by Rachel Bach
Most of my critical supplies like breach foam and the cocktail needle weren’t the sort of things I used regularly, but the stuff that kept my less glamorous systems going, like the purifiers for my water system and the liquid filter that scrubbed the excess CO2 out of my air, were going to start getting low soon. I had enough silicate flush left in my tank to clear the dirt out of the Lady’s joints when I got out of the water, but after that I was empty. I was also only carrying two spare clips for Sasha. I had plenty of thermite gel, but that was a moot point since I couldn’t get Elsie out of her sheath.
I popped my visor and stared up into the dark, breathing in the dank reek of the mine. Behind me, my compressor whirred softly, the little sound bouncing up the elevator shaft. I focused on the noise, slowing my breathing until it was as soft as the little motor’s purr. There was no use worrying about things I couldn’t change. I’d deal with those problems when they became problems. Right now, I had to keep moving before Rupert and Mabel found me.
Mission firmly in mind, I locked my visor and resumed my climb, stopping just above the water line to flush the silt out of my suit. Once she’d drained, my Lady was almost back to normal, and I shimmied up the final two hundred feet of elevator wall like a spider.
When my density sensor told me I was nearing the top, I slowed. The shaft was still black as pitch, but it was no longer silent. In addition to the soft splash of water below, I could now hear the distant moan of wind. Somewhere up there was an exit, and I was going to find it. Before that, though, I had a more immediate problem. The elevator shaft I’d been climbing was no longer empty. There was a mine elevator parked at the very top, and it was blocking my way.
Considering it had been made to haul up giant carts of unprocessed ore, the metal platform was surprisingly shoddy. Unfortunately, even a shoddy mine elevator was still thicker than I could punch through without Elsie’s help. Worse still, the corp’s lack of safety consideration didn’t extend to gaps between the elevator and the wall. The damn thing was set flush against the stone, leaving me nothing I could grab to pry it down.
I could have shot through it with Sasha, but it would have taken all the ammo I had just to make a hole big enough for my head. Likewise, I could have used Mia, but my plasma shotgun only had one shot left before she’d have to recharge, and I didn’t have the power to spare. Plus, Mia was loud. I wasn’t sure where Rupert and Mabel were, but there was no way they’d miss something as distinct as a plasma shotgun blast, not to mention the inherent danger of shooting an elevator while you were crouched beneath it.
I bit my lip. No shooting, then, but what did that leave? I could pry Elsie out of her broken sheath and slice a hole, but then I’d be stuck with my blade out instead of in. That would limit me severely if I had to crawl again, assuming I didn’t accidentally break my new blade in the process.
I was about to try it anyway when I had another idea. A fantastic one. I ran it through my head several times, looking for weaknesses, but after three times through it was still fantastic, and I decided to roll with it.
I reached into the nook under my arm where Phoebe used to sit and pulled out my block of thermite gel. Thermite clay would be a better name, because that’s what the stuff felt like as I rolled it between my fingers. When I’d worked it into a putty, I reached up and pressed it against the elevator’s underside, smearing it over an area slightly larger than the width of my shoulders. It took almost my entire block to get enough coverage, but thermite gel is cheap and it wasn’t like I’d be using my blade until I could repair the motor anyway. When I’d made a good, thick coat of the stuff, I pulled open the little panel hidden beneath my suit’s wrist, revealing my sparker.
My fellow Blackbirds had laughed themselves sick when they heard I’d ordered a sparker put into my state-of-the-art custom armor. Sparkers were exactly what they sounded like, a little fork that sparked electricity on command. Back in the old days they were used for starting fires, jumping batteries, and lighting smokes if you were crazy. They were so notoriously dangerous I’d had to sign a waiver before Verdemont would agree to install one in my suit. I’d signed it gladly, because by the time I’d been able to afford my Lady, I’d been in the killing business long enough to develop a deep appreciation for the simple effectiveness of thermite, and while the safer modern heating coils would work eventually, nothing fired the stuff as quickly and reliably as a good old-fashioned zap.
