by Eric Flint
The shifting rubble stabilized, and the ground beneath Jommy's feet stopped trembling. He approached the laboratory chamber cautiously. Wafting from the thick darkness of the interior, he could smell stale air, spilled chemicals, burned circuitry. The disintegrator tube would be in there.
Moving anxiously, Jommy squirmed through the gap and climbed partway inside, fearing that the uncertain pistons would release their hold at any moment. Even though the jury-rigged power source kept the controls active, the several-ton door could easily slam back down. He slipped inside quickly, dropped to the tilted floor, and squatted, catching his breath. Still not safe, though: If the door crashed shut now, he would be trapped in a tomb.
Jommy fumbled his way forward, straining to see details in the darkness. Then he tripped on something and crashed to his knees. Catching himself with palms flat against the metal floor, he found himself staring face to face with a pallid corpse.
The man had been smashed, his face bruised, his eyes open. Jommy scrambled backward and bumped into a second dead man. As his eyes adjusted, he noted that both men were wearing the armbands of the secret police. Both looked like broken dolls, tossed about in the tantrum of a hyperactive child.
Jommy realized what had happened. Though the vault walls were impregnable, this whole room had crashed down during the intense bombardment of the palace. To the men sealed inside, it would have been like being in a barrel going over a waterfall. They had been smashed to a pulp.
The slice of daylight shining through the open door provided just enough illumination for him to make his inspection. Forcing himself to ignore the corpses, Jommy searched the debris. His tendrils gave him no advantage; in the thick-walled vault, he could sense nothing around him, nothing outside. A table lay overturned among smashed bottles; papers were strewn like the feathers of a startled chicken. Wall brackets had snapped, tumbling and twisting metal shelves into piles. Jommy flung the shelves aside with a loud clatter, searching for his disintegrator.
With a distant rumble, the shaking vault continued to settle, and the floor tilted at a more substantial angle. Jommy scrambled to keep his balance. Three unbroken canisters and a metal pipe rolled down to the low point of a back corner. Then, as the room came to rest at a new unstable point, he spotted the slender, polished tube that had saved his life so many times. His father's weapon!
With a wash of relief and a sudden flood of urgency—something from his slan senses, even here in the thick-walled vault?—he knew he had to get out of there. He grabbed the weapon and worked his way up the steep and slippery floor, past the scarecrowish corpses. Victorious, with the disintegrator in one hand, he worked his head and shoulder through the door gap, then balanced on his elbows. He had done it!
As he blinked in the low light of sunset, cradling the weapon, he heard voices outside, other people moving through the rubble. Nearby. Treasure seekers must be looking for valuable artifacts and antique treasures in the palace ruins. He hadn't sensed them from inside the thick-walled chamber.
As he oriented himself and turned, in the cramped gap, he felt a tingling, sensed someone very close—and then hands grabbed his shoulders from behind. A man was standing right on top of the partially open vault door above him. "Here he is! I told you I saw someone up here."
Caught halfway in and out of the door gap, Jommy struggled, but the metal floor and walls were slippery and he couldn't get a solid grip. People rushed forward to grab him. To his dismay, he dropped the disintegrator weapon as he tried to wrench himself free. He heard the tube clatter back down among the debris.
More scavengers clutched at him, wrenching his arm. Someone wrapped fingers in his hair and yanked it with a painful tug. "Hey, look at this. He's got tendrils!"
"Tendrils! He's a bloody slan!"
"Looks like we caught ourselves one of the enemy."
CHAPTER 26
Now that Anthea's head was filled with wonderful, horrible knowledge from the library's "true archives," she knew what she had to do. Long ago, the children of Samuel Lann had built a large subterranean hideout right under the noses of the humans. The Porgrave message said that it had been designed to last for centuries.
That was where she would go.
The baby rested comfortably against her chest as she hurried down the corridor from the vault room. Before she could leave the great stone building, however, Anthea heard a ruckus coming from Mr. Reynolds's office. "Help me, somebody! Is anybody out there?"
As she heard his plaintive tone, a lump formed in her throat. So many people had been awful to her since the birth of the baby, but not Reynolds. What sort of person was she turning into? Did she have to leave the poor man there, helpless? With all the turmoil in the city, there would be looters, marauders—and no police or rescue workers. What if Mr. Reynolds starved to death because she had tied him up, left him with no chance of escape.
She swallowed hard, hesitated, then made up her mind. When she stepped into his office, he flinched when he saw her. "Don't hit me again! I won't hurt you."
"Right now you'd say anything to get yourself free."
He hung his head. "Yes, in fact, I probably would. I don't understand who you are, or what you want—"
"I just want to live in peace, to get from day to day without strangers trying to kill me!"
"But you have a slan baby, madam. Even if I wanted to, how could I harm you? Can't you just . . . manipulate my thoughts? Why not brainwash me so that I won't even remember you were here?"
