Scrap held on for dear life.
He wasn’t sure whether Gunner had listened to his pleas to release him, Paige and Gnat, or whether she just wanted her agile tendrils free when the firing started. Either way, she had chosen not to reveal them to the hunter. The moment Terry’s shot streaked across the emporium, Gunner had flung both Scrap and the humans up into the dense spider’s web of wires that dominated the place. The three of them clung to the web, hoping to remain inconspicuous among the unfinished cases. Corpus Coil’s unnumbered drones scuttled impatiently over them, keen to continue the cases’ construction.
Scrap glanced back at Paige. She was suspended in the web, precarious and trembling, her arm hooked tightly around her sister’s waist. One wrong move, he thought, and they would plummet to the floor below. He peered down at the top of the hunter’s gleaming spherical head. It reminded him of seeing Somewhere 513 from space for the very first time. It suddenly seemed like only yesterday that he first set eyes upon this unforgiving, doomed world. Back then he would have wasted no time in leaping into battle with the hunter, knowing that he could not lose. Now he found his courage to be as flimsy and unreliable as his case.
“Why don’t you put that thing away? All breakages must be paid for…” Gunner suggested as the hunter paced around the workshop, his hand-gun-hand drawn and glowing. Her tone was relaxed, but she made sure to keep Terry’s attention … to stop his eyes from straying too high. “How old is that case of yours?” she continued. “A year? I confess, if I keep a case for more than a week, I start to get twitchy. Why don’t you relax and let Mr Coil show you some cases that are a little more ‘today’…”
“I know you’re here, Scrap! You and those stinks!” the hunter cried, all but oblivious to Gunner and Coil. He reached into his cloak and pulled out an egg-shaped core. It was charred, scorched and glowed faintly in his hand. “See what you did? See what you did to my sister?”
Scrap knew the clock was ticking until they were discovered. His eyes darted around the web of wires for a way out. Ahead of Paige, where the web met the wall, square vents sucked hot air to the outside. Small, but large enough for a junk case and a pair of half-grown humans.
An escape route.
“That’s your sister?” Gunner asked, below them. “What happened? She looks like she’s in need of a new case, which means you’ve come to the right place…”
From the web, Scrap pointed Paige towards the vent. Paige nodded and, with Gnat clinging to her back, began edging across the wires. Scrap followed behind, so closely that the bottom of Paige’s boots left dusty prints on his face.
“The only thing I need is to junk that junk case and collect my trophies,” Terry replied, finally squaring up to Gunner. His voice became a mad howl. “There’s no hiding from me, Scrap … no mistaking that human stink.”
“Did you say ‘human’?” gasped Gunner. Without meaning to, she glanced up.
The hunter’s silvery sphere of a head rolled slowly backwards and peered into the web. In an instant he spotted Scrap, Paige and Gnat crawling across the wires towards the vent.
“Gotcha,” grinned the hunter. With a swift kick, he sent Gunner flying backwards across the workshop, before aiming his hand-gun-hand up at the web. “You can hide, but you can’t run!”
The blast flashed past Scrap’s head, burning through metres of wires and a half-constructed case. Loose wires suddenly whipped around him as a portion of the webbing gave way. Paige leaped for the vent, diving through with Gnat still on her back. Scrap felt himself plummet, before his grappling claw shot out of his arm with a dry hiss, clasping the edge of the vent with a tinny clang. He swung hard into the wall as Terry took aim again.
“No!”
Corpus Coil’s defiant cry was metal grinding against metal. In a blur of movement, the spidery robot reared up on his four back legs and pounced on the hunter, pinning him to the floor. Scrap would look back on the moment, quite sure that Coil was thinking not of him but of protecting his precious cases. Nevertheless, it gave him the seconds he needed to retract his grapple and flee inside the vent. He looked back and saw Gunner sprawled and dazed on the floor, and the hunter thrashing under Coil’s steely grip. Scrap paused for a moment, until he heard Gnat’s voice echo back up the vent. She was calling Scrap’s name. He quickly followed her cries as more blasts rang out.
By the time Scrap scrambled out of the vent and fled into the encroaching gloom of evening with the humans, the fight was over. It had sounded quick, savage. Scrap hoped it had ended well for Gunner and the spidery Corpus Coil.
But only the hunter had walked away.