Daniel Coldstar #1 Read online

  Trabasaurs! The surge of recognition turned Daniel’s heartbeat into a drum. Just like the Passava, he recognized these too. Genetically engineered to resemble ancient dinosaurs, trabasaurs were the workhorses that required very little food and had allowed humans to colonize the galaxy. . . .

  What the heck was a dinosaur?

  So many gaps in his memory. This was going to be frustrating.

  Descending to ground level, the GoLoader lurched to a stop before throwing open its gates. Daniel stepped out into a sea of a thousand boys from a hundred worlds making their way toward the Overseer checkpoints.

  Swept along with everyone else, Daniel picked his way around the remnants of a statue, now a jigsaw puzzle in stone. It had more arms and legs than any person, with an utterly alien face.

  “Who were they?” Daniel wondered.

  “How should I know?” said Blink, hurrying over to snag a place in line close to one of the hot-steam vents. “I don’t even know who I am.”

  “What do you think happened to them?”

  “I don’t care,” Blink replied, sounding annoyed. “You used to feel the same way.”

  “I did?” That didn’t seem right. Sure, he had a tough time remembering his life before yesterday, but he still knew who he was deep down inside. His gut was very clear; he wanted answers. “What are they having us dig for, anyway?”

  Blink couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You really don’t remember a thing, do you? Sheesh, you’re a lot of work.”

  Daniel shrugged. “Help me out.”

  “This is a relic mine,” Nails chimed in. “Whatever this civilization once had, the Overseers want it—”

  “Oh, remember that thing!” Choky blurted with a wheezing laugh. “What was that thing?”

  Blink took another Passava root out and started chewing on it. “I don’t know, some giant freaking robot. Took us days to chisel it out. What was it, like a million years old?”

  Nails nodded and chimed in. “It still had power.”

  “As soon as it was free,” Blink added, “it grabbed the guards, threw ’em down the chute, and tore off into next week.”

  “Did they ever catch it?”

  Blink shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope not. I’d like to think something made it out of here. It’s not like anyone’s ever coming to get us . . .”

  They were near the front of the line now. Grimy, worn-out tool belts hung on hooks and the grubs each grabbed one. Daniel followed what everyone else did.

  “Keep it fastened tight,” said Choky. “It’ll keep you alive if things go bad.”

  Daniel checked out the pouches, but everyone was watching him so closely, he didn’t even have to ask. The other grubs knew how confused he was.

  “That’s your water skin,” Nails explained. “Don’t forget to fill it up. Sometimes they forget to let us drink.”

  “What about this?” Daniel asked, pulling out a small, notched, cylindrical device.

  Blink was right behind him. He grabbed it and stuffed it back into the pouch. “It’s your Regulator. If you get in trouble, press it into your socket to activate—”

  Socket? What the heck was his socket? What was Blink talking about? “What happens when I activate it?”

  Blink nodded in the direction of the waiting Overseers. “They give us your coordinates and send us out to retrieve you. So don’t lose it.”

  One of the other grubs tapped Daniel on the shoulder. No more talk—he was at the front of the line now and Overseers weren’t known for their patience.

  Daniel’s heart did its best to hammer its way out of his chest. One more good thump and it would probably succeed.

  He hung his head and forced himself to walk over to the checkpoint, trying not to pay attention to the heat radiating from the blast-pike in the Overseer’s corroded hand. Electricity danced brightly at its tip, eager to find a target.

  “Good morning, forty-one eighty-two,” the Overseer said in that peculiar artificial rendering of Koin. “Your efforts in the relic war will be rewarded.”

  Daniel doubted that, especially when the animalistic grunting of the Overseer’s true voice under the helmet sounded so unfriendly.

  Daniel looked away, trying to ignore the putrid stink wafting out from beneath the Overseer’s armor plates.

  At twice his size, the Overseer loomed over Daniel and aimed a spindly finger at his head. He wanted to run, but he found himself bolted to the ground.

  A tingling sensation shot up his ear. He held his hand up to try to stop it, only to find his skin peeling back. There was a small socket embedded in his temple.

