Endurance

by Richard Chizmar

  The hatch opened, waking me up. “Terran.”

  I peered up to see GothVar staring down at me. “Not you again.” An image of the huge lizard being lowered down into the pit with me made me close my eyes tightly. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  He turned his head and said something to the pit guard that sounded like “not … rational,” then slammed the hatch shut.

  Rational. I was rational. Not like FlatHead was an authority on the subject.

  A day passed. I took to muttering to myself, to keep awake and to stop dwelling on my thirst and hunger. Eventually both became so strong that the only peace I found was in sleep.

  A small object hitting the top of my skull woke me up. I jerked out of sleep to look around, and shuddered as I remembered where I was. Then I saw it.

  A small square container, the kind sojourn teams carried in their packs. I grabbed it and looked up.

  Above me, a dark, furry face hung over the edge of the pit. “Doctor?”

  “Zel?” What was she doing here and where was the guard? “Get back to the infirmary before you get caught!”

  “Wait.” She pushed something else over the side, and I tried to catch it. The burn made me clumsy, and it bounced into my lap, the weight bruising my thighs. “With more, I’ll try to come back.”

  Before I could ask more what, her face disappeared. The thing on my lap was a large, thin plas container of liquid, the square case opened to reveal emergency sojourn rations.

  Both of which Zella could have tainted, of course.

  I didn’t care, I thought, scrambling to open the container of liquid. It would solve my problem if she had, and I’d be a complete idiot not to drink if she hadn’t.

  Cool, wet liquid poured into my mouth and down the sides of my throat as I took a big swallow. Not water. Nutri-enhanced glucose and water, the kind of beverage I routinely prescribed for dehydrated patients. It slid down my desiccated throat to fill and warm my belly. Only with supreme will power was I able to close the container and keep myself from gulping it all down at once.

  Can’t drink too fast.

  I waited for the inevitable nausea to pass, then rummaged through the sojourn rations. All Terran foods, I saw, and in sealed, nonperishable packets.

  Suddenly I knew exactly what GothVar had said to the pit guard. Not “not rational,” but “no rations at all.”

  They meant to starve me.

  Don’t know how long I’ll be down here. Have to conserve what I can. I tore open the smallest packet and carefully ate half the contents. Simply chewing and swallowing made my jaw ache and my eyes sting. I would have wept, but I was too dehydrated.

  No taste of chemicals, no indication of poison or drugs.

  At last, exhausted with pleasure and the new hope it gave me, I curled over on my side and fell asleep again.

  The dream I had was bizarre, without images, only sensations. For a long interval, I felt sure I’d been transported back to the Sunlace. The chilly, unyielding walls disappeared, and I was back on my own sleeping platform, snuggling into clean, crisp sheets. Jenner’s cold, dry nose nudged me a few times, and once I thought he licked my burned arm, but it didn’t hurt, so I dismissed it.

  I would have gladly slept for another week, but something decided I’d been dreaming long enough.

  Wake up.

  I murmured something vaguely obscene and rolled over.

  Wake up, woman.

  The odd voice made my ears hum, and I swatted at it with one hand, annoyed by the disturbance.

  Do you wish to stay here?

  I opened one eye, and promptly shrieked. Or would have, if the humanoid bending over me hadn’t clamped a flipper over my mouth.

  “Be silent, or we will be discovered. I am not here to harm you.” Gently it eased its fin-shaped hand away. It—he? she?—spoke through a wristcom, I realized, instead of the Hsktskt-issue headgear. A hooded cloak concealed it from head to toe. If it had toes. “Come, we must go now.”

  The cloak, I realized, was dark brown. Not yellow. Not orange.

  “How did you get in here?” Behind it, I saw a gap in the wall that hadn’t been there when I’d fallen asleep. A Lok-Teel scurried over my chest, and I automatically removed it and set it aside. “Where did you come from? Who are you?”

  “A friend.” He—taking a guess, I would say he—helped me to my feet, and I muffled another yelp as the days of inactivity made themselves known in my sore muscles. “You must crawl through there”—he pointed to the opening—“to reach the surface.”

