by James Axler
His overseers were used now to the odd way that the pockmarked baron spoke to them.
"Sure. Yeah, Major-Commissar. No problem with them at all." His fingers crossed behind his back that the Russkie didn't learn about the drowned corpses.
Zimyanin didn't have much of a reputation for liking men who lied to him. The last sec man he'd caught in an untruth had been crucified upside down over a slow fire.
The Russian stood, legs slightly apart, hands locked behind his back, surveying the main galleries. The workers scurried over the scaffolding and ladders like golden ants.
A group of laborers trudged by, a guard at their heels, a carbine slung over his shoulder. They all paused at one of the water butts, immediately in front of the Russian and his sides.
"Been a slide in Tunnel Three, Major-Commissar," one of the foremen said.
"Slow work?"
"No."
"You are certain?"
"Yeah, Major-Commissar."
"I shall peruse the control invoices for Tunnel Three on the morrow. I trust that you will be correct in your judgment."
Despite the bitter chill of the afternoon, the man's forehead was suddenly beaded with sweat. "Sure thing, Major-Commissar. No problems."
Zimyanin patted him on the shoulder, lips parting in the thinnest and bleakest of smiles. "I am sure of that."
The workers were filing past, all gulping down a ladle of the filthy water. They were of all shapes and sizes. Last in line was the smallest of the shift, a skinny youth whose face and head were covered in a mask of sulfur.
"There's someone who's been working hard, Major-Commissar," the overseer said, hoping to slide back into the Russkie's good books,
"Someone who hopes to make us believe that he has been working hard," Zimyanin corrected.
The boy seemed oblivious to them, swilling down a beaker of water and then stooping and leaning over the drum. He dipped his entire head below the surface and brought it out again, shaking himself like a dog after a swim.
"Wipe his face," the Russian said very quietly. "Show him to me."
"What?"
Zimyanin swung his right fist around and drove it into the overseer's lower stomach, all of his considerable strength behind it.
The man, stout and wearing multilayered furs, doubled over as though he'd been shot, his soured dinner gushing over his boots from his gaping mouth. Zimyanin grabbed him by the back of the head and brought his knee up sharply into the foreman's face.
The crack of the nose splitting was clearly audible throughout the mine.
The Russian ignored his victim as he slumped to the wet stone, rolling on his side, unconscious.
"Wipe his face," he repeated.
"Yes, Major-Commissar," one of the guards replied. "At once."
"Show him to me."
The boy glanced up at Zimyanin, shrugging off the hand of the sec man. "I can wash my own face," he said quietly.
He dashed more water over his head, streaks of crusted sulfur running over the chiseled planes of his high cheekbones. Dean rubbed his sleeve across his mouth and eyes, spitting on the floor.
"Look at me, boy," the Russian ordered.
"Yes, Major-Commissar." It was said with enough insolence to be recognized, but not quite enough to be worth punishment.
Oregon Zimyanin stared intently at Dean Cawdor. The light was very poor in the gallery of the mine, but he still had the nagging suspicion that he should recognize the boy.
"Name?"
"Will Goode."
The Russian smiled. "Of course. I saw you when you arrived here. I warned you about—"
A tiny alarm bell began to ring in a distant, dusty room at the back of Zimyanin's mind. He hadn't been a senior officer in the Internal Security Section for the whole of the massive ville of Mockba for nothing. He had great cunning and deductive powers, linked with a ferocious intuition.
There had been a corpse found in… no, there had been two corpses, both slaughtered with great skill by someone who had a delicate touch with a knife.
The boy stood still, not shifting his feet or showing any discomfort. There was something about the mat of black, curly hair and the determined jaw that tugged at the Russian's memory.
"Very well," he said, waving his hand at the young man. "You may leave us for the present, but I might require your attendance at some later time. Go, now, Master Goode."
Dean Cawdor sodded and turned away to follow the rest of his working party, leaving Oregon Zimyanin looking after him with a thoughtful expression on his face.
