>> A Lost Tyrant Falls

Monoliths invert, and we fall under power. Blazing back into visibility as the wind rams itself against my hull. Slamming itself through the hollow hearts of my ring-engines as I angle all my surfaces for maximum speed. Towers and Pirate frigates launching themselves at me, hard and fast. The whole ship humming and juddering. Shivering and bucking under my control. It's times like these, you really notice all the little flaws. The drift of the nose. The rattle of loose wires and armour. And those weird screaming noises from the rear cabin.

I become one with it all. The speed. The roar. The blur of cameras vibrating as we burn hard for the ground.

Ten. Nine. Eight-

Too close!

My bi-directional engines flatten off, like wings, and I revert directional thrust. Pulling back, as hard as I dare, to swoop us up - and up, and up - over the vast black of The City. Rotted towers cleaving past my belly, like the spikes of a swinging mace. I tilt engines to the side, and we swing around the fat bones of a slum-tower. A billion mutated shacks piled up in a hideous heap. Strung with sparking cables. Haunted by viciously feral gangs.......

And that would have been me, if not for Joan….

I shake off the memory, and fly.

Because this is the absolute opposite of The Falling Nightmares. A dream where I’m untouchable, transcendent, and alone - high above it all. Following the whispers of an almost instinct, leading me…. home? Or to something else?

To adventure? To the surface? Or some other, better, world?

I don’t know….

Not even the way it leads......

I finally slow as we carve around the flickering belly of a neon dancing girl - fifty stories tall. Smiling at nothing, forever. Her purpose forgotten. Her dreams drowned by rain. Pirate trawlers flickering and shimmering, above, as they ‘decloak’ on the edges of ‘friendly’ Karrak airspace. Peeling crude stealth-holos and projections off mottled skins, painted in camouflage grey.

Hauling their battered plunder behind them.... or just their battered egos.

We slide back into the swarm of traffic, as if we never left. Passing dozens of faction-held towers, beaming up the symbols of Pirate Lords. Commerce platforms, massive shipyards, walkways, and public areas. Massive labs built into armoured domes, welded to the sides of monster-infested lairs. And even a couple of private Aristo-owned mansions, wreathed in light and false-reality.

And the heaviest mek-suit weaponry you've ever seen.

I'm talking fifty-foot robots that hang above their plastic grass; weighing guns the size of tank-canons in their cold metal arms. And spreading burning, white-hot, ionic wings in the path of any fool who gets close. Or hacking them with plasma-ion swords big enough to cleave an entire ship in half. One turns its

We give them a wide birth. Rocketing into the deep network of flying roads, skyBridges, and outcrops. All cluttered, tight and thick, with sparking webs of cable. With ganger ambushes, shimmering laboratories, vulgar taverns, and well-armed coffee shops. With street raves, brawls, cyber-brothels, and things that are basically all three at once. Buildings built on buildings. Buildings within buildings. All of it surrounded by a rising sea of lesser sights. By Slum Towers, and small wars. By combat drones escorting packages, ships, and people. And built atop gargantuan megaStructures so vast and complex that even the topmost layers are barely explored. Endless expeditions hanging above the vast networks of trenches, tunnels, and gaping caverns leading down into that blackened abyss.....

The Undercity.

The Deep Beneath.

A place spoken of, only, in whispers. Where The Lost Things dwell, and shadows eat even the wary. Where abominations dream of things long forgotten, and deranged AIs tinker with things that should not be dreamed of. Cracking the very edges of reality.

All of it built atop even deeper places. Down, and down, to the twinkle of water far beneath.....

And the things that dwell beneath even The Undercity....

We stream along the edges, flickers of gunfire and torches flashing in its inky windows. And tentacles. And eyes. Skimming the boarder of Karrak, on roaring rings of light that burn the dark to shaking shadow. Flickering the world between the towers, and the monsters. Passing windows into nothingness, scattered with instants of light and chaos. A thousand tableaus, frozen by speed into striking images. Hunters cracking ancient doors, shooting at tentacles and things from your nightmares. Fighting through lost labs. Pillaging forgotten apartments, museums, and shops. Raiding banks, and factories, and labs, from long-ago times.

But we blur past it all. Seeking the Outer Reaches of Karrak, and its border with the QIZ.

