by Blaze Ward
“What in the world is that?” Chike asked.
“Do you know what it reminds me of?” Eleanor asked.
“Who’s that?” Chike asked suddenly.
Dani sighed, mostly inside. Normally, the Governess kept a low profile. Certainly, she had never spoken to Chike before this, but Fairchild had only generally dealt with the head boffin over the radio anyway.
She reached up between her breasts and pulled Eleanor out.
“Dr. Chike Odille, Chief Expedition Planetologist, may I introduce you to my Governess, Eleanor,” Fairchild said, holding her up. “Eleanor, Dr. Odille.”
“Please,” he said, unconsciously holding up a hand to shake before he stopped himself. “Call me Chike. I’ve never met a full AI before.”
“Thank you, Chike,” Eleanor said.
“What was it you were saying, madame?” Chike asked. “This reminded you of something?”
Fairchild felt like she could disappear, but for holding Eleanor up. That was okay. She didn’t need to be the center of attention here.
With a flash of insight, Fairchild wondered if Eleanor was doing this specifically to deflect this boffin. As she had said earlier, an AI couldn’t co–author an article in an academic journal, just like she couldn’t own real property, or be subject to most laws.
But if the words came out of Eleanor’s mouth, and not Fairchild’s, Chike might be willing to take all the credit himself. Probably with some pushing on her part, the kind that verged on blackmail.
Chike Odille was far too nice and upstanding to hog the spotlight to himself, but he might be willing to let her stand clear over on the edge of the stage and smile pretty.
Those deportment classes had to serve some purpose in her life, right?
“A puquios,” Eleanor said simply.
Fairchild had never heard the term before, but she wasn’t plugged directly into an encyclopedia. That was what she had Eleanor for.
“A puquios?” Chike repeated. “But that’s impossible. That would suggest it was an air shaft down to a man–made, underground water tunnel. There’s nothing like that around here.”
Lady Danielle Cooper wanted to remain perfectly silent and still. Pretty, decorative, pliable. The kind of woman Alphonse Cooper preferred.
It would be so easy to do right now.
Even easier than pulling out the Tomya and putting a few kilograms of pressure on a trigger.
But she couldn’t do that.
Lady Danielle Cooper would actively encourage Chike Odille to take all the credit. Just hide and make everyone else do the work, and clean up the mess.
Eleanor was covering for her, so she didn’t have to stand up for herself and say something.
Like the woman always had.
How many decades had Dani been hiding behind Eleanor’s skirts?
Enough.
In her mind, Fairchild growled defiance.
It sounded remarkably like the call of a giant raptor.
Fairchild’s Golden Eagle, perhaps.
“It’s an airshaft to a qanat, Dr. Odille,” Fairchild’s voice shattered the calm, afternoon air. “The path we’ve been following for the last several hours runs above it. The line is as straight as a surveyor could run it, following the general slope of the mountains in perfectly straight lines.”
If she hadn’t been paying such close attention, Fairchild would have never seen the difference. A white person like Fairchild was technically normally pink in hue, and would fade to alabaster as all the blood drained out of their face.
Chike turned a kind of dark umber, but the reason was the same.
“Do you have any idea of the implications of what you just said, Fairchild?” he whispered intently.
She wanted to shrug. Maybe slouch. Slink off into the Trudywood trees and hide. Climb into the bottle and pull the worm in with her.
Yesterday, she would have.
Today, she had considered using the Tomya to make it all go away.
But that was Lady Danielle Cooper, a flouncing, bubbling airhead of a bimbo that wanted nothing more than the latest adrenaline rush, the latest extreme sports fad. The latest, mindless drivel.
Anything to fill that bottomless emptiness.
But Fairchild was a–borne, a navy–blue Golden Eagle in the skies of Escudra VI.
“Yes, I do, Dr. Odille,” she replied calmly, staring the man in the eyes and daring him to do his worst. “Eleanor and I have spent the last several hours discussing the topic and exploring the possibilities.”
She could see herself now, standing in front of a room filled with boffins–in–training and reporters, lecturing with one of those long, birch pointer rods they always had in period movies with stuffy professors.
In her mind, she was stark naked as she did so.
And the nakedness didn’t bother her.
“Dr. Odille?” another voice yelled. “Are you here?”
“Lacumaces,” Chike smiled. He turned, raising a hand to wave.
The boffin started to say something else, but a tremendous crack and rumble overrode his words as the ground shifted and started to fall away, down and into the hole beneath their feet.
Fairchild threw herself backwards and to one side, the instinct of an aeronaut drilled so deep into her soul that even unconscious reflex was slow by comparison.
Her last glimpse of Chike’s face was one of utter surprise, followed just as suddenly by the kind of utter, relaxed calm she had felt at that moment when that storm had turned ugly.
And then he was gone into the earth.
Chike
One moment, everything was good.
Chike had found Fairchild. Lacumaces was just about to join them. They were all set to get to a place where they could get back to Calypso–2 and return to Ground Station Beta like conquering heroes.
