Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (27 page)

‘Would it cost so much to put a cutting edge on the end of this?’ asked Carter, holding up his heavy length of wood.

‘Vandians would consider it a bladed weapon,’ answered Owen. ‘And that’d cost you your life.’

‘Seems to me that Princess Helrena Skar is the one asking us to fight. Least she could do is to send us into the fray properly armed.’

‘The Vandians are big on their caste system,’ said Owen. ‘Even the lowest caste of citizen is allowed to carry a dagger. If a low-born Vandian saw a slave bearing a bladed weapon, it would be like that slave claiming they were the equal of an imperial citizen. They want a sky mine up here, not an armed camp of slaves that might spark a revolt. That’s something they really fear, because there’s a
lot
of slaves in the imperium.’

Carter shook his head. ‘I’m not their equal, I’m better than a dozen of them.’

‘Got an ego to match theirs, for sure,’ said Duncan from down the line.

Carter shot him an angry look.

‘Never underestimate the Vandians,’ said Owen. ‘They live by their duelling code. It’s intended to weed out weaklings, make sure the sons and daughters of empire never get fat and complacent. Allows feuds to be settled without the empire collapsing into civil war every few years. Princess Helrena can be challenged by anyone of equal caste, or receive a challenge from above. No champions permitted; she has to be ready to fight to the death to keep what she has, every minute of every day. You face an adult Vandian in combat; you’re fighting a proven survivor.’

Carter dropped the wood into his palm with a thud. ‘And am I allowed to challenge up?’

‘No,’ said Owen. ‘And the princess wouldn’t dirty her honour by challenging anyone lower to a scrap. Vandians don’t duel with slaves; they apply whips to our backs.’

‘You know a lot about their kind. Ever been off the sky mines?’

‘The easiest way off is to die, get wrapped in a shroud, and be tossed over the side. Try talking to the house slaves when they visit the station with the princess and her allies,’ said Owen. ‘You might pick up a few things to help keep everyone alive.’

Carter swung the makeshift club around. ‘So this is it?’

‘This is it… and be glad of it. In the Vandians’ gladiator combats they’ll throw you bladed weapons inside an arena, for the few days you survive. Compared to a gladiator’s fate, labouring in a sky mine is a weekend fishing trip.’

‘I’ve fought with steels,’ said Carter.

‘And you think a pickaxe handle is below your station?’ said Owen. ‘Then we’ll start with you, Mister Carnehan.’

Carter stepped out of the line, testing the heft of the wood, feeling the balance. ‘You want me to hold back?’

‘I want you to take this seriously. Just pretend I’m one of the Vandians that purchased your sorry hide for a handful of coins. If that doesn’t make you mad enough, let me know. I’m sure I can come up with some insults to help you along.’

Carter laughed and faced off against the bushy-haired slave. Owen held his length of wood two-handed, one fist at either end of the handle, circling Carter as they manoeuvred around each other in the chamber. Carter kept his club clutched in his right fist, holding it forward, ready to jab and strike when he saw an opening.

There was a shout from one of the other training groups – someone taking some lumps, and Carter thought he saw Owen’s eyes slide away for a second. He rushed in and aimed his club at the old hand’s gut, a blow to knock the air out of his lungs, then a tap to the head, and Carter would have made his play. Unfortunately for Carter, the distraction was simply a ploy. Owen stepped forward, moving to the side, tripping Carter up with the club and letting him sprawl onto the hard rock surface. Owen brought the weight of wood down towards Carter’s head, halting it a hair above the back of his skull to make the point.

‘Looks like I’m a survivor, too,’ said Owen. ‘One of my uncles ran a fencing hall back home and I helped with the business. Sabre and staff weren’t strangers to me when the skels came raiding. The corpses I planted in the ground just hung a higher price around my neck.’

‘You’re quick,’ said Carter, carefully picking himself up from the stone floor.
Quicker than you look.
The thing that smarted the most was his pride.

