- -
- 100%
- +
«Water?» Elias muttered, his voice sounding hollow against the concrete walls. «How? Everything on the surface is frozen solid.»
«Geothermal heat pipes,» Aurora explained. «The Old World grid used sub-surface steam conduits to keep these transportation trenches clear of ice. If the core infrastructure is still functioning at a minimal capacity, there may be a live terminal ahead.»
The prospect of warmth spurred Elias forward. His boots spluttered through shallow pools of dark, brackish water that had begun to accumulate on the canal floor.
After a mile of tense, silent walking, the trench opened up into a massive underground junction. Huge, rusted iron pipes — each wide enough to drive a steam truck through — converged into a central drainage vault. From somewhere deep within the pipe network, a low, rhythmic thump-thump-thump echoed. It sounded like a mechanical heartbeat, but to Elias’s trained ears, it was the sound of a malfunctioning pneumatic piston.
He turned on his flashlight, casting a narrow beam across the vault.
The light caught something that made his blood run cold.
The walls of the vault weren’t just made of concrete and rust. They were covered in thick, pale, vein-like structures that pulsed in sync with the distant piston. It looked like a bizarre fusion of industrial machinery and biological growth.
Before Elias could step back, a sharp, wet clicking sound echoed from the dark interior of the largest pipe.
Two eyes illuminated in the beam of his flashlight — but they weren’t normal eyes. They were completely milk-white, covered by thick, protective cataracts. The creature that crawled out of the pipe resembled a wolf, but its skin was completely hairless, translucent, and gray as the ash outside. Its elongated jaw was filled with needle-sharp, overlapping teeth designed to crush frozen bone.
«An Ash Scavenger,» Aurora warned, her voice dropping to a rapid, urgent whisper. «They are completely blind, Master Thorne. They hunt entirely by sound and heat. Stand perfectly still. Do not let your heart rate spike.»
Elias froze. He didn’t even dare to exhale. The creature slinked down from the pipe, its long, clawed paws clicking softly against the damp concrete. It raised its snout, sniffing the air. The heat from Elias’s body, radiating through his heavy coat, was a beacon in the freezing vault.
The scavenger crept closer, stopping just five feet away. Elias could smell the foul, sulfurous stench of its breath. His hand slowly slipped down to his tool belt, his fingers wrapping around the cold grip of his heavy iron wrench. If he swung and missed, the noise would bring the rest of the pack down upon him.
Suddenly, a drop of condensation fell from a rusted pipe overhead, striking the surface of a water pool thirty yards to their left with a loud plop.
The scavenger’s head snapped toward the sound. With a terrifying, guttural hiss, it launched itself toward the splash, its claws tearing up the wet soot on the floor.
«Time to go,» Elias breathed, turning on his heel and sprinting toward a smaller, metal-runged ladder that led up to an auxiliary maintenance platform.
The sound of his heavy boots immediately alerted the beast. A chaotic chorus of shrieks erupted from the surrounding pipes as three more blind scavengers emerged from the darkness, chasing the sound of his footsteps with terrifying speed.
Elias climbed the ladder frantically, his hands slipping on the frozen iron rungs. Just as he hauled his body onto the high metal platform, a pair of snapping jaws slammed shut inches below his boot, the metal ring of the ladder ringing like a bell under the force of the strike.
He lay on the grated floor of the platform, panting heavily, looking down at the pack of blind monsters circling the base of the ladder in the dark. He was safe for the moment, but he was trapped on a high ledge, his flashlight battery was dying, and the path forward was blocked by things that thrived in the dark.
Глава 6
CHAPTER 6: THE STEAM OVERRIDE
The cold metal grating of the platform bit through Elias’s clothes as he lay there, listening to the wet scratching of claws on the iron ladder below. The blind scavengers weren’t leaving. They circled the base, their pale, translucent bodies moving like ghosts through the beam of his dying flashlight.
«Master Thorne,» Aurora’s voice hummed in his ear, her digital signal wavering. «Your core body temperature is dropping. Staying on this open platform for more than twenty minutes will cause severe hypothermia. We must find a way to clear the vault.»
«I’m working on it,» Elias whispered, his teeth clicking together.
He crawled backward on his hands and knees, keeping his head low. At the far end of the catwalk, buried under a thick layer of yellowed frost and dust, stood an old control booth. It was an iron box with thick, reinforced glass windows, designed to let engineers monitor the drainage system safely.
