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

by Brian Lowe

  I should have run.

  It was Amal Amman, the man I'd beaten and humiliated in that little tavern in Catilla.

  As far as I could see, he wasn't carrying a gun, but that didn't mean he wasn't, and the moment he recognized me I would find out. Not that it mattered, since there were armed guards not far away, or Amal could just expose me when we both returned to the public areas. He was Nuum; Trocas would have no choice but to execute me on demand, and without question. It would solve Amal's problem perfectly.

  Unless I did for him first…

  There was no one around but Tierse, and she didn't even know I was here. If Amal wasn't armed, there was no question I could subdue him, or even kill him. What I would do with the body afterward I had no idea, nor did I know how long I could avoid suspicion when Amal disappeared, but right now I was staring Death in the face and it was getting closer by the second.

  "What are you doing down here? Were you looking for me?"

  He didn't know I'd seen him earlier! And he hadn't recognized me!

  "Uh, no--no, my lord!" I stammered out, with sincere nervousness. How long would he not remember? And what was I going to say if he started asking questions?

  "Well?" he demanded. "What are you doing down here?" His eyes were boring into mine. "Never mind!" he snapped. "Can you find your way out of here? Damned maze…"

  "Of course, my lord," I said in my best beaten-down whimper. "This way." I gestured for him to go ahead, but he ordered me to go first with a jerk of his head.

  My shoulder blades itched, but I complied, leading him back through the two forks, and finally to the point where the original tunnels branched off, one to the stairs and the other to the guarded door. The Nuum grabbed my shoulder and I jumped.

  "Stay here and be quiet," he ordered in a whisper. "I can find my way from here." He pulled me around to face him. "I was never here; do you understand?"

  I nodded mutely, and as he slipped off toward the stairs, I leaned against the wall, telling myself to breathe normally again and my heart to slow. He hadn't recognized me, hadn't known me from a thousand other apes walking the halls of Udar. I was out of danger.

  And that was when the alarms started going off.

  XXXVI

  I jumped about three feet in the air, but the Nuum, he ran like a rabbit. At the speed he was going, I doubt he touched more than three steps scrambling up to the next level. Which was where I needed to be--except that in about two seconds those guards from the other tunnel were going to come running up to see what was the matter, and when they saw me they were going to shoot first and ask questions of my burnt-out husk of a body later.

  Maybe I could hide in one of the empty cells? No, they'd catch up to me before I made it halfway down…

  Hold on a minute…

  Where were they?

  The alarms were still blaring and I thought I could hear footsteps rumbling by above--the Nuum must've left the door open when he escaped--but no one had come to investigate. Apparently the guards had strict orders against leaving their post, and I for one was all in favor of discipline. So now what?

  It was almost certain that I'd stayed too long, that Aerios had finished counting, noticed I was gone, and sounded the alarm. In that case, they'd be looking for me, and I was all out of excuses. I cursed my luck--now that the Nuum was gone, I could have gone back and talked to Tierse, but instead I had to find a way just to stave off discovery.

  And if I survived, I could maybe find out what was going on around here. Perhaps there was a good reason they were keeping Tierse down here, but there was no good reason they should be talking with the Nuum--particularly that Nuum.

  But I would survive only if I managed to get out of this spot. I'd seen enough of Udar to know there were a lot of potential hiding places, but I also knew I hadn't seen enough of Udar to choose a good one. If I tried to hide, they'd find me in hours. Unless… I was hiding in plain sight.

  I followed the Nuum at the best speed I was able. Above ground, Udar had turned into an anthill full of disturbed ants. The guards who had been bored and inattentive before were brisk and efficient now, scanning the crowds which had thinned considerably. I immediately got the feeling that if you didn’t need to be out, you were supposed to be in your quarters. I put my head down and did my best impression of someone attempting to do just that.

  Amazingly enough, I did make it back without being stopped. When I reached the corridor outside my apartment, I slowed down, catching my breath. All I had to do was hope that when I got to Avanya's door, she would let me in. Then when they came looking to see why I'd ducked my robot nanny, they'd find me right next door minding my own business.

