Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult

by E. E. Knight

  Some might say suicidal.

  14

  Borg joined her at the edge of the pit.

  She dropped the chemical light in her hand, watched it fall past the stone stairs, past their crumbled end, become a dot, then a wink, then a nothing.

  “Bottomless?” Borg asked.

  “They built a staircase leading nowhere, just for show?”

  “Then to what purpose?”

  “The priests would go down and return with revelations. Their gods spoke to them from the depths. Another legend says that sacred etchings are down there. All this gear makes me think the second. Think we can do a BASE jump?”

  Borg got down on one knee to look at the side of the sound. “A climb would be safer.”

  “Time, Borg. We may only have hours.”

  “Too bad the film crew isn’t here.”

  They laid out their parachutes, put on the harnesses. Lara took extra care with Borg’s.

  “Did we ever decide who would go first?” Borg asked.

  “I will,” Lara said.

  “How many BASE jumps have you done?”

  “A dozen or so. I jumped off a skyscraper in Hong Kong once.”

  “I’ve done over a hundred, including a cavern jump in Mexico. The cavern was much bigger than this, of course.”

  “The air currents will help. We don’t know what we’re going to land on. I’ll go first.”

  “Very well. Tight spirals, Lara. Very tight.”

  He helped her place her specially designed chute on the floor. It spread out behind her like a huge wedding train.

  They put on light-intensifying goggles. Lara shook a chemical light to life.

  Borg gave her a nod. “Good luck, Tomb Raider.”

  “See you in hell.”

  She ran so that the chute could partially fill. Behind her, Borg gave her chute a fluff.

  The Tomb Raider jumped into darkness, felt a reassuring jerk as the stunt chute opened fully with a whipcrack sound. She grabbed her right toggle, tried to get into a spiral—

  Chute and parachutist hit the wall. Her canopy collapsed. She fell in a tangle of lines, righted herself, and her chute opened again. Pulled on the right toggle again, tried to get herself into a spin … but hit the wall again, the breath rushing out of her at the impact, and pushed herself away by instinct before the chute collapsed further.

  Lara Croft felt like a pebble falling down a drain.

  She tried the left toggle. Méne mysticism or no, the left toggle worked better for her, and her breathing returned to normal as she descended in a smooth, tight spiral.

  Even so, each turn swung her farther outward, forcing her to kick against the wall whenever it got too close. The chute required constant adjustments; she performed them with precision and skill.

  Then the shaft widened. She found herself able to drift. The stairs clung intact here.

  She looked down, saw a ledge. She caught a glint of shining metal beneath it.

  Her heart sped up, as it always did when she was in sight of an objective. The walls sloped inward again—like a bowl’s—around the ledge, almost a mirror image of the chamber above. The shaft continued down beyond the ledge. She turned so she’d hit the walkway lengthwise.

  The wind flowing up from the Abyss caught her chute oddly. She ran into the wall again, slipped, and tumbled—rolled off the ledge in the tangle of her harness.

  She grabbed as she fell, caught the ledge with her left hand, then got her right up, too. The chute hung beneath her. Lara managed to wedge one foot into a crack, but the other leg was tangled up in her lines.

  She pulled herself up, caught her legs in the chute again, and slipped back.

  Something struck the wall next to her with enough force for the impact to transmit through the wall. She turned her head and saw Borg land on the ledge, cleaner than she had. The chemical light stick around his neck filled his face with shadows. He looked like a child holding a torch under his chin while telling a ghost story.

  He pulled in his chute. “The piton, by your left knee.”

  Eight centimeters of steel stuck out from the wall. She swung her left foot up, got it on the piton.

  Accurate with that cannon of his.

  With the leverage from her leg, it was easy to get back on the ledge. The Tomb Raider sat for a moment, legs dangling over the edge of the walkway, gathering in her chute and getting her bearings. She looked up at the circle of light far above. They’d come down perhaps the height of New York’s Empire State Building.

