by Rachel Bach
It took the sound of Rupert rolling back his feet to snap me out of my daze. I turned on my heel at once, putting my back to the ledge as I commanded my targeting computer to keep track of both symbionts now that I was outnumbered. Up until this point, I hadn’t paid much attention to the new symbiont. Now, I saw that it was shorter than Rupert by several inches and, I realized with surprise, female. That was all I got before the woman released her grip on Ren and charged me.
I fired on reflex, plugging three shots at the female symbiont’s chest. The woman dodged each bullet, getting right in my face. As soon as she was there, she kicked up, her foot slamming into Sasha as she tried to knock my pistol out of my hand.
She almost got it, too. But I love Sasha the best of all my guns, and I clenched down at the last second, hammering the woman’s toes with my pistol butt instead. I’d hoped that would be enough to throw the symbiont off balance at least, but the woman simply stopped her kick midswing, hanging for a moment before lowering her foot as gracefully as a dancer.
I leveled my gun for another shot, but the symbiont held up her hands in surrender. I should have fired anyway, but the armor on her face was sliding away before my eyes, and the sight it revealed was better than a stun gun.
When the new symbiont had first appeared, I’d thought for sure it was one of Caldswell’s pickup team, but the woman behind the scales wasn’t a stranger. It was Mabel, and she was smiling the same sunny smile she’d given me back on the Fishermarch when I’d first seen her walking up to the Fool with her cat crate tucked under her arm.
“Drop the gun, Morris,” the captain’s sister-in-law said.
As she spoke, Rupert stepped behind her to take command of Ren. He’d dropped the scales from his face as well, but it wasn’t actually an improvement. He was back in his cold mask now, and ice would have been friendlier than the closed-off look in his eyes as he stepped in front of the daughter.
To say I was in a bad spot would be a criminal understatement. Rupert’s new position formed a V with the two symbionts at the tips, me at the point, and the cliff at my back. I was cornered tight and proper, and from the smug smile on her face, Mabel knew it.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” she said, her voice easy and cajoling, like she was trying to get me to drink one last beer. “Just put the gun down, sweetheart. Nice and easy.”
That “sweetheart” was the last straw. I snapped Sasha up as my computer painted a fat red target on Rupert’s wounded shoulder. My gun might not be able to really hurt him, but her force would still blow him back. If I could just make a hole, I could run for it. But as I squeezed the trigger, I felt something prickle across my mind.
The sensation stopped me cold. It was like something slimy had touched my consciousness, and I wasn’t the only one. Rupert and Mabel had both stopped with a shudder and were now looking back at where Ren was standing over Rashid’s crumpled body.
For the first time ever, the daughter’s eyes weren’t blank or hyperfocused, and that wasn’t a good thing. I’d have taken the empty doll stare in a heartbeat over the expression of horrified comprehension she wore now. Rupert recovered first, reaching out to grab her, but Ren didn’t even twitch as his claws circled her wrist. She just kept staring at Rashid’s broken body, and then, in a tiny, raspy voice, she whispered, “Papa?”
The word was barely louder than the wind, but the silence that came after it hit me like a phantom’s scream.
Pressure filled my mind so fast I thought I was going to pop. My cameras went snowy at the same time, the white lines filling my vision until they were all I could see. If I hadn’t been so used to my suit, I might well have toppled backward off the cliff, but I managed to fall forward instead, going to my knees as Ren’s silent scream dug into my brain.
I couldn’t see squat by this point, so I took a chance and popped my visor. As my eyes took over from my cameras, I saw Ren lying over Rashid’s body with her head pressed against his bloody chest. Her shoulders were shaking violently, but it took me several seconds to realize she was crying. Ren was sobbing without making a sound, and with each heave, the pressure in my head grew worse and worse. And then, just before it crushed me, the pressure stopped.
The pain in my head evaporated, the white lines clearing off my side cameras like someone had cut a switch. In the space of seconds, my suit was back to normal, and I looked up to see Rupert standing next to Ren. The two of them side by side was such a normal sight, it took me a few moments to realize Ren’s feet were dangling off the ground, her body suspended from Rupert’s black claw wrapped around her neck.
