Chapter Twenty
The interior of the pale ship was less of a horror show than Nathan had expected. He wasn’t sure what he thought he’d find when the raiders dragged him and the other two inside. Humid, mucus-lined corridors? Flesh-walls covered in the screaming faces of their victims? A giant, beating heart for a reactor?
The reality was almost disappointingly mundane. The unusual exterior of the pale ships seemed to be mostly cosmetic, and besides the glaring orange lights, the interior resembled any other spacecraft.
Nathan tried to free his arms—now bound behind his back—but only succeeded in chafing his wrists against the metallic rope the raiders had used. Rufus and Joshua sat next to him in the same cell, all three of them caked with mud. They’d been relieved of their weapons and gear, though not all of it. Rufus still retained the equipment on his belt, Joshua his glass pocket watch, and Nathan the Beany cutting stuffed into his jacket.
Not that any of those would prove helpful, even if their hands weren’t bound.
“Where do you think they’re taking us?” Rufus asked.
“The deifactory,” Nathan guessed.
“What for?”
“Wish I knew.” He paused and considered his words again. “Or maybe I don’t.”
The flight over didn’t take long. The cell lacked windows, but Nathan could feel the ship slow and then land with more grace than he gave the raiders credit for. It seemed they could pilot their ships without crashing them through random buildings.
The cell door opened, and pairs of raiders came to collect them. One pair grabbed Nathan’s bound arms and hauled him to his feet. He didn’t see the point of resisting, at least not yet, and so he allowed the cyborgs to manhandle him.
The raiders escorted them out of the ship, and Nathan took in their surroundings. Wind whipped across a wide, circular landing platform that jutted out the side of the deifactory, perhaps a tenth of the way up. Two pale ships sat on the pad, including the one they’d arrived in, each boasting a unique mix of spiky ornamentation.
He spotted smoke rising from the Neptune Belle’s wreckage, which sat at the end of a short furrow between the lake and the edge of the forest. Another pale ship flew in from that direction, and Nathan wondered if Aiko and Vess had managed to seize the vessel, but those hopes were dashed when the third pale ship settled onto to the pad next to the others.
“Guess not,” he muttered.
One of the raiders gave his shoulder a shove, and he let himself be corralled across the platform and into the deifactory. Massive cylindrical machines towered on either side of a dimly lit path, and narrow passages branched out through gaps between the machines, peeling off to either side at regular intervals. Light spilled through those openings, and the noise of human activity echoed from distant rooms: the scraping of feet, the slurping of meals, the banging of tools.
But no words.
No conversations.
No laughter or tears.
Not so much as a single whisper.
The raiders escorted them through the factory, and the human activity around them grew denser. They passed a group of female cyborgs heading in the opposite direction, many with pregnant bulges pressing against their long, leather cloaks. None of the women so much as looked their way.
“We’re in deep, aren’t we?” Joshua said under his breath.
“Yup.” Nathan supposed he should have tried to put on a brave face, but if there was a glimmer of hope in their situation, he couldn’t spot it.
“Have faith, you two,” Rufus said. “We’ll get out of this.”
“You have a plan?”
“Nate, the cyborgs are mute, not deaf.”
“Right, right. Silly me.”
“But no, I don’t.”
The raiders took them by the shoulders and shoved them down a side passage single file until the path opened into a long, rectangular room with a low ceiling. Orange lights shone across rows of gleaming metal tables, some occupied by naked raiders.
“Is this where they sleep?” Joshua wondered aloud.
“Don’t think so,” Rufus said. “See how they’re strapped in?”
A hunched cyborg with matted, graying hair and a cluster of five large eyes for a face shuffled over to an occupied table. Two mechanical arms sprouted off his back. His extra arms reached toward a wall rack and grabbed a pair of objects: a hammer and a fist-sized orb with a thick spike on one end. He inspected the body on the table, placed the tip of the spike against the cyborg’s ribs, and then hammered it in with a fierce blow.
The cyborg on the table twitched. Blood oozed from around the spike.
Joshua cringed.
“That’s not how you do that,” Rufus whispered with a shake of his head.
“I’ll let you know if I spot their suggestion box,” Nathan muttered.
The raiders brought the prisoners to a halt, and the cyborg surgeon walked over. He inspected Nathan first. Three hands grabbed the captain’s head, forced it left and right, then worked their way down his body, poking and prodding without any sense of personal space. One of the metal hands reached in between Nathan’s legs, and he jumped from the sudden pressure.
