“Stay still,” Varian told me, his advice echoed by Case and Tens and Rohan’s.
I half expected to be wrapped in silver and pulled onto the ship, but it didn’t happen, and I didn’t know whether to feel grateful or betrayed.
“Stick it out, girl.” Mack’s voice, and it made me happy to hear it—even if I was going to put him on his ass when I got back on board. “You and whose army.”
“Me, with one arm tied behind my back,” I muttered, and didn’t realize I’d said it out loud until an antenna dipped down and stroked my head.
I gave a yelp of surprise and tried to twist away from it, but the jaws tightened a little further, and I felt my ribs shift.
“Stay the-fuck still!” Mack snapped, and I wondered how he was handling his broken legs.
“Never you mind,” which only meant Doc wasn’t happy with him being up and around.
“You have no idea.”
I almost wished I was back on board the ship, with Doc taking a good look at where Barangail’s trackers had been dug out of my ribs, but I still had something to do. One way to keep my mind off the pain—and the fact I was being carried to the Stars only knew where—was to go into the implant and see what had become of Celia’s trail.
It was a surprise to find the ants taking the same path the concubine had used in her escape. How had she avoided them? I kept my eyes closed, and watched as the implant tracked our progress along Celia’s trail. When we reached a point where our paths diverged, I opened my eyes.
The first thing I saw was a huge crystalline vat set on the edge of a canal. The vat was full of a gleaming golden-orange liquid, the same liquid that flowed sluggishly down the canal beside it. As we approached, ants pushed levers and then maneuvered large stone half-pipes away from the top of the vat. Through the clear walls of the vat, dark shapes marred the honey-colored fluid.
Some of them looked like the insects that had attacked us in the cavern, but others looked distinctly human. All of them were ominously still. It took me a moment to register what I was looking at, and then I felt shock send a wave of ice through my insides.
“Oh, fuck, no.”
My barely breathed words didn’t have any effect on the big creature carrying me—and it didn’t change the fact it was taking me directly towards the vat, itself. I watched as the ants carrying Barangail’s guard took them to the edge of the vat and dropped them in. When my ant followed in their path, I looked for Varian. I caught the look of horror on his face when he realized where I was being taken, saw him twist in the mandibles holding him as he cried out.
“Wait! She’s not one of them!”
But the ants didn’t listen, and they didn’t wait. They kept moving. Only, now, the creature carrying the rebel leader took a different route across the cavern—one that took him away from the vat.
“Wait!” he called, but the ants were intent on their path, and I wondered how he was going to explain this one to Stepyan and Case.
Now, that would be a conversation worth sitting in on... if only I had the chance.
I scanned the cavern, taking in as much of my surroundings as I could.
“Stop!” Tens said, his voice suddenly tense with excitement. I stopped, and scanned back the way I’d already looked. “Take a closer look at that.”
‘That’ was a strangely angular piece of rock sitting in a raised section of the cavern. It was resting in a patch of yellow light, and I had the implant scan in closer.
“And there it is,” Tens said.
“Well, damn.” Mack was not impressed.
At least this time he had a reason.
“I’ll do a deep scan, see what we can turn up of the rest of the hulk. It can’t be that far off.”
He was whistling in the dark. We all knew the ants might have carried the piece of ship from anywhere, and we didn’t know if they’d brought it up from a wreck buried too deep for the Marie’s equipment to see through. It was good to know the trip hadn’t been a total loss.
The ant carried me up the side of the vat, and dumped me in. I remembered to spread my arms as I dropped, and took a breath, in case my head went under. It didn’t, and the ant above me hesitated. I wondered if it was going to push me below the surface, but it turned away, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Well, damn,” murmured through my head, and I wondered what had happened to make Tens say it.
“I can’t get a lock,” he explained. “The, whatever that stuff is, it’s interfering with the signal. You’re going to have to find a way out of it on your own.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that.”
Personally, I thought the best way out of it would have been for them to not let me be dropped into it, in the first place, but I was going to drown if I didn’t get out of this shit, soon. I saw Barangail’s men struggling and noticed that their struggles only seemed to pull them under faster. Looking back to the side of the vat, I watched as the ant turned away.
Scanning the side of the vat for more, I realized I’d been dropped on the opposite side of the vat to where the others were—and I was grateful. I watched as another of the men, lashed out in his struggles, trying to pull himself up using one of his comrades. That didn’t end well, and I looked away.
I couldn’t help them. Wasn’t sure I would, if I could... Actually, that wasn’t true. I wouldn’t let anyone drown in this stuff if I had a choice. Right now, though, I had to work out a way to stop drowning in it, myself.
“Focus, Cutter.”
Like I couldn’t have worked that out for myself, Mack.
Funnily, enough he didn’t have an answer for that, which was a good thing—because he was right. I had to focus. I could already feel the viscous liquid dragging at my limbs, and my arms were starting to settle lower on the surface. Once they went under, getting out was going to be a Hell of a lot harder. I looked for the side of the vat, and was glad to see it was about a foot off from where I’d been dumped.