Silence fell over the cliff like snow. My suit was perfectly functional; I was the one who couldn’t move as Rupert gently lowered Ren’s still body to lie next to Rashid’s. Next to her father.
My vision started to go blurry, and I blinked rapidly, snapping my visor back down as I shot to my feet. I had no time to be weak. Mabel was back on her feet already, stalking toward me like a hunting wolf. I backed away instinctively, almost stepping off the cliff in the process. The near miss sent a few rocks clattering over the edge, and Rupert looked up at the sound. His face was closed and cold as ever, but I could see a hint of fear in his eyes as he glanced at the ledge, and then back to me.
“Step away from the edge, Devi,” he said softly. “It’s over.”
I ignored him and peered down the cliff through my rear camera instead. The fall to the black water below was so far it made me dizzy, but I forced myself to get past that and really look. What I saw wasn’t encouraging, but it was enough, and I looked back at the symbionts with a new eye.
Other than that first tiny flash of fear, I couldn’t read Rupert’s blank expression at all. Mabel on the other hand looked insufferably smug as she stalked closer, and with good reason. The symbionts were stronger, tougher, and faster than my suit would ever be. My allies were dead, leaving me cornered and outnumbered. That was a winning combination in any game, but I had one card left. There were still a few things my Lady could do that symbionts couldn’t, and that was the hope I clung to as I lowered my gun.
“Good girl,” Mabel said, giving me a warm smile as I returned Sasha to her holster. “See how easy that was? Now—”
She never got to finish. The moment my gun was locked in, I jumped.
I flipped backward off the cliff in a beautiful arc. At first, all I could hear was the wind whistling through my speakers, and then my velocity alarm started screaming. I silenced it with a thought and rotated in the air until I was feet down, straightening my body to a plank in the process.
When I was certain my position was right, I locked my suit and turned off all my cameras except the one looking at my feet. The sight of the cliff hurtling by did nothing but terrify me anyway. If I was going to survive this fall, I had to hit the water at exactly the right angle. For that, all I needed was my gyroscope and my ground cam, so those were all I left on as I plummeted through the empty air.
I’ve fallen longer distances in my suit, but never without a parachute, and as the seconds ticked by, I began to wonder if I’d ever hit. Finally, after what felt like years, my proximity alarm began to blare. The water was close. I turned off the beeping and closed my eyes, putting my faith in the Lady Gray as we fell the final dozen feet.
Even knowing it was coming, hitting the water caught me by surprise. I crashed into it so hard I was knocked breathless despite my stabilizers. Every alarm I had was blaring in my face, and for a horrible moment, I thought I’d broken my suit for good. But though I couldn’t feel anything but adrenaline, my vitals told me I was alive and unharmed. More importantly, I didn’t feel anything cold or wet on my skin. A quick scan confirmed it; there were no breaches. My suit had held, and we were now sinking into the black water like a stone.
As the rush of survival began to ebb, another set of instincts took over, the sweet, efficient energy of my battle sense. Like a weapon switching firing modes, I flipped from shock to action, unlocking my suit and flicking my cameras
back on to get a good look at the water around me.
The disgusting lake that filled up the mine’s base was black as tar and about as thick. Even my floodlights couldn’t penetrate more than a few inches, so I cut them and switched everything to my density sensors. I was setting up a scan to see how far I was from lake’s bottom when my speakers picked up the crash of something hitting the water above me.
I looked up before I remembered I couldn’t see anything. A quick thought switched my cameras to thermographics, and a huge smile spread across my face. Density sensors were for big things—walls, armor, rocks, and so forth. They didn’t pick up symbionts for squat, but I knew from experience that Rupert ran warm. Down here in the cold water, he glowed like a beacon. I could see him swimming above me, looking around in vain, and my smile grew wider.
Symbionts might be stronger and faster than I was, they might be unkillable monsters tough enough to cross the vacuum of space in only their scales, but Rupert was swimming through the black muck with nothing but the air in his lungs and his eyes to see by. My suit, on the other hand, had a crush depth of two thousand feet, a full suite of sensors, and a sixteen-hour air supply. I wasn’t sure how long symbionts could hold their breath, but I was pretty sure I’d won this round.