Anthea marched toward where he was tied up in his chair. "Now you listen to me, Mr. Reynolds." She showed him the back of her head, and though he squinted without his glasses, he could definitely see that she had no tendrils. "I'm not a slan. Neither was my husband. But somehow I gave birth to a baby with tendrils. Don't ask me how." She turned back around, let him take a good look at the infant's innocent face. "I never expected this to happen, but I am not going to give up my baby. I will not let him be harmed by lynch mobs of ignorant and prejudiced people. We're getting out of here, to safety."
"But . . . but, ma'am—I didn't threaten him in any way."
She crossed her arms. "I saw the look of horror on your face."
"Probably more a look of surprise. I've never seen a slan baby. In fact, we don't get many babies in the library." A look of alarm crossed his face. "Wait! If you're going away, please don't leave me tied up like this!"
Though she tried to be stern, Anthea simply wasn't very good at looking tough. "It's your lucky day, Mr. Reynolds. I've decided not to."
"My lucky day. . ." he groaned.
She took the eyeglasses from his pocket and set them on a filing cabinet in the far corner of the room. "I just want a head start." She unbound both of his arms. "You can free your own feet. By the time you get out of this chair and find your glasses, we'll have vanished into the streets. It won't do you any good to chase after us."
"I have no interest in chasing after you, Madam! You'd just beat me up again. I wish you'd asked for my help instead. . ."
She felt a twinge in her heart. "I feel the same, Mr. Reynolds. But the sad fact is, if you helped me, you'd be putting yourself in danger, too." She winced at the memory of poor Davis, how he'd been killed so that she and the baby could get away. As she turned to leave, Anthea hesitated at the door of his office. "You're a man of books and of learning. Don't let prejudice and ignorance get the best of you. In fact, why don't you go into that archives vault and take a good look at those reports from the Slan Wars? Learn the truth. There's plenty of blame to go around, for humans and slans alike. Protect those records. Someday, they might help us all understand each other."
She left out of the room, not even feeling the need to hurry. She could see something trustworthy in the librarian's round eyes.
* * *
From the mysterious Porgrave transmission, Anthea had an instinctive grasp of how to get to the safe underground base—if it still existed. Slans had apparently hidden there for many generations, and the ol
d redoubt had been built to last for centuries, maybe even millennia, as a stronghold. However, Centropolis itself had changed a great deal after such a long passage of time and the long rebuilding from the devastating Slan Wars.
Anthea had faith it would still be there.
Leaving the shelter of the library, she discovered it was a new morning, though the city was a chaos of still-burning fires, collapsed skyscrapers, smashed cars, and crushed bodies. Anthea spent most of the day picking her way through the streets, hiding from anyone who might see her. In normal, civilized times, no one would have refused to help a mother and her baby; now, though, she looked like a victim, an easy target. And if anyone should notice the baby's tendrils . . .
When she finally stood at the supposed entrance to the hidden underground base, she fought back her disappointment and surprise. Maybe it had been a wild-goose chase after all.
The small, old building was nondescript, intentionally designed so that no one would give it a second glance. A small sign in the window said that it was a "Museum of Sewing Machines"—a legitimate-sounding place, but one that would not entice great crowds of visitors. Even with the blast marks and rubble in the streets, this structure remained intact and untouched. Anthea realized that the building was incredibly old, deceptively ancient, and reinforced to the point that it must be virtually indestructible. The small, quiet museum had probably existed in this spot since the days of the Slan Wars.
Looking around furtively, Anthea scurried over to the Museum of Sewing Machines and found the door unlocked. That seemed strange to her, but then she realized that the mobs had many more tempting places to ransack.
The current owners of the small building probably didn't even know its connection to the ancient slan hideout . . . or maybe hidden slans watched over the building. She clung to that hope. If there were others, she could take safety among them. They would help protect her and the baby.
"Hello?" she called into the shadowy lobby. No one answered.
On tables and in transparent cases, strange contraptions were on display, spindles and pulleys, specialized industrial stitching devices and models used by homemakers from days past. One battery-powered demonstration unit slowly bobbed up and down, pumping its needle endlessly through a patch of cloth like a mechanical mosquito.
"Hello?" She crept around behind a desk where an attendant would have waited fruitlessly for paying visitors who never came. She found a small file room, a broom closet, a cold coffeepot and a packet of stale crackers, which she wolfed down, but no hidden passage that led to the underground vault. Of course, if this secret had endured undetected for centuries, the door or hatch would be well hidden. She wandered back out to the display room, at a loss for what to do next.
The baby was restless in her arms, and she felt a thrumming inside her skull. Another Porgrave signal was coming from here, a pinpointing beacon like the one transmitted from inside the archives vault. The infant could not speak, could not direct her, but she could sense things through him. Anthea was not entirely on her own.
The vibrations seemed strongest in the main museum room, surreptitious scanners or detectors that no human would notice. She continued to search, tapping on walls, looking for hidden doors. She walked from one old sewing machine to the next, from the bulky and old-fashioned to the sleek and modern.
Anthea felt drawn again to the battery-powered demonstration model that continued pumping its needle up and down. When she touched it with her outstretched hand, she felt a thrill of rightness about this machine. The baby's tendrils waved in the air, and the beckoning signal grew stronger. She heard a click, as sensors detected the baby, accepted him.
