Stars Beneath My Feet

by D L Frizzell

  I’d always thought field rations were terrible, but the coffee tasted pretty good this time. I sat there and sipped it, wondering what happened to my horse, the one I’d given to Kate. Althayr was my first mount, and a good one, too. He had personality, like he could tell what I was thinking.

  I jumped a bit when someone touched my shoulder.

  “Ready to travel?” Hathan-Fen asked. “We still have a long way to go.”

  “Aren’t we back in Dogleg?” I asked, pointing to the windows.

  “No,” she smiled, which was not really a smile as much as a scowl. Still, it felt friendly. “Why don’t you come see?”

  She helped me to my feet. Oh good, I had my regular clothes on. Not my hat, though. I looked around ‘til I saw it on the ground next to my feet. Got to have my hat, I thought. I put it on, unrolled my duster and put it on, too.

  “Stand here,” Hathan-Fen told me as she stood me next to the windows. “What do you see?”

  I put my feet where she instructed and looked around. I was still in the cave. That was obvious. Oh yeah – the window. I looked outside and gawked. That wasn’t what I expected.

  “Tell me what you see,” she said, weirdly insistent.

  “A beach,” I said. “Golden sand, and the water goes all the way to the horizon. Is that an ocean?”

  “What else do you see?”

  I looked left and right through the glass panes. “White birds flying over the water and…wow…a city. I think it’s a city. It looks too tall, but those are definitely buildings. They look like Founders’ Tech. Very shiny.”

  “Good,” Norio said. I hadn’t realized he was standing next to me.

  “What are those dots moving in the distance?” I asked.

  “Airplanes,” Norio said.

  “This isn’t Dogleg, is it?” I asked, feeling very confused. “I know because the sun is too high in the sky.

  “Right,” Redland mocked. “You can tell from the sun.”

  “Did you drug me again?” I asked.

  “No,” Norio replied. “You are recovering from hypothermia.”

  “You’ll feel normal soon,” Redland added. “Normal for you, anyway.”

  “Whatever,” I said, feeling like I should be angrier at him. Instead, I watched the flying machines zip back and forth across the sky. The view here was amazing. “Kate,” I said. “Have you seen this?” I turned to her. She was still playing with her hair and gave no indication that she’d heard me.

  “We need to get movin’, major,” Redland told Hathan-Fen.

  “I know,” she said. They left me to stare through the window.

  A few minutes later, Brady grabbed my arm. “Hey, buddy, aren’t you coming? Here, take this.” He gave me a wooden handle, which I noticed was connected to my sled, except now it was a wagon.

  “Huh?” I looked where he pointed and saw the entrance to the cave for the first time. It seemed a little too symmetrical for rock, but okay. I followed him as he pulled his own wagon into the long, dark tunnel.

  “Shouldn’t we put our jackets back on if we’re going outside?” I asked.

  “We’re going inside,” Brady said, clapping my shoulder. The outer door’s already closed.”

  We were the last two into the tunnel. As I started to reply to Brady, somebody shoved both of us to the ground from behind. Not expecting this, I hit my knees unceremoniously on the sharp gravel floor.

  Whatever had fogged my mind cleared out with the rush of adrenaline. “What the hell?” I blurted. Everybody on the team spun around to see what happened.

  I looked up into the face of a bearded man I’d never met before. He held a pistol in one hand, aiming it at my face. Another man stepped out of the shadows with a similar device.

  “You get up now,” the man said gruffly to Brady and me. “All others keep still.”

  I stared at the gun in his hand, not even sure it was a gun. It had the right shape, with sights atop the barrel and a trigger underneath. What it didn’t have was a hole for bullets to escape. I moved as if I were getting up, and carefully moved my hand under my duster to unclip the holster.

  “I understand what you are doing,” the man said. He lowered the gun-thing toward the ground and pulled the trigger. A red flash of light, quiet as a whisper, bored a smoking hole into the rocks before me. “Durks get hole in face. Now you understand me, yes?”

  “Yeah,” I said, raising both hands so he could see them. He reached over and took my pistol while the other man kept me covered with his weapon.

