The First Book of Ore: The Foundry's Edge (34 page)

In the blue blast of another explosion, Phoebe saw the enemy flood in. There were so many of them, their silent guns whirling with deadly fire. Bullets ricocheted and clattered everywhere. Phoebe covered her head with her arms, trying desperately to blink away the flare patterns from her eyes.

The Grim Reaper mehkan fell like a shadow, enveloping a Watchman with its cloaklike body. Its muscular membrane thrashed violently, and then the creature bounded back up into the darkness on javelin spring legs, leaving its victim a twitching, perforated mess. Cable strands whisked down as the chraida lassoed rifles out of the hands of Watchmen and scurried around the grid overhead to draw away enemy fire.

Reeking smoke from the hunchback's explosions filled the chamber, stinging Phoebe's eyes and burning her throat. She couldn't make out what was happening in the skirmish, but she could hear far-off jarring booms that shook the walls as the Foundry tried to break in.

And something else.
Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack.
Hazy silhouettes marched through the smoke in another corridor. They were being surrounded.

“Behind you!” Phoebe cried at the top of her lungs.

She pulled her father down as a barrage of bullets hammered the crate that hid them. He took her hand, and they fled for better cover.

Orei heard her warning. At the commander's order, a mehkan with folded forelegs like a praying mantis skittered over to a massive shelving unit. Its serrated limbs buzzed like chain saws, and the creature hacked through stout supports. With a tremendous crash, the loaded shelves toppled on the wave of Watchmen. The mantis mehkan spun into their ranks in a shredding cyclone.

Phoebe and her father dove for shelter behind a Mini-lift. They were outnumbered, pinned in this hub and assaulted from all sides. Jules tried to take aim, but it was impossible to find a clear target in the chaos.

With a series of deafening detonations, the hunchback mehkan collapsed a corridor onto a squadron of emerging Watchmen. A lumbering Covenant warrior covered in shaggy steel wool, one of his arms massively oversize, charged into combat. The beast swung its colossal limb, and its bulky fingers, tethered by lengths of chain, shot out like a bludgeoning flail. Its bashing attacks scattered Foundry soldiers, wrapping around their legs and yanking them off their feet. Weaving through its comrade's chains, the Grim Reaper mehkan impaled a Watchman with its spear legs. Then it used the victim as a springboard to vault at another, blinding him with its smothering membrane.

Through the smoke, Phoebe saw the chain saw mantis mehkan stagger back and petrify as it was riddled by a wave of lethal white bonding rounds.

Orei toppled a crate of long gas tanks. She measured them quickly with her shifting apparatus, adjusted their positions, and then swiped off the ends with a slash of her scythes. The canisters screamed off with a hissing wail, blasting into the advancing forces like torpedoes.

A Watchman grabbed Phoebe from behind. Jules hammered
it with the butt of his rifle. She screamed and fought as the soldier reared back to strike her dead. But a cluster of silvery bolts cracked through its face shield.

Korluth appeared and spat another shard from his beak, piercing the Foundry soldier. Then a cable looped around the Watchman's neck, and he was yanked into the rafters to be dispatched by the watchful chraida. Motioning urgently, Korluth led Phoebe and her father forward. They followed his slinking form through smoke, bullets, and blue explosions. The black swoop of the Grim Reaper mehkan fluttered overhead.

Finally, they reached the corridor that led to Micah. Behind them, the Covenant team was still battling furiously, trying to keep this path clear. Among a ravaged pile of Watchman carcasses, Entakhai lay dying, his body splattered with crystallized chemical ammunition. Orei and Korluth stood beside him, their fists clenched over their dynamos.

“He rusts for you, bleeders,” Orei said. “Pay respect.”

More death. More loss. And this time, Phoebe was to blame. If it weren't for her, they would have escaped the Citadel by now.

“No. But…but we—” she tried to explain.

“Thank you, Entakhai,” her father said.

Phoebe stared into the mehkan's vacant, glassy black eyes.

“Pr-praise the gears,” she said, soft and unsure.

