by John Daulton
“Get that spell on your suit,” Orli demanded. “Now.”
The great slam of Red Fire’s recognition struck him the moment she said it, and once again Altin went down to his knees, the interior force greater than mashing gravity. He clutched at his head, grasping for his ears reflexively despite their being buried inside the bulky helmet.
Orli was at his side once more, the click of her face plate against his, her mouth and eyes wide. “Cast the spell,” she yelled, so loud it made the speakers crack. “Cast the fucking anti-magic.”
Die, came the fury of Red Fire, a death weight of incalculable mass. Die.
Altin fought with all his will to focus long enough to cast the anti-magic spell. His hands shook with the palsy of his weakness and fear, but he placed it on the control panel of his suit and, finally, barely, enchanted it.
Red Fire was gone again.
“Tidalwrath’s teeth,” he exclaimed breathlessly, looking up into Orli’s worried face. Bits of debris bounced off her visor. He could hear other bits ticking against his own when they struck. “I’m not sure I’ll manage even a minute fighting down here, not this close to the source. That was worse than before.”
She was already tugging him up to his feet. “Can you still go?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay.”
Orli watched him for a moment, expectant in her posture and attitude. He looked back at her, shifting his weight to compensate for the gusting wind. He realized she was waiting for the teleportation spell that would take them out. He realized it because he’d thought about casting one.
“We have to take the stairs,” he said. He reached out for her hand and together they made their way down the stairs, moving as quickly as the bulky suits would allow. The descent was interminable and Altin cursed himself for not having thought to just bring the top portion of the tower. Experiments in space made opportunities for the strangest oversights.
Soon enough, however, they were outside in the full force of the wind. Altin walked to where the little palm tree decanter was, leaned down and looked at it, searching for cracks or signs of fatigue. It seemed fine, though. Its fronds whirling furiously, but otherwise looking as it always had.
“So where is it?” Orli asked.
“Over there,” he said, pointing beyond the decanter to a huge formation of dark red stone that was roughly eight hundred paces away. He started off immediately, once more pulling her along. The buffeting force of the wind had them staggering like drunks as they clambered over and around the rocks and boulders of the hostile landscape. Altin couldn’t help the instinct that had him shielding his eyes with his hand against the blowing dust and grit as they made their way toward the dark tumble of piled rocks, a great mound of them, enormous stones that seemed to have collapsed together, like a fallen temple from some ancient time, though scoured clean of any remnant grandeur by the merciless sandblasting wind.
They got to it and quickly found some relief inside from the violent atmosphere. They moved deeper into the formation, carefully weaving through a veritable maze of giant, tilting stones, climbing over some, under others, and squeezing through narrow places carefully. In the process of doing so, Orli discovered, quite by accident and certainly to her surprise, that there were lichens there. It was a small patch growing on a rock, like cracked gray skin, and just the one spot of it, but there it was just the same. She took only enough time to lean close and turn on the suit’s video feed to record it as she passed, her botanist’s instincts coming naturally. “Well, there’s the life it needs,” she said. “At least some of it.”
“Here,” Altin said from up ahead, “down there.”
Orli came up behind him and saw that he was looking down into a pit.
“I didn’t think to bring any rope,” he said, kneeling down to look inside. “I can’t see very far down, and I doubt even an elf could climb the sides. Definitely not us in these suits.”
Orli clicked on her suit’s spotlight and shined it down into the hole. She could see the bottom. “About sixty feet,” she said.
Altin was fiddling with the suit controls on his left sleeve. “How did you turn the light on?”
She reached over and turned it on for him.
He added his light to hers, and they studied the bottom of the hole again. He looked back up, directly at her, blasting his light right into her face. He quickly turned away when he saw her face contort. “Sorry.” He felt so uncomfortable and out of place. Partly because he was in the suit, but mainly because being cut off from his magic left him helpless, unable to do anything for either of them now. “Somehow we need to find another way in.”
“Did Blue Fire show you another way in?”
“No. This was it.”
“Then we can use the prism. I’m not good with these because I never had any reason to use one before. They’re all automatic on the ship. But I think I can figure it out.”
Altin watched her face for a moment, then nodded. “What do you need me to do?”
“Come here,” she said. “Get right up here and hug me as tight as you can. Don’t let go.”
“Gladly,” he said, trying to sound chipper. It only sort of worked.
He scooted up to her and wrapped her in a hug as best he could.
“Turn off your light,” she said, squinting again. “And don’t pull anything loose back there.” She gave him a very serious look at that, before adding, “And don’t cover the jet ports.”
He found the button she had pressed on his sleeve and turned off the helmet light. “What jet ports?”
“The little holes at the bottom, both sides and in the middle back. You should be able to feel the lip of them. They stick out a little bit.”
“I’ll try.” He looked left and right, saw the jet nozzles and repositioned his arms around her, gripping the corners of the suit’s blocky dorsal pack carefully and slightly lower than he had before. “That better?”
“Yes, except now I can’t see. Get sideways a little bit so I can see my controls.”
