Angel Stations (39 page)

Luke looked up, saw a flash of light, far up. A sudden sense of elation filled him, surprising him with the strength of it.

Come on, Matthew
, thought Luke.
Get out of there, now, before he comes looking for you
. If Vaughn hadn’t already figured it out, he would soon, and Matthew would need to be far away by then.

Kim

She dreamed a great weight was crushing her.

Kim woke up, tried to shift, and a blazing agony of pain ran across her chest.
I’d rather stay here forever than go through that again
, she thought. She felt leaden, made of stone, the near-Earth gravity crushing her into her seat. She’d survive it, but she wouldn’t get used to it.

Still strapped into her pilot’s seat, she lay there for what felt like an eternity. The Goblin was still, quiet and dark.

But we’re alive
, she thought wonderingly, then looked around and realized she couldn’t see anything. For a bone-freezing instant, she wondered if she had gone blind. She twisted her head round wildly until something glinted in the deep shadows.

We’re down, but no power
. She was suddenly glad Elias had ignored her, and not aimed for water. How the hell would they have escaped? The Goblin would have sunk to the bottom like a stone, with them all trapped inside, slowly suffocating.

In interacs, she’d always been bad at playing the heroine and, to her disappointment, she wasn’t now proving much better in real life. Despite his tendencies towards piracy, Elias, she realized to her annoyance, was probably better cut out for this kind of situation.

Flexing one arm, pain shot through her again, but this time not quite so bad. She remembered how to speak. ‘Elias?’

No answer.

‘Elias?’
Please, dear God, don’t let me be the only one left alive. I can’t do this on my own
.

Vincent?

Shit
. She couldn’t believe she’d almost forgotten about Vincent.

She knew she had to be careful as she unbuckled herself from the safety webbing. Wherever the Goblin had landed, it tilted at an angle. She was already half hanging out of her seat. She used her good arm to untangle the straps from across her.

She tumbled out of her seat with a yell, sliding along the cockpit’s rear bulkhead. Breathing hard, her heart hammering in her chest, she felt out with one hand, touched the rim of the crawlspace.

After a couple of minutes, she felt able to lower her head enough to peer through to what had once been her cabin. It was faintly illuminated by daylight.

As she gazed around the cockpit, faint shapes started to reveal themselves. She reached up gingerly and touched the top of her head. Her first worry was that the intense pain indicated she had damaged her neck, but if that had been the case perhaps she wouldn’t feel anything at all.

Pain is good
, she thought.
It reminds you that you aren’t dead yet
. Elias seemed to be gone. Gone for good? she wondered.

A wave of depression washed over her, almost overwhelming in its bleakness. She would be lucky to survive for a week, she realized. Even if something did not try and devour her, she would have to hide from the Kaspians. She didn’t want to think about all this.

She peered through the crawlspace, toward where her cabin was still visible. At least the whole structure didn’t shatter on impact. Then she worked her way through, grunting with pain every time she jogged her left arm against the wall. Gradually she could discern that one wall was cracked open. Real sunlight – it was years since she’d seen any – poured through a great rip in the side.

Through it things like trees were visible. She could hear strange sounds beyond. Animals? Birds? She caught a glimpse of clouds beyond the trees, far overhead, and faltered. Until she had first come to Earth, she had never walked under a naked sky before. So many years living in the Goblin had made it easy to forget what being on the surface of a world was like. And thank God for modern medicine, otherwise she’d have barely been able to crawl, let alone walk.

The securing locks on most of the storage cabinets had broken, spilling out their contents. But where the hell were Elias and Vincent? They must have already gotten out. Or perhaps something else had happened to them. No, she wouldn’t allow herself to follow that train of thought.

She kneeled and started poking through the debris. Food? They’d have to have a food supply – at least until they could figure out what was safe to eat outside.

But if she was right, she had a way to find out. The knowledge they needed to survive, she was sure, was quite possibly contained within the remaining Books of Susan’s memories. She hunted around until she found them, groaning with relief when she did so.

