Kotinevitch smiled grimly at her armada.
And yet, despite the apparent simplicity of her mission, she hoped she would never need this Might.
Inside, inside her breast, inside her heart, inside her soul, something finally relaxed as the fruits of her labour and pain, and anguish for the last decade ranged before her in all its magnificence, all its brutal military glory. Everything she had worked for, everything she had fought for, everything she had risked: it glistened like a dark jewel, a dark God, beckoned her to step forward to the precipice and use that which she had created for its final terrible ultimate purpose.
Kotinevitch licked her lips.
She fought herself.
And fear tumbled through her brain.
She descended the white ethereal tower, back out onto the oval platform; everywhere, in every micrometre of space surrounding the desolate moon, appeared the bulk of military craft, of Kotinevitch’s gathered War Machine: so many vehicles the eye could not count. Enough to fill the most feared enemy in Quad-Gal with absolute and unshakeable terror. Kotinevitch had amassed the greatest military fleet ever gathered. She was in control of a New Age.
And yet...
It is a deterrent,
she thought.
But if we must go to war, then we will go to war.
If there must be bloodshed, then it will be terrible.
Keenan, you have a lot to answer for. Your ignorance is colossal. And you will destroy everything we have fought to preserve; you will bring Him back from the Eternity Well.
I will make sure you die for your sins.
Vitch smiled the smile of a woman ready to sacrifice everything: a woman ready to kill, to murder not just on a planetary scale, but on a canvas that spanned four galaxies.
She watched the War Machine.
It glittered dark.
“Keenan! Shit! Ahh! What do we do?” Franco was flapping; in fact, more than flapping... he was practically plucking his own feathers in his eagerness to escape the blades.
Keenan nodded, as if taking counsel from an internal dialogue. “Drop a bomb,” he said in a lazy, almost emotionless, drawl. Franco glared into lizard eyes.
“
What?
”
“
Wait there.”
Keenan struggled to climb up past Pippa, and squeezed onto the ladder next to Franco. He unclasped Franco’s pack, delved inside, and by experience of touch pulled free a funnel grenade, or what those in the profession liked to call a Funnel Fuck. Keenan pulled the digital pin, heard the
click
of DNA recognition, and held the bomb in his fist as Franco craned his head trying to meet Keenan’s eyes.
“You might blow us up!”
“Either that, or we get minced.”
“Shit,” said Franco.
“Exactly.”
Keenan nodded, leant back, and dropped the bomb into the mesh of spinning discs.
Franco and Pippa cowered against their treacherous, slippery rock. There was a hiatus in time, an apparently endless pause filled with nothing but honeyed silence as the bomb fell, a spiralling trajectory, and above them with thundering great crashes the ladder folded over and over and over, down into itself leaving a slippery oil wall in its wake.
The funnel grenade connected with the blades.
They heard screams of shearing metal, the
shrring
of tortured circular saw steel, then a devastating
crack.
The world seemed to topple. Metal exploded outwards, two of the huge discs jigging and disconnecting from their framework; one went down, spinning and bouncing into dark nothingness, the other spun up, a huge distorted wheel with razor edges whirring end over end as it chased its own metal tail and reached the soles of Pippa’s boots.
She screamed.
The disc, losing momentum, hung for a moment just beneath Pippa, threatening to cut her in two. Then it fell away, tumbling silently into darkness. A stink of chemical explosive filled the shaft. Above, the shock of the explosion had upset some deep internal machinery; the self-folding ladder halted, one rung half in and half out of its aperture. It made tiny groaning noises, and moved half-heartedly in a fractured cycle. Then, with a final click, it stopped.
The three members of Combat K shivered.
Their world plunged suddenly into silence, and complete darkness.
“Are we all OK?” said Keenan.
“Yeah, said Pippa.
“Yeah boss,” sighed Franco.
“Let’s move, then.”
