Flying the Storm

31.





The Mountain

Commander Petrus had been gone for a long while. Hammit sat on his seat in the aircraft, looking out of the canopy at the giant green mountains that disappeared into the clouds. Big rocks were scattered all over their slopes, like somebody had thrown a strop and flung them there. Somebody strong. He squinted up at the high slopes, looking for where they’d come from. He couldn’t see anything, just white cloud.

It wasn’t raining, really, it was just sort of wet anyway. When he’d been allowed outside to piss, the cold clouds seemed to find their way through his clothes, making his skin clammy. The thought of it made him smile to himself again. He’d stood on the ground. It had been soft and spongy, and the grass had rustled as he walked through it.

Weird.

But now he had sat on his own for a long time. His backside was aching, and his feet wanted to feel the grass again. Commander Petrus had told him to stay put, to watch the aircraft. He’d taken the two marines and the flight lieutenant with him, but he didn’t say how long he’d be gone for. Could be hours, could be days.

That got Hammit worrying. Maybe Commander Petrus was in trouble, wherever he’d gone. Maybe one of those rocks had fallen on him and the others, and Hammit wouldn’t ever know about it. That frightened him more than a little. He didn’t know how to fly the aircraft. He didn’t even know where he was, only what Commander Petrus had told him: north. Suddenly he was all fluttered with worry.

Maybe, then, he should go and try to find them. He’d watched them go, across the grass until they looked tiny as little bugs, and then they disappeared into the rocks. He reckoned he could remember which ones. Those ones there, he thought. Or was it those ones there?

He sat for a little while longer, staring hard at the rocks, waiting for them to appear. They didn’t. He sucked in some courage and opened the hatch.

It was colder outside than he remembered. The wind was stronger, and it seemed to cut through even the thick flight suit that Commander Petrus had given him. Little drops of water settled on his sleeves. He shivered.

When he looked hard, he could still see the trampled clumps of grass where Commander Petrus and the others had passed by earlier. He set off, following the tracks, stumbling on the soft, lumpy ground.

It took what seemed like a very long time to reach the rocks. They were huge close up. Even just the sight of them made him a little bit scared. He glanced back at the aircraft. It looked so small and out of place, sitting on the hump between the mountains. He was tempted then just to hurry back to it, and forget about the whole thing.

But no. Commander Petrus could be in trouble. Hammit had to find him.

The ground was harder near the rocks. It felt drier under his feet. He couldn’t see the tracks any more, and there was no obvious way to follow. Slowly, he picked his way around the base of the huge rock.

And then, just when he thought he’d looked all around it, he saw it. There, under one of the rocks, was a door. He had to be standing right in front of it to see it; it had been hidden so well. It looked so out of place, with its angles and squareness.

Hammit went in under the rock, stepping down a little drop, one hand feeling the damp stone above him as he walked towards the door. Without the wide, bright sky above him, he felt almost at home.

The door was slightly open. Steadying his breathing, he nudged it open wider. Inside was a long, dark corridor, a bit like the long engineering passages of the Gilgamesh. Hammit looked behind him at the daylight outside, and then back to the darkness. He wasn’t imagining it. The corridor was going into the mountain.

He shivered again as he felt a draft blowing at him from the corridor. The air felt drier and even a bit warmer. Bunching his fists, he stepped in.

The floor was a metal grill, and he couldn’t see what was beneath it. His footstep echoed faintly from the walls around him, and then a moment later from whatever was at the other end. The walls were almost close enough for him to touch when he reached both of his hands out. He picked the left one, and felt along it as he slowly made his way in. The wall was cold but dry compared to the stone outside.

There was a loud creak behind him. He spun around, heart thumping in his throat, until he saw that the draught had just pushed the door almost closed again. It was darker with the door closed over, but the light hadn’t seemed to help much anyway. The corridor seemed to soak it up.

It took a long time feeling his way into the darkness to reach the end of the corridor. He was going slowly and as quietly as he could, though he couldn’t say why. It was like he feared there was something there, waiting for him in the dark. And there could have been, for all he knew. There could have been savages and cannibals hiding in the mountain, waiting for a soft engineer to come along, just like the Chaplain had warned.

But Hammit could fight. He was big compared to the other engineers. He’d held his own against Morley, until… well, he didn’t want to think about that. Hammit knew he could fight. That was what mattered. If he had to fight to save Commander Petrus, he would. Commander Petrus had been kind to him. Commander Petrus had taken him flying. He’d shown him the sky, and let him feel the ground. It was worth fighting for him, Hammit decided.


That steeled him up some.

The corridor ended suddenly with a cold metal surface. Hammit pressed his hands against it, then turned to look back the way he’d come. Way off in the distance he could see the thin slice of light where the door was. It seemed to just hang there in the blackness. The walls of the corridor reflected none of the light.

He turned back to the metal wall in front of him. He felt out to his sides and found the stone walls. That meant that the metal had to be a door. Why would there be a corridor this length to a dead end?

