by Josi Russell
Theo’s eyebrows drew together. Aria could tell that he wasn’t used to delivering unpleasant news. “They disappeared so completely, Aria, it’s almost like they were snatched right out of the air. We’re not sure they’re out there. They could have been—” he squirmed, “taken.”
Aria heard the panic in her own voice. “Taken?”
“It happened before, with the Others from Beta Alora. They took people right from Minea without any trace. Did Ethan tell you that there is a ship orbiting the planet?”
Aria nodded. They had seen the spot on Lucidus at the festival, and he had told her when he came home from the defense committee meeting what it was.
“It’s definitely alien. The defense forces have hailed it, but it hasn’t responded. It is just hanging out there in space, and we don’t know what the aliens want, or why they’re here, or what they’re capable of.”
“You think aliens took this ship?” Aria was incredulous, “but why? What would they want with a survey crew?”
Theo shrugged, and Aria noticed the weariness in his face for the first time, “We just don’t know. You need to understand, Aria, that they just disappeared, and there’s not a lot of hope that we’ll find them.” Theo shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Especially if there’s nothing out there today.”
Aria grasped his arm. “What do you mean? Why ‘especially’?”
Theo ducked his head and untangled his arm. “This is the only rescue mission, Aria. Unless there’s some encouraging evidence, they won’t go out again.”
Anger flooded Aria, and with it a bitter taste filled her mouth. She opened the door, stepping quickly onto the liftstrip. “Then I’ll look for him myself.” She slammed the hovercar door as hard as she could, sealing Theo in his comfortable insulated world, and turned to board the ship.
The search team followed the route that the ship had been scheduled to take in and out of the mountains and touched down in a pristine valley. They spread out, giving Aria a sketch of the terrain. She hiked the places that the surveyors were supposed to map, wondering if Ethan had gone with them or stayed near the ship. She looked behind every boulder and climbed as high as she could on the peaks, expecting any moment to see a ship’s wing or a broken tree that would point her to him.
When the search team gathered back at the ship that evening, she heard them radio back to Saras Company Headquarters that there was no evidence of the craft or the crew.
As the sun dropped to the horizon, Aria stood on the edge of the meadow where the picture, maybe the last picture, of Ethan was taken. She looked at the meadow, at the rising peaks around her, and called his name.
***
That night, when Saras sent the box of scrip that was supposed to be “compensation” for the loss of her husband, Aria knew they really weren’t going to look for him. She sat at the table and sketched out a plan. She would start with the survey site and she would search until she knew what happened to him. But Ethan had been deep in the mountains, and she couldn’t get there without a ship. So she called Kaia, who called Admiral Reagan, who got her one.
***
Ethan was sore and aching when he rose from the hard ground. They had slept, on and off, the whole day and some of the night. Now, only the light of Brynn’s shoulder lights illuminated his sleeping companions, and he felt again the great loneliness that had found him when he was Caretaker. He knew he would carry it with him all his life, that it would always find him again in moments like this.
The only time he had been without it was when he was with his family in their little cottage or exploring with them. He tapped his shoulder lights on and wandered around the cavern. The thought struck him that this would have been a great adventure if they’d embarked on it intentionally.
The stalagmites stood in uneven rows around the edge of the room. As he walked, he felt the floor rising under him. Behind the stalagmites, he saw an opening.
Walking to the tunnel, Ethan noticed, with renewed hope, that it rose at a sharp incline. That seemed a good plan. If they could get up closer to the surface, the Suremap devices might have a chance of working. It was even possible that they may find a diagonal shaft that could lead them straight out. He returned to the group and waited with increasing impatience for them to awaken.
When Maggie awoke, he told her about the tunnel.
“Seems like as good a plan as any,” she said, with her usual lack of enthusiasm. But Ethan didn’t let it discourage him. He wanted out of this dungeon.
Maggie didn’t wait around for her crew to wake up. Her bold voice rang through the cavern. “Up and at ‘em, team,” she called. “Time to get out of here.”