  Daniel’s eyes flared wide, his mind jolted with detailed information and key skills—everything he would need to know to do his job today.

  When it was over, Daniel jerked his head back. “Hey! Did you just put your finger in my head?” He reached up, feeling around the strange object embedded in his skull. It itched like crazy.

  The Overseer jabbed him to get moving.

  Daniel held up his hands and backed away through the checkpoint. By the time he turned back around, it was the weirdest thing: all of a sudden he knew where to go, and what to do, without question.

  He glanced over at Blink, jerking a thumb at the trabasaur enclosures, like he’d done it a million times before.

  Who knows, maybe he had?

  In the first corral, a crash of massive Hammertails waited impatiently for their troughs to be filled. On the far side, a few grubs had separated one animal into a pen and were busy pulling a harness over its tough, gray folds of skin. He was about the size and shape of a rhinoceros, but his horns weren’t on his nose; they were clustered around a massive club tail that swayed menacingly from side to side.

  “Watch it. He’s in a mood,” one of the grubs warned.

  Daniel reached up and ran a hand softly over the animal’s neck, careful to avoid the stains of oil seeping from the glands on each side of the beast’s head. That stuff never came off.

  Weird, he knew how to handle a Hammertail. . . . He hadn’t remembered any of this until just a moment ago. What other information had the Overseer injected into his brain?

  The beast fidgeted, stomping his front pads on the ground. He was trying to glance back, but his neck hadn’t evolved that way and there was no room in the pen to turn around. He snorted, hot steam blowing from his nostrils.

  “Easy, eeeeasy . . .” Daniel said, trying to sound as calm and reassuring as he could.

  He wasn’t afraid, even when the animal reared up and could easily have crushed him. Why wasn’t he afraid? He slid around to the front so they could look each other right in the eye.

  It was a moment Daniel hoped he would never forget for the rest of his life. He peered into the dark brown eye of this magnificent, enormous beast, and saw a deep friendship staring back. This Hammertail knew him.

  The animal immediately calmed, purring in deep, rumbling tones. He bowed his head and nuzzled against Daniel’s chest.

  “I see Alice remembers you,” a boy in the next pen commented. Unlike Daniel, he wore his dugs, the rugged pewter jumpsuits that all the grubs wore, fastened right up to his neck with the collar pulled up around his ears. He was riding a Ridgeback, but the once-proud animal was cowed and beaten. Dried blood had encrusted around puncture wounds in its side, right where the spikes on the boy’s stirrups gleamed.

  The boy introduced himself as Pinch. “These pathetic beasts are the only creatures allowed to remember anything around here. I understand Darkada and his friends have been trying to get you to remember what happened. Take my advice, don’t try to remember,” Pinch warned with disdain. “It’s forbidden. It breeds ideas and ideas breed trouble. You’ll just make it worse for yourself. You have a chance to start over. Don’t waste it.”

  Pinch attempted a smile, clearly not something his face was used to. “Just my advice,” he said, “unless you want to make a habit of disappearing.”

  Daniel kept his mouth shut. If he opened it now, thi
ngs would probably get ugly.

  The grubs opened the gates and Pinch jabbed his ride. The animal cried out in pain, dutifully whisking its master off down the nearest tunnel.

  Alice started gnawing on Daniel’s dugs. “Hey!”

  Alice the Hammertail complained, and tried again.

  Daniel reached into his pocket and pulled out a Passava root, holding it up so Alice couldn’t get to it. “Is this what you’re after?”

  Alice lunged for it, but Daniel was quicker. He took the reins and clucked a couple of times. “C’mon, then,” he said. “Behave yourself and you might get this.”

  The Hammertail snorted, happy to play along.

  4

  IT’S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEBODY BRINGS A DROTE

  If there was a worse place to be in than a relic mine, Daniel didn’t know where it was, but at least now he knew why they called it the Snake.

