Palace Mosaical, Linat Primau, Pekun
‘Flame,’ said Shadowsun, bringing back a measure of focus. ‘Flame, twinned with ice.’
She punched in the emergency release sequence, pressing her palm against the reader to doubly confirm her intent. With a clunk, the plexus hatch released its hermetic seal, the gripping haptic sleeves on her arms and legs relaxing to let her withdraw her limbs.
Reaching back, she unfolded the single-use enclosure helm from the emergency cavity behind the nape of her neck, placing it with a surgeon’s care over her head before sealing it around the collar at her neck. Gold symbols of completion glowed on the inside of the helm’s display, her flight suit adding its own affirmations. Twisting, she took her pulse pistol once more from its storage at the small of her back and slid it into a lockslot at her hip.
‘High commander,’ said Oe-hei, his tone strangled, ‘it appears very much like you are making preparations to exit your battlesuit. Are you sure this is wise?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘But it’s no longer operative, and I am. I cannot simply stay here, awaiting the knife. I believe I can find the Rightful Claimant swiftly enough. You two will watch over me, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said the drone, his tone still baffled. ‘It is our sole function.’
With a hiss of depressurisation, the battlesuit hinged open, letting her slide out and drop lightly to the slime-slicked gravel with a muffled crunch. A moment later the XV22 closed behind her, auto-locking itself as it did so.
It was a profound relief to have the power of sight once more, her surroundings spattered grey-green but at least in clear focus. There was the horticultural maze, taller and more imposing now she had stepped down out of her mantle. It seemed made of thorns, the occasional yellow-white flower a pale eye staring from a mass of dark foliage.
And there, in the shadows, was the crouched, sparse frame of Opikh Tak, his rough, toad-like skin glistening faintly in the gloom.
Shadowsun ran for her life. She could see little in the swirling storm of algae other than the looming walls of the hedges, the greenish-white discs of her barely functional drones and the lanky, quick-moving physique of the kroot shaper Tak. With her XV22 all but out of commission and her cadrenet down, she had to withdraw, to get to the Orca in the heart of the maze and bring in fresh forces. Her plan to be the bait of her own Kauyon, a strategy that had worked so well against the Imperium on Prefectia and Mu’galath Bay, had spectacularly backfired. Yet the battle was not over yet.
Running half-crouched, she made it to the lee of the maze just as the storm of algal-green filth began to die down. With a shocking roar, a blast of fire blazed barely an arm’s length away from her, great craters ripped in the foliage. Oe-hei’s field flared, deflecting the next volley as it tracked her progress, and the flight suit took some of the impact, but thorny shrapnel ripped her skin nonetheless. The pain cleared her mind to knife-sharp readiness.
When under fire, we show our true selves.
Tak gestured right with a long claw, sprinting off. She ran close behind, her drones bringing up the rear with Oe-hei’s shield taking the incoming fire without complaint, but the long-limbed kroot was almost half her height again and it was nigh impossible to keep up. In a blur of movement, Tak leapt sidelong, and was gone.
The entrance to the maze loomed, a dark rectangle of greenish black against the walls of emerald foliage. There was another crack-boom of fire behind Shadowsun as she ducked inside, the spherical blaze of force coming from Oe-hei’s deflection generators lighting her path for a moment. It led left, right and straight on. She darted right, running hard towards a bend that led to a T-junction.
‘Shields recharging at only six per cent,’ said Oe-hei. ‘Without knowing the vectors of the attacks, I will be forced to burn through them at an unsustainable rate.’
Shadowsun winced, peering through a thin part of the hedge to scan the palace roofs over the other side of the moat. Sure enough, the quad-barrelled guns had been redirected from the drop-ships and now pointed right in her direction. To climb high enough to get a visual on the ship inside the maze would be to risk getting ripped apart; with Oe-hei running so low on power, a volley of sustained heavy weapons fire might wipe out his reserves altogether. Thorny and dense as they were, the hedges would provide little cover against high-calibre cannon shot. Her best hope was to go unseen, trusting to her hunter’s instincts to find the Orca the hard way.
‘Oe-ken-yon, how are you doing for power?’ she said as they paced towards another junction, reaching out to wipe the algae from his sensors with a delicately placed fingertip.
‘Seventy-nine per cent,’ he replied.
‘Excellent. Remote link with Oe-hei and refuel him, please. Ensure even distribution.’ The command drone blipped his assent, wise enough not to protest. She ducked low, scanning the ground on either side of her for a moment.
And by the grace of the T’au’va, there it was in the gravelly dirt, the fresh, three-toed, spatulate footprint of a kroot at full run.
‘The wise leader knows when to follow,’ she muttered to herself, jogging after the trail.
To her horror, the track petered out in less than twenty metres. The footsteps had led to a slightly lower point in the hedges; likely the kroot had leapt right over them to make a shorter journey to the maze’s heart. It was unlikely, but if the shaper made it to her Orca before her, he could potentially overcome her aides, murder Shimmersky and take the Rightful Claimant for himself.
Her blood pounded even faster at the thought. Her jog turned to a run; moments later she came to a corner, then a junction that doubled back the way she had come. A growing sense of floundering confusion joined the simmering panic in the depths of her heart.
To devise a maze was to rely on expectations, and confound them. Her understanding was that most standard humans favoured their right hand. Surely an Imperial citizen would prefer the left turn to be the way to the heart of the maze, so they could let their gun barrel lead the way. Therefore, any competent designer of labyrinths would instead ensure the correct path was to the right.
Deeper she went, following her instincts with the drones relying on audio to follow the light gravel-crunch of her footsteps. Shadowsun kept one eye towards the heart of the maze, keeping her bearings as best she could. A switchback led to another junction, then another.
