Splintered Suns by Michael Cobley

Author:Michael Cobley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2018-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Ten minutes later he was creeping along a blue-green corridor hung with broad, dark leaves whose undersides gave off a warm golden glow. Having backtracked from the portal room window, he had gone searching for any passage that might lead him back to where the whole business with the alliance had started. It was a task he now felt equal to—the hefty snort from the blue flowers had swiftly cleared his head, heightened his senses and kicked up his metabolism. He was ready for action and impatient to find the others.

The corridor reached a crossroads—the passages ahead and to either side were all brighter and more open, glows pulsing out amber and rose tints. He was about to cross over to the opening directly ahead when he heard a hiss then a voice calling his name in a hoarse whisper. Turning, he saw Ancil’s head poking out from a mass of vegetation.

“Chief! Found you at last—quick, this way.”

Ancil beckoned, moving backwards into shadows as Pyke approached. Behind the screen of foliage was a door that led into a long, narrow space, like a tunnel through stacks of ancient containers overgrown and almost buried by layers of roots and tendrils. It was humid and dark, apart from a few clusters of glowing tubers, crusty looking lumps giving off yellow and blue radiance.

“Down here, Chief.”

Ancil was at the tunnel’s end, sitting with legs dangling inside an open hatch in the deck.

“What happened after I went off to waste my time yacking with Raven?” Pyke asked as he followed Ancil down into a cramped maintenance conduit lit by small recessed lamps.

“Even now I’m not sure,” Ancil said. “We heard a sound like the angriest bees ever, then those root-suits opened up and let us go—they were so itchy! I wanted to scratch just about everywhere, then Dervla and Kref showed up with the weird weavey, twiggy woman who said we had to move out of the area due to a sneak scent attack, I think is what she said … so we were hurrying off and Derv was explaining that you’d gone to negotiate with that psycho Raven, when we heard something detonate …”

“The first bomb,” said Pyke. “She must have used some of their charges to blow a hole in the cabin wall or deck so that they were out and away when the second one went off—but how did they know where to place those charges?”

The maintenance conduit sloped down and turned to the right. Ancil pointed out a couple of jutting, severed pipes as he sidled past them.

“Yeah, so the first bomb explodes, me and Kref look at each other then we turned and started running back to where we saw you walking, before, then round a coupla corners, dodged a squadron of those big insects zooming past us. There was an unholy racket of buzzing and snarling going on somewhere in that big hall when we got there, although there was too much foliage and bushes to see. And

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