Yolanda read and felt that excitement in her belly morph into a pit of fear.
“Justified uses of lethal force in the line of duty — twenty-two,” she said. “Incidents that resulted in death of a suspect — seventeen.”
Parmot the Insane had killed seventeen sentients in the line of duty.
“You’re right, Whykor. I guess I should have been nicer to him. I think we should take an official work break, and right now.”
“Why is that, Miss Davenport?”
“Because I need to drink,” she said. “And I don’t want to drink alone.”
• • •
Yolanda Davenport stumbled out of Brazilia’s, assisted by Whykor the Aware, who was only stumbling a bit less than she was.
“As I was saying, Miss Davenport, I feel that the ’72 Hullwalkers were the best team ever.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “The ’75 Jacks would have beat them like a Purist Nation concubine.” They stumbled across the busy sidewalk to the curb and started waving for a cab.
The artificial suns had faded out for the day, leaving the crystal-encrusted city dome high above hidden in darkness. The city itself, however, was very much alive. Lights lit up the buildings from the inside, making the translucent crystal walls glow a steady, soft blue. Nightclubs and bars were lit up with different colored lights, making for an eye-pleasing array of purples and green-blues. Some of that illumination reached up to the ceiling and reflected off of the massive, curled crystals to create a constant twinkle similar to the night sky of surface cities. It was like being a tiny speck of magnesium dust inside of a sprawling geode.
Yet even at this hour in this city of crystal light, the crawlers kept on crawling, kept on scraping and cutting. Madderch wasn’t the city that never slept; it was the city that never stopped trimming.
“Those Jacks won two Galaxy Bowls,” Whykor said. “I will grant you that Don Pine in his prime is possibly the best quarterback ever, but the Hullwalkers won three Galaxy Bowls in a row. A feat of this magnitude has never been equaled.”
“Ah, what do you know about football,” she said. “You think you work for the Commissioner or something?”
Whykor’s pedipalps started shaking with laughter. “I see what you did with that word play, Miss Davenport! It is funny because you imply that if I knew a great deal about football, I could work for the Commissioner, when in fact I do work for him! You are making an intentionally ironic obfuscation!”
His pedipalps shook uncontrollably. Yolanda was glad he liked the joke, but explaining it like that seemed to take the fun out of it. He laughed so hard that she had to help him remain standing.
Movement farther down the sidewalk caught her eye. A Quyth Warrior wearing gray pants, the red chitin of his upper body exposed to the evening light.
Um … red chitin.
Uh-oh.
“Whykor, stop laughing.”
“Ah, I see! Telling me to stop makes me think about it, and if I cannot then stop because I am thinking about it, the humor continues to—”
“It’s Marik,” she said.
Whykor’s pedipalps went still. “Marik?”
She pointed. He looked. Marik had closed the distance and was only a few hundred feet away, pushing his way through the nighttime crowd.
“Great,” Yolanda said. “Right after the police leave us.”
“Miss Davenport, we have been in that bar for three hours.”
“Whatever,” she said and slung her satchel across her neck and shoulder so it wouldn't be lost. “Let’s get out of here.”
“A wise choice.”
They turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction, still trying to flag a cab. She suddenly wished she hadn’t had so many beers and that Whykor had gone a little easier on those Beefeater cocktails.
Whykor suddenly stopped walking.
“Whykor, come on! We’re in trouble!”
“From the front as well as the rear,” he said and pointed a pedipalp hand down the sidewalk.
Yolanda looked and saw the danger: the Ki who had tried to follow them that morning when they were headed to Miriam’s. The Ki was pushing people out of the way and coming straight for them.
“This is a problem,” she said.
“You Humans have a propensity for stating the perfectly obvious,” Whykor said. “Can we go back into the bar or enter another establishment?”
She looked right, to the traffic whizzing by. Daytime traffic had been bad, but nothing like this — it was like they were against the glass at a hovercar race. Maybe back into the bar was the way to—
A strong hand grabbed her arm. “Be quiet,” said a gravelly voice. “If you scream, I will hurt you.”
