another
clunk,
then another and another. They started to get faster, and Franco’s drug-fried brain suddenly made sense of the image moving towards him.
“Keenan!” he shrieked. “It’s the ladder, it’s folding in on itself!”
The ladder, in small sections, was folding down and retreating into the narrow slots behind each rung. Viewed from below, it seemed as if the ladder was racing towards them... leaving nothing in its wake: no handholds, no handy ledge to hang from, just narrow slots too thin to get a human finger inside.
Keenan glanced down. Then up.
They were trapped, between sea and shore, hammer and anvil, between a rock and a hard place.
Anger boiled through his veins: a slow injection, a terrible rising of hot blood.
The metal discs spun faster and faster. They shrieked. And in that sound of discordant metal music, harsh and unreal, it seemed to Keenan they laughed at him.
He snarled something incomprehensible...
And stared down into shimmering blades, which mocked him with an impending slaughter.
Chapter 12
Vault
Polka Yux was a rocky, barren, desolate moon, which squatted, a forgotten bastard child on the lesser-known fringes of the Sinax Cluster. Lifeless, with nothing worth mining, no breathable atmosphere, no discernable purpose, and located away from all viable trade routes, umbilicals or SPIRAL docks, Polka Yux was—in the main, and quite rightly—ignored as the actuality of pointlessness it was.
Kotinevitch stood on an Ion Platform two klicks from the moon’s bleak surface and floated on a stream of synthetic radiation uplift. She gazed around the vast oval level, at its gently glowing green edges where sparks streamed from Friction Buffers in glowing trails all the way down to the moon’s surface. She strode to the edge, her FRAG Bulk Fighter silhouetted behind her. A vast blackness lay above and a vast darkness beneath her, her vision moving and tracking and drawn by the streams—a curtain, in fact—of tiny green fireflies, which tumbled and danced and fell into infinity, blending and merging on trajectories to become a blurred haze-like semi-transparent mist of fire.
Kotinevitch watched the phenomenon for a while, entranced by the simple raw beauty, and enamoured by an almost romantic inclination at her position. Standing, like a God above a planet, it was as if she stood on a platform floating in space, surrounded by eternity, master of all she surveyed.
Eventually, aware she had to dock the advancing machines, but unwilling to pull her gaze from the majesty of—rawness
—
surrounding her, Kotinevitch wheeled, boots squeaking against the slightly corrugated surface of the platform; she moved to the central tower.
The Tower was a machine, a hub, and the majority of its intelligence was a concentration of navigation data built with one specific function: to gather the War Fleet.
In readiness, for... The Time: a Time, which hopefully, would never come.
Because, if this Fleet was needed... then it was already too late.
Kotinevitch eyed the machine warily as she approached; like a white needle it rose from Platform Central, piercing the infinite black with radiant brightness. A beacon, a guidance module, a totem, it seemed to Kotinevitch this pinnacle of modern technology was almost... alive
...
sentient, and, if not alive, then certainly divine.
She exhaled, breath escaping as white smoke. The platform was cold, colder than ice.
She climbed into the Tower’s feeder hatch and felt a moment of disorientation as it elevated her to the summit several thousand feet above. She stepped out onto the Controller Ridge and knew awe.
Kotinevitch gasped.
She felt like a Star Strider; a Builder of Worlds.
Is this what they felt like?
she thought, remembering the old stories, the ancient tales of heroic pioneering Terraformers who, with the aid of World Builders—mammoth tank-like machines used in the terraforming of planets—had left Earth on decade-long journeys to find new places for the creation of colonies, in order to extendthe longevity of the parasite mankind. They had travelled the years, searching out, creating, terraforming, and, ultimately, aiding with the final transfer before Earth had spun into decline and frozen to become a static dead world, a raped shell.
Is this how they felt? Surveying an infinity from the bridges of their great and terrible, and powerful machines? And knowing they held in their hands the infinite power to create and destroy... knowing they had, to some extent, become a reality of apotheosis?
During the thousand years of the Helix War the World Builders—fifteen working models—had been utterly destroyed. However, these machines were not created by mankind; they had been discovered; and despite the billions of man hours spent in an attempt to duplicate, to replicate, to understand, to remanufacture, Man—in his arrogance and actual ignoranceof technology—had failed
.
The World Builders used materials humanity had never before seen; they used Creation Minds that humanity could not understand
.
And so, listed (by many Professors) as one of the greatest crimes of the Helix War, the annihilation of the World Builders had been a tragic loss, an obsolescence of the art of creating new worlds.
Still, maybe it was for the best,
thought Kotinevitch.
The loss of the machines meant we had
to spread our wings, had to wander and search and diversify, had to seek out other life forms and amalgamate, accept them, integrate with different cultures and customs and religions.
Kotinevitch smiled. She had a feeling that, after Mankind fled the diseased and dying Earth, if the World Builders had continued to exist—if Halo and Tetrol missiles hadn’t vaporised them into component atoms—then maybe Mankind would have remained the secular, insular beast He had always been.
Now, she thought, Man had been forced to integrate, to become part of a quad-galactic mixture of alien races, ethnic species and genetic experiments, all living together in one big happy boiling pot of politics and religion, and of culture and understanding.
We’re a cosmopolitan species, now,
she thought.
Ha!
Kotinevitch reached out and, fingers a blur, allowed the computers to transmit coordinates; then her head lifted and her eyes narrowed and, with one hand on the hilt of her yukana sword, she waited.
Sophisticated, multi-species, integrated: there’s no such thing as a fucking
alien any more.
Vitch smiled a very grim smile.
Well, not for long,
she thought as the first massive BULK Attack Craft slammed into view, space around it distorting and wobbling, and battering Kotinevitch’s stance with a terrible pressure.
The first BULK craft fired bright purple jets and shifted, banking, and filling her vision with sheer volume
.
It filled not just Vitch’s vision, but also her head. It was huge
.
It was a world killer
.
Now three BULK Freighters arrived, followed by D5 Transport Craft and a swarm of Piranha Fighters; the vision before Kotinevitch, as her fingers coordinated data on the computer, swam like nothing she had ever before witnessed. More and more ships arrived, hundreds of craft decelerating from Dead Space and distorting reality for just a moment; again and again space rippled with an Empty Displacement Effect as wave after wave of ships, shuttles, fighters, transport craft, freighters, mobile weapon units, energy organisers, mechs, and mobile brain units, all flowed into and around Polka Yux turning the desolate area of space into a hive of insane activity; turning it into a mass of devastating weaponry ten times greater than anything ever witnessed during the Helix War.
Kotinevitch looked out over her fleet.