by A Keuser
“All nonessential personnel are out.”
Nala twisted off a pair of wires, and laughed, despite herself. “Just you and me then?”
“Nearly.”
“And if I can’t get this fixed?”
There was a long pause before Angela said, “If that’s the case, I don’t want to be there when you let Chadha know.”
As if in response to her name, the comm crackled and Chadha asked. “How is your Tower coming along, Klef?”
"Not terribly quickly. There were some hurdles, but I'm at the panel and it's not as much of a mess as I expected."
The floor rumbled beneath her feet and she tried to steady herself.
Tapping her comm function, she asked, "Did you feel that, or is it just here in the C Tower?"
"Nothing here," Angela said before Chadha reported the same.
“I need to test the stability and functionality of these changes before I give you the go ahead to reopen this section.”
Chadha’s pause was as Nala had expected. She waited, still working as the partner dealt with her misgivings.
When the crackle of the comm came through, Chadha said, “I will trust your judgment.”
Nala reported another rumble, and the partner added, "The foundation of the C Tower must have become unstable when the other tremors happened."
Chadha's lack of concern was concerning.
Nala pulled her tablet from her bag and shook her head at the woman’s coldness. "And you want me to give you the all-clear to open the doors back up?"
Chadha's next words were calm and spoken slowly, each measured in its turn. "I won’t risk the lives of our colonists, but neither will I give up on our home."
"Good," Nala said as she tapped through the start-up procedures on her tablet. “I've got the panel fixed so we'll probably be able to get the system to accept it again. Have someone out there work on that."
"What are you going to do?" Angela asked.
"I need to know what's causing these tremors and how we can stop them. Until I know we won't experience any more, I can’t allow full access to the C Tower."
There was a tense silence from the comm as Nala hurried down the corridor, not bothering to wait for the partner's response.
She ran into three more foamy impediments before she got to the tertiary command center. Stepping inside, she immediately back pedaled, grabbing hold of the hatch to keep herself upright.
The floor in front of her held a hole, the edges of which were crumbling.
"You are not going to believe what I found...."
Another rumbling shook through the tower and her comms went buggy.
With the shaking of the colony around her, the hole widened.
And she fell.
Nala woke with a start, her head reeling and in total darkness.
“What happened?” she asked, but received no response. “Angela? Chadha? Can I get a status update?”
In the darkness, she took a moment to make sure nothing was broken, that her suit was still sealed, and that she was not about to do herself more harm.
Depressing the secondary transmission button on her suit’s controls, she said, "Hello? Can anyone hear me?"
Nothing came through the comms, and she vented her frustration via a selection of her favorite curses.
She stood, carefully, and dusted herself off, fumbling for her suit's lamps. Smacking the button - twice because the first time gave her a flicker of initialization - her suit’s lamps flared and she blinked at the suddenness brightness.
Around her, the space was not overlarge. In her confusion, it took her a moment to realize what it was – a tunnel.
She'd read the original reports from when the tunnel system had been proposed - meant to connect each of the colonies via a small subwaylike system that would allow for easier movement of workers and better collaboration between the scientific branches housed in each. In reading, she'd also discovered that the tunnels had all been sealed off and filled in to minimize terrorist threats.
"Apparently they missed one."
Behind her, a massive pile of rubble filled in the tunnel, but it also blocked the area between her and the hole through which she'd fallen. She couldn’t climb back up, and she didn’t have enough air in reserve to wait and hope for help to arrive. She had only one option and that was to move forward.
Taking each step gingerly, she moved away from the rubble pile.
A pair of tracks cut a line in the middle of the floor and Nala kicked one rail.
Her comms crackled to life.
A trio of chaotic shouts accosted her ears. Their words were too garbled to be clear. Then the comm line cut out again.
“Can anyone hear me?” Nala asked. Nothing . She glanced tentatively down at the track and stepped on it again. Once more, the static chaos erupted in her ears.
Depressing her transmitter, she spoke as calmly as she could. "I've fallen into the old tunnel system they never put into commission. I'm alright, but can’t get back to C Tower. What's going on up there?"
Another garbled and too-loud pulse of comm chatter assaulted her ears. She caught four words that made her blood chill. "Explosion" "Failure" and "Tower Collapse" were not words that created a happy image.
With her foot still on the rail, she depressed the transmitter again. "I'm going to work my way out of here. I don't know which colony this leads to, or even what direction I'm headed. If you can hear me, don't waste your time digging for me. Make sure everyone else is safe."
She swallowed the worry that had collected in her throat and turned back toward the darkness that awaited.
The lights from her suit shone a halo around her that spread five feet in every direction before it faded into the surrounding darkness. She started off slowly, checking herself for any pains or concerns she hadn't noticed before. Everything felt alright. Glancing once more behind her, she took off at a loping jog - quick enough that she felt like she was making progress, but slow enough she never got ahead of her light. The decreased gravity threatened to send her careening off in the wrong direction, and she forced herself to keep her progress in check.
Bounding for what felt like hours, she started to lose track of time and distance.
She didn’t have enough control to stop herself when she reached the end of the line. A metal wall capped the tunnel behind a maintenance skiff that sat empty and abandoned on the rails.