The guards had been dropped a lot further from the side. Maybe ‘my’ ant had been distracted, or maybe the fact I’d stayed so still for the last part of the journey had fooled it into thinking I was a lot more damaged than I really was. Still, that foot was going to be a difficult distance to cross.
At least they’d made the vat nice and full. If I could get within arm’s reach of the side, I’d be able to pull myself out of the gunk they’d tossed me into. That was if they didn’t notice me making the attempt and then toss me back in. Yeah. Lots of ‘ifs’, there. Still, all I could do was try.
16— Of Wolves and Honey
Getting a good bead on the edge of the vat, I tried to swim over and grab it. Swimming wasn’t a skill I’d learned growing up—mum had never had that much money—but Odyssey had been very thorough in their training. At Odyssey, I’d learned enough to outdistance Ax and the other recruits before they could try to drown me for what I’d done to them on the interactive range. I put those skills to good use, now.
It was a good thing the edge of the vat wasn’t any further away. I risked tipping myself onto my side and tried side-stroking my way to the lip—and counted myself lucky when it worked. Moving my hands through the thick, sticky liquid was a lot of hard work, and my sides burned with the effort. In theory I might have been able to move faster, if I’d put my head under, but there was no way I was risking not being able to pull it free, again.
There were a lot of ways to die, and being drowned in something resembling honey was not one I wanted to try. I pushed myself to the side and flung an arm up over the edge of the vat, curling my elbow up over the impossibly smooth surface of the vat’s lip, and hanging there long enough to catch my breath, and see if my antics had been noticed by any of the cavern’s inhabitants.
A quick survey of the area showed me that the only folk who’d noticed what I was doing had been the guards thrown in ahead of me. The three remaining on the surface were now doing their best to make their own swims to safety. It made me wonder why the ants hadn’t posted anyo
ne to guard against captives doing exactly that.
That thought was replaced by the idea that maybe they hadn’t seen the need. It was damned hard to pull enough of me free to swing a leg over the side and drop down onto cavern floor, three ant-lengths below. The weight of the... ant honey, seemed to fit... the weight of the ant honey pulled at my clothes and dragged at my limbs, and I landed heavily, glad of the strapping that stopped my ankle from crumbling completely. Glad, too, of the fact the nanites seemed to have done some of their work, and it didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as before.
Maybe. I still hit the floor pretty hard, and I sank to my knees to catch my breath. By this stage, one of the guards had reached the side of the vat and was hanging on. I figured it would be a lot easier for him to get out, if I just tipped the whole damn thing over, but my escape had been noticed and an ant had emerged from the tunnel through which Varian had been taken.
I pulled myself up onto my feet, and looked around for somewhere else to hide. The only place I could find was the other side of the vat, and I didn’t know if there were any more ants over that way. Still, a potentially bad option was better than no option at all, and I stumbled around the crystalline edge, noticing the way it tapered as it reached the floor.
Tipping it over might not be as far-fetched an idea as I had thought. A heavy thud signaled that one of Barangail’s men had landed nearby.
“Hey,” I said, coming round the side of the vat. “Help me tip this thing over.”
He looked at me, and then looked over at the tunnel, where a second ant had emerged. I caught him glancing up at where another of Barangail’s men struggled at the edge of the vat.
“If we tip it over, he might have a chance.”
And that was all it took. I didn’t know how loyal these guys were to their boss, or why, but they were as loyal as Hell to each other. The ant had followed us around, so we moved back to the other side, the one I’d first come out on...the one away from his men... the one that put a river of honey at our backs.
Of course, that didn’t seem to bother that guy. He eyed the vat.
“Gonna need a lever,” he said, and I pointed to the stun stick still attached to his belt.
Damn thing was useless for anything else, anyway.
As he reached for it, I looked around for something I could use, but the cavern floor was clean, bare stone, and I was out of luck. I backed up to the edge of the vat, and set my back against it pushing up. It didn’t shift. He tried wedging the stick underneath, but there was nowhere for it to stick. In the end, he did what I was doing, and we both pushed back, together.
At first the vat remained as still as still could be, and then I heard a grunt, and the glass-like ring as a combat boot hit the other side, and the whole thing shifted a little.
“Mika, stay there, but lean a little out.”
The guardsman didn’t speak above a low mutter, but I figured they had some kind of fancy comms system inside their heads, or along their jaws. His colleague would hear him just fine. It would be the same if Case or I were speaking.
“You mean we’re not?” Case tried to sound a little hurt, and failed.
I didn’t have an answer for her, no energy to even try and match the comment with some smart-ass of my own. It was a right bitch just not backing off from the little bit of progress we’d made.
“Little more,” the guard said, and wedged the baton in the tiny gap we’d made between the base of the vat and the floor.
I shuffled lower so I was further under the curve, and looked at him.
“One...”
He began counting with me.
“Two...”
“Three!” and we both did our best to straighten our knees and lift the weight at our backs.
Just when we were about to give up, the vat jerked, as though some kind of pressure had been applied to the other side. We pushed harder, but it wasn’t quite enough, and the ants weren’t wasting any time. They crossed the floor of the cavern in a blur of legs, their antennae cocked towards us.