Pressing my body against the wall, I stretched out my arm until my sparker touched the edge of the smeared thermite. The little lightning bolt of electricity from the sparker’s fork was blinding after so long in the dark, but it was nothing compared to the thermite’s glare. The moment the charge hit, the rough circle I’d made lit up like the sun.
Since this was just mashed-up thermite gel smeared over metal rather than a measured ration fit into a specialized blade, it burned unevenly, dropping huge glowing globs down into the dark, where they continued to burn even after hitting the water. But inefficient as my work-around was, it got the job done. The thermite burned through the heavy steel like it was paper, and by the time the last embers winked out ten seconds later, there was a nice Devi-sized hole in the elevator’s floor.
The heat had left the metal brittle, though, and the hole’s edge broke the first time I grabbed it, forcing me to scramble to keep from falling two hundred feet back into the water. Fortunately, my suit is faster than I am, and the Lady found a handhold before we tumbled. I flipped myself up after that, rolling off the dangerously brittle elevator platform into the tunnel beyond.
Thank the king, the new tunnel was much larger than the one below. The ceiling wasn’t towering, but I could stand without hitting my head. Better still, it wasn’t pitch black. I could actually see the gray edge of the tunnel’s curve in my night vision, and a faint breeze was whistling over my speakers, showing me the way out.
For one giddy second, I almost ran forward. Fortunately, my soldier’s sense kicked in before I could, and I fell into a crouch instead, listening. Burning through the elevator had been much quieter than a plasma shotgun, but it had still made a lot of noise, and the flash from the thermite would have been a signal flare to anyone looking for me. But even with my speakers turned to max and my sensors sweeping every inch of the tunnel ahead of me, I didn’t spot so much as a nesting bird. I did another sweep anyway, just in case, and only when that came back negative too did I pull Sasha off my hip and follow the breeze down the tunnel.
I’d thought it would be a long trip, but all the crawling must have skewed my perception of distance, because I reached the end of the tunnel after only ten minutes. I passed several branches off the main path on the way, other shafts going down into the dark. My suit added each one to my growing map, but I was focused only on getting to the light. The exit turned out to be much wider than I’d expected, a truck-sized hole leading out to a sunny ledge that dropped off into nothing. I’d guessed from the wind that I was high up, but it wasn’t until I crept to the edge that I realized just how far I’d come.
The tunnel was one of the holes I’d seen in the mountain across the quarry from the cliff where I’d jumped. I was even higher now than I’d been then, and I had a bird’s eye view of the whole pit, including the other tunnels and the lake below. Unfortunately, what I saw wasn’t good.
The abandoned mine was crawling with soldiers, all humans, dressed in security uniforms with the Confederated Industries logo splashed across their backs. They had dredgers working the black lake and patrols checking the tunnels at the water’s edge, and the air was full of security drones. One actually buzzed my tunnel while I was looking, forcing me to dive back into the dark. I hit the ground hard and lay still, taking shelter in the dust. When the hum of the little flier was gone, I grabbed Mia, the only gun I had that was big enough to take down aircraft, and crawled back to the ledge for another look.
A quick count from my suit confirmed my fears. There were almost five hundred corp guns down there. Even thoug
h I was staring right at it, the size of the response seemed crazy to me. I’d only been in the tunnels for an hour and a half. Even assuming Mabel had put in the call the second I’d jumped, how the hell did you get this sort of muscle to an abandoned mine in the middle of nowhere on such short notice?
I spotted my answer down by the filthy lake’s edge. Three men in corp suits with expensive-looking ledgers were standing on a rocky outcropping not far from where I’d hit the water, and beside them, looking out over the black lake like it was his own private sea, was Caldswell. The captain looked pretty good for a man who’d taken two sniper shots today, I thought bitterly. But then, after what I’d learned about Mabel, that wasn’t surprising. If the Fool’s engineer was a symbiont, there was no question that Caldswell was one, too.