  The rest of the team stood in the tunnel, hands raised. The first man waved Brady and me forward to join the team, so we did as instructed.

  “Do not say anything,” Norio whispered to all of us. “I will handle this.”

  I held my tongue, figuring that my first choice of words might get us shot. That didn’t mean I couldn’t simmer, though. As the two men looked us over, I figured out how to disarm them and see if their guns were as effective against kneecaps as they were against rocks.

  The man who kicked me said, “Seagull.”

  Norio stepped forward to the front of the group. “Canaveral.”

  “Loss.”

  Norio answered, “Vostok.”

  “Mars.”

  Norio said, “Hades.”

  Both bearded men nodded and lowered their pistols. “Welcome to southern hemisphere.”

  “Hell’s bells,” Redland barked. “You greet everybody like that?”

  “Sure, sure,” the man replied. “Apology for confronting.” They gave us our weapons and sealed theirs in a red box on the floor. Once their hands were free, they pulled two sap torches from a notch in the wall and brought them to life with pocket lighters.

  “Now we go further under mountain,” the second man said.

  “We’re still in the Colderlands?” I asked, not sure I heard them right.

  “Yeah,” Brady said. “Where’d you think we were?”

  The two men identified themselves as Dima and Leo. They were Titans. That much I got from their accents. They were either brothers or close cousins. That much I got from their features. Their clothes suggested they weren’t planning to go outside any time soon. They took our winter suits and piled them up carefully in a wide area of the cave tunnel. My suit, the ruined one, got tossed down a mine shaft.

  “How did you get here?” I asked Dima and Leo.

  “You did not see us open the cave?” Dima asked suspiciously.

  “No. I was wearing the suit,” I gestured down the mine shaft, “you just threw away.”

  “Ah,” Dima said. “You were the one who almost died. Yes, we opened the door. And now we close. Zakroi!”

  Cracks appeared in the cave wall. Not a jagged, splintering crack like one would see during a cave-in. These were straight lines, seams in the rock that expanded into a gap, and then became a great hole. An immense door slid into view. It had a rock surface, or a very good approximation of one. That was just the front side. The back side was a complex arrangement of servos and mechanical armatures that silently moved the door over the cave entrance and filled it completely. Computerized deadbolts the size of my arm slid into all four sides, each clicking neatly into place. A cog in the center of the door spun halfway around and locked a secondary set of deadbolts into the first ones. Once completed, the door powered off with a series of beeps and buzzes.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “This is Dolina portal,” Dima replied.

  “It looks like Founders’ Tech,” I said. “How does it work?”

  “Portal works, is all I know,” he shrugged. The matter settled, for him at least, he grabbed two more wooden torches from a niche in the wall and lit them, handing one to me and the other to Hathan-Fen. “We go to Dolina now,” he said.

  “Torches?” Redland asked. “You’ve got windows into another world, laser guns, a mechanical door the likes I’ve never seen before, and then you light plain ol’ torches?”

  “We are leaving
portal,” Dima shrugged. “Past red line, these technologies not work.” He walked several step down the tunnel and held his torch out. A faded red line adorned the tunnel wall on both sides.

  “Power is off now. Will get cold fast,” Leo said, and marched down the tunnel.

  He was right. A chill overtook the tunnel, causing everyone’s breath to condense into billows of frozen vapor. Brady and Traore grabbed their wagons and followed the two Titans down the tunnel. Hathan-Fen gave her torch to Redland and helped Norio lead Kate. Kate must have been hurt by the cold more than I had been, because she was in an absolute stupor. I moved alongside Norio. “You’ve been here before.”

  “Yes,” Norio said.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked, pointing at Kate.

  “She’ll be okay,” Hathan-Fen said. “Just a little out of it.”

  “She is not drugged,” Norio added.

  “Glad we cleared that up,” I said.

  Behind me, I heard Redland and Ofsalle whispering to one another. I stopped and waited for them to catch up with me.