I watched Rupert’s heat signature all the way down. My suit landed neatly on the silted floor of the flooded mine pit, and I sank into a crouch. Rupert had actually made it almost all the way down as well by this point. He was only a few feet above me, one of his hands grabbing blindly just above my head.
Looking at that reaching hand, it occurred to me that I could drown him. Blind and underwater, his superior strength wouldn’t matter. I was heavier, and I didn’t need to go up for air. I could finish what I’d been too soft to end in the woods. But I didn’t reach up to grab his hand. I didn’t move at all, not even when his clawed fingers came within a half inch of my visor.
But as his grasping fingers missed me yet again, a memory bubbled up in my mind, pushing its way to the front of my thoughts. I shoved it back ruthlessly, because I knew now what sudden bubbling meant. This was another of the memories Rupert had left in me, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I might have decided not to drown him, but that didn’t mean I wanted any more of his life story. But like the others he’d left, this memory completely ignored my wishes and shoved itself forward until it was all I could see.
I was inside a crowded starport. All around me, people were screaming and panicking while a line of uniformed soldiers tried to hold the mob back. The crowd was terrifying and I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. A pale teenage girl with long black hair and blue eyes had a death grip on my arms, and she was shoving me at a soldier, yelling at the top of her lungs, “Take him! Take him!”
In the din of the panic, her voice was clear and commanding, and it worked. The soldier grabbed me around the waist and turned away, hoisting me onto his shoulder like a sack of flour.
“No!” a voice cried, but it took me a second to realize it was my voice. Not mine, but mine in the memory. A little boy’s frantic scream. “Tanya!”
But the teenage girl scowled at me sternly. “Go!” she shouted. “We’ll be on the next ship! Go with them, we’ll find you!”
I screamed, my hand reaching out frantically, straining as far as I could, but it was too late. The crowd had swallowed her, leaving me alone with the guard as he ran me toward the battered cargo ship that was already full of children.
The memory vanished with a rush that left me breathless. I’d been out for less time than it took to blink. Rupert was still right above me in the black water, his hand reaching out for me just as it once had for Tanya, and my hand went up to meet it of its own accord.
I caught myself just in time. Above me, Rupert snatched his arm back as well. He must have pushed himself to the absolute limit, because he flipped and swam straight for the surface at a speed that astonished me, even though I’d seen enough symbionts to know better. I watched his bright shape on my thermographics until he surfaced, but he didn’t dive again. Instead, he turned and started swimming for the shore. When he’d shrunk to a bright dot against the black wall of the water, I turned and started walking in the opposite direction.
My density sensors had been scanning the lake the whole time Rupert and I had been doing our little dance in the dark, and they’d built me a pretty good map of this part of the flooded mine pit. Good enough to guide me to one of the still intact tunnels. Even looking at it in outline through my density sensors, the dark hole was forbidding. Crush depth and air supply aside, I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of going into an underwater mineshaft, but I didn’t have much choice. Down here I had the advantage, but if I surfaced, it was over.
I took one last look at the flooded tunnel. Then, with a deep breath of my precious air, I stepped inside and started walking, trusting my suit to draw a map that I hoped would keep me from dying an ignominious death lost underwater on a planet whose name I’d already forgotten.
I’ve done a lot of scary shit in my life. I’ve fought my way out of a xith’cal ambush with nothing but a recruit’s suit and an army standard sidearm, had a drug-crazed pirate get the drop on me from above with a thermite knife, and been stuck under a trauma shell without being able to pass out. All of those had been horrible in their own special ways, but I would have taken any of them in a heartbeat to get out of that damn flooded mineshaft.
The first hundred feet were fine. The tunnel was a little silted up, but the way was large enough that I could walk upright without feeling too claustrophobic. But then, at the hundred and fifty foot mark, the mineshaft had started to get narrower. Soon I didn’t have enough room to turn around, but that was still bearable until the ceiling started getting lower, too. I made it a bit farther by hunching over, but soon enough I was crawling on my hands and knees without enough room to double back, or even lift my head.
