The Tech One screamed. He pushed the body off him and heard it sigh and bubble as it sloughed aside. He stood. Warm soft lumps slid off him to plop softly onto the deck. He blinked at the open ball turret, hatch askew where it had struck the hydraulic rig frame. Blinking at the half body lying face-down in a metallic-smelling mush. At the patch of red glimpsed through the little hatchway where the severed legs and groin lay crumpled in the tiny metal ball.
The Tech One’s body did a little galvanic dance and then he vomited copiously.
“Medtech,” he said weakly. He touched his collarbone. “Medtech,” he repeated. “Medtech needed in the aircraft.”
The diagnostic biobot crept back and picked its way around the mess like a crime witness who didn’t want to get involved. The Tech One heard it clattering toward the rear of the aircraft. He thought he might be sick again but he forced it down.
If the medtech got here fast enough the Weaponry Officer might be saved. But then the Tech One realized that the sources of the organs the man would need had just been blown to sludge by a volley of .50-caliber slugs unleashed by the Weaponry Officer himself.
The Tech One set his hands on his bloodsoaked knees and heaved again.
The Twenty-Seventh Supreme Commander General of Services and Forces of the Redoubt watched the three medtechs roll silently across the cavernous staging area, their nimble manipulators already at work on the Engineer Threes slung in their hanging bays. The Supreme was in a cold fury. He knew that the debacle he had just witnessed firsthand had been the sole fault of the idiot Weaponry Officer One, who had lost control of an unfamiliar system. But despite where the responsibility clearly lay, the Supreme was certain that his prisoner had played a role. There had been too many accidents in the round-the-clock repair and modification of the warplane. Too many biobots put out of commission or inexplicably reconfigured. Too many convenient delays. Missing or damaged parts. Personnel injuries. Miscommunications.
He knew that, in time, his people could repair the aircraft to combat status without assistance. But the captive seemed to have a complete model of the entire vessel in his mind. Every nut, strut, gauge, feed, and gear of the clever and stupefyingly complex Gothic clockworks that was the Flying Fortress. This lucky scrap thrown at them from the past, a bone offered up by the same incalculable power that had ruined their world. Many of his people were already whispering that the warplane’s arrival was an act of providence, proof that resumption was at hand. As if some coughed-up tool were the reward for all the destruction, the centuries of hardship and cruel necessity, the attenuating generations lived without knowing whether their descendants would ever leave this box to reseed some bettered earth.
The Supreme would say nothing to counter this absurdity, though, because it was useful. It kept the remnant population bolstered as they toiled toward their common goal.
But destined or not, the warplane was a tool. A lever, accidentally dropped between the cracks of worlds, found by those most suited to take full advantage of its ability to move the world.
And the fulcrum?
The fulcrum stood beside him, arms folded as he regarded the quiet bustle, the organized response to unexpected mayhem.
Three Engineer Threes and a source clone shot to mere protein. Deliberate?
The Supreme looked back at his prisoner and felt his cold fury rise. The insolent slouch, the feigned indifference. The organ tanks will be there for you as well when I no longer need you.
Two repair drones dropped from the opened bomb bay doors, each carrying a bloody section of the Weaponry Officer One.
The man watched the biobots clatter off on multijointed legs in the direction of Medical Engineering and the organ tanks. He adjusted his dirty cap and shook his head. “Well, that’s unfortunate,” he said as he lit up a cigarette. “I musta tole that boy a hundred times to set that brake.” He turned his head to spit a fleck of tobacco on the Redoubt floor.
TWENTY-SIX
The sun that had set over the top of the high cliff when they were in the fissure had come into view again as they progressed along the crater floor, shining merciless and unwavering in an indigo sky bereft of cloud, in air too thin to distort. A few hard stars shone through.
Even though Farley had passed through the crater’s eastern perimeter not a week ago, the scale of the thing assailed him. It was the size of a large city, so big that it was hard to see it as a crater at all from within the bowl, so wide that the two-mile-high rim wall was a thin line at the horizon. Frozen lava ripples were ranges of low smooth hills, like folds in thick batter. Clusters of solidified air bubbles were the size of city blocks, some thin enough to have collapsed or broken open like bombed stadiums. The rubble of some final battle between warring deities.
And at the center of the crater five miles away, the flattened cone that rose above the well looked like an anthill at the bottom of a shallow bowl. Faint green light glowed from deep within the mound like something awful rotting in a bog. It looked ruinous and infected. The commander’s eggheads had said it was a kind of friction caused by the fraying edges of reality itself, a byproduct of the cataclysmic energy produced by whatever was still functioning in the well. They thought it might be what the Typhon guarded. Some archaic remnant of the world before.
High above the crater well the constant vortex churned, a tornado sensed not through any feature of its own but through the reality it displaced. A tear between two worlds, the violation that had brought them here. And their only hope of going back.
Europe, Farley thought as he ran. We’re still in Europe.
Farley called another break at an outcropping a hundred yards from the knifecut wedge of black that would lead them off this soul-grinding crater floor and into the massive fissure that led to the Redoubt. Between here and the fissure entrance were small rocks, pebbles, a large boulder shaped like a sausage, and a narrow slope of rockfall at the cutaway where crater rim became cliff wall. This time the men collapsed where they halted, breathing hard and sipping water and shaking their heads. Boney took off a boot and tended to his foot. Broben just laid down in an X.
Farley posted Martin at rear guard again with Wennda’s binoculars. If north on the crater face was noon, they had been near eight o’clock when the belly gunner had finally spotted the team sent after them as it emerged from the southern fissure onto the crater floor, though he couldn’t say for sure how many there were. Five or six. Weapons fire had not yet been exchanged, but Farley knew it was only a matter of time. This break would be just long enough for everyone to catch their breath and tighten up their gear and move out again before their pursuers gained too much ground.
Wennda sat beside Farley and sipped from a tube in the collar of her smartsuit. She was breathing hard but not winded. “When we head back out you should remind your men to keep something between them and the team chasing us,” she told Farley. “They forget that their body heat is visible if they aren’t wearing armor. Staying in the dark isn’t enough.”
Farley nodded. “Hell, I keep forgetting it, too.” He took a few deep breaths and slowed his breathing.
“So.” Her smile was slanted. “What’s our plan once we get to the Redoubt?”
“I was kind of hoping you could provide some info in that department.”
“Sten and Arshall have a copy of the report from the team member who made it back yesterday. When we were there before, I was going to find out what I could from Yone.” She nodded at the small man sitting on the ground a dozen yards away. “He’s from there, after all.”