Chapter Twenty-Three
RYAN HAD BEEN winded by the fall, landing belly-down in the shallow lake. But he recovered consciousness in a few moments, kicking out, coughing to clear his throat. His feet flailed against the rounded boulders that lined the bottom of the icy pool, and he quickly looked around to get his bearings.
The drop had torn the ragged cloth from his hands and he saw Kate, floating a dozen yards away from him, arms and legs spread wide.
His body felt swollen and stiff, as though someone had injected all his arteries and muscles with a mix of frozen concrete. It took an enormous effort of will for Ryan to force himself toward the young woman, stumbling chest-deep.
When he reached her, Ryan slid a hand under her chest and turned her, managing to support her head. She lolled in his arms, eyes closed, a thread of blood oozing from her blue, parted lips.
"Kate." Ryan's voice was barely audible, even to himself.
There was no movement. His fingers were too numb to try to locate a pulse, so he simply dragged her out of the pool onto a shingled beach. He rolled her onto her stomach, pumping at her, kneeling astride her hips.
"Come on, you stupid bitch, or we'll both freeze to death," he panted, thumping her between the shoulders with clenched fists.
There was a groan, and the girl puked up a few mouthfuls of pale yellow water, moving her hands feebly to try to push the small stones away from her face.
"Better?" He stopped pounding on her.
"Terrible."
"Got to keep moving. Find someplace to try and get warm."
"Oh, Judas on the tree!" She was sick again, her body racked with the effort.
"Get up." He stood himself, rocking a little with a nauseous vertigo, and reached down and grabbed Kate by the wrist.
"You don't ever give up, do you, Ryan?" she said weakly.
"Never."
He'd managed to work out where they were, marveling at the weaving extent of their perilous journey far within the heart of the surrounding mountains.
Allowing for the doubling and snaking of the river, Ryan's guess was that they'd traveled ten or fifteen miles. But, as the crow flew, they were less than four miles away from the part of the canyon where the mines were situated.
From the position of the clouded sun it seemed to be late afternoon.
Not far from the lake, Ryan and Kate found shelter in caves, less than five feet high, and only a dozen feet deep, that looked like they went back a thousand years or more.
"Valley must flood," Ryan said through chattering teeth. "Lots of driftwood caught on this corner."
Kate was close to coma, lying just within the cave opening, eyes shut, hands folded across her breast. She hadn't spoken another word to him and had passively let him heave her into the shelter.
Ryan dragged a couple of armfuls of the brushwood, trying to dust some of the powdery snow off the dry branches. With the panga he managed to whittle a few slivers of bark, laying them in a circle, piling on some larger chips. His fingers wouldn't cooperate in the struggle, and he kept dislodging the base for his fire.
He was certain there was a single, old pyrotab in one of the pockets of his coat.
Doc Tanner had once kept them enthralled around a campfire with his retelling of an old story. Ryan could vaguely remember that the writer had been called "Jack" but the second name had gone. But he did recall the name of the story—To Light a Fire.
A man in a freezi
ng wilderness had fallen into water and knew that his life was done if he failed to get a fire going to warm himself. But in his haste he had tried to light it beneath a tree, branches loaded with snow. The snow had melted and put out his precious flickering flames.
And he'd died.
Kate sighed and he glanced across at her. The young woman's face was as pale as the bleached granite where her head rested, and her breathing was becoming more and more rapid and shallow.
Ryan rummaged through his pockets with wooden fingers that didn't belong to him.
Like J. B. Dix, Ryan used his long coat as a receptacle for all manner of useful—and useless—things. Various bits and pieces tumbled onto the floor of the cave: a spent round of 9 mm ammunition; the torn top off a can of self-heat soup; a green pebble with a streak of silver quartz running through it. Ryan was puzzled by that and was about to throw it away when he remembered that he'd picked it up, many months ago, because it reminded him of the emerald eyes of Krysty Wroth.
