Runaway: Assignment Darklanding Read online

  Runaway

  DARKLANDING

  Episode 4

  By Scott Moon and Craig Martelle

  This book is copyright © 2018 by Scott Moon and Craig Martelle

  Darklanding Series is copyrighted ©2017 and ©2018 by Craig Martelle

  All rights reserved.

  ASIN:

  Cover art by Kevin McLaughlin

  Editing services provided by Mia Darien – miadarien.com

  Formatting by James Baldwin – jamesosiris.com

  Based on a concept by Diane Velasquez, Dorene Johnson, and Kat Lind who also provide developmental editing for the series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE: Trouble

  CHAPTER TWO: Spirit Quest - Part One

  CHAPTER THREE: Bad Decisions

  CHAPTER FOUR: Devlin’s World

  CHAPTER FIVE: Battle of the Frys

  CHAPTER SIX: SagCon Credits

  CHAPTER SEVEN: White Skull Fury

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Unwilling Bodyguards

  CHAPTER NINE: Spirit Quest - Part Two

  CHAPTER TEN: Escape

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Partners

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Spirit Quest - Part Three

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Grandfather Cornelius

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Three Airships

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Death in Raven's Haven

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Rescue Gone Wrong

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Let's Work Together

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Spirit Quest - Part Four

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Good-byes

  CHAPTER ONE: Trouble

  Sheriff Thaddeus Fry stood near the armored bus he had contracted to move Stacy “White Skull” Rings to the spaceport. The Marines, for reasons he didn’t understand, refused to hold the outlaw until the marshals could transport him off the planet. He studied the bus. An entrepreneurial Unglok had welded bars over the windows and added security passcodes to the doors.

  It wasn’t half-bad for a cobbled-together prison bus he only needed for one trip. The rather stout bill for the project had been sent to Shaunte Plastes through SagCon’s convoluted purchasing process.

  SagCon Special Investigator Michael “Sledge” Hammer stood beside Thad. “Mister Skull won’t be able to break out of this thing. It’s ugly as an Unglok bridesmaid, but stronger than a mining lift.”

  “Mister Skull, that’s funny. Not sure if that’s better or worse than his real name. Thanks for tagging along. They wouldn’t tell me what the Marshal’s name was, so I couldn’t do a background check,” Thad said.

  “The marshals started contracting this sort of thing to SagCon after the last statutorily mandated budget review.”

  “Really?”

  Sledge shrugged. “Not a bad gig. I’ve done it a few times.”

  “Do you know who’s coming this time? Should I be worried?”

  Sledge smiled like a cat after a canary feast. “Worried? Oh, I don’t know. Probably, but not for the reasons you think.”

  “You know this SagCon SI who is pulling transport duty for the marshals?”

  “Used to be my partner. She probably won’t want to leave once she figures out Ruby is here,” Sledge said. “She’ll stick White Skull in the Marine brig until she’s ready to leave Ungwilook.”

  Thaddeus shook his head. “Already tried. The company commander won’t even answer my calls. All I want is him out of my jail.”

  “Ha! You call it a jail? My old partner will handle everything. You’ll see,” Sledge said. “She has a way with Marines.”

  The SagCon ship landed an hour after dawn. The cool air was dry and colorful. The mountains beyond the mesa created a panoramic backdrop for the spaceport’s landing fields. Like most SI ships, this one was high-tech. It landed swiftly and shut off the engines before the dust settled.

  Sledge clapped his hands together and went up on his toes like a kid at a birthday party. “I can’t wait.”

  “Don’t get weird on me, big guy,” Thad said. “Is there something I should know?”

  “You’re going to hate me for not telling you,” Sledge laughed.

  Thaddeus watched the ramp drop. A few moments later, SagCon Special Investigator Penelope Fry-Grigman strode onto the tarmac. Thad took a step forward, reaching with one hand, then reversed direction and tripped over his own feet.

  “The look on your face!” Sledge said, slamming a broad palm on Thad’s back.

  Thad dropped his hand as though he’d forgotten it belonged to him, keeping his eyes focused on the starkly beautiful redhead in SI dress fatigues, and assessed the situation. His heart rate leveled off, then slowed a bit. “She may be my first ex-wife, but I think she’s more pissed at you than me.”

  He watched as the familiar ice and fire in her eyes missed him for once and decimated Sledge’s laughter.

  “Special Investigator Hammer, may I remind you of regulation Alpha Tango 0810? An agent of SagCon will not abandon his or her partner in the field!”

  “Uh, oh,” Sledge muttered as he backed away with both hands raised, palms out. “Listen, Penny, I had good reasons.”

  “Don’t Penny me, Sledge!” Her red hair had been slicked back and glued down, giving her ivory skin and full lips a harsh look. She cut her partner to pieces with her green-flecked hazel eyes.

  Thad wasn’t sure his ex-wife had even noticed him. If this continued, he might actually feel bad for the brute who had thought a surprise reunion would be funny.

  “Penny, I was going to come back, but I got a lead on the Ruby Miranda case,” Sledge said, retreating further and sidestepping to avoid her wrath.