  A long, winding tunnel, its walls oozing with moisture, led down to a vaulted area of the mine they called the Workings, a cathedral of misery perfumed with the stench of rot. This was where the real mining happened. Grubs caked in mud were crammed onto excavation scaffolds, hammering and digging, loading up skids with rubble for trabasaurs to haul off.

  Somewhere around the middle of the Workings, sandwiched between a rickety observation platform and some kind of pulverizer, Daniel found Blink holding an angry, snaggletoothed rodent by the scruff. He struggled to coax the mean-tempered ball of crazy into a bait-box, while Fix Suncharge steadily backed away, clutching his bloodied hand and ranting in Jarabic.

  “Of course it’ll bite; it’s a drote!” Blink snapped, frustrated.

  Fix wasn’t nearly done complaining, but Blink was having none of it. “Forget it!” he said. “I’m doing it!”

  “Making friends?” Daniel remarked.

  Blink glanced up, panic punching him between the eyes. “Whoa! Whoa! Stay back!” he warned.

  Fix scrambled to block Daniel’s way.

  “Alice gets one whiff of this drote and all hell breaks loose.” Blink crammed the struggling drote’s head into the bait-box. The creature kicked violently with its back legs, but Blink had the drop on it.

  The bait-box snapped shut, trapping the raging drote inside.

  Daniel, still giving Alice’s muzzle a soothing rub, asked, “Are we good?”

  Blink breathed easy. “While there’s carbon between ’em, Hammertails could care less.”

  Daniel pretended he understood, but he really didn’t. His incredibly brief socket education had given him the knowledge to wrangle Alice, but there were clearly still gaps in what he knew.

  “Get moving!” an Overseer ordered. The guard towered over them on the observation platform, blast-pike aimed at the far side of the Workings. “Section Five.”

  Blink answered for all of them. “Yes, Master Overseer,” he said, bowing his head.

  The rock face at Section Five glowed like hot coals beneath the blazing LightEye. The markings daubed all over it were not in Koin, or any language Daniel recognized for that matter, but other sections had similar markings, so he got the gist. The Overseers had definite plans about where they wanted to mine next.

  Daniel led the Hammertail into position. “This’d be a whole lot quicker if they just used machines,” he said.

  “But bruised flesh won’t destroy their precious relics,” Blink remarked. He opened up one of the pouches on his tool belt, pulled out a scent marker, and began dabbing its sticky contents over the marks left by the Overseers.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Didn’t they just fill your head with instructions on how to mine down here?”

  “Kind of. I’m still trying to process it,” Daniel confessed.

  Fix nudged him out of the way, setting down a bait-box with a bucket of water not far from it. He seemed pleased with the setup.

  Alice’s ears twitched. He was thirsty.

  Daniel led him over for a drink. The sixteen-ton beast nudged the bait-box out of the way as though claiming his territory, and thrust his huge mouth into the bucket.

  “Just let him loose,” said Blink, spotting a cohort of Overseers approaching. “Come on, before they get any ideas.”

  Daniel unhitched the leash and the three boys ran. “Where are we going?”

  Fix snapped at him in Jarabic.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said anywhere but here!”

  Whatever the heck the sudden rush was all about, Daniel didn’t know, but he knew enough not to question it at the moment.

  Fix snatched a pebble up off the ground and lobbed it up at a bunch of squabbling grubs huddled on a gantry overlooking their section. It dinged on one of the metal uprights.

  “Will you hurry up?” said Blink. “It’s about to get busy down here.”

  A couple of grubs scrabbled around for a rusted-out ladder with a rung or two missing; it would have to do. The three boys climbed as fast as they could, pulling themselves up onto the gantry where the others were crowded around Henegan Rann, waving sticks of Passava in his scaly face. He was taking bets—

  “Grubs!” he said. “This is Alice we’re talking about. He whacks more guards than any other Hammertail in this entire miserable, stinking hole. You know he’ll take out at least three of ’em—”

  “I’m in,” Blink said, pushing forward.

  “Just the one?” Henegan took the stick of Passava and tossed it into the bucket Ogle Kog was holding—

  Wait, not a bucket. An Overseer’s helmet—

  Fix and Blink were arguing, but Henegan had other things to worry about. “You let me know what you decide,” he said, turning to another kid. “No Passava, no bet. No exceptions!” He turned on Daniel. “What about you?”

