Revolution's Shore (7 page)

The miner came to a confused halt, seeing this apparition, and Lily reached forward to grasp his shoulder. “That's your power source,” she said. “Let me show you.” She could not whistle in the helmet, so she called out, and Bach, complaining the whole time in a low undersong about the rough surfaces of the tiny shaft which threatened to scratch his exterior polish, floated up to them and allowed her to holster him to the easer drill.

“I'll be glad to get out of here,” she said, her voice a little shaky. “The mines on Unruli weren't anything like this. My father would
never
have allowed it. Imagine if this place collapsed.”

Kyosti had squeezed in beside her, a very tight fit, and he chuckled. “‘And the height of the rock above the head of the workmen was a hundred cubits.'”

“Cubits?” Lily asked, but Bach began at the same time to sing as the Ridani miner thrust him forward to the end of the shaft.

“What is he saying?” asked Kyosti.

“Something about—waters of Gihon.” Lily shrugged. “I can't hear him.”

Then the miner settled into place, about ten meters in front of them, and began to drill.

Spitting sparks of light, a sudden rise in temperature, and pressure on her eardrums were the only signs that the drilling was in progress. If it made noise, it could not be heard above the muted sound of Bach's song.

“Someplace named David,” said Lily. “Where's your rifle?”

Hawk patted a long shape tucked in between his knees, briefly touched the shock grenades on his belt, and let his hand come to rest on her waist, a gesture almost protective. At her back, she felt Jenny's movements as she checked out her weapons and loosened the straps that held them against her body. Farther back, Yehoshua spoke to his cousin, but his words were lost in the muffling air. Behind them, the faint beam of Rainbow's helmet light cast a luminescent glow on the same mineral vein cut along the shaft wall, and behind her—a wall of solid blackness.

They waited.

A slight shift in pressure in her inner ear.

“Here we go,” said Lily, moving past Kyosti. “He's got equilibrium.”

The miner did not stop working, but the pattern of his drilling changed. Lily passed through a recent pocket, almost filled now with the rubble of the current drilling, and inched forward into the new shaft, crawling almost on her belly. The miner paused as Lily came up behind him.

“I pierced through, min,” he explained. Around him, the walls gleamed as if they were hot, but she could feel nothing through her coveralls. “We be coming in at ya angle, so I mean to bear down ya circle here, so ya last dislodging shall make ya least stirring.”

“Good.”

Bach winked blue lights at her, but no longer sang as the miner went back to work. Sparks flew, cut off abruptly as a cracking noise shuddered the air. Flipping a switch on the drill, the Ridani eased away a meterwide circle of rock. Lily was amazed at how thin it was—a sure sign of the precision of Bach's sounding and the skill of the miner.

“Thank you,” she said to him as she helped him unholster Bach from the drill, and then she looked back at her five companions, and crawled through into the 30s.

It was like coming into another world. For a moment she hesitated, until she realized that they had come into a dig supervised to standards more befitting a House mine. With a roll and a push she slipped down the side of the sloping wall, and stood up on mercifully smooth floor. If she raised her hands she could touch the ceiling, but she could stand, and Bach, floating out next to her, had ample room to drift beside her as she crouched and peered, gun raised, in both directions.

The shaft was deserted, and silent. A small antenna rose out of Bach, and after a moment of dense quiet he gave a four-note whistle,
All clear, one hundred meters.

She motioned to Kyosti, and the others clambered out of the shaft behind her. She surveyed them briefly, and then set out to the right, toward the main tunnel.

The shaft was empty, lit by an uninterrupted string of tube lighting. Shafts branched out at irregular intervals, and three times they had to climb long stretches of ladder seamed into the rock face. At last, ahead, the intensity of the light changed, and Lily knew they were nearing the shaft's opening into the main level 9 tunnel.

She put a hand back, stopping the five people behind her, and then reached up to tap an acknowledgment of previous commands into Bach's keypad. He winked lights, a quick pattern, instead of replying in song, rose to the ceiling, and went forward alone.

Yehoshua pushed quietly past Jenny and Kyosti and crouched beside Lily. He waited for a while in silence. Shifted once, then spoke in an undertone.

“You really think this is going to work?”

Beneath the concealing mask of her helmet, Lily smiled. “I think so. He'll go up the elevator maintenance ladder just like we will, only faster. And once he gets to the power plant's main console, we're free. No one will expect Bach.”