  “I don’t want to go to the surface.” Did I? No, I wasn’t leaving Jennifer or Alunthri behind again. Plus there were Zella and Vlaav, FurreVa, the other patients … no way could I go. “Take me to the infirmary.”

  “I take prisoners away from this place,” he said in his strange, whirring voice. The wristcom translated the words, but couldn’t remove the underlying hum. “Arrangements have been made. We must go now.”

  “No.” I sat back down and reached for my liquid container. “Thanks, I’ll stay.” The slave-runner reached for me again, and I shook my head. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the offer. But I’m not leaving my friends behind.” I thought about what he’d said. “Who made the arrangements?”

  “I did.” He made a disgruntled noise. Definitely a male. “Very well. I will take you to your infirmary.”

  Crawling through the tunnel took time, considering the shape I was in. The cloaked humanoid went first, stopping every ten feet to glance back at me.

  “I’m okay. Keeping going.” I disliked tight places, and the walls of the narrow passage were already starting to close in on me. “What’s your name?”

  He stopped for a moment at a cross section, then turned to crawl off in the right branch. “Noarr.”

  “My name is Cherijo.”

  “I know.” He was silent for another few minutes, until we reached the end of the passage. “I will jump down. Wait.” He disappeared over the edge, and I hurried toward it.

  The tunnel emptied out into one of the prisoner tier commons. I spotted Noarr a good four meters below me. He gestured for me to jump.

  I shook my head. “Too far!” He only made a more impatient version of the gesture. “Okay.” I eased my legs over the side, took a breath, then pushed off. Seconds later I landed in a strong pair of arms.

  “Whoa.” I grabbed onto his cloak, and tore off a small piece in the process. “That was scary.” The warm, dark scent of him rose from his garments, and teased my nose. I glanced up into the dark hood. I couldn’t see his eyes, and that bothered me. “Thanks.”

  Noarr set me on my feet, then guided me to another portion of the crystal tower. We ended up at a wall, where he placed his hand on the solid surface, and pushed. An entire section silently swung inward, revealing another hidden passage, which we entered. Noarr paused long enough to shut the invisible door, and I saw my reflection on the interior.

  I looked awful. My face appeared drawn and gaunt, my hair was a snarl of knots, and my tunic needed a thorough decon. But I stared at the reflection, amazed not at what I saw, but that I saw anything at all.

  “How were you able to drill through the crystal? Where did you get the mirrors to conceal the entrances to these tunnels?”

  “The tunnels already existed. The Lok-Teel deposit a substance which creates the mirror effect.” He urged me forward. “We must hurry.”

  “You’re too big to be a Reedol.” Hurry, my foot. “Mind showing me your face?”

  He pulled the hood from his head, revealing a hairless skull half again as large as my own. “Satisfied, woman?”

  I’d never seen his species before. I’d have remembered the unusual swirls of white pigmentation curving over every inch of his dark brown face. Or were they some form of tattoo? He had a large head with heavy-lidded, shadowed eyes, and a small, full-lipped mouth. More curved, white ridges followed the lines on his high-arched nose.

  The eyes were veiled by the
protrusion of his brow, but something less than civilized lurked in those shadows. Noarr was, I decided, not a person to be trifled with.

  Neither was I.

  “Where did you come from? Are you a slave? How did you get into the pit? Why do you want to get me off Catopsa? How can you do that?”

  “I cannot answer these questions now.” He pulled me along after him down the hidden corridor. “I will take you to your infirmary. Stay there and out of sight for now.”

  “I can’t do that. I have to treat my patients.”

  He thought about that for a second. “If the beasts ask why you have returned, say it was on the orders of the Terran OverMaster.”

  “Right. Like they’d believe that.”

  “They will believe.” The white spirals on his cheeks shifted as he gave me his rather startling version of a grin. “You belong to him, do you not?”

  “I don’t belong to anyone.” We’d reached the end of the corridor and faced another mirrored wall. “Hold on. Are you the one who moved those infected females over to the male tier?”

