Pippa took a deep breath. The humid air smelt good. It smelt of life, and particularly potent, especially to somebody who wondered if it would be her last breath.
She rubbed eyes rimmed with exhaustion and clambered awkwardly into the narrow chute.
It smelled like death.
Silently, the metal wall closed behind Pippa.
And left Combat K entombed inside the Metal Palace.
The climb was long and arduous. The chute was grease-slippery, steep, and with no obvious handholds. Keenan cursed as he pressed his shoulders against one solid metal wall and braced his boots against the opposite. Slowly, inch by jaw-tightened inch, he ascended; sweat ran in rivulets down his weary face, stung his eyes and dripped from his chin, tumbling into darkness and polluting Franco and Pippa below.
“How far up?” said Franco’s voice after a while. The words eased between desperate pants for oxygen.
“I can see light,” said Keenan. “Not far now.”
“It stinks in here, Keenan.”
“Yeah, like a year-old plague corpse.”
“That puts my mind at rest. Thanks very much, buddy.”
“Actually,” grunted Keenan, “maybe it’s just you, Franco. You did take a dip with your fish friends back in the swamp. Maybe they imbued you with some of their scent.”
“They were eels, actually.”
“Oh, eels, excuse me Franco old man. Eels, fish, hell mate, you don’t half pick your moment to start larking about with the local marine life. Let’s just hope you haven’t been infected, eh?”
“Infected? What do you mean, infected?”
“I’ve read some bad stuff about this place, real bad shit about the insect wildlife.”
“Like what?”
Keenan shook his head. “You remember back on The City? We were supposed to be doing background research for the upcoming mission? Remember that? But youbunked off, a swift right-hook to Cam and a hurried visit to the local hostelry to partake of warm beer and the company of itchy scratchy cheap-time dead-eyed hookers?”
“I remember.”
“Well, you should have done your homework, Franco.”
“Keenan!”
But Keenan had gone, pushing onwards and upwards towards the gleam of light above. Franco glanced down at Pippa, but her hard cold grey glare told him she held no sympathy. With a curse, he followed, shuffling upwards, ascending the narrow chute.
Keenan reached the summit of the near-vertical tunnel; hands grasped the sharp folded edge of the shaft and he shifted his weight, lifting and dropping lightly into a compact square chamber. He landed in a crouch, Techrim in his fist, eyes narrowed and roving. Underneath his boots the floor was metal, and gleamed with a coating of what appeared to be light oil. The walls were bare, dull, like old machined steel. Keenan glanced up to the blank steel ceiling, then around once again in case he had missed something. He had not. There was nothing tomiss. The chamber was a lesson in stark simplicity.
Franco landed beside him, with a grunt. His wild eyes meandered, then focused on Keenan. Franco frowned, as Pippa’s boots touched down and slid a little on the greasy sheen; she steadied herself with elegant, tapered fingers.
“What’s this?” said Franco.
“It’s like a prison cell,” said Pippa with a shudder.
“This is how it works,” said Keenan. “The Metal Palace—the entire construction—is a machine.”
“A machine?” Franco’s frown deepened. “I don’t like the sound of that. It has a distinct echo of foreboding, reminds me of a meshing of gears, of a mincing machine... With meinside it.”
“I have maps and timings,” said Keenan. “Every fifteen minutes, certain parts of the machine shift and change; walls move, component parts retract: the whole of the interior is a giant maze and we have to work our way through in periodic steps. You with me so far?”
“Sounds... dangerous,” said Pippa, rubbing at her mouth. She glanced around again. The air was perfectly still, as befitted the interior of a metal cube. It was warm; uncomfortably warm. She was already sweating beneath her tight combat clothing.
Keenan handed both Franco and Pippa a detached page from the TuffMAP
TM
. “I’ve marked our route; the only problem lies in if we get separated. The interior works on an eight hour cycle. So, if we are separated, it would take another eight hours for the Metal Palace’s internal schemata to rearrange itself for a reunion. And by that time, we’d probably be dead.”