“Hey, there!” he snapped. “Back off! We only just met!”
The surgeon paused. Three of his eyes swiveled up and focused on Nathan’s face, then swiveled away. The surgeon continued his inspection.
So they can hear us, Nathan thought. And perhaps even understand us.
The surgeon moved on to Joshua and then Rufus. He spent several minutes poking at the nubs along the cleric’s scalp before moving on to jab at the rest of his body. Once finished, the surgeon backed off without a word, and the raiders marched the three men to the far end of the room, past rows of strapped-down cyborgs.
“There’s a nekoan on the table ahead,” Rufus said.
Nathan followed the cleric’s gaze to a table with a black-haired nekoan male. The victim’s eyes were closed, but his ears and tail twitched. Two spiked devices had been driven into his chest, both undulating as they pumped . . . something into him.
“Oh, hell,” Nathan groaned. “We’re in trouble.”
“How is this news?” Joshua breathed.
“Because that’s why they kidnap people.”
The raiders marched them to the far side of the room. A dense row of cells lined the wall, each barely large enough for a person to stand or sit in and composed of transparent doors and transparent walls to either side. A caramel-haired nekoan male in tattered T’Ohai livery crouched in one of the cells, his head slumped against his knees. He looked up when the raiders stuffed Nathan and the others into the next three cells.
“Hey there,” Nathan greeted their fellow prisoner, unsure what else to say in a situation like this.
The nekoan responded in their guttural, growling language.
“Sorry,” Nathan replied. “I don’t understand your language.”
“You. Speak crafted?”
“The crafted tongue? Yes, I understand it.”
“I, um, a little. Not good. I born, um, not capital.”
“It’s all right.” Nathan leaned against the wall between him and the nekoan. “Your crafted is better than my nekoan. What’s your name?”
“Name? Dezzo K’Lannet va T’Ohai. You?”
“Nathan Kade. Were you taken from the palace?”
Dezzo’s brow wrinkled and he shook his head. He didn’t seem to understand.
“You serve King D’Miir S’Kaari?” Nathan asked, trying a different approach.
“Yes. My king. I, um, soldier.” His ears drooped. “Strong, but v’zegget stronger.”
Nathan bobbed his head toward the cyborgs. “V’zegget?”
“Yes. I not know crafted word.”
“That’s all right. We’re still having a good conversation, aren’t we?”
Dezzo shook his head again.
“A good talk?” Nathan tried.
“Yes.” The nekoan’s eyes lit up and his ears perked despite their predicament. “Good talk.”
“Were you brought here alone?”
“No. Not alone.”
“Where are the others?”
“There.” Dezzo indicated the rows of tables with a chin bob. “Their heads, um, hurt.”
“The raiders drive implant stakes into the backs of people’s heads,” Rufus explained.
“How do you know that?” Nathan asked.
“From the corpse Aiko and I examined. We didn’t have time to take a look inside the head, but I’m guessing the stakes introduce a web of connections to the brain. My own implants would look similar if you cracked my head open. They’re using these implants to communicate with each other.”
“Then you can hear them?”
“Sometimes, but all I pick up is nonsensical buzzing and clicking.”
“Does knowing that help us?” Joshua asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Rufus said with a frown.
Joshua kicked the clear door, but it didn’t budge. “Does anyone have an idea on how we get out of this?”
“Still working on it,” Nathan said, even as he struggled with his own sense of hopelessness. “How about you, Dezzo? Do you have an escape plan?”
“No escape.”
“Chin up. There’s always hope.”
“No. No hope.” Dezzo let his head slump back between his knees.
The room fell silent on that depressing note. Nathan watched the cyborg surgeon conduct his rounds, hammering machinery into each victim. Those mechanisms seemed to come to life afterward, and some blossomed open like horrific flowers made of scalpels and syringes instead of petals. Others contracted, forcing their contents into twitching, convulsing victims.
Nathan wasn’t sure how long he watched the surgeon work. An hour? Two? Maybe more? It was mesmerizing in a grotesque, unsettling way. When the surgeon finished impaling the last of his “patients,” he trudged over to the row of cells, his many eyes scanning across the selection of raw material.
