by Bill Adams
He gestured at an equipment rack before us.
“Yes and no,” I said. “Strictly speaking, it’s not a test. It’s a rescue. Some of our companions have strayed into a ‘nonfunctional area,’ unless I got it all wrong. We’ve got to lead them out.”
“Our…companions,” Mishima said.
“Exactly. Whether they’re really friend or foe isn’t clear. And I don’t know what sort of trouble they’re in. But we’re being sent after them.”
No food had been issued on the equipment rack, from which we inferred that our mission shouldn’t take long. Along with lengths of rope, there were lanterns; I couldn’t help but think how much I could have used them in Slugland. We were also issued plastic pullovers to fit our boots, with traction bottoms for climbing, and from a shelf marked “Optional” Mishima took some strap-on cleats he called crampons; he seemed to admire the compact way they could be made to fold up, because he put them in one of his utility belt pouches.
I took a good look at that belt. It was my first real chance to inspect all the mysterious devices he kept holstered on it, since he’d had it on him when I searched his tent.
He caught the direction of my gaze and straightened up cautiously, then gestured at the rest of the gear. “There are no pitons or hammers or carabiners, though,” he said. “So serious mountain-climbing is out.” I was relieved to hear it, though he seemed indifferent to any challenge.
Finally I considered the extra coil of supercord I’d saved from moth country. It was too fine for proper climbing, strong enough but hard to grip. Still, it had come in useful in Slugland, and I was loath to give it up; I tucked the coil under my broad uniform belt along the spine, out of the way for now.
Soon a door opened to one side of the equipment rack and we lugged our ropes into the revealed transport car. A two-seater.
“I don’t know how many people we’re going to meet,” I said as the transport began to move; this time there were no windows at all to distract us. “The computers prefer teams larger than two. So far I’ve seen Foyle, Hogg-Smythe, the Lagado boy, Ariel Nimitz, and Friar Francisco.”
I paused. “Ariel told me she had a little trouble when she was partnered with you. Something about the wall crumbling away beneath her, and you not going back to help. I hope you’ll keep your ears open when you’re with me.” Mishima made no comment, so I returned to my account. “The friar is dead, I’m afraid, and Hogg-Smythe was in bad shape the last time I saw her. But I’ve been lucky not to have been linked up with mercenaries.”
“I was half-lucky,” Mishima said. “Ruy Lagado and I were teamed with two of them, but something bigger went wrong just as our transport was being docked with theirs. It didn’t seem like a deliberate test, more like an accident. We crashed into them, the whole terminal ripped apart—and then seawater poured in from above! Lagado and I made it to the surface without harm, but the mercenaries were wearing heavy equipment, gunpowder weapons and ammo. We found one of them drowned, later—his gun ruined—and the other one never turned up.”
“I’m glad Ruy had you to look after him. Not really an outdoorsman, I imagine.”
“Oh, but what could I do with him?” Mishima said lightly. “We had to cross cold, treacherous, broken ground. A fjord, with a fierce tidal bore—I suppose you’d still call them tides in this place…Eventually I lost him. But anyone who carries that much fat bears a death wish as well. It will be tough on his son, but that’s life.”
“‘That’s…life?’ Spend much time memorizing that one, or is it original with you?”
The car was still accelerating strongly; judging by the feel—in comparison with, say, flitters—the cumulative speed might have reached a thousand or more k an hour.
“It is curious that I should actually take your needling personally,” Mishima finally said with his usual poker face. “Some part of me must feel that you are not…negligible—not just the arrogant fop you appear, but a spirit of power, mysteriously disguised.”
“One never knows,” I said. “Even Lagado might have surprised you. Given the chance.”
“I didn’t realize that Shadow Tribunes have such a deep respect for life,” he replied. “I know, I know: you don’t claim to be one.”
We passed the next few hours in silence.
◆◆◆
We emerged at the lower end of a long, narrow valley lined with rocks and loose dirt.
“Which way do we go?” Mishima asked.
