their brackets.
TWO-WEEK SOLSTICE TOUR. TWENTY GOLD GRAMS. CHILDREN UNDER TEN TRAVEL FREE.
She vaulted the turnstile gate, racing past the security zone and duty-free booths. The goblins were descending now, boots and gloves flapping on a frozen escalator. One lost his headgear in his haste. He was big for a goblin, over a metre. His lidless eyes rolled in panic, and his forked tongue flicked upwards to moisten his pupils.
Captain Short squeezed off a few bursts on the run. One clipped the backside of the nearest goblin. Holly groaned. Nowhere near a nerve centre.
But it didn’t have to be. There was a disadvantage to these foil suits. They conducted neutrino charges. The charge spread through the suit’s material like fiery ripples across a pond. The goblin jumped a good two metres straight up, then tumbled, unconscious, to the foot of the escalator. The hover trolley spun out of control, crashing into a luggage carousel. Hundreds of small cylindrical objects spilled from a shattered crate.
Goblin Number Two fired a dozen rounds Holly’s way. He missed, partly because his arms were jittery with nerves. But also because firing from the hip only works in the movies. Holly tried to take a screen shot of his weapon with her helmet camera for the computer to run a match on, but there was too much vibration.
The chase continued down the conduits and into the departure bay itself. Holly was surprised to hear the hum of docking computers. There wasn’t supposed to be any power here. LEP Engineering would have dismantled the generators. Why would power be needed here?
She already knew the answer. Power would be needed to operate the shuttle monorail and Mission Control. Her suspicions were confirmed as she entered the hangar. The goblins had built a shuttle!
It was unbelievable. Goblins had barely enough electricity in their brains to power a ten-watt bulb. How could they possibly build a shuttle? Yet there it was, sitting in the dock like a used-craft seller’s worst nightmare. There wasn’t a bit of it less than a decade old, and the hull was a patchwork of weld spots and rivets.
Holly swallowed her amazement, concentrating on the pursuit. The goblin had paused to grab a set of wings from the cargo hold. She could have taken a shot then, but it was too risky. She wouldn’t be surprised if the shuttle’s nuclear battery was protected by nothing more than a single layer of lead.
The goblin took advantage of his reprieve to skip down the access tunnel. The monorail ran the length of the scorched rock to the massive chute.
This chute was one of many of the natural vents that riddled the Earth’s mantle and crust. Magma streams from the planet’s molten core blasted up through these chutes towards the surface at irregular intervals. If it wasn’t for these pressure releases, the Earth would have shaken itself to fragments aeons ago. The LEP had harnessed this natural power for express surface shots. Recon officers rode the magma flares in titanium eggs in times of emergency. For a more leisurely trip, shuttles avoided the flares, ascending the chutes on hot-air currents to the various terminals around the world.
Holly slowed her pace. There was nowhere for the goblin to go. Not unless he was going to fly into the chute itself, and nobody was that crazy.
Anything that got caught up in a magma flare got fried right down to sub-atomic level.
The chute’s entrance loomed ahead. Massive and ringed by charred rock.
Holly switched on the helmet’s PA. ‘That’s far enough,’ she shouted over the howl of core wind. ‘Give it up. You’re not going into the chute without science.’
Science was LEP-speak for technical information. In this case, science would be flare-prediction times. Accurate to within a tenth of a second.
Generally.
The goblin raised a strange rifle, this time taking careful aim. The firing pin dropped, but whatever this weapon was firing, there wasn’t any left.
‘That’s the problem with non-nuclear weapons, you run out of charge,’ quipped Holly, fulfilling the age-old tradition of firefight banter, even though her knees were threatening to fold.
In response, the goblin hefted the rifle in Holly’s direction. It was a terrible throw, landing five metres short. But it served its purpose as a distraction. The triad member used the moment to fire up his wings. They were old models — rotary motor and a broken muffler. The roar of the engine filled the tunnel.
There was another roar, behind the wings. A roar that Holly knew well from a thousand logged flight hours in the chutes. There was a flare coming.
Holly’s mind raced. If the goblins had somehow managed to hook up the terminal to a power source, then all the safety features would have been activated. Including.
Captain Short whirled, but the blast doors were already closing. The fireproof barriers were automatically triggered by a thermo sensor in the chute.
When a flare passed by below, two-metre-thick steel doors shut off the access tunnel from the rest of the terminal. They were trapped in there, with a column of magma on the way. Not that the magma would kill them — there wasn’t much overspill from the flares. But the super-heated air would bake them drier than autumn leaves.
The goblin was standing on the tunnel’s edge, oblivious to the impending eruption. Holly realized that it wasn’t a question of the fugitive being crazy enough to fly into the chute. He was just plain stupid.
With a jaunty wave, the goblin hopped into the chute, rising rapidly from view. Not rapidly enough. A seven-metre-long jet of roiling lava pounced on him like a waiting snake, consuming him completely.
Holly did not waste time grieving. She had problems of her own. LEP jumpsuits had thermal coils to disperse excess heat, but that wouldn’t be enough. In seconds, a wall of dry heat would roll in there, and raise the temperature enough to crack the walls.
Holly glanced up. A line of reinforced ancient coolant tanks were still bolted to the tunnel roof. She slid her blaster to maximum power and began sinking charges into the belly of the tanks. This was no time for subtlety.
The tanks buckled and split, belching out rancid air and a few trickles of coolant. Useless. Thev must have bled out over the centuries, and the goblins had never bothered replacing them. But there was one left, untouched. A black oblong, out of place among the standard green LEP models. Holly positioned herself directly underneath and fired.
Three thousand gallons of coolant-enhanced water crashed on to her head at the very moment a heatwave came billowing in from the chute. It was a curious sensation being burnt and frozen almost simultaneously. Holly felt blisters pop on her shoulders only to be flattened by water pressure. Captain
Short was driven to her knees, lungs starving for air. But she couldn’t take a breath, not now, and she couldn’t raise a hand to switch on her helmet tank.
After an eternity, the roaring stopped and Holly opened her eyes to a tunnel full of steam. She activated the demister in her visor and got up off her knees. Water slid in sheets from her non-friction suit. She released her helmet seals, taking deep breaths of tunnel air. Still warm, but breathable.
Behind her, the blast doors slid open and Captain Trouble Kelp appeared in the gap, along with an LEP rapid-response team.
‘Nice manoeuvre, Captain.’
Holly didn’t answer, too absorbed by the weapon abandoned by the recently vaporized goblin. This was the prize pig of rifles, almost half a metre long, with a starlite scope clipped above the barrel.
Holly’s first thought had been that somehow the B’wa Kell was manufacturing its own weapons. But now she realized that the truth was far more dangerous. Captain Short pried the rifle from the half-melted rock. She recognized it from her History of Law Enforcement in service. An old Softnose laser. Softnoses had been outlawed long ago. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Instead of a fairy power source, the gun was powered by a human AAA alkaline battery.
‘Trouble,’ she called. ‘Have a look at this.’
‘D’Arvit,’ breathed Kelp, reaching immediately for the radio controls on his helmet. ‘Get me a priority channel to Commander Root. We have Class A contraband. Yes, Class A. I need a full team of techies. Get Foaly too. I want this entire quadrant shut down…'
Trouble continued spouting orders, but they faded to a distant buzz in
