Driftmetal IV

by J. C. Staudt

  “That way,” I said.

  Zilch raised his hand, palm outward. A light winked on at the base of his pointer finger. He waved it around for a better look. “Gods, it stinks down here.”

  “It’s a sewer,” I reminded him.

  We started moving, our boots stirring the murky water along the walkway’s uneven surface. After a long, straight run, the tunnel began to snake. We passed dozens of doorways, barred circular outfalls, and drainage basins where trickles of water joined with ours to transform the tranquil stream into a turbulent rapid. Then the elevation of our travel changed abruptly; the walkway began to rise. It kept sloping upward until the river was rushing through a deep channel about ten feet below us. Maude was wrong, I thought. This isn’t so bad. I can handle this.

  “How much further?” Zilch asked.

  “It’s going to be a while.”

  A few minutes later, we came to the one thing you never want to see when you want people to think you know where you’re going.

  “A dead end,” said Pearson.

  The river rushed through an opening in the wall ahead, a circular tube about five feet around. If we wanted to go any further, we’d have to swim.

  “Let me see that map,” said Zilch.

  “It’s alright, I got it,” I said.

  “Let me see it,” he demanded.

  I held out Maude’s pencil sketch. He studied it for a second, then said, “This isn’t a schematic diagram. It’s a drawing.”

  “Look… I know it isn’t much, but it’s the best Mrs. Fitzsimmons could manage off the top of her head.”

  “You didn’t even get a real map from her?”

  I told him no, I hadn’t. Then I told him about Maude’s office at city hall, and the circle of robots in the way.

  “So you led us down here to get lost. And probably starve to death.”

  “I didn’t lead you down here. I tried to go on my own, but you two knuckleheads wouldn’t let me.”

  “This would’ve never happened if you’d just listened. If you’d come back with us and regrouped, we could’ve figured something else out before this all went to hell. Call Yingler and tell him we’re on our way back. Next ladder we find, we’re going back up to the street. All three of us. Matter of fact, I think I saw a ladder in one of the side tunnels back there.”

  “You do whatever you want,” I told him. “I’m going to keep moving. Find another way through.”

  Zilch grabbed me by the raincoat and pulled my face toward his. “You’re coming with us. You’re a criminal at large, and my orders are to keep you in marshal custody at all times.”

  “Whose orders might those be? Kupfer’s? Sorry, but I’ve never listened to Kupfer before, and I don’t plan to start now.”

  “These orders came from the Admiral.”

  I looked at Pearson. “Since when is your dad involved in this?”

  Pearson shrugged. I could see by the look on his face that he knew as little as I did about his father’s involvement.

  “You didn’t know?” said Zilch. “The whole fleet is on its way to Roathea. When Captain Kupfer bluewaved Admiral Pearson last night and told him we were going in without the ships we’d mustered on Grimsley, he was pissed.”

  “Did Kupfer happen to tell him that attacking head-on was suicide?”

  “I don’t know what he said. All I know is the Admiral and most of his fleet were on the Kalican Heights, helping the victims of the Obernale collision last month. He was too far away to get here on such short notice. But it won’t be long now.”

  “How long?” I wanted to know.

  “Nightfall, by Kupfer’s estimation.”

  “That idiot,” I said. “That law-loving, war-mongering idiot. No offense, Pearson, but your dad is a moron. Now we really have to shut down the legions, and quick. If we don’t, the whole Regency fleet is—” I stopped myself, realizing the full meaning of what I had been about to say. The medallion came alive inside me, and I couldn’t help but think of the old adage I’d been neglecting to remember until now. The enemy of my enemy… is my friend.

  5

  “I’m not gonna trudge all the way back there and let my pop and his men die, Zilch,” said Pearson. “We gotta keep going.”

  “No way,” said Zilch. “We’re lost. We could be wandering around down here for days before we find the palace.”

  “If we don’t risk our lives, we’re just risking everyone else’s,” I said.

