Rechs felt a coiled moment of energy crouching in the darkness. He could almost taste it.
“No mind for, Joba,” grumbled the moktaar. “Hooman bizness is hooman bizness. Always war, fighting, taking… all is hoomans ever do.”
Rechs didn’t bother to remind the old monkey that the moktaar and the wobanki had been at war for over three thousand years. And that the moktaar had ruined their own home world along with several others nearby as a result. War had never been limited to any one species, race, gender, or class.
They were climbing a wide set of ancient metal platforms that led up into a vast darkness. Hopefully, thought Rechs, this would lead to some lift that would take him up into Detron itself.
“Are the Savages back yet?” asked the ancient moktaar, pausing to catch his breath and stare in contempt up at the darkness.
In the half-light of this place, where running emergency operations lights still ran on millennial batteries, Rechs could now see that the moktaar had the look of a tribal shaman about him. Instead of the moktaar coverall the species always seemed to be wearing, he was wrapped in a threadbare robe that might once have been a packing cloth. In one hand the old monkey was clutching… a prayer chain, maybe, and in the other, his staff. There were carvings in that staff, but Rechs couldn’t make out the details, even with his bucket’s visual suite. Old Moktaari runes and scribble-scrawl.
Later, when Rechs’s mind had time to focus on the minute details, and he realized that the staff had been made of human teeth, he would think he should have looked at that staff a lot more closely. But for now, he just took it for some ritualistic totem the old one carried about as he wandered in the long dark. Forgotten.
“Moktaar ran these forges for the hooman wars against their own kind… Savages.”
Rechs detected movement up in the darkness. High above on a processing computer that was easily three stories high, an impossible piece of tech considered state-of-the-art in its time, something scrambled along an access rail and disappeared.
He brought up the sensor sweep inside his HUD and checked the scan. Nothing was there. At least not right now. He ran it back. Checked the scan. There had been a blur. For just a moment.
“Who are the children?” Rechs asked cautiously.
The old moktaar coughed out a harsh laugh and began his laborious climb up through the platforms once more. At first the bounty hunter thought the old monkey would ignore him as he’d ignored the moktaar’s question. But after a moment the shaman began to speak.
“The children are the night,” he muttered. “And this…” he lackadaisically swept his gnarled paw and stick across the ruin, “…is their kingdom.”
He barked his laugh again. It sounded sick and breathless. Like the beginning of a screech.
“Don’t worry. Joba protect you. Hooman.”
But Rechs had a suspicion Joba wasn’t going to do anything of the sort. He felt that what was coming next was pretty clear. And this was an excellent place for it to happen.
Ahead, between two massive cooling towers that rose out of the deep subterranean power core still far below, Rechs spotted hundreds of pairs of eyes in the darkness. In the gray and green wash of night vision, they appeared to be the eyes of demons, alight with fire.
All of them were watching him.
Giles had probably had some little toll booth game out here. The smuggler knew what the moktaar wanted. Meat. Human flesh. And in return, Giles kept the smuggled goods.
Rechs wondered if the old man at the bar knew. Took his credit chit and sent him to die all the same. He hoped not. He liked that old man.
There wasn’t much of a way through the awaiting moktaar without killing them outright. And even then, a swarm of the things wouldn’t be an easy assault to repel.
“Old one,” Rechs growled over his bucket’s external speaker.
“Yes, hooman?”
“This little trap you’re leading me into… you’ll be the first to die.”
Then he stepped forward swiftly and grabbed the moktaar by the neck, shoving the barrel of the shotgun into the shaman’s spindly rib cage at the same time.
The chorus of screeching that came next was unholy. It erupted from everywhere all at once, bouncing off the far walls of the immense complex and into its many halls and chambers.
Rechs did a slow turn to show all those demonic little eyes his prisoner. If they came at him all at once, they’d win through sheer numbers. That’s how they’d managed to finally put up a fight against the wobanki. Ferocity in numbers.
Rechs was down in the deep. There was a real chance he’d never make it out alive. And no one would know. Unless his theory about Giles was correct. And then the gangster would probably make a few trades to get Rechs’s armor and bones. Dead or alive—that was the bounty. The smuggler would land himself a fortune.
Not that any of that mattered to someone like Rechs. The only failure his mind would register when the monkeys swarmed and dragged him down, gnashing fangs and battering quick paws, attempting to figure how to get his armor off… would be that those leejes would get left hung out to dry by the scumbags in the House of Reason. Props for the next election cycle. KIAs without cause.
“The children don’t care, hooman,” croaked the old moktaar, struggling in his grip. “They’re all mad now. Lost their hooman ways once the work stopped. Back to the jungles and deserts of our old worlds. Only… down here now. This is the dark jungle. And we owns it all.”
He began to titter as Rechs jerked him this way and
