by James Axler
J.B. and Ryan had a dozen other, critical questions that needed answering, but before either could speak, Gabhart's head drooped his chest and his mouth went slack.
"Fireblast!" Ryan said.
"He's not dead, just unconscious," Krysty told him. "I can see him still breathing."
"From what Mildred told me," Ryan said, "he may never wake up. He's on his last legs. If he comes out of it while we're gone, J.B., get as much info as you can from him."
"Gotcha."
Ryan and Krysty picked axes from the pile at the bottom of the cart. The tools had wickedly curved points at one end; the other end was flat, more like a hammer. The reason was obvious. That way, two axes could be used to split apart pieces of nuke ore too big to lift: one acting as a wedge, the other as a sledge. They also each took one of the roughly woven bags.
"Be careful, Dad," Dean said.
"Always, son. You, too."
He and Krysty stepped into the nearest side shaft. The opening was as wide as Ryan's arm span, and a couple of feet taller than the top of his head. It looked as if it had been hacked out with a laser. There were no tool marks on the walls, just smooth glass; it almost looked polished. And the floor, walls and ceiling all met at near right angles. Inside the shaft, the level of available light dropped even more.
"Look at our badges," Krysty said.
They were definitely glowing brighter. But they weren't bright enough to light up more than twenty feet of tunnel ahead.
They had only walked thirty or so yards when the darkness in front of them began to dance with green lights. From deeper in the fissure, three slaves appeared, single file, dragging the loaded ore bags behind them. Their badges were like tiny beacons on their chests. The blurry circles of light they cast bounced and quivered as they walked.
Ryan and Krysty put their backs against the wall, their axes ready to fend off a sudden attack. No words were exchanged. Not even a nod to acknowledge one another's existence.
After the slaves had passed, Ryan and Krysty stood there, staring at the glass wall opposite. Their badge lights penetrated the solid mass, allowing them to see deep inside. There were shadowy, mysterious shapes, distorted by folds and masses of bubbles, obscured by irregular, unidentifiable pieces of large and small debris.
"Gaia knows what all's in there," Krysty said.
"Yeah," Ryan said, "it's a treasure chest of busted-up shit."
Around a tight turn that would have blocked an ore cart, they came across the first of much smaller intersecting tunnels, obviously hacked by hand. As they approached it, a man's head and shoulders popped out of the narrow hole in the wall. Before they could reach him, he had scrambled out with his ore bag. Growling like an animal, he threatened them with his ax, the pointed tip of which was worn into a tiny mushroom, like an expended bullet.
"Easy," Ryan said, raising his own ax as he stepped between Krysty and the guy. "We don't want your ore."
The slave scuttled past them with his bag, his back to the wall, feinting with short swings of his weapon. His arms and hands were a mass of barely healed cuts. There were deeper gashes across his forehead and cheeks. His trousers and shirt were slashed from glass edges; his spindly thighs were visible between the long tatters.
Ryan knew the looks of wild animals caught in traps or mortally wounded, awaiting death. He knew the looks of human beings as they faced that same terrible unknown. But what was in the slave's eyes was something even more desperate, even more despairing. The man's expression said that he knew his life wasn't worth living, but he couldn't let go of it yet.
As Ryan and Krysty moved deeper, the available light became nil, but their badges grew brighter, casting forty instead of twenty feet ahead of them.
"Wait," Ryan said, stopping.
"I thought I heard something, too."
It wasn't the intermittent crying of the glass, which was something they had gotten used to, like the sound of the wind. This was the moan of a human being. And it was punctuated by the whack of an ax. Over and over again. Then came a crash of falling glass.
"Let's take it slow," Ryan said,
As they advanced, at the edge of their green circles of light, they could see a single dim figure. Moving forward, they caught the frantic rise and fall of the ax it was wielded two-handed. A slave was hacking away at the face of the right-hand wall. Puffs of glass dust exploded at every impact. Chunks of glass lay at his feet.
