Warrior Queen

by J. N. Chaney

  My muscles were on fire, but I dug deep and found more, running faster than I’d ever thought possible.

  Something hit me in the back, but not hard, and I realized it was a spray of dust and rock from Tiberius’ hand missing me and digging into the ground.

  When I turned around, he was dragging it back, leaving deep grooves in the rocky floor. I heard shouts and recognized Allan’s voice. Mario must have sent them in after us when he saw we were getting away.

  “Everyone keep going,” I ordered. “I’m going to head them off so they can’t follow us.”

  “You can’t face them alone,” Nell protested.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not,” I assured her.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do,” asked Mark, who must have noticed the grim look of determination on my face. “That didn’t turn out so well last time, remember.”

  “It’s the only play we’ve got,” I grunted, lifting the staff and creating another sphere of energy. “Here we go again,” I said under my breath.

  This time I was careful not to overdo it and took the time to aim before releasing the orb.

  I still wasn’t entirely prepared for the shockwave, but at least I managed to stay upright as the ceiling began to fall.

  16

  “You’re either brave or crazy,” Mark coughed in the dark.

  This tunnel had been dug by the Boneclaws, and as such, it had no source of light. When the cave-in blocked off access to the cavern, it had also plunged us into total darkness.

  “A little of both,” I replied, releasing enough energy to turn the staff into a light source.

  “Come on, “I said. “I think I can hear the others up ahead. We need to clear out in case that didn’t stop everyone following us.”

  The other two nodded and we followed the tunnel until the small group of survivors came into view. I tried not to wince when I only counted seven forms.

  “What’s going on?” asked Don Hardy, his voice unsteady.

  I couldn’t remember what his job was in the community, but I’d seen him around plenty. He was bald and always wore a thick cap to stave off the cold. At the moment, he looked skittish. His eyes were wide with fear as though he’d run away at any moment.

  “I had to close off the tunnel entrance to stop anything from getting in,” I explained.

  “No, not that. Her. She’s been helping them, I saw it.”

  He was looking at Nell accusingly.

  Even in the dim light I could see her pale face turn red and she twisted her hands together nervously.

  There were a few grunts of assent from the others, but I focused on Don. “Nell is the reason you’re not still in that room or Boneclaw dinner. I trust her,” I said, fixing a cold stare on him.

  “Who put you in charge?” His voice was rising, his fear becoming something else. “You’re a child barely out of training.”

  My temper flared. Mario’s words from Don’s mouth.

  “I did,” declared Prime Lambert, appearing from somewhere in the back. “As the highest-ranking citizen among you, that is my right. Miss Visaro is more than qualified for the task.”

  Don looked as though he might protest but must have thought better of it.

  “Mark, can you do anything with this?” I asked, shooting Lambert a grateful glance, then pulling the datapad out and handing it to Mark. “It’s been restricted.”

  He took it from me with an of course I can look, then started working on it with a series of complicated finger taps.

  “We can’t stay here long,” I reminded him. “If you can get it working, we’ll have the map and you can try to get a message out.”

  “It’s done,” he announced less than a minute later, not hiding his pride. “But it’s useless right now. Wherever we are, it’s not close enough to the facility to get any kind of signal.”

  “Will it still work to modify the staff? I don’t think using the core’s energy like this for long is a good idea. If something catches me off guard, it’s liable to cause another cave-in. I want to put a cap on the power output to prevent that.”

  He performed a few more taps and handed the pad over. “Yeah, it can still connect. Just remember if we get into trouble, we’ll have to stop and recode it again.”

  “I know, but it’s either that or we walk in the dark. Unless someone has a light?” I asked, glancing around at the others.

  Don shook his head and averted his gaze, clearly still upset about Nell. When no one spoke up, I made the necessary alterations on my own, capping the energy draw at 18 gigajoules. I reasoned that it would be enough to stop any trouble we ran into without killing us in the process.

  I was about to disconnect the pad when I paused, quickly making a final alteration. “Mark,” I said, waving him over. “I don’t want to advertise this, but I took off the bio lock in case someone else has to use this.”

  He nodded. “Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.”

  After it was done, I walked away from the group a few dozen paces and tried an experimental shot. The staff produced a small stream of blue light that dissipated as soon as it left the barrel.

  “Okay, we’re good,” I said crisply, trying not to show my annoyance at hobbling my weapon.

  A loud bang came from the caved in area, and everyone froze. Then it came again, louder this time, followed by the sound of falling rock.

  “They’re trying to get through,” Don whispered, stating the obvious.

  “Everyone, move!” I ordered, leading the way at a brisk pace.

  The racket continued as we moved farther into the tunnel, but I took that as a sign that they hadn’t made it through yet. This tunnel mirrored the one Nero had lured us to—empty, with deep grooves in the floor and walls where the Boneclaws had dug.

  “Hey, got a signal,” Mark said after a little while. “It’s not strong enough to send a message, but the map is working.”

  “Where are we?”

  He showed me our green marker in an unmapped part of the cave system and shrugged. “This tunnel wasn’t exactly part of the original design.”