‘If I wasn’t,’ said Owen, ‘I wouldn’t be here.’ He turned to the other slaves ringed around the two of them. ‘
Never
underestimate your enemy. When you’re out there in the sky, trying to stake a claim to put rations on the table of your friends and family, you won’t know anything about the slaves attacking you. Not their names or their country. You certainly won’t know if they’re old hands or as green as a Weyland meadow. You want to stay alive, you’d better act as if they’re superior to you and plan accordingly. There’s no such thing as easy up here. Only dying is effortless. So make
it
and
yourself
damn hard.’ He pointed to a series of air masks stacked inside wooden crates against the wall. ‘Pull those on. You’ll be wearing oxygen breathers when it comes time to scrap, so you need to get used to fighting with restricted vision.’

Carter took one of the masks by the strap and slipped it on, then spent a second or two getting over the smell of stale air from the air canisters on either side, choking down his gag reflex. Everyone else milled around, jostling for masks, some of the slaves swapping sizes until they got a respirator with straps that could be adjusted for a half-comfortable fit. Carter tapped the clear visor. Not quite glass, lighter and with a slight oiliness to the touch.

‘It’s called plastic,’ said Owen, his voice slightly muffled behind the air mask he had slipped on. ‘It’s shatterproof. Okay, Duncan Landor, you seemed to find the sight of Northhaven here falling on his tail amusing. Step forward. Let’s see if any of you northern country boys have anything to teach me.’

Carter was pleased to see the heir to the Landor fortune hadn’t, and the harsh ‘instruction’ the rich boy received made Carter glad he’d cleaned his visor for the lesson. Until now he would have laughed if anyone had told him there could be so much finesse and craft behind swinging a club. Owen could make that simple shaft of wood a short staff, a wooden sabre, a billy-club or a stave. And he made it dance in his hands, as well as painfully administering cracks and impacts across his victim’s form. The trainees went at it for long hours, and by the time they’d finished, the new slaves were limping back to their barracks with a constellation of purple bruises across their bodies. The next day the training began anew, and the next day, and the next. Owen was as underfed as the rest of them, nothing but water and subsistence rations to keep him going – he was hungry, and always absorbing blows on his lithe, bony body when someone, usually accidentally, connected with him.
He’s putting his heart into it, that’s for sure
. It was obvious that it meant something to Owen to help his fellow Weylanders becomes as skilled as possible, ready for the day they would need to fight. Carter doubted he would have been as passionate, if he had seen so many fresh intakes arrive from home and then disappear into the heartless maw of the sky mines. It was obvious that with a few exceptions – Owen and his friend Anna among them – most of the old hands had been blunted by life out here. Carter would have to survive for a good few years or so before he would be considered worth talking to. As far as the veteran sky miners were concerned, getting to know Carter Carnehan would be an emotional investment in a walking corpse.

Training on the station wasn’t easy for any of the greenhorns. Willow and Adella had been set to learn the sorting lines. They were given a crash course in identifying minerals being run at speed down conveyer belts. For every valuable ore they missed or failed to sort correctly, there was a sharp lesson from an overseer that Adella described as a bitter old harpy. Another long-term survivor, but one without Owen’s core of decency, it seemed. Only Kerge seemed to have landed on his feet – his uncommon mechanical skills bringing him a job in the repair bay, maintaining the heavy mining machinery.

If there had been any fat on the slaves when they were been taken, there certainly wasn’t now. Carter got used to getting up hungry, training ravenous and collapsing, sweating, on his cot with his stomach still grumbling. The training was exhausting, especially on short rations. When the slaves weren’t learning combat as hitters, they were taken to mining training – fewer lumps, but it was even more back-breaking. Cutting new tunnels in the station’s rock just for the hell of it. The skills of tunnelling and shaft sinking, ore haulage and hoisting, stopping supports for the passages, air pumping, blasting powder safety. Adella, Willow and many of the women captured at Northhaven were taken away to master the grinding and crushing lines, classification and screening. They came back with their hands and arms raw and bleeding, complaining about lessons in electrostatic separation, gravity separation, dense medium separation, magnetic separation and froth flotation. The distracting effect of this harsh regime was, Carter realised, probably largely the point of it. No one had time to brood over their lost lives, though from the sobbing he heard rising from cots at night, that strategy wasn’t always successful. Sometimes, Carter had to work hard not to join that sad night chorus. Agonising over his last moments with his parents. Remembering his mother’s blood pooling around her stretched-out body, his father’s body vanishing in the exploding shell flash. It was odd. He could feel pain for the family he had lost and the comfortable life he had known. But the station’s grinding toil didn’t really leave much room for self-pity or fear. There wasn’t hope. Or ambition. Nor much in the way of glimpses of joy. There was just a weary grind until Carter lost track of the days, each the same as the last. Until it was a relief to let fatigue prise him from his thoughts and send him spinning into darkness. And asleep he dreamed of food. Real meat and vegetables, not the thin barley gruel that barely covered the bottom of the bowl pushed across the counter towards him in the station’s refectory cave. The dreams seemed far more tangible than his meagre rations; memories of the wholesome smell of his last meal in Northhaven. But you couldn’t live on happy reminiscences, and the contrast with life back in Weyland and his existence here in the sky mines was too stark to dwell on without going mad. In the end, his former life drifted away into the perpetual mist of volcanic vapours surrounding the station. This was his life, here, or at least it was base survival.