The slave turned to blink at their badge lights. His nose and mouth were uncovered, and snot swayed in long strands from his chin. His pupils were mere pinpoints. "You've got to help me get her out!" the man cried. "We've got to save her!"
With that, he returned to the wall, slamming his ax into it.
"Save who?" Ryan said as he and Krysty came closer.
"Hold on, honey," the man cried as he reared back for another blow. "Hold on!" He was bleeding from deep cuts on his forearms and hands.
"Who is it?" Krysty asked him. "What is it?"
"My baby, she's caught in there," the man said. "Can't you hear her calling me? Can't you see her? Are you deaf? Are you blind?"
When the man lowered his ax, Ryan looked into the crude crater he had fashioned. Much deeper in the matrix was a dark, elongated shape. Something was entombed.
"That's definitely not a baby, mister," Ryan said. "It looks more like a big rock."
Not understanding, perhaps not even hearing, the man rambled on, "Her name is Charla. She's only four…she calls me Poppy Deary."
Ryan shook his head.
"Idiots!" the man cried, and resumed smashing the wall with his ax. Foam bubbled from the corners of his mouth, and as he swung his tool, it flew in sticky streamers along his neck.
A big hunk of glass tumbled to the floor. From deep in the wall came a crying sound, shrill, quavery. It grew louder and louder.
Rearing back for another blow, the man said, "I'm coming, honey. I'll save you!"
"Out of here!" Ryan told Krysty. "Now!" They turned to run back the way they had come. They got no more than a few strides before the ceiling and walls crashed down behind them. There was a rush of wind, and Ryan took the stinging blast of glass fragments on his back, protecting Krysty with his body.
When the dust cleared, they found the man partially buried in jumbled pieces of glass. His head was connected to his body by the slimmest of threads, a single strip of muscle and skin. His still jetting blood glistened black on the edges of the glass.
The cave-in had exposed the entombed object that had cost him his life.
It wasn't a rock after all, but a dirty void, a nothingness. A gap left by a section of predark wooden log or telephone pole that the nukeheat had charred to ash.
Jutting out of the cavity was one end of a piece of predark Unistrut metal framing. About a yard of the U-shaped metal channel was showing; the rest, a slightly shorter length, was still embedded in the wall of glass. Ryan leaned closer and looked at the exposed end. Molten nukeglass had filled the inside of the two-inch-wide half tube of steel. The cave-in had fractured away most of the glass outside the free part of the Unistrut, leaving behind a three-inch, green fringe of crude, razor-edged spikes that stuck up from the channel opening like nightmare hacksaw teeth. "Poor bastard didn't know what he was doing."
Krysty said. "Had to be from the spores Gabhart warned us about."
"Yeah," Ryan agreed. "There must be some of those mushrooms around here close. Keep an eye out. We don't want to stumble onto them by accident."
They found the Mindbursts a bit farther on. In the green light of their rad badges, little button shapes clustered along the seam of the floor and wall. They were dainty looking, with small, rounded caps. Ryan noticed a peculiar sweet but sharp smell they seemed to give off. Holding his bandanna tight around his nose and mouth, he bent closer and saw some of the caps had been gnawed down to stumps. Scattered about were dozens of tiny, half-moon-shaped black turds.
"Like Gabhart said, the rats must eat them," he said as he stra
ightened.
"And their crap fertilizes the next crop," Krysty said.
They moved past the corpse caught in the glass fall, and continued down the tunnel until they found an intersecting shaft that was stand-up height. The space inside it was much narrower. There was hardly enough room to swing their axes. But their badges glared like searchlights, so they knew they were in the right place.
Working together carefully, they excavated the base of the walls, using their axes to crack big blocks of it free. The ore wasn't all that dense; their bags were severely stretched by sixty or seventy pounds of the stuff. With Krysty in the lead, they headed back for the sledge.
When they reached the site of the cave-in, she exclaimed, "He's gone!"
"What?" Ryan said.
"The stoner, he's gone!"
