by Eric Flint
A hasty hair-dyeing followed. "I thought I'd try blond, once upon a time. Fortunately, I'm terrible at throwing stuff away." Double braids, and a quick down-and-dirty paint job and they were on way, Lani eavesdropping on the police channel. Howard was just too big to go unspotted for too long.
Yet it would seem that he had. He'd vanished. Lani even heard someone getting instructions to search the protein production unit.
***
The ceiling had lifted. It had taken Howard thirty-two tries, before something moved, with a sound of tearing metal. A little stud popped and the roof rose three inches, tearing the next stud. Looking up, Howard could see that the room above was dark. He dropped the ceiling boards down and waited. No one came to investigate the noise, so he lifted again. Another stud tore free. The assembly method was tongue-and-groove, quick to assemble and impervious to rot. Very useful, light and easy. It was similar to the old barn, a relic that had collapsed under too much hay, but was made of something that wasn't wood.
And now that he'd lifted it, it was possible to get the tongue out of the groove. It wouldn't go back down, leaving a finger-wide gap. With a lever, he'd be out of here in thirty seconds. Unfortunately, he didn't have a lever. All he had was himself. It took him quite some time to get the next boards to part, giving him a hand-width gap. Then he managed to haul himself up and feel into the room above. His hand hit a chair leg. He grabbed it, pulled it into the crack. A lever.. .
… And the sound of footsteps coming down the passage to his cell. Hastily Howard dropped down and went to a far corner of the cell. There was a piece of chair leg sticking through the corner of the roof. Howard sat down on the floor. Maybe they'd look down at him.
It was a little male with two bowls. The man was graying, and his face was lined and tired.
And he did not just look down.
All he said, very quietly, as he passed the bowls through the bars: "Run to the badlands near the core."
He turned and walked away, leaving Howard with water, a sort of stew, and some idea of direction. The food was not particularly tasty, but it seemed wholesome. They weren't cruel to prisoners in that way, at least. The water was even more welcome after all the effort. But the hope that there was somewhere to go to was sweeter. He set the empty bowls down and took hold of the chair-leg with vigor.
A minute later he was standing in a dark room-the only light coming from his cell below.
Howard was a tidy worker by nature. He slipped the tongues into the grooves and put the floor-ceiling back, before even thinking of trying the door he'd spotted in the light from his cell. It was not locked and led onto a passage, lit with dim-set glow-lights. He walked quietly down the passage until he found a door marked "Fire Exit. Emergencies only."
Under the circumstances, using it seemed reasonable. He walked out, closed it, and walked down a fire-escape to freedom. A freedom he intended to keep, along with his testicles. He'd had time to think of strategy. These women had everything done by machine. They lived in a different world to the society of Brethren, but the basic design of the habitat was close to identical. Howard would bet that they did no crawling along the water-arterials to check for leaks, like the Brethren did. He'd spotted one of the belled arterial walls when they came in. It was a bare hundred yards off. Of course, he'd have to find an access door, but there was usually one every few hundred meters. He simply had to wait for a lull in the passing people and vehicles-not hard, even here in this town, as it was plainly after the working day and things were slowing down.
He reached the water arterial unobserved, and found an access door. For a horrible moment he thought that it was locked in some way, but it was simply stiff from lack of use. He crouched down and got inside, pulled it behind him, and began crawling. He wished, briefly, that he was as small as the local men. He crept onwards. He wanted to rescue Kretz. He wanted the sheer joy of wearing clothing, but first he wanted to be as far from these women and sharp knives as possible.
Then, in the sheltering darkness, there was something else. Something with green and red eyes that flickered. Howard nearly knocked himself unconscious, trying to turn and flee, before realizing that it was a machine. It flashed lights at him-and then began to reverse, far faster than he had been able to crawl. So Howard crawled on. True to his memory of the water system of home, this too came to a larger belled tunnel-with a larger pipe system and just as little space for a man.