Two raiders opened Dezzo’s cell and reached for him. At first, he let them drag his slack body to its fate, but then his ears stood erect, and his eyes gleamed with sudden sharpness. He launched himself between the two raiders and threaded the space between them. They groped for him but missed and he sprinted across the room—
—only to be tackled by the raiders guarding the exit. He screamed and growled while they dragged him to one of the tables and strapped him in face down. The surgeon steadied the nekoan’s head with powerful cybernetic arms, placed a stubby, metallic stake against the base of his skull, then hammered it all the way in with three harsh blows.
Dezzo screamed, eyes wide, hands and feet flailing. He thrashed against his bonds, but his efforts began to slacken almost immediately. The stake let out a high-pitched whirr of activity, and little chunks of gore spat from the top. It took Nathan a moment to realize those chunks were pieces of Dezzo’s brain. The muscles in the nekoan’s face loosened, and he began to drool. His limbs twitched one final time, then fell limp.
The surgeon wiped the bits of brain off the back of Dezzo’s head and inspected his grisly handiwork with an impassive face. He presented no signs of either approval or disappointment before he looked up, large metal eyes locking on Nathan.
A pair of raiders came for him.
Nathan swallowed. His heart thumped fiercely in his chest, and blood pounded in his ears. He didn’t want to have part of his brain carved out so he could be turned into a mute cyborg! He liked his brain right where it was, thank you very much!
His mind raced but with no direction. He struggled against the bonds behind his back, yet they wouldn’t budge.
What could he do?
Was there anything he could do?
One of the raiders reached for the lock to his cell.
“Hey!” Rufus bashed his shoulder into his cell door. “Hey, you!”
The two raiders hesitated at the door, and their surgeon approached Rufus at a casual pace.
“Yes, I’m talking to you!” Rufus thumped the door again. “Take me first! Come on! I want to join!”
The raiders stood like statues while the surgeon studied Rufus. Two of his five eyes widened, then contracted again.
“What are you waiting for?” the cleric taunted. “Let me join your glorious community! I’ve waited my whole life for an opportunity like this!”
“What’s he doing?” Joshua whispered to Nathan.
“I think he has a plan,” he whispered back. “Be ready for anything.”
“Okay.” Joshua nodded with tentative determination etched across his face.
“Hurry up!” Rufus headbutted his cell door this time hard enough for Nathan to wince. “Open up! Take me first!”
The surgeon stepped forward and opened the door.
Nathan wasn’t sure what he expected to come next, but it wasn’t Rufus dropping to his knees before the surgeon. The cyborg hesitated one last time, then finally took the cleric’s head in his hands.
“Yes!” Rufus declared excitedly. “Just like that!”
The surgeon positioned a fresh stake—almost dead center with the cybernetic plate on the back of Rufus’s head—and hammered it deep. Sparks spat into the air, and the surgeon flinched back. Rufus gasped. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he shuddered and collapsed.
“Rufus?” Nathan asked softly. “Buddy?”
The cleric twitched on the cell floor, and a stream of fresh sparks flew in an arc out the back of his head.
Joshua gulped. “Do we have a Plan B?”
Aiko was afraid.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d experienced genuine fear. Death wasn’t supposed to matter to Jovians, other than as an opportunity to learn from failure, but now she found herself with a single body and her persona safe buried inside a dead ship. If she died here, that was it. End of story.
End of life.
The concept ate at her mind, filling her with worry and dread, but she pushed through the negativity, putting one foot ahead of the other as she and Vessani cut a path through the forest. She couldn’t afford to sit on her composite butt pondering the meaning of life. Nate and the others needed her, and she’d be damned if she was going to sit idly by while the raiders did gods-knew-what to them!
Besides, living life with permanent consequences was a refreshing change in a strange way. Kind of exhilarating, though she could have done without the “companions in mortal peril” part.
Aiko used her commando body to cross the rugged terrain with ease, her footing sure as she darted through the stifling, murky woods. Vessani had impressed her with her ability to keep up a steady pace. She huffed and grunted behind the Jovian, her face slick with sweat, but she hadn’t complained once on their way to the deifactory’s massive slopes.
Aiko slowed at the edge of the forest and crouched beside the wrinkled, fleshy trunk of what she’d begun to categorize as meat-trees. A part of her wanted to chop one up and put the slices on a grill. Who knew? Maybe they made great steaks. The cyborgs ate something after all, and she hadn’t spotted any obvious farms or livestock so far.
