The shakes were still there, and violent. She couldn’t run yet. She wasn’t sure she could walk.
Faintly she heard Metra ask questions, Bella answering. Metra understood quickly.
“You’re perceptible on sensors now you’re out of a crowd,” Metra said. “Anybody after you will be too. Keep going. We’ll keep watch.”
Hanna could not stop shaking. They started to move again, but she could not run. Neither could Gabriel, as if the shock of falling had thrown a switch. The stimulant had too little to work with and energy was already flagging; their muscles, lately so little used, were worn out too, weak and aching. Endeavor’s medics joined the conversation, worried about hallucinations: Hanna had had them when she used the stimulant before, hadn’t she, and was there any evidence of them now? Explaining that she had lied would take more energy than she could summon, and she just said, “Not yet.” She even thought of taking more, but Metra relayed urgent warnings from the medics to both of them: No more. In your condition it could kill you.
The fear she had thrust away when Gabriel’s safety was at stake flooded her now. If it doesn’t come back. If it never comes back. She kept moving, but her brain felt paralyzed. Crippled, crippled forever. Blind and deaf on D’neera. Blind and deaf everywhere forever. There were voices from the communicator but they did not penetrate, as if they came from a long way off, echoing on the edge of hearing in the shadows of the endless tunnel. She didn’t answer. After a while Gabriel stopped her and took the com unit from her wrist, clumsily, because he could only use one hand. She didn’t object, but it roused her enough to help him.
The voices kept sounding while they moved ahead, which felt like crawling through liquid mud.
She heard Bella say, “All right, I can think to Gabriel and I can read what he thinks. That’ll have to do. H’ana’s a blur, not even as clear as true-humans. She doesn’t hear me when I think to her, I don’t know why, even true-humans do.”
Forever.
Hong: “—off to the side, fifty meters ahead. Looks like there was a shaft there but it’s filled in. Don’t go that way, keep straight.”
“Be easier digging there, wouldn’t it?” Gabriel said.
Metra answered. “We don’t want to attract attention. The optimum’s getting you out without being noticed. Get as far out as you can.”
“We can’t go much farther.”
“Do the best you can. If anyone’s after you there’s no sign of it yet. If you can make it another three Ks, there’s a shaft we know is open.”
Hanna had lost the thread of conversation.
I don’t want to live like this, I can’t. . . .
Her feet went on without her noticing.
• • •
Soldiers told Kakrekt Kwoort’s route. They had no reason not to. He had given no order for silence and Kakrekt was High Commander. Word that she was looking for the Holy Man sped ahead of her, Soldier to Soldier, and replies sped back to her ear. He rides a one-Soldier conveyance—two wheels, that meant, fast and maneuverable.
What of his robes?—Kakrekt hoped for robes catching in wheels, the machine spinning out of control, the Holy Man flying headfirst into something ungiving.
He wears the uniform—so she had to give up the gratifying vision.
As she neared the breeding ground, at the edge of a power complex, she pulled up to question an informant who had news. Kwoort had seized a Warrior to accompany him.
What for?
He said he wants Woke to make records—
Records?
The up-ramps slowed her and made her furious.
She had often seen Kwoort writing, writing, when he was not looking at maps; she never knew what he wrote. At least a rider would slow him down, and she thought of Woke Warrior clinging to the Holy Man with one hand, frantically scribbling with the other, and her ears unfurled and flapped. But he had stopped again, a Soldier’s voice said in her ear; he had taken another Soldier’s weapon, complaining that Woke was unarmed.
At the thought of what he might do with it she tried to get more speed out of her own machine, but it had no more to give.
• • •
A long time had passed.
“Down to one K,” Metra said.
“We can make it,” Gabriel said. He glanced at Hanna and was not so sure. She looked in the dimness like a walking skeleton; like a ghost.
