lining raining across her. The trappers fired their weapon arms wildly up into the darkness, the whirling circles of light cast by their lanterns trying to pick out the creature assaulting them. Only the blinking red orbs – its eyes? – betrayed the fleeting presence of the attacker, rapidly skimming over their heads as though an enraged mosquito was harrying them. Except that this mosquito carried a sting capable of piercing the armour of a RAM suit.
One of the trappers in front of Hannah turned, and she caught sight of the creature in her beams – it was clinging to the back of the trapper’s suit with two tiny bony legs and plunging its other two limbs – long piston-like lances – into the suit’s battery pack as spouts of green acid gushed out. Attached to two circular wings, the creature’s body could almost have passed for human were it not for its transparent skin revealing pumping, pulsing organs within.
Hannah’s lantern beams were only on the monster fleetingly – it leapt off the disabled trapper, leaving the man’s paralysed suit sparking electric energy from a damaged spine plate. The thing’s eyes were twin telescopic tubes mounted on its skull, irising open and shut to blink out an evil red semaphore at her. Hannah ducked her suit as the humming of the monster’s wings bounced off the tunnel walls. The creature could be circling around and heading straight for the blind spot on her suit’s back right now.
Hannah’s brain desperately churned; there was something about the way the creature had shied away from the lantern beams, its telescope eyes casting diffuse red light. The sort that enabled it to hunt inside the dark tunnels?
Hannah tugged the handle down by her knee inside the pilot frame, the handle that would activate her – ‘Leg flares!’ she yelled. ‘Light up the tunnel!’
Fizzing out of the tube of her suit, a flare ricocheted off the roof well before its parachute could deploy and went spinning across the tunnel like an angry firework, painting the shadows with its sodium glare. Then, all around Hannah came the sound of flares firing, and every shadow in the darkness was instantly banished, the sudden brightness making her eyes water with its ferocity; her eyes that were born to see daylight. For the murderous Angel of Airdia it must have been a different sort of pain altogether, the creature lashing around between the vaults above their heads, blindly trying to find a way out. But not before the maddened trappers raised their magnetic catapults and scored a dozen direct strikes on the thing, the creature’s massive, disk-like wings torn to shreds, sending it dropping, mewling, in front of them. Lurching forward, the nearest RAM suit connected its metal foot with the creature’s head – the crack from the amplified strength of the trapper’s strike carrying all the way through the armoured crystal of Hannah’s skull dome.
The creature was finished now for sure, laying sprawled on the tunnel floor, energy from its long, lance-like arms sparking across the space while one of their flares spun madly around inches from it, illuminating the organs visible deep inside its transparent chest.
‘Nothing like this has ever been recorded attacking the battlements,’ said Tobias Raffold, gingerly pushing at one of the monster’s limp lance arms. ‘Not that I’ve bleeding heard of, at any rate.’
‘It was waiting in ambush,’ said Nandi, looking with fascination at the mangled beast, ‘as if it knew we were coming.’
‘That wicked eye on the slopes behind us, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘It was that eye that ratted us out for sure. They’re an evil pair, watchman and sentry, waiting for innocent travellers to enter their lair before slaughtering them and divvying up the meat.’
Hannah watched Nandi looking more closely at the thing. There were cables hanging out of one of the broken tubes the creature had been using for its eyes.
‘It’s a metal-flesher, an animal-machine hybrid,’ observed Nandi.
‘Made for war,’ whispered the commodore. ‘Aye, and sure I’ve seen many of the same dark arts practised down Cassarabia-way by their womb mages. But this is an ancient thing, Hannah Conquest, as foul and old as that beastly eyeball up on the mountain slopes. You wanted to know what happened to William of Flamewall and his lover’s terrible god-creating design, I say it ended here, in the clear belly of that tube-eyed horror.’
‘No,’ insisted Hannah, firmly. ‘Bel Bessant travelled past this point centuries ago and she, at least, lived to return to