The cousins complained the loudest, but even they rose and shouldered into their packs.
***
They followed the tunnel for hours, with only one short break where they each ate a nutrition bar and started eagerly off again. After the initial incline, the way evened out and was relatively flat and smooth. Now, for the last fifty meters or more, the tunnel had been climbing steadily. It felt like they were rising out of the nightmare. The group buzzed with anticipation, and Ethan even heard a couple of jokes behind him as he helped Maggie up the slope.
She had fared all right at the beginning, but the climb began to take a toll. A hundred meters later she was really struggling. And she wasn’t the only one. The angle of the slope had increased, and the stone was smooth and slick under their boots. They climbed for nearly an hour and their enthusiasm waned in direct proportion to the slope of the tunnel.
Suddenly, Ethan saw a change in the darkness in front of them. Involuntarily, he quickened his steps toward what looked like the top of the slope. It definitely looked lighter ahead.
But as he crested the slope, he realized that the light was his own, the Maxlight’s beam reflected back to them from the blank wall of a dead end. For a moment, he didn’t know what to think. His mind refused to register that the climb had been for nothing.
Maggie swore, then called back to the others, “Don’t bother. We’ve hit a wall.”
Their disappointment echoed through the tunnel. The full reality of the cave began to sink in. There was no way to know for sure if they were going the right way, no way to tell what was at the end of any tunnel they chose. The time they’d spent on this one was a complete waste.
They headed back to the stadium in subdued silence.
If going up was difficult for Maggie on her broken leg, going back down was much worse. Ethan felt her tense against every impact.
“We can stop, Maggie, and give you some rest,” he said.
“It’s not gonna help. It’ll hurt if I go down now, it’ll hurt if I go down later.” She gripped his arm hard as he tried to brace her against the decline.
Ethan opened his mouth to argue, but just then she pitched sideways and fell hard on the stone, sliding several feet in front of him on the slick floor before scrambling to a stop, bracing with her good leg against the side of the sloping tunnel.
An involuntary cry of pain escaped her. It seemed, to Ethan, so much worse coming from someone who was unused to making them. He clambered down to her, pulling the bright light out of his pack and inspecting her covered wound through the clear Sprayshield. It had been healing well, but now it was seeping blood, turning the transparent dressing an opaque ruby color.
Traore and Ndaiye scrambled up beside them. “It’s no good, Captain. You’re gonna have to stay off of that.” Ndaiye’s voice was commanding, a change from his usual jocularity.
“I don’t see how that’s gonna work,” Maggie argued. “You can’t carry me, and you’re not gonna leave me down here to be krech food.” Her voice was stubborn, but Ethan sensed a real fear behind it.
“We won’t leave you, Cap,” Traore said soothingly. “Just give us a minute to see if we can figure out a way to get you through here easier. Promise that you’ll wait here while we check the medical pack.”
When they’d convinced her, the two of them disappear
ed into the darkness, leaving Ethan and Maggie sitting silent on the smooth rock.
“They’ll be back soon.” Ethan said, trying to be reassuring.
“Maybe,” she said gruffly. “It’s hard to tell how long things take down here.”
Ethan thought a moment. “That’s true. It’s weird to be in the dark all the time. Like now, it’s midmorning out there, and I feel like it’s the dead of night.”
“It’s always the dead of night here.”
Ethan nodded.
“Gonna lose that tan pretty fast,” Maggie said, “now that we’re mole-people.”
Ethan blinked, looking down at the backs of his hands, sticking out of the sleeves of the Everwarms. He was tanned, he supposed, from spending every possible moment out in the forest meadows behind the cottage. It seemed strange that he would be, after all those years on Ship 12-22.
“I’m used to that. When I was Caretaker, I spent five years under artificial lights. I got pale as stone.”
Maggie grunted. “If that happens again, you’ll fit right in down here.”
