Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (60 page)

They moved faster, not quite running, but at a steady trot. Altin’s breathing became loud over the speakers, but Orli didn’t say anything. He wasn’t a runner, and this was hard for him, not to mention that he had the heavy drill slung over his shoulder too. The work was made worse by the stiffening in the suit, its adjustments for the atmospheric pressure gradually bearing down on them. She knew he had no idea what the suit was doing in the same way that she knew she didn’t know how much pressure it could take, or how much it would need to take. How far down could they go? How bad could it get? She knew nothing about this planet. She had no tools for measuring. The suit’s alarm would sound if it got too bad. That’s what she knew.

Red Fire seemed to sense that, or perhaps it was simply a quirk of fate, but they came upon a vast canyon then, so far across that their spotlights couldn’t reach the other side. It was simply the end of forward progress, abrupt and absolute, as if it had been put there on purpose to block their way. There was back, and there was down.

Their spotlights revealed no more of the fissure’s depth than it did about its width or the altitude of the ceiling somewhere high above.

“Well,” she said as she looked up and then down for perhaps the tenth time, “did we make a wrong turn? Did we miss something?”

“No,” he said. “This is it. We have to go down there.”

“You’re kidding me?” She leaned out over the edge and peered down to where the beam of her light simply faded to nothingness.

“No,” he said. “I’m not kidding.”

“Shit.”

“I agree.”

They both looked down. “So do we try the prism again?” she asked.

“We can’t go back.”

“No. We can’t.”

He moved up against her once more, prepared to hold on to her for the jump. Their eyes locked for a time, the bright sparks of spotlights reflecting in each. He didn’t bother to turn it off this time, and she didn’t ask. He felt her chest rise and fall with a sigh. He nodded, and then pulled himself tightly to her. “On three?”

“On three,” she said. She pulled the prism up on its tether and set it to where it had been before, mitigating most of the planet’s gravity. “One, two, three.”

Once again they were falling. Altin clutched her so tightly that his arms began to tremble after a while. They started to tip over again and Orli tried to straighten them, but she let the gas flow too long and they tipped the other way. She tapped the control on the opposite side, trying to right them, but the jet hit Altin’s arm so hard he lost his grip on that side of her suit back. The released energy swung him out from her like an opening door, his other hand gripping tightly and serving as a hinge.

He tried to hold on, to cling to her suit with that hinging hand, but he didn’t have anything to grip firmly, only the corner of the suit. He couldn’t risk grasping for something else because he didn’t want to tear anything loose by groping wildly. So he broke free and started to drift away. They both knew that if he got beyond the range of the Higgs prism, he would plummet like a stone.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Orli said as she tapped her jet controls trying to get closer to him. The jets weren’t meant for flying, only for little thrusts to get across short spaces between ships or space station construction sites. If she hit the wrong one, or too much on one, she would take herself, and the Higgs prism, out of range.

Altin, however, remained calm. “Should I try my jets?” he asked. “Which ones are the controls?” He had crooked his arm to where he could look at the panel on his sleeve.

Orli might have laughed had she not been so terrified. “No!” she commanded. He’d only make it worse.

She turned two dials on her suit and a pair of jets fired for the barest instant each. She had to twist her hips to fix the angle some, but in moments she was drifting closer to him.

They reached for each other’s hands and, still falling, finally caught one another. Soon they embraced each other again. It was Orli’s turn to tremble now. “I told you not to cover the damn jets,” she yelled. Fright was obvious in her eyes.

He sent a sheepish look back at her through his visor, that charming grin he had. “I know. My mistake. But look here, now I’ve got it right.”

She wanted to throttle him, but she was glad that she hadn’t lost him in such an awful way. She sent him a narrow-eyed “never do that to me again” look and allowed herself once more to breathe normally as they fell.

And they fell.

And fell.

And fell.

They fell for so long Orli wondered if perhaps they might fall out through the bottom of the world. They fell for fourteen minutes before the alarm went off.

It was a low, pulsing sound, and it came so suddenly it startled him. “What’s that?” he asked. “It doesn’t sound promising.”

Her alarm went off next. “Shit.”

“You seem to be saying that a lot.”

“Yes, well, we’re in it pretty deep now. Too deep. I don’t know how much pressure these suits can take. They’re made for space, not deep diving, or even for being too deep underground apparently.” She called up the gauge in the helmet display. “We’re going to run the power down really fast like this too. Where’s the bottom of this fucking thing?”

She couldn’t look down due to the way Altin was wrapped around her now, rather like a starfish on a rock, but he could see. He tilted his head as far as he could and directed the light down. Still nothing.

They fell for another six minutes.

“They’re all going to be dead,” she said after a while.

“We still have to try.”

They found the bottom a few minutes after that. They came to rest as gently as the spell name Altin had given to the prism’s effect implied, like leaves falling. The descent ended so gently and uneventfully it seemed the pinnacle of anticlimax after the near disaster high above.

Still, they were down.

Altin let go of Orli, who set the prism back to Earth normal again. He looked about them, shining his light around, turned full circle, with only the cliff face along which they had descended sending any of the light back. The rest was utter darkness, as if they’d found themselves at the very core of nothingness.

“It should be here,” he said.

“What should?”

“Something. I should see something. Over there somewhere.” He pointed for a moment then switched off his light. “Turn that off,” he said. “And dim these lights on our controls if you can.”

She quickly obliged, and both of them peered into the darkness, only the sound of their breathing disturbing the absolute nature of the emptiness.

“There,” he said after what felt a very long time. “Look.”

“Where? I can’t see where
there
is.” It was true that they were completely in the dark.