“North,” I said. “There’s a t-stop at the other end of the valley, from which we’re supposed to leave one at a time.”
“Yes,” he said impatiently, “but which path do we take?” The two paths both showed footprints; one led up to and along the ridge to our left, the other mirrored it on the right.
The valley was so narrow it hardly made a difference. “You take east and I’ll take west, for starters,” I said. “One of us can always cut across later.”
Mishima objected to dividing our party, but agreed that we should scout both paths. Soon we stood on opposite lips of the rift. On the other side of my ridge, the ground fell off sharply, leading to a vast desert. I could see a sandstorm in the distant west. I shouted a description across to Mishima. “What about your side?”
He refused to shout, but at length joined me, saying, “Rain forest over there.” Together we began to trudge north along the west ridge, surveying the gullied valley below as we passed.
It was a strange backstage area between two of the Hellway’s sub-environments, without a theme of its own, littered with outsized junk: the skeletons of huge, unidentifiable beasts; amorphous lumps of melted plastics and ceramics, often as big as houses; great pipes and cables snaking from one ridgeside into the other, sometimes broken in the middle and leaking steam, rusty fluid, or tangles of wires; and occasionally, motionless amid the debris, a lost or broken earthmoving robot. The Skid Row of the Gods.
“Those we are to ‘rescue,’ ” Mishima said. “Did you get any impression of what shape they’d be in? Is combat likely?”
“They’re in trouble, that’s all I know. We still have to go this way, even if we choose to pass them by.”
After a few hours we came to a point where the ridge became so spiny with broken slabs of rock that it was impossible to continue, and the path led back down into the valley. Across the way, the other ridgepath did the same. Not without trepidation, we bowed to the inevitable and continued along the valley floor. The sides became gradually higher and steeper.
We had a nasty moment—an earth tremor, accompanied by heavy subterranean rumblings. We gave each other one terrified glance, trying to keep our feet and waiting for a rockslide to bury us, before it passed. Soon after, we arrived at our destination.
It looked like part of an immense concrete building, jammed sideways into the valley to stop it up, and so weathered with centuries, so bare of detail, that its chambers looked almost like caves in a natural cliffside. Jutting out of the honeycombed structure at every height up to the summit, some fifty meters above us, were pipes and tubes of various materials, big enough to walk into without stooping. If you were crazy.
What was it, exactly? Perhaps a section of basement from one of the more elaborate Hellway environments. Perhaps its pipes and tubes and passageways had once provided power and ventilation and drainage for a place like Slugland. But it had been torn up and dumped here, and now it was just an obstacle.
“Can we climb over it?” I asked—shouting, because a second tremor had begun to rumble under us. At that moment something black came hurtling down the side of the structure, and I had just taken a step backward to avoid it when Mishima reached out and yanked me into one of the wall caves instead.
What I’d dodged was just the shadow; the thing itself hit the area of dirt I’d been moving toward. And as we peered out from the cave I saw that it hadn’t been a falling rock.
It was a long thin dart, with a needle nose of steel.
Chapter Twenty-two
Mish
ima’s hand fell from my arm.
“Well, thank you, Ken,” I said.
“You’re welcome. One must learn to separate real dangers from…shadows.” I shrugged this off and looked out from the darkness of the cave. The dart stood straight up and down in the rocky ground, a slender shaft with a conical plastic tail.
“A blowgun dart,” Mishima said. “Probably poisoned. Certainly shot from above.”
“Poxy fucking bitch!”
We whirled at the hate-filled whisper, bumping shoulders. As far as we could make out, our chamber was empty. Mishima found his lantern first, and played it inward. Our hiding place was small, its other exits blocked with earth. But one of the smaller metal pipes, as big around as a pumpkin, hung down from the ceiling to end jaggedly a half meter above our heads. With my own lantern, I took a closer look while Mishima faced the cave entrance en garde. The voice had to have come from the pipe. I listened intently.
