Dalida: A Scifi Space Opera Adventure

by G. P. Eliot

  “I can hold my breath for about three minutes,” Hank said. “Maybe four if I’m willing to lose a few brain cells.”

  “You can’t afford to lose any more, boss,” Ida said.

  “Now is not the time for jokes, Ida!” Hank said as the water started to rise over his waist and creep up his chest.

  “I would have thought you’d appreciate a bit of humor in this of all times…” the personal intelligence said.

  “Ida….” Hank growled.

  “Okay, okay. I was allowing my tactical intelligence to process the situation, anyway, leaving just my personality overlay talking to you.” Ida said.

  You have two intelligences inside you? Hank thought. But it really wasn’t important enough for him to muse over right now.

  “Look. Here’s the best that I can come up with: The water is getting in here somehow, right?” she said.

  “Obviously.”

  “Well, when you fell down here, you didn’t find yourself splashing into a swimming pool, did you? There must be a way for it to get out as well,” Ida said.

  “Can’t it use the same way it came in?” Hank said.

  “Do you really want to argue with your only chance of escape, boss?” Ida sounded exasperated.

  “Guess not,” Hank thought that she had a point. As always.

  “It has to do with water flow and basic logical efficiency.” Ida told him. “Yes, you’re right–but that would require pumps, which require energy. It’s far simpler, when designing a pit trap, to have a pipe going in and a plug leading out.”

  Hank was about to ask her how much time she spent designing pit traps, but then realized that the water was now crossing the mid part of his chest. He didn’t care. He knew that Ida didn’t really sleep anyway.

  “A plug. Right.” Hank took a deep breath, and then dove under the water.

  He had been right. It was freezing, he thought as the shock of the water hit his face. The blue gleam of his suit lights illuminated the dark murk of the water. There was the stone floor, looking just as marbled and the same as every other part of the room, and there were the eggshell pieces of his helmet, rocking slowly in the eddies. Hank sank quickly, as the in-built buoyancy aids of his suit were now compromised by his lack of helmet.

  Nothing that he could see even remotely looked like a plug.

  The Captain scrabbled at the floor with the gauntlets of his gloves, hoping to find a crack, a groove, any sort of segment at all.

  Nothing.

  And now Hank’s lungs were beginning to burn, so he pushed out from the floor and kicked his legs to power himself upwards. Where his environmental suit had felt heavy before, now it felt like an anvil strapped to his chest.

  “Bah!” But he succeeded in bursting from the top of the water, just for his head to smack against the ceiling. He had less than a foot of air left, and he was even beginning to lose that fast, as well. Hank had to fight to get stay afloat, as, at every second his suit was trying to pull himself down again. He took another breath of air, and another–not knowing if it would be his last.

  “Knock,” Ida said as Hank gasped.

  The Captain didn’t even waste his time to ask what she meant, but she continued anyway. Her voice became strange and muted as soon as he dove under the water, but her transmitter was close enough to his ear that he could at least understand it.

  “Continue knocking on the floor, boss–I’m going to run an audio analysis of the sounds. If there’s an opening behind the rock, I’ll be able to detect the difference in echoes,” she said.

  Hank let himself sink once more, and this time he used both of his hands to rap repeatedly across the floor of the room.

  His chest felt tight and started to hurt when he was little more than halfway across.

  “Stop! There!” Ida said, and Hank sank to his knees over the section of ‘hollow’ floor. He thumped it once again and this time even he could detect a more rounded sort of sound behind.

  But where is the access?

  As his chest started to palpitate with the desire to breathe, he bent closer–and there it was, a thin line in the rock describing a perfect circle. He cursed himself for missing it earlier as he poked at the rock with his fingers.

  Dammit! The seal was too tight. It was too well-machined. How was he going to get it open?

  “Pitons, boss!” Ida said, referring to one of the many features of his environmental suit. These sturdy and bulky things were designed to keep a human alive in any number of hostile situations; from deserts to ice caps. They had climbing spikes that could be extended from the soles of his boots, as well as poly-filament climbing lines stowed along his arms.

  And, just in case the wearer had to scale a frozen mountain or a cliff on some hellish ice world–they also had a bulky hand-held device that fired small steel pins. The intention was to be able to ‘staple’ the pins into the ice, or a tree, or whatever the wearer had to climb without the need to use both hands to pull out a spike and a hammer.

  Hank fumbled at his utility belt as his vision started to see sparks, he disengaged the Piton-launcher and dropped it, where it clunked on the floor.

  “You can do this, boss!” Ida said.

  He seized the device and ran its stubby nose over the floor until he felt the groove of the plug and fired.

  The water echoed with the boom, and Hank felt the recoil shoot up his arm and into his shoulder–but when he moved the launcher he saw that there was the gleaming body of a steel spike embedded in the groove of the floor.