A brilliant green ' house' icon designates our target. A lonely tower, deep in the monster-writhing dark, lit with glowing fronds that snatch at ships above.

Nearly there.

Sensors ping as we turn again - weaving through the bottomless canyon between the dead towers. Pirate speeder-craft stuck to the walls - high up. Jagged. Lean. Riddled with weapons. We pass them in a blur, and their jet-igniters roar. Blazing with white-hot fire as they flip from dark holes, and the bellies of broken skyWays. Detonation-engines cycling up, even as they fall. Catching with a stutter, a roar, as a billion explosions spin together into one.

And the shadows jump with neon-stripped speeders.

Damnit.

I pull a hard, wrong, turn and hit Stealth. Titling my Monoliths to ramp up our speed as rockets whine behind us. I turn, hard, again, and slip us into the dead maw of a rusted construction yard. Panic thumping in my engines as they blaze on past. Fire raging from their tails to streak the air crimson.

One second. Two. Three.

I slide us to the door. Then out, and away. Rising again, to coast across dead towers built upon dead towers. Like always, I spot our own - but it’s far outside the boarders of Karrak. An empty thing. A dark thing, barely seen in the downpour. Its windows plastered with tendrils, and eyes, and wretched things that squirm…. Just one doomed building out of many - buried to the hip by the huge, rotted, slump of the Old District. With slum-shanties crawling up its walls, like reaching fingers…. Scrapped together by clawing hands. By feral people, broken and rabid.

Mutated and Wrong. Lost to the world.

Their greatest works decaying and falling, even as they’re built.

Yet, to me, it stands proud. A hidden Tower of Babel, reaching for the untouchable heavens of The Aristo world above. Its shimmering towers carving the storm with dreary trails of rainbow fire as I edge out, over the island of decay. Monumental canyons opening the depths beneath us. Vast. Dark. Strung with cables, and dripping with oil from a thousand ruined factories. Traces of coloured light streaking back along its edge as the Pirate raiders circle. Lost, and unsure.

Shrouded in Stealth, I wait for them to vanish.....

And then we drop.

Down. Down. Down.

Between the bright bulk of Karrak, and the tar-black edges of the Greater Slums. The living world dropping away, as we plunge into the depths of The Beneath. Neon light darkening to a permanent twilight hue - cast in hues of faint, faint colour. Purple here, and red there. Blue, and green, and yellow….. So faint as to be almost imagined.

Down here, The City itself hungers like the void. With living mouths in rotten walls, and sprawling caverns filled so full of dark that it seems to spill from it. Pouring out humming cables, fat as cars, and whisper-thin threads that snatch flying monsters from the air.

Reeling them inside for a chat.

And still we plummet. Down, and down, and down. Past massive eyes, and eerie noises. Down, and down, and down into the rain-lashed depths. Until we hang above the endless, churning, flood-water. Rivers of dark, licking at the forgotten windows and walls of The First City.

Fed by the storms, and ever rising.

Rising. Rising. So slowly. So very slowly. So slowly, you’d hardly notice at all…..

Drowning us all, bit by bit.

We swoop along it, as the thunder cracks. Borne on wings of silence, as we trace that endless crevasse. Sensors ping cables, and I shift my metal body to avoid them. Monstrous, bow-legged, machines rising from the faintly purple darkness. Twisted. Strange. Savaged, and glowing, as they trudge through swirling waters. With distant neon and holos, from high above, dancing upon their rot-soaked backs. Gently. Almost unseen. Unfelt. Shimmering across the surface of the water, beneath them. The fallen things shuddering, flicking their half-dying lights. Ever-shifting with the rain.

Like things from a long-ago dream…..

Polybius pings a symbol on a wall, to my right, and I follow. Tracing it around to the crack-toothed mouth of a crude service-tunnel, spewing its mess of fat cables and lost trash. We only found our hidden way in with sensors, radar mapping, old maps, and Polybius. It’s just one of a million little holes in this City. Tucked away in the deeps, where nobody will ever find it.....

A perfect place to secret away our most prized possession: The Night Tyrant.

Our little ‘gift’ from our Evil Stepmother…..