Ryan pushed past her. One look told him she was right. Someone or something had shifted the chunks of glass and pulled the body free. All that was left were strips of shredded clothing.
He turned to Krysty. In the glow of his badge he saw her prehensile hair drawing up into tight coils.
Then he heard soft kissing sounds from the darkness.
Chapter Twelve
It was nasty-hot underground.
Gradually, the heat of the day had built up inside the tunnel, until by late afternoon it was an airless furnace. In the greenish twilight of rad badges and glass-filtered sun, crouching human forms made animal growling sounds as they circled.
J.B. watched yet another fight unfold beside the row of sledges at the shaft's end. The rock axes made mean hand-to-hand weapons. He wondered what one of them would do to the helmet of a battlesuit. Probably nothing, he decided, or the otherworlders wouldn't have passed them out so freely. Probably couldn't even get near a helmet with one; the ax head would clang harmlessly sideways before contact, just like a 9 mm slug.
The odds were stacked against the lone guy trying to protect his cart. He had three raggedy-ass thieves coming at him, taking turns ducking in and out trying to get him to commit himself and expose a weak point for the others to attack. These were the same three scumbags who had been working over the end-of-tunnel sledge line up for half an hour. They took note every time somebody dumped a bag of ore in a cart. Then they would wait until the guard was alone and close in and take some of it. Sometimes all it took was a show of force to get what they wanted; other times, like this one, it took more.
If J.B. hadn't been charged with protecting the boy and Gabhart, he would've walked over and stuck his ax in, and put an end to the harassment forever. As it was, he could only be a spectator in other people's trouble. The boy didn't like doing nothing about it, he could tell.
The guy guarding the cart finally made a move, took a big swing at one of the thieves. And missed. The other two were on him before he could get the ax back up to block. They didn't hit him with the pointy ends. That would've been too merciful. Instead, they shattered his left elbow and right collarbone with the flat sides of their ax heads. His arms hanging limp, the poor bastard staggered against the wall and slipped down to his butt.
The thieves didn't bother finishing him off. He was already done for. Unable to lift another piece of ore, he'd earned his last cup of water.
None of the slaves standing around the other sledges did or said anything. They watched the thieves push their sledge over to the wounded man's cart and take every piece of ore he had. Even though the slaves knew the three bastards would surely victimize them next, they were relieved that it had happened to someone else this time.
Everybody down here was crazy, J.B. realized. And with good reason. The bastard place was death row with festival seating.
The thieves started shoving their loaded cart back toward the mine entrance. In so doing, they had to pass J.B. and Dean. The Armorer took a good, long look at them. All three wore overcoats so greasy it was impossible to tell what their original color had been. Their side pockets bulged with dead rats, the tails sticking up stiff as sticks. From their expressions, they thought they had surviving Ground Zero all figured out. They didn't collect ore for water or hunt the dark tunnels for food. They stole it, which meant they lived longer because they didn't spend as much time in the high rad zones.
One of them, a guy with long, matted hair pulled into a ponytail and a wispy chin beard, looked into their cart. An appraising look. Just to see how the ore collection was going, for future reference. All he saw in there was Gabhart, unconscious.
"What are you looking at?" he demanded of the man in the fedora and wire-rimmed spectacles.
"Dog shit, walking," J.B. replied.
At once, Dean had his ax up and ready to strike. J.B. rested his, nice and relaxed, on the rim of the cart. He smiled at the thief. He already had his moves worked out, although he figured that after he dropped this one, the other two would light out in a hurry.
The Armorer's stance clearly unnerved the pony-tailed guy. The usual reaction to threat was tension and retreat, not gleeful anticipation. The other thieves seemed uninterested in backing up a confrontation over personal honor; there was nothing in it for them—the cart was empty. Though he had been insulted, Ponytail didn't push the matter any further physically. "Hey, I'm just making the best of a bad situation," he snarled back. "Just like you'd do if you had any balls."
"We got nothing for you scabs," J.B. said. "Fuck off."
"We'll be back," Ponytail promised over his shoulder.