The next, catastrophe. Or, rather, gravity.
The geologist in his soul recognized the sound before his brain even processed that there was a sound to be concerned about.
Mortar crumbling.
Perhaps it would be better to say the mortar had long since rotted and crumbled, and the stones were held in place by inertia and mass. Having stayed in place in spite of wind and weather for however many years (Centuries? Millennia?), they were all set to remain.
Until a pudgy, middle–aged Professor of Planetology stood atop them and shifted his weight in the process of turning, pushing rocks that had been stable to move sideways and press against each other instead of their downstairs neighbors.
Of course they had taken offense. It was the nature of rocks to do that. Given any excuse, they would fail to hold you upright, grasping with greedy fingers to pull you down steep slopes, hoping to bury you at the bottom when they could assemble a whole army of little rocks, like ants, to do the trick.
All that, in the blink of an eye.
The geologist nodded approvingly as Fairchild threw herself clear from one awkwardly–balanced foot. She was a bird. That was natural.
He was a scholar. They didn’t move nearly as quickly.
But Fairchild and Lacumaces were both here. They would be able to handle anything this angry planet chose to throw at them, no matter how much trouble he had gotten himself into with the rocks below.
He felt like that character in the children’s cartoon who ran three meters past the edge of the cliff and hung in air until they could turn to the camera and make a silly, surprised face.
Chike felt gravity take hold of him.
Freefall.
Darkness.
Somewhere in his soul an adventurer awoke from a decades–long slumber. Perhaps grad school, filled with crazy stunts and the sorts of juvenile hijinks generally frowned upon by faculty members and the local gendarme.
The scholar was lost, in over his head literally as well as figuratively.
Chike tried to relax, but freefall took him into a steep embankment with a lip that caught his foot.
Before he could react, the weight of his belly and chest had tu
mbled him over forward, like those first seconds outbound from the shuttle.
The scholar identified the lip as part of what Eleanor had called the puquios, corkscrewing down into the earth for reasons he could not understand.
Not yet. There would be an answer. He just had to demand it. That would come.
The slope remained there. Not quite straight down, but not shallow enough to catch him. Chike brushed stone again, this time with a gloved hand and a shoulder.
The helmet absorbed the blow. It probably would have cracked his skull, had he been doing this later enough in the day to have taken the helmet off.
Chike didn’t even know how to do that, to pop the emergency helmet off and breathe the local air. He had been relying on Lacumaces to push the right button.
Fairchild probably knew as well.
If he was going to turn into an adventurer, it was obvious to Chike that there were going to be evenings and weekends spent with much younger folks learning these things.
Otherwise, he might not survive being an adventurer.
And that just wouldn’t do.
Still, he saw stars, circling just like the cartoon character always saw. Maybe there was something there, after all.
Chike was amazed at how rational he was able to follow all the happenings as he fell into a deep hole in the earth.
Feet and knees touched another ring as he fell. They were getting closer together, or he was falling faster.
Gravity won that argument.
He felt himself spin again, friction rubbing his side against another rock in the darkness.
The next blow was square against his face–plate.
Light.
Darkness.
Fairchild
Fairchild couldn’t have even told Eleanor where the image in her head came from. Probably a geology lecture at some point.
Fairchild certainly wasn’t the type of person who read books for pleasure.
It had been the regularity of the clearings, like metronomes, that had planted the thought in her head, lonely as it might have been in there. Seeing the little hill with the hole in the middle just crystalized it in her head.
Fairchild didn’t know the work puquios, but she knew what a qanat was. Knew they had been common in the ancient days. Dig a shaft straight down into the ground atop a hill or mountain until you hit the water table. Go a little deeper to be sure, and then start boring sideways at a very slight incline until you emerged from the side of the mountain, remembering to drop vertical shafts for maintenance and air at regular intervals.
That was the key. Regular intervals.
As regular as the ticks of a metronome clicking away atop the piano you were learning to play.
At the bottom of the mountain, you will have created an underground aqueduct.
Fairchild could remember seeing something like that in Spain that the Romans had built, however many centuries ago, that still supplied water to a city.
She refused to even think about what this thing below her was, or how it had gotten there.
Giant, OCD Moles with carpentry tools.
Why was a question for the boffins to answer tomorrow. Right now, Chike was in trouble and there was nobody else who could save him.
In her mind, little Dani wanted to say something, but Fairchild interrupted her with a savage snarl.
He came for you. You’re going for him. I don’t care how scared you are. I don’t care how dark it is, or cold, or cramped. Owls roost in the ground and they aren’t afraid.
After that, the voice was silent.
Fairchild was on her feet by then, standing as close to the newly–broken edge of the lip as she dared.
She would dare more, shortly, but she needed to plan.
She turned and located Lacumaces, sprinting across the clearing towards her.
Fairchild held up a hand and waved it.
“Hold there,” she commanded.
Lacumaces looked like he wanted to argue with her. Maybe pull rank as the resident Search and Rescue expert.
After all, wasn’t he here to rescue her in the first place?