  “It has to end soon,” I pointed out. “That’s the encasement assembly line of the fusion core facility.”

  “Which has been deemed off limits by the Primes and your father,” he reminded me.

  “Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to get reprimanded for breaking that ordinance,” I said.

  “Of course not, dear,” said Lambert, walking faster to catch pace with us.

  I waited a beat to see if Nell would as well, but she hung back and kept quiet. In fact, I realized she hadn’t spoken since Don’s outburst, and I had a feeling it was to keep the others’ attention off of her.

  Part of me felt bad for her, but Don hadn’t been altogether wrong. She had made a choice to follow Mario, at least for a time. There was bound to be some fallout from that.

  “You know why it’s off limits, don’t you?” asked Mark, a touch too peppy for my liking.

  “Yeah,” I said, waving a hand. “Unstable materials, structural damage, lots of broken machinery. We were in the same class, remember?”

  Mark looked a little deflated, as though I’d scored higher on one of Janus’ quizzes or something. “Don’t forget about the radiation,” he said, perky again.

  “Right,” I said, slapping my forehead in mock dismay. “How could I forget the radiation.”

  “Well, I did some studying on the facility.”

  “You don’t say?” I muttered. My patience had begun to wear thin from the subject.

  “Yes, of course,” he continued, not catching my sarcasm. “In case we had to go there for the fusion core task. Anyway, there’s a tank of water under the assembly line area.”

  “So?”

  Mark blinked. “It’s contaminated, likely from the up-channel flow from the production line.”

  “How contaminated?” I asked, a little more curious now. “Like melt our faces off contaminated?
Instantaneous death?”

  “Death wouldn’t be immediate,” he replied seriously. “The opposite actually. It would be slow and agonizing.”

  “Well, let’s avoid that, then,” I said quickly, before he could launch into a detailed description of the side effects and scare the others more than they needed to be. “It’d be a shame to come all this way only to die from exposure.”

  “We should be out of here soon,” he commented a few minutes later. “The facility is less than a hundred meters away. I think it will be around the next bend.”

  Mark’s prediction turned out to be correct and we were soon standing in a large space that had clearly been built by the Eternals.

  Where the tunnel had been crude and simplistic, the advanced architecture of our ancestors was prevalent here. Metallic surfaces and abandoned equipment abounded, though there was no evidence of power. My staff remained the only light and it wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the entire area, giving the space an unsettling feel.

  “What’s the best way through here?” I asked Mark.

  The rest of the group huddled close, looking unnerved by their surroundings. I couldn’t blame them. Besides the lack of power, the place looked as if all the workers had gone on a break and would be back at any time.

  Industrial vehicles had been parked haphazardly, some with loads still raised into the air. A conveyor meant to transport materials throughout the facility still had half-filled compartments, waiting to be loaded and sent on their way to destinations unknown.

  “Okay, I’ve been looking it over and did the same thing we did when looking for the fusion cores. The red areas are high levels of radiation. Yellow for medium, green for safe.”

  From what I could see, there was overwhelmingly more red than yellow and green. “Looks like there’s only one way out,” I remarked.

  “Hopefully it’s all passable,” said Nell, finally speaking again.

  My lips tightened into a frown. I hadn’t thought of that.

  A slight tremor shook the ground and I looked up sharply.

  “Did you feel—”

  The roar of an enraged Boneclaw echoed from the tunnel we’d just exited.

  “Break time’s over,” I said, turning to Mark. “Take point since you have an idea where we’re going.”

  He nodded and took off in the direction of the first green marker I’d seen. The rest of us followed close on his heels.

  “At least Tiberius couldn’t fit in the tunnel,” Nell said to me.

  “Maybe not him, but Boneclaws created it,” I said darkly. “At least one of them is small enough to get through it.”

  We fell into silence, trailing after Mark as he led us deeper into the darkened facility.

  “Is there any way to get the power back on?” asked Jennifer Murphy, a woman I recognized from scavenging jaunts.

  We were backtracking for the third time after hitting another dead end of collapsed rubble. I knew we weren’t lost, but with the snaking path through identical rooms, I was having trouble keeping my bearings.

  “No, Janus had the power off for safety reasons,” Mark explained.

  “How are you getting a signal then?” asked Don.

  It was a fair question and I waited to hear Mark’s answer.

  “Different system. The Eternals wanted to have a way to communicate in case they lost power, so each facility had its own tritium core. Our compound was the one that handled communications,” he said, rattling off the information as if he’d been waiting for someone to ask just that question.

  Knowing Mark, that was probably the case.

  “Which way now?” I asked when we reached a junction with three connected passages.

  He studied the map for a second then pointed left. “We came from the right. It’s a dead end behind us. That way leads to a yellow area though.”

  “Not much of a choice,” I said, waving my arms wide to indicate he should take the lead again.

  This passage took us through a series of small rooms that looked like the office portion of the production facility. The map took us through the maze of cubicles and communal areas, most untouched.