The sewing machine stopped, and Anthea froze as well. Then she heard a whirring release, and the display stand moved slightly. She stepped back, fumbled around, and realized that the whole podium rested on a clever pivot. When she pushed it, the stand slid easily on lubricated tracks to expose a hatch in the floor—the entrance!
As she bent down with the baby, a metal covering whisked back to reveal a ladder leading down into a narrow chamber. Weak-kneed with relief, Anthea wrapped one arm around the baby and painstakingly made her way down seven rungs until she found herself in a small metal-walled room. She could make out no doors or hatches. A dead end.
Overhead, the covering slid back into place, sealing her inside. With a whirring noise, the sewing machine display case pivoted back into its normal position. She held the baby against her; this felt like a trap.
Anthea could find no controls, no windows, no posted instructions. "Well, now what?" she asked, a rhetorical question.
Then the whole room fell into a stomach-lurching plunge. Cables hummed and the walls vibrated as the elevator shot downward. In her arms the baby cooed and gurgled happily, sensing no danger.
Because the machinery still worked, because of the well-maintained sewing machine museum overhead, she was sure they'd find another population of slans inside the underground base. She would ask them for help. She could be at home among the other refugees, who would protect her.
When the elevator finally stopped, one wall whisked aside to reveal a huge, warm, and well-lit cavern. Anthea formed her most welcoming smile and stepped out, carrying the infant and expecting to be greeted by a group of slans, people who would help her, protect her baby, and explain everything to her.
Instead, she found only skeletons.
CHAPTER 27
As the angry mob grabbed for him in the wreckage of the palace, Jommy was precariously caught in the vault door gap. He had dropped the disintegrator, and now hands clutched at him, seizing his arms, his hair. He tried to let himself drop back down into the chamber, but somebody grabbed his collar, dragging him back up.
If he struggled too much, Jommy feared he might jar loose the tracking device wired up to the door mechanism, and then the thick pistons would release the heavy door. Or, the whole armored chamber might collapse into the unstable rubble. As a trick, he went limp, forcing the scavengers to drag him out; they would underestimate him, believe he was weak. As soon as he was free, though, he flew into a frenzy.
Jommy punched the nearest man with strength that surprised his attackers, knocking him back head over heels. Then he flung two more far away as they threw themselves on him. Like a pair of rag dolls, they tumbled into the rubble, smashing into the jagged stones. One slipped and fell into a wide gap, dropping deep into the unseen lower levels; a rumble of a cave-in accompanied his fall, cutting off his screams.
The murderous scavengers circled, wary now. "Dirty slan!"
"Careful, he might fry your brain."
"You didn't have a brain to start with, Jerome."
One scrawny man who wore several layers of mismatched clothing was much more interested in the vault Jommy had been investigating. Ducking away from the fight, the scrawny man shouted, "Looks like a treasure room! I bet he was hiding something in there. Slan treasure." He started to crawl headfirst into the vault.
Jommy fought each attacker that came at him, but more and more people swarmed over the rubble, at least a hundred, all of them carrying makeshift clubs and pipes; a few had firearms, but they did not shoot. Jommy could tell they wanted to tear him apart with their bare hands.
When a man jumped on his shoulders, Jommy clawed to get the attacker away. A red-haired man sprang at him as well, but Jommy spun, knocking him with the other attacker's thrashing feet. Pinwheeling his arms, the redhead stumbled against the door controls and knocked loose the device that powered the unlocking mechanism.
The scrawny treasure hunter had crawled halfway through the gap, peering into the darkness of the chamber. When several tons of vault door dropped shut on him like a mammoth guillotine blade, he made a sound more like a cough than a scream. On the outside, separated from the rest of his body, his legs kept twitching.
Several of the scavengers stepped back with expressions of queasy disgust. Two men began to laugh like hyenas at their comrade's misfortune.
J
ommy slugged an oncoming attacker in the chin with enough force that he heard both the man's jaw and his neck snap. Then he snatched up chunks of rock at his feet and began to throw them like cannonballs, smashing several more scavengers in the face. But still they kept coming, swinging their clubs, closing in.
Jommy couldn't possibly fight them all. A heavy pipe smashed down on his left arm, numbing it from the elbow down, and another caught him a glancing blow on the temple. He reeled, but kept fighting.
A square-shouldered man with a scabbed cut on his left cheek drew a long knife and came at the stunned slan. Jommy threw another sharp-edged chunk of rubble at the knife-wielder, but his aim was off and the burly man ducked to one side. Jommy held up both fists, ready to fight, barely keeping his feet on the shifting ground.
The knife-wielder was apparently the leader of the mob, judging from the way he barked orders and how the others deferred to him. The rest of the mob backed away to let the leader have his chance. He slashed designs in the air with his dagger, taunting Jommy. The scavengers hooted and chuckled roughly, enjoying the show, while more vermin streamed over the ruins of the palace, coming from side streets. While Jommy defended himself from the dancing blade, more attackers seized his arms—far too many for him to throw off. The leader with the knife just smiled, letting the others do the work for him.