He scooted around so that he was hugging her at an awkward angle from the side, his right arm around the back of her neck and shoulders, his left across her chest. She lifted the gravity filtering device up to where she could see it, tugging it up by the short tether with which she’d tied it to her waist and contemplating its controls.
“Okay, on three, we’re going to try a little test. Just a gentle little hop with your toes. More like standing up on your tiptoes than jumping, actually. Got it?”
He nodded.
“One, two, three.”
They both lifted themselves up onto their toes, she with a little more force than he. They lifted into the air together, several inches off the ground and moving slightly sideways, then settled gently back down.
“Okay, I think that will do,” she said. “I’ll take a little more off while we’re falling, so we don’t pick up speed.”
Altin began to realize what she was going to do. He laughed.
“What’s so funny?” She squinted up at him through her helmet’s glass.
“You’re doing magic,” he replied. “This spell is called Falling Leaves.”
She smiled, but only until she blinked. “We can laugh later. Let’s go. On three, we jump up and over the edge. I’ll try to keep us from getting too wonky on the way down with my attitude jets, but don’t expect much. We’re kind of a mess like this.”
“I trust you,” he said, watching her through her visor. Even standing at the brink of death her beauty was radiant.
“On three. One, two, three.”
They jumped over the edge, him clinging to her like the lichens had the rocks, and her tapping her backpack thrusters just enough to keep the two of them from rolling over sideways as they fell. They picked up a little speed, but she arrested it with a click of the Higgs prism dial. And then they were down.
Altin let her go and turned to where the pit became a tunnel, a low cave leading into darkness. He switched his suit’s l
ight back on. “It’s really dark,” he said.
“Altin, go. We have to hurry.”
They moved into the cave and found that it headed very steadily down into the surface of the angry red world. For a time, it was fairly narrow, more like a crack than a cave, but eventually it started to widen until it provided more than enough room to move easily, in places, much more than enough.
They passed through wide tunnels and large open caverns, the surface of everything was pockmarked with tiny holes like those left behind by bad acne. There were no familiar formations, nothing like stalactites or stalagmites that might suggest there was water on this world, or at least that there had been at some time.
Onward they pressed, Altin leading them through twisting passages and down steep declining chutes. He moved through it all like a creature who’d lived there his entire life. But still he grew anxious and afraid. What Blue Fire had given him was recognition of the way, not a map. He had no gauge of distance. He had no way to predict how far they had to go. All of that pertained to his own ideas, human ideas of movement and time, things that had no corresponding part in the information he had gotten from Blue Fire, who had in turn taken it from Red Fire, from this world they were now sneaking down into. Altin only knew when they came to a place where they should turn, a place where they should climb, a place where they should jump. He even knew where not to go. But not how far.
They were nearing the forty-minute mark as they headed down, and both of them began to fret. Forty minutes with the orcs and demons pushing at the gate that was already all but lost before they left. Forty minutes with Red Fire’s orbs draped all over Earth dissolving things, spreading disease. There wasn’t going to be time. Both of them could feel it, but neither wanted to speak it aloud.
They moved faster, not quite running, but at a steady trot. Altin’s breathing became loud over the speakers, but Orli didn’t say anything. He wasn’t a runner, and this was hard for him, not to mention that he had the heavy drill slung over his shoulder too. The work was made worse by the stiffening in the suit, its adjustments for the atmospheric pressure gradually bearing down on them. She knew he had no idea what the suit was doing in the same way that she knew she didn’t know how much pressure it could take, or how much it would need to take. How far down could they go? How bad could it get? She knew nothing about this planet. She had no tools for measuring. The suit’s alarm would sound if it got too bad. That’s what she knew.
Red Fire seemed to sense that, or perhaps it was simply a quirk of fate, but they came upon a vast canyon then, so far across that their spotlights couldn’t reach the other side. It was simply the end of forward progress, abrupt and absolute, as if it had been put there on purpose to block their way. There was back, and there was down.
Their spotlights revealed no more of the fissure’s depth than it did about its width or the altitude of the ceiling somewhere high above.
“Well,” she said as she looked up and then down for perhaps the tenth time, “did we make a wrong turn? Did we miss something?”
“No,” he said. “This is it. We have to go down there.”
“You’re kidding me?” She leaned out over the edge and peered down to where the beam of her light simply faded to nothingness.
“No,” he said. “I’m not kidding.”
“Shit.”
“I agree.”
They both looked down. “So do we try the prism again?” she asked.
“We can’t go back.”
“No. We can’t.”
He moved up against her once more, prepared to hold on to her for the jump. Their eyes locked for a time, the bright sparks of spotlights reflecting in each. He didn’t bother to turn it off this time, and she didn’t ask. He felt her chest rise and fall with a sigh. He nodded, and then pulled himself tightly to her. “On three?”
“On three,” she said. She pulled the prism up on its tether and set it to where it had been before, mitigating most of the planet’s gravity. “One, two, three.”