The Goblin seemed utterly destroyed. Kim climbed up on top of an open storage door, pushing herself up to the rent in the hull. She saw grass – or something like grass – and peered at it, squinted. Was it moving? But there was no wind blowing . . . and her skin crawled. Up at the Citadel, in the North, there had been nothing living. It could have been the Arctic up there. This wasn’t the same.

Or perhaps it was just the wind. The trees nearby looked more like bundles of black snakes gathered together and thrust in the ground, with wide, spade-like leaves fleshy with veins. She tried to push her head through the rent in the hull, but something gave way beneath her. She grabbed at a piece of buckled metal, slashing the palm of her hand, then managed to boot herself over the edge. Falling to the ground, she landed with a loud
oof
.

Her arm filling with furious pain, she rolled over to near the roots of one of the trees, and looked up through its branches. She settled herself on one knee, then the other, and stood up unsteadily. The Goblin had carved a wide gouge through the forest. Its cargo section had split off and shattered altogether. The central cabin section was badly warped but intact. By some miracle, the cockpit seemed to be relatively undamaged. She looked around, saw Elias. He was kneeling over something, in a glade just aside from the wreck, sunlight illuminating his shoulders and his head. She walked over towards him.

‘Elias?’

She came closer, to see he was kneeling over Vincent’s supine form. Elias looked up at her, saying nothing, with a frightened expression.

‘Elias, what’s happened to Vincent? Will he be all right?’

‘I didn’t anticipate this,’ said Elias, his face deathly white.

‘You didn’t what?’

She heard a sound from the forest on her left, and turned. A face like a nightmare rushed towards her from between the trees, eyes burning bright and its teeth bared in a snarl. Something flew through the air towards her, and for the second time that day, all consciousness fled.

Matthew

Within the great caverns, they had been digging since before Matthew was born.

When you stood at the entrance to those deep caves, you could look up to a high rocky ceiling that reminded him of pictures of cathedrals. This cave was only one of a linked series that ran deep beneath the mountains. Until Sam Roy had found a way to utilize the Angel technology he found deep within the Citadel, creating a shield that could hide them from view, this had served as the home for the Kasper Primalists.

He recalled what Sam had told him once about the war that had taken place amongst the orthodox Primalists, who had become appalled by the lack of control they had over Vaughn and his two brothers, Sam and Trencher. Vaughn and Sam had remained faithful to the basic Primalist edicts, but accused those who had created them of betraying the principles of their own religion. Sam claimed they had wiped out half of the Primalist leadership in a bloody putsch, forcing Primalist-controlled corporations with offworld interests to seed the first Kasper Station crew with Primalists who had declared their loyalty to Vaughn.

The surviving Primalists who had instigated the genetics programme that had created them were only too glad to see them go, and happier still when the Hiatus came and sealed them off, seemingly forever.

Matthew was old enough to find some irony in being brought up to believe his father was the Son of God. But whatever it was that had been unleashed in Ernst Vaughn’s genes, it was genetically recessive. Matthew himself had been born an entirely normal human being, to his father’s disappointment – or perhaps relief.

He listened for any sound. So quiet here. History had happened here; events he’d only learned about, too young to understand the hardship of those early years. He could see nearby the rapid-assembly makeshift homes the First Families had originally lived in, almost lost in the cavern’s deep gloom; and the transport shuttles, similar in design to the one that had flown Trencher down from the
Jager
.

Vaughn’s plan, of course, was to make use of the caverns again once the gamma radiation arrived. But Matthew felt troubled by something Sam, his uncle, had said, when Sam had told him the burster might not be natural in origin.

There were times when he did wonder about Sam’s sanity; however, the fact remained that when Sam declared something was going to come to pass, it came to pass. What had happened that morning had been the first real demonstration Matthew had seen of the man’s power. It had frightened him, making him wonder what it would be like to be imbued with such power – and thankful he’d never have to find out.