The mehkans looked at her strangely. Entakhai flashed his gnashing bolt teeth, streaked with oily black blood, though she couldn't tell whether it was a smile or a sneer. Orei murmured something to Korluth in Rattletrap, and the two of them raced deeper into the corridor, followed by Jules and Phoebe. As the battle raged behind them, she wondered what would happen to the rest of the Covenant team. All she knew was Micah and Dollop needed her.

Phoebe would save them. She had to.

The throne room erupted in applause. Goodwin stood ramrod straight with a winning smile on his face, arms folded across his ample chest.

“Thank you. No need for that,” the Chairman said to the staff at their workstations. “We are all just doing our jobs.”

He had been right all along. There was, in fact, a secret team of intruders trying to sneak into the Armory on Level Three. His hunch had enabled their forces to intercept before the enemy could breach the final security seals. Now the creatures were surrounded, and it was only a matter of time before they were eliminated. Goodwin breathed a little easier.

“Patch me in to Kaspar,” he called out.

“I propose we reduce privilege to the access codes,” a military executive said. “Re-encrypt them on a daily basis.”

“Agreed. This was too close a call,” another concurred.

An operator called out, “He's not responding, sir.”

Goodwin's smile slipped. “Get me Captain Eldridge.”

“Another intruder eliminated in the sublevel,” an executive announced, indicating the live feeds on-screen.

“Eldridge here, sir,” replied a voice over the speakers.

“Give your Com-Pak to Kaspar,” Goodwin said. “I must speak with him.”

“He…he is not here, sir.”

Goodwin's nostrils flared. His flushed face settled into a hard mask, thick white brows hooding his icy eyes. The military executives watched him warily.

“What is the status of the detainment block?” Goodwin reviewed the screen, deciphering the dark chaos of gunfire and explosions. A window winked out as another Watchman was deactivated, replaced instantaneously by another feed.

“Three intruders down,” announced a coordinator.

“Only three?”

“They have assumed a defensive configuration near the passage leading to Sector Nine-D.”

“About time,” Goodwin mused. “Fall back and let them get to the boy. Prepare to strike on my word. How long until the surrounding doors are open?”

“Our technicians are still struggling with the override, sir. But they assure me they will—”

“Dispatch the Titans.”

“Sir?”

“Take down the doors,” he said impatiently. “Get in there and stop them.”

“Yes, Mr. Goodwin,” the coordinator responded. “Bringing Titans on line.”

Goodwin studied the screen, which displayed a frozen image of two glowing white figures caught on a Watchman's heat-sensitive optics like a pair of grainy ghosts—a man and a lanky girl. The Chairman narrowed his eyes.

“James!” snarled a voice.

He turned to look across the vast expanse of the throne room. There, storming in through the reinforced platinum doors, were the five representatives of the Board. Their unwelcome faces were sour.

“What is the meaning of this?” Director Malcolm hollered.

“We demand an explanation,” fumed Director Layton.

Phoebe tried to keep up, but the red darkness, gauzy smoke, and the ringing in her ears made her feel like she was stumbling through a dream.

She followed Orei, Korluth, and her father as they ran down the corridor, hurrying past intersecting hallways and Watchmen corpses blackened by the hunchback mehkan's blasts. Her father took a fresh ammo clip from one of the soldiers' belts and reloaded his Dervish rifle with practiced ease. As his weapon charged up with a low burring sound, its four barrels hissing into place, Phoebe considered taking one of the abandoned guns, then discarded the idea. Not only did the rifles look too heavy for her, but she hadn't the slightest clue how to use one, and now was not the time to learn.

Shuddering blows shook the detainment block.

Korluth led the way, his pronged radar dish flaring open to detect a signal. They entered a huge chamber where the mildewed air was filled with the muffled churn of water. The hair on Phoebe's neck prickled. It was the same foul reek from the drowning tank that clung to her coveralls. How she hoped that Micah hadn't suffered the same murderous depths.

The room was a forest of color-coded pipes, layered so heavily that it obscured the ancient golden wall. The convoluted plumbing network ran up into the impenetrable darkness above and down through the floor below.

“Nine-point-six ticks. Move,” called Orei as she directed them to a connecting passage beyond the blinking banks of an electronic control system.