He groped for her and found her shoulder, then turned her to face where he was looking. Then she saw it too. A tiny green light, like a pinhole in a black curtain, a glowing dust mote seen from a thousand steps away.

“Come on. That’s him. It has to be,” he said. They clicked their lights back on and soon were running toward the tiny spec of light as fast as the space suits would allow.

They covered the distance in no time and soon found a small opening, barely as high as Orli’s knees and about three paces wide. “This is very similar to how it was before, on Blue Fire,” Altin announced. “But will we fit?” He eyeballed the square block of her suit back in tandem with contemplating the narrowness of the entry.

“Lying flat, maybe,” she said. “We won’t be able to crawl.”

“Won’t be able to get out in a hurry either,” he said. But even as he spoke, he was getting down onto the ground, preparing to slide in.

“Let me go first,” she said, drawing her blaster from where it was strapped to her leg. “You can’t do magic in that thing, remember?”

He cringed. He didn’t want her going in first. But he knew that she was right. He was helpless if anything went wrong. It occurred to him that this was what life must be like living as a blank. So vulnerable. “Harpy spit,” he swore. He couldn’t stop the instinct that made him reach out and pull her back. “I can take that,” he said, his eyes sliding to her gun.

“Oh, stop it,” she said. “I’m bad enough with it as it is, and we’ve come too far for this right now.” She yanked free of him and got down on her hands and knees, bent down and peered through the opening. “It’s about ten feet to the other end. I don’t see anything moving in there. And at least there’s light.”

She lay on her stomach and tried to crawl through, but the module on her back was too big. “Damn it. I’m like a pregnant camel in here.” She flipped onto her side and tried to wriggle through, but couldn’t get enough traction to move. “Push my feet,” she said. “At least until I get far enough in to pull myself through with the lip on the other side.”

Altin peered through the space into the area beyond. He didn’t like this at all.

“Come on, Altin. Just do it.”

He put his hands on the bottom of her boots, the chevron treads still filled with red grit and gravel from the surface far above. He gave a shove.

She pushed away from him with her legs and got her hands on the upper edge where the small opening gave way to the chamber beyond. The substance her fingers came in contact with was supple, spongy, like the rubber mats in the hand-to-hand combat rooms on the
Aspect
, but it held. She pulled herself through and quickly looked around, blaster ready as she verified that she was, in fact, alone.

She was.

“Come through,” she said, holstering her weapon. “I’ll pull you.”

She reached back into the gap and, between the two of them, they managed to get Altin through as well. “We’re definitely not going to be able to make a hasty retreat if it comes to it,” he reiterated as she checked his suit for rips.

“There’s no turning back at this point anyway,” she said as she finished going over his suit carefully with her hands and eyes. “Now look and make sure nothing came loose on mine and that there aren’t any tears anywhere.”

He nodded that her point was accurate as he inspected her suit as well. “Nothing I can see,” he said after a time. “Let’s go.”

Soon they were moving through tunnels again, although this time with no need of spotlights. The glow coming from the soft substance on the cave walls was everywhere. The small chamber they’d entered was covered floor to ceiling with it, a pale green luminescence that Altin said was exactly like the stuff he’d found on Blue Fire’s world. They were definitely close.

“Be on the lookout for balls or tubes or barrels of this stuff,” he warned. “She sent me a guide when I was there, a creature like a rolling log. It might be hard to spot since it looks exactly the same as the walls and everything. It will blend in. But look for motion of any kind.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“I have no idea. I’m not even sure it was a creature.”

Onward they ran, as fast as safety would allow, Altin’s blind reliance on memories he could not actively draw upon guiding them. They ran through caves and caverns. They ran up gentle slopes. They used the prism twice more to accommodate long drops, though nothing of the magnitude of the last. On and on they went.

Finally they came to a long, narrow tunnel that was, in places, so low Altin had to stoop, though he never had to crawl. They squeezed through the tunnel’s narrow places, ducked and leaned around several bends, until suddenly, around one sharp turn, Altin gasped.

“What?” Orli demanded as she came around the bend behind him. It became clear he need not answer it as she stepped beside him and muttered, “Oh, shit.”

They’d emerged at the bottom of a tremendous chamber filled with red light. An entire cavern covered at every inch by projecting crystals, like broken fingers, each aglow like the warning lights of a billion ships’ alarms, red beacons that seemed to radiate nothing but “Get Away!”

They both gaped, staring around them, slowly turning as they took in the awesome spectacle. It might have been beautiful had they not known what it was. Who it was, and what it represented to humanity and to Blue Fire.

Orli recovered first and patted her satchel filled with mining charges as she looked up into the seemingly endless vault above. “So, where’s the heart? Let’s do this.”

“Gorgon’s blood!” came what served as his reply. At first she thought he was still marveling at what he saw, but when she looked to him, she saw that he was pointing off to their right. “Look, here come the rolling things.”

Orli drew her blaster and fired a few quick bursts at the nearest of six oblong creatures—if
creatures
were what they were. Even from twenty yards away she cut it easily in two, the bright beam of her laser halving it with the barest flicker of flame and a wet hiss of steam. Both halves came rolling on, however. Now there were five big ones, about waist high, thick as an oil drum and twice that wide, and two more smaller ones. She flipped her weapon to conventional rounds and sent two shots at one of the bigger ones. The flare of the discharge flashed white in the red chamber, and the concussive blasts echoed and amplified from everywhere around. The creature gave no indication that it had been struck, though Orli was confident that she hadn’t missed, at least not with the first two rounds. And yet still it came, right along with the rest.