by Erik Hyrkas
Chapter 10. Max
The cavern was a rough triangular corridor with the ceiling somewhere high above in the darkness. It looked like the foundation of the earth had cracked and shifted, and like the slabs of stone we walked between were waiting to smash back together at any moment. The floor was uneven, covered with loose debris and large sheets of rock that the walls had shed. At one point, the cavern’s walls became very narrow and we had to shuffle sideways through. Further along, we had to crawl on our bellies. After what seemed an eternity to me in that tight passage, we eventually stood up in a large open room.
The low ceiling stretched like a dome over us, touching the rugged floor dozens of feet away in each direction. Nothing about this cavern looked artificial, and there were no obvious exits. Even the way we had crawled in was difficult to make out after taking a few steps. I realized that the different crevices in the walls all looked the same.
“Hold up,” I said. “Shouldn’t we mark the way we came in so we can find it again if we need to?”
Miranda nodded. “You’re right. We should be placing markers every dozen feet so we know where we’ve been and how to get back. I’ve been spelunking before, and anybody in a cave needs to be careful even if they aren’t looking for a flesh-eater.”
She set about building a cairn, and I helped. When the pile of stones was sufficiently tall so that it did not look like some random pile, she pulled out a thin green glow stick, lit it, and put it on top.
“That should be plenty visible,” she said. “Even if we don’t need to come back this way, it’s good to know where we’ve been so we don’t cover the same ground again.”
I had to agree, but I had also resolved to dig my way out of the cave before trying to swim out the way we got here. Then I had a depressing thought. “If we’re stuck down here for a while, we might need fresh water.”
Even in the dim light of the glow stick, I saw Miranda frown.
“I really hope we aren’t down here that long,” she said.
Being stuck in a cave made me wonder who I was stuck with. I realized I really didn’t know Miranda very well. I looked at her. “Why did you become an agent?”
“There aren’t too many jobs where you get to put your life on the line to save the planet or even the galaxy on a day to day basis,” she said.
“So, you’re in it for the excitement?” I asked.
“Aren’t you? There isn’t a more dangerous job.”
I shrugged. “People get hurt, die, or get smelly all the time. I am not sure it is worth it. I’ve heard time and again how amazing my parents were, for example, but now they are dead. I have only a vague idea of who they were. A big price to pay, it seems to me.”
“Why did you join if you didn’t do it for the excitement?”
“I was seventeen when my parents died. I didn’t really know what else to do. I guess I wanted to show I could do something I knew they’d be proud of. I didn’t know that I’d be this bad at it though. I probably should have been a truck driver.”
She patted me on the back. “Well, for what it’s worth, I think you’re a good partner.” Miranda took out another glow stick and handed it to me. “You might need this if you lose your flashlight. It’s always good to have an extra light source.” She scanned the debris around us. “Let’s explore.” She walked away and started digging around the room.
We searched the cave, which turned out to be rather large, for over an hour before Miranda called to me, “I found something!”
I made my way through the rubble as quickly as was safe. “What is it?”
“There’s some sort of hole in the ground here. It’s half covered with this rock, though.”
The rock to which she referred was more like a boulder. I didn’t see any way we were going to move it, but Miranda suggested we try. I thought it a waste of effort, but what the hell. Together we pushed on the boulder and, amazingly, it moved. Miranda must have been much stronger than I thought. With the boulder out of the way, the opening was barely big enough for one person to descend at a time into what appeared to be a slide.
“It’s called a chimney in spelunker-speak,” she told me.
I looked into the narrow hole, which twisted and bent into the dark. I thought a more appropriate name for it might have been corkscrew. “It doesn’t look like much of a chimney.”
She smiled her brilliant smile, which I had not seen since yesterday—at least not in all its amazing glory. She was beautiful when her eyes lit up. “That’s just what spelunkers call vertical tunnels like this, and they might lead to another room or cavern or might simply dead end. I’ll go first. Wait up here until I give the all clear. I don’t want us both to get stuck at once.”
I pulled a thin cord from my belt and tied one end to the large boulder we had moved. “Take this, just in case you need to climb out or be pulled back up.”
“Good thinking.”