Groping around blindly, he felt for anything that might show the door. A crack, a hinge, a handle.

He found nothing.

Curses.

It couldn’t be a dead end. It just couldn’t.

Out of ideas, he leant sideways against the stone wall. He slipped and fell to his backside when the metal suddenly groaned and lifted itself, sliding away into the ceiling. A bright blue dot had lit up on the wall where he’d leaned. A button. Even with the tiny light it shed, he could see the walls and ceiling and door as clear as day, compared to how it had been before. He could have laughed.

Hammit heaved himself to his feet and went through the door. As he passed under it and into the dark space beyond, it slammed shut behind him, sealing off the light of the button and the far away day. But it wasn’t dark for long. When the echoes of the door closing had faded away, he took another step forward into the space. Suddenly the chamber lit up with long strips of light set in the stone ceiling, all blue and white and painful after the dark corridor.

When his eyes adjusted, he could see that he was in another, shorter corridor. This one was much wider and taller than the other had been, and the air here was warm and dry. The walls and ceiling had been cut away from the stone by some machine, all smooth and arched like the chapel on the Gilgamesh. There were other doors, too, leading off to the sides of the corridor, but they all looked closed. At the end was another doorway, but the door was nowhere to be seen.

In the ceiling, he thought, like the other one went.

So that was where he headed. Commander Petrus must have gone through there. That would be why the door was open. Hammit’s boots squeaked on the polished floor as he crossed it. The floor looked to be made of stone or maybe ‘crete, but it was hard to tell in the fuzzy blue light. It didn’t ring or clank like the decks of the Gilgamesh. It felt solid. Really solid. He liked the feel of it, almost as much as he’d liked the feel of the grass.

Beyond the open door the passage took a sharp right turn, and then began to wind downwards in a wide, smooth spiral. The long lights came on bit by bit as Hammit reached each section of corridor, going dark suddenly in the ones he left behind. He was hurrying along now. With every step he became more worried for Commander Petrus. He had to find him.

The spiral finally levelled off at a big intersection between corridors. All the doors were open here, and Hammit stood breathing heavily for a while as he decided which one to try.

The middle one.

The warm draft was coming stronger from this corridor. Hammit even undid the zip of his flight suit a little bit, it was getting so hot. The air had a smell now too, really faint, but definitely a smell. Not pleasant, either.

Hammit slowed a little, as a pressing dread settled on him. He’d never felt like this on the Gilgamesh. He was starting to think about the sheer weight of all the stone above him. Half a mountain. A mountain so tall he couldn’t see the top for cloud, when he’d been outside. He hunched his shoulders and tucked his head down as he walked. It didn’t help much.

The corridor took several turns; left, right, left, right, one after another. Hammit started to wonder if it would ever end, or if it would just keep leading him deeper and deeper into the mountain. He couldn’t guess what lay at the end. Commander Petrus had never told him what they were looking for. Something his superiors were very worried about, Hammit remembered. But that could have been anything.

His imagination started to run. If the brass were worried about it so much… It must have been something the savages were doing. Something the evil folk down surface-side were up to that had given the brass a real fright. He didn’t want to know what that was. Something that frightened the Gilgamesh was not something Hammit wanted to run into.

Something his imagination wasn’t exaggerating was the smell. It was getting stronger the deeper he went. On any sane day, Hammit would have stopped to reconsider. Everything about this place was telling him he didn’t want to be there. But today, there would be no going back until he’d done what he came to do. He wouldn’t turn back till he’d found Commander Petrus, and made sure he was all right.

If he was careful and quiet, he might even spot Commander Petrus before he saw him. Then, if everything seemed fine, he could sneak back up and out to the aircraft. Yes, that’s what he would do. He’d be quiet as he could, walking on the outsides of his feet. Just like coming back from the brothel late, keeping from waking the next shift in their bunks so he didn’t get a belt round the head.

Finally the corridor straightened out. It ran straight for a short distance, he could tell by the light cast from behind him. Then, with another step the long corridor’s lights came on, and at the end was a dark shape, sprawled on the floor.

Hammit’s stomach jumped right up into his throat. It was a person. He couldn’t tell who. He just stood, frozen to the spot, not even daring to breathe. The person on the floor didn’t move. It’s dead, thought Hammit, the dread of the stone closing in around him.

He managed to make himself go on. Silently, he crept up the passage. He reached the body, just short of the end of the corridor, where another open doorway led off to the right.

Hammit made himself look at the corpse. It was face down in a dark pool of blood, but from the rusty coloured hair he knew it was the flight-lieutenant. He swallowed back a dry heave as he saw the huge, gaping holes in the man’s back. Punched right through, it looked like. Like somebody’d taken a presshammer to his back. A piece of white rib stood out under the blue light. Hammit had to turn away, hands on his knees, retching again.

Getting back some of his steel, Hammit stepped carefully around the corpse and went through the open doorway to the right. The corridor he stepped into now lit up as the one behind him went dark. At the end was another door, closed this time.

