Eril was wondering how he could communicate this to the others when he noticed the faint, distant throb.
“Can you hear that?” Lennart’s mouth opened and his throat moved as if he were shouting. Eril could barely make out the words. A few minutes later, his hearing had returned enough to activate the implanted translator.
Suddenly Raerquel’s head section extended upwards, popping up like a child’s box-toy. “Sufficient time is having passed for recovery of all?” it inquired, and began uncoiling its appendages.
“Raerquel!” Kithri cried. “We thought you were — ”
“I placed myself into a state of protective estivation,” it said, quickly regaining its usual pear shape and sending the platform forward at top speed. “I could not be risking damage to my sensory structures, so I timed the duration of my estivation to my best estimate of your recovery time.”
“You timed?” Brianna said. “But estivation is an involuntary suppression of all but the most basic autonomic functions!”
“No time to be discussing!” Raerquel said. “We must move quickly now. We must be underground before the primaries hit.”
o0o
Where the Council platform had once towered like an elegant dream, there now sprawled an irregular pile of shattered therine, interspersed with chunks of oozing gastropoidal flesh. A lone gastropoid, its skin a flat, yellowish gray, scored with abrasions and burn marks, swam slowly towards them. It halted, wavering as it studied them, and then dove out of sight. Raerquel called after it but it did not respond.
“Can’t blame the thing from running away from us,” Lennart commented. “We’re the aliens here.”
Raerquel brought the platform to a halt and they climbed out. The remains of a broad, rectangular landing was bordered by the wreckage of delicately fluted columns. Although they were forced to pick their away around the splintered therine, they encountered no unsurmountable obstacles. At the far end of the landing sat an oval-shaped pool.
Raerquel dove into the powder-filmed water and reappeared a few minutes later. They waited, shivering in the warm air.
“The entrance is passable,” Raerquel said. “Let us proceed with haste.”
“Will it take us that long to get through?” Kithri asked in an unsteady voice.
“Raerquel had to go down and check on everything.” Eril tried to sound reassuring. “And come back out again. With full lungs, you won’t have any problem going straight through.” Her stricken expression didn’t waver. “What’s the matter?”
She wet her lips and swallowed hard. “I can’t swim.”
Lennart looked at her in astonishment. “How can you not swim?”
“I never needed to learn! Maybe I knew how on Albion, but I can’t remember! There’s barely enough water in Port Ludlow to drink, let alone swim in — ”
“It’s all right, I’ll get you through,” Eril said.
Kithri glared at him. “Goddamn war-hero, you think you’re so hot, rescuing a lady in distress! And what are you staring at, Lennart? I suppose you consider swimming a basic requirement for civilization?”
“Shut up!” Brianna grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Get control of yourself! What’s the matter with you?”
“Matter with me? I’m only scared half out of my skin — ”
“You think you’re frightened now, you should have been the decoy for those pirates!” Brianna snapped. Kithri ducked her head and twisted, as if to pull away, but Brianna held her fast. “You listen to me! The one thing — the only thing that kept me going was thinking, ‘Sooner or later that untranslatable bitch will find something that’s too big for her to handle, and I’ll be around to see it.’”
Kithri flushed and met Brianna’s eyes. She stopped shaking. Her chin lifted. “Maybe you will, but it won’t be now.”
Brianna let her go with a tentative, almost apologetic gesture, and Eril understood why she’d taunted Kithri like that. It was, in small measure, the repayment of a debt.
“Brianna, you go first,” he said. “Then I’ll take Kithri down with me, and you last, Lennart.”
Raerquel’s sleek shape disappeared into the water. Brianna slipped beneath the surface in a graceful dive.
“I’ll be right with you,” Eril told Kithri. “You don’t have to swim, you just have to let me carry you along. You may feel like you’re running out of air, but you’ll have enough. I promise.”
“I don’t have any choice, do I?”
He shook his head.
