The Cache, James Brogden [ebook e reader TXT] 📗

do was take one step towards the mural, then another, as close as possible so that she could give them her terror to feed on and her imagination to clothe them, and they could slip through the painting and be free…

She tottered on the edge of the platform, nearly losing her balance. It snapped her back to herself and she found that she had moved almost to within touching distance of the mural, her right hand outstretched. She recoiled in disgust, and dropped the draw-cord as if it were a live cable. The curtain fell back, and the Outside was hidden again.

Lyse drew a deep, shuddering breath. How close had she come?

‘Idiot.’ She slapped herself. She needed to leave now before she attracted the attention of anything else.

Sure enough, there was a trail through the debris which led to a small door and then a warren of shafts and chambers leading upwards. She knew she was getting closer to the hab-halls when it started to grow warmer and she heard the rattling of the pipes that carried heat from the Spike’s lower reaches, but this district was unfamiliar, and since she didn’t know whose territory it would take her to, she advanced more cautiously. Most were friends to the Urretzis, but by no means all. The final door wasn’t much more than a hinged panel, probably disguised to look like something innocuous on the other side. The air was thick with a familiar acrid pungency and she could hear the churning of vats, and she finally knew where she was. It was almost enough to make her return to the shrine and its loathsome effigy. This was Jaax territory.

She’d only ever been here once, in the company of her father and Prime Adjutant Domitia to present her betrothal gift to Clanfather Hadzor Jaax. It was a good match; everybody said so. A Jaax-Urretzi child would ally two of the most powerful clans in the Spike, streamlining both food production and the maintenance of the Spike’s defences, and put an end to generations of bloodshed. The prime adjutant had negotiated it for months. The fact that Lyse would rather let herself be eaten alive by crawlers than share a wedding bed with Hadzor Jaax was irrelevant. He was a leering, cadaverous beast of a man whose lifetime proximity to the corpse-starch vats he controlled had afflicted him with a chronic fungal flesh-rot that caused pustulant boils. He’d had two wives already, but one had proved barren and it was rumoured that the other had thrown herself down a shaft in shame after having bred a crawler. The idea that he, or someone in his clan, was worshipping a being of the Outside with human sacrifice and cannibalism didn’t surprise her one bit. From her memory of the vat halls, they were dark and noisy places – easy to sneak through unnoticed unless she was unlucky.

She eased the panel open and slipped inside.

Instantly the noise, smell and cloying humidity all intensified. Like most of the Spike’s larger chambers it was taller than it was wide, but long, and filled with ranks of towering vats that churned the yeast-based gruel which kept most of the Spike’s population fed. Occasionally the discovery of a cache of ancient ration packs would be cause for a feast, but most had been plundered generations ago. Jaax’s vat-workers clambered amongst the pipes and ducts which fed the containers, stirring, hammering, shouting, while servo-skulls floated around them performing their unknowable tasks.

She kept her head low and her biolux dark, and slid through shadow, hoping to find the exit before she was seen. There was plenty of cover for someone small, and she crept behind the machinery along the wide gallery that led to the exit. When a servo-skull suddenly rose up in front of her with its eye sockets gleaming and mechanical mandibles a-quiver, she froze, heart hammering. It regarded her for a moment, but she obviously didn’t fit the criteria of ‘intruder’ because it ignored her and zoomed away on its business. Lyse heaved a sigh of relief and continued creeping.

The shout came like a knife between the shoulder blades – expected, but still a shock. ‘Hey! Who are you?’

Lyse didn’t bother looking at who it was. She just ran.

She twisted and turned randomly as much as possible to confound pursuit until she could find the way out. Only a few passages separated Jaax and Urretzi territories, but home might as well be at the bottom of the Spike if she was caught.

Racing footsteps pounded after her, clattering on metal catwalks above. Whistles, catcalls, whoops and jeers. Someone stepped out from a corner brandishing a wrench, but she slid underneath his wild swing, rolled, and came up running. The medallion in its pouch slapped heavily against her hip, and the fear of letting down her father was almost as bad as that of what the Jaaxes might do to her.

Ironically, it was the tech that got her caught. She was running on instinct and doing what she did best, finding small spaces and squeezing through them – gaps between pipes, underneath conduits, behind tanks – while her pursuers yelled to each other, coordinating, driving her and cutting off her escape. She tried to go feet first through the gap between two metal steps, but she’d forgotten about the extra bulk she was carrying and it got wedged – not tight enough to get her stuck, but it slowed her down, and as she was cursing and tugging herself free, a hand on the other side grabbed her ankle and dragged her out.

‘Gotcha, thieving maggot!’ The owner of the hand grabbed her throat. He was a nondescript vat-rat, scrawny but heavier than her, and his arm was livid to the elbow with burn-scar tissue that made it look half melted.

She made her biolux flare so that he could see her tattoos, the clan-sigils inscribed in her flesh. ‘I am no thief!’ she retorted. ‘I am Lyse Urretzi, first daughter