And by the foot of the door were three more bodies.

The two armoured forms of the marines lay sprawled closer to him than the third body. Fist-sized craters had been punched in the stone of the floor and walls. There had been a fight, it looked like.

The third body lay propped up against the wall near the closed door. Hammit knew who it was even before it spoke.

“Engineer,” gurgled Commander Petrus, his head slugging round to look at him. “Get out… Get out of here.”

“Commander-” Hammit started to say, but the commander cut him off.

“No. Go, now.”

But Hammit wasn’t just going to leave him there. He’d made a promise to himself that he’d get Commander Petrus back safe. Ignoring the order, he ran down the corridor.

As he got closer he realised what the smell was. It was Commander Petrus. He was holding a huge gash in his belly, and blood and shit was on his hands. The awful mixture covered his clothes and the floor around him.

And then, as he took another step towards Commander Petrus, the lights went out.

Suddenly the only light was a little red dot, bright as fire, above the place where the door was. Even the terminal screen by the door had gone dark.


“Don’t…move,” hissed Commander Petrus, somewhere by Hammit’s feet. “If you want to live, do not move a muscle.”

This time, Hammit didn’t need told twice. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see that the little red dot was no longer just a dot. It was a beam. And it was pointed at his chest.

“Commander Petrus, what-”

“We tried-” he almost whispered, “We tried to open the door. Stay very still. The others tried to run.”

And look what happened to them. Hammit’s heart was thumping in his chest so hard he thought it might hammer through his ribs. That red light was watching him, he knew. It was watching and waiting for him to move. His bladder felt near to bursting all of a sudden, and the stink of Commander Petrus’ guts was worse than anything he’d ever smelled.

“How long?” asked Hammit, trying to move his lips as little as he could.

“A few minutes,” wheezed Commander Petrus. “I think.”

Hammit stood in silence. Every muscle in his body was tensed and starting to ache, but he didn’t dare relax them. He could hear Commander Petrus’ unsteady breathing near his feet, getting weaker. The smell seemed to be getting worse, and the red light burned in the black.

He’s dying, Hammit thought. He’s dying and I can’t help him.

“Engineer,” Commander Petrus whispered faintly. “You have to go back to the aircraft. Get a message… a message to the Gilgamesh. Tell them what… what we found here.”

“I’m not leaving you, sir,” hissed Hammit, his eyes fixed on the red dot. “I’ll take you back with me.”

Commander Petrus sounded like he was laughing, though it was more of a gurgled wheeze.

“I am a dead man, Engineer,” he said.

No you aren’t, thought Hammit fiercely. Not yet you aren’t. When the red light went out, he would pick him up and carry him out of there. There was a med kit on the aircraft. He could fix him. Just like a piece of machinery, he could fix him.

He couldn’t hear Commander Petrus breathing. Hammit held his own breath, listening hard.

Nothing. The corridor was silent.

“Commander Petrus!” he cried suddenly, panic overrunning his sense. Without thinking he dropped to Commander Petrus’ side, grabbing him by his flight suit and shaking him.

There was an awful humming noise, and a metal clank from above the door. The red light had followed him to where he crouched. His mind went silent then.

Run, was all it told him.

He ran along the tar-black corridor, feeling for the open doorway. Looking over his shoulder, the red light hadn’t followed him. It was still pointing where he’d crouched, at Commander Petrus. Then the corridor erupted as the gun above the door opened fire. The walls strobed with orange light, and through that Hammit could see the mangled ruin of Commander Petrus being hammered with heavy bullets. The gun flashed so fast. A spray of blood, caught in the air as it looped across the corridor. One instant Commander Petrus’ head was there, the next flash it wasn’t. Hammit ran as fast as he could, but he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder.

The red light moved just as he found the door. He crossed into the other corridor just in time to see it blast the wall where he’d been, spraying him with stinging scraps of stone.

The blue lights didn’t come on, but Hammit kept running. He didn’t know where. Then, at the end of the corridor, he saw another red light blink on.

He felt an opening to his right and leapt through it, hurtling headlong into the dark. Somewhere ahead of him another red light appeared, and round another bend another appeared. And another and another. Each time they opened fire just a moment too late, chasing him through open doorways and around corners with deafening thunder.

He ran and ran and ran, feeling his way with his hands and guessing where the turns were, somehow missing running into a wall, somehow still alive. His body was pure panic and speed.

Hammit ran until there were no more red lights. He stopped then, spinning around in the dark, waiting for a bullet to burst him like a wet bag.

But it didn’t happen. He collapsed to his backside on the stone floor, deaf and blind and lost. But he was alive.

He brought his knees up to his chest then, and huddled against the wall. Commander Petrus was dead. Hammit was alone in this place, alone in the dark, and the red lights were around every corner, looking for him. He’d never find his way back to the aircraft, not now. Even if he did, he didn’t know how to fly it. He would die there, he knew, in the dark stone corridors beneath the mountain. He would die there and nobody would ever know.

For the first time since he could remember, he started to cry.