Once again they were falling. Altin clutched her so tightly that his arms began to tremble after a while. They started to tip over again and Orli tried to straighten them, but she let the gas flow too long and they tipped the other way. She tapped the control on the opposite side, trying to right them, but the jet hit Altin’s arm so hard he lost his grip on that side of her suit back. The released energy swung him out from her like an opening door, his other hand gripping tightly and serving as a hinge.
He tried to hold on, to cling to her suit with that hinging hand, but he didn’t have anything to grip firmly, only the corner of the suit. He couldn’t risk grasping for something else because he didn’t want to tear anything loose by groping wildly. So he broke free and started to drift away. They both knew that if he got beyond the range of the Higgs prism, he would plummet like a stone.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Orli said as she tapped her jet controls trying to get closer to him. The jets weren’t meant for flying, only for little thrusts to get across short spaces between ships or space station construction sites. If she hit the wrong one, or too much on one, she would take herself, and the Higgs prism, out of range.
Altin, however, remained calm. “Should I try my jets?” he asked. “Which ones are the controls?” He had crooked his arm to where he could look at the panel on his sleeve.
Orli might have laughed had she not been so terrified. “No!” she commanded. He’d only make it worse.
She turned two dials on her suit and a pair of jets fired for the barest instant each. She had to twist her hips to fix the angle some, but in moments she was drifting closer to him.
They reached for each other’s hands and, still falling, finally caught one another. Soon they embraced each other again. It was Orli’s turn to tremble now. “I told you not to cover the damn jets,” she yelled. Fright was obvious in her eyes.
He sent a sheepish look back at her through his visor, that charming grin he had. “I know. My mistake. But look here, now I’ve got it right.”
She wanted to throttle him, but she was glad that she hadn’t lost him in such an awful way. She sent him a narrow-eyed “never do that to me again” look and allowed herself once more to breathe normally as they fell.
And they fell.
And fell.
And fell.
They fell for so long Orli wondered if perhaps they might fall out through the bottom of the world. They fell for fourteen minutes before the alarm went off.
It was a low, pulsing sound, and it came so suddenly it startled him. “What’s that?” he asked. “It doesn’t sound promising.”
Her alarm went off next. “Shit.”
“You seem to be saying that a lot.”
“Yes, well, we’re in it pretty deep now. Too deep. I don’t know how much pressure these suits can take. They’re made for space, not deep diving, or even for being too deep underground apparently.” She called up the gauge in the helmet display. “We’re going to run the power down really fast like this too. Where’s the bottom of this fucking thing?”
She couldn’t look down due to the way Altin was wrapped around her now, rather like a starfish on a rock, but he could see. He tilted his head as far as he could and directed the light down. Still nothing.
They fell for another six minutes.
“They’re all going to be dead,” she said after a while.
“We still have to try.”
They found the bottom a few minutes after that. They came to rest as gently as the spell name Altin had given to the prism’s effect implied, like leaves falling. The descent ended so gently and uneventfully it seemed the pinnacle of anticlimax after the near disaster high above.
Still, they were down.
Altin let go of Orli, who set the prism back to Earth normal again. He looked about them, shining his light around, turned full circle, with only the cliff face along which they had descended sending any of the light back. The rest was utter darkness, as if they’d found themselves at the
very core of nothingness.
“It should be here,” he said.
“What should?”
“Something. I should see something. Over there somewhere.” He pointed for a moment then switched off his light. “Turn that off,” he said. “And dim these lights on our controls if you can.”
She quickly obliged, and both of them peered into the darkness, only the sound of their breathing disturbing the absolute nature of the emptiness.
“There,” he said after what felt a very long time. “Look.”
“Where? I can’t see where there is.” It was true that they were completely in the dark.
He groped for her and found her shoulder, then turned her to face where he was looking. Then she saw it too. A tiny green light, like a pinhole in a black curtain, a glowing dust mote seen from a thousand steps away.
“Come on. That’s him. It has to be,” he said. They clicked their lights back on and soon were running toward the tiny spec of light as fast as the space suits would allow.
They covered the distance in no time and soon found a small opening, barely as high as Orli’s knees and about three paces wide. “This is very similar to how it was before, on Blue Fire,” Altin announced. “But will we fit?” He eyeballed the square block of her suit back in tandem with contemplating the narrowness of the entry.
“Lying flat, maybe,” she said. “We won’t be able to crawl.”
“Won’t be able to get out in a hurry either,” he said. But even as he spoke, he was getting down onto the ground, preparing to slide in.
“Let me go first,” she said, drawing her blaster from where it was strapped to her leg. “You can’t do magic in that thing, remember?”
He cringed. He didn’t want her going in first. But he knew that she was right. He was helpless if anything went wrong. It occurred to him that this was what life must be like living as a blank. So vulnerable. “Harpy spit,” he swore. He couldn’t stop the instinct that made him reach out and pull her back. “I can take that,” he said, his eyes sliding to her gun.
“Oh, stop it,” she said. “I’m bad enough with it as it is, and we’ve come too far for this right now.” She yanked free of him and got down on her hands and knees, bent down and peered through the opening. “It’s about ten feet to the other end. I don’t see anything moving in there. And at least there’s light.”