It was no place for a man. Only, there were men here. Men, and light.
They had weapons. Knives. They were smiling, though.
"We're not going to find him, if the force can't," said Lani, dispirited, when they paused in a quiet corridor. "I think we need to split up. At least that way we can cover more ground, and if I'm caught, you won't be implicated."
"That might be true," admitted Dr. Geriant. "But I was planning on using you, and your ability to look and act the part to get Kretz and me to the airlock."
"It won't work," said Lani. "They've stationed officers at my home, and at the airlock he came in. They're expecting him to head there."
"That wasn't the airlock I had in mind," explained Amber. "There is the forward one. You could take us to that."
"I'm sorry," Lani said with genuine guilt. This woman had helped her, after all. "I've got to find Howard first. I'd gladly help you if I could. I'd even gladly go with you, but it wouldn't work. There are alarms on the airlocks. It's part of the original system."
The Chief Microbiologist slapped her own cheek. "Of course! I didn't think of that. Don't worry about the alarm. I have the system codes… but, aha! We can ask the system if this Howard of yours been detected by any of the machines in the system."
Lani blinked. "You can do that?"
"Oh, yes," the scientist said casually. "It's quite possible. All I need is an approximate weight-you say that he's very large?" she said, opening up a portable computer and linking with the web.
Lani gaped at her. "Do you know how easy that would make police work, Dr. Geriant?"
The woman scientist raised her eyebrows and smiled wryly. "Call me Amber. Yes. That's why I never pointed the idea out to anyone. Now, how much would you guess he weighs? Approximately?"
"About… I don't know, two hundred and fifty pounds?" said Lani.
"We'll try that. There are a few women in that bracket, but it does make the search narrower." She looked at the screen. "Ah. Two hundred and eighty-three pounds, moving here, at a speed of fifteen miles per hour. Let's get some more detail… Good grief. There are four of them, on a pipe-maintenance machine, heading inward to the core, toward sector Zed Alpha 32. That's one of the damaged sections."
"Four? He's been captured?"
She looked at the screen and tapped something in. "The other three weigh less than one hundred pounds each. Males, at a guess. No, I would say that he's with some of the runaways."
"We need to rescue him!" said Lani, starting the scoot. "They're dangerous!"
Amber looked at her, very squarely. "To us, yes. To him, no. He's quite safe, except from being caught by one of the patrols that the force periodically sweep those areas with. We aren't."
Lani shook her head. "We don't know that he's safe. Look, there are only three. I can deal with three easily enough."
"And then?" asked Amber.
"And then I'll help you get to the airlock, and out of here. I think… we might have to go too," said Lani, quietly. "It doesn't sound too bad, back where he came from. Let's go."
Amber had to smile at the child. She was pretty, but really not her type. Too large and Juno-esque by half. Lani had absolutely no idea what anything outside her own environment was like, but she was plainly so cockstruck that she was ready to leave Diana. Well, it suited the rest of them. Amber wasn't going to point out, just yet, that "back" to her Howard's habitat was not going to be possible.
Instead she engaged the transmission of her car, and they went up, corewards, heading into lower G and areas that showed definite signs of bre
akdown. The lighting had gone in a number of places, and so too had the irrigation network and with it the plant life.
It made sense to concentrate the system's resources on the working areas, she supposed, but this was alarming. In downtown Diana one forgot that there was a problem. This was not an area that anyone lived in these days, but it had been very popular up to a hundred years back as a retirement haven for the elderly. Less strain on the heart, and on old joints. Now it was the sort of environment where only the brave or the foolhardy went without a police escort. And not just one policeman, either. Preferably about twenty.
Well, she had a few surprises for any troublemakers, if the worst came to the worst. They possibly wouldn't be enough to help. Unlike that young woman, she was not a fighter.
She continued to track the pipe-maintenance engine, until it stopped. A door to the arterial opened… and Amber then realized she should have watched the surrounding area more carefully before coming to a stop.