When I zoomed in for a better look, I saw that Caldswell was talking to the men in suits, sweeping his hands out at the water like he was giving orders. The corp suits didn’t look happy about that, but they didn’t argue. From what I knew of Caldswell, they couldn’t. All he had to do was flash his Royal Warrant or whatever the Terran equivalent was and even a corp planet fell at his feet to do his bidding, and from the huge search going on below, it didn’t take a genius to see that his bidding was to find me. The only question left was how the hell was I going to escape?
I could hear another air patrol coming, so I ducked back into the tunnel to consider my options. I hadn’t seen Rupert or Mabel down there, but that only made me warier. A battalion of corporate cannon fodder was annoying, but even on low ammo, I could take a lot of rent-a-soldiers before I got overwhelmed. Symbionts were a different story. If I was going to survive this, I had to get away. Fast.
I looked back down the tunnel with a long sigh. I really, really, really did not want to go back into the mine, and I thought I might die if I had to go underwater again, but there was nothing for it. With that army outside, it was tunnel or nothing, so I pushed myself back to my feet and walked into the dark, using my map to pick the shaft that looked most likely to go in the opposite direction from Caldswell.
The next dozen hours were some of the most stressful of my life. The abandoned mines were huge, pitch black, and endlessly complicated. I tried to stick to a pattern, using my map, compass, and sensors to plot a course west from the lake. Even so, I ran into countless dead ends, cave-ins, and tight squeezes. I went back underwater two more times, both for mercifully brief periods. Mostly, though, I walked through absolute blackness, blind except for the map my suit drew of where I’d been and the fifty feet my density meter could pick up ahead of me.
I stopped listening for pursuers after the first two hours, not because I thought I was safe, but because the paranoid ear I kept out for footsteps also picked up the groan of the tens of millions of tons of rock above me. Every collapsed tunnel I passed reminded me I was only one vibration away from being entombed myself, and the more I listened, the worse it got. I caught myself jumping at imaginary rumbles, and every now and then I’d see things in the dark. This combined with my blindness and the constant fear of pursuit was quickly mounting up to be more than I could handle, so, three hours in, I set my speakers back to normal, flipped all my lights on, turned my music up loud, and just focused on walking in the right direction.
Around the ten-hour mark, my luck finally changed. I’d been hitting dead end after dead end for hours when the little tunnel I was following intersected what I’d come to recognize as a main branch shaft. A main branch shaft that was going up.
With a prayer of thanks, I turned and started jogging up the incline. The big tunnel got wider the farther I went, which I took as another good sign, and when my lights picked up a line of dusty trucks, I almost cheered. Despite how I’d spent the day, I didn’t actually know much about mines, but it didn’t take an expert to guess that trucks were parked near exits. I hadn’t spotted any outside light yet, but I could hear a breeze whistling over my speakers. Still, it wasn’t until I rounded a wide corner and nearly ran into a lowered steel door that I realized just how close to freedom I was.
The door was huge and heavy, an enormous trundling blockade to protect the truck depot I’d been jogging through. There was no power to run the motor that moved it, but the door was set on a rolling track, and after a little shoving I was able to push it open wide enough for my suit to get through. When I cracked the door, I realized why I hadn’t seen any light from this exit as I had from the first one. Night had fallen while I’d been underground. But even the darkest night is nothing compared to the blackness of the mines, and my suit’s night vision kicked in like clockwork.
I cut my lights and wiggled through the gap I’d made into what must have once been a loading zone. The trees had been cleared for hundreds of feet to allow hauler ships to set down, but the clearing hadn’t been tended in years, and the forest was taking it back. I walked out of the mountain into a field of saplings, tilting my head back to get a good look at the sliver of large blue moon overhead. And then, because it was so nice to be out in the open air again, I fell backward, flopping into the overgrown weeds for the sheer joy of it.