• • •
The not-Soldiers are not in the breeding ground, I searched it, I went myself. Have you seen not-Soldiers, I shouted, I roared. Who sees anything while they mate? To my amazement some had seen. A Warrior sat up and said she knew the not-Soldiers, they took back from her a communications device they had given her I do not know when, I would have her executed but she will soon be quick with young so I will not. Then I found a couple rising to retire to a crèche who said they had seen two strangely shaped Soldiers pass through who talked to such a device, so the not-Soldiers are talking to their Commander despite all my precautions against it. I write this so that if I cease to survive all will know what they have done. Sent machines to destroy us. Sent machines against the facilitators, my High Commander herself sent the not-Soldiers into the warren against them! They have crushed facilitators under their feet, I have seen the remains! I will not allow it! When I get them back they must be torn apart!
I think I know where they have gone. If they have not been seen in the city then the only way out goes through the deserted places
• • •
Gabriel was on Hanna’s right, his undamaged hand clamped firmly on her wrist. He took every turn specified by Talley Hong, but other corridors and downward ramps meandered off everywhere, and he began to wonder what they led to.
Hanna did not seem to notice. She appeared to have shrunk.
After what seemed a very long while he said suddenly, “Wait a minute.”
Hanna stopped obediently, but Metra’s voice said, “I wouldn’t advise it. Someone behind you now and closing. A single vehicle, maybe one individual aboard, maybe two. Interception in ten minutes at current rate of speed.”
Gabriel had felt a puff of cold air against his cheek. He let go of Hanna and licked a finger and lifted it into the dark.
“How far away did you say that shaft is?”
“Less than a K. You’re not going to make it before the pursuit gets to you. Keep going, though. We’ll send servos in ahead of you.”
Gabriel started walking, but he had—maybe, if they were lucky—a closer goal in mind. Hanna lagged behind, and after a minute he stopped and waited for her. When she got to him she stopped too, but she didn’t look at him. She was an automaton, her mind shut down or somewhere else.
He touched her face and said her name. She finally looked up. Her eyes were dull. She whispered something, but it was unintelligible.
“I don’t know what it’s like for you,” he said. “I can’t know. But you have to come out of it.”
He sounded different even to himself, as if something drained from Hanna had passed to him. The blurred outlines of the cavern seemed to sharpen. He recognized that though Hanna might be helpless, he was not. He leaned forward and pushed both translator mouthpieces aside and softly kissed her mouth. When he pulled away and looked at her again there was a little more life in her eyes.
“Stop it,” he said. His voice was loving. “When we get out of here you can spend all the time you want feeling sorry for yourself. If you even need to. The blackout didn’t last before; why should it this time? But now you have to stop. That’s for later. I need you now.”
A spark for sure.
He kissed her again, long and hard. This time there was a response. Just a little at first, but then it was stronger, and then it stopped his breath. Ludicrous they must look, two bags of bones, skulls kissing, but there was life and heat here. And no one to say ludicrous.
“Get moving,” Metra said from orbit.
They started walking again as fast as they could. Hanna had not said a word, but her footfalls were quicker, and firm.
• • •
Kakrekt had not wasted time finding out if the not-Soldiers were still in the breeding warren. It had already been searched on the Holy Man’s order. Her ears flickered with amusement when she heard that he himself had charged into the warren, raged through it, strode over the couples oblivious to him as they obeyed the god’s imperative and got on with breeding.
And he had lost time, because he had had to return to the common entrance to resume his vehicle and the assistance of Warrior Woke.
There was only one point where the not-Soldiers could have left the warren without being turned back toward the city. Kwoort probably knew it, thanks to his endless perusal of maps.
She had wasted no more than the space of a breath wondering how the not-Soldiers had found that point. She had not imagined it was possible when she left them there. But if they had been in communication with their spacecraft, perhaps by “speaking to the mind,” other not-Soldiers might have guided them somehow. Not-Soldiers could do seemingly impossible things. And certainly the guests had gotten out.