For a moment, I hoped at least one of them would run right into us, maybe even bump the vat in their hurry, but that didn’t happen. Two kept heading for us, and one split off and went around the other side of the vat. It had just vanished from sight, when the vat jerked like a counterweight was swinging on the other side, and I hoped it was from two big dudes weighed down by combat armor swinging from the edge, and not one big dude in combat armor being ripped off the side by a giant ant.
The Stars knew the ones standing in front of me looked plenty mad at what we were doing.
“And down,” said the guardsman beside me, and, catching a vague idea of what he was thinking, I dropped the vat when he did.
We were gonna try and use its own momentum to put it over. I just hoped it didn’t rock so far this way that it squashed us instead. It didn’t, and we threw our backs against it as it rocked back the other way. It wasn’t much, just a few inches off the ground, but it was more than we’d had when we started.
Our sudden movement forward as it tilted over us, drove the incoming ants back a couple of cautious paces. They hesitated as we reversed and slammed back into the underside of the vat. As we pushed, they moved in, again. This time, we had no choice, we’d got the vat rocking the other way, but we needed to move, or we wouldn’t be able to do it again.
I dived one way, and the guardsman dove the other, sliding under snatching jaws without much room to spare. Both ants turned to go after us, their heavy bodies slamming into the side of the vat as it tilted, and succeeding where we had failed.
There were two startled shouts from the other side, but I ignored them. I’d slid under the closest ant’s nippers, and scrambled to my feet as soon as I was clear of its legs, but the damn things was fast, and I’d bolted away from the tunnels leading off from the cavern, not thinking of where I was going.
I was also not thinking of what kind of a mess an entire vat of ant honey might do when it was tipped over, or how fast it might spread. Before I knew it, I’d run across the front of the spill, catching just a glimpse of the tide of gold before it hit me and swept me into the canal at the cavern’s edge.
“Where are you?” Mack asked, as I struggled to keep my head above the honey.
On the upside, the ant wasn’t chasing me anymore. It didn’t look happy, as it scuttled back and forth on the edge of the canal, but it wasn’t coming after me. Gutless wonder.
It was a relief to realize that the honey in the canal was warmer, and a bit more fluid than the stuff in the vat. It was easier to tread water, so to speak, and keep my head out of it. I looked around for the guards, but didn’t see them, and figured they were either being rounded up in the cavern, or had been swept down the canal ahead of, or behind, me.
Either way, I had more important things to worry about—like, for instance, where, in all the Stars, this canal went to. It spilled out of the cavern in a man-made, or ant-made, channel, and had to flow somewhere. For an instant, I had a vision of a gigantic vat or holding tank, and didn’t want to find out if the vision was accurate. If I ended up in something like that, I was sunk.
I paddled, feeling fatigue weigh down on my arms and legs, and knowing I had to get out of the canal. It took me a little bit to realize the flow was actually getting faster, and felt like it was going deeper into the canyon. That couldn’t be good, particularly with an emergency teleport out of the question.
“You got it, yet?” Mack’s voice cut through my thoughts, interrupting me as I tried to scan the closest ‘bank’.
Damned implants.
I struggled to keep my head above the honey, looking for somewhere I could grab the edge of the canal and hang on while I hauled myself out.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Call me later. I’m trying not to drown,” and I shut the comms down.
It was a fast-acting trigger, Tens had given me for emergencies. Pretty sure I wasn’t meant to be using it against Mack, but
whatever, right? I really needed to concentrate.
Up ahead of me there was a sort of dip in the far edge. If I could come alongside that, I might have half a chance of getting out of the goo. I started stroking towards it, pulling against the current as the honey towed me along. It really was getting faster, but no less sticky. I even thought it was getting cooler.
How was it getting cooler?
Cooler was just temperature, but it was the sticky and the speed that were my main problems. The first, because it made it hard to move, and the second because, if I didn’t haul ass, I was going to miss my low point. I started swimming directly for the bank, knowing I’d be carried to the point I needed, regardless of the angle. I just had to reach that point before I passed it.
It was easier said than done. I was about an arm’s length off where I wanted to be when something grabbed my leg—which was about the same time, Tens broke through the programming in my head, and Mack started talking.
“Where are you?”
I took a breath to answer, and the grip on my leg became a drag, and it was all I could do not to shout. I held that breath, as something pulled me under, tilting my head to try and see what had me. It was a gold-blurred shadow, not quite human, and very strong, which is exactly what was needed against the current.
My lungs started burning, and I clapped a hand over my nose and mouth, trying to see where we were going as Mack demanded an answer. Tens was shouting, too, but I couldn’t make out the words.
Blood roared in my ears as whoever was dragging me, pulled us into a side drain, and over to a door. They let go of my leg, probably figuring I wasn’t going to try and go anywhere, when the only door in sight was the one they were opening.
They figured right, and I flipped forward in the honey so I could grab onto their belt before the sluggish current dragged me away. At least they didn’t object. They even grabbed the collar of my combat suit, and pulled me through the door as soon as it opened. I really wished Mack and Tens would shut the Hell up; I couldn’t focus on them and this helpful stranger at the same time.
Mack 'n' Me: The Wolves of Alpha 9 Page 14