  I had just come abreast of my own door when it opened and Aerios stepped out.

  "Oh," she said before I had a chance to react. "I wondered where you were. We should go back inside until the alarms are shut off."

  Of all the dumb luck… She had finished counting and come out to search for me at the exact moment I arrived home. She had no idea I'd been gone.

  "Okay," I replied. "I just came out to see what was going on."

  "It's only a fire alarm system test." She carefully allowed me to precede her inside. "It should be over soon."

  A fire alarm system test… in a city carved out of living rock. Aerios might be a computer, but she obviously hadn't been programmed for lying.

  I turned down her invitation to do more touring. I now knew where I wanted to go, and she sure wasn't about to let me go there. As I lay back on my bed, though, I had to ask: How long was Trocas going to let this pretense drag on? I hadn't seen Avanya in a couple of days, and maybe she was staying in her apartment until Zevi returned from wherever he was supposed to have gone, but she wasn't stupid. At some point she was going to start asking Trocas questions again, and the answers were going to involve me, too.

  Meanwhile, I had my own questions, like: What was Amal doing here? What was Tierse doing in that cell downstairs--and why had Amal gone to see her? Trocas wasn't going to tell me, and Amal would rather shoot me, so the only way to get even some of my answers was to get back to Tierse.

  Easier said than done. The last time, I'd somehow triggered an alarm of some kind and was fortunate to get back here without being recognized. I wouldn't be that lucky again.

  The frustrating part of it was that I knew I could get past Trocas' watchdog any time I wanted; so long as Aerios wasn't re-programmed, I could use the same trick on her. But I had no way of knowing what I'd done that precipitated the alarm, and without that knowledge, I was sticking my head into the breen's mouth.

  Hours later, I was no closer to a solution than when I'd started, and I was exhausted from chasing my own tail. If only I had somebody I could bounce ideas off of…

  The first thing I noticed about Avanya was that she hadn't been sleeping. Her hair was disarrayed and there were dark circles under her eyes. She smelled of alcohol and bad hygiene. She let me in and walked back to her chair, slumping into it with a careless disdain that said she didn't care whether I started a conversation or fell over dead.

  I could've been polite, but it would have been wasted effort. "You looked better when we were sleeping in caves."

  "I screwed up." Her voice was low and rough, lacking inflection. It wasn't a confession, merely a statement.

  "Well, there was that time you almost shot me," I said, "but you might have something different in mind. How do you think you screwed up?"

  "I betrayed my city," she said dully. "I betrayed my city, I got Tierse and everybody killed--" She looked up at me with dead eyes. "And us, too."

  XXXVII

  I wouldn't say that Avanya's assessment of our situation came as a surprise to me, but it did give me a chill to hear her say it out loud. I had hiked with this woman through a jungle of thunder lizards, poisonous snakes, giant centipedes, and carnivorous vines. Practically unarmed we had made our way across a subterranean valley haunted by lake monsters, bears, and plains lions, slept in caves and b
een captured by sentient trees. Now, when we appeared to have reached our final destination, she had given up the fight and sat here waiting for death.

  It wasn't so much what she had said, but why she had said it. I was fully aware that Trocas and his council were hiding things--I had met Amal, and seen Tierse as a prisoner. Avanya hadn't. What did she know that could cause her to give up so quickly?

  "You should get a drink," she said. "They've got some terrific whiskey." She snorted. "It ought to be good. They got the recipe from us."

  "No, thanks." A lock of hair was hanging in front of her face and I automatically reached out to fix it.

  "Not mine!" She threw an arm over a bottle in her lap that I hadn't noticed earlier, and clutched it to her chest. "Get your own," she muttered. "It's free."

  I considered taking the bottle away. I needed her sober, or at least paying attention. But she'd fight me for it, and the room would only give her another if she asked.

  "You want to tell why you think we're both dead?"

