Kendric helped T.C. up from under the conveyor that had sheltered them. When he saw the large rock that had smashed it, he realized it was big enough to have pulped both of them had it not hit the carballoy framework braces of the belt instead. The air was foul with an indescribable stench and seemed to be even hotter than normally. Had the air pumps been interrupted?
Kendric strained to listen over the noise of the crowd. He couldn't be sure, but it sounded as though the pumps were still in operation. If so, they were not likely to be flooded, and fresh air would continue to flow from the surface. All in all, they had gotten off lightly in the quake. Then he saw the boulder that had fallen, saw the color of the water around it, and shuddered.
The struggling mass of slaves continued to fight their way toward the tunnel entrance. The large boulder had blocked the ramp completely, however, and the only way to the top of the ramp was by scaling the nearly vertical sides of the ramp or scrambling up and over the boulder—neither an easy task. Those mobbed at the mouth of the tunnel were still in danger of being crushed by their comrades. Many of the slaves whom the boulder had missed had given up trying to breast that tide and were back in the water of The Pit again. They moved with grim and steady purpose, wading about or clambering over the freshly fallen rubble, helping those who had been injured and were in danger of drowning.
Kendric estimated that, of perhaps two hundred men and women working in The Pit, fifty or more had died. He patted T.C. on the arm, then waded toward the center of The Pit, looking to help the injured. After a second's hesitation, T.C. followed.
At that moment, Kendric recognized the hulking form of Van struggling with a boulder as big as he was near the center of The Pit. He was alternately struggling to move the rock and reaching down to pull someone's head up above the water. As Kendric got closer, he saw that the trapped slave was Casadren, the near-youngster who had stepped off the elevator with him that first day in the mine.
"Let me help!" He joined Van and put his shoulder to the boulder, but without noticeable effect. At Van's suggestion, he ducked down and concentrated on holding Casadren's head above water, allowing the giant to concentrate on shoving aside the massive boulder.
"Where does it hurt?" Kendric shouted into the young man's ear. From the size of the boulder, he imagined Casadren' s legs being pulped and mangled, him bleeding to death while they struggled to free him. Desperately, Kendric wondered what they might use as a tourniquet. His headband might serve, if he could figure out a way to get it in place.
Casadren's pulled his head up, spluttering mud. "Doesn't hurt," he managed to say. "Ankle pinned between the rocks.. .not hurt." After a moment, he looked puzzled. "It is getting awfully warm down there, though..."
Kendric wondered if, after all, Casadren's legs had been smashed. Might he be bleeding and not aware that his lower body had been crushed? Then he became aware of a feeling of intense heat in the water around him and realized the trapped man was right. It was getting hot.
The rock shifted under Van's straining muscles. Casadren screamed.
"Did it catch your leg?"
"No! Get it off! I'm burning! Burning!"
The water around the boulder erupted in bubbling, seething fury and Casadren screamed again. Kendric felt a wave of searing heat brush his legs as steam fumed from a geyser of water that blasted into the air only a few meters away.
The boulder shifted again and started to roll, but against Van's efforts, rather than with them. Kendric was dimly aware that the roaring had begun once more, that the rock walls of the pit were trembling and shaking as though pounded by the fist of some unseen giant. Casadren's head was yanked under the boiling water as the boulder rolled him down. His arm remained above water, slapping helplessly at the wall of rock above him. Kendric grasped the hand and pulled, but the muddy limb slipped from his grasp as the boulder continued its inexorable movement.
The screams from the slaves in the cavern redoubled now as rocks rained from the ceiling. The mist was thickening second by second until Kendric could scarcely see as far as The Pit's wall.
Steam! The water in The Pit was boiling in places and filling the cavern with steam!
He looked around wildly, searching for T.C.. He saw her nearby, hauling at the arms of a man trapped in a rockslide. Her face was turned away with the effort she was making, and she could not see what Kendric could see—that the man's body was gone from the waist down.
