by Allen Wold
The snake men moved so fast that only a few of the Human defenders could get off a shot before they were overwhelmed and had to fight hand to hand. Toerson, with Rikard, Droagn, and Grayshard in the middle group, was pushed back toward the gaping hole in the floor of the bubble. The attackers gave way on that side, and before the Humans realized their danger a woman was pushed in. She fell screaming for a long time. There was no sound of impact.
Human legs are better than snake bellies when push comes to shove, and encouraged by this incident, the crowd of humans started to inch back toward the escape route. But before they could make much progress the snake men suddenly thrust in from the sides and another man went staggering over the edge of the hole into the darkness.
Toerson shouted orders. Her people yielded suddenly on one side and thrust strongly on the other, toward a side passage. The press threatened to crush Grayshard but Droagn protected him from the worst of the crowding as the beleaguered Humans pushed through the surrounding snake men and entered the largest of the side tunnels.
The surface of the tunnel was frothy stone, alternating with glossy streaks, mostly black but occasionally striped with white, reflecting the light of the lamps and sparkling around them. At least they had to defend from only one side, and while those continued to struggle hand to hand, those immediately behind them were at last able to bring their rifles to bear in the manner in which they had been intended. There was a brief volley of laser shots, and the hissing crackle of blistering flesh as the bolts struck at point-blank range. The snake men fell back out of the tunnel, and for a moment the fight paused.
"Where does this thing go?" Toerson demanded. A couple of her people went to find out.
A rock the size of Rikard's head hit the floor a few meters in front of him and bounced up to strike one of Toerson's people in the face. The woman went down without a cry, the rock wedged into her helmet. There were one or two panic shots, then a second rock came zinging in, hit the ground at a flat angle, and broke in two. One half smashed into the ceiling, but the other half hit a man in the center of his chest and folded him up like a newspaper.
And then a wave of snake men plunged into the tunnel, each brandishing a kind of javelin in one hand and carrying more in their other hands. They threw the javelins even as the Humans opened fire. But these light weapons could do no damage, and the laser shots decimated their front ranks. Those behind threw as fast as they could, and went down almost as fast under the concentrated laser fire. Then the snake men broke and they retreated, losing more of their number even as they did so. Aside from the two Humans who had been hit by the rocks, which were supposed to have been only a distraction, there were no other casualties.
"Against the walls," Toerson ordered. Even as she spoke a rock whistled into the tunnel, struck the floor near the middle, and spanged off down the tube. A moment later another rock came in, struck the floor a little farther down the tunnel, then zinged off into the darkness.
"Now move back," Toerson said. "Fast!"
They did so until they came to one of the rock missiles, where they met the two scouts coming back.
"It gets narrower after a while," one of the men said, "and then I don't know."
"We couldn't see very far," the other said, "but there weren't any tracks. I'd guess it was a dead end."
"You should know," Droagn projected, "that they are gathering up there in the bubble. They have more catapults like the one that threw the rocks."
Those who still wore their helmets could not receive Droagn's telepathic communication, but Toerson and one or two others could. Toerson stared at Droagn in surprise, then forced herself to regain her composure. "And back the other way?" she asked.
"It's empty. It's not a dead end."
"How many catapults do they have?" She quickly accepted Droagn's method of communication.
"I think six. Like crossbows, not slings."
"And they can bounce those rocks around corners. Maybe we'd better keep on following this tube and see where it leads us."
The two scouts preceded the party down the tube, while the last five fighters covered their rear. Rikard, Droagn, and Grayshard stayed in the center of the group, still under guard. Toerson joined them, nonchalant at first, then she looked sideways up at Droagn, at the Prime, at the Subordinate on his arm. Her face gave no hint of her thoughts.
"I thought you were unique," she said to him. "Those 'people' back there, they look like they might be relatives of yours."
Droagn flashed her one of his carnivorous smiles. "So it would seem."
"There were Ahmear here fifty thousand years ago!" Rikard said. "What else could they be but the descendants of the last few families who didn't escape the volcano?"
"And they've been down here all this time," Toerson said incredulously, "without causing even legends up on the surface?"
"Maybe," Grayshard said, almost as a non sequitur, "it was they, and not the Kelarins, who scavenged the top levels."
"Living off canned food until they found some way to provide for themselves," Toerson said. "I don't believe it."
"You don't have to," Droagn said.
The tube did narrow after a short ways, but then broadened again a bit farther on. There were no signs of passage other than the footprints of the scouts on the floor.
"Are they following us?" Toerson asked Droagn.
"Not yet," he said. "But then, I can reach back only a hundred meters or so."
They came to a three-way branching, and on Droagn's suggestion took the tube on the left. After sixty meters or so the tube began to slant upward, at first just gently, then more sharply, until they were climbing a fifteen-degree slope. It got gradually broader, and then leveled off where, suddenly on the walls, were the marks of tools. They slowed, and the lights showed that the tube ahead was more and more worked.
"It would appear," Grayshard said, "that we've come to the outskirts of a colony."
"There's somebody coming behind us," one of the rear guard called out.
"Then let's move it," Toerson said.
