by Kelly Jensen
Felix looked at the bodies. Were they super soldiers? “Are they Preston’s?”
Zed wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Yeah.”
“So, stunning them still works.”
“They won’t be out for long.” Crouching down, Zed pulled more stunners from holsters, tucking both into his pockets. “Let’s go.”
Twenty minutes and two scuffles later, they ran out of civilized tunnel. There had been no hatches set into the wall for the past five minutes and the two tunnels ahead weren’t lit.
“We must have missed a turn somewhere.” Felix turned around. “I tried to keep track last night, but...” It had been dark and he’d been too worried about being buried under the ground somewhere.
“Going back is going to mean more opposition. Preston has got to have realized we’re gone by now.”
Zed sounded tired. He’d Zoned and phase-shifted countless times today already and he wouldn’t be fully recovered from the shuttle crash yet. Felix felt as if he’d been laid out flat on the ground and run over by a team of raw recruits. But going forward meant heading into an unlit tunnel. He’d almost rather...no. If they went back, Preston would take more of his arm. Worse, she might figure out how he’d grown it.
Felix nodded toward the unlit tunnel. “Okay, into the dark it is.”
* * *
The holos from their wallets didn’t give off enough light to do much more than mess up their night vision, but without the dim illumination, they’d be left in the pitch black. They’d already come to a half-dozen forks in the tunnel and each choice looked as disused as the last. At one such fork, they’d found what looked like a storage closet—or it used to be, the ration boxes inside empty and broken down for other use. The lack of amenities and supplies worried Zed. He really hoped that these tunnels were simply a secondary route, used infrequently, rather than abandoned for being inaccessible.
Guess they’d find out.
So far, he hadn’t heard or seen any sounds of pursuit—which was good, because the only thing that would be worse than working their way through these tunnels would be working their way through them at a run.
Zed tried to hold his wallet as steady as possible, but the jolting light still made his stomach queasy. He could barely make out Flick’s features with each frequent glance in his lover’s direction. Flick looked pale, the lines in his forehead etched deep, the scar snaking down his cheek and under his jaw that much more stark than usual.
With an effort, he bit back another “you okay?” query. He’d asked it five minutes ago, so it was off the table for at least another ten. Unless he wanted to goad Flick into a fight. The silence was oppressive, though.
“I ever tell you about the time I was assigned to explore the caves on Outrock?” Outrock had been his first posting—a dinky little colony way the hell out on the edge of human space, but he’d loved it. It had been destroyed in the war.
Flick grunted. “If this story ends with a cave-in, I don’t want to hear it.”
“No.” Zed snorted out a laugh, then ducked around something that looked like a broken-off stalactite. He hadn’t seen any evidence of water in the tunnels so far, though, so stalactite was probably the wrong term. “Watch your head.”
“Got it.”
“So yeah, caves on Outrock. We’d gotten reports from some of the farms near them that they were losing animals to a beardog.”
“A what?”
“Native fauna, predator, looked like a cross between a grizzly bear and a wolf.”
“So why not call it a ‘bearwolf’?”
“I have no idea.”
“Colonists are stupid.”
“Yeah, well, they’d say the same thing about station rats. Scared of wind,” Zed said in a mocking voice. It was a longstanding joke from their childhood, how a breeze always made Flick nervous. Something to do with air currents on a station never changing. He supposed when you grew up in a closed environment like that, randomness would be very unsettling.
“Fine, point made.”
“Are you o—”
“I want to get the fuck out of here, Zed, but since that’s not a possibility at the moment because we’re stuck in unknown tunnels under a fucking mountain in the fucking dark—” Flick’s rising voice cut off sharply and he sucked in a ragged breath. “Go on with your story. The distraction is good.”
Zed touched the back of Flick’s right hand. Barely a trickle of anything came over their connection—a sure sign that Flick was functioning only because he had everything in his head on lockdown. Zed picked up the pace. Going faster would be tough on them both, but it had to be done.
“Right. Beardog. My captain sent out me and three other guys to investigate.”
“Was this before or after you started sleeping with the married guy?”
Heat flashed through Zed’s cheeks. That particular affair had ended poorly—his lover’s wife had found them midact in the barn and beaned Zed in the back of the head with a shovel—and Zed’s indiscretion had always been a bit of a joke to Flick. There was the part where he was literally caught with his pants down, but beyond that, his decisions had proven he was anything but perfect. Zed figured Flick could appreciate that. He definitely liked to poke him about it.
“After,” he admitted.
“Did he give you a kiss for luck?”
“Shut up.”
Flick chuckled. “Okay, okay, go on.”
Zed ducked beneath another maybe-stalactite, then paused as he eyed what he could see of the tunnel in front of them. The walls had been getting steadily closer on either side, and now they’d narrowed significantly. Fuck, this was not going to be pleasant for him. For Flick, it was going to be a living nightmare.
“It’s getting narrower.”
“N-narrower?” Flick stiffened as his voice wavered.
