***
Chase steered the Kra fighting machine down the corridors of Arran Kra, following the tail end of Gar’s machine. It seemed they had descended halfway to hell. He was still getting the hang of the driving controls and, more than once, steered the machine into a wall or against a stalagmite rising from the floor, having to rely on the machine’s fine motor skills to avoid a fall. The quahka would stagger but automatically regain its balance and move forward again.
In a dark corner of one tunnel, Gar paused his quahka beside a massive wall of stalactites. Sometime in the distant past a fissure had opened in the bedrock here, cleaving the tunnel from ceiling to floor. Over millennia the split had filled with sheet-like, flowing limestone formations that almost completely sealed off the tunnel. Gar raised the canopy of his machine and pointed to a narrow vertical gap penetrating the surface between two massive stalactite columns.
Chase stopped his machine, hunkered it down and opened the canopy.
“Tee nu deekoo,” said Gar.
“This is the place,” Kit translated.
As Chase and Kit climbed down from their fighting machine Gar closed his canopy, turned into a side tunnel and left them. By pre-arrangement, he was heading for another destination. But their objective was here. When the clank and whir of Gar’s machine had faded away in the blackness of the side tunnel Kit whispered, “We’re on our own.”
They moved to the gap in the rock wall, from which a shaft of white light slanted into their dark corridor. Chase glanced through the small opening and was astonished at what he saw. On the other side of the veneer of flowstone was a chamber as large as an airport hangar, lit by harsh white lights high in its cavernous ceiling. In the center of this wide subterranean space were their objectives: two flying machines of silver metal, shaped like manta rays and about forty feet wide from wing tip to wing tip—Kra fighter aircraft.
He glanced around the interior of the chamber. As Gar had explained by pantomime and gestures, massive piles of boxes and crates filled much of the sepulchral space. These contained thousands of kekuah power cylinders. This was the main armament storeroom of the citadel.
“It’ll make a big bang when it goes,” he whispered.
Kit crowded her head near his to get a look. She pointed beyond the more distant aircraft. There, two Kra warriors guarded an entrance tunnel on the opposite side of the chamber.
“Reception committee,” Chase murmured.
“What are we going to do?” Kit asked. “They’ll see us.”
“See me,” he corrected. “You’re waiting here.”
“Oh no, I’m not,” she protested in a whisper.
“Listen,” he hissed. “There’s no reason for both of us to risk going in there. You know how to drive that thing, don’t you?” He pointed at their fighting machine.
“I think so.”
“If they spot me, don’t hang around, okay? Just take off.”
“No.” She looked at him earnestly in the dim light. “I won’t run off and leave you.”
He scowled. “I’m not going in there until you tell me you’ll try to get away.”
She shrugged her shoulders and said with a note of sarcasm, “Okay, my gallant hero. I promise to leave by myself if they catch you.”
He pointed a finger at the tip of her nose. “And no heroics.”
“You’ll handle that yourself, right?”
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I won’t try anything fancy. I’m no Indiana Jones.” He fetched the kekuah bomb from the walking machine and returned to the opening. He spun his cap around with the bill backwards on his head. Then he tried to think of something to say to Kit that would be a suitable farewell if he didn’t make it back. The words weren’t there. His mind was a jumble of thoughts. He caught her by the arm, planted a kiss on her lips and said, “Wish me luck.”
She hugged him and whispered, “Just hurry and get back here.”
“Believe me, I won’t be in there any longer than I have to.” He began squeezing himself into the opening with one shoulder high and one low to fit the vertical space. The gap was narrower than he thought, and crowded above and below by flowstone into a small window. Try as he might, he could not force both shoulders through the opening. He backed out and turned to Kit. “I can’t get through.”
She stared at him for a moment in surprise. Then she put out her hand and said, “Give me the bomb.”
“What?”
“Give it to me. I’m smaller than you. Maybe I can get through.”
“No way.” He held the bomb out of her reach. “How you gonna handle those guards if they see you?”
“Well, what were you going to do? Point a sharp stick at them?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
She lunged and grabbed the cylinder from him. “Now stand back,” she said. “Sometimes being smaller has its advantages.”
“This is a bad idea,” he muttered as she climbed up on the flowstone. She paused at the brink of the gap and impulsively threw an arm around his neck, pulling him to her and kissing him harder than he had kissed her a moment before. “Wish me luck,” she said, although her bravado was tainted by a faint tremor in her voice.
“I do,” he whispered.
She crawled into the opening. As she forced herself between the stalactite columns, the damp chill of the slime-covered walls soaked through her shirt and set her heart pounding. The space within the gap grew narrower as she drew herself in. With one shoulder above the other as Chase had done, she pulled herself forward, half-wriggling, half-crawling across the slimy surface like a salamander. Just as her head and shoulders emerged into the light of the hangar, her hips stuck at the narrow point. She kicked her feet, which had lifted off the floor behind her, but her hipbones only wedged in tighter.
Exposed in the glare of the hangar lights, she began to panic at the thought of being seen by the Kra guards. Fortunately they were gabbing idly and staring away from her into the far hallway, from which the pulse of a distant drumbeat came. She reached out and found a handhold on a muddy stalagmite ahead of her, gritted her teeth and pulled hard. Her hips came free and she tumbled down the hangar side of the stalactite wall.
She was through.
She glanced quickly at the guards, worried they might have heard her fall, but they seemed enthralled by the drums’ increasing volume and tempo. Her heart hammered as hard as the drums, goaded into high gear by the chill moisture on her skin and the dank musty smell of the place. She forced herself to inhale slowly to calm the fear racing through her. Then she turned and looked back through the opening at Chase. He gave her a thumbs-up sign that helped a little. At least he seemed confident.
She looked around the inside of the chamber. The area near her was a forest of huge stalactite columns stretching from ceiling to floor. She moved into the shadow of one of these, peering around it at the nearest aircraft, twenty paces from her across the starkly lit floor. An inviting shadow lay under its wing. Beyond that and past the second ship, the guards chatted in their almost inscrutable language. Now, if she could just find the courage to dash across the lighted space…
Drawing a deep breath, she stepped out from behind the stalactite—and immediately leaped back. One of the guards had turned to look around the room. She froze behind the column, her heart in her throat, wondering if it had seen her and was rushing her way. Instead, the guards’ placid conversation resumed. Pausing to collect herself, she peeked around the column again. The guards’ attention had returned to the drumbeat. She scurried across the exposed hangar floor to the wing shadow, stopping beside a landing strut to let her heart quit racing.
A pylon was slung under the center of the wing with a huge gun barrel attached. It looked like the light cannon of a Kra walking machine but much larger. That’ll do nicely, she thought. Creeping to it quietly, she began searching for a place to rig the explosive charge.
Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall Page 64