  I noticed that Ofsalle’s eyes looked redder than they were when I first met him. Not just bloodshot, but downright bloody. “What happened to your eyes?” I asked.

  “I have bad allergies,” he admitted. “I must have picked up something in Sunlo, but I left my eye drops on the train. I should be okay as long as we don’t come across any flower beds.”

  “Not much chance of that,” Redland quipped.

  “I should ask how you feel,” Ofsalle told me. “I’m surprised you are still alive after what happened.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You damaged your suit and wandered off the trail,” Redland said. “You were blue by the time we cracked it open.”

  I stared at Redland. “Damaged how?”

  “The outer layer got torn,” Ofsalle said. “Even the slightest hole in one of those suits can cause major temperature variations. Whenever ice crystals manage to get into a hole, even a small one, they thaw in the warmer layers and leech into the fabric. This would make room for more crystals to do the same thing. You accumulated so much water in your suit that your body couldn’t prevent it from freezing. You had close to thirty kilograms of ice built up around your back, Marshal Vonn.”

  “What a terrible way to die,” I said, leering at Redland.

  “Indeed,” Ofsalle said. “It’s a good thing Marshal Redland went back out after you.”

  “What?”

  “He volunteered,” Ofsalle said. “His suit had developed a hole as well – not as bad, mind you - but he insisted on finding you himself.”

  “What a hero,” I deadpanned. Being the skeptical sort, I suspected foul play. A hole in an extreme-weather suit would be the most effective form of assassination in the southern hemisphere. I would have pegged Redland as the primary suspect in the event of my death. Trouble was, he apparently saved me from what would otherwise be the perfect murder. Something didn’t add up.

  Unless this was really an accident and he wanted to save me. Or this wasn’t an accident, and he just wanted me to think he saved me. Paranoia notwithstanding, I had reasons to keep my eyes open. I ran forward to catch up with Hathan-Fen.

  “So, Redland saved me?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “Didn’t think he had it in him.” She adjusted her grip on Kate’s arm, found her steady enough, and let Norio handle her alone. Hathan-Fen then led me along the other side of the cave for a quiet conversation. “Are you really okay?”

  “Sure” I said. “I guess I should thank you for the warm blankets and the chance to recover.”

  “It wasn’t enough,” she said.

  “That sounds like modesty, Major,” I said. “Are you going soft on me?”

  “Screw you, Marshal,” she said, sliding back into character without missing a beat. “What I meant was that you should be dead.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We had to chisel you out of that suit with our hooks, Alex. I thought for certain that if you lived you would have debilitating frostbite. But here you are, walking like nothing happened.”

  “I’m resilient,” I said.

  Hathan-Fen stopped and grabbed my shoulder. Peering into my eyes, she said cryptically, “Remember that.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Have you been here before, too?”

  “No,” she said, letting go of me. “Just remember everything Norio taught you.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything.”

  The major walked over to take Kate’s arm again. Norio let go and went to talk with our Titan guides. I looked around. Everybody else had paired up with somebody. All I had was my wagon, which had developed a squeaky wheel along the way. As I pulled it along, I remembered why I like to work alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The walk was long, but not overly taxing. The temperature dropped for a while, but then started warming up again. Nothing eventful happened, which everyone agreed was a good thing. However, I got the sense things were about to change for the worse. Call it a hunch, or maybe I suspected that good luck died in the Colderlands. Either way, I felt unsettled. The sergeants traded dirty jokes with one another to pass the time while I kept quiet watch with troubled thoughts.

  I had just started sensing humidity in the air when light appeared at the far reaches of the tunnel. Dim at first, the light brightened until we no longer needed the torches. Our Titan escorts insisted we keep them lit until our presence was acknowledged properly.

  My sense of anticipation heightened, as I’m sure was true of the others on the team. We approached a bend in the tunnel. The busy sounds of life reached our ears, softly at first, but grew to a clanging, hissing, industrial tenor echoing in a sort of chaotic harmony. Shouts echoed back and forth through the din – questions, instructions, acknowledgements – the kind of words a person would hear from a team of workmen. I tried to pick sentences out of the roar, but there were too many voices, too much activity.