But my happiness was short-lived. I wasn’t trapped underground anymore, but I was still stranded in enemy territory with no way out, no way to repair or replenish my armor, and no food. Even if I did find a town, Caldswell undoubtedly had control of this planet by now. If I showed my face, I’d be turned in before I could buy dinner.
I was getting good and depressed over this when my suit beeped a warning in my ear. I sat up at once, rolling into a crouch as I scanned the tree line for what had triggered my suit’s early warning system, but all I saw was the normal movements of the woods at night. I was about to dismiss it as a false alarm when my body stopped.
I’d only been frozen in place with plasmex once before in my life, but it wasn’t a feeling you forgot. The moment the heavy pressure landed on me, I knew I was hosed. I was already braced for the hand to land on my spine and yank me around to face my doom when I heard a familiar voice.
“Hello again, Miss Morris.”
Never in my life would I have thought that I’d be happy to hear that voice again, but I was almost ready to sing when I glanced at my rear cam to see John Brenton step out of the forest. He looked just as he had back on Falcon 34—same smug look, same leather pilot’s jacket, though I knew it had to be a different one since I’d seen him shred the first when he’d brought out his symbiont. I looked around for his backup next—mercs, more symbionts, even another HVFP team—but I didn’t see anyone except the pale young man who’d been with him last time. The plasmex user who’d locked me down, Nic.
“Turn her around,” Brenton said.
Nic nodded and turned his fingers, lifting and spinning me like a puppet. I didn’t fight it, just slumped against the pressure, letting it carry me. The wall of force wobbled when I put my weight on it, and I saw sweat spring up on Nic’s brow. That hadn’t happened before, but then, Nic hadn’t been the one moving me before. That had been the girl, Evelyn. Until I’d killed her, anyway.
That thought put me on guard. I didn’t feel the pins and needles that I’d come to recognize as the sign the black stuff was spreading, but after what I’d done to Evelyn, I didn’t want to risk killing another plasmex user. At least not by accident.
“No need for the invisible lock,” I said, putting my weight back on my feet. “I’m not going to run.”
Nic glanced at Brenton, who nodded slowly. “Sorry,” Brenton said as the pressure melted off me like snow. “Old habits die hard.”
I shrugged. I might not think much of Brenton, but I couldn’t fault anyone for healthy paranoia. Especially considering I’d shot him in the head the last time we were together.
“Where’s Rashid?” Brenton said, looking around. “He was supposed to be with you.”
“He’s dead,” I replied. The words were harder to say than I’d expected. I’d liked Rashid. I hadn’t known him well, but what I’d seen had been good. Even if I hadn’t liked
him, though, no one deserved to die like that. Not him, and not Ren.
Brenton’s smile fell into a grief-stricken grimace. “He knew the dangers,” he said quietly. “But Rashid was a good man. I am very sorry to hear that he is dead.”
“He found his daughter,” I said.
Brenton’s head snapped up. “Is she still with them?”
“No,” I said. “She’s with him.”
Brenton caught my meaning and heaved a deep sigh. “Another daughter would have been useful, but I’m glad she’s free. Maybe their next lives will be a little happier.”
I frowned. I didn’t like that his first thought had been disappointment that he wouldn’t get to use Ren, but then, I couldn’t talk. My first thoughts had been of survival, too.
“Well, done’s done,” Brenton said, holding out his hand. “Can I see his handset?”
I blinked. “I don’t have his handset.”
“Of course you do,” Brenton said. “How do you think we found you?”
Now that I thought about it, how had they found me? I’d come out of the mine miles away from where I’d gone under. Glowering, I pulled up my suit’s security monitor. I don’t normally use my bug sniffer because I’m not normally worried about being tailed, and I hadn’t actually done a full sweep in months. I did one now, though, and sure enough, the reading came back an angry red.
I swore and began feeling over my armor. Finally, my hands found a small lump on the back of my right shoulder, right where Rashid had slapped me. I dug in and pulled, ripping off a small black tracker.