The wall seemed to cut into the tunnel's curved sides. The door set in the middle of it had no locking mechanism. Nala did not know whether to be thankful for that fact or wary of what lay on the other side. When people had no fear of trespassers it could mean many things, but Nala still tended toward the maudlin.
With little confidence, Nala opened the door and stepped into an airlock that had lights of its own. She killed her suit’s lights to save their battery and used the airlock’s manual controls to get through to the other side.
The sound of a heavy lock behind her and air rushing in overhead were equally terrifying and relieving.
She could not get through the door into whichever colony she’d found fast enough. Once inside, she took an unnecessarily relieved breath. The compartment in front of her was cold, empty… and noticeably ventilated. Her suit’s readouts confirmed the air was abundant and breathable.
The antiquated locking mechanisms and bulkhead materials were laid out in a configuration similar to that of the lowest levels of Lunar Colony Six… but her home did not have an underground entrance. At least, the schematics said they had never put in the underground station. So what Colony was this?
Taking a risk, Nala pulled off her helmet, but kept it close at hand… just in case.
She walked cautiously through the corridor, wishing she had a weapon.
Silence met her at every junction, and then, at the fourth intersection, she heard what sounded like the low murmur of a human voice.
Glancing at the empty halls in the other two directions, she carefully made her way toward
the sound. The corridor opened into a small compartment with no airlock. A handful of crates and boxes were stacked haphazardly about.
A slumped figure rested against the pile of boxes, shoulders hunched.
Stepping around the perimeter of the room as quietly as she could, Nala kept to the shadows as she searched for signs of a trap.
When his face came into view, she flinched.
"Boudri?" Her voice was barely a whisper, but he startled at his name and peered around the room through the one of his eyes that was not swollen shut.
Nala stepped carefully around him, still unsure what part he played in this. He looked up at her and she could see his split lip in addition to his bruised eye. Swaying, he blinked at her in confusion.
"Y-you can't be here," he stammered, his confusion quickly turned to fear as he struggled against bindings she hadn’t noticed until now. "You have to get back to the Colony. They're going to destroy it; you have to get everyone out."
"Shhhhhhh," she patted his shoulder as gently as she could.
"The colony is being managed,” she said. “Oh, Ethan, who did this to you?"
He rocked gently. "They didn't need to hurt anyone. They’re after you...they only wanted me out of the way; said I was uncooperative."
His hands were tied tightly behind his back. The bindings cut into his skin and the once white cording was stained the dark brown of dried blood. His skin was ashen, and she was afraid he would lose consciousness soon.
Trying to keep a hopeful, soothing tone, Nala said, "Let's get you untied and you can tell me what happened, okay?"
She dug through her bag, but the snips she’d used earlier must have been lost when she’d tumbled into the tunnel. She pushed that thought aside and wrestled a knife from its sheath and carefully freed his hands.
Pulling her water bottle from its place in her bag, she passed it to him and he greedily drank it down, only pausing to take slower sips when she warned him off his near drowning gulps.
She had a snack in her bag - a necessary precaution held over from the days when she'd given her now deceased employees time off and taken on both of their shifts - rummaging for it now, she handed it to him as he finished the water. He looked more aware, but that didn’t mean anything.
"Feel better?" she asked.
He nodded, but did not vocalize a response.
"Where are we?" She asked, somewhat rhetorically, but Boudri answered.
"Lunar Colony Three," he said with a cough as she gave him her secondary water bottle.
"I didn't think I'd gone that far. It’s amazing it still has operational life support."
“Apparently there’s a lot we didn’t know about Three, like the fact it used to house weaponry that could have destroyed half the Earth.”
That sent an uncomfortable shiver through her. “You can’t be serious.”
She had no idea what the other colonies were up to, but it was still in her nature to think better of them than that.
Boudri looked at the crates he leaned against wearily. “I wish it was a joke.”
Helping him to his feet, Nala cursed his lack of a space suit. If they were as cut off from help as she expected, there was no chance they could get out.
“Why did they put you in here?” She asked, glancing around the room once again.
He laughed and wiped his hands on his pants. “They thought I was annoying.”
Smiling, she handed him a small container of hand sanitizer from her bag. “Well, they’d be right about that, wouldn’t they? But who is ‘they’?”
“You have mentioned it to me on several occasions before.” He winced as he handed her back the sanitizer. “Partner Dendrond got me transferred and then some friend of hers named Diana shanghaied me. They are working together. By the way, sorry about that call. I tried to give you hints they wouldn’t understand, but I don’t think I was successful.”
“To be honest, I was too distracted with other things to notice if you did.”
“I knew I wouldn’t be any help dead… but I did try to do my part.”
Nala glanced at him warily, “What did you do?”
"I tried to escape. This," he held up his still bloody wrists, "This isn't because I'm pretty."
Tossing him a bandage roll, she said, "You're definitely not that."
Wrapping his wrists with her help, Boudri lapsed back into silence.
"What happened?" she asked.