She turned the corner to find a pile of pallid humans lying sprawled on the ground, slumped and limp as if shot by tranquiliser darts. She ducked back. They must have sensed her presence somehow, for they were already groaning and slipping in the thin layer of slime coating the dirt and gravel. To her horror, in places some of their flesh appeared to have melded with that of the others, the slime mould substance sticking them together to form stretching sheets of skin and greenish algae. Bending unnaturally, they slowly got to their feet, some of them still out cold, others babbling in the grip of their nightmares.
‘Top speed, fifty metres,’ said Shadowsun, tapping her drones on their disc-rims. ‘Just get us past them.’
‘Acknowledged.’ The drones shot forward without question, and she was close after them, keeping within Oe-hei’s renewed bubble of force. The sleepers, upright now, spun and lurched towards them, their slime-peeling faces stricken with anguish.
Oe-ken-yon shot over the top of the first of them, veering to the side as one grabbed for his rim. Shadowsun shot another in the face as it stumbled towards her, pistol-whipping a third as it turned its slack-jawed, plague-mottled face in her direction. The human went over in a tangle of limbs, but the impact slowed her just a fraction.
Shadowsun felt something horribly strong grab the rearmost toe of her trailing leg, then a sharp pulse of pain as the bone within cracked and split. She went down hard, reflexively kicking at the palsied, white-tendoned hand that grabbed her like a vice. It came apart in a mess of broken fingers. Turning, she shot the arm reaching towards her, blasting it to a fine mist as she scrabbled backwards in the gravel. Bile rose in her throat. The smell of blood and rancid flesh was so overpowering it was seeping into her pilot suit.
Another of the sleepers leaned towards her from the pile, bending over almost backwards, like a dancer at full extension with her hands grasping for Shadowsun’s flesh. She batted the sleeper’s hand with her pistol. Its long human fingers grasped at nothing. She turned its head to a shattered red bowl with a blast from her pistol. An aerosol cloud of blood spattered across her suit’s thorn-ripped neck. She was already rolling into a runner’s crouch, ignoring the pain in her broken toe as she lunged away hard with the drones once more at her shoulders. Her suit flooded her bloodstream with hyperdrenaline. The pain faded as her headlong charge through the maze turned into a sprint. A left turn, a right, and she would be–
The creature around the third corner was far from human. It blocked the passageway completely, a molluscoid mass of grey-green flesh rippling with hideous peristaltic motion. Behind it was another of its kind, greyer still and with long orange fronds rippling down either side of its body.
Her stomach lurched as the discolouration and rot of their skin reminded her of the gangling, one-eyed things under the moat bridge. These creatures were likely from the same planet as the horrible aliens that had breathed flies all over her. Crushed beneath the beasts were more slumberers, flattened bodily into the muddy gravel in seeping pools of blood. Their limbs were twisted and broken, their skulls like shattered crockery with nameless grey-red stew spilling out of the cracks.
The first beast-thing was nuzzling softly at the fallen slumberers with the thick, bloodstained tentacles sprouting from its disturbing mockery of a face. The second beast mewled, a sound like a dying man gargling thin gruel. Its companion rose up from its forlorn efforts to awaken the sleepers and turned fully towards her, trilling in something that sounded like animalistic joy.
Then, as if at some unspoken signal, they both charged.
The things were huge, together forming an avalanche of frilled, fungus-like flesh that left a stinking trail of slime behind them. She shot the leading creature in its centre mass, a crater of steaming grey-pink flesh appearing a foot under its yapping mouth. Still it came on, its unnatural stink thickening fast as its brother creature advanced behind it. She levelled another pulse pistol shot, this time tearing away two of the leading creature’s tentacles and a hand-sized chunk of what passed for its skull. It roared, but did not slow.
‘I don’t think I can hold these ones back, high commander,’ said Oe-hei. ‘Their sheer mass is too much.’
‘You won’t have to.’ Shadowsun’s third shot disappeared into the first creature’s maw, blasting out the back of its head so cleanly she could see daylight beyond. It kept coming for a moment before slumping in a deflated heap. The second beast roared in something approaching outrage as it slimed and writhed over the deliquescing body of its kin, lunging forward with a sudden burst of speed.
‘Position yourselves here and here!’ she shouted, clicking her fingers in the air.
Responding to the sound the drones came together one atop another, Oe-ken-yon slightly further back.
‘I offer contrition,’ said Shadowsun, ‘but follow fast!’ She planted one foot on Oe-hei, the other on his companion, and used them as a ladder to leap as high as she could, vaulting over the hedge like an athlete clearing a bar. The drones headed after her, rising fast in her wake.
At the apex of her jump over the hedge there was a sudden storm of fire around her. For a second her whole world blitzed white and grey, then blue and white, before she thudded down hard on the other side of the hedge. She got up to a crouch – just bruises, thank the T’au’va, even though there were a dozen trails of smoke in the air. Loyal Oe-hei had cushioned her fall with a–
Her guardian drone lay smoking on the ground, his fuselage shattered into pieces and his inner processing unit jetting brown smoke.
‘Oe-hei…’ she said, her chest feeling hollow.
‘No time!’ shouted Oe-ken-yon. ‘We must–’
One of the repulsive beast-creatures burst through the hedge wall in an explosion of foliage. Spatters of ropy spittle flicked like whips around it. Shadowsun shot it on instinct and ran, the beast no more than an arm’s length behind her. She rounded the next corner, something about the light and the sky telling her she was near the centre of the maze. The alien monster crashed after her, yelping and burbling. She swore she could feel its hot breath, wet and humid at her back. No time to fight. No time to recover poor Oe-hei.
Another junction up ahead. Left or right. One choice would lead to freedom. The other, very literally, would be a dead end.
A single binary moment, with life and death hanging in the balance.