She put on light gloves that left her fingertips exposed. I dug around in one of my many cargo pants’ pockets and followed her example. The gloves were standard issue and, like so much of our equipment, they were light, compact, and durable. The palms were coated with Marhid rosin, which gave the gloves a sticky quality that would let you grip nearly any surface.
Miranda studied the hole a moment longer. “I’m going to go down feet first in case it’s a dead end, which will make it easier to crawl out—especially if there isn’t enough room to turn around at the bottom.”
She lowered herself into the hole and sat on the smooth, slide-like surface, then started scooting further in. First her feet disappeared around the initial bend, and then she slowly twisted and lowered her torso out of sight. In a few moments I was staring into the darkness where she disappeared. I dangled my feet into the hole and sat down. The extreme silence and stillness of the air unnerved me. At first I heard small sounds coming from the hole as she made her way down, her scooting against the rock, and then nothing. I listened for many moments without hearing so much as a whisper, and then I heard something, a ticking noise coming from the darkness around me. I shined my flashlight around the room and saw small metallic shapes emerging from cracks and dark corners.
The shapes looked like little robotic spiders with glowing red eyes and sharp pincers. They approached warily as I reached into a pocket and pulled out a small ball that looked like it was made from rubber but was really a synthetic material that retained near complete inertia after each bounce—the universe’s best super ball. This ball also emitted small EMP bursts with each impact. I pulled the thread out of it the same way you pull a pin from a grenade, activating it, and tossed the ball with all my strength at the nearest spiders. Even if they were EMP resistant, they would still have to fail-over to their redundant systems, and that would slow them down. The spiders nearest the first bounce froze and clattered to the floor. I narrowly dodged the ball as it zipped past my head, disabling the spiders threatening to pounce on me. I could tell that I had upset the robotic spiders by the high-pitched, robotic chirping they squealed at me.
I jumped into the hole to avoid the next rebound of the ball. “Miranda?” I shouted.
“Yes?” Her voice was muffled.
“We have trouble up here. Is it safe for me to come down?”
“What kind of trouble?” she asked.
A spider robot leapt at me and bit me in the arm, tearing into my flesh. “Miranda, is it safe for me to come down?”
I tossed the spider across the room and it bounced off stone, squirmed, righted itself, and began its approach again. The EMP ball was still bouncing around disabling spiders, but there were hundreds of them and I didn’t have any other way to destroy them. I pulled out a metal cylinder with a nylon-like strap from my belt and pushed a button. The cylinder spiraled out into a circular shield as I held it above my head, but the opening wasn’t big enough for the shield to expand to full size and the shield’s mechanisms groaned and protested at the resistance. The cord that was tied to the rock above
was sliced by the shield, and I cursed as the cord whipped past my head. I heard Miranda scream below me. Metallic feet clicked and ticked on the shield. It was made of an alloy that could stop bullets and lasers, and so I reasoned that it should stop a few spiders long enough for us to escape.
“Are you okay?” I called below me. I glanced at my arm and saw the tissue that the spider had torn into was already healed.
“No,” came a disgruntled voice below me. She sounded fine to me, at least faring better than I was with the metal bugs.
I carefully slid down the hole until I couldn’t feel anything below me. I kept my feet and back braced on the wall while I shined a light downward. Eight feet down, Miranda glared up at me.
I dropped the remaining distance and landed on my feet. The ground was smooth, flat, and polished like marble. Other than the hole, the ceiling was also flat and polished.
“What the hell happened?” Miranda asked as she rose to her feet.
“Spiders.”
“You let me fall because of some spiders?” She brushed off her butt. “That’s going to leave a bruise.”
I shrugged. “They were kind of creepy—they had red eyes.”
“They also have a venomous bite that could knock out a bull rhinoceros,” said a man from the shadows. “Raise your hands so that I can see them, unless you’d like to be dematerialized by an antimatter blast.”
“Who are you?” I asked, realizing I was not tired after my arm self-healed because of the metabolism boost pills. In my mind, I measured the distance to this person, measured the odds of surviving an antimatter blast from here. Self-healing has its limits, and that weapon definitely represented one of them.
“Hands in the air, or Miranda gets the first blast.”
I slowly raised my hands, but Miranda had other ideas. She growled and marched right toward him.
“Don’t make me destroy you,” the man warned.