Elias pushed the heavy metal door open. It groaned on its rusted hinges, a sound that caused a furious outburst of shrieks from the creatures below. He slammed the door shut behind him and turned the heavy locking wheel.
Inside, it was slightly warmer, shielded from the drafts of the giant pipes. Elias wiped the dust off the central console. To his surprise, a single analog dial was pulsing with a dull, amber light. The mechanical systems of the Old World were incredibly resilient; they ran on deep-bore geothermal steam that outlived the civilization that harnessed it.
«Aurora, can you read this layout?» Elias plugged a universal interface cable from his tool belt into the console’s maintenance port, linking it to the cylinder in his pack.
The amber lights on the dash suddenly shifted to a sharp, familiar sapphire blue. A schematic of the entire vault projected above the cracked glass.
«This station controls the thermal purge valves for Sector Five,» Aurora reported, her voice stabilizing as she drew power from the station’s residual line. «There is a high-pressure steam reserve directly beneath the floor plates where the creatures are gathered. If we open the primary bypass, we can vent the heat directly into the vault.»
«Will it kill them?» Elias asked, looking through the cracked window at the pale monsters sniffing the bottom of the booth.
«No. Their hides are adapted to geothermal environments. But the intense heat and sudden acoustic shock will force them back into the deep drainage tunnels. However, the manual pressure lever is jammed from the outside. I cannot override it digitally.»
Elias cursed softly. He looked out the window. The jammed valve was a large, iron wheel located on the catwalk just ten feet outside the booth. To reach it, he would have to step out into the open, right above the snapping jaws of the pack.
«I need a distraction,» Elias muttered, his hand wrapping tightly around his heavy wrench.
«I can overload the station’s diagnostic terminal,» Aurora offered. «It will create a high-frequency electrical arc on the opposite side of the vault. It will give you exactly twelve seconds before they realize the sound is a trick.»
«Do it,» Elias said, placing his hand on the door wheel.
«Initiating in three… two… one.»
From the far corner of the vault, a deafening CRACK exploded as a high-voltage transformer short-circuited, throwing a shower of bright blue sparks into the dark. The scavengers shrieked, their sensitive ears overwhelmed by the sudden noise, and they scrambled toward the flash.
Elias threw the booth door open and bolted down the catwalk.
He reached the iron wheel. It was covered in ice. He fit his wrench onto the central bolt and threw his entire weight against it. Nothing. The rust held it tight.
«Come on!» Elias roared, his muscles straining.
Down below, the alpha scavenger realized the trap. It turned away from the sparks, its blind white eyes locking onto the vibration of Elias’s boots on the catwalk. It launched itself toward the ladder with terrifying speed.
Elias slammed his boot against the wrench.
CLANG.
The ice broke. The wheel spun.
Deep beneath the floor plates, a heavy mechanical valve slid open. A deafening roar filled the vault as a massive wall of white, scalding geothermal steam erupted from the floor vents. The temperature in the room spiked instantly. The scavengers screamed in agony, completely blinded and disoriented by the roaring heat, and fled into the dark recesses of the drainage pipes.
Elias collapsed against the handrail, coughing as the warm, wet fog enveloped him. For a moment, he simply breathed in the humid, hot air, letting it thaw his frozen limbs.
«Excellent work, Master Thorne,» Aurora said. «The path below is clear. But we must move before the steam dissipates.»
Elias stood up, wiping the condensation from his mask. He turned to walk back to the ladder, but stopped dead in his tracks.
On the wall of the control booth, freshly scratched into the thick layer of frost and rust that he hadn’t cleaned, was a single, hand-drawn symbol. It was a crude drawing of a bird rising from a gear — the exact same symbol he had seen on the blast doors of the Leviathan.
But this wasn’t fifty years old. The frost around the edges of the scratches hadn’t even had time to reform.
Someone had been standing on this platform, watching him, just minutes before he arrived.
Глава 7
CHAPTER 7: THE COAL SCOUT
The steam was already beginning to thin, condensing into heavy, warm drops that dripped from the ceiling like a slow, metallic rain.