  She grabbed the front of his jumpsuit and pulled herself up onto her toes to glare at him. “I told you she couldn’t be caught by one person. That’s a team assignment. Did you find another partner someplace?”

  She jerked her gaze toward Thad without warning. “Hello, Thaddeus.”

  “Um, hello, Penelope,” he replied.

  She turned her attention back to Sledge before Thad had finished speaking.

  “I had to take the worst assignment on the SI board, with transportation accommodations that would make a Priestess of Hedon blush. Have you ever shared a cabin with a pair of Yonji twins? Well, have you?”

  “No, Penny. Can’t say that I have,” Sledge muttered.

  “Of course you haven’t! I need a bath just thinking about it. Where are we staying?” she asked.

  “Well, the thing is…there aren’t a lot of long-term hostels in Darklanding. I moved into the establishment where the Sheriff of Darklanding has his temporary headquarters,” Sledge said.

  “Fine. Help me with my bags, and by help, I mean get them from the ship and carry them. You have a lot of shit work to do to make up for that stunt. I should have filed a formal complaint,” she said.

  Sledge leaned closer to Thaddeus. “A formal complaint always leads to dismissal. Your ex-wife is pretty mad this time. Have you ever seen her this mad?”

  Thad shook his head. “You have no idea.”

  “Can you be there when she figures out where we’re staying?” Sledge asked.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Thad said.

  “I better get her things from the ship.”

  Thaddeus ruminated on his fate as he followed the SagCon partners. She looked good and he looked scared, despite lumbering down the street with three times her mass. He held her considerable collection of battered luggage under
his arms without apparent effort. Thad recognized one rather long piece of Penny’s luggage as her infamous sniper rifle. Thinking about what she could do with it gave him chills.

  Darklanding is a strange place, Fry-man, he thought. He’d come here to escape his past, and here was his first wife as fired up and ready for a fight as ever. If she could find him, they all could.

  “I need a drink,” he muttered.

  Sledge hurried alongside Penny, nodding and pleading with her—maybe promising to do this or that or whatever. Thad wasn’t close enough to eavesdrop. The sight of her stirred something in him, but he was wary and tired. There was more than one reason things hadn’t worked out in the Fry-Grigman household.

  He focused on the crowds of miners heading to the transport trollies—the same conveyances he had jumped on to help with the mining collapse his first or second day here. He wondered how Foreman P. C. Dickles and his crew were doing now that most of the debris from the recent train derailment had been gathered and stacked outside Raven’s Haven for re-shipment.

  Darklanding never slept, not really. SagCon ran the place for a profit. The people working here struggled to get ahead, be they human or Unglok.

  Thad stopped and looked toward the Unglok sector, contemplating calling his partner on the radio, but hesitated. He’d learned from Sledge, of all people, the importance of the spirit quest to an Unglok like Mast Jotham.

  “Are you coming, Thaddeus?” Penny said as she turned toward him and stood with her hands on her hips.

  Thad pulled his hat down snug and took his time.

  “Don’t annoy me,” she said.

  “But it’s what I do best.”

  She moved her head sideways without moving her neck, expressing attitude he both loved and hated. Their eyes met. She turned her back on him and walked toward the Mother Lode.

  * * *

  Stacy Rings looked at the orange jumpsuit he’d been wearing for a week, then at his greasy hands. The floor of the customized bus was slick with grime that could never be completely washed away. Thousands of boots had tracked in years of the filthy goo from the mines of Ungwilook. He rubbed it into his hands, then studied the front of his prison jumpsuit.

  He slowed his breathing and squinted, concentrating like an artist creating a masterpiece. Then, all at once, he sketched a skull on his chest. Standing and turning in a circle to display his work to the other prisoners, he laughed and threw back his head.

  “You can’t keep White Skull down!”

  A big Unglok, tall and unusually thick, glared up at him from his bench seat. “You mud skull. Muchly mud skull. Ha. Ha. Ha. Stacy is human girl name, me think.”

  White Skull punched the Unglok before the eight-foot-tall bonerack could stand. His fist slammed into the almost-human face, violently rocking the native’s head backward.

  The Unglok shook all over, roaring as he tried to stand despite being bolted to the floor in four places—both ankles and both wrists had been manacled with stainless steel.

  The Unglok cursed in his own language, yanking on the restraints with all his strength.

  White Skull stepped back. “Well, isn’t that a riot. You’re bolted down like an angry rhinoceros and I’m standing here looking out the window like an inconvenienced tourist. I ought to take you with me when I escape.”

  “Human filth!” snorted the Unglok. “You can’t escape. My people must help. You no plan have.”

  White Skull moved closer to the cage door at the front of the bus, keeping an eye on the raging Unglok. “You’re pretty thick for a Glok. Is one of your parents human?”

  The Unglok prisoner thrashed against his restraints hard enough to rock the bus.

  On the other side of the cage door, an Unglok driver hammered one fist against the metal grating and yelled in his language.

  White Skull didn’t know a word of it, but he understood. Quiet down, asshole. I’m trying to read my horoscope up here! Or something like that. He giggled and clapped his hands as the conversation between the Ungloks became heated.