  Dima asked me for my torch. When I gave it to him, he instructed all of us to wait a moment while he announced our arrival. He walked to the bend in the tunnel, raised both torches high overhead and waved them several times before finally crossing them overhead and holding still. After a long moment, he gave a nod and inserted the torches head-down into drilled holes in the rock wall. A puff of smoke coughed out of the holes, which told me their fires had gone out.

  With an exaggerated flourish, Dima waved us forward. “Welcome to Dolina,” he smiled.

  Not knowing that Dolina existed up to this point, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Being under a mountain, I figured it would be some kind of mine, similar to the ones outside Sunlo. Perhaps it started as a mine, I thought, but it had become far more than that. It was a town, an honest to goodness town, with at least a hundred concrete buildings arrayed in an orderly matrix within the irregular boundaries of a massive cavern system. Between the buildings were streets, each paved with a black substance I didn’t recognize. People walked back and forth along a wider, central avenue where vendors had set up carts with different items for sale. At the end of the avenue was a larger building – a city hall, maybe? – built with pillars on the four corners that supported decorative soffits. It was a simple building, but a grand statement nonetheless. Its builders had taken care to craft an amazing centerpiece that gave Dolina both a civilized and romantic character.

  Changing my focus from Dolina to the cavern itself, I saw a variety of minerals looming overhead, arranged in differently colored strata. A complicated lattice of metallic scaffolds reached up from the cavern floor to buttress the low points, which were still twenty meters or more above the ground. On the scaffolds, huge lamps flickered brightly enough to illuminate everything in town. There didn’t appear to be a single shadow outside any of the buildings. If any of us had been asked to visualize the perfect town, this would not have been much different from our imaginations. It seemed to live in daylight, desp
ite being hundreds – or even thousands – of meters under the surface.

  “This is amazing,” Major Hathan-Fen exclaimed. “Everything is so well-built and…level.”

  “We have plenty of time to make perfect,” Dima smiled. “Five hundred years.”

  “The Founders made all this?” Redland asked, seemingly confused.

  “Eh, most of it,” Dima said in his thick accent. “They drop in heavy equipment to get started. Mostly this was exercise to move rock from one place to another. This area was once huge crack in Arion’s crust. Product of cataclysm, you know. But…we take rock from walls, refine what we can, drop the rest into crack as cement. It reinforced with steel, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” Hathan-Fen said.

  Dima pointed to a bend past the far edge of town. “You not see from here, but drilling is constant. We keep mines away from town proper, so noise does not bother children.” He smiled again, holding up his right hand to show off a gold band on his ring finger. “I have two granddaughters.”

  “Congratulations,” Hathan-Fen said, sounding more mystified than complimentary. “Are those lights electric?” she pointed to the scaffolds.

  “Yes,” Dima said. He started to explain, but Ofsalle cut in.

  “Where do you get your food?” the doctor asked.

  “Well,” Dima hesitated, “that is in another part of Dolina.”

  “Perhaps we should focus on our immediate purpose,” Norio said. “I am certain more explanations will come as time permits.”

  “A tour, perhaps?” Ofsalle asked hopefully.

  “Uh…maybe,” Dima shrugged. “First, we make introductions, and then get to business.”

  Dima led us through town, and my estimation of the town handlers only went up. Dolina was divided into different sectors, one with a smelting facility that operated near the mine. I couldn’t see how they dealt with dust and toxic cave gases, but the air seemed perfectly clean. Another sector provided support services, where reclamation facilities recycled and purified waste products. Un-reclaimed waste was transported to a small hydroponics area where crops, including fruit trees, grew as large as they did in Sunlo. A smaller sector of town was devoted to various businesses, with the largest section reserved for dwellings. A pair of small railway tracks encircled the town station, with one of the tracks detouring through the center of town not far from the avenue. I couldn’t see any trains at the moment but imagined they couldn’t be too big considering the narrow gauge of the tracks. There were other tracks that branched out from the town perimeter, presumable going to the mine and other areas.