  Daniel hesitated. “What are the rules?”

  Henegan shrugged; this was a no-brainer. “Simple. Guess how many Overseers Alice’ll knock on their butts—exactly, mind you, not closest guess,” he said, tapping the Overseer helmet in Kog’s hand. “And the winner gets the whole stash.”

  “If there’s more than one winner?”

  “You split it.”

  “And if there’s no winner?”

  Henegan Rann flashed a smile. “Better luck next time,” he said.

  Henegan had obviously been running this thing for a while. He had a little more meat on his bones than most other grubs; beads and other odd little trinkets hung on strings around his neck, probably nothing important or the Overseers would never let him keep them. But he clearly made out like a bandit.

  “What do you say?”

  “No, I’m good,” said Daniel.

  “Suit yourself—”

  Someone farther down the gantry gave a couple of sharp taps on the metal handrail. The guards had finished inspecting the site and had settled on a target.

  The mining process worked like this: Hammertails were strong enough to smash through solid rock, but sucked at taking orders. Hammertails hated drotes, so drotes were released to get them all riled up. The problem was drotes couldn’t take orders either, but since drotes were wildly attracted to certain smells, the grubs used scent markers to get them to go where they wanted—which were the spots they needed the Hammertails to hit. A few good hits and the tunnels soon opened up a few more paces.

  It sounded more complicated than it really was, and Daniel had no idea why the Overseers wanted to do it this way, but it worked.

  While the rest of the troop watched from a safer vantage point, a lone Overseer took his blast-pike and pressed its electrified tip against one of the marks Blink had left on the wall. The substance began to smoke.

  Ogle Kog put his hand over the helmet, muttering something in Chaff.

  Henegan held up his hands. “No more bets,” he said, happily sitting down and swinging his legs over the edge to watch the show—the smoke, curling down the rock face, creeping along the ground, and smothering the bait-box until—click.

  A series of vents opened up all around the box.
r />   The drote sensed the sickly, sweet odor almost immediately, drawing it into a state of frenzy. Sharp claws probed the vents, scratching for a way out.

  Alice flattened his ears back.

  “Ladies, if there’s one thing a Hammertail hates,” said Henegan, with relish, “it’s an odious drote—”

  “Let’s hope he hates it enough to smash us a way out of here . . .” Blink said, leaning against the railing.

  Daniel glanced over at him. Now he understood the strange look Blink had had in his eye when Daniel came back. Underneath the joy of seeing a friend who had survived was the pain of shredded hope that Daniel had gotten out—but maybe there really was no escape from this place.

  The bait-box snapped open and the drote poked its head out. Alice bellowed at it, thick globs of spit spraying from his mouth.

  The drote paid no attention. It ventured out into the open, intent on finding where the aroma was coming from—then darted between the Hammertail’s legs.

  Alice jumped around in circles trying to stamp the drote into oblivion, but the drote was quicker. Letting out a shrill screech, it shot across the rocky ground and clawed its way up the rock face, following the train of smoke to—

  Smash!

  The massive ball of spikes at the end of Alice’s tail clubbed the mine wall, peppering the chamber with shards of rock—

  Smash!

  The drote jumped for cover.

  Smash! Smash!

  The ground shook as Alice padded around, raging, swinging his horn-crested tail into the rock face, again and again, until—

  The entire roof of Section Five collapsed down on the Hammertail in a tremendous column of rubble and dust, leaving the choking grubs gasping for air.

  The Overseers stood impassively watching, untroubled by the chaos.

  Henegan did a quick head count. “One, two . . . aw, bad luck, ladies. Not one Overseer with so much as a scratch? Banker wins. Better luck next time.”

  He got up to leave, urging Ogle Kog to bring the pot before someone started a fight.

  Down below, an Overseer aimed the sparking tip of his blast-pike up at Daniel. “Forty-one eighty-two,” he said. “Retrieve your animal.”