  CHAPTER TWO: Spirit Quest - Part One

  Darkness surrounded Mast Jotham as he rested on the first landing he had found in nearly an hour. Just large enough to lie across, the platform had never seen a candle or incense. “I have come farther than anyone else. Which is disappointing, because this place looks just like the last three, except each of those possessed traces of burnt offerings and a ceremonial blanket.”

  He looked up and saw blackness. Down was more of the same. His entire universe consisted of the landing and the ladder extending in two directions—up and down. “For the record, talking to one’s self does not help muchly.”

  Sleep came as he grumbled about his feet hanging off the edge and the stagnant air making his head cold. This was no different than the mines. When he was deep enough, the air would be poison. Just like the A19 gas was poison aboveground to Ungloks.

  Mast thought about Sheriff Fry. Do not be angry with me, friend. Lingviat is right. I need this spirit quest. And a blanket. Why is it suddenly so cold?

  He curled into a ball and dreamed, which was a monumental event. Ungloks only had nine dreams in their entire lives. Each held a riddle and could mean everything or nothing to the path of an Unglok’s life.

  Mast pushed his back to the wall of the vertical shaft and shuddered so hard he thought he would fall from the narrow ledge where he had slept fitfully. He wept and tried to speak, but the words that came from his mouth were a confusion of Unglok and human languages. The dream had been beautiful, but not of Ungwilook.

  “Am I to be cursed? Will I be banished from my home world? Why do I see this wet world full of green things and strange animals?”

  No answers came.

  “I would like not to be so greatly cold,” he said.

  Then come down to see us.

  Mast Jotham, Deputy Sheriff of Darklanding, went as still as a hunted animal—no more trembling or crying or talking to himself. He wondered if the thought was his own. “Did I just hear the spirit of the planet?”

  He looked upward. “Lingviat, why did you send me on this quest?”

  The Unglok priest neither heard nor answered.

  “I really thought the legends were stories for toddlers and crazy people too afraid to have their own spirit quest,” he said, muttering the words since he didn’t have an audience. “Voices from the deep. Night terrors. Can there really be a sentient power in the deepest crust of the planet?”

  Without knowing where his courage came from, he started to climb. Best not to think too much. Just complete the quest and climb to the surface. Lingviat would glare at him in disapproval no matter what he reported. The old priest didn’t know what was down here. No one had ever come this far. Only Mast Jotham was muchly stupidly willing to keep going.

  The climb was easy despite several sleep cycles without food. His water was gone now as well, and that would be a problem. He’d already gone deeper than was safe. There should have been poisonous gases to drive him back to the surface, but there weren’t. Maybe on the next level. Maybe he would fall to his death. Maybe he would go crazy and start talking to himself.

  Come down to see us? Mast thought. He tried the words over and over in his head, analyzing the way they sounded and trying to believe that the first phrase had been his own—a random thought born of boredom. After a time, he abandoned the exercise because it was too disturbing. If the initial plea had been his own mind, then it came from a place far deeper than his consciousness could detect.

  He descended steadily into the darkness, pleased with the strength of his grip. His muscles ached and his back felt tweaked in several places. The strange exercises that Thaddeus Fry taught him were having a positive effect. Many times, he had wanted to tell the sheriff that lifting things and running around in circles for no reason was not something that Ungloks did. Children, maybe, but adults moved with more purpose.

  He occupied his mind with thoughts of the sheriff and his strange pet in the exer
cise yard. Whatever the creature was, it was not something from Ungwilook. He wondered how it came to be on this planet and why it decided to tag along behind the sheriff.

  Before he knew it, Mast was at the next ledge. This one was so small that he did not think he would be able to sleep upon it or rest for long. He waited for the voice and heard nothing. Now he felt foolish. There was no reason to descend this deeply into the spirit quest shaft. He did not even have a candle or other item to leave on this ledge to prove that someone had been here. Perhaps that was what had happened to other questers.

  The more he thought about it, the more it made sense that many people had been here and just never said anything.

  “Okay, listen to me, mysterious voice in my head,” Mast said. “I need a very good reason to continue muchly downward.”

  He waited. “I’m waiting.”

  The silence of the darkness was absolute. This vertical shaft was extremely wide. For all he knew, there could be a small lake at the bottom. Maybe, he thought, other questers had descended on the opposite wall of this huge vertical hole and found an entire buffet of food and drinks and entertainment left by more conscientious questers in the past. It was a silly thought, but he cherished it for longer than was reasonable.

  “Still waiting.”

  The time before Ungloks understood numbers…

  Mast wrinkled his brow in concentration. “That is a senseless and incomplete thought. Surely not one of mine.”

  He leaned against the wall and tried to rest. There was a limit to his endurance and patience, even after all the unnecessary training the sheriff had put him through.

  Our journey has ended.

  Mast looked around for the speaker, even though he knew it was his imagination or some crazy genetic memory bubbling to the surface of his brain. Maybe he had found the poison gas layer after all and was slowly dying. “Listen, you crazy, random firing of my brain synapses, I am tired of this climbing and shivering and being hungry. If your journey has ended, there is no reason for mine to continue. I will go back up now. Thank you for your muchly stupid riddles.”