“Then it doesn’t matter how scared I am, does it? Let’s go.”
She took a few quick, deep breaths, filling her lungs as he told her to, and jumped. Eril dove in after her. The water was surprisingly cold, but clear. Kithri was right in front of him, her hair floating around her face like a halo of curly seaweed. Beyond her, Raerquel floated like a metallic teardrop. Kithri grabbed his shoulder as he turned and swam deeper, following the gracefully undulating gastropoid. After a few moments, he could feel the force of her kicking.
Unexpectedly Eril came up bump! against an intact therine wall. He recoiled, hardly able to tell where the water ended and the glass-like wall began. Raerquel swam downwards, blue shadows rippling its silvery skin. With Kithri still clutching his shoulder, Eril dove deeper.
Fire began to creep along his diaphragm. Kithri was still hanging on, her fingers digging into his muscles. What would he do if she panicked at the unfamiliar suffocating sensation? There wouldn’t be much he could do...except to die with her.
The next moment they emerged from a short, wide tunnel into a small chamber. A few feet up, a final convulsive kick, and their heads broke together into a pocket of air.
Eril hauled himself onto a wide ledge in the oval-domed room and pulled Kithri up after him. She lay across the ledge, gulping air. A moment later Lennart’s head popped through the surface. Brianna and Raerquel had already pulled themselves up on the landing.
Eril grinned at Kithri. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Speak for yourself,” she panted, grinning back and pushing her dripping hair back from her eyes. “I can think of easier ways of dying than drowning.”
Chapter 35
The domed foyer lead to a spacious chamber, equally deserted and lined with therine. The air was cold but surprisingly fresh. The colorless light reminded Eril of times during the war when he’d gone without sleep for days, running on stimulants and adrenalin. His mouth tasted stale and metallic.
They followed the rail westward as it disappeared down a narrowing tunnel. Their footsteps, muffled by the tube socks, made faint, rustling echoes. After a short distance, Raerquel paused to run its sturdy lower tentacles along the therine-coated walls.
“What are you looking for?” Eril asked.
“Transport vehicle,” the gastropoid replied. “Even shielded from above, we are not going to crawl all the way to Mountains-of-Darkness.”
An oval door, truncated at floor level, slid open under Raerquel’s manipulations. A long, narrow platform glided out on to the rail. Unlike the flat transport they had used before, this one was walled on three sides and had a bullet-nosed front and a gently arching roof.
At Raerquel’s urging, the humans climbed on board, crouching under the roof. The platform was too narrow for them to sit side by side, so they nestled in a row like spoons. It took a few minutes for everyone to get settled, first the two women, then Lennart behind them.
Eril started to climb in back, but Kithri pulled him down between her and Brianna. He lowered himself into place, his slightly bent legs on either side of hers. Her damp curls smelled of the sea. He realized he was cradling her between his knees as a co-pilot would. The dark, curving tunnel loomed in front of them.
Raerquel crawled aboard, flattening itself to fit in the compressed space. They began to slide along the underground rail, rapidly gaining momentum. Their movement was smooth and almost silent, except for the air streaming past. Any resemblance to Eril’s first duoflight down a Manitou t
unnel vanished at once. This was much more like slipping through the greased tubes in the Academy scramble course. The nose piece sheltered them from the worst of the wind, but from time to time the chill air tugged at Eril’s damp hair.
After a short distance, a second rail appeared on the tunnel ceiling. It dipped down until the carrier was anchored at both top and bottom. Once they were underway in earnest, the diffuse lighting disappeared. Occasional isolated spots passed so quickly they seemed no more than flickers in the darkness.
“Eril?” Kithri turned and spoke over her shoulder, her voice a reedy whisper against the hiss of their passage. “Do you think we’ve still got a chance?”
“Raerquel must think so, or it wouldn’t have come halfway across the continent for us.” The gastropoid couldn’t see their translator panels, but Eril kept his voice low.