"Looking forward to caving in your head."
"J.B.," Dean said, "the colonel is waking up."
Gabhart stirred in the bed of the cart. He moved his arms and opened his eyes. "Damn, I dreamed I was already dead," he whispered. "It was a happy dream."
"Come on," J.B. said, "let's get you out of there."
He and Dean helped the colonel to a seat on the floor of the tunnel, propping his back against the wall.
"We need to know more about these manacles," J.B. said to him. "How do they work? What sets them off?"
Gabhart stared at him blankly for a moment, and J.B. thought he was going to pass out again, but then he spoke. "They're linked to the satellite's ground position locator, which divides the planet surface into grids. A comp somewhere in the Slake City compound controls which grid sectors trigger the cuffs. When you cross into one of those sectors, the lasers automatically fire. The slaves at Ground Zero have one activation setting. Slave catchers have another. Ours is on either side of the road and outside the mines perimeters."
"Can we get them off without setting them off?"
"No. If you try, they'll fire. They have to be deactivated at the control source."
"How do we do that?"
"Smash the comp. If there's no link with satellite, there's no way to trigger the cuffs."
"Sounds easy enough."
"There's another possibility, of course. There could be a fail-safe measure in place."
"What would that be?"
"When the satellite signal is broken, all the cuffs activate."
J.B. caught the boy staring at the dull silver bands around his wrists. He put his hand on Dean's shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. "Nothing for you to worry about now," he said. "We're a long way from making that move. But if it turns out that's our only chance to get free, we've got to take it. We've got to find a way to get back there and pull the plug."
"My mouth is so dry, my tongue's split," Gabhart said. Then he suddenly doubled over, wrapping his arms around his stomach. "My guts hurt," he moaned. "Feels like they're on fire."
"Hang on, Colonel," J.B. said, kneeling beside him. "Try to hang on. We need to know about the battlesuits. Do they have a weak point?"
Gabhart sagged over onto his side.
"Colonel? Colonel?"
Gabhart couldn't hear J.B. He had passed out again.
PUFFING, DOC TRIED to stay close to Jak's heels as he scrambled through the maze of side tunnels and man-size crevices. In the light of Doc's rad badge, the albino's long hair reflected back a shocking green, and
he moved with an economy of motion and a split-second decisiveness that the old man couldn't hope to match. It was more a glide than a trot. Effortless. Silky smooth.
They had already dumped off one load of ore. About 150 pounds of it. By Doc's estimate, it was going to take thirty more trips to fill up the cart. At fifteen to twenty minutes per trip, it would be eight to ten hours before they'd have more water.
Not something to dwell upon.
Doc was relieved when Jak slowed his breakneck pace down the tunnel. They began looking into the intersecting crevices and holes for a likely place to collect more superhot ore.
As Doc glanced down one of the narrow side seams, a set of eyes flashed back in his badge's light. It was so startlingly close that he jumped back a step. There was a rustling noise, then the eyes were gone.
"What in Hades was that?" he cried.
"Stickie," Jak said. "Crawling through the cracks. From inside walls up into ceiling. He's over there now. Hear him?"
Doc had to admit that he couldn't hear anything except the sighing of the nukeglass, but he took the youth's word for it. He felt damnably naked without his LeMat. The pickax he'd been issued was no substitute for nine .44-caliber lead balls.
The corridor they were following zigzagged back and forth before it opened onto the high domed expanse of a partially collapsed bubble. A huge interior space, it was too broad for their badge lights to reach the other side. They could see the ceiling, though. To Doc it looked like a vast, curved mirror, blurred by swirls and ripples.
Jak found the place unattractive, for strategic reasons. "Too big, too dark," he said. "Can't stay here."
Then they heard a cry from the far side of the bubble.
"Help me. Help me."
A man's voice, certainly, Doc thought. But where exactly was it coming from? "I can't see where he is," he said to Jak.
"Me, neither. Mebbe a trap. Could be stickies."
"Most stickies cannot form words."
