The clapping grew in vigor as the president appeared, and she looked out into the auditorium. Because of the lights shining on her, Bacco could make out only the general, shadowy mass of the audience. When she reached the podium, she took her place behind it, placed her hands up on either side of its surface, and waited.
When the applause ended, Bacco opened her mouth to speak. To our honored guests, she thought, but before she said anything, she saw a flash of yellow-red light near the back of the auditorium. For a fraction of a second, it occurred to her that somebody had taken a holophoto of her, but then she staggered backward and couldn’t figure out why. Even in the darkness shrouding the audience, the president could tell that many of them had turned their heads to look behind them, as though to condemn the holophotographer for interrupting the proceedings.
But then a loud report resounded in the theater, and Bacco realized that it was the second such noise she’d heard. She staggered back again, and then felt annoyed with herself for doing so. The podium stood a couple of meters in front of her, she saw, and suddenly she couldn’t remember how she had planned to begin her speech.
Confused, Bacco peered down at herself, just as she had a few moments prior with Phiri. It surprised the president to see flaws in her lovely dress: two crimson florets bloomed on her bodice, and she tried to figure out how she hadn’t seen them earlier. Suddenly, though, she realized that she could no longer stand, that her legs were going to give out and that she would fall down right there in the middle of the stage.
President Bacco heard a third report, and then everything went black.
Dust
Twelve
The blackness faded, replaced only by a gauzy shade of gray. Without opening her eyes and without moving—it scared her to imagine what she would discover if she tried to move—she attempted to take stock of herself. She lay on her right side. She didn’t feel cold. Her breathing didn’t seem strained or shallow, but slow and regular. Her head ached, but no pains troubled her anywhere else on her body.
Satisfied—and hopeful—she flexed her muscles, one part of her body at a time: left arm . . . left hand . . . right arm . . . right hand . . . left leg . . . left foot—She stopped, concerned, and tensed her left foot again. It met with resistance.
Something’s wrong with my foot, she thought.
“Keev?” a voice whispered, though she could not tell from which direction. Even that soft sound had sent back echoes from the cave walls.
Is that Altek? she wondered. She didn’t know who else it could be, but then she hadn’t anticipated explosions in the cave, either. She remembered the reverberating booms, and running with Altek, and wanting to make it past the glowing red spot on the roof of the cave. She even remembered the third boom—seemingly directly above them—and all the earth and stone falling around them.
Keev squinted her eyes open. She saw a run of bright light across her field of vision, and beyond it, nothing but an impenetrable darkness. She waited, allowing her eyes time to adjust, but it didn’t help; she could still see nothing but the streak of light.
“Keev?” A bit louder, the voice revealed itself as Altek’s.
“I’m here,” she said, though it sounded more like croaking than actual words. She swallowed, and her mouth tasted dry—more than dry: it tasted like dirt. “I’m here,” she said again, a little more clearly.
Keev saw movement in the form of shadows capering about her, and then the bar of light shifted. Altek appeared, down on his haunches, a beacon shining toward him from its place on the cave floor. Dirt blanketed his clothes and darkened his face, but he looked uninjured. “Are you all right?” he asked. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve just been in a cave-in,” Keev said. Her tongue felt as though she had licked the ground. She pushed herself up off of her side, but then she felt a sharp pain slice through her foot. She winced and immediately stopped moving.
“Hold on, hold on,” Altek said, dropping to his hands and knees and moving toward her. She felt his hand on her upper arm, through a jacket, which she realized had been draped over her. “Just lie there for a moment so we can make sure you’re all right.”
“I need—” Keev started, but then she coughed over the dry, gritty feeling in her mouth and throat. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she said, “I need water.”
Altek’s hand withdrew from her arm and moved down to her waist. She felt him tug at her water bottle and free it from its harness. She heard him twist the cap off, and then he held the mouth of the bottle up to her lips.
“I need to spit after I drink,” Keev told him.