And then at last, there was something new…

Carter stood in the station’s hangar, rubbing the stubble on his face while Owen rummaged around in one of the aerial transporters, re­turning with a handful of leather masks, round biscuit-tin-sized canisters on either cheek to hold air tanks and a voice amplification device built into its shaped mouthpiece, lending the speaker a tinny machine-like burr. Carter blinked the sleep from his eyes, leaning on a length of thick, heavy wood… a pickaxe with its head removed. Kerge was with them, too, the young gask trained in the use of the transporters’ survey equipment.

‘You’ll need this to breathe,’ said Owen, the slave checking the masks’ seals. ‘The stratovolcano pumps out pyroclastic flows and gases strong enough you can smell them up here on a bad day.’ Anna Kurtain was the pilot who would take them down to the edge of the caldera to check the ground sensors for seismic activity. She arrived in the hangar accompanied by an unwelcome sight: Duncan Landor, swinging his wooden club as if he was a constable rotating a truncheon.

Anna laid a palm on Carter’s chest, the other on Duncan’s. ‘You can both save it for the other houses’ hitters, right? ‘

‘No problems from me,’ said Carter.

‘I’m not planning on starting anything,’ growled Duncan.

‘Good,’ said Anna. ‘Because between Old Smoky down there and the princess’s rivals trying to kill us, I’m going to need you watching for anyone coming after us, not fixed on each other.’

‘I find your people’s proclivities towards violence quite disturbing,’ added Kerge.

‘You don’t get any argument from me, there,’ said Anna. ‘Be a lot better if the ores erupting from that stratovolcano were fairly parcelled out by the gods. But being as we are where we are, us Weyland slaves are just playing the bad hand we’ve been dealt. Walking away from the game isn’t a choice anyone gets to make.’

‘It’s why the princess raids the same country, rather than mixing too many nationalities together,’ said Owen. ‘It’s easier to make her slaves pull together as a cohesive force – easier to fight off a rival house’s miners when they come swarming towards your claim.’

Carter noticed the gask was carrying something that looked very much like the small calculating device he had lost back in Northhaven. ‘You found a new one?’

‘I constructed it,’ said the gask, ‘from spare pieces in the machine shop.’

That’s a useful skill to have
, Carter mused.
Reckon it’s one worth cultivating for an escape, too
.

‘Yeah,’ said Anna, ‘we lucked-in, getting you, spiky. We’ve got slaves that’ve been on the station’s maintenance team for a decade, and they know less about imperial gear than you do.’

Owen, Duncan, Carter and Kerge climbed into the transporter, slipping on masks, while Anna climbed into the cockpit up front. There was no roof on top of the flying cage, so Carter could stand up and glance around at the hangar as they prepared to take off. Rotors under the platform spun into action, and the craft hovered, shaking in a cloud of oily smoke above the hangar floor before tilting forward and powering out into the sky. In the back, all four slaves held on to the metal benches, pieces of equipment sliding about the stowage area under the seats.

‘We’ll be making more and more of these trips over the next few weeks,’ said Owen. ‘There hasn’t been an eruption for a while – we’re overdue. Late. After the last rock blew apart under our feet, we’ve been mining nothing but vapour up here. There’s a lot of pressure from the princess to score a good claim with the next eruption. She has plenty of rivals in the imperial family out to stop us getting one, too. They scent weakness. A chance to remove Princess Helrena from the emperor’s favour and yank her sky-mining concession from her hands. It’s going to cut up rough, that much I can tell you.’