Chapter Two
They had been clanking across the rolling sands for half an hour, the familiar motion lulling Aimee into the usual trance, when Kendra came back into the cockpit, settling back into the co-pilot’s seat with a sigh. She had been checking on the children, making sure they were settled, fed and watered (having been assured that the water was drinkable and trying very hard not to think about it being recycled).
“So how did you end up all the way out here?” said Kendra, trying to start a conversation that might take her mind off both the approaching storm and her impending unemployment. “Seems like a long way from Ireland.”
“Well,” said Aimee, looking wistfully out of the window, absently noting that the sandstorm was getting closer. “I’m afraid to say that I’ve never set foot on any planet but this one.” She laughed at the confused frown on Kendra’s face. “My great-grandda decided, in his infinite wisdom, to leave the emerald green fields of Ireland behind to find his fortune in the stars. The old bastard had the whole universe to choose from and decided on this sand-covered ball of shite - he got caught up in that first land rush after they found cylithium here. You can probably guess from the fact that his descendant is tooling around the desert in a battered old mech that his business acumen didn’t match his ambition. And then what little he’d made we lost in the war. My grandma, displaying similar levels of judgement to her da, picked the wrong side. Coming out the other end of the war, the old duffer had just enough left to buy a garage in the Mesa and put a small deposit down on this thing, the rest of which I’m still paying off, by the way. She passed it on to my da, my da passed it on to me and here we are. That’s my family’s legacy; a battered old mech, a mountain of debt and a confused yet fierce pride in our ancestry.”
“Sounds like your family’s got an interesting history,” said Kendra.
“Ha! One way of putting it,” said Aimee. “Whoever came up with the phrase, ‘luck of the Irish’ had clearly never met any of my folks. We’re like the opposite of that. We keep going though, too daft to know when to quit! I’ll make it back to Ireland one day, that’s my distant dream.” She looked across at the weary teacher. “So what possessed you to go in the opposite direction and come to this paradise in the stars? Are you perhaps the reincarnation of my old great-granddad, following in his tragically misguided footsteps?”
There was no reply, and when Aimee looked round she could see Kendra resting her forehead on the console. “I don’t want to say,” said Kendra.
Aimee grinned knowingly. “Ah. Did you cross the depths of space for true love?”
Kendra still hadn’t raised her head from the console. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said.
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said Aimee.
“The course on this occasion ran over a cliff and into a bottomless abyss, never to be seen again. We met at university, made promises of undying love. Ha!”
Aimee opened up her leg once more, pulled out the flask and tapped Kendra on the shoulder with it. “Here.” She held out the flask until Kendra took it. “So you’ll be heading back to Earth soon then?”
Kendra took a swig of the vicious whisky, barely gasping at all this time; she wasn’t sure if she was getting accustomed to it or if it had just numbed the nerves in her throat. “Nope. I’m on a three year contract at the school, though that may not be much of a problem after this. And I don’t think I could face the ‘I told you so’s if I went back home this early anyway.” She took another drink and handed the flask back. “You’re going to run out of this soon.”
“No chance, I’ve got plenty. So your parents didn’t approve of your life choices?”
“Ha! No. They didn’t want me to become a teacher, didn’t want me to go to university in Ireland and they definitely didn’t want me to come here,” said Kendra, putting her head back down on the console. “There were dire warnings that I was wasting my life, that joining my dad’s accountancy firm in Shropshire was a better career move and that I would end up alone and destitute. Ha.” She held out her hand; a flask appeared in it as if by magic. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure. Did you say you were in Ireland? What was it like? Was it green and lovely?” There was an eagerness to Aimee’s voice now.
“Uh, it was nice, very olde worlde. It wasn’t that green because we were in Dublin. It had lots of cobbled streets, old pubs, English stag parties getting drunk on stout and wearing foolish hats; very traditional. There was plenty of greenery when you got out of the city though.”
Aimee had leaned back in her chair and was staring up at the ceiling with a faraway look in her eyes. “Sounds grand,” she said, “just like me da used to describe it.”
“Has your father visited earth?”
“Ha, no. I think he just looked at the same pictures that I did but he was a fine one for spinning a tale; you’d think he’d spent his days wandering the streets of Dublin.” Aimee took the flask back from Kendra and raised it in a toast. “To my wondrous bullshit merchant of a da and the emerald green fields of old Ireland.” She took a long gulp, then let out a long, satisfied sigh. “Best change the subject or I’ll get all maudlin and start singing Danny Boy at you. See the storm?” Aimee pointed out of the window as Kendra reluctantly lifted her head up. The top of storm had crested the horizon now, a towering wall of sand that dwarfed the dunes that ordinarily seemed so imposing. “It’s still about ten miles away.”
