by T. M. Catron
“Wait!” she called.
More curious eyes, more piercing stares.
Rance sped up, moving up to Solaris’ elbow. Behind her, Moira stumbled, and Tania steadied her.
“This is going to get bad,” Rance said. “Get us out of here.”
Solaris nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
He turned aside so quickly he almost ran her over. They darted down a side alley.
But Lysa wasn’t going to get lost so easily. “You have a ship!” she yelled at their backs.
“No,” Rance whispered, hoping no one had heard Lysa.
But the crowd had heard her. One by one, nobles and servants looked at the group running down the alley. And then, as one, they followed. Lysa put on a burst of speed and caught up to them. Abel grabbed her arm and shoved her back.
She fought him, kicking and scratching. It didn’t do any good against his armor, but it drew even more attention. Behind, the crowd grew closer.
“Moira!” Lysa called. “You can’t leave us here! Take me with you!”
Moira turned.
Rance grabbed her arm. “No! Keep moving!”
“We can’t take anybody with us,” Moira whined. “I’m sorry!”
Rance groaned.
“Let’s get out of here,” Solaris said through gritted teeth. He grabbed Moira’s left arm, Rance grabbed her right, and they marched her down the alley. Abel had released Lysa, but the woman followed. So did the growing crowd.
Lysa fell in with the followers, making sure they heard her loud and clear. “They have a ship! They’re going to leave us here to die!”
Moira burst into tears, dragging her feet and forcing Rance and Solaris to pull her along.
“Keep it together, Moira,” Rance hissed. “We can’t do anything for them. We don’t have room. Do you want to stay here and die with them? Huh?”—she shook her friend—“Sacrifice yourself for the people that turned a blind eye when your husband disappeared?”
Those were the wrong words. Moira moaned loudly and tried to turn around.
Solaris pulled Moira close. “So help me, Your Ladyship, we will drag you out of here if we have to. We came to this stinking planet to save you, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Moira tried to pull away from him, but his grip on her arm remained firm.
“But if you endanger my friends any more than you already have,” he continued. “I’ll leave you here to deal with the pirates that are this minute occupying the city. Is that clear?”
Rance wanted to argue with him, but she couldn’t. She felt the same way. And that Solaris valued her and Abel’s lives enough to say so made her heart swell with pride, despite her growing anxiety about the crowd.
And then they came to the end of the alley.
Another group had gathered, blocking their exit. Drawn by the noise of the crowd behind, they looked curiously at the six people running away from an increasingly angry mob.
They were trapped. To the left, one door read Stairs. Without thinking, Rance steered her charge for it, hoping it wasn’t locked.
The crowds, sensing their prey was about to get away, charged. Rance didn’t even have time to wonder what they’d do if they caught them. She waved her hand over the sensor at the door, and it swung open. The group fell through the doorway as one, jostling each other into a dark, narrow entryway. Solaris turned and locked the door behind them with a tap of his staff.
The structure shuddered with the onslaught above, and the stairs groaned. On reflex, everyone looked up the dark stairway.
Outside the door, someone screamed.
“Tania!” Sonya yelled in answer.
Rance looked around—Tania wasn’t there. She’d been shut out.
Moira began crying afresh, and Sonya whimpered like a lost child.
“Everybody PULL YOURSELVES TOGETHER!” Rance yelled.
Startled, they stopped crying long enough to look at her.
Rance dropped her bag on the floor and then unholstered her blaster. Abel already had one in each hand.
“Stay here,” Rance commanded Moira. “We’ll be back in five minutes.”
Moira grabbed Rance’s sleeve, pinching her arm hard. “Don’t go out there!”
Sonya grabbed Moira. “We can’t leave Tania!”
“Let go of me, servant!”
“Enough,” Solaris said. With one hand, he separated the women. Then he nodded to Rance. “Count of three. One, two, three.”
He tapped the door again, and it burst inward—the crowd had been pressing against it. Surprised, the people closest pulled out of the doorway. With the door open, Rance saw the desperation and malice in their eyes. This crowd was terrified—they would kill all of them before they realized what they were doing.
Abel pushed his way out the door, and when the blood-crazed crowd saw his weapons pointed at their faces, they halted. From somewhere to the right, Tania shrieked again.
“Give us the girl,” Abel said. “Now.”
“Take us with you!” someone screamed. Lysa had disappeared.
When they didn’t back off, Abel leveled his blaster at the man standing closest. The man’s eyes grew wide.
“I am asking nicely,” Abel said.
But the rest of the crowd, indifferent to what happened to the man, began shouting. The din bounced off the close walls and into the stairwell.
Rance scanned the crazed mob, looking for Tania. They needed to find her before something worse happened. The earth rumbled again, this time so violently Rance grabbed the door frame to keep from being thrown off her feet.
But instead of fading away, the trembling grew more brutal. Rance’s teeth chattered so much she had to clamp her mouth shut to keep from breaking them all off. The alleyway ceiling began to crumble, and the mob scattered, screaming.