The floor was the icing on the cake, though. As you’d expect in a flooded tunnel, the ground was squishy and silted over. The mud was like tar, grabbing my hands and knees with sticky suction. Sometimes the tunnel was blocked completely, forcing me to stop and dig my way through, scratching at the mud with my fingers like a drowning mole.
Even when the path was clear, though, I moved at a snail’s pace. My suit can take being underwater, but it’s not made for it, and the Lady was dragging like never before. The dirty water was starting to work its way into her cracks, and after an hour of horrible crawling, I swore I could feel her motor slowing. If I didn’t get out and flush the Lady’s system soon, there was a real danger something would jam and I’d be stranded down here in the dark, unable to turn around, unable to move forward, unable to do anything except watch my air meter run down as I slowly suffocated.
Given all that, you’d think the silt would be my biggest worry, since it was the variable most likely to kill me. But stupid as it was, what really made me panicky was the fact that I couldn’t see. True, my density sensor mapped things for me, drawing little colored lines across my screen to show the edge of the wall, the floor, the ceiling, and the tunnel ahead, but colored lines aren’t much comfort when you’re crawling underwater with your head scraping the roof of the tunnel and you can’t even see where you’re putting your hands. Colored lines were what I had, though, so colored lines were what I clung to, following the glowing edge of the walls like the Paradoxian princess who followed her magical ball of yarn out of the labyrinth.
In a way, it was actually good that the tunnel was so narrow I couldn’t turn around. I’d never thought of myself as claustrophobic, but crawling on my knees through the dark with the walls scraping on all sides was bringing me closer to a breakdown than I’d ever been. If there’d been any chance of going back, I would have jumped on it and ended up right back in the lake where I’d started. But the only thing that scared me more than crawling in the dark through a tiny, flooded tunnel was the idea of doing it backward, so I kept going, making my way at a painfully slow pace until, at
last, my density sensor picked up a wall in front of me.
I started crawling faster. When I was ten feet from the wall, the low ceiling vanished, and I shot to my feet, craning my head back as far as it would go, even though I still couldn’t see a damn thing. My sensors told me there was nothing overhead for at least fifty feet, but it was my groping fingers that figured out the truth when they found the rails set into the walls on either side. I was standing at the bottom of an empty elevator shaft.
You’d have thought I’d found heaven’s gate from the way I started jumping around and singing praises to the king. I knew I was making an idiot of myself, but with no one around to see, I didn’t care. I grabbed the rails next, putting all my weight on one, then the other. Both held, and I gave another whoop as I started pulling myself hand over hand up the wall.
It was a slow climb, but after spending the last hour at a literal crawl, I felt like I was flying. The water pressure lessened with each hand up, and fifteen minutes and almost a hundred feet later, I broke the surface at last.
The sight of normal darkness instead of ink-thick water made me want to shout for joy all over again, but I kept my mouth shut, turning my speakers as high as they would go. I didn’t hear anything except the water splashing against the rough stone walls, but I still didn’t dare turn on my lights to have a look around. Instead, I checked the air. It came up stale, but breathable, and I took a few moments to refresh my supply. While my suit was running the mine air through its filters, extracting and compressing the oxygen, I turned my mind to other problems.
The tunnel had been horrible, but at least it had kept me too busy to think about just how screwed I was. It felt petty and selfish after what had happened on the cliff, but while I was sad as hell about the pointless, bitter deaths I’d witnessed, my worries at the moment were purely practical. With Rashid gone, I’d lost my contact with the people who could get me off this rock. Even supposing I could find some way to get in touch with Brenton while dodging Caldswell’s people, I was still screwed, because when I’d jumped to get away from Rupert and Mabel, I’d left my armor case up on the ledge. Without my case, I couldn’t repair the motor Rupert had crushed when he’d grabbed Elsie’s sheath, and I couldn’t recharge my suit when her batteries started running low. More immediately, though, I couldn’t replenish any of my chemicals.