He grabbed her shoulder, pulling her away. "He's dead! Leave him!" Somehow, he stumbled with herthrough mud that was alive with steam and the splashing of falling rock. The water, boiling only in several isolated spots, was rapidly becoming too hot to bear. The survivors struggling to get out of The Pit crowded their way into the tunnel entrance above the ramp. The rotten-egg stench of burning sulfur choked the air.
One of the conveyors was close at hand and still operating. Kendric scooped T.C. up in his arms and dropped her on the moving belt, then scrambled up beside her. He looked back for Van, saw that the big man had broken for the ramp and was smashing his way through the struggling slaves toward the tunnel.
"Van!" he shouted. "No, Van! Over here!" There could be no escape that way, certainly. If the elevator was still working at all, it would be jammed to capacity with ten or twelve people... and hundreds of slaves on every level must be battling one another now to find the elevator and climb on. There was another way.
Built to withstand Herculean stresses, the twin tubes of the vertical lifts beckoned, their hopper buckets still fed by power from the surface and moving. How long they would remain moving was anyone's guess, but they offered a better chance than the press of the mob driven to blind insanity in the tunnel. The right-hand tube, Kendric knew, led to the tailing dump on the side of the mountain, the left to the rows of cargo containers on the mine's upper level.
The right-hand tube offered a quick escape, but Kendric feared it. Dozens of similar tubes throughout the mountain would still be in operation, and the chances were all too great that they would be shot from the opening onto the mountain slope and immediately buried under tons of rock. If they did not first hurtle headlong over a cliff.
The left-hand tube would be safer. It traveled more slowly and was smaller, designed to carry the far smaller loads of ore-bearing rock to the surface. If rock was still falling from the lifts into the hoppers, it would be mostly smaller stuff, and not traveling as fast.
Kendric took T.C.'s hand, pointed to the left, and prepared to jump before the conveyor reached the end of its run and tossed them into the wrong opening.
A fresh chorus of screams made him turn his head. Slaves were streaming back into The Pit now, trampling still more of their slower, or weaker, or injured comrades. The tunnel behind them glowed red, and a deadly yellow fog gushed from the opening. Kendric saw the black-encrusted, guttering red glow of liquid rock filling the tunnel mouth as they reached the end of the conveyor belt.
He and T.C. jumped together as the water remaining in The Pit behind them flashed into steam. The shriek of steam drowned the shriek of people suddenly burned as lava surged from the tunnel into the Pit.
The hopper was small, little more than a bucket attached by its side to a metal belt running up into blackness. The distance between one hopper and the next was so small that T.C. and Kendric had to bend nearly double to fit, with T.C. in Kendric's lap and their knees braced up high near their ears. The ferriplast cover to the lift raced down at an appalling speed, and they cringed farther back against the steel belt to avoid touching that deadly wall and perhaps losing a foot or a hand. They could not see it in the hot, heavy blackness, but they could sense its hurtling and deadly motion only centimeters away.
Sound engulfed them—the clatter of the moving lift and the deeper, throatier roar of the mountain around and below them. After that last instant's blast of steam, it seemed that they were safe from the final explosion of The Pit, but the air in the lift's shaft seared the lungs and left them gasping for breath. They wer
e aware of the tremors that continued to wrack the mountain, but those were more distant now and felt like the ones coming from below.
"What if the lift breaks down while we're in it?" T.C. yelled in Kendric's ear.
The walls of the tube were lost in the darkness, but he could picture her bare back and shoulder perilously close to the lift tunnel wall as they raced up the shaft. Somehow he managed to wiggle back a little, pulling her closer to him before answering with a shout of his own.
"Then we'll have a long climb!" He tried not to think about the difficulty of climbing from hopper bucket to bucket all the way up the 1 ift tube. How many meters down had they been on Level 3? Hundreds? Thousands? There was no way of knowing and he didn't want to guess. The blackness around them was absolute. T.C. was squeezed tightly against his chest, and he could feel her short, wet hair in his face. Try as he might, though, he could not see her and had to blink several times to convince himself that his eyes were actually open.