She slapped the shadowy figure in the face. “We were worried about you. We were trying to save you…”
He backhanded her with enough force that she landed at my feet. “And it turns out you were wrong,” he said.
Lights came on in what turned out to be a room, and I blinked as I tried to adjust to the brightness. When my vision cleared, I saw Tyler standing with a large chrome pistol pointed at Miranda.
His graying hair was now closely cropped, and he wore black leather pants and a black leather vest over a long-sleeve black cloth shirt. I thought it likely the pants and shirt were insulated with some form of armor. He also wore heavy combat boots, which made me wonder what jungle he planned to walk through. He had shaved the stubble from his face.
The room looked like a giant workshop. Tables were arranged neatly in rows, and shelves along the walls held metallic parts and tools. The lighting appeared to be standard florescent shop lights, but I knew they were actually Virrean Fusion-Lit brand bulbs. Sure, they flickered a little when you turned them on, but they were the most natural light in the universe without going outside. Expensive for a workshop, I thought.
“What did you do with my little helpers?” Tyler asked. “They should have been along by now.”
“They wanted to play, and so I gave them a ball.”
Comprehension dawned on him immediately. “You EMP’d them?”
“Just a little.”
“Tyler, why are you pointing a gun at us?” Miranda asked.
“I’m actually pointing it at you, sweetheart, because I think that’s the best way to control Max here.” Tyler pushed a button on his watch and it gave a small beep of confirmation. “If I miss his multiple hearts and just shoot Max in the arm or something, he’ll just regenerate it—but you won’t be that lucky.” Then I noticed the red laser dot on Miranda’s forehead. He wasn’t likely to miss by much. “I had hoped to take Max without involving you. I like you, and I wanted you to live. Unfortunately, that’s not how things worked out.”
Miranda scowled. “This isn’t over yet.”
“I’m sorry, but it is,” he said.
Two shiny black humanoid robots entered the room from behind Tyler. Their heads had a dozen glowing blue eyes arranged to see in different directions. They had two arms, each equipped with guns on the wrists, and four fingered hands. Their metallic legs resembled a dog’s hind legs.
Tyler didn’t take his eyes off Miranda as he spoke to the robots. “Detain them and strip them of weapons.”
“Confirmed,” the robots said in unison as they walked toward us.
The machines zip tied our hands efficiently and uncomfortably, then quickly stripped us of anything that might have been construed as a weapon or that they couldn’t identify. They even took my graviton bars and my ring, which pissed me off. Each of the items they took disappeared into a compartment that opened in their chest.
Miranda’s face was bright red. “Tyler, why are you doing this?”
“Tritium.”
“What?” I asked.
“Any fool can get all the Deuterium they want. It’s practically as easy to acquire as hydrogen, but Tritium is a different matter. On this planet, humans have only produced about five hundred pounds of it since they learned to use it in controlled nuclear fusion, not that they have the process completely right. However, interstellar travel requires tons of Tritium, and I’ve located a source willing to sell it to me—and the price was right.”
“You sold out?” Miranda asked. “What about your oath as an agent to serve and protect?”
He scowled at her. “I have served and I have protected. Now it’s time to enjoy my retirement.”
“Wait! What price?” I asked. “What price was right?”
“On our last mission, when I took a bullet made of depleted uranium for you…” He gripped his shoulder. “I thought I was going to die, but then you saved me using that amazing blood of yours. It hurt like hell, but I survived. A month later I heard about this vast pool of Tritium on Zeta-Terra that nobody had been able to get, and when I found out who has it, I realized that I could offer something nobody else could: you.”
“So you’ve been killing innocent people to lure me here?” I asked.
Tyler smiled. “No, no. You see, the Wendigo don’t have technology, and so I had to go talk to their king in person.”
“The Wendigo?” Miranda asked. “Who are they?”
“They wouldn’t have taught you about them in the Academy,” Tyler said. “Long ago the Alliance attempted to make an outpost on that planet. The Wendigo crushed it.”
“And you wanted to make a deal with them?” I asked.
“The king was receptive to my proposal, but he asked for payment to let me leave his planet alive. That’s the reason I had to bring his son to this planet. Otherwise negotiations would have been over right there with my immediate demise. The king’s offer was really one I couldn’t refuse.”
“What were you thinking?” Miranda asked.
