14
“What the flank are you doing?” yelled Cole. “What the flank!”
Joshua smiled and calmly returned the wooden sticks to their furry folds. He then brushed his hands along his thighs, smoothing the pelt covering them. “More questions?” he said. “Should I divide your friend into smaller pieces?”
Cole shook his head and panted for air. He watched the two goons bend down and grab Riggs’s boots, pulling his calves forward so they could smear the cut edges with the purple goop. Blood leaked out the top of them. As they held them away from the rack, Cole could see the concentric circles of Riggs’s insides, the white of bone surrounded by bright layers of red meat.
“Are you ready to answer my questions?”
Cole nodded.
“What’s your name?” Joshua asked.
“Cole,” he whispered. His mouth responded directly to the question, bypassing his brain, his heroics, his fear.
“Where are you from, Cole?”
“Earth. Portugal. What are you going to do with us?”
“If you ask me another question, I’m going to pull out my favorite toy again, do you understand?”
Cole looked away from Riggs, whose head had begun lolling from side to side, dull moans leaking out that seemed to come straight from Riggs’s gut, not his vocal cords. The sound—primal and eerie—snapped Cole out of his zombie-like state. He nodded at Joshua.
“How do you know Mortimor?”
“I don’t, I swear. I know his daughter.”
Joshua nodded as if that made sense. “Have you been to Lok?”
“Never.”
“Do you know what fusion fuel is?”
Cole dipped his head. “Yeah, of course. I went to the Academy, I—”
“No. Not what it’s used for. What it is. What it’s made of.”
The question startled Cole. He thought of Dani back on Drenard, the conversation they’d had on that prison rooftop. Dani had told him that this was the most important question. He lowered his brows and shook his head.
“Were you about to say something?” Joshua asked.
“No, just . . . it’s an odd question.”
Joshua stepped close, frowning at Cole, his gaze boring straight through his skull. “I’m only going to ask the following once,” he said, “so be honest with me. Are you a Drenard?”
Cole stopped breathing. He glanced at Riggs, who seemed awake, but in shock. His friend’s head rolled around, the whites of his eyes showing.
“Yes,” he said, not looking back at Joshua. “I’m a Drenard.”
“Well, well!” Joshua slapped his thighs. “This is just unbelievable. Jons, finish putting that boy’s legs back on. Kelly, untie Cole. You and I are taking the Chosen One to meet his maker.”
Cole had no idea what any of that meant, but at least half of it sounded very bad for him. He kept his eyes on Riggs as one of the goons stood up, wiped his hands on his fur, and came over to untie him.
Joshua smiled at Cole and moved his goggles from his neck to his forehead. “If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “we were always going to take the legs off both you lads. Had nothing to do with the questions.”
Cole grimaced as the goon pulled him down from the rack. The brute loosened his hands and yanked his arms around his back before re-tying his wrists. Cole kept looking to Riggs, waiting for his eyes to focus, to see if he was going to survive. The guy at his feet had the ends of his legs forced together, the purple paste squeezing out between the severed edges. The man met Cole’s stare for an instant before turning away; Cole closed his eyes right as the door squeaked open, blasting the room with harsh light. The last thing he saw before squeezing his eyes shut was one of Riggs’s thighs twitching involuntarily, a trickle of blood oozing past the purple paste where the two parts of him were pressed together.
????
They dragged him outside, the cold air and searing light washing over him. The light flashed through his eyelids, his thin flesh filtering the photons to the redness of glowing steel. Part of him wanted to open them a little—just to cauterize the image of the severed legs out of his memory. He instead forced himself to concentrate on other sensations, both to get a feel for his surroundings and to be distracted by something.
The first thing he noticed was a slight breeze swirling around his neck and flecks of freezing snow on his face. He could feel dollops melting in his hair, turning it wet. Forceful hands gripped his arms and shoulders on both sides, and hinges squeaked behind him as the door was pushed shut. Just before it clanged tight, Cole heard agonizing moans leak out from his friend, the sound bringing back the very images he was trying to avoid.
“Goggles!” Joshua barked.
Cole tried to shake the echo of the moans out of his head. He focused on the other sounds around him: the groaning of metal as if massive sheets of it twisted under pressure; the stomping of feet on steel decking, vibrations coming up his own shins; people shouting commands in the distance; the clatter of a sparse crowd. Behind it all—the sound of a soft yet persistent wind; the crunching of packed snow and crackling ice; a slight sway in the deck, like a boat at sea, or a ship with dying grav panels.
