The Valley Beneath the World: The Fugitive Future - Book One

by Brian Lowe

  I'd hardly time to tell it to open when Avanya was on her feet, poised to leave. She pushed her way past Tierse, who was much surprised to be pushed aside, and disappeared down the hall without a word. I stared at Tierse, who was staring after Avanya.

  She turned back to me, stepping into the room. "What was she doing here?"

  I stood up; if I was going to be skinned alive, I'd be skinned alive standing up.

  "I don't know. She came in here to tell me she wanted me to work on some kind of project with her." I paused to consider and went for broke. "She said you probably wouldn’t like it."

  "She said she wanted you for a what?" She returned to the doorway, but Avanya was long gone. "What did she tell you?"

  I shrugged. "Nothing."

  "Good!" she stomped out, somehow getting the door to slam behind her. I stood alone in my room, marveling at my luck. I might still not know where I was going, and maybe I was about to be thrown into a political fight with a bunch of strangers, but at least I still had a whole skin.

  The door flew open again without my permission and Tierse stuck her head in.

  "You're off my team! And you can stay in here until you rot for all I care!"

  Then she was gone.

  Well. That hadn't gone nearly as badly as I'd thought it would.

  XV

  Although I'd never been granted access to the datasphere--do I look like a Nuum?--when I was living in the real world, just knowing it was there had always been a part of life, and of course when I came to Dure, I was as free as the next person to visit the Library. I had never made much use of it, mind you; even though the holographic Librarian could teach you any one of hundreds of subjects overnight, every time I went inside and a Librarian materialized, I was reminded of Keryl and his Librarian, and I had to leave. Maire had an even worse time of it than I did, but then again, as a Nuum she didn't really need to visit the Library anyway.

  Now I couldn't go into one, and I wanted to more than anything.

  As bare-bones as it was, my room had an entertainment console and a connection to the local network, to the extent they had one. Given that even back when this was a working research station, it had been considered rather far off the map, they had maintained a pretty extensive library of their own (without a Librarian). The only problem was, except for the reports the scientists here wrote and the occasional self-published novel, everything in it was now over two hundred years old.

  Which is not to say I didn't read it. Everything I could get my hands on that I had a hope of understanding, and some stuff that I didn't. I lay on my bed and watched holoreports and read holobooks until I fell asleep from sheer boredom, then I backed them up and watched what I'd missed. For days I did this.

  And Tierse didn't come back.

  For that matter Avanya didn't come back, either. I read and I watched and I called up my food rations and I slept and then I did it all over again. Then one morning I woke up with the distinct impression that I had dreamed about my mother, that she had come to me and seen me in my depression, homeless and friendless, and offered me the kind of uplifting and loving advice that only a mother can give:

  "Don't just lie there! Get up out of that bed and do something!"

  Well, a boy should always listen to his mother, right?

  As far as I could tell, Vollan hadn't moved from his chair, hadn't eaten, slept, or changed clothes. He looked exactly the same as the last time I'd seen him--and he seemed so unsurprised to see me that I knew he'd been watching for me. I told myself he hadn't been monitoring my room and forced myself to believe it.

  "This is a really nice place you have here, but I think it's about time I checked out."

  He gave me a glance that said I was the least important of the several people he was talking to simultaneously.

  "I can give you a coat and you can go upstairs, or I can give you a gun and you can go outside. Either way, you die. You choose."

  I honestly think he didn't care what I did. "Well, in that case, I choose neither. How about you give me a job?"

  "You had a job. You failed."

  "I made one mistake!"

  He paused to address another issue with a separate part of his mind. "Take it up with Tierse," he said at last.

  "Tierse won't talk to me." I knew I sounded whiny, but I was running out of options.

  "Tierse has a job. She does it very well. If she doesn't want to take you on her team, I'm not going to tell her to do it…"

  Was that hesitation?

  "You won't do it," I said, "but someone else might. Who do I need to talk to?"

  He actually looked the smallest bit uncomfortable. "I told you; I won't micromanage my people. Go see Avanya." And he waved me off, having already moved on to other matters.

  According to the network, Avanya was not at work in a lab, which everyone seemed to be during the day, but in her quarters. I had not been there before, but the computers led me straight to where I needed to go, although they could not explain the odd hesitation I felt before I waved my hand before the annunciator panel. The door slid open before I could give my name.

  I stopped halfway across the threshold because I couldn't go any further. Avanya was standing in the center of the room, her back to me, hands on hips. Virtually every horizontal space in the room was covered--with guns.

  "What the--?" I exclaimed with my usual razor-sharp perception.

  "I'm glad you're here," Avanya said without turning around. "You can help me. I want to take as much firepower as possible, but some of these things are just too heavy for me." She turned, holding up a finger. I waited for her to finish whatever thought she was processing. At last she nodded. "Yes, that's how I remembered you." Stepping carefully across an array of what appeared to be rifles of different lengths, she stooped, grunted, and turned, loaded down with a four-barreled contraption gilded with laser sights, a half-harness, and what I thought was a collapsible bipod.

  She dumped it into my arms. "Perfect!" she pronounced with a satisfied sigh. "How's that feel?"