  “The Admiral is going to wipe those robots out,” said Zilch, still holding me by the collar. “This whole thing was just a backup plan. Time to get out of here. We ought to find Yingler and the team and skip town before the fur starts flying.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “A backup plan? What is it about you people that makes your inevitable defeat so hard to understand?”

  “The Corps never loses a fight,” said Zilch. “We do whatever it takes to win.”

  “You won’t win this one.”

  “The Admiral will. And we’re all going to be up there to watch it happen. Now get going.”

  Zilch turned me around and tried to push me down the walkway. When I stepped back to steady myself, there was no floor beneath my boot. I flicked my wrist out of instinct, but the compartment where I’d always kept my grapplewire was empty. I scrambled to grab hold of him, but my arm was broken, and he didn’t react until it was too late.

  I fell over like a tree, struck the far side of the channel, and plunged ten feet down into the rushing water. A rumbling hiss filled my ears as I submerged. It was only about five feet deep, but that’s plenty when you’re not expecting it.

  The current swept me downstream in a boiling stew of debris whose composition I didn’t want to think about. I stretched out my arms and legs, stopping myself at the mouth of the tube like a human spiderweb. Pain pulsed down my injured arm as I struggled to hold on. The force of the water was oppressive; my hands and feet only overlapped the tunnel by a few inches each. I could hear Pearson and Zilch shouting behind me, but I couldn’t spare a look or a listen.

  A chunk of stone exploded off the wall above my head. I looked up to find a grappler biting into the rock, its wire twanging like a plucked guitar string. Their words finally came into focus.

  “Grab on,” Zilch was shouting. “Get a hand on it, that’s all you need.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t decide whether to reach up with my good hand and continue bracing myself with the bad one, or vice versa. I decided I might as well grab on with the good one. I knew I only had one chance. I slid one foot up a little, then pushed off from the wall and swung my arm.

  I felt my fingers close around the wire and hung on for dear life. The problem which quickly arose was something neither I nor Zilch had had time to consider: there was no railing for him to cling to. No anchor by which he could leverage himself against my weight. So when I followed with my other hand and took hold of the wire, allowing it to support my full weight, he began to slide.

  The walkway was slick stone, and I was hanging from the grapplewire like a wet blanket from a clothesline. I heard Zilch curse. I saw Pearson lower his shoulder and charge into Zilch like a football tackler, hoping their combined weight and strength would be enough to hold me up.

  It wasn’t.

  The rope dragged them both to the edge, Zilch facing me, Pearson facing him.

  Pearson’s back foot slipped off the walkway first.

  He cracked his knee on the edge. Now, instead of pushing Zilch backward, Pearson was gripping him to keep himself from falling. Zilch held on for another half-second. Then he lurched forward, and both men tumbled into the water with a giant splash.

  In that instant, a new problem became apparent. They were coming toward me, and if I could barely hold myself in place against the rushing water, there was no possible way I could ever hold them.

  I let go.

  One of the overgrown clods—I couldn’t tell which—flattened me like a steamroller. He managed to both elbow me i
n the gut and slide over top of me, knocking my wind out and pushing me under. There was no stopping us then. My eyelight shorted out as the river swept us through the tunnel opening. We found ourselves rushing through a pitch-black hole amid the discarded turds of a generation.

  There was no light at the end of this tunnel. But there was an end. It was an outfall, with a set of thick steel bars to keep giant turds like us from falling through it. We came to a clanging stop against them, crowded in and pressed tight as flies on glue paper.

  I hit myself in the temple with an open palm until, thank Leridote, my eyelight flickered on. Through fits and starts I managed to turn my body around, struggling to keep my head above water, and get a glimpse of what lay beyond our little tube. From what I could gather, the tube was protruding through the side of a wall. The water was falling into a deep chamber whose bottom contained a pool of mud and sediment. This was not the kind of mud or sediment which occurred in nature, of course. It was the kind that could only occur in a sewer.

  “Our little sewer safari has gone worse than expected,” I managed.