The cave where they kept a few shuttles in a ready state of repair was just ahead, and he walked rapidly through the caverns, eerily silent but for the faint echo of his boots. He suddenly sensed a presence forming just behind his shoulder, and for a brief instant feared it was his father. Freezing sweat erupted on his brow, and he thought he might faint from the terror. No way would Vaughn let him live this time.

It was only Sam, appearing in mindform, and Matthew almost moaned with relief. But the man’s form seemed warped, twisted.

‘He knows,’ said Sam, his voice strangely out of synch with the movement of his lips. ‘Get out of here, Matthew. Get out of here immediately.’

‘I’m on my way,’ said Matthew, breaking into a run. He could see the shuttles now, the same ones that had brought Vaughn and the others down into the mountains during one single, long night, mere months after the Hiatus had begun.

He found the ship he’d long been preparing for his flight. It hadn’t been easy finding the time and opportunity to sneak down here regularly, but one thing Matthew had inherited from his father was his cunning. There were only a dozen of them standing between Vaughn and his plan involving the gods of Kasper, but that was enough. They were all well trained in their separate skills, skills they’d have needed in Vaughn’s brave new world. Skills they could also use against him. No turning back now.

He climbed into the shuttle and within a minute felt its engines growl before it shook and lifted up from the floor of the cavern. He guided it forward into the sunlight, and took off into the clear skies.

Elias

Elias was mildly surprised to find he was still alive.

The creatures – the Kaspians, he should call them? – had come pouring out of the forest in their dozens, swarming over Kim’s prostrate body. He’d thought she must be dead at first. They’d then flung themselves onto him, binding him tight with something that looked like pale blue reed. He’d expanded his chest as wide as he could while they held him to the ground.

Just before they’d attacked, he’d looked up from Vincent’s body, to notice two of these creatures watching him from within the woods. Strange eyes which were curiously blank, long, wolflike snouts, and legs that bent the wrong way.

For all their alienness, they carried what were recognizably weapons. One of them had what looked uncannily like an old-fashioned flintlock strapped across its shoulders. They were garbed in heavy clothes dyed a deep brown and black, with some kind of pattern interwoven into the material, colours which made them seem to almost vanish amid the earth and trees.

He’d turned to see Kim edging towards him, and tried to say something to her. But the sudden shock of the landing had chased all sense from his tongue. Just then, one of the creatures had come running out from the woods, twisting something round its head like a bola. As the creature released it, it slammed into the rear of Kim’s head, and she dropped like a stone.

After that the three of them were dragged off and thrown into a wagon, its wheels bumping and lurching across rough ground. Elias shifted against the reed bonds constraining his arms and shoulders. It was much tougher than expected but, by sucking in breath and wiggling his torso, he managed to manouevre the bonds further up towards his shoulders. It then took only a matter of minutes to free himself.

The slatted covering of the wagon was loose and crude enough to allow a fair amount of light in, striping the three prisoners in alternate shades of light and dark. The enormous beasts hauling the vehicle looked to Elias vaguely like hippopotami, with wide, splay-toed feet. There were maybe forty of the Kaspians in attendance. Most were on foot, but a few of them rode three or four each on the back of some of the beasts drawing the wagon.

He kneeled down and touched Kim’s head. He’d already tried to do something for Vincent, but wasn’t sure his administrations would work. The Kaspians had interrupted him too soon. Even in this dim light he could see how badly bruised Kim was. But she stirred at his touch, and an eye flickered open.

‘Kim?’

She replied with a moan of pain. He tried to help her sit up, leaning her against one side of the wagon. It was so low-roofed he couldn’t stand, in fact could barely crouch, as it bumped and crunched over the rough terrain.

‘Kim, wake up,’ he urged. Her eyes opened again, but unfocused. She snorted, pushed him weakly away, then leaned over to vomit in a corner of the wagon. Elias held her arm steady until it was over.

‘What’s my name?’ he asked, after she had managed to right herself.

‘What, you’ve forgotten?’ He could feel her shaking, and hoped she hadn’t gone into shock. ‘Your name’s Elias.’