  I hefted the monster gun. It was heavy, but nothing I couldn't handle. I told her as much.

  "Terrific! It's got an anti-gravity pad built in to help you carry it, but it's still too big for most Thorans to use effectively. You'll probably want something smaller as a sidearm, but if we see any more thunder lizards, you'll be more than a match for them."

  I blinked, the only thing I could do with my arms full of, well, arms. "Thunder lizards?"

  "Yes!" she replied. "Vollan sent you over here, right? Didn't he tell you? We're going on a trip!"

  I looked down at the cannon in my arms. It was more weaponry that Tierse's entire team had carried on my last visit outside.

  "Trip?"

  XVI

  As unsure as I was that I wanted any part of whatever Avanya had in mind, there was someone else who was equally sure how she felt about the idea.

  "We are not taking him!"

  "We are taking him. No matter what you think of him, Timash is the only person in this city who can reliably handle the neutron cannon by himself."

  Tierse took a moment to compose herself. "That's because the neutron cannon is meant to be handled by a team of two--which you would know if you had asked a weapons expert. Oh, wait!" She put on a manic smile. "I am a weapons expert! And I say if we need a neutron cannon it should be handled by a trained two-man team."

  "And do you have such a team at your disposal?" Avanya waited a beat before supplying her own answer. "No, you don't. And Timash is one person instead of two. I want to keep this team as small as possible."

  This prompted a short pause. I didn't know where we were going, but even I knew that the reason for keeping "outside" teams small was because so many of them didn't come back.

  "All right," Tierse said, "that brings me to my next question. Why do we need a neutron cannon in the first place? There's no reason to believe we're going to run into anything we can't handle with normal weapons."

  "And ther
e's no reason to believe we know what we're going to run into," Avanya countered. "Nobody from here has ever gone as far as we have to go and come back. If anyone has tried to reach us from any of the other stations, they didn't make it. And we don't know what Kur has been up to these past years. One of the reasons Vollan hasn't approved of this mission is because he didn't think we could carry enough firepower. But when I told him I wanted to use Timash, he had to agree."

  I thought this seemed like a really good time for someone to ask me how I felt about joining this expedition they were mounting, but no one seemed interested in hearing my opinion--and I had the distinct impression that nobody would give a damn if they did. I thought about how heavy the neutron cannon had felt in my arms, and suddenly it didn't seem nearly heavy enough.

  Tierse scowled at me. I recognized the expression from the hundred or so times I'd seen it on Skull's face as I trained on The Dark Lady.

  "Does he even know how to use it?"

  "He can learn. I've created a training program we can download in his sleep, and we can give him some virtual field time in one of the lab holochambers." Avanya shrugged. "We've got the space to spare."

  Tierse shook her head slowly. "All right, but you have to write the holo-program, and I have to approve it before he goes in." She gave me a long look. "If you die in there, you won't get the chance to die out there."

  Somehow she made the opportunity to fail sound like a bad thing.

  I awoke with a new appreciation for the Mark II M multi-load neutron cannon, not to mention a healthy appreciation for what I could do with it: cyclical firing rate of one per second, twenty shots without recharging, and a combined fire mode that would blow a hole through the roof of this valley and let the snowfall in. But as much as I was in awe of my new best friend, I had to wonder: What was it doing here? This was a military weapon; how had it gotten to a scientific installation five thousand miles from civilization, and why was it here?

  Those questions were lost to time; there was no way I was ever going to know the answers. But Tierse was right; there were far smaller guns that could put a hole clean through a thunder lizard, and that didn't need a gorilla to cart them. Why did Avanya and Vollan think we were going to need it, wherever we were going?

  "Now the important thing to remember is that these are not holograms. I don't know what kind of set-up you might have used in the outside world, but these are shaped force fields with holographic tinting. That means they not only look like the types of creatures we've seen or heard about outside, but they feel like them. If you shoot one, the AI disrupts the force field and the animal will 'die.' But if one touches you--well, they're weak fields, so you won't die, but you could be hurt."

  I took a last look around the cavernous former laboratory so that I could pretend I hadn't heard the undertone of hopefulness in Tierse's closing words. She had been playing the good soldier, but she didn't want me on this expedition. I couldn't shake the feeling that she had put everything she could think of into the test program in hopes that I would fail. Not for the first time, I wondered why; yes, I had screwed up when she took me outside, but no one had been hurt--in fact, I came the closest to being injured. There was no way I could've been the first trainee who had ever messed up, and wasn't making mistakes the point of training in the first place?

  I had to put those thoughts aside. Tierse was waiting to see if I had any questions before she left me to join Avanya at a monitoring station on the other side of a thick wall. Judging from the size and structure, this had to have been an interesting room in which to work, once upon a time. Come to think of it, I had never really asked what kind of research they had done down here, so far away from everyone else.

  Maybe I should have.

  Tierse took my silence for assent and left without any words of encouragement. She had what she wanted, then, because that hurt. The door slid shut and I was in the jungle again.

