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

Lyse nodded. ‘We find remains sometimes, but not often. Crawlers ate most of them long ago.’

He turned to regard her. ‘Have you never stopped to think what the crawlers actually are?’

‘I don’t understand. They’re just… crawlers. Messed-up meat.’

‘Yes, well, we’ll come back to that later. Anyway, before the Spike became what it is, her name was the Spira Tenebris, and she was a battleship.’

Lyse knew ‘battle’ well enough. ‘What’s a ship?’ she asked.

‘Don’t interrupt. Now, the crew complement of the Tenebris numbered in the hundreds of thousands – virtually a small city…’

‘What’s a–’

Cracius glared at her, and she shut up.

‘A city that had to be provisioned,’ he continued. ‘From stores containing enough to feed a quarter of a million mouths for the few weeks of a campaign.’

Lyse continued listening in the hope that he might say something coherent.

‘Keeping track of those stores was the responsibility of the master sergeant victualler. This,’ he said, indicating the medallion, ‘is the Victualler’s Seal.’ He waited, plainly expecting her to be impressed.

She looked at him. ‘And?’

‘And it contains stock data, location and access codes for all the food caches on board, you ignorant oaf of a girl!’

She sat up straight. ‘Wait – did you say food?’

‘Yes, I did. And mark you, I’m not talking about spit-roasted rat or this corpse-starch slop.’ Her flask fell out from within his robes, empty now, but she didn’t rush to collect it. She didn’t want to think about where it had been. ‘I’m talking about protein bars, vitamin supplements, freeze-dried ration packs, water-purification tabs, cal-gel… things your taste buds couldn’t begin to dream of.’

‘Well, where are they?’

The spider device probed the Seal some more while the tech-priest muttered words which might have been prayers to the Machine-God, or equally curses. Abruptly, the central amber stone burst into life, and a glowing apparition sprang into the air above it. Lyse drew her knife and backed away. ‘It’s a ghost!’

He squinted at her. ‘In a way, yes, it is. This is the Spira Tenebris as she was, in the time of your grandmother’s grandmother.’

The apparition was long and sketched in a network of bright geometric lines, like a picture of a bone scratched in fire, but it wasn’t flat; it rotated slowly, and it wasn’t a smooth bone but wickedly pointed at one end and heavily flared at the other and jutted with angular excrescences along its length.

He was still squinting at her. ‘Do you recognise this?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘Var/aspect/exec,’ he muttered, making further adjustments, and the phantom swivelled from a horizontal to a vertical alignment, the sharp point uppermost. ‘How about now?’

Lyse shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at.’

He sighed with irritation and pointed to the top, where it curved into something like a fang. ‘This is where the prime adjutant and her arbiters have their quarters. Below that, the hab-halls of the five families. Then down through a mile of wreckage and devastation to the lower reaches where crawlers make their nests and the air is poison and the djinn fires burn eternally.

‘Much data is lost, but either the grav-generators failed or else it happened during the first moments of upheaval when the Tenebris was open to the immaterium. The shafts that you clamber up and down were once halls and galleries, thronging with people and the glorious song of countless machines. Now all is silent,’ he murmured. ‘All is dark. It is the Spike. Our home.’

She stared, wondering at the strange melancholy that had come over him. Then she burst out laughing.

His voice was a low growl. ‘I did not realise I was being amusing.’

‘I’m sorry!’ she sputtered, trying to stifle her giggles. ‘It’s just that what you’re saying…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well it’s nonsense, isn’t it? You’re insane.’

Instead of being insulted, Cracius seemed to consider this seriously. ‘That is entirely possible,’ he admitted. ‘In which case you’re not going to like this.’ The spider probed a third time, and the image filled with fire-spark points, each orbited by a tiny ring of numbers and figures. ‘Each one of these is the location of a cache of provisions. Food, to you. Unless I’m insane,’ he added drily.

‘But…’ she stammered. ‘But there are so many of them!’ Enough food to last a few thousand people for centuries. And it wasn’t just something to fill bellies, it was freedom from the tyranny of scraping a hand-to-mouth existence, freedom from the Jaaxes’ control over the vats, freedom from her obligation to marry a man she loathed.

‘Correction: there were so many of them.’

One by one, the fire-sparks began to die.

‘No…’ she whispered. ‘No!’ They were disappearing. She grasped at the image to stop them, but her fingers just closed on empty air, and they kept dying inexorably. She turned to Master Cracius. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The Seal is updating its records. Your ancestors plundered those caches long ago. But look.’ He pointed, and she turned back. Two fire-sparks remained. One, which was just a plain glowing icon with no halo of orbiting figures, was in the middle of the image, close by a sphere of empty space. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is this,’ and he indicated the Seal. The second fire-spark was ringed with numbers and was a lot lower down the Spike, almost at the very bottom. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is a cache that has not been plundered. Yet.’

Its depth explained why it hadn’t been found before. It was in the lower reaches. Crawler territory. Dangerously close to the djinn fires and the kind of place you never went without protective gear, weapons and a full support team – none of which she had.

‘Well that’s–’ she said, and was interrupted by a high-pitched wail coming from a servo-skull that had floated from its perch amongst the stacks of equipment; its eyes were flashing an urgent red.

‘Visitors,’ commented Master Cracius. The skull glided over to him and he connected a cable, communing with the device. ‘Friends of yours,’ he added drily. ‘Jaaxes and a squad of