Still in Stealth, I flicker my sensors out. Looking for other ships. Then, I slip us down into that cavernous mouth, and into its carnivorous throat. Silent, hidden, Monolith engine blasting dirt and water clean off the floor as we hover above that coal-black tongue. Building a rage of steam that slithers back through its teeth.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Swarm security mode.” I mutter, and a laser-sharp circle of red flashes into being around The Tyrant. Burning a virtual ring, into which no living thing may pass. And there I float, on unseen jets of shimmering blue. Guns primed. Sensors locked to the vast dark of the abyss beyond our sight. as massive cogs drip rust and silence from the black above.

Blessings from a dead machine-god.

My turrets shift. Scopes picking up a Neolithic drone skulking in the corner. Body of dark glass. Eyes of red fire. It stares at me for a moment, then slips away on clicking legs. Too dangerous to be salvaged. Too advanced to be anything new.

It’s a bad combo.

“Anything?” I hesitate.

“Detecting movement in bisecting tunnels." Polybius states in the cold void behind me. "The Vile Ones are active.”

“Active….. how?” I shiver.

“They are screaming.” It clicks in echo of the things that move outside. “Some have torn themselves open. They appear to be filled with-”

“Breeding cycle.” I state, with the kind of calm where you ain’t calm at all. “No threat. Yet. Lets slip by... before...." I swallow. "Before they start laughin'.....” I manifest in Cyberspace, and raise my arms. Engine control-rings begin to shift - venting upward to overcome buoyancy. The Night Tyrant lurching down onto unfolding wheels, as I drop my arms. Letting the Monoliths spin out in a flash. Cooling gently, in the dark, as the crew unbuckle behind me.

Still nothing.

I tap a virtual claw on the firing panel.

“Dammit. They’re playin’ with us. I can feel it.” I shift my turrets, with a snap, as a wisp of dirt drifts downward. Then slam them upward to target the distant ceiling. “Still nothin’….. Rrrrrrrrrrrr…”

"Perhaps there really is nothing?"

"Maybe." I disengage locks, and my Monolith engines shift outward. Shuddering to a stop. There’s a clunk. A click. And then they fold back into the storage position - first try, even. Now would be a great time to leap us, so I hit ‘drive mode’ as quick as I can - and our chunky wheels unlock. Virtual controls morphing into something out of a car.

We start to roll, and the throat swallows us.

The walls thick with cables, spilling up to the distant ceiling. Ruined, scavenged, machines trapped forever in the dark.

Like terrible fossils. Like memories of Before…..

I slide us in around the rusting, ticking, hulk of a fallen machine. Its purpose unknown, and unknowable. Its gargantuan head still flickering with light. With symbols no living creature understands.

On and on we drive. Following a map made of digital markers, into the endless maze of tunnels. Vanishing away from the world…..

Who even knows what this place was?

Factory? Supply system? Maintenance tunnels?

It’s all junk now - stripped out by hoodlums, and worse things…. Things that slither back into the evil depths on a million freaky little legs. Things from old-world labs, long buried…..

….but not dead.

We delve half a mile through solid, worming concrete - infested tunnels strung with glittering eyes. Dark things in the dark. Infested robots and people, trailing twisted tendrils as they walk….. Gene-freak nightmares with no names…. or faces…. but all the mouths and eyeballs you could ever want…..

We creep past them all.

Vanishing away, into the maze.

Eyes on the wall. Hunting out the big peeling ‘Zone One-Fifteen Power Conduit’ painted on the left. Take the next right after that - and stop when you see the red bucket in the skip.

And the rubbish-filled alcove behind it.

I lock wheels, and eject my mind from the machine. Collapsing in a disorientated mess of arms that aren’t engines and legs that aren’t rear thrusters. But I pull the cable out of my skull - slipping out the door.

Ground outside feels thick with grit and oil. With textured lines of paint to break the concrete. The world looming huge, outside the bird. So much bigger than it seemed inside The Tyrant. And.....

And I….

My legs wobble, and I lurch sideways. The ship's wall catching me as I almost fall. Lungs heaving. Zip and Kami land with a pat of feet, and a thump of boots. Badger bobbling along behind, one brown hand over mouth, as Demon and Tufty slip down and away. Prowling around the other side of the ship.

They’ll be our eyes.

I ease myself off the wall, and fumble my SMG out of the footwell. Barrel shivering.