“Oh my…I’ve watched them from the mesa. It was even quite good fun when one hit the town, hunkering down in my flat with a pizza and a terrible movie while the wind swirls about outside. Feels a lot different when you’re out in front of it.” She looked at Aimee with wide eyes. “Are we going to get to this shelter in time?”
“More or less,” said Aimee with a laugh; her own eyes were gleaming with excitement. “We’ll probably get clipped by the leading edge but we’ll make it. You should probably warn your sprogs though, it can get pretty loud.”
The winds had started to whip around the mech when the gaping entrance to the shelter, a wide cave in the base of a large, sloped hill, came into view, dimly visible through the clouds of sand. The children, who had been chatting and playing games, fell silent at the sounds of the wind roaring around the mech’s leg ports and the noise of the sand scratching and skittering over its metal skin.
“That’s why you’ll not be seeing any mechs with fancy paint jobs,” said Aimee, piloting the mech towards the sanctuary of the cave. “They get stripped down to the bare metal in minutes.”
“Will there be other salvagers there?” asked Kendra.
“Sure there will, but there a decent bunch for the most part,” said Aimee, checking the scanner to make sure she wasn’t about to run into another mech obscured by the sandstorm. “Never seen any of them eat anyone, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“No no, I didn’t mean…” said Kendra with a shake of her head. “I just meant, will they be okay with the kids?”
Aimee thought about her fellow salvagers, a bunch of idiosyncratic loners who spent their time travelling across the desert or in dark caves carving up old, wrecked mechs left over from the war. “I can’t promise the little darlings won’t pick up a rude word or two - the conversations tend to be a little robust, shall we say - but they’ll be all right.” A thought occurred to her. “Saying that, keep an eye on them. There’re one or two you’re better off steering clear of, not because they’re dangerous, they’re just a bit…odd; too much time trudging across an endless desert on your own can do that to a person. Oh, and if there’s a guy named Markov there then watch your back as well.”
Kendra looked worried now, thick frown lines on her forehead. “Why? Is he dangerous?”
Aimee laughed. “He likes to think he is, though to be honest he’s really just a tragic arsehole. He’s no fan of mine, that’s for sure.” She smiled, thinking back over the sweet, sweet memories.
“Why not?”
“He thought it’d be funny to pick on the poor, weak girl in the wheelchair; I suspect it’s just because he’s so chronically insecure. Anyway, I shot him in the balls with an electro-pulse.” She sighed happily. “Good times. Look, he’s no threat to anyone, he’ll just sneer a lot and be a supercilious bell end.”
“You shot him?” Kendra’s mouth and eyes were three perfect circles of horror.
They were nearing the entrance now; just in time, too, the wind was getting fierce outside. Aimee could feel the mech’s gyros working to compensate against the powerful gusts. She adjusted their course slightly. “Only a little bit, it was on a very low power setting so it didn’t really do any damage. I’m sure everything was working properly again after a day or two.”
“That’s awful!”
“It’s a tough world out here, you got to fight your own corner. And I did mention that he was an arsehole.” She reached across and patted Kendra’s knee. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” She laughed loudly.
The mech entered the Stygian gloom of the cave. The noise of the wind and sand abruptly cut off, leaving only the whirring of the mech’s motors and the clanking of its feet on the cave’s floor. Ahead of them was a pool of light cast by numerous headlights with a fire at its centre. Beyond the light, the dimly seen bodies of various other mechs loomed in the darkness.
Aimee switched on her own lights, illuminating a rocky floor, smooth but for the scratches and scrapes left behind by the passage of innumerable robotic legs. The lights didn’t do anything to illuminate the vault of the cave that arched above them.
“This is huge!” said Kendra. She suddenly turned to Aimee with wide eyes. “Was there an animal that made this?”
Aimee shook her head. “Nope. All man made. Believe it or not, we’re actually inside a mech. The hill above us? It’s the chest cavity of a Titan that got taken down during the war; took a Scimitar missile right to the nape of the neck that damn near took its head off.”
Leaving Kendra and the children to peer in amazement at the ceiling lost in the darkness and steered them towards the back of the massed rank of mechs, throttling back as she arrived to bring her own mech to a gentle, clanking stop. She had been the same the first time her da had brought her in here on their first trip out back when she was only seven. Even though she’d been brought up on tales of the Titans and Leviathans that had battled out in the sands, the scale of it had still left her speechless. It was said that the ground had shaken for hundreds of miles around at the height of the fighting, with the pounding of the mechs’ feet and the explosions from the missiles and bombs detonating. It had been destruction on an unprecedented scale that had left behind a landscape of broken machinery for the scavengers to pick over.
“We call it The Belly, because when you have something as epic and awe-inspiring as this you’ve always got to have some eejit who gives it a dumb name,” said Aimee, lowering the mech on to the ground with a gentle thump. She pulled herself out of the pilot’s seat and dropped down into her wheelchair. “Now let’s go and say hello, see if anyone has any better food than those protein bars.”