by JE Gurley
Dax unclenched his fists. It was no use fighting old battles. “Let’s dig our way out of here. I’m getting hungry.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“And?”
He tossed a rock away in disgust. “I figure it will take about a month to move enough rocks to get out. There may be another way.”
“I’m interested.”
He pointed to the ventilator shaft above the sanctuary door.
“We can barely fit inside, and it twists and turns before it reaches the surface. We’d never make it.”
“No, not to the surface, but they must connect with each other. All we need to do is find one that takes us around the cave-in.”
Ivers plan made sense except for one detail. “How do we reach the opening?”
Ivers pointed his flashlight at the door. “See those markings? At first, I thought they were some kind of decoration. Looking closer, I saw they are notches deep enough for a human foot.” He grinned. “They’re a ladder to the opening.”
Dax eyed the notches with suspicion. It was precarious climb under any circumstances. With blistered and numb hands, it would be an ordeal, as would be negotiating the ventilation shaft itself. In the end, what choice did he have?
“Let’s get going.”
Ivers led the way. Climbing up the shallow indentations proved more difficult than Dax anticipated. The Huresh surely had smaller feet to fit into the small notches. His size-ten boots barely fit, and he slipped often, leaving him hanging by one blistered hand. The going become tougher once they reached the opening. The shaft, carved from the native rock, went straight up for ten meters. Romeo had slightly underestimated the ventilator shaft’s size, but it still measured less than one-and-a-half meters wide. The interior was not smooth, providing traction for his feet, as he wiggled up the shaft behind Ivers. He pushed his laser rifle ahead of him, balancing it on the top of his head. He used muscles he had not exercised for years. By the time they reached the first horizontal junction, his calf muscles and shoulders burned from the exertion.
Folding at the waist and sliding along on his belly, he made the 90-degree turn into the horizontal shaft. The tight, enclosed space played tricks with his mind, closing in on him. He closed his eyes and concentrated on crawling along like a worm. The air was scorching hot and dry. Two thousand years of dust had accumulated in the shaft. It was difficult to draw a deep breath, but he realized his mind was trying to force him to stop the punishment he inflicted on his body.
The shaft seemed to continue for a dozen kilometers, but he knew it could not have been more than one before they came upon a second opening above the roof of one of the ruins. The shaft above the opening made a tight bend before continuing on its horizontal course. They could go no farther. It was a five-meter drop to the roof below. Because of the narrow confines, they could not turn around to drop feet first. Ivers slid headfirst into the opening and fell. Dax watched him hit the roof amid a cloud of dust. He groaned, cursed loudly, and rolled out of the way for Dax to follow.
Dax took a deep breath and repeated Ivers’ graceless maneuver. He tried to use his hands and legs to cushion his fall, but he landed on his back hard enough to knock the breath from him. As he lay there hurting and gasping for air, the roof sagged beneath him. With a loud crack, the supporting beam snapped, dropping the roof and its two occupants onto the floor below.
Ivers pulled himself from the rubble. “That’s one way off the roof,” he quipped.
Dax pushed a pile of rocks from him. “Where are we?”
Ivers checked his watch. “GPS says we’re in the bypass tunnel to Level 2.”
“If the fall didn’t break your watch,” he groaned. “I think I broke my back.”
“You’d better hope not. I’m not carrying you.”
Dax pulled his laser rifle from beneath him, the source of the sharp pain in his back. Clenching his teeth against the pain, he pushed himself from the floor, brushed off the chunks of masonry, and sat up. His muscles ached and his hands were raw and bleeding, but he could move.
They climbed down from the third-floor room through a former stairwell half-filled with debris. In the lava tube, Ivers shone his light across the floor until the beam picked out three sets of tracks – the sledge and two ATVs.
“They made it this far anyway,” he said.
Dax hoped they made it all the way out.
They walked. Dax felt more movement in the air and more dust. The storm Myles had predicted had hit the city. As they neared the Atrium, another odor mixed with the flinty smell of dust. Ivers noticed it too.
“Cordite,” he said. “Your Plia used a missile.”
That meant Ravers. Dax checked his rifle and switched off the safety. When Ivers’ light illuminated the sledge, he felt sick at his stomach.