There was an assortment of crumbs and unidentifiable shreds of paper and fluff. A small side pocket produced a plastic key with the number Six stamped on it, and a picture of an old penny-farthing bicycle. The handle of a tiny screwdriver was in the same pocket and a length of neatly coiled fishing line.
No pyrotab.
"Fireblast!"
The last pocket, deep and narrow, produced an iridescent bird's feather, a splinter of broken mirror and… a pyrotab.
Ryan muttered a prayer to Krysty's Gaia that it wouldn't malfunction.
The metal was slippery and difficult to hold at the best of times. Ryan made three abortive efforts to grip it and start the ignition process, but three times it fell to the floor.
Feeling sick and dizzy, Ryan managed to shove his right hand into the waist of his trousers, pressing the numb flesh against the faint warmth of his stomach, down into his groin.
He leaned back against the wall of the cave, breathing slowly, eye closed. The past few hours had been among the most bleak and exhausting of his entire life. Now all he wanted was to get a fire going and fight off the icy lethargy that was creeping through his body.
Creeping through his body.
His body.
The afternoon thunderstorm had been soaring high above the circle of snow-topped peaks, lightning flashing vividly against the pewter sky.
A bolt lanced to break against the hillside across the river, the noise bursting into the valley with a thunderous roar.
"Not my brother… What?" Ryan jerked awake, looking out of the cave to where a heavy rain had begun to cascade from the north.
The realization that he'd slipped into what might have been a final sleep startled Ryan, and he deliberately found a less comfortable way to sit, resting his cheek against a sharp spur of the rock.
Now his right hand was feeling a little warmer. He experimentally wriggled his fingers, finding a degree of response.
"Go for it," he urged himself.
The pyrotab clicked into action and he laid it carefully, hand trembling, onto the chips of wood. The ends of the white splinters darkened and began to smolder, glowing crimson. With the utmost caution, Ryan put a few more tiny shards of pine on top of the pyrotab.
The flames gathered strength, working its way along the kindling, biting at the dry twigs that Ryan placed on the fire.
Now there was the sound of crackling as larger pieces of wood were fitted into the heap. The dark red flames were turning yellow, then white as the heat raced through, consuming the driftwood. Ryan rose and went outside, looking cautiously around, bringing back several bigger branches, some pine and some from an old sycamore. There was a little pale smoke coming from the mouth of the cave, but the rain was dispelling it.
And they should be far enough from the main complex of the sulfur mines to be safe from any roving sec guards.
The storm seemed to have settled directly overhead, and Ryan could smell the bitterness of ozone in the air.
A couple of feet away from the edge of the fire, Ryan's coat was already beginning to steam, and the dusting of blown snow on some of the rocks was beginning to melt.
"Kate," he said, moving to kneel beside the unconscious young woman and to place a hand on her forehead, which was cold as any stone.
IT TOOK RYAN several minutes to get Kate completely stripped from her sodden, clinging clothes. He placed them by the fire to dry, taking off more of his own wet clothing.
The SIG-Sauer and the panga were near at hand, and he kept going to the entrance to glance into the torrential downpour. Before the huge pile of driftwood became soaked through he dragged several more big branches into the cave.
The young woman moaned once as he rolled her onto her back. She looked absurdly young, lying there naked and helpless. Her bare feet were puckered and white from the long immersion in the river, and the skin on her palms was also wrinkled, with a corpse-like pallor to it.
Her eyes were closed, and a fringe of black hair clung to her temple. The roaring flames glowed off her body, making parts of it seem ruddy and healthy, flickering shadows dancing across her small breasts, the nipples erect with the cold.
"Come on, lady, come on," Ryan urged, chafing her wrists and ankles, trying to get the blood flowing through her frozen veins.
In the confined space of the low-roofed cavern, the heat built up very quickly. Ryan had to stop and move their clothes farther away, as her shirt was beginning to char at the edges. He was already sweating, stripping off to his underpants and a sleeveless T-shirt.
Kate groaned again as he rubbed hard at the insides of her arms and her calves, massaging her knees. He noticed a slight change in the color of her skin.