Dani might have allowed it. Probably welcomed someone else taking charge and doing all the hard thinking.
Lacumaces had the right instincts, most of the time.
Right now, it would get both him and Chike killed.
“I said stop, damn it,” she snarled at him.
That seemed to get through.
“What?” he asked, coming to a rest at the foot of her little rise.
Up close, the man looked generically Mediterranean, much darker than her, but not nearly Chike’s color. Straight black hair. Hooked nose.
Cute, but a total freaking rush junkie.
Fairchild had gotten over the need to push things to the edge of death for fun.
She pointed down at the mound.
“This is an airshaft,” she said. Let him worry later about the what and the how of her knowing. It felt right. “Chike was standing here when the ground gave way under his feet.”
“Right,” Lacumaces said, staring to pull his pack clear.
“You aren’t going down the hole, Lacumaces,” Fairchild said in a hard voice. “I am.”
“Damn it, Fairchild,” the man’s face curled up in a sneer. “We’re here to rescue you.”
“I know that,” she countered. “My radio’s already hosed. Yours wouldn’t work underground, anyway, and I need you to keep in touch with Rain and Ann–Marta. That means you stay here and provide me backup. But you’re going to have to move to stay ahead of us.”
“What?” he asked, confused.
Good, she had his attention. She jumped clear of the rise and led him to the path, using her arm again to point out how straight it was in both directions.
“This follows an underground aqueduct,” she said. “It’s flowing downhill, but I don’t know how fast, or how deep, and I won’t until I get to the bottom and look around. We don’t have the equipment to pull either of us back to the surface, so we may have to follow it all the way to the bottom and see where it comes out.”
Fairchild realized that there was too much to explain. Chike might be drowning or dying in the qanat while she tried to overcome her own reticence to explain things to someone with a brain like Lacumaces.
Inspiration struck. It was almost painful.
“I’m going to leave Eleanor with you,” Fairchild said, handing the Aide into Lacumaces hands.
“Eleanor,” she continued. “You explain everything to him and anyone else that asks.”
“That I will,” Eleanor replied as Fairchild turned and jogged across the grass. “Good luck, Fairchild.”
She paused once to glance down into a cold, wet hell and take a breath. She quickly re–attached her flight membranes, checked her life support dials, and lit up the twin, ram’s horn headlights.
Darkness.
Wet, dark walls broken up by the way the hole was augured into the stone. Maybe seventy–five degrees, now that she was thinking in freefall mode.
Screw you.
Fairchild stepped into nothing.
There wasn’t space to really glide in here. But she didn’t need speed. If anything, she would have liked to pull a stunt like this with a proper parachute, the kind that would drop her more or less straight.
She settled for puffing herself up like a thistle and letting her surface area piston as much air as possible down in front of her. Fairchild knew she was right about the tunnel system when she fell.
If this was just a well, the air wouldn’t have anywhere to escape as she fell, so it would compress and slow her down until it could slip by her fringes. But this was rushing along with her, so it had somewhere to go.
This was another new sport she could invent when she got back to civilization. Add a timer and rules about touching the walls, and see how long you could stay up.
The free–glider slowed her some as she intended, and she kept her weight as far back as she could. As a result, sh
e had to occasionally butt her head forward to push off a wall, but more frequently she would touch with her feet, run a step or two and then hop to clear that next lip.
It was like rappelling face–first down a mine shaft.
She could see the bottom rushing up at her now.
Instinct made her want to curl into a cannon ball when she hit, but she had no idea how deep the water was. She braced herself instead, arms and legs as far apart as she could get, willing herself to stall in the tight confines of the tube as it widened out.
Fairchild clenched her jaw and neck to reduce the risk of a concussion. The water was a black pool, welcoming her into death.
Before, that might have been an easy way to go. Just let the water claim her.
Before, she might have even been willing.
Impact.
Pain.
Water.
Fairchild could see underwater. Those twin lights were brutally powerful.
She could breathe, never having undone the faceplate or life support, intent on finding water on a dry planet before she did anything stupid, like get naked and enjoy the warm sun on her skin.
The current wasn’t even that bad. Clear water, flowing at barely a walking pace, as near as she could tell without all of her electronic systems to back up her guesses.
Fairchild detached her flight membranes again, turning back into a person and not a flying squirrel.
She needed to become a mermaid, so she left the one between her legs. That would give her an amazing dolphin kick.
The water here was around three meters deep, and the smooth sides were seven or eight meters apart.
She could see a lip running along both sides. She would have said catwalk, but it was too narrow, even for elite fashion models. You would need to be a cat to walk on something less than half a meter wide, slick, and sloped in ever so slightly.
Whoever built this was skinny and amazingly sure–footed.
She wondered if her OCD Moles with carpentry tools really were giant boring machines. Qanats could be cut by hand, and had been in antiquity, but this was something on an entirely different scale from those claustrophobic tunnels she remembered from a picture book somewhere.
At least the current was clear and her suit insulated. She could only imagine how cold that damned water would be, coming up from the water table itself.
