Page 29
Author: Rachel Bach
In the din of the panic, her voice was clear and commanding, and it worked. The soldier grabbed me around the waist and turned away, hoisting me onto his shoulder like a sack of flour.
“No!” a voice cried, but it took me a second to realize it was my voice. Not mine, but mine in the memory. A little boy’s frantic scream. “Tanya!”
But the teenage girl scowled at me sternly. “Go!” she shouted. “We’ll be on the next ship! Go with them, we’ll find you!”
I screamed, my hand reaching out frantically, straining as far as I could, but it was too late. The crowd had swallowed her, leaving me alone with the guard as he ran me toward the battered cargo ship that was already full of children.
The memory vanished with a rush that left me breathless. I’d been out for less time than it took to blink. Rupert was still right above me in the black water, his hand reaching out for me just as it once had for Tanya, and my hand went up to meet it of its own accord.
I caught myself just in time. Above me, Rupert snatched his arm back as well. He must have pushed himself to the absolute limit, because he flipped and swam straight for the surface at a speed that astonished me, even though I’d seen enough symbionts to know better. I watched his bright shape on my thermographics until he surfaced, but he didn’t dive again. Instead, he turned and started swimming for the shore. When he’d shrunk to a bright dot against the black wall of the water, I turned and started walking in the opposite direction.
My density sensors had been scanning the lake the whole time Rupert and I had been doing our little dance in the dark, and they’d built me a pretty good map of this part of the flooded mine pit. Good enough to guide me to one of the still intact tunnels. Even looking at it in outline through my density sensors, the dark hole was forbidding. Crush depth and air supply aside, I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of going into an underwater mineshaft, but I didn’t have much choice. Down here I had the advantage, but if I surfaced, it was over.
I took one last look at the flooded tunnel. Then, with a deep breath of my precious air, I stepped inside and started walking, trusting my suit to draw a map that I hoped would keep me from dying an ignominious death lost underwater on a planet whose name I’d already forgotten.
I’ve done a lot of scary shit in my life. I’ve fought my way out of a xith’cal ambush with nothing but a recruit’s suit and an army standard sidearm, had a drug-crazed pirate get the drop on me from above with a thermite knife, and been stuck under a trauma shell without being able to pass out. All of those had been horrible in their own special ways, but I would have taken any of them in a heartbeat to get out of that damn flooded mineshaft.
The first hundred feet were fine. The tunnel was a little silted up, but the way was large enough that I could walk upright without feeling too claustrophobic. But then, at the hundred and fifty foot mark, the mineshaft had started to get narrower. Soon I didn’t have enough room to turn around, but that was still bearable until the ceiling started getting lower, too. I made it a bit farther by hunching over, but soon enough I was crawling on my hands and knees without enough room to double back, or even lift my head.
The floor was the icing on the cake, though. As you’d expect in a flooded tunnel, the ground was squishy and silted over. The mud was like tar, grabbing my hands and knees with sticky suction. Sometimes the tunnel was blocked completely, forcing me to stop and dig my way through, scratching at the mud with my fingers like a drowning mole.
Even when the path was clear, though, I moved at a snail’s pace. My suit can take being underwater, but it’s not made for it, and the Lady was dragging like never before. The dirty water was starting to work its way into her cracks, and after an hour of horrible crawling, I swore I could feel her motor slowing. If I didn’t get out and flush the Lady’s system soon, there was a real danger something would jam and I’d be stranded down here in the dark, unable to turn around, unable to move forward, unable to do anything except watch my air meter run down as I slowly suffocated.
Given all that, you’d think the silt would be my biggest worry, since it was the variable most likely to kill me. But stupid as it was, what really made me panicky was the fact that I couldn’t see. True, my density sensor mapped things for me, drawing little colored lines across my screen to show the edge of the wall, the floor, the ceiling, and the tunnel ahead, but colored lines aren’t much comfort when you’re crawling underwater with your head scraping the roof of the tunnel and you can’t even see where you’re putting your hands. Colored lines were what I had, though, so colored lines were what I clung to, following the glowing edge of the walls like the Paradoxian princess who followed her magical ball of yarn out of the labyrinth.
In a way, it was actually good that the tunnel was so narrow I couldn’t turn around. I’d never thought of myself as claustrophobic, but crawling on my knees through the dark with the walls scraping on all sides was bringing me closer to a breakdown than I’d ever been. If there’d been any chance of going back, I would have jumped on it and ended up right back in the lake where I’d started. But the only thing that scared me more than crawling in the dark through a tiny, flooded tunnel was the idea of doing it backward, so I kept going, making my way at a painfully slow pace until, at last, my density sensor picked up a wall in front of me.
I started crawling faster. When I was ten feet from the wall, the low ceiling vanished, and I shot to my feet, craning my head back as far as it would go, even though I still couldn’t see a damn thing. My sensors told me there was nothing overhead for at least fifty feet, but it was my groping fingers that figured out the truth when they found the rails set into the walls on either side. I was standing at the bottom of an empty elevator shaft.
You’d have thought I’d found heaven’s gate from the way I started jumping around and singing praises to the king. I knew I was making an idiot of myself, but with no one around to see, I didn’t care. I grabbed the rails next, putting all my weight on one, then the other. Both held, and I gave another whoop as I started pulling myself hand over hand up the wall.