  "I told you, I betrayed my city." There was a pause, either to regain her thoughts or her voice. "They've been playing me for years, playing on my insecurities, making me…" She stopped again, for so long that I thought she was finished, and when she spoke again it was so low and rough that I almost couldn't catch it. "…They made me think I was in love."

  A tear rolled down one cheek, but I didn't need to see it. I knew Avanya was a good actress, maybe good enough to fool everyone she'd ever known, let alone me, but at this moment her mental walls were crumbling under so much grief and guilt and alcohol that she could no more lie to me than I could grow another arm.

  "I was a diplomat. But there wasn't anyone with whom to practice diplomacy. We lied to you, you know. We knew there was only Tanar and Udar and Kur left, and we weren't talking to each other." She stopped, looking down at the bottle as if she didn't recognize it, but then she took a swig. "So I didn't have a lot to do. I tried studying bioscience, but I'm not good at it. I tried training to be on one of the outside teams, but I trained in secret because I didn't want anyone to know. I got good at that. But they rejected me anyway."

  I recalled, but didn't mention, how she had nearly shot me when I was fighting the lion. All the training in the world doesn't necessarily make you a good soldier.

  "And then we were contacted by Udar. Suddenly I was needed. Suddenly I was important! It took two years, but we built a rapport. And over time, it became more than that. Zevi was my contact; we spent hours communicating, making plans for our cities to join up, but every time I took a plan to Vollan, he and his advisors vetoed it.

  "Meanwhile, Zevi and I were falling in love, and it occurred to me that if I could go there and establish a personal relationship, I could guarantee an alliance. He told me that wouldn't be enough, that I needed something more--and I suggested presenting them with the neutron cannon! I can't believe I was so stupid!" She turned her face to me and I could see tears coursing down both sides of her face. "There is no Zevi! There's only Trocas. If we had walked in here with the neutron cannon they'd have taken it away and shot us both on the spot." She buried her face in her hands. Her grief was blazing from her in almost painful intensity.

  "How do you know that? They didn't even ask us about the neutron cannon when they found us."

  "Of course they didn't! And you didn’t think that was at all suspicious? We were supposed to bring them the most sophisticated weapon Tanar has ever produced, and when we showed up without it, they didn't bat an eye. And then, you remember what Trocas said? He said, and I quote: Zevi 'was very specific, though, that the both of you were to be treated as his guests until he returned.' The both of us. Even Trocas said they thought our party would be bigger. If Zevi has been gone since before we were rescued, how did he know that only two of us were left?"

  Her words were hitting home, but she was such a wreck I despaired of getting any help from her. I had to try to calm her down.

  "Look, I understand what you're saying. There's stuff going on here that you don't know about. But why would Zevi and Udar want to hurt us? Don't they want an alliance against Kur?"

  It was tough to read her expression through the red eyes, the tears, and tangled hair, but with her mental shields decaying along with her emotional state, her incredulous sense of "Haven't you been listening, you idiot?" came through loud and clear.

  "There is no Zevi!" she snapped. "There is no Udar! This is Kur!"

  XXXVIII

  Suddenly it was as if all of Avanya's broadcast shame and despair had exploded in my brain. I fell back in my chair, blind to all but the realization that she was telling the truth and that somewhere deep in my own mind I had already known it. I must have known it; the facts were staring me in the face, but I had ignored them, refused to believe that tiny voice shrieking warnings in the back of my mind because after all of my hardships and the hope that I might find a home here, I hadn't wanted to know.

  Now I understood Avanya's grief. She had wanted nothing more than to help the man she thought she had fallen in love with, only to find that not only did he not exist, but she had almost delivered the means to destroy her own people into the hands of their greatest enemy. She was right; had we walked into this cave with the neutron cannon strapped to my back, we would have been shot the minute I took it off. We were traitors--the both of us--however unwillingly. And our lives hung by a thread. As soon as they could make one of us reveal the location of the cannon, we were both dead. And likely Tierse as well.