  “Yes. The infirmary lies beyond.” He took out a small device and aimed it toward the wall. “Readings indicate no one is in the corridor. Go, now.” Noarr turned to head back down the passage.

  I caught the edge of one flowing sleeve and tugged. “Wait. I want to know more about these tunnels. How you make that fungus into mirrors—”

  He removed my hand and stepped back. “There is no time for that now.” His full cloak swirled and he was halfway down the passage before a low “Farewell, woman” floated back to me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Namesake

  Nurse Dchêm-os dropped an entire tray of instruments on the floor when I finished cleaning up and walked out from behind a berth partition. “Doctor!”

  “Keep your whiskers on, Zel.” I spied Vlaav, who was staring at me as though I’d risen from a postmortem table. “How are the meningitis cases?”

  The Saksonan shuffled his footgear, then eyed me with a nervous expression. “They weren’t responding well to the intravenous cephalosporin, so I’ve switched them to synrifampin derivatives.”

  He’d done exactly what I would have. “Carry on, Doctor.”

  I had a great deal of work to do and probably very little time in which to accomplish it, so I gave Zella a highly abbreviated version of what had happened, without mentioning the tunnels or Noarr by name.

  “Thanks for bringing me the rations,” I said to the nurse, not bothering to hide the speculative tone in my voice.

  She wouldn’t look at me, and shoved a stack of charts in my hands. “For what I did, my family would have me torn to pieces. For my moment of weakness, do not thank me.”

  I put the charts aside. “Explain that to me.”

  “Mean, what do you?”

  “Why did you make a vow to kill me?”

  Zella turned and started for the inpatient berths, then stopped. Without looking at me, she removed her headgear. “They killed eight members of the crew, when the Hsktskt boarded the Perpetua. My genitor, one of them was.” She looked back at me. “I swore to avenge him, that is why.”

  “I see.” I’d never been told about the deaths. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “You responsible, I held.”

  I pushed the hair from my brow, and tried to think of what to say. Only the truth mattered. “I was.”

  “You were, yes.” She retreated to the berths and began her vitals checks on the patients.

  I could wallow in the guilt, or I could work. I ended up doing both.

  To my utter astonishment, I discovered halfway through my first shift that Noarr was right. A Hsktskt centuron who reported for a minor laceration questioned my presence, only to accept the bland excuse completely. No one else bothered to ask.

  Maybe the Hsktskt didn’t run quite as tight a slave-depot as they thought they did.

  FurreVa’s infants had gained control of two limbs and were now confined to her chamber. The infants toddled and crawled around a “playpen” made of two quasi-quartz walls with plasteel panels clamped between them. Inhibitor webbing kept the kids from crawling out. During my house call, I checked the healing grafts on her back, then asked if she had reviewed the text data on the reconstructive surgery.

  “I have.” She handed the data chart back to me. “Although I am not versed in the terminology, it seems very ambitious.” She looked over the web at her young. “Dangerous, as well.”

  “You’ve put your life in my hands before,” I said. “I can do this procedure safely. But ultimately the decision is yours.”

  “I do not wish to look like this”—she touched her face—“for the balance of my existence.”

  I’d take that to be a yes. “Then we’ll do it.”

  She removed several containers of what looked like synthetic, pulp-laden blood from her prep unit. “I must feed my brood.” She set them a good foot apart from each other inside the “playpen.”

  I didn’t want to watch the babies slurp that up, so I left and went on to my own chamber. Jenner was waiting for me, and I programmed a much more civilized meal for my “baby.”

  “Dried catfish bits for you, lucky guy.” I set down the large server. I wasn’t hungry, so I headed for my pallet. The chime of an incoming signal startled me—I hadn’t noticed the new com console someone had installed in my quarters. Slowly I went over to answer it.

  What if it’s Reever, and he wants to know how I got out of that pit?

  Taking a page from Noarr’s book, I decided to tell my Lord and OverMaster that TssVar had released me.