Silence. Then a soft hoot was followed by an eerie sustained moaning that could only be wind blowing across the mouth of some other pipe connected to this one.
But the prolonged scraping that came next was something else again. Metal distinctly rang on stone. Someone grunted heavily.
“Shit, shit, fucking bloody shit!”—almost a confidential voice in my ear.
“Hello?” I said loudly. Even Mishima jumped when echoes came back: Hello? Hello?…Hello? But that last one was somebody else’s voice.
Nothing to do but continue. “Are you the one who fired on me?”
Silence. Then, “Go away.”
I looked to Mishima. He turned from the entrance and joined me in the rear of the chamber. With a slight lift of his chin, he encouraged me to speak again.
“Go where?” I asked.
“Go away! Find the next transport.”
“We’re not going to let you take another shot at us.” My eyes met Mishima’s; we were trapped.
“Fuck you, then.”
“ ‘Steel rusts at dawn,’ ” Mishima said, his voice sharp. Another one of his wooden—
“ ‘Blades gleam in firelight.’ ” The answer from the tube was prompt, automatic. Trained.
“ ‘Thunder whispers…’ ”
“ ‘Lightning sings.’ ”
“If green is thirty-five…”
“Yellow is seventy-two.”
“And the sum, in blue, is ten-C,” Mishima concluded, evidently at the end of the identification sequence. “I am Colonel Mishima, a brother of the executive grievance committee, here on union business.”
He once more locked eyes with me in the bobbing lamplight—a new introduction, and a cautious opening of negotiations. My mind raced back to what I’d overheard in the statue chamber, the Iron Brotherhood mercenaries talking shop—We should’ve called in a field representative…I did try.
This could get tricky.
Mishima continued to address the unknown soldier. “What is your name and rating?”
“Principato. Sergeant. Sir.”
“Well, Brother Principato. We have much to say to one another, and other codes to exchange. I am in the company of an agent of the Column government. We are here to prevent—error.”
Of course. As long as Mishima continued to believe me a Shadow Tribune…But did the merc at the other end of the tube know my original role in Condé’s bloody farce?
“Do you understand?” Mishima prompted him.
“Don’t know.” The disembodied voice sounded guarded. A distant wind groaned through the pipe.
“Is there anyone else there with you, Brother Principato?” Mishima asked.
“No.” Less hesitation this time.
“No teammates?”
“All killed, sir. Got me talking to myself.”
“I want you to come down here.”
“I cannot leave my position at present, sir.”
“Why? What is your position?”
“I’m about forty meters above you in a small cave.”
“What is to prevent you from coming down here?” Mishima spoke the language of command so fluently that it came as a surprise when the enlisted man did not answer immediately.
“…Sir, do you have a shot of neuroblock antidote on you?”
“Certainly.” Mishima patted his holstered utility belt. “Don’t you?” And a touch of the lash: “Answer my question.”
“Sir, I have fallen on one of these bitch-whore poison darts. I’ve got a puncture wound in my left thigh and even though I cleaned it out, you know how it works—even a little bit gets you the slow way, paralysis. I can feel it starting, sir. I don’t want to risk the climb, but I could let a monofilament down for you to tie the hypo to. Then I can come down when I’m better.”
“And your antidote kit?”
“I lost some of my stuff down a shaft.”
The sound of his voice had continued to fade in and out, as if he were moving. Curious. “How deep inside the wall are you?” I asked.
Mishima raised one eyebrow at me, and called up, “The speaker is nominally a Commissioner Parker. You will address him as ‘sir.’ ”
“Yes, sir. Sir, I am about five meters in.”
Mishima leaned toward me as if to confide something, but I held a finger to my lips and shook my head. Even a whisper might be caught by the pipe.
He nodded and pointed to himself, then upward.
I flipped a finger at myself, at him, and back to myself, then pointed up.
He nodded again. “We’ll both come up to you, Brother Principato.”
“Well…can you use a ninja line, sir?”