She had set off again as fast as before, certain now that she could catch up. She knew the same maps the Holy Man did, but they showed only the uppermost level of the city’s extent in forgotten times. He might know lower levels existed under the plateau, but he could not know how to move about in them.
Kakrekt, though, had explored them over many summers. No life stirred in those strange depths, though facilitators must lie dormant in the floors and walls of abandoned breeding warrens. Kakrekt had seen ancient crèches there, refectories and vast hollow kitchens, living quarters, dried-up crops and processing facilities, transport centers filled with machines drained of fuel, echoing administration halls, silent machine shops, emptied storage facilities, armories bare of weapons, hollow assembly halls. Deepest of all were empty chambers where faded pigments showed faces of Kakrekt knew not what, like the one in the overgrown structure far from the center of Wektt. Other things, too, that she did not recognize and could not explain. The not-Soldiers could help her find out what they were. And always the corridors and roads, silently waiting for Soldiers, connected by ramps in an unending web.
Kakrekt knew shortcuts.
• • •
“Do. Not. Go. There,” said Talley Hong.
But the side passage Gabriel had found led upward, and a breeze flowed from it, fresh and cold.
“I don’t think you’ll have to dig,” Gabriel said, and turned into it. Hanna trotted after him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt fresh outdoor air, and he took great breaths of the cold draft.
“That tunnel’s not on the schematic. It doesn’t exist.”
“We’re inside it, so it must. The walls are different. Have you accounted for solid rock?”
“The geology says there can’t be—”
There was a silence. The incline was shallow, but it was long, and they trudged up it with heads down, breathing hard. There might be light up ahead—surely dawn had come to Wektt by now—but the communicator’s light obscured it.
“All right,” Hong said finally. “Rock. A sinkhole or something not far ahead. Might be an exit. There’s a shuttle on the way—” Yes! thought Gabriel—“we’ll redirect. Look, there’s a lot of levels below you, and somebody’s moving on the next one down. Coming your way. Captain says get a move on. It’s closing fast, and so is whoever’s right behind you on the level where you’re at.”
Hanna said, finally sounding like herself, “Too late. They’ll think we kept straight, like we’ve done all along.”
Gabriel, however, turned for a moment to shine the light behind them. The dust on the floor was thicker here, and damp, too; there might be mud ahead. Maybe Hanna hadn’t noticed the clear trail they had left. He thought a droning noise touched the edge of his hearing. The tunnels echoed and it was hard to decide where sound came from, but this could only be coming from behind them. Closing fast.
Slowly, he turned the light back ahead of them. Hanna had seen the footprints now, and heard the drone, but she did not say anything about them, and Gabriel did not either. There was no need.
• • •
Through the last few meters the mud turned to ice. The incline rose more sharply and they skidded with every step, the light skewing wildly from Gabriel’s wrist, dimming as they drew near daylight. At the very end there were rocks and boulders, a haphazard camouflage still effective against eyes outside, but time had loosened and tumbled them and there were gaps. The following drone had become a roar. Hanna and Gabriel squeezed through separate cracks into a deep hollow. There was frozen mud underfoot, the color of drying blood in dim morning light.
Hanna thought she could not take another step, but Gabriel grabbed her and pulled, squinting in natural light that blinded them, though the lowering sky was gray. The wall of the hollow rose more steeply yet and they half-climbed, half-crawled up it, grasping at handholds with fingernails, and they made it to the lip of the hollow and over it, a meter farther, two meters, four, before Hanna collapsed on stony flat ground, too numb to feel the cold of snow scattered over more ice. She heard Gabriel say, “Where’s the goddam shuttle?” and could not answer, but he had said it to the communicator.
“ETA five minutes,” said Metra’s voice, and Gabriel said, “Why? Why isn’t it here?”