“Cheery fucking place you brought us to,” said Franco.
Keenan slapped him on the back. “Hey, just call me Mr. Fun Time.”
“So, do we go down?” said Pippa.
Franco grinned. “Baby, you can go down on me any time.”
“When do you ever stop?”
Franco grimaced. “Actually, about now.”
“Why?” She looked closely at him, staring past the mask of his bravado. “Franco... are you OK?”
“Well, I didn’t want to say anything before...”
“What’s the matter?” snapped Keenan.
Franco looked a little sheepish. “I think I need the toilet.”
Keenan and Pippa stared long and hard at their Combat K comrade. Finally, Keenan broke the stalemate silence. “So, you mean to tell me you waited until we got stuck in a four-foot square room together before announcing you needed a shit?”
“You dickhead,” snapped Pippa. “You can’t go to the toilet in here.”
“But I need to go. It’s damned urgent!I’m desperate!”
“Why the fuck didn’t you go before we climbed into the chute? Outside? In the fresh air?”
“Because I didn’t needthe toilet then,” snapped Franco. “Anyway, there’s something else.”
Pippa grimaced. “Yeah? You need to masturbate as well, do you? Pull off a quick one while we stand here watching? Class act, Franco, just pure fucking class.”
Franco glared balefully at her. “Actually, I’m in a lot of actual pain, if you really want to actually know.”
“What kind of pain?” said Keenan.
“Well, it’s a little bit embarrassing.”
“Franco, I rescued you from the metal grasp of a deranged and short-circuited robot whore. I had to help prise your flaccid encapsulated
dick
from a twitching metal vagina with organo-foam inserts. Believe me mate when I say it wasn’t a fun adventure; some might suggest more embarrassing for me than for you.”
“OK then. My problem.” He took a deep breath. “It’s my arse.”
Again, Keenan and Pippa stared at him.
“Go on,” said Keenan.
“My arse, it’s sore.”
“OK. Been doing anything you shouldn’t? Sorry, only joking.”
Franco, face sulky, lower lip protruding a little, said, “See, I knew you’d be like this, ganging up on me, taking the piss, mocking my terrible painful ailment.”
“Taking the piss? Franco, you’re giving it away.”
“Well, it’s like this.” Franco folded his arms. “My arse hurts, it hurts a lot, and in real terms it’s looking like my arse could jeopardise this entire mission. It isn’t just normal pain, oh no, this is special real deep painful arse pain.”
“Painful arse pain.” Keenan looked unconvinced.
“Yeah, painful arse pain, right deep up there, like there’s some mad little mongrel with a scalpel and he’s crawled up my pipe to carve his fucking initials.”
“You still taking your medication?”
Franco twitched. “I had a pink one.”
“Is that good?”
“Dunno. I’m not a doctor.”
Keenan tutted. “Pippa?”
“I’m on it.”
Within seconds her med-kit was out. She gave Franco a shot in the neck. Euphoria slid slowly through his system like a snake through its own discarding skin. Franco’s eyes rolled and for a few glorious moments he experienced life without pain... Then his frown increased—apparently into agony—and he yelped like a kicked puppy.
“Ow ow ow! It hurts! It hurts more! Even more now! What’ve you done to me, woman?”
Pippa glanced at Keenan. “It shouldn’t have happened like that.” Keenan nodded.
“What about a local?” gasped Franco. He leant against the wall, sweat beading on his brow.
“Local?”
“Anaesthetic!”
“Hey, I’m not going up there,” said Pippa. “No fucking way. Some places are holier than holy.”
“Please! It stings! It’s like I’m being gang-fucked by fifteen well-endowed Highlanders! You’ve got to do something! You’ve got to sort out my arse pain right now! Come on, where’s your sense of humanity?”
“Tell him Keenan. Just tell him. If he wants an injection up his arse, he’ll have to do it himself.”