  “Anybody hungry?” Don joked after we passed a vending machine with packages of food still inside.

  Even Lambert snorted at that.

  “If you want to chance nearly two millennia old food, be my guest,” I said, then made an exaggerated gagging noise.

  The exit led to the warehouse that held the assembly line, and we entered it warily, unsure of what we might find.

  “Stay behind me,” Mark warned us. “The radiation is higher to our left and right, but if we stay on this path, it should be okay.”

  Even with the map and Mark leading the way, progress was slow. Unlike where we entered, most everything was in shambles. Judging from the wide-scale destruction, fallout from the collapse had been the worst here.

  “Watch your step,” I told the others. “Not all of this looks stable.”

  A far-off thump reminded all of us that we weren’t alone.

  We’d left the Boneclaw tunnel behind in a hurry, wanting to put as much distance between us and the enemy as possible, and gone into the large warehouse that Mark promised would lead us out. Perhaps ten minutes after that, one of the creatures ran out of the tunnel, alerting us with its thunderous steps.

  The video Janus showed us from the era when the assembly line was up and running looked nothing like the scene before us now. A few areas were blackened and burned out husks, the site of some kind of explosion.

  Robots tasked with the handling of radioactive material lay twisted and broken, their protective shielding cracked or completely destroyed.

  To my knowledge, the facility had been checked for a potential explosion, but none was found. At the time, no one wanted to risk radiation poisoning, and this was one area that had never been scavenged.

  The cores we scavenged currently were completed units that had been shipped from this facility and were already stockpiled at the other two. The Eternals had built the fusion core compound with catastrophe in mind, making sure to include a layer between it and the rest of the cave system. That way, no radiation could leak out. We had treatments of course, in case of emergency, but had never had to use them.

  The ones who survived the chaos after the Boneclaws’ escape and the ensuing destruction had opted to just close it all up, turn the power off, and forget about it. Nothing had been salvaged, including the dead.

  We discovered that last part when a resource handler named Alix Thurman squealed, making the rest of us jump.

  She stumbled back, pointing at something behind a vehicle used for transporting heavy loads of material.

  I eased over to her and shone the light on the dark lump she was staring at. It was a person, or had been once, lying facedown on the ground.

  “Nothing but clothes and bone,” I told her. “It can’t hurt you.”

  She grimaced, looking embarrassed. “I know that. Sorry, it just freaked me out.”

  “It’s okay,” I replied. “But something might have heard that. Mark, are we getting closer?”

  He nodded. “Once we get through here, we just have to go down three levels. From there, there are a number of exits that will take us to the main cave system.”

  We started walking again, only to pause once more when Nell signaled for us to stop.

  “What is it?” I asked, thinking she might have seen another body.

  She put a finger to her lips and pointed the other one at her ear. “It’s getting louder,” she mouthed.

  I went still and strained my ears. A few seconds later, I heard it: clicking noises, like Boneclaws talking, then a soft thump.

  My eyes widened. “They must be moving carefully so we don’t hear them as well,” I whispered. “Mark, you have to pick up the pace. They’re closer than we thought.”

  Mark started speed walking. I jogged a little to catch him so he had the light to see by. He almost tripped over some debris.
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br />   “Steady,” I told him.

  We had almost cleared the warehouse floor when a crash came from behind us. A loading door crumpled inward with the force of something smashing into it then started to tear away from its track.

  A hairy white arm stuck through the opening and swiped with its clawed hand.

  “Go!” I yelled.

  Mark ran first, checking to make sure the rest of us were behind him, then sprinting forward again. We followed him through piles of ruined building as the Boneclaw screeched and broke through the rest of the door.

  I was out of breath, dragging in great gulps of air when at last the end of the warehouse came into view. Everything hurt and my lungs were on fire, but we were too close to stop now.

  “It’s there!” Mark yelled, pointing at a wall coming up fast.

  As we drew closer, I could see what he was talking about. A derelict elevator stood half open, as if it had been trying to close when the power went out. That wouldn’t do us any good, but where there was an elevator there had to be stairs.

  Scanning, I saw the emergency sign to the left of the elevator, its red arrow pointing the way to a manual door. If we could cross the fifty meters to it, everything would be fine. There was no chance in hell even the smallest Boneclaw could make it in there.

  A transport lift sat to one side, along with a few overturned cases of fusion cores, but not much else. If we kept to one side, it would only take a few seconds to cross.

  “Wait!” Prime Lambert was waving his hands frantically and yelling to get our attention.

  I skidded to a stop, searching for the source of his concern, and saw it immediately.

  The expanse of floor we stood on shook and groaned. At first, I thought that was what he was warning us about. Then Lambert pointed at the ground and I saw it.

  A fusion core lay there. It wouldn’t have been a big deal under normal circumstances. The core housing had been designed to be safe to handle without protective gear, which we did regularly. Unless the protective casing was damaged, as this one appeared to be. Whatever had happened to break the casing had also torn through the floor. The metal sagged and groaned with every step, and the glowing core rattled with every motion.