  Tierse… They had to be keeping her locked up for the same reason they kept us alive: They didn't know that she didn't know where we'd left the cannon. But why had Amal been questioning her? And why had he ordered me to forget I'd seen him there? For that matter, why had he gone to her cell alone if he didn't know his way around? And why had he fled when the alarm went off?

  A faint light began to glow deep in the fogged recesses of my brain. I sat still, barely breathing, coaxing that flickering thought into brighter life. Suddenly I gasped, the sun rising in a blaze of glory. What if I hadn't set off the alarm at all? What if it was because of something Amal had done?

  "Are you all right?"

  It might have seemed an odd question under the circumstances, but at least Avanya was staring at me now, and not focused inward, or on her whiskey.

  "I think… I think you need to take a shower."

  "What?"

  I held up one hand to stave off a torrent of unwarranted invective. A focused Avanya was good, but a raging mad Avanya was no better than I'd had before.

  "Listen. I may have an idea. There are things going on that you don't know about, but before I tell you I need to know you're functioning at top speed. We don't have time for you to catch up on your sleep, but a shower will help. Besides, we're going to have to move quickly, and looking like you do right now is going to attract attention."

  She stared at me for a few more seconds, then got up and marched to the bathroom, leaving her bottle behind. I figured I had about ten minutes to formulate a plan, or when she came back she was going to pick up that bottle again, and hit me with it.

  "There's only one explanation for this Amal character to be visiting Tierse on the sly: He's trying to double-cross Trocas," Avanya said. Once I'd explained what I'd seen, she grasped its import immediately. All that diplomatic training had probably made her an expert in double-crosses. "Tierse doesn't know anything he can use, but she's smart enough to keep that to herself."

  "She must be, or Trocas wouldn't have let her live this long," I pointed out. "He doesn’t know we stashed the cannon after we separated from Tierse and the team. I wonder what he thinks we did with it?"

  "That's probably one of the reasons he's giving us the soft touch. We walked right into the station with his people like we didn't have a care in the world. So if we didn't know they were from Kur, why didn't we have the cannon? It must be driving him crazy."

  "Yeah, especially if Amal was the one who set off that alarm. If
Trocas thinks Amal is trying to get to Tierse to find the cannon, he must be frantic to get the information first."

  "Which is why we probably don't have much time," Avanya said. "Amal hasn't come looking for us, either because he doesn't know where to find us, or because Aerios has him scared off. But Trocas is going to run out of patience pretty soon."

  "It's possible Amal doesn't even know about us. I'm surprised he knows about Tierse. He must have bribed someone." I snorted. "That would've burned him. Nuum aren't used to having to convince people to help them. They're more the do-what-I-say-or-die kind."

  "Then let's hope Trocas doesn't follow his example."

  "I agree. We need to get out of here, you, me, and Tierse. Once we do that, we can wait until it's safe to retrieve the neutron cannon, since you and I are the only ones who know where it is. But how do we get of here? They won't just let us walk out the front door."

  "So do you have an idea, or did you tell me to take a shower because you really didn't like the way I smelled?"

  "I have a couple of ideas, actually. If we can get out of here and back into Treeland, I think the Tizinti would help us get away."

  "Who?"

  I waved off her question. "Never mind. It's complicated. I like my other idea better. Amal has a ship. We're going to steal it."

  Avanya stared at me, then at the bottle she had so recently been cradling. "Have you been--?"

  "We're not really going to steal it, technically, we're going to hijack it. And we need to get started. It's a safe bet that Amal is going to go back to talk to Tierse again, even we don't know when. But first things first; we have to get past the robot."

  "I'm sorry, get past the what?"

  This time I took no chances, ordering Aerios to count to one million at the rate of one integer per second while facing the wall. She obeyed without question.

  "She's not designed for this," I explained to Avanya, as if Aerios' reputation needed protection. "I'm sure she's just a labor unit they drafted to keep an eye on us. She knows she's supposed to keep me from leaving alone, but if she doesn't see me go…"