She could take her chances and scream, but would anyone help her before it was too late? Her head was still spinning. She didn’t know what to do.
The Ki scurried up. She went from being held by a Quyth Warrior to being held by the Ki’s two left arms. The twelve-foot-long creature’s two right arms held Whykor firmly.
Marik stood at the curb and waved his pedipalp arms over his head. From the far lane, a six-legged crawler turned out of its dedicated lane and crossed traffic, making wheel-trucks and hovercars break to avoid a collision. In seconds, the crawler stepped up onto the sidewalk. The pedestrians seemed annoyed but not afraid — crawlers walking on sidewalks seemed to be a common thing.
She hadn’t seen one of the crawlers this close before. Scratched yellow paint decorated with various warning decals — also scratched — covered the dented body and legs. Three light but strong legs on each side, a gripping, extendable arm under the long “head.” On top of that head, some ten feet off the ground, was the narrow cockpit, the canopy of which ran the length of the head.
The canopy opened, rising up on a rear hinge. A Quyth Worker in a yellow jumpsuit stood up.
“Hurry up,” he said. “Get them in here.” He pointed behind his seat into an area Yolanda couldn’t see.
Yolanda felt herself lifted. Her satchel started to come loose, so she grabbed it as she fell into a dirty, greasy, narrow compartment littered with metal boxes and tools mounted along the interior wall. She started to sit up, but Whykor landed on top of her, knocking her back down again.
The canopy hissed down on top of them, its metal frame and crysteel panes sealing with the crawler’s edge. She pushed against the glass, but it wouldn’t move. She leaned forward, pushing past Whykor. The outer and top edges of the driver’s seat ran right up to the canopy — they were trapped in the maintenance vehicle’s trunk.
She banged on the metal back of the driver’s seat. “Hey! Let us out of here!”
“Hold on,” the driver said, his voice muffled but still audible. “This is a bumpy ride.”
The crawler lurched forward. She and Whykor were thrown back against the rear of the compartment. Each step of the six-legged machine was a jarring thump — maybe the driver’s seat had inertial compensators, but there were none back here.
They had to get out of there. She looked at the tools lining the compartment walls. Drills, hammers, crystal picks, everything a city-dwelling girl could need. She grabbed one of the hammers and tried to pull it free.
It wouldn’t budge.
She pulled harder, until her muscles screamed and her ligaments threatened to give way, and still it wouldn’t come free from the compartment’s inside wall.
“Don’t bother,” the driver called back. “Magnetically secured.”
She let go. That made sense; the crawlers moved up and down, hung beneath the crystal that arched between buildings — anything hanging loose would clatter around endlessly.
“Whykor, where are they taking us?”
“I am not privy to such knowledge, Miss Davenport,” he said as he tried to brace himself against the crawler’s constant thump-thump-thump.
The driver called back again. “Hold on tight, we’re heading up.”
Yolanda had time to blurt “What?” before the world tip
ped over and she fell back hard against the compartment’s rear wall. She tumbled and hit her head on a toolbox, sending a searing pain through her scalp. She wound up on her head and shoulders, Whykor’s weight pressing down on her chest.
“Apologies, Mistress,” he whispered and climbed off her.
There was barely enough room for them to sit side by side. The crawler lurched higher.
The back wall had become the floor, and the roof a window out onto the city. All of the views she’d had thus far were nothing compared to this one — she could see all of Madderch curving up and out to the left and right, fading into darkness straight ahead, a sea of glowing blue spires beneath.
“I think we’re climbing the dome wall,” she said.
Whykor’s eye swirled with the pink of fear. “I think that you are correct.”
Higher and higher they went. At first, they were level with the skyscrapers that paralleled the dome wall. Then they were even with the tops of those buildings, then those tops faded off below.
“How high do you think we are?”
“A thousand meters, at least,” Whykor said. “Miss Davenport, do you think they are going to murder us?”