“Okay.” He shifted out of her way, then picked up the beacon and shined it on the cave wall in front of her. “Here’s your water.” He brought the bottle back up to her lips and tilted it up.
Keev felt the smoothness of the liquid, still cool from its insulated container. She filled her mouth and closed her lips, then sloshed the water around. She felt the grit of the dirt as it floated free, and she visualized stirring up a swamp. She leaned forward and spat toward the wall.
“Better?” Altek asked.
“Yes,” Keev said. She wiped her mouth with her left hand, then reached toward Altek. “May I?” she asked. He handed her the water bottle, and she drank down two long pulls, emptying it. “What happened? How long was I unconscious?”
“You were out for about half an hour,” Altek told her. “I tried to wake you at first. I also examined your head. You’ve got a knot on the left side, directly above your ear, and a gash. I applied pressure to it, so it’s no longer bleeding.”
“What about the rest of me?”
“I used the beacon to check for any visible injuries,” Altek said. “I didn’t see any blood or any bones breaking through your skin anywhere.”
Keev nodded, thinking that all of that sounded good. A wave of exhaustion suddenly broke over her, though, and she wanted to lie back down. As she moved to do so, Altek helped her ease herself toward the ground. She expected to feel the hard, coarse floor of the cave against the side of her face, but instead found a soft mound there, obviously a rolled-up jacket that Altek had placed beneath her head. “I just need to rest a minute,” she said, then asked again, “What happened?”
“Do you remember the explosions?” Altek asked.
“Yes.”
“Those—or at least the last one—clearly caused the roof of the cave to collapse.”
“Are we trapped?” Keev asked. “Do we have to go back?” With the way she felt, Keev did not look forward to having to backtrack to the far entrance.
“We don’t have to go back,” Altek said. “We made it past where the roof caved in. We’re on the Joradell side of it. But . . . we might be trapped.”
“What?” Keev said. “What does that mean?”
Altek directed the beam of the beacon down her body. “Your leg appears to be pinned,” he said. Keev followed the light and saw her shin disappear beneath a wall of rubble that she lost sight of in the darkness above the beacon’s reach.
“How far up does it go?” Keev pointed at the heap of fallen rock.
“Up to the roof of the cave.” Altek shined the light there to show her. “It looks impassable.”
Keev shook her head. She didn’t want to think about the repercussions of that. If the gild had to move escaped slaves to Shavalla without access to the passage beneath the Merzang Mountains, it would take weeks longer and of course would require that much more time to return to the gild. The extended trip would expose them to greater natural dangers, as well as to detection by the Aleira.
“How does your leg feel?” Altek asked. He seemed reluctant to pose the question.
Keev studied the place where her shin disappeared beneath the mass of stone. She tried to move her leg. Once again, she felt a stabbing pain and grimaced. “It hurts when I try to move it,” she told Altek. She imagined her shinbone fractured and piercing through her torn flesh. The image made her shiver, and she pushed it away.
“I removed some of the rocks that were covering your leg,” Altek said, “but there’s a large one there that I couldn’t move easily, and I didn’t want to risk crushing your foot by trying. I did reach in through an open space and felt around as much as possible; when I pulled my hand back out, there was no blood on it.”
No blood, Keev thought. That sounded like a poor excuse for good news, but she’d take it. “Can you move the large rock at all?” she asked.
“I might be able to, if I lie down and get my arms below it.”
“Try,” Keev said. “If you can lift it at all, I’ll try to pull my leg out.”
Altek nodded. He propped the beacon atop a rock so that it shined along the lower part of Keev’s body and the pile of stone. He then went around Keev and stretched out prone, his head toward the roof collapse. He dug his elbows into the ground, set his hands beneath the edge of the large rock, and pushed against it.
Nothing happened.
Altek glanced back at her, then rolled over onto his back. He repositioned his arms beneath the rock and reached up to it again. “Okay, here we go,” he said, and Keev saw his body tense as he tried again to free her. As moments ticked away, Altek issued a throaty cry.