The mountain heaved and lurched again. A shock cracked like a whip through the lift tube kicking Kendric and T.C. from the bucket where they had squatted, and smashing them against the bucket close over their heads. They rebounded together and fell outward sprawling against the tunnel wall. For a horrid instant of blind fear, Kendric thought they were going to be torn to shreds in the moving machinery.
That never happened. The lift had jammed suddenly, freezing in place. They clung to one another for a moment, listening in the darkness. There were still deep rumbles from far below, but the mountain, for the time being, was still.
After a few breaths, Kendric loosened his grip on T.C. a bit. He felt her trembling, then realized that he was, too. "Are you all right?" He sensed her nod. "Good. We'd better start climbing."
TO: Morganen, Acting Flag Captain, Gael Warrior
FROM: Arda, V. Admiral, Cdr, Alba
DATE: 20 Sep 6830
TIME: 0945 H. (Alba Port Local)
SUBJECT: Orders
1. You are directed to complete final preparations for detaching Destroyer Gaidheal (GIS2) and Frigate Damadas (CIS 8) to independent command.
2. Gaidheal and Damadas instructed to commence boost no later than 1500 hours 22 Sep 6830. Course and T-space velocity to be downloaded into shipnavcomps no later than 1200 hours 22 Sep 6830.
3. Gaidheal and Damadas directed to report to Imperial Squadron 3 73 in vicinity of Targath, no later than 29 Sep 6830. Upon reporting, command to be transferred to Admiral Hogarth, Imperial Squadron 373, Cmdr.
4. Morganen, Gael Warrior, directed to personally ensure both vessels in readiness. Expect further orders one week.
5. Luck—C.E. (Signed)
Marius Arada, Vice Admiral FLEETOPGAELCLUST
Lenard Morganen took a last look at the orders displayed on his console screen, then glanced back up at the bridge main screen. It felt good to be back in the hotseat of the Gaidheal again. She had been his ship before his posting as acting CO of the Gael Warrior, and he found her more familiar and more comfortable than the battleship had ever been.
More, it was good to have a destination fed into the nav computers, and the bridge officers each reporting their stations ready for boost. He was not supposed to be in command here, of course, but they'd weighed the risks and decided that MacAllister and the others could cover for him aboard the Gael Warrior until his return.
Having brought the plan this far along, Lenard Morganen had no intention of being left behind!
The only thing wrong was that Caius Elliot had not come aboard for their last scheduled meeting before departure, had not sent a message to explain his absence. That worried Morganen, nagging at the back of his mind. He had tended to consider the bureaucrat's obsession with some shadowy "they" dogging his heels as either a touch of melodrama to convince his Gael companions of the urgency of their mission or the wild product of imagination. Though Morganen had doubled the normal standing dock watch around each of the squadron ships, none had reported mysterious loiterers or suspicious strangers. The most likely explanation of Elliot's disappearance was that the TOG administrator was busy with his plan to rescue the families of the Gael Squadron's crews, and either unable or unwilling to communicate with the Gaels for fear of compromising his work.
Elliot's warning that many close family members of the Squadron's crews had been "tagged" had proven to be accurate. TOG agents had already rounded up many of them, apparently having forced the planetary militia and Parliament to yield to Imperial pressure. There were no details yet, but many of the squadron's crewmen began to receive frantic messages through Alba Port communications until the government shut down planet-to orbit communications. That ban had been lifted only a few hours earlier.
When men in the fleet tried to put messages through to home, there was only silence now from the base housing around Port Balmarin and from residences elsewhere across Alba. Morganen no longer had family on Alba, but most of the other bridge officers did. It was rumored that their families had all been taken to Port Balmarin, dropped into cryosuspension. and stacked aboard the two transports like shipments of frozen meat. They would stay there, the rumor suggested, to guarantee the cooperation of the Gael Squadron in coming weeks.