  “We’re gonna freakin’ die here,” said Zilch. He was starting to panic, pushing himself against the grate and trying to figure out a way back upstream. When he began reeling himself back in, he only made it a few yards before we heard a snap. The line let him go, and he slammed back into us. A moment later, the end of his grapplewire came down the stream and disappeared into his wrist port. He cursed, shaking the bars like a madman trying to escape an institution.

  Pearson reached through the bars and felt around the edge where the grate met the tunnel. “It’s bolted in,” he confirmed. “I think I have something that might help. Can you move out of the way?”

  “Oh sure, let me just stretch out on my lounge chair, here.” I braced myself against the bars and switched places with him, wondering what kind of crazy gearhead augment Pearson was about to use. But it was no augment at all. He opened his pack and fumbled around as the water rushed over us. Then he drew out something that would’ve made me laugh if the whole situation hadn’t been so disgusting: a wrench. Just a plain old ordinary socket wrench.

  He stuck both his arms through the bars and got to work. It must’ve been hard to make progress at such an awkward angle, but Pearson’s slow, patient manner lent itself to the task. The same aspects of his behavior that had led myself and others to think he was simpleminded served as a boon in this situation.

  We felt the bars shake when the first bolt came loose, but the grate held tight. It wasn’t until Pearson gave the third bolt its final twist that the grate scraped off its frame like a door caught halfway open. We all tumbled out in a rush and smack-landed in a brown pool with a deep muddy layer at the bottom. We took a few moments to collect ourselves and get as cleaned up as possible. Which wasn’t very.

  I trudged through the morass to reach the stepped platform surrounding the semicircular pool, which was bordered by four massive archways with heavy steel gates covering them. The chamber was a junction of some kind, where runoff from several different passages converged. A levy system of gears and gates and pulleys and steel cabling was set up to control the system’s outflow. High above, a balcony ran along the top of the room. A set of controls up there seemed to connect with the floodgates around us.

  Pearson plopped himself down on a step and began cleaning his wrench.

  Zilch, despite having been completely submerged in the detritus of our surroundings only a moment before, appeared reluctant to sit for fear of becoming even dirtier somehow. He circled the room, shaking each of the steel floodgates to gauge its durability. “We’re stuck,” he said. “No bolts on any of these. They’re locked in place. We’re gonna die down here.”

  “You said the same thing up there, and we got through that,” said Pearson. “All we have to do is figure out how to raise the gates and we’re out of here.” He gestured toward the levee system above us and resumed his cleaning.

  “What are you waiting for, then?” asked Zilch. “Let’s do something.”

  Pearson glanced up at him. “Will you pipe down for two seconds? I’ll figure out how to open them up when I’m done.”

  Zilch lumbered over until he was standing above Pearson, looking down at him. “What’s got you all calmed down all of a sudden? You were chomping at the bit a little while ago. Now you just want to sit here while daddy leads the charge and gets himself killed?”

  Pearson stood, never flinching as he came face to face with the slightly larger man. I sat back and crossed my arms, watching the unfolding conflict with interest. Pearson and Zilch were both big guys, but I’d have to root for Pearson if it came to fisticuffs. Not because I thought he could win, but because I liked him better.

  “You want to get out of here?” said Pearson. “Then shut up and let me figure out how to get us out of here.”

  Zilch lowered his brow and balled up his fists. “If you weren’t the Admiral’s son,” he said, “you’d have it coming.”

  Pearson straightened, still cool as a cucumber. “That right? Well, here’s your golden opportunity. Let’s pretend for the next five minutes that I’m not anyone’s son. I’m just a nobody. Another rank-and-file grunt. Like you. You want us to come back to that square and find Yingler with you? Do whatever it is you think will get us there.”

  I didn’t try to break it up; I figured if it went that far, I’d have a chance to slip away while they were both otherwise occupied. I sidled over to the nearest steel cable and wrapped my fingers around it, ready to start climbing as soon as the moment was right.

