by J. J. Green
“You… you…” Cariad was so outraged she couldn’t speak.
“I understand this will be something of a shock to you,” said Strongquist. “But please try not to be alarmed. This isn’t something we undertake lightly. Aubriot will come to no harm, his absence will be temporary, and it is for the overall good of the colony. We have all the necessary equipment and treatments to maintain him in an unconscious state until the Nova Fortuna Project returns to stability. I’m sure you’ll agree that its health is fragile at the moment.”
Outrage finally broke through Cariad’s shock. She shouted at the Guardians over Aubriot’s prone figure. “You can’t do this! You can’t just knock people out if you think they’re going to do something bad. This is barbaric! Who do you think you are? You aren’t even a part of this project. No one invited you along. You’ve turned up out of nowhere.” Frenzied possibilities rushed through her mind. It was impossible to verify the Guardians’ story. “You could be anyone. Maybe it’s you who turned off the electric fence in the First Night Attack. Was it you who planted the bombs in the stadium and on the shuttle? It was, wasn’t it? No Guardian has ever been hurt. Not ever. It’s only ever been Gens or Woken.”
As the words tumbled out, Cariad was backing away from the Guardians, who regarded her impassively. She reached a corner and she could go no farther. She was the only non-Guardian on the ship and entirely at the mercy of these people—people who thought it was okay to sedate someone indefinitely because of something they thought he might do.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Since the Woken had discovered the absence of significant numbers of Gens at the settlement, tension had grown at the caves. What had been a happy mood of optimism as they fitted out their new homes had turned to a quiet, constant sense of anxiety for some, and for some, plain fear. There was talk of setting up armed defensive positions and a watch to constantly check for signs of an impending attack.
If such an attack were to come, Ethan speculated, they could easily be trapped. The only exit he, Garwin, and Cherry had discovered that time they had explored the caves was narrow and difficult to navigate. The Gens would only be able to pass through slowly, one at a time. They’d hoped that more escape routes would be discovered later when people arrived and began to investigate the site, but none had turned up.
As Ethan pondered the problem again one day, stealing some precious moments of solitude in his cave, he decided it was time to look again. They’d already found one route from the rear of the caves to the surface. There had to be others. The cave walls all bore the signs of being worn by water, and what appeared to be a dry river bed ran along the route to the coast. Ethan was no expert on such matters, but everything he saw pointed to the fact that, at some point in the history of the area, the river water had sunk into the ground and drained out from the cliff through the caves, as well as pouring over the edge in the now dried-up waterfall.
Even if he found a tunnel that was too narrow to climb through, maybe they could blast them wider with explosives, as Seaberg had suggested. They needed all the escape routes they could get.
Ethan filled a canister from his water container, grabbed a helmet that held a headlight, and climbed out of his cave and up the ladder on the cliff face, heading for one of the larger storage caves. He’d remembered that at the back of it was a tunnel that hadn’t been deeply explored yet. It could lead to just the passage they needed.
As he climbed, he noticed Garwin coming down above him. Garwin had rarely been at the caves in recent weeks. He’d taken the responsibility of remaining in the settlement for the time being, helping to keep up the appearance of activity in the place. Also, his workshop was there. He had to finish off putting together the kits to create the remaining machinery and vehicles the Gens needed.
Ethan called out a greeting. Garwin looked down.
“Ethan,” he replied. “I was just coming to see you. I wanted to catch up on how things have been going here.”
After Ethan briefly explained what he planned on doing Garwin said, “That’s a great idea. I’ll come with you. You can tell me about the progress here while we explore. I’ll just tell Twyla where I’m going, then I’ll meet you there.”
Twyla had recently arrived to set up a school for the younger children and she and Garwin were sharing one of the larger caves with several other childless couples.
Ethan continued climbing up to the storage cave. The place was more orderly than it had been the last time he’d seen it, and the areas were clearly labeled with signs that hung from the rock overhead. Garwin soon joined him. However, Twyla had also come along.
She gave no sign to Ethan of their earlier conversation. Had she told Garwin she knew about his affair? It didn’t appear so. Garwin was as relaxed and easy as he’d ever been. His arm was around his wife’s waist as they came over to Ethan at the back of the cave.
“I brought this,” Twyla said. She held up a thick yellow crayon. “I’ll write on the wall so that people will know where we’ve gone, and we can mark the walls as we go along so we don’t get lost.”
“Good thinking,” said Ethan. He’d been concerned about that possibility.
“That’s my wife,” Garwin said affectionately.
Ethan felt sick. The man’s duplicity nauseated him.
“It’s this way,” he said after Twyla had written her message, walking into the opening at the back of the cave, turning sideways to squeeze through the gap. Garwin and Twyla followed him. “Unless we find something better, we need to make the current escape route safer. It’s too cramped and uneven.”
“Yes it is,” said Twyla. “I had a look at it. The younger children won’t deal with that floor very well. We’d have to carry them. The whole place needs to be safer, in fact. The caves themselves don’t need much work—only smoothing out some walls and erecting barriers to prevent kids from accidentally falling out—but we have to find a better way of getting around than those ladders. I don’t even like the idea of adults using them. It’s really dangerous. People are getting lazy. If two people meet, instead of one of them backing up to a safe place, they go around each other. I’m surprised no one’s fallen off already.”