  But it hadn’t broke the seal of the plug yet, he cursed.

  It is all about pressure, Hank thought, remembering some distant and long-ago science lesson at one of the Union academies. The water pressure was pushing down on the plug and the air pressure beneath was holding it intact. He could try to fire into the opposite side, but that would only mean he was trying to lift the entire plug at the same time.

  Hank knew that it would be better if he concentrated on one side, and attempted to break the seal at that point alone. He fired again, another spike next to the first.

  “Water pressure increasing, boss!” Ida said, and Hank could feel it too: There was an increased current of air against his legs and side that hovered over the spikes.

  This means that the water is flowing, being drawn downwards…

  Hank fired again, another spike on the other side of the first. The pressure increased. But by now his chest felt like it was on fire. Hank felt a sick certainty that he was going to exhale and take a breath automatically, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.

  He fired a fourth spike next to the previous three into the groove, and suddenly he was rolled in place as the water surged downward.

  The spikes had levered open the round plug only by a few inches, but it was enough to cause a sudden rushing of water all around him. He exhaled half of the breath in his lungs as it had turned to carbon dioxide and was starting to hurt.

  And he kicked at the spikes with his boots. Once. Twice. Three times—

  “Bingo!” He heard Ida say, just as the increasing pressure from the spikes as well as the water popped open the plug, and the water was roaring around him.

  The only problem was; that it was dragging him down with it.

  Steed had to call it, in the end. He didn’t want to–but he forced himself to anyway.

  “Look Madigan, we have to continue on with our mission,” he said warily. Madigan was a big man. A very big man. And he also appeared to be very loyal to the Captain.

  “I’m not leaving with him down there,” Madigan said, just as expected. “He’s the Captain.”

  “And do you think Hank would want our entire mission to be thrown away just because of him?” Steed had to berate the man.

  Madigan flinched, rolled his shoulders as though he were about to argue or shout at the Confederate General–but then he slumped forward. He glowered at the burn mark on the floor, and eventually nodded.

  “Fine,” the big man said irri
tably.

  “Come on. There might be a way we can open up that floor thing,” Steed said. But seeing as the shuttle behind them was even now being broken apart by the lake of acid, and they also had no way to contact the Dalida, Steed knew that the only answer to their problems had to be ahead. There could be no going back.

  Steed was surprised to see, however, that as soon as Madigan had decided to move on with the mission, the big man seemed to be driven with a furious passion. He ran, his feet thundering down the corridor at a quick pace.

  “Maybe we should slow down just a little bit…” Steed attempted to say, in the seconds before a shadow flickered in front of them.

  The trap missed Madigan by a matter of inches, Steed was sure.

  It was a huge rectangle of stone like a meat grinder, shooting out from the right-hand wall and slamming into the opposite one.

  “Whoa!” Steed slid to a halt just as the column of rock clicked back into place as if it had never been. Madigan wo was in front of him, also halted.

  “Uh…?” Madigan slowly turned around—

  Only for his large frame to become completely obscured as the pillar smacked home once again.

  “It’s movement sensitive,” Steed was sure. He spoke in a breathy voice that was barely above a whisper. Then he had an idea.

  “Wait just there…” he unlatched one of the round battery cartridges for his medium laser blaster and rolled it as fast as he could down the tunnel.

  Not only did the column of rock in front of him crunch against the wall, but further ahead a series of more rock pillars threw themselves out of the walls, the ceiling, and the floor.

  “Two…Three…Four…” Steed counted. There were five of them to navigate.

  “We do it in stages,” Steed told Madigan, pulling out a new battery charger. “We trip the traps and move. Got that?”

  Madigan nodded, turning to ready himself for the first run.

  I’m going to need to remember exactly where each pillar hits, Steed told himself. But this had to be just like basic training, right? Back then, in the military training camps of the Confederacy he had to do things like jump tires and pillars and assault courses, didn’t he?

  Only, back then I had only the prospect of falling on my ass, not of having my head crushed INTO my ass.

  “Ah well,” he threw.

  The first pillar activated, and it moved so quick that Steed knew he had to move almost at the same time as he saw it. He felt the whistle of air as he flew back across his chest just as he crossed its path and landed on the spot that Madigan had vacated. Madigan was now one trap further on, and grinning as he nodded back at him.

  “Again,” Steed said, and this time he threw the next battery-charger pack and moved.

  The next trap shot across the passageway at a different angle than before, but Steed managed to navigate it. Madigan, he saw, was now on the penultimate grinder, and was squished against the side wall, as the last two came out of the floor and the ceiling.