Ethan looked around. The Maxlight lit up a small portion of the tunnel: a smooth circle of stone encompassing them. “We’re not going to be down here that long. We’ll get out.”
Maggie didn’t turn toward him, but he heard the desperation in her voice. “I hope you’re right, Caretaker.”
The last word hung in the still cave air. Ethan switched off the Maxlight to conserve its battery and listened for the sounds of their crewmen returning, but he heard nothing. Unlike the forests, where a distant bird cry or the scurrying of a small creature was always audible, here only a great silence pressed down on them. They sat waiting.
***
Ethan was nearly panicking when the cousins returned. The time they’d been gone was unbearable in the quiet. Ndaiye used the Emedic to re-splint Maggie’s leg. They also pulled a foldable stretcher from the medical pack, which they quickly assembled amid Maggie’s protests.
Though maneuvering while holding the stretcher behind him was difficult, it wasn’t impossible, and Ethan thought it may even be easier than trying to help her hobble down the slope had been. Ethan breathed a sigh of relief when he saw, ahead, the last turn before the tunnel opened out into the Stadium.
Only it wasn’t the last one. Rounding the turn, he saw another; a sharp elbow in the passage that he didn’t remember coming through when they went up.
It was so sharp, in fact, that they had a bit of trouble getting the stretcher through it.
“You’d better not drop me,” Maggie growled, oblivious to Ethan’s growing dread. Suddenly, the tunnel narrowed and the roof slanted sharply down. They found themselves staring at another dead end.
“We’ve made a wrong turn,” Ethan said, trying to keep his voice even. “We’ll have to backtrack.”
The cousins traded off with Ethan, making the grueling climb back out much easier. A few meters back they saw a tunnel smoothly joining the small dead end they’d just come from.
“Here’s where we must have gotten off track,” Ndaiye said cheerily. “The Stadium is just down there.”
But what they found just down there was yet another dead end. This tunnel ended in an outcropping of greenish flowstone. Ethan realized that instead of one tunnel that led up and out, they had wandered into a complex of spurs and tunnels that could go on for kilometers. There was no way to know which one would lead to the Stadium and which would lead to another dead end.
Panicked, they turned the stretcher around and nearly ran back up the slope, hunting frantically for any sign of the tunnel they’d originally come from.
“Go to the left!” Traore urged. Ethan complied.
“Are we supposed to be going up or down?” Ndaiye asked, trying to get his bearings.
There was an uncomfortable silence before Ethan spoke up. “I’m not sure,” he said, hitching the stretcher up a little higher.
“You mean to tell me that you guys got us lost when we were fifty meters from the rest of the crew?” Maggie said, disbelieving. “Some surveyors you are. You’re supposed to have some sense of direction.”
“Not underground,” Traore reminded her. “We signed on as topside surveyors. You were supposed to get us OUT of the mines, remember?”
Maggie, for once, didn’t reply. Ethan glanced back to see her digging in her pack, which she held on her stomach. She came out with a notebook and pen and went to work on what looked like a map of the tunnels.
They came to a fork and took another tunnel. Ethan had a good feeling about it. It seemed familiar.
When their lights fell on the green flowstone at the dead end of the tunnel, he knew why.
“We’re going in circles!” He said explosively.
“You’d better leave some breadcrumbs then,” Maggie instructed, “something to show we’ve been down this tunnel already.”
Ethan carefully set his end of the stretcher on the ground. Traore did the same. Each of them rifled through their packs, but all they came up with were the nutrition bars, and Maggie refused to let them use those.
“I didn’t mean literal breadcrumbs, you hobos. You never know when you’re gonna need food. You can’t waste it like that.”
“We could use our ropes, string them behind us as we go,” Ethan suggested, but Maggie refused again.
“Rope is too valuable too. Think of something else.”
Ethan kicked at one of the hanging points of the green flowstone formation. It broke off easily. He picked it up. Long and thick, it was about three inches in diameter and tapered at the end where it had dripped for centuries. It was like a giant pencil. He tested it against the cavern wall. It left a broad white streak.