Elias lowered himself from the catwalk, his heavy boots splashing into the warm puddles below. He kept his flashlight beam low, tracing the edge of the control booth’s base. There, clearly imprinted in the thick, wet soot of the floor plates, were tracks. They weren’t the chaotic, clawed gashes of the Ash Scavengers. These were the clean, patterned treading of reinforced survival boots.
Someone had stood right beneath the platform, watched him fight the creatures, and then slipped away into the shadows when the steam erupted.
«The tracks are fresh, Master Thorne,» Aurora’s voice hummed in his ear, her tone analytical yet cautious. «The stride length suggests a human height of approximately five feet, eight inches. The indentation depth indicates they are carrying a heavy pack. They went into the secondary dry exhaust line.»
«Why didn’t they help me?» Elias muttered, tightening his grip on his iron wrench as he stepped into the mouth of the dark, circular exhaust pipe.
«In the wasteland, survival is a zero-sum game,» Aurora replied softly. «Trust is a resource more expensive than coal or clean water.»
The exhaust pipe was wide and dry, lined with old ceramic tiles that insulated the space from the biting cold of the upper trench. Elias walked cautiously, his ears straining for any sound over the distant, muffled thudding of the geothermal machinery.
After a few hundred yards, the smooth pipe abruptly ended, opening into a small, square maintenance chamber. Elias stopped, instantly lowering his flashlight.
In the center of the chamber, built inside an old iron junction box, was a makeshift camp. A small, ingenious stove made from a hollowed-out engine cylinder was throwing off a faint, cherry-red glow. It burned not with the foul, sulfurous coal of the Behemoth, but with a strange, sweet-smelling dried moss that filled the room with a pleasant, earthy aroma.
A single sleeping mat made of patched industrial canvas lay near the stove. Scattered around it were tools that made Elias’s breath catch in his throat: old circuit boards neatly stripped for copper, a hand-cranked shortwave radio, and several empty tins of corporate rations bearing the old insignia of the Leviathan.
«They’re a scavenger,» Elias whispered, stepping into the light of the stove. He reached out to touch the metal of the stove; it was piping hot. They had left in a hurry.
«Look to the workbench, Elias,» Aurora said.
Elias turned his flashlight toward a rusted iron crate serving as a desk. Spread across it was a hand-drawn map on thick, greasy drafting paper. It didn’t look like the simplistic, rigid route maps used by the High Council of the Behemoth. This map was beautifully chaotic. It showed the entire northern sector of the continent, marked with red ink showing the moving paths of all the major Syndicate city-trains, their hunting grounds, and their blind spots.
And right in the center of the map, circled in thick black charcoal, was a jagged mountain range labeled: The Midnight Terminal.
«They’re looking for it too,» Elias said, his mind spinning.
«I’m not looking for it, mechanic,» a sharp, cold voice cut through the silence from the darkness behind him. «I’m trying to make sure no one else finds it.»
Elias spun around, his wrench raised defensively.
Standing in the shadows of the exit tunnel was a young woman. She wore a tight, patchwork flight suit made of dark leather and reinforced canvas, covered in carbon-dust smudges. Her face was half-hidden behind a sleek, high-tech respirator mask with two circular brass filters. In her hands, balanced with terrifying steadiness, she held a short-barreled pneumatic rifle. The pressure gauge on the side of the weapon was locked in the red zone.
«Drop the tool,» she said, her grey eyes locking onto Elias’s face through her protective goggles. «And take your hands off my map.»
Глава 8
CHAPTER 8: THE SCRAP TRADER
The pressure gauge on the girl’s pneumatic rifle hissed softly in the tense silence of the chamber. Elias stood perfectly still, his heavy iron wrench feeling entirely inadequate against a weapon compressed to three hundred atmospheres.
«Her rifle is primed, Master Thorne,» Aurora warned in his ear, her voice dropping to a hyper-receptive frequency. «The kinetic energy of that projectile will puncture your armor plate at this distance. Do not make sudden movements.»
«I’m not a Syndicate spy,» Elias said slowly, lowering his wrench just an inch to show he wasn’t looking for a fight. «I’m a mechanic from the Behemoth. I fell off the lower maintenance decks during the storm.»
The girl didn’t lower her rifle. Her grey eyes narrowed behind her protective goggles, scanning his grease-stained coat and the specific brass rivets on his tool belt. «A floor-monkey from the Behemoth doesn’t survive a three-hundred-foot drop into the Ash Sea. And they certainly don’t navigate the drainage canals without being eaten alive by the blind feeders. Try again.»