There were a good number of people in the shadows. People and the gleam of steel.
It was amazing how much less attractive a life of adventure suddenly seemed.
***
Howard had found the ride on the back of the pipe-checking machine an education, not only in how the work might be done mechanically but also in how men-runaways-had adapted their lives around the system. They used what the women running Diana ignored. It appeared that they'd learned the schedules of these machines, and used them rather like Lani used the trolley-bus system out in the open. The runaways also plainly had more contact with the kept males than the women rulers realized. They knew who he was, and that he'd escaped-and that he was being searched for.
"We get traitors and spies, sometimes," said the leader of the three men, a swarthy-skinned fellow with a gap between his teeth. It was hard to see more in the dim light that shone from the instrument panel. "But you're probably all right. How did you know about the hidden ways?"
It took Howard a while to figure this one out. The doors to arterials weren't obvious-unless you know what you were looking for. "Among the Brethren they are not a secret," he explained.
Apparently his explanation was less than clear. "Who are the 'Brethren'? Have they told any women?" asked the scar-faced one, worriedly.
"You are quite safe," reassured Howard. "The Brethren are the people of New Eden. My habitat." He was proud of that word. "I am the first man to come from there to here. Women do not rule there. God does."
"Is he a man?"
Howard was spared having to answer this one by the pipe-checker slowing down. "Time for us to get off," said the gap-toothed leader.
They jumped, and, with a small flashlight, gap-tooth led them to the door. "Welcome to the kingdom of men," he said sardonically, opening it.
Outside was dim. A number of the light-emitters were missing and the place was full of shadows and… people. Mostly short men-but there was a surprise too. A strange woman and Kretz in a car, with a woman beside it, swinging her nightstick in a defensive arc.
"Howard!" she yelled. There was no mistaking the relief in her voice, even though, until he heard it, he hadn't recognized the blond-braided woman.
He waded through the armed men to them, holding up his hands in a pacifying gesture. "Peace be with you," he said. Lani dropped her nightstick and hugged him, fiercely. One of the men decided this was a good opportunity to grab her. Howard caught him by the hair. "Now. There is no need to fight," he said, trying to calm the men and cope with being hugged at the same time. Holding off the small attacker was easier. "No one needs to do anyone any harm."
"She's a cop! We kill them if we catch them on their own," said gap-tooth, "after we've had our fun with them."
"Yeah. You want to try your luck?" said Lani, snatching up her nightstick again, trying to push Howard aside.
"Calm down," said the woman from the car. "Or I'll have to shoot some of you." Her voice quivered. She sounded far from calm herself. She had some device in her hand that Howard failed to recognize, but several of the men obviously did. A frightened keening echoed around them.
"We're runaways too. And Lani is a wanted woman, I believe. Not a 'cop.' "
"What?" The shocked exclamation came from Lani.
"I don't think that you can still be part of the force, Lani. Not after beating up several officers in your attempt to find Howard."
"Uh. I suppose not," said Lani, looking shamefaced. "Look, we just came to fetch Howard. We're out of here."
"No," said gap-tooth firmly. "You-and him especially, know too much. And also, this stinks. How did you get here at the same time as him? How did you know where to come to, to find him?"
"A computer system I have never bothered to show the police," the other woman said. "It is possible…"
She never got any further because someone snatched the weapon out of her hands and the little men swarmed over them.
Howard was totally unprepared for the ferocity of it, or the suddenness. They were trussed up before he could even start to struggle. Howard had to admit that he'd done more to get in Lani's way than anything else.
"What are you doing this for?" he demanded.
"They're women and you're a traitor," snarled gap-tooth.
"I'm not," protested Howard. "I hardly know who you are. All we want is go to where we need to. We're not intending any harm to you."
"Yeah?" said gap-tooth sardonically. "Well you're not going to have a chance. Spread their legs, boys. Captains get first share. Those of you who like a bit of bum can have him."