“That’s a little harsh, Pippa. You
are
our medic.” Through his weariness, and tension, there was a trace of a smile on Keenan’s lips.
“OK,” she said, handing him the sting-bot. “You do it.”
“Get to fuck.”
Keenan passed the injection unit to Franco. “Sorry mate. A man’s arse is his own affair, unless he’s gay, of course. Even then, it’d take a brave and raving-mad homosexual lunatic to go anywhere near your hairy triple-cheeked monstrosity.”
“You saying I got a funny arse?”
“Funny? It’s like a comedy beachball.”
“I resent that!”
“Just take your drugs and shut up. We’ve got the Fractured Emerald to find.”
Pippa and Keenan covered their eyes as Franco gave himself a local anaesthetic, and he settled his clothing back into place with a series of grunts. With a sigh, he promised he could hold on for the toilet until a more sanitary location was located. However long that took.
Ten minutes later, and Pippa, who had an acute mathematical mind, was studying the map. Her head tilted slightly to one side, and she chewed her lip. “According to this, if I understand your script right, we should be ready for a move—”
There was a grinding sound, distant, as under a deep and fathomless ocean. Two of the walls slid upwards, turning the cube prison into a corridor.
“About now.” She smiled. Her head tilted. “I see how it works.”
Franco stared at the flowing data. “Well I bloody don’t!”
Pippa patted his shoulder. “You just stick to blowing things up, dearest.”
“This way.” Keenan moved ahead, boots padding the metal walkway. The corridor stretched away, apparently into infinity. “Come on, we have a tight schedule to keep.”
Pippa and Franco padded after him.
The corridor sloped downwards, and as they moved swiftly and silently through the Metal Palace’s interior they could hear noises, sometimes distant, sometimes frighteningly close and deafening in their stark metallic suddenness. The noises were mainly sounds of mechanisation: the clang of metal on metal, the whirr of spinning discs, the occasional clanking of what could only be chains.
“It’s exactly how I would imagine the inside of a machine to be,” said Pippa.
“That’s the whole point,” said Keenan, stopping for a moment and checking his TuffMAP
TM
. “The Ket-i did not build this place, they found it. It’s an alien artefact, and scholars have come from distant universities, ancient planets, to study its intricacy and heritage. Admittedly, less so during the Helix War when the Ket-i were less, shall we say, friendly to visiting professors with nothing better on their minds than the next damned chapter of their thesis. I think the Ket-i shot some of the high-brow intelligentsia on sight, or, at least, hung them by the neck until dead. And, I acknowledge, many of them probably had it coming. However, all this concentration of study and hypothesis could only ascertain two facts about the palace in its entirety.”
“Which were?”
“One, the greatest academic minds could not discover why it had been built; and two, they couldn’t actually work out what it
did.”
“Did?” muttered Franco. He looked to be in some minor discomfort and his brows had darkened to a foreboding V.
“Yeah. After all, every machine has a purpose, a function, right? This machine moves, breathes, is alive
.
It has a purpose. It’s been ascertained it absorbs energy, from the sun, as one source, and from chemical underground deposits, as another. The machine sits in equilibrium with its natural environment, and yet despite absorbing energy, it produces nothing.”
They moved on again. Keenan stopped at a junction. Another, identical corridor, formed a T. “Down here.” They moved again, across oil-slick burnished steel; only this time there were grooves at waist height in the walls. Pippa examined them, pushing her finger into their polished interiors.
“They look like rails.”
“I hope not,” said Keenan, “because that would suppose a vehicle, possibly moving at very high speed. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, our exit chute isn’t far.”
“I see it!” said Franco.
Then they heard it: metal on metal, rhythmical, and getting louder.
“Up ahead,” said Keenan with urgency, and they broke into a run. The thought was at the forefront of all their minds: the rails were polished, and thus regularly used. Something was approaching, fast. It didn’t take a genius to understand the concept.