They hurried forward. The walls of the tube became almost completely artificial, carved smooth, with here and there some ornamentation taking advantage of a change of color in the frothy rock. The tube turned into a corridor, with alcoves on either side, and this turned into an arcade, with a second level above supported on columns carved out of the living pumice. Without needing orders, ten of the eighteen surviving fighters started looking through arches and into chambers.
"This place looks good," one of the women called from an arch on the far side of the larger space. Toerson hurried to inspect. Rikard's guards did not relax their vigilance.
Toerson reappeared in the arch at once. "Let's move it," she said. Her people responded quickly, bringing Rikard, Grayshard, Droagn, and what remained of their equipment along with them.
There was no other entrance to the chamber beyond the arch. It was rough-hewn, with boulders and piles of rubble scattered on the floor. Toerson directed Rikard and his companions to move toward the back, while the rest of her people took up sheltered positions near the front, between the largest of the rock piles and the left-hand wall.
"Here they come," Droagn warned. Two seconds later the broad archway was filled with snake men, throwing spears, javelins, and stone-headed battle-axes. Toerson's troops opened fire, the front line withered, and the attack stopped. The surviving snake men hurried back out of sight, and several of Toerson's people stood from their rocky shelter, to get a parting shot, but were met by a hail of deadly accurate arrows.
Five of her people were slain. Two arrows hit Grayshard, who fell to the floor of the chamber, and three more hit Rikard, and he too fell, though the arrows just bounced off the combined armor of his leathers and underlying meshmail. The battle acquired a desperate feel, as Humans and snake men exchanged laser fire for arrows.
Droagn lowered himself beside Rikard, and pointed to a shallow recess in the right-hand wall, shielded from the others by
a shoulder-high pile of debris. Rikard nodded, touched Grayshard, and quietly the three moved into it. Grayshard did not seem hampered by the two arrows sticking into him. From the recess it was a clear path to the archway—except for the cross fire.
"What's the plan?" Rikard asked quietly.
"I’ve been trying to talk with them," Droagn said, "and they can hear me, I think. We're not the same people anymore."
"What can you possibly be saying to them?" Rikard asked, astonished.
"Get away from here, leave us alone." Then the snake men began throwing stones that, because of their greater mass, succeeded in knocking one or two defenders down, and smashed one of the lasers to pieces. Toerson and her people became too busy defending themselves to worry about their prisoners anymore.
"I'm going to try something different," Droagn projected to Rikard. He concentrated for a moment, directing his thought at the snake men. And then there was a pause in their attack.
"Now," Droagn said, and started toward the archway. Rikard and Grayshard had perforce to follow. And just as they got to where Toerson could see them, the snake men launched a withering volley of rocks, forcing her and her surviving people to keep down out of sight.
Rikard, Grayshard, and Droagn ducked around the corner of the archway. They were safe from Toerson for the moment, but now they were surrounded by snake men who, though smaller than Droagn, were still formidable, and who coiled tensely around them, their weapons held at the ready. They carried small smoking lamps, made of some translucent material and stone, which cast only a minimal light.
Droagn raised himself up, and stared around at them, and after a bit the snake men began to cower. A dozen of the snake men gathered around Rikard's party and, leaving the others to deal with Toerson, escorted them away from the arch back the way they had come.
When they came to where the two-level arcade became a simple corridor, Rikard called a halt. "I want my gun back," he said to Droagn, "and the case too, if we can get it."
"I'll see what I can do," Droagn said. He turned away from Rikard, crossed his lower arms, raised his upper ones, and froze. The snake men gathered around him.
For a long moment Droagn and the snake men just looked at each other. Then one of the snake men, who seemed to be something of a leader, raised a hand and turned toward several of his—her?—companions, four of whom went off toward the sounds of distant fighting. They waited for a long moment, then there was a sudden and furious sound of lasers crackling, and the chatter of Toerson's unitron pistols going off.
"What the hell's happening?" Rikard asked. "Just what it sounded like," Droagn said. "Our four friends appear to be unhurt. They're just at the limit of my reach."
"Why don't you give that to the 'sergeant' there," Rikard said. He jabbed at the Sub on Droagn's arm and pointed to the leader of the snake men. "Maybe it would help."
Droagn snorted in disgust, then took the Sub off and handed it to the snake man, who looked at it dubiously, then put it on.
And for a moment stood enraptured. The other snake men watched, at first apprehensive, but the "sergeant" must have reassured them, because they turned back to Droagn, more obsequious than before. And then the other four snake men came back, with Rikard's 4D case, his megatron and recording helmet, Grayshard's laser, and Droagn's lamp and forceblade.
"Now let's get out of here," Droagn said, to the snake men as well as to Rikard and Grayshard, and they hurried off toward Toerson's entrance route.
They paused when they got to the bubble. "We don't know where that comes out," Rikard said as he looked up at the hole high in the bubble wall.
"It's got to be more direct than going back down and up again the way we came," Grayshard told him. "And look." He pointed at the lamps the snake men carried. Wisps of smoke were blowing away from Toerson's exit. "We're not that far from the surface."