It was a slow climb, but after spending the last hour at a literal crawl, I felt like I was flying. The water pressure lessened with each hand up, and fifteen minutes and almost a hundred feet later, I broke the surface at last.
The sight of normal darkness instead of ink-thick water made me want to shout for joy all over again, but I kept my mouth shut, turning my speakers as high as they would go. I didn’t hear anything except the water splashing against the rough stone walls, but I still didn’t dare turn on my lights to have a look around. Instead, I checked the air. It came up stale, but breathable, and I took a few moments to refresh my supply. While my suit was running the mine air through its filters, extracting and compressing the oxygen, I turned my mind to other problems.
The tunnel had been horrible, but at least it had kept me too busy to think about just how screwed I was. It felt petty and selfish after what had happened on the cliff, but while I was sad as hell about the pointless, bitter deaths I’d witnessed, my worries at the moment were purely practical. With Rashid gone, I’d lost my contact with the people who could get me off this rock. Even supposing I could find some way to get in touch with Brenton while dodging Caldswell’s people, I was still screwed, because when I’d jumped to get away from Rupert and Mabel, I’d left my armor case up on the ledge. Without my case, I couldn’t repair the motor Rupert had crushed when he’d grabbed Elsie’s sheath, and I couldn’t recharge my suit when her batteries started running low. More immediately, though, I couldn’t replenish any of my chemicals.
Most of my critical supplies like breach foam and the cocktail needle weren’t the sort of things I used regularly, but the stuff that kept my less glamorous systems going, like the purifiers for my water system and the liquid filter that scrubbed the excess CO2 out of my air, were going to start getting low soon. I had enough silicate flush left in my tank
to clear the dirt out of the Lady’s joints when I got out of the water, but after that I was empty. I was also only carrying two spare clips for Sasha. I had plenty of thermite gel, but that was a moot point since I couldn’t get Elsie out of her sheath.
I popped my visor and stared up into the dark, breathing in the dank reek of the mine. Behind me, my compressor whirred softly, the little sound bouncing up the elevator shaft. I focused on the noise, slowing my breathing until it was as soft as the little motor’s purr. There was no use worrying about things I couldn’t change. I’d deal with those problems when they became problems. Right now, I had to keep moving before Rupert and Mabel found me.
Mission firmly in mind, I locked my visor and resumed my climb, stopping just above the water line to flush the silt out of my suit. Once she’d drained, my Lady was almost back to normal, and I shimmied up the final two hundred feet of elevator wall like a spider.
When my density sensor told me I was nearing the top, I slowed. The shaft was still black as pitch, but it was no longer silent. In addition to the soft splash of water below, I could now hear the distant moan of wind. Somewhere up there was an exit, and I was going to find it. Before that, though, I had a more immediate problem. The elevator shaft I’d been climbing was no longer empty. There was a mine elevator parked at the very top, and it was blocking my way.
Considering it had been made to haul up giant carts of unprocessed ore, the metal platform was surprisingly shoddy. Unfortunately, even a shoddy mine elevator was still thicker than I could punch through without Elsie’s help. Worse still, the corp’s lack of safety consideration didn’t extend to gaps between the elevator and the wall. The damn thing was set flush against the stone, leaving me nothing I could grab to pry it down.
I could have shot through it with Sasha, but it would have taken all the ammo I had just to make a hole big enough for my head. Likewise, I could have used Mia, but my plasma shotgun only had one shot left before she’d have to recharge, and I didn’t have the power to spare. Plus, Mia was loud. I wasn’t sure where Rupert and Mabel were, but there was no way they’d miss something as distinct as a plasma shotgun blast, not to mention the inherent danger of shooting an elevator while you were crouched beneath it.
I bit my lip. No shooting, then, but what did that leave? I could pry Elsie out of her broken sheath and slice a hole, but then I’d be stuck with my blade out instead of in. That would limit me severely if I had to crawl again, assuming I didn’t accidentally break my new blade in the process.
I was about to try it anyway when I had another idea. A fantastic one. I ran it through my head several times, looking for weaknesses, but after three times through it was still fantastic, and I decided to roll with it.
I reached into the nook under my arm where Phoebe used to sit and pulled out my block of thermite gel. Thermite clay would be a better name, because that’s what the stuff felt like as I rolled it between my fingers. When I’d worked it into a putty, I reached up and pressed it against the elevator’s underside, smearing it over an area slightly larger than the width of my shoulders. It took almost my entire block to get enough coverage, but thermite gel is cheap and it wasn’t like I’d be using my blade until I could repair the motor anyway. When I’d made a good, thick coat of the stuff, I pulled open the little panel hidden beneath my suit’s wrist, revealing my sparker.
My fellow Blackbirds had laughed themselves sick when they heard I’d ordered a sparker put into my state-of-the-art custom armor. Sparkers were exactly what they sounded like, a little fork that sparked electricity on command. Back in the old days they were used for starting fires, jumping batteries, and lighting smokes if you were crazy. They were so notoriously dangerous I’d had to sign a waiver before Verdemont would agree to install one in my suit. I’d signed it gladly, because by the time I’d been able to afford my Lady, I’d been in the killing business long enough to develop a deep appreciation for the simple effectiveness of thermite, and while the safer modern heating coils would work eventually, nothing fired the stuff as quickly and reliably as a good old-fashioned zap.