They'd tied Howard up well, by their standards, but not by the standards of the furious disgust and rage that went through his thews right then. As Lani screamed furiously, the cord they'd used snapped at the same time as his temper did.
"Have you no decency!" he roared, snatching up the fallen nightstick and laying about him as if he were threshing corn.
They were small, and he was in such a rage that he had forgotten that he was a man of peace. But there were still too many of them.
Then there were a sharp series of bangs.
"Stand still or I will shoot all of you!" said Kretz. He emerged from behind the car with a smoking metal pipe in his hands. Thinking back now, Howard realized that he must have fled in the first attack. At least he'd come back!
Gap-tooth had the device that someone had struck from Amber's hand. He pointed it at Howard. "I'll shoot him first." Howard stalked towards him.
Gap-tooth was standing just above Lani, where he'd been about to exercise his "rights" as a captain of this filth.
The device went flying. Lani's second kick sent him sprawling.
Howard helped her to her feet. "Get the gun," she said urgently. "And then untie us."
"Gun?" Sister Thirsdaughter had said that a "gun" was what had inflicted those wounds on Kretz. That metal device was a gun? He picked it up, and a fallen knife.
"Don't get between me and them, Howard," said Kretz. Too late-several darted away up the passage.
"They'll call the others," said gap-tooth savagely, as Howard cut Lani free.
Her first act with her hands free was to snatch the gun-thing from his hand. Click something. "Damn safety was still on." She pointed it at gap-tooth. "It won't help you if they call anyone. I'm gonna blow your stupid balls off first." She took a stance, both legs apart, and the gun-thing held in both hands.
Howard paused in cutting free the other woman, suddenly realizing what was going to happen here. He stepped in front of her.
"Get out of the way, Howard." Lani's eyes had a dangerous glint to them.
His temper had cooled now, and with the cooling his conscience had returned. He'd hit… and hurt those men. Some of them were still lying on the ground. "No," he said calmly. "I cannot let you do this. It is a sin."
"That's what they were going to do to us, you idiot!" she snapped.
The defiance was not all out of gap-tooth either. "You treat us like that, why shouldn't we do the same or worse to you, b
itch?"
It was an awkward question, but for once Howard had an easy answer. "Do unto others as ye would have them do unto you."
"Yeah? And if they turn around and kick you in the teeth?" said the gap-toothed one. "What you do then? Give them the rest of your teeth?"
That was less easy to answer. "Rape is not right. Neither is violence."
"We were just doing what they do to us. A woman's got to know her place up here," said gap-tooth sullenly. "And we share and share alike here when we get one. Not fair that you keep her to yourself, big one. Two is greedy, anyway!"
Howard hadn't thought of it quite like that. "She's not mine. None of them are."
"Correctly speaking, he's mine," said Lani crossly. "Although it doesn't seem to have gotten through to him."
"Can we get out of here, and you can argue about who belongs to whom somewhere less dangerous?" said the other woman.
Lani nodded. "You've got a point. And now we've got these jerks to avoid as well as the force."
"I've thought about it. I can get the computer to simply give me all warm bodies, not just those over a certain weight. We should be able to avoid any more charming incidents. I do begin to understand why Diana came into being."
Lani had picked up her scoot, with one hand, and kicked the stand down. She moved towards the remaining men. "Don't worry, I won't shoot anyone-as long as they cooperate. We'll keep this one as a hostage." She grabbed gap-tooth, twisting his arm up behind him. He squealed. "I'm not hurting you, yet. But I will if you don't shut up. I'll let you go as soon as we're in the clear, idiot. All right, the rest of you lot. Move out and we'll move out too… In opposite directions. Those of you who can walk take those who can't. And don't try anything stupid. I was top of my marksmanship class."
They backed off. Lani slipped the weapon into her belt, took a pair of cuffs off it, and handcuffed the gap-toothed man. "Open the back. I'll put him in there," she said to the woman in the car.