  She noticed something on the wall between her legs.

  “Borg—,” she began.

  A buzzing sound rising from below cut her comment off.

  An impossibility flew straight for Borg. Occupied with drawing up his chute, he didn’t see it until it was on him.

  Lara caught a flash of yellow chitin, trailing legs, the hum of wings.

  The flier was the size of an eagle, but far more agile. It looked like a gigantic bee. It changed course without banking, like a helicopter. She swept her guns up.

  But before she could fire, another yellow-armored flier erupted from the darkness and flew at her face. She knocked it away; her forearm felt like it had struck a glass vase.

  Borg yelped. One of the things had landed on his metal claw arm, where it pumped frantically with its abdomen, trying to sting.

  Now there were two more darting around the Tomb Raider. She crouched, fired. The explosive and incendiary shells turned the insects into burning goo. Chunks fell away into darkness.

  Borg swung his arm, smashed the thing clutching at his cybernetic limb against the wall. Another came up at him, and she shot it on the wing; it described one neat loop and dropped back into the Abyss.

  More came up, and she shot them, and then still more came up, and she reloaded and shot again. She had VADS switch to explosive bullets, and the bugs exploded like fireworks all around them.

  Then they were gone, as quickly as they’d come. Bits of insect, bulbous-eyed heads and crablike legs mostly, lay scattered about the ledge.

  Borg was looking at his piton arm. A broken-off stinger was lodged in the joint. It was the size of a switchblade.

  “Nils, are you stung?” No answer. “Borg, are you stung?”

  Borg shook his head as though awakening from a dream. He used the digits of his other arm to pull the stinger free.

  “Where were those things?”

  “I don’t know. Remember the oversized butterflies and other creatures we’ve seen? I’m beginning to think that something in the ecosystem here is creating mutations.”

  “They are deadly, whatever they are.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Lara cautioned. “Maybe the noise drew them.”

  Borg nodded. “What do we do now?” he asked in a whisper.

  Lara knelt at the edge and and ran her hands across the side of the shaft beneath the ledge. It was pebbled; she held her light up close to see better. The Abyss wall was encrusted with masses of tiny shells, long dead, empty and dry.

  And something else. The same things she’d seen glinting beneath the ledge before the insects came.

  Borg gasped, seeing them, too.

  They were panels, the now-usual platinum color. Dirt-covered but legible, each about the size of the Mona Lisa in its frame and covered with fine engraving, close-placed, the lines orderly and regular, not quite letters and not quite hieroglyphs. Lara counted nine of them, just beneath the base of the stairs where the ledge was a little thicker. Netting and lines lay here, placed by the cultists in readiness for drawing up the plates if they could ever be detached.

  A strange place to put holy texts, the Tomb Raider thought. It would be like putting artwork around the wainscoting rather than at eye level.

  She saw a roll of cargo netting, a crowbar, and a hammer left on the ledge. She’d bet the contents of the Croft bank account that Ajay’s fingerprints could be lifted off those tools.

  “Is this what they are looking for?” Borg ask
ed.

  “I think so.”

  “You mean to take them?”

  “If I can get them off the wall without making a racket and bringing those bugs back up—yes, I mean to take them.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Borg bent and shook another chemical light, put it in his mouth, and hung over the ledge. Lara imitated him, her ponytail dangling down the Whispering Abyss.

  The Tomb Raider could detect no fitting. Not so much as a fingernail’s gap could be found between the plates and the wall behind. Each one was infinitesimally curved to match the shape of the wall. It was as though the platinum alloy had grown from the cave wall, etching and all.

  The edges of the plates were scored with fresh chisel marks.

  Why didn’t they just do rubbings? Take photographs that could be examined at leisure?

  Lara tried pushing on a plate, hard. She searched the rim with her fingernails. Nothing. No, judging from the marks, Ajay had already tried forcing the plates in all sorts of different ways.

  But only from the outside?