They navigated another series of tunnels and raced past adjacent corridors and chambers humming with machinery. The turret guns sagging limply from the overhead grid seemed like they might snap on at any second. Phoebe's life felt like it hung by a hair. All she could do was keep up. And survive.

Korluth diverted off the main corridor and descended down a channel that had a rugged decline, steps worn away by millennia.

“No,” her father said, suddenly distraught. “Not in here.”

She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but when the passage opened into a dismal cave, she knew. Her heart deflated.

It was a relic that had remained untouched since the days of Kallorax. The only light was a red glow from the hallway reflecting off the walls, but it was enough to glimpse the gallery of horrors. Cruel hooks and knots of thorns hung from chains above moldering equipment that bristled with rusty blades. There were crushing cages, spiked chairs, and slabs fitted with barbed-wire manacles. The floor was stained black and pocked with circular drains.

Stretching across the span of the back wall was a spiked sun, dangling with a sickening arsenal of implements that Phoebe was glad she couldn't decipher.

Micah was being kept in a torture chamber.

And there, whimpering in the dark, came his broken sob.

“Micah?” Phoebe whispered. The crying stopped. Korluth skittered across the chamber, and the others followed him. “Micah, where are you?”

“H-hello?” his voice creaked. “Hey!”

“Shh,” Jules responded. “We're here, son. You're safe.”

“Doc? Oh man, I'm really losin' it.”

Korluth snapped his radar dish mouth shut and motioned to one of the drains in the floor. Together the four of them hefted the lid.

“Hold on,” Phoebe growled, straining against the hinges.

“Phoebe?” he gushed. “Oh man, get me outta this thing!”

As the top squealed open, they saw the glimmer of his desperate eyes.

Orei halted suddenly, clicking and measuring.

“Ambush,” she growled and let the lid clang back down.

“No, no! HEY!”

The Covenant commander issued some instructions to her comrade and was gone in a flash, a silent swirl of deadly rings whispering out of sight. Korluth scuttled up the wall and vanished into the shadows above.

“Wait! What about Micah?” Phoebe cried.

“Yeah, what about ME?” he hollered. “Don't leave me!”

“We'll be back,” Jules assured him.

“WAIT!”

“We'll get you out of there,” Phoebe declared. “I promise!”

Her words were drowned out by ricocheting bullets.

Jules and Phoebe rolled behind the protection of a monstrous vise as Watchmen charged into the torture chamber. Orei intercepted them in a razor blur. She had no clear shape as she fought, just an incalculable assembly of hacking discs, expanding and retracting with dizzying speed. Attackers fell before her in pieces. She spun along the ground and swept cleanly through legs, and then sprang over their heads to assault from another angle.

Korluth's long silver darts whistled from the darkness, penetrating Watchmen with deadly precision. They shot blindly at him on the ceiling, but his skittering form was too fast. While they were distracted, Jules took aim with his own rifle, leveling two more in a flurry of white rounds.

The rings of Orei's body spun and shifted as she dodged bullets. Three Watchmen tried to follow her, guns blazing, but she streaked between them unexpectedly. They tracked her motion and blasted away, but only managed to strike each other. In seconds, all three were riddled with bonding rounds.

Korluth sprang from above and landed on one of the soldiers with a crack, his pickax beak buried in its body. Orei snared another two in a scythe headlock, one under each arm, and decapitated them with an efficient snap.

The final sparking Watchman, alive despite being only a torso, tried to drag himself toward a rifle lying beside Micah's prison. As the Covenant commander strode past, she sliced off the top of his head with the spinning rings of her arm, and he stopped moving.

Phoebe and Jules ran to help the mehkans open the lid again. Orei hauled Micah out of the narrow tube by his collar and deposited him roughly.

“Everything is going to be okay,” Jules assured him.

“Are you all right?” Phoebe asked. “Did they hurt you?”

Micah was white and trembling. A thin silver stream oozed across his leg.

“Ahh! Get it off! That thing's gonna eat my brain! It—”

Korluth opened his pickax beak and lowered it to the ground. He made a soft squeaking sound, and the silver streak squiggled back to him. The mehkan slurped it up, his radar dish reclaiming the liquid sensor.

“Who the hell are they?” Micah asked, disoriented.