“I don’t see the ATVs,” Ivers said.
That fact gave him slight hope, until they drew nearer the sledge. The smell of blood was strong, as was the foul stench of the dead Raver lying on its side.
“She got one of them,” he said.
Ivers had spotted something else. He pointed to the two bodies in the dirt. One was headless; the other crushed into the ground. His heart pounded with dread, fearing that one of them was Tish. He felt a moment of relief when he recognized Andy by his flight suit; then, immediately regretted taking comfort that one had been spared at the cost of another. He imagined Andy playing the hero and held himself to blame. The young co-pilot had constantly sought Dax’s approval, but he had been too hard-nosed to give it.
He approached the headless corpse slowly, not wanting to look. He steeled himself. The body was male and too tall for Tish. That left Myles or Romeo. The clothing was too drenched in blood and dust to tell if it was a flight suit or casual clothing. He decided the corpse was not thin enough for Romeo. Dax returned and knelt by Andy’s body. A large hole bored through his chest where a Raver had clawed him before crushing him with its enormous weight. He looked around but didn’t see any more bodies.
“There’s a missile left in the pod,” Ivers said. “I wonder why she left it.” He crawled up on the sledge. “Oh, I see.”
Dax brushed his hand across Andy’s hair in a last goodbye gesture and joined Ivers. A nest of shredded fiber optic wiring protruded from a severed cable. Ivers fingered the wires.
“Oh, I see.” He began tracing wires with his finger.
“What are you doing?” Dax demanded. “We need to go.”
“Why walk when we can ride?”
“Plia wouldn’t have left it if she could repair it.”
“Maybe she didn’t have time.” He looked around. “If you haven’t noticed, we’re being watched.”
If they were in danger, Dax wondered why his scalp didn’t itch. Then he realized the flesh on his head was so burned it was numb. He heard a rock bounce down a wall to his left and peered into the darkness.
“Maybe you had better hurry with those missiles.”
“Just a minute.” He opened an access panel in the floor of the sledge. “Now, if Plia is the woman I think she is … Aha! A fiber splice kit.”
He took a multi-use tool and stripped several of the wires. He worked deftly and quickly but with the knowledge that cutting off too much wire might leave him short. He set the lock assembly on the deck of the sledge, placed a fiber lock splicer in the press, and inserted a matching stripped wire in either end. He pressed the lever, connecting the fiber optic cables. He repeated the process with two more cables. Dax willed him to hurry. The sound of a Raver grew louder as it came closer. The floodlights snapped on. “One more wire,” he said. The missile pod illuminated. “There. That should do it.”
Dax almost kissed Ivers in appreciation. “Right. Let’s move.” Dax took the makeshift seat and grabbed the remote control.
“We might need this,” Ivers said, tossing Andy’s laser rifle onto the sledge. He hopped up and aimed his disruptor toward the noise. “Okay, hit it!”
Dax cranked the sledge and gunned t
he engine. Just as they took off, a Raver raced at them from the darkness. Ivers fired two shots at it, driving it back into the rubble. A second Raver joined it. Both popped out from behind a building behind them. Ivers turned the missile pod upward. “I hope this works,” he said, as he pressed the switch.
“You’re aiming too high,” Dax yelled, but it was too late.
Their last missile streaked down the tunnel and struck the roof sixty meters behind them. The explosion rocked the cavern. Long, jagged fissures opened in the roof. Pieces showered down, pelting the sledge with fist-sized rocks. A low ominous rumble in the distance grew louder. The floor began to bounce beneath the treads. Ruined buildings collapsed around them. Finally, with the screech of a dying animal, the roof behind them let go.
It did not end there. The explosion shattered the brittle rock like a sledgehammer blow to a block of ice. An avalanche of falling roof raced up the lava tube toward them. When it reached the Atrium, the cracks spread out across the entire roof. Sections of the rusted metal supports for the glass dome in the roof broke away, as did pieces of the surrounding rock. Slabs of rock fell onto the buildings, crushing them. The metal framework for the elevator shook itself apart and collapsed in a heap of metal beams and a smashed cage.