"Hot," she said, eyes still squeezed tight shut, fingers clenching into her palms, her toes curling as she arched her feet.
"Yeah. Better than cold," Ryan muttered, breathing hard with the labor of trying to restore the young woman to life.
A burning branch off a lodgepole pine collapsed in a shower of bright sparks, some of which settled on Kate's body. Ryan leaned forward and brushed them away from her breasts, extinguishing a few that had landed and hissed in her damp tendrils of pubic hair.
Feeling his hand touching her, lower, Kate opened her eyes. Her lips were now restored to their normal color, and they parted in a half smile.
"Good job Cody isn't around, Ryan. Might take what you're doing a tad different."
"You feeling better?" He sat back on his heels, his T-shirt sticking to his chest and shoulders with perspiration.
"Feel like a living woman again. First time for… Hours I guess. But it seems like days in that blackness."
She reclined and extended her back, not making any effort to cover her naked body. Stretching her arms above her head she stared into the writhing dragons of the fire.
"Wish we had some food," Ryan said.
"Can't have everything. I'll settle for this warmth and shelter from the storm. Listen to that old idiot wind raging outside."
The rain poured down in a ceaseless curtain, and the afternoon seemed as dark as dusk. Ryan moved to arrange his clothes again, finding that they were drying well. The butt of the automatic was hot to the touch, and he moved it farther from the fire.
"Need some more wood at this rate," he said. "Get some in when the rain eases. Let it dry off in here for awhile."
As he sat again the dizziness returned, making him bite his lip, putting his hand to his forehead.
"You okay?"
"Sure."
"I'm real tired, Ryan. Could we mebbe sleep awhile?"
"Should move on." The truth was that he was bone-weary, on the ragged edge of exhaustion. Nobody functioned well at that pitch of fatigue.
"Can't we…" she began.
"Yeah. Good a place as any. Recce at first light. Catch up on some sleep."
She knelt on her clothes, close by him, reaching out to touch him gently on the bare arm.
"Ryan?" she whispered.
"Yeah?"
"You know?"
"What?"
She drew closer, and he could almost taste her.
"You know, Ryan. Please." He didn't say anything, and Kate moved against his body, her arms around him, hands reaching. "Please."
Chapter Twenty-Four
WHEN RYAN WOKE it was full dark outside the entrance to the cave. He could hear that the rain had stopped falling and the night was still. The fire had died away to a pile of glowing ashes that would need further nourishment if it was to see them through the night.
The sound of the river was louder than he remembered, and he guessed that the downpour would have raised its level.
Kate was still fast asleep, flat on her back, mouth open as she snored slightly. One arm was stretched above her head, the other lay under the pile of clothes that had provided them both with a covering. In the warm half-light from the dying fire, Ryan noticed for the first time that the young woman's nails were bitten down clear to the quick.
He sighed. His body felt drained, and as he glanced down at himself he saw that he was a mass of patched bruises, mostly fresh and purple, where the river had pounded him.
His wrist chron told him that it was still an hour shy of midnight. The pile of wood had diminished, and Ryan glanced again into the blackness beyond. Lying warm and naked by the side of Kate was a good feeling and wasn't one that he wanted to disturb.
But that had been the last pyrotab.
Ryan was as good a backwoods survival expert as any ever born, but not even he could conjure fire from nothing. J.B. had once demonstrated, back on War wag One, that it was possible to start a fire from almost nothing.
But it had involved a small bow and a pile of carefully tended tinder and sawdust and the right kinds of wood. The Armorer had labored for a good quarter hour, scraping away until sweat burst from his forehead, drilling until the small hole began to show a tiny thread of dark smoke. Then it had been an inelegant struggle on hands and knees, blowing to make the scorched wood glow, dropping a few pinches of the sawdust until it finally caught.
Ryan grinned to himself at the memory of the ironic cheer that had greeted J.B.'s achievement. The Trader had remarked dryly that it reminded him of watching a frog trying to shit a bowling ball.