“Don’t worry. I’m perfectly safe in this cave. Fortunately, Wendigo are not too fond of swimming, and so he stays out of here. However, he’s another reason I carry this little baby.” He nodded in the direction of his antimatter pistol. “It’s good for more than killing agents. After this deal, I’ll be off to retirement and the Service can have their fun dealing with the Wendigo.”
“Handheld antimatter weapons are banned,” Miranda pointed out.
“It can be hard to play by the rules, which is a big reason the Service is going to have their work cut out for them with the Wendigo. Oh, I expect they’ll win, but it’ll be costly—and I’ll be gone. Anyway, the Wendigo turned out to be a convenient way to lure you here, but that was just luck. I had other plans of trying to get you alone, but things have worked out for the best.”
“I still don’t get it. Why would the Wendigo want my blood? They can already regenerate, right?”
He frowned. “I’m truly sorry, Max,” he said. “It’s not pleasant, I admit. It might be the worst possible fate one can suffer.”
“You’re going to give me laxatives and then make me watch Barney and Friends until I die?”
“Wendigo are always hungry, and you’re the meal that doesn’t end—and you’ll make the king stronger than any other Wendigo.”
I felt sick when I realized what he had in mind. I was going to have chunks bitten off of me for as long as I lived, which would be a long time if the king didn’t get carried away and bite off my head. I realized with some sadness that my best hope might be to provoke Tyler into blasting me in the head or chest with the antimatter pistol. If that failed, I might have to starve myself, but that would take time, time filled with unimaginable pain. I shuddered. Then I realized the robots hadn’t taken my metabolism boost pills. I wasn’t going to live through this—that wasn’t an option. I needed to find a way to get Miranda out, and then I could down the whole bottle and then nothing could stop me from starving.
“Master, where would you like the confiscated items?” one of the robots asked.
“Leave their items in my quarters. Take the prisoners to the ship’s containment area. We’ll leave at midnight.”
A robot grabbed my arm and pulled me roughly into a hallway. I glanced back at Miranda, who looked angry. I knew this was my fault. I should have checked out the cave first and kept a com link to call for backup. This wasn’t the first time that I screwed up and my partner paid for it.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered back to her. “I should have come alone.”
She looked confused. “Sorry? This isn’t your fault. He wasn’t supposed to be on the mission, and we should have tied him up and flown him back the moment we knew.”
“I know, but I was suspicious even as we left the command center.”
The robot shook me. “Cease communication. My orders are to drill a hole in the female if you do not comply.”
“That’s sort of harsh,” Miranda said.
The robot next to her held out a finger that spouted a small spinning drill bit.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I get it.”
The machines dragged us to an elevator that took us deeper into the Earth. When we emerged from the elevator, we were in a giant room with a spaceship in the middle.
The ship was bright red with orange flames painted on the sides, some alien markings that I couldn’t make out on the sides as well. The craft was about forty feet long with a glass cockpit connected by a slender neck to a thicker body. The shape resembled a giant flaming goose.
“The Phoenix 5000?” Miranda asked. “Tyler took it?”
I heard the spinning of a drill bit.
“Oh, right. Shutting up,” she said.
I noticed some black scars in places and gestured to them silently. A faded Stellar Command symbol on the side had been partially sandblasted off.
The ship was obviously stolen and, by the looks of the burns, it had seen some action. Either Tyler was in a dogfight or he took it from the repair dock. I realized that the ship might not even be fully functional.
“Our briefing originally listed this ship’s disappearance in the report of the ping, connecting this ship possibly with an energy signature measured here,” she whispered.
“What?” I whispered back.
“When I first read our brief, it said a Phoenix 5000 had been stolen, but then the brief changed and the information was gone. Wendy said there were no missing Phoenix 5000s.”
“Did you check who changed the brief?” I asked.
“I did, but it had been hacked. There wasn’t a trace of who modified the brief to remove this information. Tyler must have erased it.” The robot’s drill buzzed again and Miranda quit speaking and stared straight ahead as we were dragged along.
As the loading bay doors opened, I tried to think of a way to put up a last moment fight, but with my hands zip tied and Miranda’s life at risk, I couldn’t think of anything.
The robots loaded us into the ship and threw us into holding cells. The cells were near the back of the ship, near the supply bay.