The opening in the ceiling grew larger. Dust from the dunes above cascaded down. The entire complex was collapsing in on itself. A cloud of dust enveloped them, mixing with the storm-driven dust blowing in from outside. Dax could barely see to guide the sledge.
Gradually, the sledge pulled ahead of the dust. He shot between the failed protective walls and up the ramp as it crumbled beneath them. He saw Fortune’s Luck through the dust and swore at Plia that they were still there, but glad she had not left them behind. As he drew abreast of the ship, he saw the rip in the hull of the engine room and guessed why the Luck was still on the ground. He grabbed the walkie-talkie.
“Open up, we’re coming in,” he shouted.
Seconds later, the cargo hatch opened. He didn’t bother hitting the brakes. He released the accelerator going up the ramp. The sledge went airborne and landed with a bounce and a thud in the middle of the cargo bay. One of the tracks snapped and slung across the bay. He turned the wheel sharply to the right to avoid Plia standing at the door control console, and slammed into the ATVs.
He leaped out of the seat. “Ivers, take the pilot’s seat. I’ll check the engines.”
“Dax,” Plia said, “the Skip engine ….”
“Later. We have to go. Now!”
Ivers rushed to the bridge. Dax raced to the engine room, saw the damage, and cursed his luck. They couldn’t Skip, and they couldn’t leave the atmosphere with a two-meter long gash in the hull. He wasn’t certain they could take off, but they had to try. He made a quick survey, determined the damage mainly affected the Skip engines, and brought the main engines online. He had no time for the long pre-flight checklist. Either they worked or everyone died. There was no in between.
He hit the intercom. “Everyone brace themselves. Ivers, get us off the ground.” He held on as Ivers fired the engines. “Come on, Luck, baby. One more trip for papa, okay?”
13
The lift-off had been rougher than Cici expected. The crosswinds and rising thermals ahead of the storm front tossed the ship around like a kite on a short string. She clenched the chair armrests so tightly her hands ached. She had once ridden the station’s shuttle along the edges of a dust storm, but it had been nothing compared to the shaking of Fortune’s Luck. The high-pitched scream of shearing metal that had echoed throughout the ship just after takeoff had not been a normal sound. She did not know much about ships, but the sound was enough to concern her.
She watched the take-off on the wardroom’s view screen. Through the swirling haze of dust, the ground around the station trembled and subsided, collapsing into the lava tubes. First, the outer reaches of the ruined city disappeared block by block; then, the station domes and shacks, her home for over nine months, followed, swallowed by the expanding yawning chasm. Geysers of dust jetted into the air to join the thickening cloud shrouding the city. Station K124 and everything they had built, even the ruins they had come to explore, were gone. At least the bodies of her friends and colleagues were getting a proper burial. She hoped it meant the end of the Ravers, though she doubted it. They had already proven more resourceful than anyone had thought possible.
She was overjoyed that Dax and Sergeant Ivers had made it. Enough people had died on Loki. She felt out of place sitting helplessly while the others tried to get the ship operational; however, she knew she would only be in the way. She could not question Rathiri about events at the station. He had fallen asleep almost as soon as she had strapped him into a seat, even before he had his tea. Days with no sleep, no food or water, and the constant tension had drained him. She let him sleep and concentrated on her field, xenobiology.
She had not been able to perform a microscopic examination of the creatures, but her visual inspection of the dead Raver had revealed much. She was more certain than ever that they were engineered creatures, a combination of advanced gene manipulation and technology. She had performed a spectral analysis of one of the ebony shards of the creature’s scales and discovered that the Ravers had not secreted them like normal keratin. The material resembled a crystallized metallic compound cast as one piece and attached to the creature by a strong organic bonding agent.
Given Ivers’ account of the creatures surviving in a vacuum and deep-freeze temperatures, and Dr. Rathiri’s revelation to the crew of the Abraxas that the Raver DNA did not match any DNA found in the few Huresh remains, they could not be native to Loki. But who had created them? She regretted her inability to access any of the computers at the station. She hoped that once she reached KB, she could download copies of files from the backup server in the orbiting satellite. Until the discovery of the Ravers, her nine months on Loki had been unremarkable and not very productive. Now that she had a subject worthy of study, she would have to leave the planet. She consoled herself with the fact that she was still alive when so many of her companions were not.
