He turned to Rechs again. “Wild tribe of feral moktaar down there. Been breeding like rats since the shipyards closed down and they turned off the foundry. They went completely savage. Them and a couple of other things. If we reach the other side without any encounters, then I’d say we’re in the clear until we get to the Watcher.”
Rechs had no idea what any of this meant, but soon the company of fourteen—two were staying behind—set out for the back of the darkened shopping arcade. Many of the men were carrying actual torches, flames guttering and held aloft. Rechs threw a filter up inside his HUD that accounted for their haphazard lighting and gave him a good visual picture of his surroundings.
They arrived at an old blast door whose seals and safety locks had long since been disabled. New mechanisms had been jury-rigged and installed. And it looked like Giles was the one controlling access. One of his lieutenants, a squirrelly lizard race Rechs failed to identify, darted forward and bent to the data seals that controlled the locks.
While the lizard worked, constantly shifting the over-large blaster to his back as it kept slipping down in front of his workspace, Giles began to question Rechs.
“Sooooo… that bounty still out on you… or did you clean that up? Last time I heard it was ten million untaxed? And listen… I’m just getting this out in the open, so you don’t think I know about it and am setting you up for the old double cross. Understand, Tyrus? I’ve found it’s best to just go ahead and get the obvious out in the open. Prevents misunderstandings down the line. Know what I mean?”
Rechs was pretty sure he was going to get double-crossed. But that was part and parcel of being a bounty hunter. Sometimes you had to work with the locals, and the less desirable ones at that, to get to your target. They knew the planet you’d just shown up on better than you did. And fifty percent of the time they thought they could just shoot you in the back and somehow collect on both ends while selling your gear off and stripping your ship for bonus profits. That they visualized this plan without ever taking into account that hired killers are well aware of this kind of thing never failed to surprise Tyrus Rechs. Who did they think they were trying to rip off?
“Just wanted to let you know that, Tyrus,” continued Giles. “Just so we can trust each other going forward. Because we are going to get into some really hairy stuff down here, man. I mean like, really hairy.”
The blast doors hissed open on a rusty note of long disuse.
Giles Longfree laughed and pulled out a small oxygen purifier with a bottle attached. He held up his hand that everyone should wait. With the other hand he dialed a small knob on the purifier and opened the contents of the bottle into the mask. He inhaled deeply and then shut it off as he began to cough.
“Purified jade lotus mist,” he sputtered at Tyrus. “My medicine,” he croaked after another fit had subsided.
He stowed the mask and bid the forward scouts to enter the passage beyond the old blast door. Paces were counted off and the next group started through into the darkness beyond. After a moment, Giles stepped through as well, looking around at the dust and cobwebs to make sure none of it got on what he apparently considered to be a finely cut suit.
Rechs followed, and so did eight other hired blasters strapping all the heavy weaponry they could.
They proceeded down a long maintenance access shaft for some time before arriving at a massive cavern. Rechs’s armor imaged the vast space. They were ten stories above a main floor and down there, like some vast model city, lay the foundry works that had once manufactured the hull plating for the battleships Detron produced for the galaxy. But to get down there they had to descend ten stories of badly maintained stairs clinging tenuously to a support pylon that jutted out from the side of the cavern.
It was here Giles began to tell the tale of this place between long sucks of the jade lotus mist that filled his mask. His voice was animated and his cadence that of a bad Shakespearean performer.
“See, Tyrus… this was a whole city down here. And before everything went belly-up, this was the heart of Detron, the jewel of the shipyards. This was the heart of darkness of the whole place… where the war machines were made that all those legionnaires rode out there on the tip of the spear thrust into the Savage foe. Fightin’ Savages like some latter-day Achilles.”
Inhale and then coughing.
“The other side of this place is a big old underground cistern and someone…”—inhale—“a long time ago when everything began to die on Detron… they left something in the water and it just got all big and weird. I think. That’s my guess what the Watcher is. The Watcher in the Water. Or maybe…”
Another inhale. They were halfway down the rickety stairs of the ten-story support pylon.
“Maybe it was always there, Tyrus. Deep in the vast underground oceans on every world we never get into. You ever think about that, Tyrus? We know so little about these planets and we just camp out on top of them for a season. But way down there… there’s creatures in the water. Been there for a long time and no one knows how long. I think about that.”
He inhaled from his mask again and began to cough violently. This had happened before, and each