Boudri rolled his eyes and glanced toward the room’s exit. "Diana isn’t above boasting. She and Dendrond knew who you were… about your past. You apparently did something to piss them off, so they decided they'd screw you over... but they didn't want to hurt just you. They wanted to blame you for something so big anyone associated with you would fall under scrutiny.
"I think they meant for you to die in that skywalk bomb... if that had happened, the colony would have needed to be evaced until it was fixed and they'd done a dozen bomb sweeps."
"That doesn't explain the Aspersion hub... or how they killed my crew when both men were supposed to be on Earth."
"Kiln and Sharpo are dead?" He said, sounding more confused than sad. "Damn, I've been out of the loop."
"I'll tell you the whole story later. Let’s figure out how to get out of here and get someone out here to take care of this."
Nala led her friend down the corridor away from the airlock she’d arrived through; there was no chance they could get out the way she’d come. When they got to the next set of intersecting corridors, she paused, hoping Boudri would help her. He remained silent behind her and so she took her third choice.
The long ramp slowly worked its way upward and Nala hoped that was a good thing. When it ended at a large space filled with rows of boxes and crates, she had to hope they would find something with directions soon. She might have felt the signage on Six was redundant, but it was helpful when she needed it.
A sound echoed from down the corridor and she thanked her stars she didn't have to tell Boudri to get out of sight. He dropped to a crouch behind the crate to her left and they watched in silent stillness as Diana strode past, humming a popular tune. She ambled through the room with a smile plastered across her face and disappeared down the tunnel through which they’d come.
Waiting longer than they probably needed to, Nala finally turned back to Boudri. "If she's going to check on you, we need to find our way out – now."
“Yeah, there’s not much chance of her missing my absence.”
Nala started toward the doorway in the far wall, and stopped as soon as movement caught her eye.
Swinging to her left, she swallowed the curse that might have escaped her lips.
"Where do you think you're going?" The gun Eri Dendrond had leveled at her was not standard issue. A missed shot could punch a hole through the colony's exterior wall behind her and then they'd all be dead. If Boudri hadn't been with her, Nala might have risked it.
When she didn’t answer, Boudri stepped in front of her. "Just for a stroll. It has been a crazy week and I was really just looking for some normalcy."
Eri’s eyes flicked to him for a moment and then back to Nala.
“You’ve been behind this the whole time,” Nala said, not waiting for confirmation. “You’re a very good actress.”
“It wasn’t all acting.” Eri smiled. "I tried to convince Diana we didn't need to kill you after her bomb attempt failed."
Nala felt sick. "At least not until you'd slept with me, right?"
Shrugging, Eri did not disagree. "It would have been a perk, but I wasn't going to hold a gun to your head."
Beside her, Ethan said, "Oh the irony."
Nodding in the direction Diana had gone, Eri said, "If that janitor hadn't found your peons... well, no point in pining over what might have been."
Holding tight to Boudri, Nala kept her tone as even as she could and said, "You are a heartless bitch."
Eri studied her for a moment, her mouth tight as though holding in a frown. "Not true, but
I'll allow you to be misinformed because it works out better for me."
Suddenly overloud echoes of footsteps clattered from the corridor through which Diana had disappeared, and Nala watched the ex-Partner’s hand, waiting for an opportunity to get the gun away from her. Eri barely acknowledged that her cohort was the one making the racket.
Diana jogged through the far corridor, her focus on the space behind her, not the one ahead. "Eri! The bastard's gone...." Her words trailed off as she came to a stop some feet behind her coconspirator.
Diana’s eyes narrowed on her, and Nala couldn’t help but feel as though her own skin was beginning to peel.
“Why is she still alive?” Diana asked, moving closer to Eri.
"She’s proven to be amusing. That’s gained her a stay of execution."
Fists balled at her hips, Diana took a step forward, her icy glare directed solely on Nala. "Kill her – now," she said.
Nala fought the urge to react to the pure hatred directed at her, and instead held Eri’s gaze. Eri studied her like a woman ordering dessert, hesitated, and then smiled.
"No," she said, without turning back to Diana.
It was a mistake.
Nala saw the rage blossom on Diana's face a moment before the woman snapped. Diana grabbed Eri by the back of her neck and swung her around. Eri let out a startled cry before bashing the gun against Diana’s arm. For a half second Nala watched as the two women struggled, then she grabbed Boudri's hand and ran.
Boot soles screeched as she ran as fast as she could down a dimly lit corridor. Gunshots sounded behind her and she prayed the crates would catch any stray rounds. She didn't know if they were shooting at each other or at her and Boudri. She didn't slow to take the corner, slamming into the wall and using the momentum to propel her down the intersecting hall.
That was when Boudri pulled his hand from hers. Only then did she slow her pace. As they jogged through the corridor, Ethan kept pace – but just barely.
"Do you have any idea where this goes?" she asked as she slowed to a stop and glanced behind them.
He shook his head vigorously, puffing out labored breaths. She shouldn't have run him so hard, but she couldn’t leave him behind either.
Looking back over her shoulder, she tried to slow her breathing. They weren't far enough away to let their guard down, but they didn’t appear to be in immediate danger anymore... not that that couldn't change at any moment.