  This time I was armed for war: the neutron cannon was strapped across my back. Now that I knew what to expect, I could tell the anti-grav was equalizing the weight, allowing me to walk normally. I wore a heavy pistol on one hip and a two-foot chopping blade dangled from the other. According to the rules, I was supposed to make my way through the trees to a communications tower a virtual mile away. And I was supposed to make it in one piece.

  The cannon was more than a match for any known predator (heaven help us all if it wasn't!), but I had only one ammo cycle, so I had to use it sparingly. The pistol and the knife weren't going to be much good against anything larger than me. Tierse had promised she hadn't simply overloaded the test with thunder lizards or earthworms, but it was broadly hinted that avoiding such creatures might be as good as killing them. On the other hand, she hadn't told me what an "earthworm" was, or how to avoid it, so her word had to be taken at arm's-length.

  The test started with black wolves. Of course it did.

  There were only three, and I was anticipating something like this. I left them smoking on the ground before they got within leaping distance. On a sudden hunch, I checked my pistol's charge. It was full, but I didn't have any extra batteries. I'd have to be careful there, too. Peering past the steaming trunks of hungry trees, I unlimbered the knife and carried it in my left hand.

  Using the knife to clear my way, I avoided the carnivorous vines and sliced off the head of a green tree snake before I even knew it was there. I moved slowly, trying to let my ears pick up danger that might be masked from my sight by the plants, and my feet detect the tremors of an approaching leviathan. But there was nothing.

  Now, I knew that I was not making as good time as I hoped, and that clawing through jungles is a time-consuming experience, but I had expected more of a challenge. If the point of this exercise was to make sure I knew how to handle the neutron cannon, shouldn't there have been something for me to use the cannon against?

  And there I went again, blindly meandering along with no idea how good I had it.

  XVII

  Suddenly I felt something, but not the rhythmic toom! toom! of the thunder lizard, but like an earthquake, right below me, rising up under my feet--lifting me into the air! I stumbled backward and managed to find relatively solid ground right before a hillside reared up in front of me.

  Whatever it was, it came up right out of the ground, tearing up trees, rocks pouring off of its sides. One blunt end shook itself free of dirt and poked about as if testing the air. I had just figured out that this was the thing's head when it turned its attention on me.

  Blind as near as I could tell, composed of thick brown segments as wide as my arm that tapered down to a point which suddenly opened to reveal a tunnel of razor teeth, it pounced and if I had tried to use my weapon it would have swallowed me whole. I fell as much as jumped to the side and the ground shook again at its impact. It was up in a second, apparently unhurt, and sniffing the air again.

  It was blind, but it had a nose for meat, and that meant me. Still, it would need several seconds to find me again, and that was a few seconds more than I needed. Almost without touching it, the neutron cannon swung into place and I fired just as the head turned in my direction.

  The tip of the earthworm and five feet more simply vanished. The trunk smashed more trees as it fell, clearing a small path for me.

  I slid the cannon back to its resting place and hummed a little tune to myself. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, I thought. That's pretty good! I have to remember that.

  If I'm honest, I'll admit that I was thinking maybe I was being a little too sure of myself--remember what happened when you went outside?--even before I felt the ground shaking again, this time in a thud! thud! that reminded me of thunder lizards crashing through the trees. I spun around, bringing the cannon to bear just in time to hear the last thud!--as the earthworm slammed its head into the ground less than a yard away, knocking me off my feet.

  It was only by a miracle the cannon didn't slap me in the head, leaving me for a meal of the resurrected monster. Someho
w I scrambled away and got to my feet to see what had happened: the earthworm grown a new head out of the stump left when I blasted it. Apparently the thing didn't have any kind of central nervous system, and each segment could regenerate lost pieces. And it did--right down to the multiple rows of teeth, which were rippling and rearranging as the worm reconstituted its mouth right in front of me.

  Worse, the process seemed to make the worm hungry and angry, so angry that it had missed me by a hair. I doubted it would make the same mistake twice, but then, neither would I.

  I pointed the cannon at the head, waited for it to rear back in preparation for another attack, and shot it straight in the mouth. It hadn't time to hit the ground again before I swung the cannon hard left and blew apart the furthest part of the worm's anatomy that I could see, where it emerged from the ground. That had to hold it; I only had one charge left.

  Which naturally was the moment that I heard a steamy, screeching roar and a thunder lizard the size of my flyer crashed out of the trees to my right. There was no time to reverse position and I was almost out of ammunition, so I took the only course open to me--I ran.

  I couldn't go where the worm had cleared my path; that was too close to the lizard. If I took to the trees it would tear them down to find me. Mentally holding my nose, I darted between the two pieces of dead earthworm. There was far more meat here than it could get from me, and it wasn't running away, either. Surely once I made it past, the monster would stop for the easy meal?

  If I made it past… As I ran, I brushed up against a rubbery scrap of flesh--and it moved. The entire bulk of worm to my right seemed to quiver at the touch. Despite my predicament, I paused for a second in sheer horror. What did it take to kill this thing? I stepped away from it…

  …and I touched the burned flesh on the other side, which also moved! Suddenly I realized I was standing on a bit of dead worm, but it wasn't dead! It was feeling around the edge of my boot like a slimy hand. If it caught me, either the worm or the lizard was going to have gorilla for dinner.