Galactic Scavengers

This is how the Cage works.

It is rickety, because it is of Sycorax make, and the Sycorax are galactic scavengers – chieftains of rubbish, masters of mongrel tech. It might once have been the hull from a cargo freighter, or the shielding from a dozen battle tanks, or a hundred something elses, but whatever it was it is now the Cage.

The Sycorax are superstitious. They have a firm belief that when something is broken down or dismantled – or stolen, as is the case with almost everything the Sycorax acquire – it becomes new. Theft is a baptism, a transformation. This may be an elaborate justification for their crimes, to make piracy into a form of prayer, but that doesn’t matter to them, and it doesn’t matter to Kyrss.

When they stole him, they transformed him too.

The Cage is fifteen metres wide and as perfect a circle as jagged, fused debris can make. There are raised areas, and lowered areas, and areas that have been fitted with long retractable spikes and the hidden nozzles of flamethrowers. If the Cage was a planet – a child’s drawing of a planet, just a horizontal circle – then it would be at each pole that the huge gates sit, carved of the same repurposed scrap.

The lifting of these gates is a tortured affair, thick chains straining in a series of slow jerks, but when they descend they come down as thundering fast as a guillotine.

They have slammed behind Kyrss now.

***

Twelve Angels Weeping, Red Planet