The climb began in silence, the only sounds the rasp of gloves on cable and the occasional metallic groan from the Black Monolith’s tortured frame. L’Uomo Prime went first, his cerametal and plasteel frame gripping the hanging lines with practiced precision. Halfway up, a frayed section of conduit kissed his shoulder plating. Blue-white current surged through him in a single vicious arc. He convulsed once, twice, then locked rigid, dangling like a broken marionette until the charge bled away. Below, Butterball misjudged his own ascent. The massive form slipped, wings snapping open by reflex, and he glided in a controlled spiral down the shaft before recovering and starting again. By sheer stubbornness the party reached the tenth floor.
They stood upon a steel grate that felt more suggestion than structure. Entire sections had simply vanished, leaving ragged voids that plunged into darkness. The ruined elevator lobby lay ahead, a single car hanging in its shaft like a tooth in a rotting jaw. As they advanced, a familiar shape drifted into view: the flying repair drone from the second-floor plaza, its spindly arms and repair rod still intact, optics glowing with cold purpose.
Butterball’s precognition flared. In the vision, D’Can’Tr’s light generation washed harmlessly over the machine, and Steve Austin ended it with a single thrust of his vibro-dagger. The vision felt certain.
Reality proved otherwise.
The drone attacked without preamble. A jet of pressurized herbicide struck D’Can’Tr square in the torso. The plant-mutant’s silicone flesh blistered and blackened where the chemical touched, steaming as chlorophyll and synthetic tissue cooked together. He staggered, quills rattling in agony. Steve’s rifle barked and missed, the rounds sparking uselessly against the grate. The drone darted, repaired itself mid-air with a spray of nanites, and came again. Only after a brutal exchange—Steve finally closing the distance and driving the vibro-dagger through its primary optic—did the machine spiral down through a hole in the floor, trailing sparks and the stench of burnt circuitry.
They searched the level and found nothing but debris, abandoned construction equipment, and a front-loader whose massive treads pinned the cables they had just climbed. No one could decipher its controls. While the others recovered, D’Can’Tr forced himself through the pain and mastered the jetpack recovered days earlier, mapping every thruster and fail-safe until the device felt like an extension of his own limbs.
Butterball discovered the way forward: a stack of crates leading to high windows. Outside, the Warden’s artificial dawn painted the Silver Wastes in cold light. Hundreds of steel rebar spikes studded the outer wall like the quills of some vast, wounded animal, offering a treacherous path to a large window on the fifteenth floor.
Steve Austin and D’Can’Tr led the ascent. Steve reconnoitered first and returned with grim news: a score of Turkeyoids held the level, clustered around a central HVAC shaft that offered the only upward path. Rear-guard. Alert.
The plan shifted. D’Can’Tr taught Sheik the jetpack’s controls in hurried whispers. Then the climb began in earnest.
Sheik launched. The jetpack carried him clear of the wall—too clear. His turn came late. A zero-g drift pocket seized him mid-correction and hurled him thirteen stories down into the dunes below. The party had no choice. They continued without him, climbing the rebar spikes hand over hand until they tumbled through the shattered southern bay window onto the fifteenth floor.
The Turkeyoids were waiting.
Six regulars and two Butterball lieutenants opened fire the moment the Reclaimers appeared. Glitchy laser rifles spat scarlet beams that scorched plating and flesh alike. D’Can’Tr took a flanking position and returned fire, his laser pistol cutting a clean hole through one Turkeyoid’s chest. Feathers and dark blood sprayed across the grate. A second Turkeyoid’s weapon detonated in a bloom of corroded-cell failure, the explosion tearing the wielder nearly in half and showering the others with shrapnel and burning plumage. One Butterball lieutenant went down under concentrated fire, its massive body collapsing in a wet heap of feathers and ruptured organs. The remaining regulars fell one by one—throats opened, torsos punched through, bodies tumbling into the dark voids surrounding the central grate.
Far below, Sheik finally mastered the jetpack. He rose like a vengeful comet and crashed through the same bay window, vibro-beak already extended. He joined the slaughter without hesitation. The last regular took a massive laser strike from D’Can’Tr that sent the corpse spinning into the abyss. The surviving Butterball lieutenant, feathers singed and eyes wide with terror, scrambled up the HVAC shaft and vanished toward the twentieth floor.
They tended wounds in the brief quiet that followed, then abandoned the uncooperative VTOL taxi and pursued.
The climb up the ventilation shaft was narrow and foul, the metal slick with decades of accumulated grit. L’Uomo emerged first onto the twentieth-floor grate, followed by Sheik and Steve Austin. Six more Turkeyoid regulars waited in a shooting gallery arrangement, rifles already raised.
The second fight erupted at once.
Scarlet beams stitched the air. The grate beneath the Reclaimers’ feet was a fragile island surrounded by a fifteen-meter chasm of pure emptiness. Twisted, melted support beams framed the void like the jaws of some metallic predator. Blue-white rad-sparks leapt constantly between the ruptured conduits, throwing harsh light across the swirling sand vortices that spun toward a dark central drain far below. L’Uomo crossed first. A massive rad-spark arced past his shoulder close enough to ionize the air; he cleared the gap in a single controlled leap and landed clean. The grace did not last. In the chaos that followed, his favored Vibroaxe slipped from his grasp and vanished into the hungry darkness below—an irreplaceable loss that left him fighting with bare hands and residual systems.
The Turkeyoids scored clean hits. One of their own rifles exploded in another spectacular failure of shoddy engineering, the blast flinging the user backward into the chasm. Sheik’s stun pistol locked a regular in mid-stride; the Turkeyoid toppled stiffly over the edge and disappeared into the sand vortices. Henry Darksky’s rifle misfired, forcing a frantic reload. Steve’s aim, however, had sharpened; each shot found flesh or vital systems. D’Can’Tr’s laser pistol jammed, the dead hydrogen cell ejecting with a sad metallic ping. For a moment the Reclaimers were hard-pressed, pressed against the edge of oblivion with fire coming from every direction.
Then the tide turned. Concentrated return fire tore through the remaining Turkeyoids. Feathers and blood painted the grate. Bodies dropped or were driven over the edge into the glowing vortices below. Sheik delivered the final stun; the last regular went rigid and tumbled into the storm of sand and rad-light.
Silence returned, broken only by the crackle of residual sparks and the distant moan of the Warden’s failing systems. The Butterball lieutenant was already gone, fled higher into the darkness.
One by one the Reclaimers crossed the chasm. Butterball glided across with casual grace. The others followed by jetpack, careful leaps, or sheer determination, each of them avoiding the random rad-sparks that still danced across the gap. They stood at last before the elevator shaft embedded in the southern wall. A car waited with its doors slightly ajar. Cool, dank air drifted down from the open roof hatch—air that carried the faint, panicked scent of the fleeing lieutenant racing upward to warn Gobble Lord Skravo.
The Black Monolith continued to rise above them, patient and immense, its upper levels still waiting.
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