“How about this?” he asked.
“Now you’re talking.” Maggie seemed proud of him.
They backtracked, keeping a close eye on the point where the tunnels joined and marking a big X on the walls of the tunnels they found leading to dead ends.
In all, Ethan counted sixteen dead-end tunnels. Their sloped floors coupled with the extra strain of carrying Maggie tired the men quickly. Ethan’s mind spun with the realization that they had passed another day since leaving the stadium, and he had no idea when or if these tunnels would ever lead them back there.
Soon they came to a passageway where all the tunnels were marked, and Ethan felt the old press of frustration. “We’ve been down every tunnel.”
“Then it has to be back the way we came.”
The warren of tunnels wove together and crossed, entangled like a pile of snakes. Sometimes they were going up, sometimes down, sometimes an angling tunnel cut across another open passage and they had to decide whether to follow the original one or embark down the new opening. Ethan came to a point when he couldn’t even remember what the last turn looked like, much less the original tunnel that led out of the stadium.
His arms and back ached from carrying the stretcher. His mind spun from the endless maze of tunnels and from the dark and mixing shadows.
As they tried yet another tunnel, Ethan froze. Far away, he heard the sound of his name.
“Do you hear that?”
The rest of the small party stilled to listen, too, then excitement shone on their faces.
“I hear it! They’re looking for us!”
“We’re here!” They began to shout, calling with all their energy.
The voices responded, louder and more enthusiastically. Ethan recognized them as Collins and Brynn and held still, trying to determine where they were coming from.
Unfortunately, the tunnels caught the voices and tossed them around in a game of keep-away. He heard them one moment from the tunnel on the left, the next from the one behind them. Just when he was giving up hope, a light flickered in the tunnel just ahead.
“Here!” he yelled. “Collins! Over here!” Ethan nearly ran toward the light, sliding on the downward sloping floor and fighting for balance as he hauled the stretcher behind him.
And then he was looki
ng into the bright beam of a Maxlight. Collins reached out a hand and called, “They’re here! We got ‘em!”
***
They took a long rest back in the stadium. None of them were eager to rush out into the darkness again. As they sat on the stone floor, surrounded again by the sentinel formations around the room, the crew worked to map the parts of the cave they’d seen so far. The keyhole entrance, the crash site, the guano field, the Shark’s Mouth tunnel, the Stadium. Ethan, Traore, and Ndaiye pitched in what they could remember of the maze they’d just come from, with an occasional comment from Maggie. Her contributions were sometimes helpful and sometimes simply commentary on their incompetence.
Ethan didn’t care. He was glad to be out of the tunnels and sitting among the little group in the big open cavern.
It was obvious that this wasn’t the kind of place that you simply picked a direction and walked out of. They were going to have to come up with some kind of coordinated plan just to survive, much less give themselves any hope of actually getting out. Ethan said so.
Ndaiye had multiple ideas. “Maybe we could go back to that high point and chip through the roof until we got to the surface? Maybe we could find an underground river and follow it? Maybe we could go back to the shaft we came down and climb out?”
“Good ideas” Ethan reined him in, “let’s look at them one at a time, though.”
“What do you mean good ideas?” Jade’s voice was challenging. “The surface is hundreds of feet up. And how do we know where to chip? And what do we have to chip with? An underground river could as easily go farther into the cave as go out, and there’s no way our scrawny ropes will be long or strong enough to get us out the shaft, even if we had the strength to climb it, which I doubt any of us has.”
“Hey,” Ndaiye teased, “speak for yourself.” He flexed his biceps exaggeratedly in the dim light. Ethan admired his ability to take Jade’s stinging criticism without offense.
Jade ignored him. “The only thing to do is to investigate every tunnel we come to on a case by case basis. We can try to guess what we’ll find, but caves are notoriously unpredictable.”