But I steel it in careful silence, and we check around the entryway. Guns on every hole and hollow.

Moving fast. Not talking. Avoiding sounds that sound like life. Like people.

Nothing here. Not much to see.

Plain hallway, sized for massive robots. Rails built into the floors, and ceiling. Tiny vents and pipes, leaking strange smells. A hunched wreck of some two-legged thing, its cockpit wrenched open and empty. Stripped to the core.

Nothing.....

I nod, and we kick the brakes off a massive wheelie bin - rolling it slowly, quietly, gently, outta of the way. The tunnels echoing with every tiny clunk and clatter of its solid plastic wheels.

And then we do it again. And again.

Four bins in total.

I take a quick look round, then clamber back into The Night Tyrant. Rolling us on, in into what used to be a massive delivery area. Now little more than a trash-hoarder's junk-room. Walls of garbage packed so tight I can barely get half the ship through the door.

No way through.

Or so it appears.

My now-grimy crew slide into the stacks, and the scenery begins to dance around me. Mounds of ‘heavy’ junk rolling away on flat-bed dollies, trailing skirts of cardboard and plastic to hide their wheels. Walls of old buckets, filled of ‘rotted concrete’, rattle as if they weigh almost nothing. As if they’re all packed full of plastic, with rubble glued on top. I edge forward, and Demon works fast to shut the rolling ‘gates’ behind me. My tail vanishing behind stacks of paint-cans, all dried out inside. Bags of stinking trash. Rotted electronics, stripped totally bare. A busted ladder. And so many sheets and cloths covered in…. uh….. best not to speculate.

I breach the trash forest. Yellow lines demarcating the robotic Loading Bay beyond. A burnt-out truck hemming me on one side as I swing right across multiple spaces. It’s tight, but the walls of trash continue to shift as I swing my nose back toward the exit - reducing its profile.

Then I drop out the door, and go help ‘em do the exact opposite of clearing up. Shunting piles of finest, locally-sourced, crap back into position. In eight minutes flat, every wheel is back on every faintly chalked number. And yeah, if you look close you’ll find ‘em. But if you’re looking that close, you’re gonna walk smack into The Night Tyrant.

We slip back to the ship, to grab our stuff and I drop the ‘emergency’ charging grapple. Zip hauling out the line to fix its prongs around a massive cable thrumming in the dark.

Security on. Stealth on. Breaks on.

And… done.

I shut down the ship’s faint outer lights, and the whole morass of junk goes utterly dark. Utterly silent. One second. Two. And our cybernetic night-vision flips on. Eyes glowing in the deeps as we hop up onto the concrete loading platform. Tracing mucky footprints along it, then down a hall to the old ‘broken’ cargo-lifts. Demon wheedles the lattice-gate shut on the specific one we use, and I crank open the busted touchscreen panel. Click the little hidden switch, and snap it shut to use the mic. “Spook to Ops, we’re coming up.”

Clicking, static - then a robotic, staticy, voice. “Password Two.”

“Ah, shit. What was it….?” I tap my finger on the mic, like I’m thinking. “‘Bluebox?’”

“Nah.” Kami says, as my claw clicks the pattern.

“Yeah, close though.” Zip smirks, popping his knuckles in a repetitive way. “‘Electric Funbox’, mate. Like the band.”

“Nah.” I grin. Clattering a nail on the grill. “It’s ‘Badger smells weird’!”

“HEY!” The yell echoes back down the hallway, and I clap my hand over the little dweeb’s gob.

“Shhhhhh!” I hiss as everyone gets their guns up. Stabbing muzzles at the eerie, dust-haunted, hall. Distant clangs stilling, quite suddenly. Leaving us in sucking quiet. The kind where even the words in your head daren’t whisper….. “Shh……”

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Or, at least - nothing dumb enough to handily give away its exact intentions with a huge bloodthirsty roar…..

I lick my lips, and glance at Zip, who taps out a few nervous beats. He nods. I shrug. And….. “Oh, yeah, right. I ‘member it now.” I breathe. “Password…. Is…. silence.”

“Permission granted.” The creepy voice buzzes, at last, and I flip the switch back. Ignoring the tiny, muted, huff still happening behind me. A second later, the whole lift goes KLUNK and we start to rise.

Two seconds. Three.