And still nothing happened.
“Try it with your legs,” Keev suggested.
Altek nodded. “I can,” he said, sitting up and facing her. “I’m just concerned I won’t be able to control how the rock will shift if I move it. I don’t want it coming down and compressing your leg.”
“If you can’t move that rock, then I’m not going to be able to use my leg anyway,” Keev said.
“I can go get help,” Altek told her. She thought she heard a note of desperation in his tone.
Keev considered allowing Altek to leave so he could bring back assistance. If he comes back at all, she thought, realizing that he could just leave her there to die from dehydration. She recognized the illogic of her paranoia: Altek could simply have left her trapped while she’d been unconscious. Of course, he couldn’t be sure that her leg had been stuck; for all he knew, she could have awoken and pulled herself free.
If he wanted me dead, he could have dropped a rock onto my head, Keev thought, and then told everybody in the gild that I died in the cave-in. No, she really needed to stop distrusting him. He’d demonstrated his loyalty more than once, and while she supposed he still might be an Aleiran spy trying to earn their trust, that possibility seemed less and less probable.
Still, Keev did not like the idea of staying in the cave by herself. “Half an hour or so to the cave entrance?” she asked.
“If there’s not another cave-in farther along,” Altek pointed out.
“Right,” Keev said. “But if there’s not, then half an hour to the entrance, a few hours to the gild, then a few hours back here.”
“That’s not that long,” Altek said, clearly reading her concern. “I’ll leave my water bottle; it’s still about a third full.” He pulled the container out of its harness and set it down beside her.
“No, that’s not that long, but . . .” She thought about the situation, about what had occurred, and tried to make sense of it. “What happened here?” she asked. “Those booming noises before the roof collapsed didn’t sound natural. They sounded like explosive charges going off.”
“I agree,” Altek said. “And there was a part of the cave roof that was glowing red, like it had been superheated.”
“Yes, I saw that too,” Keev said. “So who was doing it? Not our gild . . . surely not any of the gilds.”
“No,” Altek agreed. “It must have been the Aleira.”
“Doing what, though?” Keev asked. “Trying to kill us?”
“If they knew we were here, then why go to so much trouble?” Altek asked. “And why resort to a method that didn’t guarantee our deaths? They could have just waited outside the entrance and, when we emerged, gunned us down.”
Keev nodded; Altek’s reasoning made sense. “But then what were they doing? Mining?”
Altek took a moment to respond, apparently considering her question. “I think maybe so,” he finally said.
“If there’s a chance that the Aleira are somewhere in the mountains right now,” Keev said, “then I don’t want to stay here, even for just a matter of hours.” She could easily envision a squad of Aleira finding her, freeing her, and then carrying her into Joradell only to take that freedom away.
“All right,” Altek said. “Let me try using my legs.” For a third time, he positioned himself beside the wall of broken stone that had swallowed Keev’s foot. He placed the soles of his boots against the edge of the large rock, then searched for handholds in the floor of the cave. Once he’d found some and grabbed on to them, he asked, “Are you ready?”
Keev nodded but said nothing. She watched Altek’s arms and legs tense. He gritted his teeth, and the cords in his neck tightened.
The rock shifted, not even a hand’s width. She tried to pull her leg from beneath it, felt the sharp pain again, but also felt her foot move toward her. A fist-size stone farther up in the rubble came crashing down and struck her just below the knee. She cried out, and when she did, she saw Altek relax his muscles, probably easing off out of concern for her. “Don’t stop,” she told him. “My foot’s moving.”
Altek resumed his efforts. The rock moved again, farther, and Keev pulled her foot toward her even more. Altek began to groan with his exertion. “Keep going,” Keev said.
Suddenly, Altek’s legs thrust forward, pushing the rock upward for a moment. Other pieces of debris began to spill down, striking both Altek’s legs and Keev’s. She dug the heel of her free foot into a ridge in the cave floor and pushed with all her might. In a flash of movement, her trapped foot came free. She quickly scrambled away, as did Altek beside her. The large rock dropped back down.