Hands went to Cole’s face. He tried to pull away, but his arms were still strapped behind his back, and somebody had him by the shoulders, fixing him in place.
“Keep still,” a voice said.
He felt something tight come down over his head—hair ripping out painfully—before the cups snapped over his eyes. Someone slapped him on the back of the head, either to tell him they were done or to punish him for being difficult, he didn’t know.
With the red glow gone from his vision, Cole tried cracking his eyelids. Blinking, he looking down at his feet and away from the dangerous light, but everything looked . . . normal.
They pulled him forward again, forcing him to take in his surroundings on the move. A clump of his hair had been trapped inside the goggles, obscuring his vision, but he could still see pretty well. Around him stood several small huts; they would’ve been normal looking if they weren’t made of metal plating. Cole recognized the colors on quite a few. Navy black and gray with words stenciled in blocky white letters:
DON’T STEP. CAUTION: HOT. CAPTAIN MICKLES.
Each phrase stood at odd angles or upside down, the hull they used to be a part of long disassembled and the shape of the crafts beaten flat with hammers. Cole saw a few ship names and designations that qualified as antiques, Navy hardware that hadn’t been used since the galactic expansion.
Their group weaved in and out of the square structures, through little alleys of zig-zag confusion. Cole looked down at his feet and wondered what they meant by putting Riggs’s legs back on and how he was going to “meet his maker.” His boots clomped on the steel decking dusted with the barest cover of snow. The rivets that dotted the deck and the thick welds that held the plates together gathered the white flakes in small ridges, like miniature drifts. Here and there, these drifts were crushed flat by the boots ahead of him, pressed with the designs of mismatched soles.
They rounded another shed and popped out into a clearing—an expanse of flat steel. The area bustled with fur-clad people carrying things, coiling lines, someone welding amid a shower of golden embers. In the center of the square, a cluster of men clashed with sticks, as if training. Everyone looked exclusively human where the absence of fur revealed anything.
Cole looked down at his getup of flightsuit and jumper and wondered how they weren’t burning up in all that fur. He was cold, but not freezing. His trio of escorts, Joshua, Kelly, and whoever had joined them outside the door, pulled him through the square and toward the far side. Getting away from the tightly packed buildings gave Cole his first vista of the overall area, allowing him to appreciate the size and scale of the massive ship. The deck stretched out thirty or so meters to either side and probably a few hundred or more to the far end. Through gaps in the buildings to his left, he could see a railing at the very edge and a white field of snow beyond. Out there, the flakes continued to move sideways in thick sheets, even though only a smattering of flakes fell over the village. It reminded Cole of the smaller craft he had been on. He assumed a barrier up front was parting the heavy snow, and that the sounds and vibrations in the steel meant the entire metal village was underway, sailing across the snow-covered land on large runners.
They were halfway across the square before Cole finally noticed the fleet overhead. Ships, dozens of them, possibly hundreds. Large and black, they looked menacing beyond the veil of snow, fierce in the way only half-hidden things could be. It was impossible to count them, which added to their awful potential, but there were enough to blot out the sky. Anywhere he could see through the flurry, dark hulls loomed, their overlapping forms creating an artificial cosmos to replace the harsh whiteness he’d seen from the Firehawk’s belly. Across that black, the snowfall whizzed horizontal like speeding stars in some holovid’s corny rendering of what traveling through hyperspace might be like.
Joshua spoke with the other two escorts as they dragged him along, but Cole couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. Besides the fleet, there was another distraction: a massive tower—a larger version of the mast-like pole from the smaller vessel—that rose above a cluster of steel buildings ahead. Cole tried to follow it up to the top, but the spire rose further than he could see without arching his back. His group seemed to be heading straight for the strange object.
Beyond the tower, he could just barely make out the tall walls of dull steel that seemed to form the prow of the monstrous craft. The high barrier, shaped like a “V,” must be what broke the driving snow to either side. The sheets of steel had to be three stories high, at least. Between them and the mast there was another large clearing on which sat a few ships. Cole could see their tails sticking up over the squat buildings, the light snow swirling around them. One of the tails he recognized as a Firehawk, the rest were alien. Not just indistinguishable: alien.
“You sure about him, boss? This is the guy from the prophecy?”
A fragment of the conversation grabbed Cole’s attention, and some-thing told him they’d been speaking of him for a while. They passed through an alley on the far side of the clearing, exiting at the base of the tall mast. Cole tried to focus on what was being said, but yet another curiosity caught his attention: another group of men were practicing with wooden sticks ahead of the mast, but they were doing it in slow motion.
