Death Drop (65 page)

“Really?” she said. Dezmara’s face became intense at the mention of the beasts that had slayed her runner family and the closest person to a father she’d ever known—Felix Grinnik. “Berzerkers? I owe those sonsofbitches a little payback myself.” Her voice had become laced with pain and steeled with anger. Otto pulled his head back on his shoulders as if Dezmara’s eyes were going to drill right through him.

“Well, Rilek thinks their base of operations is on Pelota del Fuego, if you want to catch up with us. Heaven knows we sure could use someone like you around.” A slight tinge of hope had returned to Otto’s voice.

“I might just take you up on that.

“Well, Otto,” she said with a heavy exhale, “it’s been
interesting
meeting you. I hope there are no hard feelin’s about the…” Dezmara motioned over the top of his ears like a slicing blade and made a swishing sound.

“No hard feelings!” he said. Otto took her hand and shook it as he smiled up at her. “It has been a pleasure to meet you, and just so you know, you have a few more friends now.” He let go and Dezmara bowed her head slightly and smiled at his warm offer of friendship before turning slightly to face Rilek.

“Admiral,” she said with a nod. Rilek bowed and then took her hand in his and clasped his other hand over the top.

“May the stars guide you to what it is you seek,” he said as he patted her hand.

“Thank you, Admiral—good luck to you too,” Dezmara said, then she turned and walked up the gangplank of a little ship behind her. The walkway retracted as the engines coughed a few times and then thrummed with continuous jets of green flame. She looked one last time at Otto and Rilek as she hovered above the deck before turning the ship and bolting through the bay door on her way to space, Trillis, and hopefully, her friends.

Chapter 41:
Puzzling

T
he longboat Rilek loaned Dezmara was an impressive craft. It was on the smaller side, with room for eight or ten passengers, depending on their size. It had a distinct keel, and the large tiller Dezmara was standing behind moved the nimble little ship at the slightest touch. Two engines burned at each side of the stern and kept the pointed bow darting through space as Dezmara sat in the wheelhouse and wondered how she was going to get into Trillis once she found it. Like all so-called
free
places left in the universe, Trillis had qualities that kept it out of reach of Duraxian control.

Originally constructed as a geological research facility, Trillis was an immense, flying city built to travel through space in search of the richest ore and mineral deposits locked inside the rocky forms of asteroids. Because of its intended purpose, the outer hull—for it was, in fact, an enormous ship of sorts; oddly shaped, but a ship nonetheless—could withstand impacts born of asteroids or bullets to a degree that made it impossible to penetrate by force.

Through the years, Dezmara had found that one of the easiest ways to gain entry to a secured port was to sneak in through the docks. The movement of people and goods through the dockyard was a natural and regular occurrence for most ports, and the whole business opened up uncountable options for infiltration. Unfortunately, Trillis wasn’t
most ports
; actually, it wasn’t a port at all. The transfer of materials through the docks was strictly limited to load-bots only. Nothing with a pulse was allowed to step foot outside of its ship unless it wanted to die: no repairs, no medical attention, no exceptions, just a standing shoot-to-kill order known the universe over. If you wanted inside Trillis, you had to turn your life over to the Gamorotta.

Long ago, a secret league of ruthless racketeers, extortionists, and murderers had taken over management of Trillis. A string of businesses, mostly related to gambling, took root in the city center and spread to every corner of the metropolis like a plague. If there was something going on in the universe and that something had an uncertain outcome, Trillis was taking bets. Research labs were demolished and huge arenas erected in their stead to host the racing of imported alien animals; towering stadiums housed brutal death matches; and seas of colored lights flashed their enchantments to the masses from the fronts of casinos that had once been the unassuming living quarters for thousands of scientists.

The Gamorotta promised protection from the Durax within the city’s great walls and welcomed weary travelers with lavish comforts that had long disappeared elsewhere in the universe. All newcomers were given a generous credit with the house to use at their leisure as they searched the city for work and a new beginning. Word of the splendor of Trillis spread far and wide as immigrants found their credit graciously renewed again and again as the weeks turned to months and the months to years. But Trillis was a promised paradise that turned into a horrible nightmare for all who were foolish enough to walk through its gates.