Then the alley exploded in a flash of light. People flew backward, smacking against walls and crumpling on top of one another. The pressure forced Rance backward, but the middle of the alley had sustained the worst of the blast.
At first, Rance thought Solaris had attacked the mob like he had the soldiers on Doxor 5. But he stood next to her, blocking the doorway behind Abel.
She looked up. The explosion had come from the ceiling where sparks rained down on the alley below. Whole chunks of the ceiling had collapsed, causing something above to explode and ignite.
Fire licked down through a great hole. Below, people moaned and began getting to their feet. A few lay still, but Rance ran past them, looking for Tania.
She had been held farther away, out of the line of the blast. At the disturbance, the crowd had let her loose. Rance jumped over two bodies and grabbed her hand.
“You okay?”
Tania nodded, and Rance pulled her along, trying not to look at who or what they were stepping over.
The ceiling groaned and shifted, like the supports above would give way at any moment. A blaring alarm sounded, and soon the place was buzzing with drones and androids sent to assess the problem and put out the fire.
But everyone could see that the alley was going to collapse. The mob had scattered, leaving the way clear for Rance and Tania. They ran through the door to the stairwell, and Abel closed it behind. Solaris sealed it for good measure.
Sonya grabbed Tania and held her tight while glaring daggers at Moira. The noblewoman had the sense to look embarrassed and avoided everyone else’s gaze. She sank down against the wall and put her head on her knees.
Everyone took a moment to breathe. The stairwell shook again, but Rance sat down on the third step and looked at Solaris.
“What are they doing up there?”
“Sounds like they’re attacking the residential district now,” Solaris said, looking up the stairwell with a frown. “Although I have no idea why. You’d think they’d attack something more strategic, like the Unity base or the Senate building.
“It is a symbol of extravagance, boss,” Abel said. He may have been a hulk, but Abel could be surprisingly astute
when it suited him. “That is why they’re attacking it.”
“Better that than the Senate building,” Rance said. “We left the Star Streaker not too far away from it.”
“That is my home!” Moira said suddenly. She raised her head, and her red-rimmed, puffy eyes made her look older and more destitute.
“Was your home,” Solaris said. He’d lost all patience with her, it seemed.
“Where to from here?” Rance asked, standing and dusting off her hands. “We still need to go under the river, correct? We haven’t done that yet?”
Moira shook her head.
“So we are back to the tunnels,” Abel said. “Come on. I’ll lead the way.”
He helped Tania to her feet, and they walked up the flight of stairs, which emptied them out into a service tunnel. They had to choose left or right. Rance had completely lost her sense of direction, and when she called upon her NNR to show her a map, all she got was static in her ZOD. It would have picked that moment to glitch out. They still had Abel’s HUD, so he took point and led them to the service network. They headed down a corridor, and then descended two flights of narrow, metal stairs to end in another service tunnel.
The new tunnels looked much like the tunnels they’d used the day before—dirty, greasy, and smelly. More signs of an empire degrading. Only this time, Rance kept her eyes on each door they passed, half-expecting an angry mob to burst out of one and block their exit. All the doors looked alike, except for a few with red or yellow signs plastered in a language Rance didn’t know. If her NNR had been working, she could have translated without trouble.
Abel didn’t have any trouble deciphering it because he used it to navigate as they went.
“What do they mean?” Rance asked after the fifth door.
Abel shrugged. “Just numbers.”
Rance’s heart was still beating fast from the encounter below. And her senses were hyper-aware. She couldn’t relax. Really, she didn’t want to. The adrenaline rush was all that was keeping the guilt at bay. She mentally ticked off all the reasons for hating herself. One, they’d left all those people behind. Two, Rance had endangered her crew on the most foolish errand imaginable. Three, they had no plan for escaping the planet, other than taking off and hoping for the best.
Don’t think about it now.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She tugged at her collar again, but since she still wore her helmet, no air passed through her suit. She kept her visor up and plodded on. The tunnels were uncomfortably warm, and after a minute Rance realized the air flow had stopped.
“I’m surprised we still have power,” she commented.
“These underground tunnels have their own grid,” Abel said. “But it’s probably in jeopardy like everything else.”
With the absence of ventilation, they grew stifling hot. Rance sweated through her flight suit, which was designed to wick away moisture. But it couldn’t keep up with the heat. Soon, the fabric mesh lining was so wet it stuck to her skin and began chafing.
So much for state-of-the-art flight suits. Rance made a mental note to get different ones if they ever got out of this mess. As they walked, the adrenaline rush abated. The guilt hit her full force, washing over her in wave after wave. Raised around perfection and with high standards, Rance had always been hard on herself when she messed up.
And she’d really messed up this time.
They walked a long time, following Abel’s cues. Moira, Tania, and Sonya remained quiet. Once Rance had calmed down, she felt sorry for all three of them. They’d always lived around comfort, even the servants, and had never been in a life-threatening situation such as this.
But Rance was still disgusted with herself for even being in this situation.
In addition to the guilt overwhelming her, every inch of Rance’s body was bone-tired. She pinched herself to keep from falling asleep as she walked.