“Yeah.” He guided Flick’s hand to his waistband and tucked his fingers between it and the skin of Zed’s lower back. Looking back over his shoulder, he instructed, “Hold on tight, okay? You can wrap your other arm around my waist if you want, tuck yourself close. Put your forehead between my shoulder blades and close your eyes. I’ll guide us through. You don’t have to worry, just keep your legs moving. Can you do that?”
Flick wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were on the darkness in front of them, but they were wide, dull, and Zed knew he wasn’t really seeing their surroundings but something that existed only in memories. Horrible memories.
“Felix.” He kept his voice low, but firm, and said Flick’s name again until Flick looked at him. “Tuck yourself against my back. I’ve got you.”
“Fucking hate this,” Flick said, his voice shaky, but he moved to do what Zed had asked. Thank God.
With Flick securely behind him, his crystalline arm wrapped tightly around Zed’s waist and fingers tugging at Zed’s waistband, they moved forward. The rock pressed in on all sides, close, closer, and Zed found himself getting short of breath. He forced himself not to think of the tons of rock stacked over them and instead returned to telling his story. Flick was right—it was a good distraction.
“We tracked the beardog to caves a klick or two from one farmer’s fields. I don’t think any of us were thrilled with the idea of going inside, but we had our orders, right?” Zed winced as the rock wall scraped his upper arm, but he kept moving. “We’re armed, we’ve got proper lights—”
“So basically the opposite of this.”
Relief wound through Zed that not only was Flick listening, he was in control enough to respond. “Yeah. So we head in, and after about fifty feet, we get to a bend. One of my guys, a private, starts hyperventilating, so I sent him back to guard the entrance.”
“Bet he didn’t make it to corporal, did he?”
“He transferred out within the month.” Zed couldn’t even rememb
er the private’s name now, but he did remember not being surprised when the guy was no longer on the duty roster one day. He really hoped the kid had gotten out of the AEF before the war—he wasn’t suited to being a soldier. “Anyway, so the three of us continued. There were a lot of twists and turns. A lot more than in this tunnel,” he said, as they followed a gentle curve in the rock. “And we kept going down and going down. The caves were fairly large, too, more like the tunnels we were in back there. Wide enough for two guys to walk side by side.”
“Did you get ambushed?”
“Who’s telling this story?”
“You got ambushed.”
“I don’t think it’s called ‘ambushed’ when it’s an animal.” Zed grimaced at both the memory and the choice facing him—they’d come to a fork. Their wallets weren’t good for anything but light at the moment, so he picked a direction on instinct. “But yeah. It pounced at us from a side chamber.”
Flick’s breath hitched. “Fun.”
“We had guns, we were fine.”
“Did you get hurt?”
“No.”
“Zed...”
“You’ve memorized my scars. Does it look like I got chewed on anywhere?” He patted Flick’s crystalline arm, then looked up. The tunnel didn’t feel as close, and when he lifted his wallet, he saw that the walls had receded. God, he hoped that meant he’d picked the right fork. “The tunnel’s opening up again.” He paused, waiting to see if Flick wanted to pull away.
“I’m...”
“We can walk like this, if it’s easier.”
The slight sagging of Flick’s form against Zed’s back was all the answer he needed, so he started forward again.
“We shot it. One of the guys had a pretty good gouge in his arm, so we took some time to treat it. Once that was done, we noticed that we were in a pretty big chamber—think the size of Cargo One on the Chaos.”
“Huh.”
“But the weirdest thing is that the walls were covered in paintings.”
Flick jerked against his back. “I thought Outrock had no sentient indigenous life.”
“That’s what everyone thought. When we reported the discovery, there was all this uncertainty about whether they’d shut the colony down or whatever. Lots of scientists came through over the next few months looking for more evidence, but I don’t think they found much. Another cave with paintings, maybe some tools. I think eventually they determined that whatever creatures made the paintings had gone extinct.”
“Why?”
Zed shrugged. “Maybe the beardogs did it.”
Flick snorted. It wasn’t much of a laugh, but Zed would take it.
It took him a few minutes to realize that there was more light in the tunnel than he could attribute to his wallet. They seemed to be angling upward slightly too. “I think we’re coming out.”
Flick’s grip tightened, as though he didn’t quite want to believe Zed’s words. Zed patted his arm again. “Hey, hey. Have a peek.”
There was some shifting and then Flick’s chin pressed into Zed’s shoulder. “Daylight,” Flick breathed, leaning hard into Zed. “Thank the fucking stars.”
Another five minutes or so saw them emerging into the late afternoon light cast by Paradise’s double suns. The egress from the cave was small, an opening they had to squeeze through one at a time, a last bit of torture from the mountain before they were free. They stumbled onto a hillside covered in rock and, crouching low, jogged over behind a large boulder. Zed took a few minutes to scan for tentacles. One encounter was more than enough.
Satisfied there were no tentacles around—yet—Zed turned his attention to the rest of the landscape. Something wasn’t quite right about it. He looked around, judging angles, and realized what was bugging him. Unlike the ravine the colony was tucked into, this valley was less...natural. Too round.
“It’s a crater,” Flick said, his voice low. “I think this might have been another mountain or a hill once, and then smack! An asteroid destroyed it.”
