out a way to give them some air time. Or maybe we can shift pilots in from elsewhere. Time will tell," Ott said.
He stepped back, to openly admire the reassembled, improved copter, brightly painted with the brave insignia of the Subterran armed forces of Western Northam. The insignia hadn't much seen the light of day in a couple of generations, so the bravery of it seemed almost a mockery – still, there was a sense that this generation was poised to break out of hiding.
"How many copters and planes do we have in our sector, all told?" Leo asked.
"I couldn't tell you," Ott answered. He shrugged. "Classified, you know," he said, apologetically.
Leo shrugged back. "Sorry I asked. I hate to put my boss on the spot."
"In that case, next time you think about changing an aircraft from one that I can point any standard issue pilot to, into one that needs specialty training to fly, you might ask first."
"Oh, sorry. Didn't think of that. I only thought about our only pilot needing hand controls. It won't happen again, sir."
"That's not to say I won't approve it. For that matter, if asked ahead of time, I most likely would have approved this, for the same reasons that made you think of doing it. But, on the whole, we're counting on having copters and fixed wings that anyone with standard training can fly. Now, I'm going to go back to my office and fix the files so they're all tidy, and so this bird is marked off as modified. Not to worry. This time. Keep her modified. We might need to use Davis before his legs are ready."
Leo pondered that. "Is that a feeling, or are we getting reports, sir?"
"A bit of both, Leo. Keep the men digging this room out."
"Yes, sir."
Ott left. The men who'd been respectfully keeping their distance (and showing off how hard they could work) put down their tools and swarmed around Leo. "How'd he like it? How'd he like it?" they clamored.
"He liked it fine, but could you clunkheads tell me one thing? Why didn't a single, blessed one of you point out to me that this sort of modification makes it so that a pilot who is used to a standard aircraft might get mucked up if he tried to fly this one?"
"But, Leo, you showed us how it could be flown either way," one of the quicker witted ones said in his own defense.
"Yeah, that's true. But if a guy flying it the standard way doesn't know about the modifications, he could turn off the foot controls, and not know what replaces them. I should've thought of that, but didn't, having Pilot Harvey on the brain. It would have been nice if someone without Pilot Harvey on the brain might've stuck up for the other pilots out there who might have to fly this baby someday."
"Hoo-eee, Lieutenant must've really chewed you out for it," one of the men said.
"Ott? Naw. He was nice about it. Not a hundred percent happy, but nice about it. What ails me is that I should have thought of it, and didn't. I hate it when I do that. For future reference, if any of you has a question about something I'm doing, ask, will you? I might answer, or I might not, but if you get me thinking, that's usually a good thing. Got that?"
Men nodded, with a little reluctance. All too many of them had tried to question Leo when he was in what they privately called Mad Inventor Mode. It had all too often been fruitless at best, and punishing at worst.
"Let's get back to work on getting this hole dug out, shall we? This bird might be able to get out of here as it is, but it's iffy. Real iffy. It's no good having a bird stuck in a hole," Leo said. He strode across to a tool rack, grabbed a pickax, and started hewing away at the nearest wall.
Beside the helicopter, a man asked, "Has Leo ever used a pickax before?"
"Doesn't much look like it," another man said.
"Anybody who wants to instruct him on proper technique, you go right ahead. As for me, I'll count myself grateful for any help we can get, and I'm going to go work on the other side of the room until his mood's better," another man said. He headed off, back to work.
"So, does anybody want to tell Leo that we could have used explosives to make this hole bigger, if someone had decided we needed it bigger before the helicopter parts got hauled in here and she got put back together?" another man said, to the remaining men.
"Be my guest, if you're that crazy," several men said. They laughed, and headed back to work.
Joel and Trevin called a halt at the base of a porthole. They sat on a handy bench, took off their boots to rest and air their feet, and rummaged through their packs, making sure they had what they thought they'd need, organized so they could reach necessities first. Renzo stood mutely by, watching.