Soon, the tunnel began to stink. She closed her visor and let her suit’s air circulate. But the battery was low—it wouldn’t last much longer.
Everything began to look alike. The walls, the doors, the signs. The red and yellow became blurred. Rance raised her visor and pushed her palms into her eyes, trying to wake up.
They didn’t stop until an hour later when they sagged against a wall to rest. Rance leaned her head back against the inside of her helmet. But she couldn’t get comfortable, so she removed the helmet to let some air to her head.
The stench of the tunnel drove her to put it right back on. So much for some air. Rance looked over at Moira, whose dress hem was stained with the filth of the tunnel and whose nose was permanently wrinkled at the stink. The veil did nothing to protect her from it. As Rance watched, Moira removed the fine veil and cast it aside. It fell onto the greasy floor without ceremony.
They all looked worse for wear. Abel’s eyes were puffy. Solaris looked paler than Rance had ever seen, and Tania and Sonya looked so tired, they might have been sleep-walking.
If they stayed any longer, they’d fall asleep, and possibly lose their window for leaving the planet—if they still had one. With a groan, Rance climbed to her feet and gave the command to move out. No one complained aloud, but everyone glared at her. One by one, they stood and moved on down the tunnel.
The rumbling above subsided as they marched downward, under the river. Rance prayed the explosions above hadn’t damaged the tunnels so badly they would flood. She could think of more horrible deaths than violent drowning, but not many.
As they moved deeper under the river, the water streaming down the walls became more than condensation. Soon they were sloshing through water up to their ankles, and Rance was thankful for her tall boots.
The water ran downhill toward the lowest portion of the tunnel. It washed the floor grease on top, creating little rainbow-colored rivers of oil on top of the new current.
The group halted.
“What’s the final depth under the river?” Solaris asked Abel.
He shook his head. “Dunno. But we go quite a bit deeper than this before it slopes upward.”
They needed to choose. Go forward until the water became too powerful to deal with? Or go back and find an alternate route?
“Regardless of which tunnel we use,” Rance said. “We need to cross the river. I don’t know how we’re going to do that above ground.”
“Right,” Abel said, frowning. “Right.”
They all stared at the water a minute. Rance was hoping for a genius idea, a moment of inspiration. She didn’t care who came up with it as long as it got them out of their predicament. When no one spoke, she realized they were waiting on her to make the decision.
“Down,” she said finally. “At least this way we might have a chance. Up top, we have nothing.”
They nodded, and the group continued on. The farther they traveled, the deeper the water became. When it first spilled over the top of Rance’s boots, she gasped at the cold. Then she glanced back at Moira and her servants, who had been walking through the icy water without complaint all this time.
Rance felt another twinge of guilt, but she couldn’t do anything about it. The options remained the same—go back up to be stuck in the apocalypse, or continue their current path and cross the river.
When the water level was thigh-high, they moved to the wall to steady themselves. At this depth, Rance could still push through, but Moira and the other women were struggling. It was up to their waists and occasionally lifted them off their feet. Abel was shorter than Rance and Solaris, but his massive, armored body had no trouble staying grounded. He held out an arm for their wards to cling to, staying behind them to buffer the worst of the current.
When Rance lifted her visor to let some air into her suit, water splashed onto her face. It stank but cooled her face.
“How much farther, you think?” she yelled over the roar of the water.
“We’ve got to be close!” Solaris answered. “If we’re not, the current is going to wash us away!”
As
they braced themselves against the current, the lights began to flicker. Then, Rance heard the noise she’d been dreading.
A rumbling sound overcame the sound of rushing water. She turned and looked back up the tunnel from where they’d come. With a sinking feeling, she noticed the lights behind them had gone out completely. The noise grew beyond a roar, more like a tempest.
The tunnel was flooding.
“Everybody grab onto something!” she screamed, grabbing a pitifully small door handle.
She barely got the words out of her mouth when a wall of water hit them from behind.
Chapter Nine
If Rance had ever fallen out of an air vehicle without a parachute, she imagined this is what hitting the ground would feel like. All the air was knocked out of her, and her body smacked into Solaris, who was standing in front of her when the water hit.
Her hand was yanked away from the door, and sharp pain shot up her arm as two fingers were dislocated. Rance yelped and gulped a mouthful of water.
Then her entire body was underwater, the current pulling and pushing, slamming her against the wall, against another person—she couldn’t tell who at this point—and even into the piping along the ceiling.
Time seemed to slow. Rance had never felt so much pain in her life. Every part of her body was being pummeled, and she’d never been so grateful for a helmet as she was at that moment, even if she’d been caught with the visor open.
But even as Rance registered that she was still alive, she waited for her death. She was powerless to stop her body from rolling over and over in the current, from banging against every object imaginable. And she needed air.
Her lungs were about to burst. Any second, her body would force her mouth open to take great lungfuls of greasy, black water. She’d always thought she’d die in space—in a glorious space battle or as an old woman in her chair, watching the stars slide by. Drowning underground had never been an option.
If she stopped fighting, it would all be over. The pain in her body and lungs would vanish. If she’d just let go.