  “Once more and you’re free,” Steed said encouragingly. He threw the battery-charger pack and moved—

  But something must have been off with his timing. He hit the wall where Madigan had been awkwardly, as the pillar of rock had brushed his shoulder. It hurt like being kicked by, well, Madigan.

  “Steed!” Madigan said, turning instinctively—

  “Don’t!”

  There was a whump from the ceiling as the final pillar shot upwards, narrowly avoiding Madigan’s helmet.

  Both Steed and Madigan stood there for a long moment, their eyes locked together as they both contemplated how close they had come to certain death.

  “You’re alright, man,” Madigan growled at him, taking a slow step backwards. He held up his heavy blaster and said in slow, measured tones, “three, two…”

  He fired at the floor.

  The last pillar shot upwards, and Steed pushed off from the wall. The grinding stone was on the way down as Steed tripped over it, slamming into Madigan’s chest and both of them stumbling backwards into the relative safety of the corridor with a groan.

  But Steed’s wave of exultation was short lived when he realized that they were standing in the smashed remains of his battery packs. They had either been pulverized or chipped by their passage through the meat grinder.

  And he didn’t have any spares left. “Oh, great!” Steed growled as he explained the situation to Madigan. As the much larger man had only come equipped with his heavy blaster, he didn’t have any spares to offer.

  But a laser battery pack is good for two hundred charges or so, wasn’t it? Steed told himself. How many times had he fired this gun already? And had he put in a new battery-charger pack before disembarking from the Dalida? He couldn’t remember.

  “Uh…Steed?” Madigan growled, one of his giant hands landing on Steed’s shoulder and turning him around.

  “Ow! That’s my bad shoulder, you…” Steed was wincing in pain, just before his words halted in his mouth.

  Red lights were blinking down the length of the corridor.

  Hank would have been shouting, only he was also currently covered in a stream of water, so he didn’t.

  The Captain was tumbled and thrown down what felt like a water slide. The only reason why he wasn’t completely pulverized was the fact that he still had the majority of the environmental suit on. He tried his best to tuck his head into the metal collar to avoid smacking it against the rocky walls.

  And then, like a cork from a bottle, he was thrown out of the end of the water tunnel, his legs kicking and scissoring in the air as he exhaled and took a deep, deep breath—

  Only to hit another body of water with an almighty splash.

  “Kick, boss, kick!” Ida was telling him as he started to sink like a stone.

  It was hard, as Hank’s body was aching with all of the torment that he had put it through. But this time he hadn’t had the chance to take a deep breath and prepare himself for diving, and the urgent need for oxygen was forcing him to thrash and kick his legs as fast as he could.

  “Bah!” Once again, he popped from the water and floundered. “Ida, sonar,” Hank said quickly as he fought to stay afloat.

  There was a dull sensation of pressure in Hank’s ears and a strange, electronic hum. It only lasted for all of a moment, but it was enough for his personal A.I. to read the confines of the new environment that Hank was in.

  “Large rectangular room. There appears to be a tunnel leading up on your eleven o’clock,” Ida said. Even though Hank’s suit lights couldn’t illuminate that far, he trusted her as he started kicking and treading water, forcing himself to move in that direction.

  “Twenty meters. Nineteen meters. Eighteen meters…” Ida counted off the distance as Hank swam. By now, his blue suit lights had highlighted the fact that there was a ledge of rock ahead of him, and yes, there was indeed a round tunnel at the other end.

  This whole place is a goddamn trap, Hank was thinking to himself as he pulled with his arms and kicked with his legs. And then a new thought struck him.

  It wasn’t that whomever–or whatever–had designed it had merely wanted any visitors to die. If they had wanted that, then they could have easily just filled the tunnel with molten lava, given what the builders were already capable of. Or flood it with that sulfuric acid.

  No, the builders had expected some people to be able to get through this series of traps, if they had the right equipment, or knew the layout beforehand!

  Which was as close as it came to a comforting thought, for Hank at least, as it meant that there would always be a way out of whatever problem was presented.

  If he was right about his theory, that was.

  “Boss. I’m detecting movement on your two o’clock,” Ida said hurriedly, as there was a scraping sound and a sudden splash in the water.

  It seemed as through Hank was about to put that theory to the test, right now.

  30

  “Twelve meters, boss–swim!” Ida said.


  What do you think I’m doing!? Hank growled in his head, just as something brushed against one of his thrashing boots.

  “Ach!” It was powerful enough to turn him over in the water, making him splutter and gasp as he floundered once again.

  “You’re almost there, boss!” Ida said encouragingly.

  Hank didn’t know what was behind him in the water, but right now he could see the rocky ledge and the tunnel mouth. It was only a little way ahead.

  And then a red light rose out of the water ahead of him. It was a singular red light in the middle of a metal triangle that was attached to a long, segmented metal body, thicker than his arms. It was some kind of drone-snake.