"It's all right. You can sit down, too," Joel said. "And I'd advise taking off your boots and maybe your socks. We have a long hike ahead of us, and we might have to run now and then, or dive under shrubs. You might as well rest now, and get your feet dry and deloaded."
"For your information, 'deloaded' is a Joel-ism. It's not a standard word. You can use it, but not everyone will know what you mean, and if you don't use it in a joking manner they might think you're new to the language," Trevin said.
"It ought to be a word," Joel said.
"I agree with you, but the fact remains that it hasn't caught on as well as you'd like," Trevin retorted.
Renzo took off his pack, sat on a bench, and took off his boots and socks. He seemed just a little dazed, which both Joel and Trevin thought was pretty good, considering what they'd hauled him through already. The sight of bubbly children mixing with adults in the broader community, and getting hugs and kisses from their mommies, had nearly made him faint. People had been friendly, which had alarmed him. They'd been laughing and joking with one another, or speaking confidentially with friends. They'd been acting normal, in other words, which was anything but normal to a man from a society that expected men to be puppets in the here and now, while promising a perfect society in the always unobtainable future.
Trevin leaned back against the wall and blew air out, hard.
"You all right?" Joel asked.
Trevin nodded. "I'm not all that used to going topside, to be honest with you. Where I grew up, when a person said a community was downtunnel, he meant you could get there via tunnel, every step of the way."
"Live with it. This area hasn't been under suppression as long as some other places. Give us another three or four generations, we might have great burrows, too," Joel said.
"No, we won't. After the government blew up the irrigation systems, this area stopped being worth steady patrols. Given the choice between doing the backbreaking job of making burrows in hardpan or other equally fun local soils, or taking the occasional run through the sticker brush with a very good probability of having no spies on hand to report you, people are going to run through sticker brush. Besides, it's fresh air and sunshine up there. Fresh air and sunshine are good for you, right?" Trevin said.
"Yes, they are, actually," Joel said. "And I bet Renzo's been missing them like crazy. And who could blame him?"
Renzo started to say something, but decided against it.
"All right, Renzo," Joel said, "here's the deal. From here, we have a three mile overland trek to a fugitive hole, where we'll dump off some of our load to reprovision the place. We're also checking to see if anyone's there who might need help. If it's clear, we might stay there tonight, or we might move on another three miles to the next section of tunnel. It's a project that got started but not finished. It's only about a half mile long and isn't connected to anything, so sometimes it doesn't seem worth the bother of using, especially if it's a nice day, but you're not used to long hikes, so probably we'll stop there for the night. Once we reach the end of that tunnel, we have another five miles above ground, and then we can crawl back underground, inside the Nyssatun tunnels, which spread out all over the place, but don't connect to anything else. While we're above ground, we ought to be all right unless we run afoul of a wolf pack, or worse, get caught by government agents. If we get caught, they'll probably torture Trevin and me, hoping to get information out of us. What they'd do to you, I'm not su
re. The last time they caught one of our foundlings, they stripped his clothes off, put him in a barred cage, hung him in a public place, and used him to show people in gory detail what it's like to die from thirst and starvation. Nasty, that."
"I remember that," Renzo said.
"Just remember that you're no longer on their favored list, so you'd be in the cage instead of outside of it looking in, and we'll be all right," Joel said.
"It won't come to that. We promised the lieutenant that we'd shoot him if he tried to escape. I promise to kill him rather than let him get to talk to officials about us. Sorry, Renzo, but that's what we're up against here. Those kids back there, those women back there, right now they've got no good protection but secrecy, and we can't risk any of us falling into enemy hands. It's as simple as that," Trevin said.
Joel started to suggest to Trevin that he was pushing it, but realized that Renzo was handling the news better than he would have expected. "Look, Renzo, there's no reason for us to get at odds. None of us wants to get caught or shot, although we might have different reasons for that topmost in our minds. Me? That woman I smooched back in town is my top reason."
"I doubt he knows what you mean by smooched," Trevin said.
"Kissed," Joel amended. "That lip to lip business. You were rather overwhelmed at the time, so you might have missed that she's my wife. We have