Along the way, an eyeless creature conjured from the stuff of nightmares had leaped out at the two women halfway to the factory. Vessani had heard it coming before Aiko did, which impressed the Jovian, and the creature, while terrifying to behold, couldn’t defend against her vibro-knife.
Vessani dropped to one knee behind the next tree over, huffing for air, her hard suit’s visor up. She wiped her brow with the back of a hand and gulped down each breath hungrily.
“Well?” the nekoan asked, her chest heaving. She uncapped her water bottle and sucked on the tube.
“We have a problem,” Aiko replied quietly.
“Another one?”
“Yeah. The ship that took them landed on a platform about a hundred meters above us. There are at least three ships up there, which indicates a lot of raiders, but that’s not the only issue.”
“Then what is?”
“I don’t see any exterior elevators or ground access points near our position.”
“You suggesting we climb the slope?” Vessani asked.
“I don’t see any other way from here to those ships.”
“We’ll be exposed.”
“Which is why it’s a problem. We could skirt around the perimeter, but there’s no guarantee we’ll find an easier way up. We could try approaching from the inside.”
“And risk getting hopelessly turned around in an unfamiliar factory?” Vessani shook her head. “We’ll lose our way in minutes! Assuming we can even find another entrance!”
“I know. Which leaves that platform as our best way in.”
“Then let’s do this.” Vessani emptied her water bottle and stowed it on her belt. “I’m itching for a fight.” She raised her pistol.
“You and me both.” Aiko pointed to the deifactory. “You see the trough cut into the slope?”
“I see it.”
“I say we use it to scale the factory. It’s not terribly deep, but some cover is better than none. Should let us get closer before we’re spotted.”
“Good enough for me.”
“You ready?”
“As ready as I can be without a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. Lead the way.”
Aiko nodded, and took one step out of the forest—
—before the top of the platform exploded into a ball of fire and fury. The front half of a pale ship arced off the platform, trailing greasy fumes on its way to crash against the factory slope. The wreck crumpled and slid down the side, screeching, sparking, and burning.
Another explosion shook the platform, and flaming pieces of a second ship flew high into the air, then pattered down across the slope like a heavy, metallic rain.
“What?” Vessani exclaimed, huddling behind her tree. “What’s going—”
A third explosion cracked the air. Secondary detonations cascaded through the spaceship wreckage, flinging the top half of a raider clear from the platform. What was left of him landed somewhere in the forest.
Twin streams of gunfire sprayed the platform, tracers glowing, their trails weaving back and forth, saturating the area. Bullets zinged off the deifactory’s exterior, and micro-detonations added to the flames and chaos.
Vessani rose behind the tree trunk. “What the hell is going on?”
“Wait a second.” Aiko put a hand on the nekoan’s shoulder and eased her back down. “I recognize those weapons. They sound like . . . but no, it can’t be.”
“Sounds like what?”
“Jovian heavy repeaters.”
“Jovians?”
Aiko nodded.
“How the hell did they get here?” Vessani exclaimed. “We were shot down!”
“Not sure. Maybe Rufus did a better job of calming the ring’s defenses than he thought.”
The roar of gunfire ceased, and the silhouette of a black hull slid over their position, descending toward the still-burning wreckage on the platform. Its sleek silhouette broadened toward the back while thrusters capped a pair of stubby wings at the front. Weapon bays along the front were open, exposing the barrels of two turreted 37mm rail-repeaters and racks of torpedoes.
“Star Dragon corvette,” Aiko noted.
The ship passed through a pillar of thick smoke and eased down onto the space it had blasted clear.
“Which means?” Vessani asked.
“It’s a stealthy, multi-role attack craft. Probably loaded with commandos, too, judging by how it’s about to land.”
“Could this be the same ship you saw tailing us?”
“No way. That one’s plasma, but Star Dragons often act as support for a larger force. If you see one, there are likely more nearby.”
“As if crazed cyborgs weren’t bad enough. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know, but maybe . . .” Aiko trailed off, a possible future unfolding before her.
That was a Jovian ship up on the platform.
Of a class she was intimately familiar with from her commando days.
And, if her guess was correct, the corvette was about to send its troops into the factory, leaving a skeleton crew behind. She knew all the craft’s strengths and weaknesses. Its weapon arcs and, more importantly, its blind spots.
“Aiko?” Vessani knocked on the side of Aiko’s head. “Hello?”
“Stay put!” The Jovian bolted upright so fast Vessani jumped back. “Sorry, but I’ve got an idea!”