Hanna would have cursed too, if she had had enough breath. She had counted on that shuttle, like Gabriel; she had thought it would be there if they made it this far. Below them, at the end of the tunnel, machine-roar swelled and died with a cough. Gabriel spun to face it, and where in God’s name had he gotten the strength to move so fast, Hanna thought, and saw that his eyes were wild. She had never seen him angry until now; threat piled on threat had stripped him to instinct, to pure self-preservation. He looked like someone she had never seen before. He looked murderous.
In the silence there was a scrabbling in the barricade, out of sight from their vantage. Gabriel bent and picked up a rock with his wounded right hand. It must hurt, but he curled his fingers around it in a practiced, complicated grip. She wanted desperately to think No! to him and tried but there was nothing, and when she tried to shout it she did not have the breath; and why would she want him to hold back anyway if this was Kwoort? That last glimpse of Kwoort’s mind had shown that he meant to kill them. Gabriel drew back his arm, and she did not know what to hope for: that his wasted muscles could not throw a rock with fatal force, or that a final burst of energy would cave in Kwoort’s skull.
But Kwoort’s head appeared and Gabriel did not move. Kwoort’s shoulders now, and now his hands: one held a spindly weapon. Kwoort came all the way out of the hollow and raised the weapon, and Gabriel hurled the rock.
To Hanna’s complete astonishment it connected cleanly with Kwoort’s wrist. He yelled and dropped the weapon at his feet.
Hanna tried to get up and could not. Her mind would not obey her and now her muscles would not either. She made it to all fours and saw Gabriel launch himself at Kwoort, for a second he seemed horizontal, feet off the ground, and Hanna thought He is flying and Gabriel’s head rammed hard into Kwoort’s chest.
They disappeared, tumbling back into the hollow. Kwoort’s boot had jerked against the weapon and it vanished with them.
Hanna crawled toward the edge of the dip in the land. Time stopped. It would take forever to get there but she had forever. There was time to feel each separate ice crystal in the mud under her hands, each frozen shred of some dried-up creeper that would not part from its roots. The wind had stopped and she heard a faint sound from the hollow, a desperate sucking noise, and more sounds from the rough barricade, and finally a voice. It was not Gabriel’s. She crept to the top of the incline and looked ov
er.
Kakrekt was there, crouched by Kwoort. The sucking noise came from his breathing tubes, and he heaved on the ground in his struggle for air; Gabriel’s hard head had knocked all the breath out of his chest. But what had it done to Gabriel’s skull and neck, his spine?—he lay near Kwoort, unmoving. A Warrior Hanna had not seen before hung back among the barricading rocks. Kakrekt said something to Kwoort and turned to Gabriel, took hold of one shoulder and shook him, but Gabriel did not respond. There was another voice, too, coming from the communicator, but Hanna could not tell what it was saying, and Kakrekt suddenly pulled it from Gabriel’s wrist and stood. Kakrekt looked at the communicator closely.
Hanna had once seen a mortally wounded animal, savaged by a predator, struggle to move toward some illusory refuge. She moved as mindlessly as that animal, toward Gabriel, rolling over the lip of the steep decline, clutching for handholds by reflex but mostly sliding to the bottom. Somehow she was on her feet, stumbling to him and sinking to the ground again, a hand floating to his chest. She felt the slight expansion of a breath. Her hands moved of their own accord, stroking his chest and his forehead, tangling in his hair, trying to think his name to him and finally calling aloud, “Gabriel, come back, come back!”
His head turned a little and his lips moved. The breath that came out might have been her name. Then he moved a hand.
She helped him sit up, a slow process. Her mind began to work again—within limits; she tried to remember what she knew about concussion and failed, tried to think of what she might do to get them out of this and failed at that too. The weapon that had gone over the edge with Kwoort lay between him and Kakrekt on the mud, but she could not get to it without being noticed.
The hollow was full of eerie silence. Wind had started up above their heads, a distant whisper. Not even the communicator made a sound. Then Gabriel muttered, “Better.”
“Are you hurt?”
Battleground Page 50