Ethan explained his ideas of safety lines attached to the ladders and eventually constructing walled-in stairs in the cliffs.
Garwin said, “Those are great solutions.”
They’d gone deeper into the cliff where the tunnel widened out and sloped upward. Very little light made it in from the cave, and all Ethan could see was within the narrow beam of his headlight. The smooth, water-worn rock was ridged, which helped his feet maintain purchase on the sloping floor. A black entrance loomed to the right, narrower than the main tunnel.
“What do you say we try this side route?” he asked. “I think others have been down the main route already.”
Garwin and Twyla agreed. Twyla marked the entrance with a yellow arrow pointing in the direction of the way out, and they went in. This route was markedly steeper than the first, and Ethan had to use his hands as well as his feet to move along it. The atmosphere was moist and clammy, and he soon found himself wet with sweat. The moistness of his palms made the going even harder.
He was just about to suggest that they return and try a different passage when the tunnel evened out and split into two. This time, they took the easier passage, bypassing the crack in the wall that was barely as wide as Ethan’s shoulders. Twyla marked the direction of the exit again in yellow crayon.
Silence fell as they conserved their breath for the effort of navigating the passage. Ethan wondered how far they’d come, but he’d lost track of the distance. Without landmarks for guidance it was impossible to tell. They also seemed to have gone farther vertically than horizontally. He guessed they’d been going for around half an hour.
Another split in the passage appeared. They had a choice of three directions this time. Once more, they chose the easiest of the three, which was re
ally the only possible choice. The other two were so steep they were impossible to climb without ropes.
Water began to drip from the ceiling, and a fat drop landed on Ethan’s helmet. As the cold water fell onto his shirt and trickled down his back, a thought occurred to him. “Hey,” he said to the other two, who were a short way behind him. He paused as they caught up. “Do you think it’s possible that the river isn’t totally dried up? What if it still runs here, just underground?”
“I don’t think it does,” Garwin replied. “It would have to come out somewhere, wouldn’t it? I haven’t noticed any sign of water exiting the cliffs.”
“No,” Ethan replied. “But… Maybe it comes out below ground, in the ocean.” He looked upward. His headlight reflected wetly on the bumpy surface of the ceiling. Thick drops of water seeped through here and there, hanging heavily before they fell. Small stalactites were forming. “Or what if there isn’t a river as such, just a lot of water? If we have a massive storm, the water might run through the caves again.”
Twyla said, “I hope not. That would be a disaster.”
“Do you think it’s a possibility?” Garwin asked.
“No,” Ethan replied after a moment’s consideration. “The caves directly inside the cliffs are extremely dry. No plants or anything else lives in them. It’s like they haven’t seen water for decades or centuries.”
“I never considered the cave settlement our long-term home anyway,” said Garwin. “Their advantage is that we aren’t out in the open if the Woken or Guardians decide to attack us and force us back. But when things settle down, we should look to creating a proper town somewhere where we don’t have to climb to go from one place to another. Maybe we could look at the area on the other side of the farming district. We’ll need those crops when they’re ready to harvest.”
They walked on, panting a little with exertion in the humid darkness. Apart from the noise of their breathing and the drip of water, the tunnel was absolutely silent, and they could only see whatever the beams of their headlights illuminated.
The passage suddenly dipped downward and Ethan lost his footing, falling hard on his rear. He slid down the wet, slimy slope, grabbing vainly at the tunnel sides, but his hands slipped off any bumps he found.
Garwin and Twyla had suffered a similar fate. They were coming down behind him. The beam from Ethan’s headlight bounced around as he went along, wondering when he would reach the bottom.
Then empty space yawned wide beneath him. A hole in the floor of the tunnel. Ethan grabbed wildly. His hands encountered a lump of rock that he gripped with all his strength. He just had time to blurt, “Watch out,” before Garwin also arrived at the opening.
Holding tight to the rock, Ethan hauled himself out of the hole and onto the floor of the slope. There was a cry that sounded like Twyla. He swung his headlamp around to find out what had happened.
Garwin was half in, half out of the hole, barely holding onto a rough, lumpy area of the floor, and Twyla was in the hole, holding onto Garwin. Her knuckles were white as she dug her hands into his shirt and her face was panic-stricken. Garwin’s expression was tortured as he tried to prevent his wife and himself from plummeting down the hole.
Garwin gasped, “Get Twyla.”
Ethan slid quickly closer. Lying flat on his stomach, he reached down and grabbed Twyla’s arms. Garwin gasped and slipped toward the hole. Twyla cried out and dug her hands deeper into her husband’s back.
“I’ve got you,” said Ethan. He squirmed backward, tugging on the woman’s arms. Now that Ethan was taking a lot of her weight, Garwin also pulled himself upward, grunting with effort. Ethan tugged harder, eventually lifting Twyla’s upper half over the edge. She didn’t let go of Garwin until he was entirely out of the hole and she was three-quarters out.