«I had help,» Elias said honestly. He reached back slowly, unbuckling the top flap of his canvas bag.
The girl instantly shifted her footing, her finger tightening on the pneumatic trigger. «Hands where I can see them!»
«Look,» Elias said, tilting the bag forward just enough.
The pale, sapphire light of Aurora’s cylinder spilled out into the dim room, casting long, sharp shadows across the concrete walls. The blue glow caught the copper wiring on the girl’s custom respirator mask, reflecting off her glass lenses.
The reaction was immediate. She didn’t lower the gun out of trust, but out of sheer shock. Her breath hitched inside her filters. «A blue core… An untethered autonomous drive. Where did you dig that up?»
«From the Leviathan wreck,» Elias replied, sensing the shift in the room’s gravity. «My grandfather was Arthur Thorne. He left it for me. She calls herself Aurora.»
At the sound of her name, the cylinder hummed, and Aurora’s soft, digital voice resonated through Elias’s earpiece, loud enough to echo slightly in the quiet chamber. «Greetings. I am currently operating on twelve percent power reserves. If you possess a compatible DC charging terminal, I can trade ancient structural schematics of the local sectors for five hundred watt-hours of electrical energy.»
The girl stared at the cylinder, then at Elias, her rifle slowly dipping toward the floor plates. She let out a long, dry laugh that turned into a cough from the stale air. She pulled down her respirator, letting it hang around her neck. Her face was young, sharp, and smeared with dark coal dust across the cheekbones.
«Arthur Thorne’s grandson,» she muttered, shaking her head. «No wonder the Syndicate pulled an entire tactical detachment off the main line. They aren’t looking for a runaway mechanic. They’re looking for her.»
She swung her rifle onto a leather strap over her shoulder and walked past Elias toward her makeshift desk, completely ignoring him now as she rolled up her drafting paper.
«I’m Lyra,» she said without looking back. «A scrap trader, a runner, and apparently, the biggest idiot in Sector Five for not leaving this trench twenty minutes ago. Pack your things, mechanic. If you brought that core in here, it means their long-range arrays already have a lock on this grid.»
From the upper shaft of the exhaust pipe, a low, mechanical metallic whine began to echo. It wasn’t the sound of the wind. It was the high-frequency vibration of tracking rotors.
Глава 9
CHAPTER 9: THE THERMAL TRAP
The high-frequency whine of the tracking rotors was vibrating through the ceramic tiles of the exhaust line. It was a sound Elias knew all too well from his years on the lower decks of the Behemoth — the cold, digital hum of Syndicate Hunter-Seekers.
«They’re inside the secondary pipe,» Lyra whispered, her face pale under the smudges of coal dust. She snatched her rolled-up map from the desk and shoved it into her flight suit. «We have less than forty seconds before they turn the corner.»
«If we run down the main tunnel, they’ll cut us down from behind,» Elias said, his eyes scanning her makeshift camp with mechanical precision. His gaze locked onto the small, cherry-red stove made from the hollowed-out engine cylinder. «Lira, what kind of pressure valve is on that moss stove?»
She blinked, confused by the sudden technical question. «It’s a standard liquid-propane injector line adapted for pressurized bio-moss. Why?»
«Aurora,» Elias dropped to his knees beside the glowing stove, his heavy iron wrench already in his hand. «Can you hook into the automated fuel regulation system of this unit if I bridge the copper contacts?»
«Affirmative, Master Thorne,» Aurora’s voice hummed through his headset. «If you remove the safety limiter on the pressure regulator, I can cause a controlled thermal runaway. However, the resulting blast radius will be approximately fifteen meters.»
«That’s the whole room,» Lyra gasped, instantly realizing his plan. She raised her pneumatic rifle, aiming it toward the dark mouth of the entrance pipe. «You’re going to blow us up!»
«Not if we’re behind the reinforced bulkhead,» Elias pointed to a heavy, rusted iron pressure door at the back of the chamber. He jammed the teeth of his wrench into the stove’s brass safety valve, twisting it with all his strength. The metal groaned, and a sharp, hissing sound filled the air as the pressurized fuel line began to leak directly into the combustion chamber.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «Литрес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на Литрес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.