  “Borg, check the ledge. There’s got to be something.”

  She examined the stairs, the wall next to them, then the wall beneath them, holding her green chemical light, trying to detect any—

  What have we here?

  A thumbprint-sized triangular stone was recessed into the rough cave wall so it could only be seen if you held your light close and at a certain angle. She pressed it, and heard a distinctive click.

  Nothing more.

  “Borg, the wall here, start pushing.”

  They both did so, huffing and puffing as they tried the side of the wall beneath the stairs. Lara got on her knees at the base of the stairs, shoved, and was rewarded by the feel of the bottom three stairs disappearing into the wall.

  A meter-wide chamber ran in a ring around the Abyss.

  “I’ll have to go in. You’re too big.”

  She lit another chemical light and tossed it in. The backs of the panels could be seen, all secured at top and bottom by a long, curved platinum rod passing through triangular loops at the edges of the plates. The rod was also etched with tiny lines. Why decorate this concealed space?

  She crawled inside.

  The bars had an obvious handle, and showed no signs of corrosion after all the millennia they had sat there. She pushed the top handle to the left. It wouldn’t move. She tried moving it to the right, and it slid with only the faintest of grinding sounds.

  “You got it,” Borg whispered loudly.

  The bottom slide moved identically to the top. She tried a plate, experimented with pulling and pushing, careful to keep a finger in the triangular securing loop so it wouldn’t fall away into the Whispering Abyss.

  The plate came free when she pushed down.

  The plates were thin, perhaps five millimeters thick, and flanged so that the interior side was slightly larger than the exterior side. Each weighed a few kilos.

  Borg’s upside-down head suddenly appeared at the hole, a chemical light clutched between his teeth. She let out a frightened gasp.

  He spat out the light. “Got you!” he chuckled.

  You’ve got me all right, Nils. Too bad you want someone else.

  “Fine time for jokes,” she said, moving to the access-chamber entrance at the base of the stairs and placing the panel up on the ledge. “Get the netting ready.”

  Soon eight more plates joined the first. They stacked them each atop the other. Slightly curved, they fitted together perfectly, and heavily.

  “Those will be hard to climb with.”

  “We’ll use the Méne lines, just tie them into the netting down here and haul them up once we’ve made it back to the top. They’ve got strong enough rope. I think I saw a muscle-powered winch.”

  “Let us hope these stairs last for a while,” Borg said, looking at the lighted exit far above, seemingly as distant as Mars.

  Lara secured the netting shut with D-rings, standard climbing gear that they both carried. She looped a length of Méne mountain line through the rings and tested the weight.

  Sixty kilos or so. The line would hold easily.

  They repacked their chutes carefully. This way, in case of a fall during the climb, there was at least a chance for survival.

  “Let’s try the stairs,” she said.

  “Just like Ajay. Go, go, go. It will be a difficult climb, Lara. Let us sit for a moment and eat so we have strength when we need it. Five minutes, okay?”

  Without waiting for her to agree, he sat and opened a meal bar, washed his mouth out with water from his camel pack, and began to eat.

  Lara looked at her watch. The smell of the food bar made her stomach growl. Perhaps he was right.

  A little worried that the smell of the fruit bar might bring back the flying whatever-they-weres, Lara dropped down next to him at the base of the stairs. The chemical lights gave their faces strange green mottles as they ate and drank in silence; easily portable food kept the body going, but it didn’t inspire dinnertime conversation.

  When they finished, they started up the stairs.

  “What is the plan to get Alison out?” Borg asked.

  “My plan is to have a bunch of helicopters filled with Peruvian soldiers show up and arrest the whole lot of them for attempted kidnapping and murder. Ajay will have sense enough to surrender. We can sort everything out after that.”

  “Sense? She is brainwashed.”

  “Not necessarily, Borg. She may have seen the Méne as her ticket to a lot of money, enough to restore her family fortune. That’s always been her goal.”