What most greenhorns didn’t figure out until it was too late was that the Gamorotta owned Trillis and everything inside—including the businesses—and they weren’t hiring. It didn’t take long for most people to rack up a large debt, and they were abruptly put to work. The lucky few were employed in the casinos or at the track, but a vast majority fared much worse. Many were sent to their deaths as gladiators, and some were forced to sell drugs, yet another racket designed by the Gamorotta to generate debt and dependence. But the biggest debtors were forced into hard labor.

Although Trillis made a fortune from its gambling enterprise and the myriad seedy undertakings it supported on the periphery, the city’s true value lay in its original design. It was a technological marvel never seen before or since. The city consisted of two halves that expanded and collapsed along a shaft that ran through its middle. At the center of the shaft was a squat, disk-like structure known as the hub, whose circumference was ringed with enormous, flexible tubes. When Trillis pulled within reach of a mineable asteroid field, the city halves separated and the arms surrounding the hub went to work collecting the choicest rocks and passing them inside to be broken down and refined. Trillis was the only space mining facility known to exist, and since the Durax didn’t have much use for currency, the Gamorotta had a monopoly on the most popular form of money left in the free universe—
tolocnium
. Tolocnium was a precious metal melted down and formed into toloc coins and plates, and it was in the refinery that most Trillisians were worked to death, breaking down and hauling huge chunks of rock or toiling in the giant smelting furnaces.

When Trillis wasn’t mining, the tubes were coiled around the hub like the arms of a mechanical, spiral galaxy and the two halves of the city slid along the shaft toward each other. The towering structures jutting from either side were negative space constructions of one another and the buildings were more artistically rendered than the average right-angled starscraper. Where there was a pyramidal structure on one side, a mammoth pronged building waited to cradle it on the other; intricate spirals curved around each other and interlocked like living, dancing, intimate things; domes seamed flawlessly with perfectly shaped nooks; and strange curves found their mates patiently awaiting their return across the chasm. When the city was sealed, Trillis meshed together to form an impregnable fortress, as if it were a puzzle-box crafted by a master who was equal parts toy maker and magician. Fortunately for Dezmara, the Gamorotta’s greed kept the refining business in Trillis going around the clock.

She heard the city engineers had discovered particularly rich tolocnium deposits, and Trillis had been drifting off the southern end of the Adronos Field for several months now. Being a runner put you in a good position to hear all sorts of things—especially when it came to Trillis—and since Dezmara’s life revolved around snooping for information on Humans, she heard a lot. The problem was that sometimes the information she heard was either completely fabricated or out of date, and she couldn’t help but hold her breath as she approached the gliding belt of silent stones. The small curl of black hair resting on her forehead fluttered as Dezmara cracked her lips to one side and let the air escape from her lungs in relief. Trillis was floating directly ahead of her on the opposite side of the field, and she throttled back the longboat to size up the task ahead of her.

She had never seen it before—there had been no need to go there until now—and the sheer immensity of Trillis was unbelievable. Its two halves were wide open, opposing city spacelines spiking at each other like disfigured teeth on a grotesquely stretched mouth. The tubes circling the hub were moving methodically over the asteroid belt, plucking the minor planets with the most dense tolocnium deposits from the hovering sea of rock, like the tentacles of a gargantuan beast picking the sweetest meat from its helpless quarry. Dezmara watched with keen interest as a door at the end of one of the tubes opened and several protrusions slowly emerged from inside. Giant latticed fingers flexed from the bore and extended on enormous, sprocketed joints driven by heavy chains. Dezmara could almost smell the feet-deep deposits of oil and dirt caked around each cog as the blackened links marched single-file around the spinning teeth. Ribbed sections on the underside of each digit, marred by the gritty exterior of asteroids and years of use, flashed silver in the faint starglow before clamping down on a massive rock and slowly retreating back inside the tube. “That’s it,” Dezmara said. “That’s the way in.”