We'll show them cooperation. Morganen told himself. And when we get Kendric Fraser back, we'll show them cooperation like they never dreamed of! He wasn't sure what they would be able to do, with or without Fraser, but they would do something!
The alternative was to call off everything and wait. If TOG agents had taken Elliot prisoner, that might be the prudent course to take. Yet, Morganen and the others involved with the plan did not think it would help. TOG's plans for the Cluster would proceed. The Squadron would be broken up and dispersed. Fraser would remain a prisoner, as would their hostaged families. The only alternative was to assume that there was still hope for their plan and that Elliot was free but unable to communicate. To stop now would be to admit total defeat, an outright surrender to TOG.
With Elliot's help, they might yet rescue their people. The official orders from Admiral Arada's office had born the mark of Elliot's machinations. The fifth paragraph was Elliot's personal signature, proof that he had arranged those orders himself. The notation that further orders could be expected in one week was Elliot's warning to Morganen that he had to complete Old Man before new orders came down. If Morganen failed to acknowledge them, his absence would be discovered.
One week was just long enough to get to the Narbon system and back, assuming that they made both the outbound and the inbound trips in two legs. The first leg was necessary to convince Imperial watchers at Alba Port that their destination was the rendezvous listed in their orders. They would stop short of that destination, however, once they were clear of the borders of the Gael Cluster. At a prearranged site just clear the border, they would drop out of T-space, change course, then pile on the Gs until they hit better than 180 KPS. That would give them a high enough trans-C velocity to reach Narbon in three days.
The plotted, two-legged return would take them first in a direction that would keep Imperial observers at Haetai-Aleph from knowing in what direction they were headed, and then would bring them home six days after they'd left.
They hoped.
By the time the Damadas and the Gaidheal returned to Alba a week hence, Caius Elliot hoped to have rewritten Squadron orders in the Governor's office, assigning the Squadron to escort duty for the transports. If Elliot could pull off that splicing of bureaucratic red tape, they'd be ready then for the final escape. And after that? Rumors about their ultimate destination had already begun circulating throughout the squadron, ranging from KessRith space to another galaxy. For now, Morganen was willing to leave that to the TOG bureaucrat. The man had already worked miracles by finding Kendric and arranging for the
possibility of a rescue.
"Communications." The destroyer's bridge was small enough that he could speak to the comm officer nearby without using an intercom.
"Yessir!"
&n
bsp; "Open a channel to the Gael Warrior, please."
"Gael Warrior, aye, sir."
A moment later, Morganen was surprised to hear his own voice over the bridge speaker. "This is the Gael Warrior, Morganen speaking." Someone aboard the battleship had programmed a translator computer with his voice, camouflage for the fact that he would be AWOL from his post for several days. It was nevertheless a bit unnerving to hear the voice.
"Uh...yes, Captain."
"Gaidheal here. We have clearance for drift. Just wanted to say it's been good shipping with you."
"Same here," Morganen heard himself say. "Ah...Commanders Fairfax and MacCandless both send their special regards, Gaidheal. Good luck."
Morganen smiled. Warrior's Ops Director and Senior Fire Control Officer had remained with their ship, and only young Jaime Douglass would accompany Morganen aboard the destroyer. There had been an argument over that decision, a long and even bitter one. Morganen had settled the matter by pulling rank, insisting that the Warrior's bridge crew not be rearranged any more than was absolutely necessary. The Warrior would have to be ready to move at a moment's notice, one week hence. If all went well.
So much could still go wrong, and the lack of a personal message from Elliot was annoying. Of greater concern, though, was whether they could execute their mission at Grod as planned. Everything depended on Kendric being where Elliot's informant had described, on the cargo containers of gennarite being where they were supposed to, on the mine superintendent being willing to cooperate in the face of the Damadas's guns...
William Keith Renegades Honor Page 23