“But couldn’t it have...just to save us? To take us to a safer place...” Eril heard the undertones of anguish in her voice. He didn’t understand what it was, only that it had nothing to do with Raerquel.
“After the way it skipped out on us when we were no longer any use?” Lennart said from in back of them. “Not likely.”
“Raerquel’s just as dedicated to peace as it always was,” Brianna said. “We just don’t understand its motives very well. I was wrong...about a lot of things. I confused personal affiliation with goal-alliances. What matters now is that Raerquel succeed, even though the odds are dismal. What’s the good of refraining from cultural interference when the result is no culture at all? How can I justify sitting back like some damned observer when there’s even the remotest chance?”
She flinched as if a bomb had just exploded nearby. There was no sound except the hiss of the air streaming by. “I’ve been so sheltered, so — spoiled all my life. Golden girl, golden career, what could go wrong? Oh, I studied all the sociocultural ramifications of war, but I never...” She flinched again. “I thought the cave-in was the worst thing that could happen to me.”
Eril turned his head to look at her. “Are you all right?”
“All right? Will any of us ever be all right?”
I can’t change what happened to her, he thought, can’t give her back the person she was before those three days in the dark. She was, he realized, damaged in a way that could never be healed, just as Kithri was.
Just as he was.
Albion...
“I survived, then and now,” Brianna went on. “By all rights, I shouldn’t have lived through either disaster, but I did. Just as we will now. Maybe there’s a reason, maybe we were meant to succeed...”
“Maybe,” said Kithri, “we can make that happen, whether it was meant to or not.”
By all the powers of luck and space, Eril thought, I hope she’s right.
o0o
Eril’s muscles ached from sitting still. He’d been half-hypnotized by the rocking movement of the transport and the monotonous whoo-oosh of their passage through the tunnel. He hadn’t noticed when the lighted ceiling strips reappeared. The vehicle slowed, then came to a stop in a large rectangular room with generously wide exit ledges.
“City-of-Darkness,” Raerquel said in as quiet a voice as Eril heard any gastropoid produce.
“We made it,” Brianna said. Her voice was light, almost breathless, her eyes fever-bright.
The climb to the inhabited levels grated on Eril’s nerves. The angles of the ramps were all wrong for human legs, but Raerquel undulated up them at a rapid pace. After a sustained climb, long enough for Eril’s muscles to become cramped and burning, they emerged into a rounded intersection of therine lined tunnels. The few gastropoids they met hurried about on their own business.
Suddenly one of them called out. “Raerquel! Clan-superior Raerquel!”
“What news, Duvach?” Raerquel called back. “You are unharmed? Any major damage to the city here?”
“We are safe for the moment. But after you left, Ru-elliven halted all work on the project. The other Council members were forced to agree. Even if the mind linkage can work, it is now too late.”
“And you, Duvach? Are you thinking it is too late for understanding instead of destroying?”
“You are my clan-superior and have taught me otherwise. It is never the time to be giving up hope.”
As they talked, the two gastropoids slithered up the corridor at a brisk pace, leaving the humans to follow. Kithri stumbled and had to run a few steps to keep up. She stared at the tunnel walls with a peculiar, almost mesmerized expression on her face.
Eril caught her as she tripped again. “You’d better watch where you’re going.”
“Eril, these are jaydium tunnels.” Her face had gone chalky, her eyes dark and haunted. “And this stuff on the walls — this therine — it will become our jaydium.”
“But there isn’t any jaydium on this world,” Brianna said in a puzzled voice.
“They’re jaydium tunnels, all right,” Kithri answered in a deadly calm voice. “How could I fly them as I did — and hate them as I did — and not know them now?”
A thought snaked through Eril’s mind, If we somehow manage to stop this war, how will that change things in our own world? If there’s no jaydium, will there still be a Stayman, an Albion, a Fifth Fed? Will our world die if this one lives? And even if we knew that it did, would we have any choice in what we do now?
o0o
They came quickly to a smaller, downscaled version of the railway depot. The vehicles here were the familiar land transport platforms without any siding or nose cones. Raerquel and Duvach boarded the nearest, followed by the four humans.