  Meanwhile, Zilch was quiet. He seemed to be thinking things over, but I couldn’t have guessed which extreme his thoughts were bringing him toward. Finally, he pointed at me and said, “This guy is a scumbag. We’re not supposed to let him out of our sight, so I’ll stick with you for now. One more disaster like that, and I’m heading back by myself.”

  I was an instant away from hopping onto that cable and hauling myself up as fast as my gimpy arm would let me when Pearson turned around. “Hey,” he said. “Got any idea how this stuff works?”

  “Absolutely none. But if one of us can get up to that platform, we can turn some valves, toss some levers, and see what happens.”

  “Are you sure that’s safe?” Pearson asked.

  “Safety takes too long. Just don’t stand in the way of anything that looks like it might hit you.” I jumped up and began climbing the cable, but soon found myself slipping. I wished I had a winch and harness, although a left arm that wasn’t useless would’ve been just as good. Before long I gave up, grunting as I let myself slide back to the floor. “Someone mind giving me a boost?”

  They looked at each other, then at my boots, whose sides were still caked with the swampy muck from the bottom of the pool. Neither man volunteered.

  “Okay, so we’re all a little dirtier than we’d like to be,” I said. “In my defense, I did give you fair warning about the potential for something like this to happen. You did know what a sewer was before we came down here, didn’t you?”

  Pearson ran a hand through his damp hair and came over. He crouched down and had me step onto his shoulders. Zilch came over to act as our spotter, and together they managed to lift me high enough to get a good head start on my climb. It helped, though my left hand screamed at me every time I asked it to hold on while I reached with my right.

  I made it to the platform and climbed up the railing to find myself standing before an array of levers and control wheels much like the one I’d imagined. Behind the control array stood a solid-looking door, which I assumed was locked. I gave it a try.

  My suspicions were confirmed.

  Then I returned to the railing and leaned over the side, giving them a wave. “Okay, I’m going to try one of these. Get ready.”

  I chose a wheel at random and attempted to turn it. It was tough to budge at first, but as soon as the valve squeaked open I gave it a couple of fast rotations. The noise level in the chamber was alrea
dy pretty loud, what with the water rushing in through the pipes in the walls. So you can imagine my surprise when I heard the sudden booming echo of an incredible deluge below me.

  I ran to the railing and looked down. A brown tidal wave was flooding the chamber through the gate I had opened. Pearson and Zilch disappeared beneath the churning waters for a moment. Zilch resurfaced, hit the back wall, and went under again. Pearson bobbed up and rode the tide like an experienced surfer; by the time he hit the wall, he had braced himself and was prepared for it.

  I darted back to the controls and closed the valve as quickly as I could, but the chamber below was already three times as full as it had been before. Our only strip of land was now submerged beneath several feet of fetid, chunky water.

  “You alright down there?” I shouted.

  Pearson gave me a lackadaisical wave, clearly irked but okay.

  Zilch popped up a second later, sputtering and hacking up water. As soon as he could talk, he yelled up at me. “Get down here so I can kick your teeth in, you prick.”

  “Sorry,” I called through gritted teeth. “Let me try another one.”

  “Don’t touch anything else,” Zilch shouted. “Can you see a way out up there?”

  “There’s a door, but it’s locked.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” he repeated. “I’m coming up.”

  Zilch extended an arm. His grappler shot out and wound itself around the railing. When he started reeling himself in, the bolts ripped out on one end. The railing groaned and bent over, like an old man reaching for a penny on the street. Zilch’s feet hit the wall, and he walked up the rest of the way as the railing’s remaining anchors struggled against his weight.

  I gave him a hand up, expecting him to go over to the levee system and try to figure it out. Instead, he passed by the control panel and bent to one knee in front of the door. His fingerlight winked on. I watched him slide a pair of razor-thin metal strips from beside his palm.

  He slid them into the lock on the door. A few seconds later there was a click, and the door creaked open an inch. Zilch stood up, retracted his tools, and dusted off his hands. “After you.”