All three lay on the tunnel floor, panting. Ethan sat up and looked along at the passage they had slipped down. They seemed to have come a long way. He couldn’t see the top.
“Are you okay?” Garwin asked.
Ethan turned his gaze to the couple and saw that Garwin was talking to Twyla. They had sat up too and were hugging.
“Yes, I’m okay,” Twyla replied, though her voice sounded teary.
Garwin hugged her closer. “Thank the stars. That was close.” His voice was emotional too and his face was white with shock and fear. He stroked his wife’s hair and looked into her eyes. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”
The look that passed between the two was so intimate, Ethan looked away, embarrassed to intrude on the moment. Their deep love for each other was clear. Ethan couldn’t understand why Garwin had affairs if his relationship with his wife was so strong, or why Twyla was so unaffected by the revelation of his cheating.
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to get out the way we came down,” he said. “The slope’s too steep.”
“Can we get around the hole?” Twyla asked.
When Ethan looked toward the couple again, they’d broken their embrace and Garwin was peering over the edge of the hole. He ran his hands over the ground as if searching for something. “Anyone see a pebble? I wonder how deep this is.”
They looked but the tunnel was bare of any loose rock. Instead, Twyla broke her crayon in half and handed one piece to Garwin. He reached out and dropped it in the hole. A plop signaled that there was water at the bottom, quite far down. When Ethan leaned over carefully and shone his headlight into the darkness, the light reflected on a wet surface.
“It’s probably fresh water,” Twyla said, “from the old river. Unless we’ve come down to sea level, which I don’t think we have.”
“If it is fresh, that’ll save us a lot of trouble with desalinating the sea water,” Garwin said.
Ethan had been exploring the other side of the hole and found that the rock was wide enough to allow them safe passage. They went on. The slope had evened out and they were on a flat stretch. No one mentioned the fact that it was now imperative that they find another exit. Returning the way they had come could prove impossible. It was clear that the passage was useless as an escape route too. Their new focus was on their own escape.
The tunnel began to climb, which Ethan chose to look upon as a good sign. They had to have been traveling for at least an hour, he guessed. Their lights would last another hour or so. If they couldn’t get out, they could last quite a while down there, though it would be in total darkness. Though no one had brought any food along, they could lick the water from the cave walls. However, lasting weeks could be a good or a bad thing.
Ethan was also worried by the thought that a rescue party might follow the markings Twyla had made and fall down the steep slope that led to the hole. They might not be as lucky as they had been. Anyone landing in the water could drown.
Ethan gave a shiver and pushed the thought from his mind. He needed to concentrate on escaping the cave, not on what would happen if they couldn’t. He worked upward, clutching the slippery rocks, the sound of Garwin’s and Twyla’s heavy breathing joining his own. In spite of the heat of his exertion, he was chilled from the water that had dripped onto him, soaking his clothes.
A gap opened in the wall to his right. Ethan poked his head through it, illuminating the view with his head lamp. The passage looked a little drier than their current tunnel, though it was even steeper.
“This looks promising,” he said. “What do you say we go this way?”
“It’s as good as any other,” said Twyla. Both she and Garwin were sweaty and grimy and their haggard expressions told of their exhaustion. Ethan imagined he probably didn’t look much better.
Without any more discussion, they took the route he'd suggested. It wasn’t long before the signs indicated it had been a good choice. The tunnel walls and the air turned noticeably drier. Ethan panted heavily as he climbed higher. He grew warm again and his sweat began to dry on his skin.
A change in the darkness made him stop. “Hold on a seco
nd,” he said to the others. “Turn off your lamps.” He turned off his own too. Faint rays of light were piercing the black. Farther along the tunnel a ragged hole in the rock ceiling was faintly outlined by light.
“Thank the stars,” Twyla breathed. “We must be near the surface.”
The prospect of escape from the cave system invigorated them all. Ethan climbed quicker, heading toward the tantalizing glimmer of light. His head struck rock. The blow was so hard, if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet he would have suffered a serious injury. As it was, he was only a little dazed.
“What was that?” Garwin asked in response to the sound.
Ethan explained that the ceiling had lowered and told them to be careful. He was forced to crawl. The space was barely high enough to avoid slithering on his belly. But he didn’t mind. Daylight was clearly visible ahead, green-hued but bright.
In a few moments, he had pushed his way out through vegetation that overhung the exit. The sunlight blinded him and he had to put his hands over his eyes. Behind him, Twyla and Garwin also emerged and exclaimed in relief.
When Ethan’s eyes had somewhat adjusted to the light, he opened them wider and squinted at their surroundings. They were low down on the dried up river bed, the valley walls rising on each side. The route that he, Twyla, and Garwin had discovered would be useless for escape, but it didn’t matter. He was glad they’d made it out alive.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cariad demanded that the Guardians reverse Aubriot’s sedation, but they absolutely refused to wake him up, emphasizing the threat he presented to the success of the colony. Their words were little more than a meaningless jumble to Cariad. She was terrified that they might do the same to her. The horror of a potentially never-ending sleep, like returning to cryo, rose up before her.