  “She would never willingly join such killers.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know they were killers until it was too late. For all we know, she’s playing a game of her own, going along with the cult until she can get away with the platinum.”

  Borg took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Perhaps. She could be impetuous. And the lure of riches would be strong, as you say. But I still believe she has been brainwashed. This Kunai has her under some kind of spell.”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Borg? What makes you insist on that as the only explanation?”

  “Her attitude, everything. It all changed while I was in the hospital. I saw a different person when I got out. I can understand some strangeness at first. The arms. I was not used to them. The limbs disgusted even me at first. But she could hardly stand to look at me with the arms off.”

  The hurt in his voice put a knot in her stomach. How well had Borg really known Ajay? She was a woman of dreams and passions and single-minded, even obsessive, drive. In her quest for an El Dorado to restore her family’s wealth and name, would she ride an injured horse, no matter how much she loved him?

  After all, Lara hadn’t. When Ajay had proved herself unfit for the Tomb Raider’s fieldwork, endangering both herself and Lara, Lara had ended their brief partnership without hesitation, even though she’d known it might cost their friendship as well, which it had. Ever since, she’d worked alone. Attachments slowed you up. Feelings got in the way. How long had she waited next to the body of Oliver, or Von Croy?

  Stop it, Croft. You’re in the field, not your bed. This is one of the mind trips that brings tears, and tears are the last thing you need right now.

  “We’ll get it sorted, Borg. One of us is wrong about her. I’m hoping it’s me.”

  “But what if I am the one who is wrong? What will you do then? Shoot her?”

  “I can’t imagine it coming to that.”

  Borg stopped climbing the stairs. “I won’t let you hurt her, Lara.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “A promise.”

  “Borg, this is no time to argue. We’ve got to work together so everyone comes out of this alive. I have to trust you, and you have to trust me.”

  He said nothing, just turned and resumed climbing the stairs.

  15

  Usually vertical climbs meant screaming winds that brought freezing mountain t
emperatures and ice crystals, numbness and joint pain from the cold and altitude. But the climb back up the Whispering Abyss had none of these.

  A trail of pitons commenced once the stairs gave out. All Lara and Borg had to do was grasp piton after piton in the inchworm progress of climbers and continue to feed line back to the panels sitting on the ledge below.

  Lara let Borg lead. Whatever awkwardness he had displayed in getting on and off jets, or shaking hands, or eating was gone now. For the first time in her life, Lara found herself wondering if she was slowing a man down. Borg climbed, rested, climbed again, never wasting a motion or a chance to give his body a break from the strain if the placement of the pitons allowed, then after a moment continuing up with faint clicks and snicks as his arms hooked pitons and tested them. At times he improved the vertical path, using his piton arm to drive new holds.

  Behind him, Lara yanked out some of the pitons as she climbed, sending them spinning down the shaft. She wanted delay, to keep the Méne in the ruins of Ukju Pacha long enough for the Peruvian army to arrive, and putting gaps in their path down might prevent them from discovering that the plates were missing until it was too late.

  “It is too bad we did not know the way was so well prepared before we made our jump,” said Borg. “We could have climbed down.”

  “We still would have had to jump,” said Lara. “It would have taken us too long to get down and back. Besides, I saw the look on your face as you landed. You wouldn’t have missed that jump for the world.”

  “It was … invigorating,” Borg admitted.

  That was not exactly the word that Lara would have chosen.

  When they reached the lines left by the Méne, Lara spliced one to the rope at the other end of which was the plates. Despite the cool of the underground, her back was a sheet of sweat under her parachute and packs. Her guns and VADS gear seemed an unbearable weight at times, and she fought the temptation to just unbuckle and fling them the way of the

  pitons.

  Lara took the lead when they reached the spot where the stairs resumed. At last, muscles shaking and sparking, she put a hand up over the lip of the Whispering Abyss and followed the muzzle of her gun into the domed chamber. It was deserted. She holstered her pistol and glanced at her watch.