They started off slowly. Eril studied the branching passages and tried to imagine them as the Stayman tunnels after some cataclysm had wrenched them into corkscrews. He didn’t want to think what would happen to all of them, should they be inside the tunnels when that happened. If it happened, he reminded himself.
They traveled deeper into the mountain, though there was no discernible change in the lighting or freshness of the air. Eril wondered how many tons of rock hung above them or how much firepower it would take to penetrate this far. Being underground couldn’t be easy for Brianna, that was sure. She was sitting behind him and Lennart had one arm around her shoulders. She stared ahead, her features set, as if she were mentally working navigational problems — or whatever tedious and demanding calculations she did in her field. Her fingers laced together, knuckles white like bare bones.
Raerquel brought the platform to a halt at the side of a narrow tributary tunnel. They all climbed off. “The laboratory is now only a short distance.”
At first the sound was so low Eril felt it only as a vibration. Before his mind could grasp what was happening, it escalated, rumble upon intensifying rumble. Pieces of therine tumbled from the walls and smashed into powder. Behind him, Brianna screamed, but her voice was soon lost.
Eril’s senses went painfully acute. Each shard of therine, each mote of dust, each quiver of the rock beneath his feet, each sound — even the harsh breathing of the others — all etched indelibly on his mind. For an awful moment, his body wouldn’t move. Therine fragments, sharp as knives, came tumbling off the wall in jagged sheets. They crashed on the exact spot where he would have been if he hadn’t paused. He jumped backward, sweating cold.
Every instinct urged Eril to get away, back down the tunnel. Brianna and Raerquel were nearest the platform. He gestured to them to go back, then reached for Kithri, who was standing right beside him —
Suddenly a giant fist of air slammed into him. Curling and rolling, he came smack against something hard and cold. Fist-sized rocks, dust and pieces of therine showered over him. He laced his hands protectively over the base of his skull.
A rain of stones struck him with bruising force. One hit his spine directly. A bolt of searing pain lanced through him. For a moment he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t feel his legs. Fire filled his head. He choked, hardly feeling a therine sliver from the ceiling slash through his o
uter arm. Luck was with him and it was only a superficial cut.
More rock cracked, toppling, adding dust to the splintered therine. At his back, Eril felt the curve of another warm body.
Let it be Kithri. Let her be all right. Then a thought shivered through him. Maybe it would be better if she were killed right away, rather than have to dig her way out and slowly die here in the dark, maybe alone. He thought of the scars on Brianna’s hands.
The noise decreased suddenly, then rose again with more falling rock. Eril pulled himself into a tighter ball, his eyes squeezed shut. Then, suddenly, there was silence.
Eril waited for ten heartbeats, then ten more. Finally he dared to open his eyes. His lashes were wet and sticky. He dabbed at them with the back of one hand, but only made his eyes water worse. He sat up, blinking and waiting for his tears to wash the debris from his eyes. The light was dim and uneven, a fraction of its former brightness.
“Kithri? Kithri! Lennart — Brianna?” With every syllable, the light panel on his chest leapt to brightness, casting eerie shadows. “Raerquel, are you all right?” It hurt to swallow, to force the muscles of his throat into the pattern of speech.
Someone touched his shoulder — Kithri, her skin ghosty with dust except for one blood-dark cheek. Dust caked her damp curls. He grabbed her and buried his face against her neck. Her muscles tightened as she held on to him.
“Oh my god...” Behind them, Lennart had struggled to a sitting position. He gestured in the direction of the transport platform.
Rock and splintered therine completely blocked the tunnel and spilled out along the landing. Brianna’s foot, still in its sock of gray fabric, shone weakly in the light. The slender ankle disappeared beneath tons of wreckage.
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