  Speak of the Hsktskt. TssVar’s gleaming eyes coalesced onto the vidisplay, and I took an involuntarily deep breath. “OverLord?”

  “Dr. Torin. You will report to Compound Command tomorrow.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Pre-trade inspection.” He terminated the signal before I could ask another question.

  “Well, that tells me a lot.”

  “I could tell you more.”

  I whirled around to see Reever standing at my door panel. “Learn how to knock, will you?”

  “I ordered you confined to the isolation pit for fourteen rotations.” Reever walked in and closed the door. “How is it that you are released after only five?”

  “Apparently OverLord TssVar needs me for this pre-trade business.” It wasn’t really a lie. And I could get back out of that pit, if he threw me back down in it. But if he noticed my PIC had healed and vanished again—the edge of my pallet hit the back of my legs, and I stopped shuffling away from him. “What do you want?”

  “The truth.”

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re afraid of me,” he said, as though it was some huge revelation. “Why? Because of GothVar? What did he do to you?” I gave him an ironic stare. “What did he do to you on the ship!”

  “I have to get some sleep now.” I sat down and pulled back the linens. Torn and bloodstained, I noticed, and shuddered.

  “I know why you don’t wish to talk about it.” Reever sounded almost sympathetic. No, I was tired, and my ears weren’t functioning correctly. “I endured a similar ordeal. I can help you.”

  I’d thought I’d felt every feasible emotion toward Reever—dislike, affection, infatuation, and abhorrence. Apparently not.

  I gazed at Reever’s hands. “You want to sympathize, is that it? Tell me all about your tragic childhood?” Something trickled into my veins, something hot and fast. “You enslave me, bring me to this godforsaken rock, throw me down a pit to starve to death, and now you want to help me?”

  His brows drew together. “I ordered you be given daily rations.”

  I stretched out on my pallet, every muscle coiled with outrage. He genuinely expected me to believe that waste. “I need to sleep. Go harass someone else.”

  “I saw you after GothVar branded you here and on the ship. This unnatural reaction you’ve experienced will require treatment.”

  The man
simply had a death wish. I flung an arm over my eyes. “And when did you graduate Med-tech, Dr. Reever?”

  “I understand how you feel.”

  “What?” I jumped up and went after him. Both of my palms slammed into his chest, sending him staggering back. “You, understand me? You think you know how I feel? You’ve never understood the first thing about me. You don’t feel anything. You look human, but that’s all!”

  “I’ve never been human.” He seized my hands before I could hit him again. “Neither have you. That, I understand.”

  There was another of those long, silent intervals between us where a lot could have been said and wasn’t. He let go first. I went back to my pallet. I didn’t look at him again, and only when the door panel opened and closed, did I finally relax enough to bury my face in my pillow, and wish I’d let Duncan Reever die back on K-2.

  I stopped by the infirmary on my way to report to TssVar the next day, only to find the entire assessment area trashed and Pmohhi treating Vlaav for a sprained elbow.

  “I tried to stop them,” the Saksonan said, and moaned as I took over from the nurse and assessed him. “They insisted they were here, that we were hiding them.”

  “More prisoners missing?” I glanced at the League nurse, who nodded. FurreVa wasn’t in any shape to do this. “Which one of the lizards was in charge?”

  “The one with no brow.”

  “That does it.” I wrapped Vlaav’s arm and encased it with a soft splint, then went over to the console and signaled Reever.

  He regarded me with evident disapproval. “Why have you not reported to Command?”

  “Because that idiot GothVar trashed my infirmary, that’s why.” I calculated how much damage had been done. “Half the equipment is ruined. Replace it, and get some of your precious lizards down here to clean up the mess. Then I’ll report to Command.”

  “Report now. I will see to the infirmary.”

  I waited until the centurons showed up before I left anyway. Let Reever and TssVar stew about my insubordination, I thought as I stomped off to Command.

  A centuron intercepted me on the way, and directed me to follow him. We caught up to TssVar as he headed to the outer perimeter structures.