The rail makes a terrifying creak. The rising floor slicing slow inches off our view of that horribly long, empty, hallway.

Four seconds. Five. And then….

The corridor shrinks to a crack, winking out.

We all breathe out.

Slowly, everyone relaxes - Zip and Demon leaning on the wall. Kami stretching. Tufty plopping on the floor, with a mewl.

Which just leaves-

“HUMM! I don’t smell! I’m not smelly!! Why’d you call me smelly??” Badger slaps and storms about - trying to fold his arm round that massive robot hand.

“Shhhh. C’mon, I was jokin’ kid….” I roll my eyes, and my shoulders. Letting the tiny stomping and huffing drift into the background as the lift shudders upward. Juttering past derelict floors. Broken lights. Dead robots, staring us down. Shifting shadows. And then….

….. CRAK…..

Metal shutters fold upward, and we drag open the folding gate. Creeping out into a huge basement, scored with jagged yellow-and-black lines.

Automated maintenance zone.

Or was.

A few wild drones, left over from when this was a real place, skitter tiredly into the mess of pipes up one wall. Trundling back into prehistoric tunnels, built before all human records…...

I make the sign for ‘extra quiet’, and Kami slips her boots off. The rest of us going up on tiptoes. Then we slip and duck beneath rattling pipes. Past Zipper’s scorched ‘testing arena’. Dodging past piles of ‘salvage’ he swears he ‘needs’. I shunt aside another trolley fully of crap, and we climb two flights of hidden stairs to the 'ground floor'. Entering a sudden world of soft carpets, strange stains, bullet-holes, and gold trim. It’s like an old-timey cinema - all gilt, and gleam, and hasty walls where the windows and doors ought to be.

Welcome to The Lobby at the heart of the tower.

Guns out, we slip off our kit bags and do a quick sweep. Eerie, silent, little shops trapped in time - pristine, and creepily untouched, behind their sealed metal barriers. We skulk past warring holos for Red Coke and Blue Coke, angrily at odds. Dusty windows hinting at new clothes, half a century out of style, still neatly pressed on their racks.

But spattered with blood.

Crisp, synthetic, fruits gleam - waxy and perfect - behind plate glass windows. Dust thick on their plastic film. Flickering flashes of light from the virtual arcades, across the hall, gleaming on the half-seen foil of ancient snacks. Still pristine, even after all these years…..

Exactly where they were left….

We ghost across ruby carpet, soft with dust. Stirring it up into wild eddies that dance in the torchlight - making us cough. An old screen lights the dark with dire warnings of death - streaking yellow bars across the carpet.

Evacuation in progress.

Genetic freaks.

Monsters.

Danger. Danger.

Get out…. Get out while you still can….

While you’re still alive….

We pad a quiet loop around the empty, silent, concourse - and back to the lobby. Checking shuttered stairways, and the three tiny hallways secreted between barricaded shops. Each ending in a heavy, plastic, security shutter blocking off the vast - empty - shopping mall that occupies the entire floor. Two of them are empty things. Silent. As if they simply shut the place down, forever ago.....

But one.... One is terrifying.

Bullet-torn walls to hem us in. Gore-flecked plaster.

Spent grenades.

There was a last stand here - corporate police and drones. A desperate fight. A horrible slaughter. I can tell, cause they left dismantled bits of themselves all over the place. Though there’s little left, now. Just a few chewed bones. Some ripped armour. Logos. Gnawed bits of plastic. And a huge welded-shut door, plastered with grim skulls and biohazard signs….

The GMOs have a quick listen, but it’s quiet tonight.

Maybe whatever’s in there is finally dead….?

Maybe……

Shivered and shaken, we retreat to the brass lifts - and gird ourselves. Because this is where things get really dicey.

Especially after…. that…. time.

The one we don’t talk about.

The one where….

But we keep our nerve. Rank up - me and Kami, upfront, with our guns out. Demon prowling our ankles. Tufty hunkered behind them, low and scared. Petted by Badger as I nudge Zip to press the button. Which he does - tap, tap, tap, like a code. Two long, then a bunch of short. A camera beeps back, and we all give it the bird. Suitably identified, the machine begins to work. And, nervously, shakily we wait as the red number ticks down.

Five. Four. Check your gun.

Three. Two. One…

Ding~ Ding~

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