A familiar crackle of static burst from the wall. “Bravo, heroes!” They all whirled. The sounds of clapping and hooting came from the background echo of a tinny speaker. “Well played! An alliance! Such a clever idea. And weapons to boot. An uneasy alliance in the best of cases.”
“Close your yap, Drek!” called Sket, whirling about, eyes darting about for the hidden speaker.
Star’s fingers curled into claws. Her head twisted round, searching for the source of the hated voice. The attackers halted in midstep, frozen in dread.
“You see, Drek, so begins the new phase in this program,” asserted Beardly, “just as I predicted. The outlanders will have to watch their backs. Clever outlanders! Treachery abounds in these tunnels! Runs thick as spider webs. Watch your back, people. Hee hee!”
“’Tis a wretched day when we have to listen to your drivel,” growled Sket.
Beardly’s cackling and distorted curses blasted from the loudspeaker.
While Miko choked back his contempt, Star’s sharp eyes darted to a glint of chrome hanging behind some pipes and she raged over, slashing out, smashing the faceplate to bits.
The mutant’s shrill echo died in a shower of sparks.
“Good riddance,” said Miko.
“Little fool,” hissed Sket in Star’s ear. “Now Drek and Beardly’ll come after us, and have a reason to kill us with their beastly thralls!”
“I don’t care,” she panted, her lungs pumping, with a feral gleam in her eyes, not quite sane. “I’m sick of those two baboons spying on us. We need to blind them to our strategies. It sickens me to be part of their film anyways. ’Tis you who are the fool!”
“Quit arguing,” complained Fenli. “Time’s wasting, as Sket is ever keen to point out.”
The new company trudged on in silence, distrusting every shadow and leaping rat that lurched out in their path. So far, no treachery had played itself out, but Miko wouldn’t put it past these three new rogues to attack, especially if more of their cronies showed up to even the odds. Nor would it be the last of the disturbing outbursts from B & D.
* * *
It was impossible to judge time in these crypt-like depths. But perhaps two hours later, the rock walls narrowed and met at a metal barrier, a grid-like mesh that rose from floor to ceiling. The company halted, gazing in apprehension, eyes roving about the shadows. The hum had increased, an incessant throb. The barrier-mesh was buckled at its lowest point as if from a bomb blast, but it had been repaired recently. Fresh silver weld beads lined the broken bars.
Sket frowned. “Weird. Methinks B & D honoured his promise, but someone patched it up.” He looked up, peering suspiciously through the holes in the grid. Only dim shadows reigned and silence. “Anyways, we have this.” The smuggler hoisted the portable blowtorch with a sardonic grin. Carefully, he began heating the lower metal to a red glare with a skilled hand. When they were orange hot, he kicked the bars with his heel, ignoring the smoke that billowed from the sizzling, odorous burnt leather. Soon he had peeled back a small crawlspace that they all could clamber through one by one.
Fenli peered around, eyes wide as an owl. “So, this is what keeps the unwanteds from the city of Skullrox?”
Sket hooked the torch in his belt and sliced a hand across his neck, finger to his lips, indicating silence.
They crept forward. Miko peered into a cavernous hall. The space was wider and taller than anything he had seen thus far.
The distant hum of generators infected the silence with a pregnant chill. Miko heard turbines, low electric engines, transformers or distant fusars.
Apart from the low hum, everything was all too quiet. A faint sinister blue glow permeated the spaces and peeked from somewhere far beyond the jumble of shadowy shapes and crate-like forms in the foreground.
They proceeded with utmost caution. Sket urged Fenli and Miko to toss their extra weapons to the new recruits.
Star scowled.
Miko and Fenli fell in behind; Star, Usk and the three others were last to tread, hunched and grim-faced and weapons bared. The whites of Sket’s eyes glinted. The smuggler’s gaze flicked every which way, looking for traps, danger and death.
The floor, as they saw it, was a litter of fallen machinery. Also bodies. Amongst the twisted metal and rock reposed desiccated, burned and blackened corpses, as if a vicious battle had been fought here. Pale bones peeked through the charred flesh, doubtless victims of a prior ‘race’. Fenli kicked a spread-eagled corpse, and it all but disintegrated upon impact.
Fenli gave a low whistle. “Somebody held a grudge here.”
The equipment complex ahead was impassable. Sket and the others grimaced.
Fenli’s eyes turned upward to the dim cobwebbed ceiling. He pulled himself up a fallen gear box, leaping onto the half-mangled catwalk that rose the extent of the hall, high overhead, and began to explore the upper works of the mysterious machinery.
Miko followed Fenli’s lead and helped Star and the others up the precarious scaffolding that curved along the wall and down the hall. A precarious route, Miko thought, yet it allowed passage above and beyond the inaccessible jumble.
Below them the ruin of metal and bodies went on for several hundred yards. A deathly pall hung over this wreckage, also a faint reek of decayed flesh, causing a prickling chill to flutter up Miko’s spine. Even the hum seemed to guard a sinister overtone. The underground depot or plant, whatever it was, was huge. It must have taken years to carve it or blast it out of the mountains of rock. Protected at least,