“The gear we have is good enough for this piece of cheese. Show yourself at your cave mouth, and hang a cloth out to guide us.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mishima risked the open air first, but we both stayed half in, half out. There was a long delay. Then from the pipe came the echoes of Principato dragging himself along his floor, forty meters above us. It was another minute or more before a carrot-topped head poked out cautiously, halfway up the “piece of cheese.” Trying to estimate the difficulties of the climb, I just barely caught sight of the rapid sequence of hand signs Mishima flashed the merc. They meant nothing to me, but at least there was no reply.
The climb was strenuous but not difficult, going from chamber lip to chamber lip and sometimes using one of the great pipe outlets to step up on. We were lucky that the next earth tremor caught us in stable positions; it was the worst yet, but after it passed, there was nothing to do but continue climbing.
The mouth of Principato’s “cave” was larger than I’d expected. The smooth walls were pierced at various heights by pipes and toward the rear by a dozen square exits large enough to crawl through. A faint, stagnant breeze hooted and whined through the openings, but could not dispel a sulfurous stench and dampness. The merc was nowhere to be seen.
“Smells like a geyser,” I said. “I think this whole valley is coming apart. Maybe that’s why we were sent.”
“Principato!” Mishima called out.
“I’m back here,” the mercenary replied from the shadows. I was acutely aware of being silhouetted against the entrance.
“Show yourself.”
“I can’t, sir. My arm is paralyzed now, and both legs.” Metal rang on the hard surface. “I’m over here. In front of you and to your left.”
The mercenary was sitting up in a corner, supporting himself with his right arm. He was tall, muscular, and held himself with unconscious arrogance. At the moment he was sweating rivulets, and in contrast with his bright red hair and forest-green outfit, the pallor of his skin stood out sickeningly. It was obvious that his poisoning story was not a ruse.
One leg of his outfit was partially blackened with blood. I also noticed that his name, stenciled across his breast pocket, was somehow familiar to me. Why, though?
Around him lay a jumble of gear: backpack, gas mini-stove, reel of filament, and a long metal tube with a shoulder brace and tel
escopic sight.
Mishima nudged the blowgun with his boot and made a disgusted face. “Joke weapon,” he said. “Hobby of yours?”
“I hunt for the unit,” the wounded merc said grudgingly. “Sir.”
Another tremor shook us hard, and didn’t pass quickly enough.
“Do these quakes happen all the time?” I asked.
“No. They started a couple hours ago.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since just before dawn.”
“ ‘Sir,’ ” Mishima said.
“Sir.”
Even deathly ill, and outranked, Principato had something. This was the winner of every footrace, the school boxing champion, the toughest guy in his unit; you could sense it immediately. Not a sport, though. Just a lover of the crushing victory, looking us over for signs of weakness.
Mishima knelt—cautiously—by the mercenary’s side. “Maybe you can tell us this, brother. What, precisely, is going on with your unit? What is the Newcount Two operation as explained to you?”
Principato barked a laugh as Mishima hit his good arm with the injection of antidote.
“As explained to me, sir? Well, as explained to me, we were supposed to ride shotgun on a shipment of goods, from factory to warehouse, and Newcount Two wasn’t in it at all.”
An unusually shrill moan from one of the pipes made him start violently. He looked at us with haunted eyes.
“Hold it,” I said. “I want to take this from the top.” I turned to Mishima. “Colonel, the Brotherhood’s client was Sir Maximilien Condé?”
“Yes. It was a strange contract from the beginning, but it looked like easy money,” Mishima said. “This Condé is an important government contractor. Up until recently, he was also a reserve admiral in the Blue Swathe’s militia navy, and used government troops as security forces in his business.
“Just before he lost his rank, he had put together a large consignment of goods for the Column government. It was ready to ship. But without militia guards he was afraid—or so he told us—that traitors within his corporation, encouraged by his political reverses, would try to hijack it. So he wanted to rent combat troops to station on every vessel, preventing an inside job. Unusual duty for ground fighters, but he offered good money. We gave him eight platoons of commandos.