“Would explain all the rocks around, wouldn’t it.”
“Huh. Maybe.” Flick squinted through the trees farther downslope. “I think there’s a landing pad down there. See the lights?”
Zed angled himself to look over Flick’s head and spotted the same thing he’d seen. The shadows were long at the base of the crater, which made the regular flashing lights more noticeable. “Yeah.” His gaze roamed outward, looking for signs of life. He didn’t see any, but he did spot another cave entrance leading out onto the crater floor, this one with a light above it. He jerked his chin toward it. “I think that’s the usual exit from the colony to here.” A straighter shot, most likely. Not the mess of twisted tunnels that led them higher up, near the lip of the crater.
There were also two large, bulky shapes tucked into the longest shadow. Shuttlecraft. Their way off the planet?
Movement at the lower entrance caught his attention. Three figures moving purposefully toward the opposite side of the crater where they began climbing a well-concealed path.
“A search party,” Zed murmured.
Flick turned to look up at Zed. “What do you want to do?”
Zed sighed. “Head in the opposite direction to that search party and regroup while we figure out how to steal one of Preston’s shuttles and get the hell out of Paradise.” He smiled at Flick’s low chuckle. “Come on. Let’s get some distance between us and them before it gets dark.”
Chapter Fourteen
Felix leaned out over the edge of the shallow crater and looked down. “This one isn’t deep at all.”
Zed spoke from a short distance behind him. “How does the floor look? Any of those fissures?”
They’d been halfway down the side of another crater when a tentacle had poked up out of a fissure near the bottom. Felix had taken skin off his human hand climbing back up again. If not for the reinforced smart fiber over the knees of his pants, he’d have taken skin off there, too, as Zed hauled him up the last meter and back onto the plateau.
“You could come look for yourself.” Glancing over his shoulder, Felix waggled his brows at Zed. “It’s not deep.”
Zed held up a hand. “That’s what you said about the last one, asshole.”
Chuckling, Felix stepped back from the edge of the crater and wandered back toward Zed. “I dunno how deep is deep for you, or high, or whatever, but I reckon we could drop to the floor of this one without having to climb down.”
The furrows across Zed’s brow relaxed. “Okay, that’s not that deep.” He tensed up again. “Unless you’re jerking me around.”
“I’m too fucking tired, and checking this one out can’t be any worse than having to lean over the edge of that other one to pull me away from the scragglers.”
Zed offered a tired smile. “Your life isn’t at risk this time.”
Felix gazed out across the rock-strewn ground. This side of the ravine felt less like a mountain and more like an elevated desert of...rock. Stone and rock. Gravel in shallow depressions and dust over everything. The ground did slope down on occasion, but only toward another expanse of stone. Except for the bugs, they’d seen no wildlife, just as on the other side. Felix wasn’t surprised. The deep ravine was a much more hospitable place, scragglers and mad scientists aside. Some of the craters on this side were deep enough to host a pool of water, a single stubby tree and the telltale fissures, though.
They hadn’t seen signs any of the other craters were connected to the system of caves beneath the cliffs, or were being used by Preston and her people. Neither had they seen the patrol that had left from the opposite side of the landing crater. With the low clouds and charged atmosphere, Felix guessed any search parties would be confined to hoofing it, just as they were. So the mission had become to find a suitable place in which to hole up for a whi
le.
Felix put his arm around Zed’s shoulders and drew him close so they could rest their foreheads together. The connection hummed into being. “The crater looks good. Not too deep, a puddle on one side and no visible fissures.” He let the truth of his words and an accompanying image filter across.
Sighing, Zed leaned into him. “I don’t know why I let this height thing get to me.”
“Because we’re at the end of our tether. I nearly freaked out in the caves. If you hadn’t been there with me, Preston would have found me all wrapped up in a cat ball.”
“I think you mean catatonic.”
“Yeah, that. So, without me, you’d sleep up here on this plateau and be all exposed. This is why we’re a team.” Except Zed would probably find the strength to crawl over the side of a cliff before Felix found the wherewithal to crawl along a dark tunnel alone. Maybe. “We good?”
“Very good.” Zed’s lips brushed his.
Stepping back, Felix led the way to the side of the crater. Shit. Was it suddenly deeper? Only one sun remained in the sky and it was preparing to tuck itself in below the horizon for the night. Longer shadows could account for him being slightly off, but—
“Hey, this isn’t bad.”
Felix turned to Zed with a grin. “See, told you.”
No scragglers tried to entangle them on the way down and nothing stirred along the floor or in the pool. Felix paced the diameter and put it at fifteen meters. It wasn’t quite bowl shaped at the bottom. One side bulged in under the cliff, providing a shallow recess they could use for shelter from the elements and search parties.
Zed eyed the puddle of water. “Pity we don’t have the canteen.”
Felix patted his pockets, as if expecting to find it hiding in one, and frowned as he felt something else. He pulled out the pouch of water that had been tossed into his cell the night before. “Well, as a last resort, I’ve got this.” He thumbed the tab.
“Wait, don’t drink that. It’s drugged.”