The million-credit question. “I don’t know,” she said, that fear pinching and twisting her stomach. “I hope not.”
“I don’t think they’re going to kill you,” the driver called back. “I was asked to bring you to an associate of Gredok the Splithead. If they wanted to kill you, we have already passed many places where your body would never be found.”
“Wow,” Yolanda said. “You’re so comforting.”
Whykor stood up, so his head was closer to the driver’s seat back, which was now the roof. “My name is Whykor the Aware, and my shamakath is Rob Froese, commissioner of the GFL, one of the most powerful sentients in the galaxy. Did you know that?”
A pause. “No,” the driver said. “I did not know that.”
Whykor’s six antennae stood on end. “You think the Commissioner will let you get away with this? This is a direct attack on one of his servants, which is a direct attack on him!”
Yolanda sat back and watched, fascinated. She had never seen two Workers talk to each other — in a caste that was subservient to all, it stood to reason that the only time a Worker could possibly be an equal was with another Worker.
“You’ll be fine,” the driver said, his voice taking on an all-too-Human whine. “They assured me, no violence. There is no need to tell your shamakath about this.”
Whykor reached up to bang on the back of the driver’s seat. “Froese will split you in half for this!”
“Well, then I change my mind,” the driver said. “I hope they do kill you.”
Before Whykor could answer, the crawler suddenly tipped — the floor once again became the floor; the canopy once again became the roof. Yolanda landed hard on her back, the corner of a toolbox digging painfully into her right side.
They were in a small cavern. The crawler walked toward some kind of rigging or platform. On either side, Yolanda saw similar platforms with partially disassembled crawlers next to them. Streams of parts lay on sheets on the ground, large tools like hydraulic lifts, metal presses and a dozen other things she didn’t recognize were either next to the crawlers or pushed back against the blue crystal walls.
“This is a repair area,” Whykor said. “They do maintenance on the maintenance machines.”
“And you say Humans state the obvious?” It wasn’t the time to be catty, but the stress and fear ground at her, and she couldn’t help it.
The crawler drew closer to the empty maintenance platform. On it stood a Quyth Warrior. This one was a pale yellow color and wore the traditional gray pants. His cracked and scarred chitin was covered with enamels and engravings.
“That one looks dangerous,” Whykor said.
Yolanda nodded. Now wasn’t the time to say she thought all Warriors looked dangerous, but this one did look particularly so.
The crawler pulled up next to the platform and stopped. The canopy opened. Strong Warrior middle arms reached in and grabbed her before she could scramble away. The Warrior pulled her onto the platform — he didn’t hurt her, but she could feel by his grip it was useless to try and escape. He had to outweigh her by two hundred pounds or more.
Whykor started to climb out.
“Stay,” the Warrior barked. “You stay right there.”
The driver stood in his seat. “Can’t he stay on the platform? I would like to leave.”
The Warrior looked at the driver. “Stay. How else are they going to get down if you leave?”
The driver looked nervously at Whykor, then back at the Warrior, then sat.
“Come,” the Warrior said. He led Yolanda down the platform steps. The platform’s top was ten feet off the cavern’s flat blue surface. He guided her to a big tunnel at the back of the cavern. She looked back and up to see Whykor in the rear of the cockpit, but a tug on her arm made her face forward.
The long tunnel was carved right into the mountain, or crust, or whatever made up the dome ceiling, its blue walls scraped all over like scratched glass and streaked with bits of yellow paint. The floor also had scratches and gouges, probably from crawler feet. Where the floor wasn’t scratched, it was a deep, translucent blue lined with sharp, white crack lines that ran down until they were nothing but a fuzzy blur — she felt like she was standing on a hundred feet of ice.
The tunnel opened up into a big, square room. The walls were wavy and irregular, like those of Precinct Seventeen. A mostly disassembled crawler took up much of the back wall, but there was also furniture here made to the dimensions of Quyth Workers — a tattered couch, a table and chairs, and a desk.