She tightened her harness and throttled up slowly, carefully picking her way through the boulders. Her angles of approach were deliberate as she swayed, weaved, and hovered like a mosquito stalking an iron mammoth. Dezmara had guessed correctly which rock was going to be pulled next from the field and transferred to the refinery. It was the biggest in a dense cluster of asteroids that drifted lazily toward the tube, and large, dull flecks of golden ore could easily be seen on its pocked and craggy surface. She waited for the tubers—the pilots in charge of operating the tubes from inside the hub—to commit, and as the monstrous fingers crept slowly from the hollow darkness of their cannulic sheath, Dezmara aimed for the center of the asteroid and accelerated hard.

She didn’t know whether the tubers would be able to distinguish a ship the size of the longboat flying among the millions of boulders and smaller debris, but Dezmara wasn’t taking any chances. The big rock being clamped and hauled back inside the city was completely shielding her from view of the hub as she engaged the landing skids.

The asteroid filled her view as she continued to charge. Dezmara spun the helm to the left as a rogue boulder arced across her path, and the longboat danced away at the last second. The backdrop of the stone she was trying desperately to get to was making it hard to see anything else of the same color—which happened to be everything inside the Adronos Field. The immensity of the mechanical claw made it look like it was moving slowly, but the readout in front of her was telling a different story. It was retracting quickly, and if Dezmara didn’t do something fast, her cover would disappear and she might lose her only chance to get inside the city walls.

Blue glowing numbers hovered in thin air beside her and marked the distance to her target. She was in the final stages of her maneuver and there was no turning back. If another asteroid came at her, she wouldn’t be able to get out of the way.
Ten meters. Five meters. One meter.

Dezmara wrenched the throttle back and cranked the engines straight up on their swivels. The bow of the longboat swept up in a smooth curve as she feathered the accelerators. The landing skids kissed the surface of the boulder, and Dezmara jabbed her finger into the glowing ether beside her. Smoky, blue ripples fanned out from her finger tip as four loud booms shook the hull.

Zuuuuurrrt-zuuuuurrrt-zuuuuurrrt-zuuuuurrrt!

The ratcheting vibrations of the screw-head grapples Dezmara fired into the asteroid hummed up their cables, through the hull, and into the pilothouse. She killed the engines and then sighed loudly. All she had to do now was ride the conveyor into the hub, get out of her ship and slip into the city without being noticed, find Fellini, bypass who-knows-what security measures without any technical backup, rescue Simon and Doj, steal another ship, and get out of a place that doesn’t allow anyone to leave.
“Simple,”
she thought as she glided silently into the tube.

Dezmara didn’t see the outer door close behind her. She was facing straight up, strapped into the contoured, full-body brace that supported her from head to toe as she stood at the helm. The mechanical fingers gripping the asteroid she was hitching a ride on were mounted just inside the door, and as they drew inside the tube, the first two digits on each latticed frame locked into place and swung perpendicular to the walls. The ribbed plates of metal on the topmost section swiveled back on hinged joints to stay in contact with the sample as the fingers held it squarely in the center of the bore.
“I wonder how long the ride will take?”
she thought as she waited for the sounds of the conveyor to whir below her.

A low hum filled the tube and Dezmara smiled. Her plan was working brilliantly so far. She slid the kranos over her head, and as the display flashed on, her smile faded—something was wrong. The longboat trembled as the groaning of stressed metal joined the rising thrum of the conveyor. The trembling exploded into teeth-rattling convulsions and the bore filled with the terrifying sound of an entire ocean heaving its mass into the air and speeding down to crush the tiny ship. The fingers holding the asteroid in place were straining against their chained joints and just as they collapsed, Dezmara realized her grave mistake. The asteroids weren’t moved to the refinery by conveyor: they were sent spinning and crashing up the tube like vacuum propelled, unshackled wrecking balls. She was hopelessly tethered to the implement of her doom, chained to a front row seat in the theater of her own destruction, and Dezmara had locked the manacles herself.