The smoke cleared a little, allowing light to shine up from far below. They descended the shaky, brittle ladder, past the battered smashed machinery of circular blades, now a scorched and broken mess with huge black streaks smearing the walls, and onwards, downwards, into the bowels beneath the Metal Palace.
They reached the real floor of the shaft, littered with debris and with a huge battered saw blade propped bent and broken against the wall. The chamber was a central hub, with six narrow corridors leading away. Each was a squeeze, especially for Franco’s girth of belly, and as they squatted down and Keenan waited for the pulse that would tell him the right direction through the web of metal arteries, so Franco moaned.
“There has to be an easier way than this.”
“There is,” said Keenan. “But the path to the Fractured Emerald is—unfortunately—littered with hundreds of Ket-i soldiers. This is what you’d call a back door.”
“Nice of them to fit one.”
“This place isn’t a vault, Franco. It’s a machine. The Ket-i may have turned it to their own uses, but they have made few alterations. They don’t want to stop the machine working... cannot afford to upset the equilibrium. After all, they don’t know what it does.”
“Maybe it makes their oxygen?” joked Pippa.
“Now there’s a horrible thought,” said Keenan.
The jolt of machinery jerked through the Metal Palace; around their little hub, corridors and passages whirred and shifted, some folded into metal cubes, some opened like the petals of rare flowers. The whole circumference of the shaft base altered and flowed, like liquid. Pippa found she had her hand on Keenan’s arm. She withdrew it quickly.
“Not far now,” he said, watching her.
Pippa nodded. Her voice was husky when she said, “Let’s go.”
In a gloom of thin smoke and oil residue, Combat K moved further into the machine.
They crawled down a series of narrow, claustrophobic corridors. It stank of old oil and grease. Sometimes, rancid steam or oil smoke came floating past, making them gag. Keenan stopped at one point, wiping sweat from his brow and checking his map. He felt a great weight, a great mass above and around him, as if he were deep underground, trapped almost in a confined coffin. Yeah, he thought, a tomb: a tomb with my name stone-chiselled on the door.
“You OK, Keenan?”
“Never better,” he muttered, and pushed on.
Franco, in comparison, had become pretty chirpy and cheerful after his drugs. His recent anal anaesthetic had pepped him up no end, and he’d managed to stop moaning about needing the toilet. At one point he had winked at Pippa and said something about internal compression and the power of mind over bowel. Pippa hadn’t looked impressed.
They stopped at a junction, and Keenan stared at his watch.
“Here it comes,” he said.
“What?” scowled Franco.
Suddenly, gears whirred and the narrow corridors started to jig and move; they spun and rotated, and Combat K felt as if they were inside a giant simulator on some crazy ride. And then... the floor was gone. With yells they fell, twisting, through a large bright chamber, and landed lightly, coiled, weapons at the ready... and facing three large, near-naked but heavily armed Ket-i warriors.
Teeth bared, they levelled Laz-Spears. “Ket hei?” hissed one, and fired his weapon.
Combat K rolled apart as unseen energy crackled across the metal chamber and sent petals of molten metal running down the wall. Keenan’s Techrim was out, firing as the two guards leapt at Combat K. There was another crackling burst, and the Techrim was torn from Keenan’s fingers with several strips of skin. He watched as his bullets, caught in the Laz-Spear’s stream, flowed into spinning molten trajectories leading to the floor. His Techrim followed, creating a black shining puddle. Franco leapt at one Ket-i warrior dodging under a sweep of the spear’s savagely barbed point and hammering a right hook to his jaw. Pippa attacked the third guard, her own weapon firing. A bullet entered his eye and removed the back of his head. Blood sprayed and he stumbled back into his colleague, limbs flailing, bone cubes scattering like dice across the floor. Another Laz-Spear burst sent Keenan rolling, and he charged and leapt. The warrior lifted his spear too late, and Keenan’s boot struck his face. He stumbled back. Another high kick caught the Ket-i under the chin and he dropped his weapon; as he fell Keenan was on him, a small black blade in his hand. He cut the warrior’s throat swiftly, head snapped left to where Franco was fighting a losing battle. As he watched, Franco was slammed to the ground by the butt of the Laz-Spear. The weapon levelled ready to remove Franco’s head. Keenan hurled his blade, which entered the huge warrior’s ear and sliced into brain. The Ket-i warrior stumbled, then righted himself. He turned and, amazingly, glared with narrow dark eyes at Keenan.