Droagn spoke with the snake men once more. The "sergeant" offered him the Sub, but Droagn gestured that he should keep it. Then he and Rikard and Grayshard climbed up the side of the bubble to the exit tube. It narrowed after a while, became steeper, then leveled off again, and all at once came to a natural chamber, the far side of which was an ancient Kelarine stone wall that had been recently breached.
They passed through the opening into a chamber with irregular and uneven stone floors, and with stone columns supporting simple barrel arches. There were footprints on the floor where Toerson and her people had come in, but otherwise the stones were covered with a half-damp muck. There was no illumination other than Droagn's lamp. Along one side wall were some rotting crates and barrels, but nothing else.
They went out through a sagging wooden door and followed the footprints through similar chambers until they came to stone stairs going up. The small room at the top was noticeably newer, and opened onto an ancient service underground, about the same age as that by which Rikard and his companions had entered, with sewers, water, and other services, now mostly unused. It was about a thousand years newer than the previous work.
Even here the ground was slick, and the footprints Toerson had left were fading, in spite of their great number. Here there were rats and other creatures, whose trails obscured those of the descending Humans, but there was enough of a trail left to follow, along stone sewers to brick sewers to concrete sewers to a manhole shaft that went up by way of a ladder.
Rikard and Grayshard climbed, Droagn just lifted himself up on his tail and squeezed through after them into newer service ways, made of plastic composites and mostly pretty clean all things considered, with service lights every hundred meters or so. There was no real trail anymore, as this place, though many hundreds of years old, was well used. Droagn felt for a way, and they went along the sewer until they came to a shaft mat went up into an enclosed space and not, as they had expected, into the street. The shaft was a municipal service entrance in the cellar of a private building.
The city above them was in a state of revolution, and had been for two centuries, and they ran a real risk of getting caught either by loyalist soldiers or rebel forces. And they had no idea where in the city they were—except that it was someplace called the Wildercroft development—or where that might be relative to their planned escape.
There were windows high in the walls, and Droagn reached up to look out. "It's night out there," he said.
The door was not locked from the inside, so they went out into a corridor going right and left, with a stair going up directly across from them. At the top they came to a back foyer, with a corridor to the left that led into the main part of the building, an elevator opposite the stairs, and double glass doors to the right.
They went out into the middle of a side street. There were streetlights shining at the corners, some buildings were lit up nearby, but there was fortunately no traffic at the moment. They went to the corner to read the street sign, and looked it up on the map that Grayshard produced. A car came by. The driver was startled by Droagn's appearance and sped off. Otherwise the night was silent, and they heard no gunfire.
"Here we are." Rikard pointed at an intersection on the map. "And here's where we went down." He jabbed at another place, not that far away. Grayshard put the map away while Rikard put on his recording helmet again, and spoke into it, giving instructions to the vehicle they'd left waiting. It would take some moments for it to arrive on automatic. There was nothing to do now but wait.
"This has been too easy," Grayshard said in his emotionless, mechanical voice.
"I feel the same way," Rikard said.
He kept his hand on the floating case of trophies. The longer they stood there, the more he began to think that it was awfully quiet for a city in the middle of a civil war. And then they heard the hum of a floater come to a stop, out of sight around a corner a block away. The engine of the unseen car did not shut off.
"They could be just letting somebody off," Droagn said. "Or picking them up."
"Not likely at this hour of the morning," Grayshard said.
&
nbsp; Then from another corner came the hum of two more vehicles. They also stopped and idled, not quite inaudible in the night.
"I think we're in for trouble," Rikard said.
The weapons they carried were all illegal. They would be assumed to be belligerents by whichever side caught them.
"Let's be discreet," Grayshard suggested, so they went back to the building from which they had come, but the door was locked from the outside. Grayshard went up to pick the lock, while Rikard and Droagn kept watch.
There came the sound of a heavy-duty engine from up the street, and from well above it, but this time it did not stop. The floater making the noise came to the lamp-lit intersection and slowly passed through. It was a military vessel, a troop van.
Grayshard came away from the door before its spotlight struck them. "It's electrical," he whispered, "I can't open it."
The troop van stopped now, and the other three floaters came into view, lightweight carriers with light weapons and stunners. Then there was another sound, and yet a fifth floater came up the street, heavier than those on the ground, smaller than the one in the air. It looked like a command vehicle. The other floaters hesitated. This new one settled to the curb next to Rikard and his companions and the back door opened.
Rikard looked at the troop van and light armored floaters. They waited. He kept his hands well away from his side as he stepped into the open door of the command floater. Grayshard followed immediately, then Droagn entered, pushing the floating case in front of him.
The door closed behind them. Rikard stepped forward and sat in the empty driver's seat, took the controls, and they slowly drifted away. The military vehicles behind them started to follow as an escort.
But as they passed the two light floaters ahead of them, one of the Kelarine drivers looked over, saw Rikard at the controls, realized they'd been fooled, and spoke into a mike. Rikard just grinned, stomped on the overdrive, and the floater, equipped like a command car should be, streaked up past the buildings and into the night. He cut on the jets, and they were away.