A stone rolled into the beacon and sent it flying. Light careened around the cave and then seemed to get swallowed up, leaving Keev and Altek in darkness. They huddled together amid the sound of falling rocks.
After a few moments, silence reasserted itself as the loosened debris settled. Keev became aware that she could see, that the beacon still functioned wherever it had been thrown, its beam mostly buried but emitting enough light to allow her adjusted eyes to cut through the shadows.
Directly in front of her, she saw Altek’s face—and to her surprise, especially considering the circumstances, she noticed how handsome he was. For a moment, she could tell that he saw her too, and they looked into each other’s eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Probably a few bruises from the rocks coming down, but it doesn’t feel like anything too bad.” He leaned in toward her and, for a disconcerting instant, she thought he might kiss her. Instead, he reached past her, dug around, and cleared off the beacon. “Let’s take a look at your foot.”
Keev hadn’t even been thinking about her foot, but when she did, she realized it hurt badly. Altek shined the light on it. A triangle of jagged stone stuck out of the top of her boot. “Does that hurt?” Altek asked.
“Yes.”
“I should take it out,” Altek said. “But let me take a look at your leg first.” He moved in that direction, planted the beacon on the ground, and used both hands to feel along her shin. “Anything?” he asked her.
“It all feels fine,” she said. “I mean, I’ve got some aches, but nothing unbearable.”
“All right. I’m going to remove this, then.” Altek motioned toward the triangular piece of stone. Keev closed her eyes and braced herself. When Altek took hold of the stone, pain shot through her as though the nerve endings in her foot had been set afire. In the next moment, though, he pulled it free, and the pain immediately faded to a dull ache.
Keev opened her eyes to see Altek hold the stone up in the beam of the beacon. She saw the light reflect off its point in a way that suggested it was wet. “There’s blood on here,” Altek said. “I think it punctured your foot.”
“It feels like that,” Keev said.
“I need to treat it. I’ll be as gentle as I can.” Altek untied her boot, his movements slow and careful. She flinched twice, but reassured him each time that he should keep going. Eventually, he removed her boot, and then her sock. Streaks of blood painted her flesh from the top of her foot down to her heel. Altek bent in close and examined her. “Definitely a puncture wound,” he told her. “It doesn’t look too deep, but I’m going to have to wash it out and wrap it.” He looked up at her with an apologetic expression. “I’m afraid it’s going to hurt.”
“I want to get out of here,” Keev said. “Do what you have to do.”
Altek used the rest of his water to clean out her wound, then cut a strip from the lining of his jacket to swathe it. Keev cried out more than once, but each time urged Altek to continue his ministrations.
When he’d done as much as he could in their situation, he helped her try to put her boot back on her foot. She left her sock off and the boot untied, and she finally managed it. Altek helped her up, and she found that she could stand and walk well enough.
“Are you sure you’re okay to travel?” he asked her.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Keev said. “We don’t know if there are Aleira around, or even if they might start blasting again.”
Together, they resumed their journey through the cave.
Thirteen
The instant Ro heard the report, she thought that something had fallen at the back of the theater—something large—and she worried that something had gone wrong with the new starbase. But before she could even turn her head to find out what had happened, she saw President Bacco lurch backward. At first, Ro thought that the president had simply reacted to the thunderous noise, and indeed, when a second roar filled the theater, Bacco reeled again.
Even as the captain sensed the people around her turning toward the source of the two great bangs, she stood up in the front row of the auditorium and took a step forward. By the time the third report rang out, a figure had raced from the wings and onto the stage—a woman Ro recognized as Agent Ferson, the head of the president’s protection detail. Amid the sound of voices rising around her and the rush of movement, Ro dashed forward and leaped onto the stage. Somewhere behind her, she heard the shriek of a phaser.
Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust Page 23