Keenan, rigid and poised for attack, watched in disbelief as the warrior altered his stance and lifted his Laz-Spear in Keenan’s direction. Keenan grabbed the fallen Laz-Spear beside the still pumping corpse on which he knelt. Arm coming back, he hurled the weapon and the barbed point punched the warrior’s chest, to the left, just beneath the shoulder.
The Ket-i warrior took a step back, but even then remained standing. Combat K uncoiled, and Franco jumped to his feet clutching his throat. The Ket-i warrior gave a savage grin, and in a sudden movement fired his Laz-Spear... which picked Pippa up and hurled her across the chamber like an accelerated rag-doll. She smashed the wall and hit the ground in a crumpled heap as Keenan’s MPK came round from his back and he held the trigger hard. Bullets screamed across the short space, riddling the Ket-i guard. The gun juddered under Keenan’s hands and the guard’s body danced, chest caving in under metal onslaught showing yellow fat and jagged crushed ribs. Keenan released the trigger. Silence slammed them. Smoke curled through the bright chamber. Keenan turned and ran to Pippa, screaming, “Check the corridors!”
Franco, his own sub-machine gun free, ran to check for more Ket-i guards. Keenan reached Pippa and gently uncurled her.
Her eyes were closed.
For a horrible teetering moment he thought she was dead.
Then her eyes opened and she smiled painfully at him. She coughed, and tried to sit up. With a spark and a crackle, lights scattered through her WarSuit.
“Shit,” she said. “That fucking hurt.”
“Your suit took the blast,” sighed Keenan, breathing deeply.
“It fucking killed it. I can feel it getting hotter and hotter!”
Keenan turned. “We clear?”
“Clear, Keenan,” bellowed Franco, gun covering the corridor.
“I thought you were dead,” said Keenan.
“Take more than a molten Laz-Blast of 50,000psi to kill thiswoman!”
“Without the suit, you’d have no body left.”
“I’m painfully aware of that.” She coughed again, and managed to get to her knees. “Shit. It feels like I’ve been hit by a tank.” She struggled out of the damaged WarSuit. Lines of horizontal light spat and hissed through the damaged fabric, and tiny wisps of smoke appeared at collar and cuffs. Pippa stood, shivering momentarily, in her thin cotton under-suit.
“I feel naked without the WarSuit.”
Franco, who had just returned, ogled her. “You might as well be,” he said. “Don’t you wear a bra under that thing? It traces allyour curves perfectly.” His eyes dropped lower. “Phew!” he said, shaking his head in appreciation. “You’re a fine specimen of a woman, Pippa, I’ll give you that.”
Pippa scowled. “You shouldn’t be looking!”
“How can I not? Talk about peepshow!”
Her hand slammed his face, a stinging slap that left an imprint against scorched skin.
“That’s fair,” smiled Franco.
“Right, come on,” snapped Keenan, checking his TuffMAP
TM
. “Franco, I’ll scout. You take the rear. Pippa must stay in the middle; she’s more vulnerable without her armour.”
“But there’s at least one added benefit to Pippa losing her WarSuit,” said Franco. “A silver lining, you might say.”
“Oh yeah?” Pippa’s voice was dangerous, cool, and filled with snake poison.
“I can watch the sway of your arse,” he beamed.
They worked their way down narrow tunnels for another hour, one flooded with oil, which left them all slick and greasy, and Franco complaining of pains in his eyes. Down they moved, ever downwards, through corridors and shafts, tunnels and vents. They finally reached a small room at the end of another corridor, which forced them to crawl on bone-mashed knees. Standing, stretching, Keenan smiled.