Then Cole saw that everyone up ahead was moving slowly, all across the wide deck as far as he could see. A figure descended from one of the ships, taking forever to move between rungs. A woman walked across the deck in half-speed. She had fur up to her neck, black goggles over her eyes, and her long ponytail swayed side to side like a pendulum through viscous water. A man with a blowtorch cut away at one of the ships, but the shower of sparks flew up as slow as lazy bugs, arcing out forever and drifting down as if frightened of actually landing. Cole looked at his own feet; they appeared to be moving at a normal speed.
He started to ask Joshua about the effect, then saw they had almost reached the base of the large tower. About ten meters wide and perfectly round, it appeared to have a flat top—like a squat cylinder sitting on one end. The tower rose up from the center of this platform: thin and wide like a blade, but with dozens of slits running its length.
As his escorts led him past the structure, Cole thought he sensed it twist a little, the entire cylinder rotating slightly. The people in the distance moved even slower now, nearly at a stand-still. Some sort of game they were playing on him?
One of his feet hit the back of his ankles, and he nearly tripped forward, but the arms at either side caught him. Another hand smacked the back of his head, the blow echoing with laughter.
“Enough,” he heard Joshua say.
Cole tried to look over at Joshua, and then he noticed the world had returned to normal: everyone had picked up their pace across the moving village. To his side, the tower definitely moved a little, twitching and rotating. They led him around the perimeter of the base to the forward side of it.
Meet his maker? The phrase rang in Cole’s ears again. Was he about to be strung up? Executed? Simple as that? And why cut off Riggs’s legs to put them back on? How was that even possible? And why put them back on if they were to be executed? What in hyperspace was going on?
Cole felt his pulse quicken as he ran through the questions and the likely answers. He still felt shaken up from the crash landing, from the strange voices in his head, from the fight with Riggs. There was too much going on and none of it made sense. He needed one thing he could understand, something to somehow web the rest of it together.
But he had nothing. His entire environment felt out of focus as they pulled him in front of the tower’s base. He saw a steep flight of stairs there, cut into the flat cylinder and leading all the way up and aft toward the top of the platform. They started pulling Cole up the stairs while some inner self yelled: fight back. But as soon as he put his feet out to resist, they just lifted him up and carried him. Now and then, the entire tower would twitch to one side, and the men would sway together, grabbing handrails and dragging Cole roughly.
Definitely an execution. A flogging at the mast. The more Cole strug-gled, the more hands he felt on him, some coming swiftly and in the shape of fists.
Suddenly, the world started flashing by around him. He must’ve been going into shock. Everything moved at a blistering pace, the snow a blur to either side, people whizzing across the deck below. He squirmed and kicked and felt himself picked up by all four limbs, laughter filling his ears.
After the last step, they threw Cole down and wrenched his arms up; somebody forced his knees under him and he tried to kick out—he shook his shoulders back and forth. When someone punched him in the liver, Cole bent to the side in agony. He thought of Molly—tried to focus on his love for her—pulling her face out of memory to have something solid to cling to.
Rough hands grabbed his head and forced his gaze up, while his arms were yanked against the restraints. He was having the hardest time remembering what Molly looked like. It heaped sadness on his despair. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, threatening to drown him inside his goggles.
A face swam into view. Not Molly’s, not the face he was trying to conjur, but one familiar. It loomed down in front of him, smiling.
Cole couldn’t make sense of it. He recognized the man, the thin face, the wicked smile. Cole blinked, trying to focus through his goggles, feeling like this was exactly how he’d seen him before: through a sheet of thick plastic. Or carboglass.
Dakura.
The man from Dakura who was after Molly! Cole couldn’t remember his name, wasn’t sure if he ever knew it, but he knew that face—
Byrne. He did know it. He remembered Molly saying it in horror. But didn’t they leave him for dead in that loading bay?
Joshua stepped forward and began whispering in Byrne’s ear. He waved his hands as he spoke.
Byrne’s smile grew. He stared at Cole, nodding his head.
Cole tried to focus on what was being said, then noticed the strange man was wearing a red band around his forehead. He wondered if it was his; he wondered if the man remembered him from Dakura.
Byrne whispered something in return to Joshua, who stepped back and relayed it to the people holding Cole. As Joshua stepped aside, Cole realized there was something different about the thin man, something besides the red band. Byrne wore the same outfit of thin canvas pants, a shirt with large white buttons, his wiry frame poking out at the shoulders—
But Cole could’ve sworn the last time he’d seen him, Byrne had been in possession of both his arms.