Behind that desk sat a Quyth Leader.
He wore expensive clothes and jewelry, although the jewelry looked like cheap knock-off stuff and not the real thing. Big patches were missing from his reddish-black fur, showing the red carapace beneath — he resembled a dog Yolanda had once seen that was losing its fur due to mange. The Leader’s left pedipalp hand was twisted and bent — it looked like a birth defect, but considering how the Quyth treated any physical deformity, the damage probably came in the Leader’s infancy. Another mark had clearly come later in lift: a thick, pink scar cut diagonally across his upper eyelid.
“Miss Davenport,” the Leader said. “I am Turon the Ugly.”
“You can say that again.”
The Leader stood up and leaned on the desk. “You are being funny?”
Yolanda, shut the hell up! “Uh, no, Turon. I’m just a little out of sorts from being kidnapped.”
He waved his good pedipalp hand in a gesture indicative of a Leader’s derision of all sentients other than his fellow Leaders. “You are unharmed,” he said.
“So far,” she said. “What do you want?”
“I am an associate of Gredok the Splithead. We have information that you are investigating Grace McDermot’s death. We want to know what you’ve found so far.”
Yolanda made an exasperated noise. “Really? You’ve kidnapped me and brought me here to request information? Who the hell does he think he is?”
“He thinks he is Gredok the Splithead,” Turon said. “Because that is who he is, so it is logical he thinks that he is who he is.”
She felt her grasp on her composure slipping. “I don’t know what Gredok wants from me. He gave me information on Barnes and the Pirates, then when I run with it, he calls me a liar to everyone who will listen or broadcast his words! Smear my name? I don’t think so, Mister Ugly! I do not think so!”
Turon looked at the Warrior standing behind Yolanda, then back at Yolanda again.
“This part of your … interaction with Gredok is not my concern. He sent you here to find out information on Grace McDermot’s murder. Now he wants a progress report.”
Yolanda leaned back a little. What was this horrific little Leader talking about?
She felt a small trembling beneath her feet, there and gone.
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“I’m recording everything,” she said. “I have live-uploads going on now. You can’t do this.”
“Not up here,” Turon said. “OS1’s crust is too thick, and you’re far away from the signal repeaters down in the city. You have no uplink here, Davenport.”
Turon opened a desk drawer and pulled out a thick device — a long barrel and a thick handle. A gun? No, it didn’t look like a gun, at least not one she’d seen before.
“They repair crawlers here,” Turon said. “The machines break down so often. Frequently, there are cracks in the hulls. Do you know how you repair cracks in metal?”
He lifted the device so that the barrel pointed toward the ceiling. He pulled the trigger. There was a heavy click sound, then an inch-long cone of white-hot flame came out of the end. The flame stayed there, making a constant, low hissing sound.
“They weld them,” Turon said. His softball-sized eye flooded solid orange — the color of pure happiness. “I asked you what you found out. Now you will tell me.”
She started to run, but big Warrior pedipalp hands grabbed her shoulders and thick middle hands held her hips tight. She felt that trembling again, stronger this time, but she couldn’t look away from the flame.
“You don’t need that,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“I know you will.” He walked out from behind the desk, the flame still hissing from the welder.
He walked closer.
She pulled harder, as hard as she could, but it was no use. The trembling increased. They were going to burn her?
Turon stood in front of her. He only came up to her sternum, but the orange in his eye said that he was going to enjoy hurting her. He stared at her, that eye a swirling wash of light-orange shades, then he looked to her left — and his eye shifted instantly to pink.
She heard a scraping, crunching sound, but she wasn’t going to miss her chance at the distracted Leader. Yolanda raised her left foot and kicked out hard, knocking Turon back into the desk. The torch skittered along the scratched blue floor. Suddenly the four hands holding her let go.
She turned to see a miracle — the yellow crawler, exiting the tunnel and rising up on thin legs. Behind the cockpit canopy: Whykor the Aware.