Fifteen minutes into the trip, alarms began sounding throughout the ship, raising more concerns in her already troubled mind. A few seconds later, Romeo stuck his head in the door of the wardroom and said, “We may have to land. Dax said to suit up. Andy’s suit should just about fit you.” He looked at Rathiri. “Wake him. He needs to suit up, too. We have a spare suit that should fit him. I’ll help you.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. Her heart pounded. “Are we crashing?”
“Ivers took out the station’s com antennae when he lifted off. Part of the mast lodged in the port forward thruster. We’ll never be able to land at K124B. She’s too unstable. Dax is trying to set down on a flat plain and repair the thruster. If not, we’ll have to hike in.”
“How short of KB are we?”
“About fifty clicks, er fifty kilometers.”
Walking fifty kilometers in a raging dust storm, even wearing an excursion suit, sounded suicidal. She knew from experience that most of the suit’s visor filters and radar would be useless. The area in which the Fortune’s Luck’s captain had chosen to land was crisscrossed with fractures ranging from half-meter-wide cracks to two-hundred-meter-deep chasms fifty meters across. Avoiding them in near-zero visibility would be a challenge.
She roused Rathiri. At first, he looked confused; then, realizing where he was, his features contorted into a mask of fear. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re landing to make repairs. You’ll need to suit up.”
He nodded, but needed her help to stand. “I’m sorry. I feel rather weak. I haven’t eaten in quite some time.”
She noted how pale he looked. As she held his hand, she felt his rapid heartbeat. His ordeal had taken a heavy toll on him. He looked much older than his fifty-six years. “There will be a nutrient drink in the suit. Sip on it until we can eat a real meal.”
He nodded. “Yes, thank you
.”
She felt a twinge of guilt when she saw the name Andy on the suit Romeo handed her. Romeo held it upright while she slipped her legs and arms into the one-piece suit. She was several centimeters shorter than its former occupant was. She could barely see over the lower lip of the faceplate, and the joints rubbed the underside of her armpits. She was thoroughly uncomfortable, but she did not let Romeo see her discomfort. She had worn a suit before on the trip out, but that had been over nine months ago. She did not like it then and liked it even less now.
“Thank you,” she told him.
He smiled at her. “My pleasure. You had better strap in again. It’s going to be a rough landing, I think.”
After he left, she helped Rathiri into his suit, following the same procedure Romeo had shown her. Just as they returned to the wardroom, Dax announced over the intercom, “We’re landing in two minutes. I’ll channel power to the other thrusters to compensate for the damaged one, but it might get a bit shaky. Hold on.”
Hearing his voice brought a thrill to her. She had thought he had chosen a hero’s death to save his crew and her. Ivers had decided to return to help him. Her first estimates of the captain of Fortune’s Luck had been off the mark. Dax had struck her as self-centered, cowardly, and untrustworthy. He had proven her wrong on all accounts.
Tish had been beside herself with joy since she heard Dax’s voice on the walkie-talkie. It was all they could do to keep her from rushing out to meet him. Since the take-off, Dax had acted like another person. His concern for his stricken ship rivaled his concern for his crew. Having lost two of them, he doubled his efforts to save his ship.
She tightened both her and Rathiri’s harnesses as taut as possible and held on with both hands. Without warning, the ship fell from beneath her. For a moment, it felt as if the ship were standing on its nose, but then it leveled off. She heard the engines powering down from a thunderous roar to a painful scream. The ship slewed to the right and tilted twenty degrees. It had barely righted when it hit the ground like a stone skipping a cross a lake, jarring her teeth. The ship’s keel gouged out a deep furrow in the hard earth; then, lifted back into the air. Like an awkward gooney bird trying to land, it hit harder the second time and spun to one side. The deck canted onto its side until Cici was lying parallel to the hull, which had become the new deck. A large steel stewing pot flew from the galley and bounced by her head, barely missing it. The metal deck shuddered and popped until the ship expended its forward momentum. With the groan of an old man rising from his chair, it settled back down on her keel.