Yehoshua considered this in silence for a time before replying. “I've never seen a 'bot like that. And I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. Where did you say you got it?”

She began to reply, heard voices, crouched and poised her rifle. The voices passed, evidently guards patrolling the main tunnel.

“How many prisoners can we expect will be down here?” she asked after a suitable interval.

Yehoshua shook his head. “I can't guess. Not many. This deep the only cells are for the recidivists: violent or political repeat offenders. My great-grandmother's brother spent time on Harsh.”

“What for?”

“Triple murder. Died here, too. Story is he got in a vendetta and was taken out with one of those old vibration drills.”

“Hoy.” Lily shuddered. “That's terrible.”

Yehoshua chuckled. “Yeah. Because we're Monists, we got the body back for proper burial. My old grand-pap once told me that there wasn't much left.”

“Is this true?” Lily demanded suddenly. Yehoshua inclined his head, recognizing her question, but he retreated back to stand beside his cousin without answering her. Quiet descended on the little group.

They waited.

Lily felt one foot begin to numb, shifted it. Now and again she looked back to check Jenny and Kyosti, but they both remained still and absolutely quiet. Rainbow coughed once or twice, a low sound, and Yehoshua whispered something to Alsayid, followed by a muffled laugh from the cousin.

More time passed. Inevitably, her mind wandered from the task at hand. She thought of the dead Ridanis in the shaft they had just passed through. The Sar had never employed Ridanis, but she knew him well enough to know that he would not countenance a policy that condemned them to such a horrible death. She felt a sudden and unexpected urge to tell him what she was doing now. It was strange, thinking of Ransome House after having been away so long. Perhaps he would even approve of her new life—but the chance to explain was unlikely to present itself. With a sigh, she checked her wrist-com for the hour.

Then, without warning, without any transition whatsoever, the lights went out.

Lily stood, banishing nostalgia in an instant because it was time to act. “Let's go.”

They came out into the tunnel just as a low, moaning alarm began to wail, seeming to come from deep beneath the walls of the main tunnel. The beam of Lily's helmet lamp swept a sheen of smooth wall and ceiling, stopped on a dead surveillance camera, moved to Yehoshua.

“You and Alsayid and Jenny, take out the A Block guards. Kyosti, Rainbow: with me.”

She set off at a lope down the straight corridor. They met no one until they had crossed the circular intersection that surrounded the huge central elevator shaft, but coming around the curve they almost ran into two guards, helmet lights still off as they stood surprised by the blackout.

Lily took one down with a sweep of her rifle, clubbing him to the floor. Turned to see Kyosti with a hard grip on the second, his rifle pressed against the guard's head. All Lily could see was the terrified widening, the plea, in the guard's eyes; the rest of his face was hidden by the breathing mask.

“Kill him,” said Kyosti as she stood staring. He fired, and a blast of light streaked out. The guard collapsed.

She hesitated, still straddling the unconscious man at her feet. Kyosti swung his gun around and shot.

The stench of heat rose up to her, a fine thread. She felt sick, was afraid to look down to see what now lay beneath her. Rainbow had already moved on, up the C Block corridor, rifle raised.

“You've never killed anyone, have you,” Kyosti said.

She barely managed to shake her head.

“Catch,” he said, and she just caught his rifle as he tossed it to her.

“What—”

“That's yours until you've killed someone.”

“But you're unarmed!”

“And I'm going straight in,” he promised as he followed Rainbow.

She gasped out an unvoiced curse, moved, stumbled on the body, and ran after Kyosti. Needing him as a vital part of the team, it had simply not occurred to her that she might put him in danger. Or else, she realized, as she passed him, passed Rainbow, that when she acted, all other considerations vanished. At the C Block lock she pounded frantically at the door. It opened to reveal a guard, tense but unsuspecting.

“Emergency,” Lily gasped out, thrust past him, past the second open lock door, and into the main guardroom.

Opened up with her rifle as she dove behind a console.

It was over in seconds. Rainbow evidently shot the man in the lock, because moments later, as Lily sweated and shuddered in the silence, huddling behind the console, she saw Kyosti enter, distinctive by the relaxed precision of his walk.

“One's still alive,” he said, and she had to stand up, to survey the five dead guards: three were half-dressed, as if they had just woken up. Most were sprayed with blood and gaping wounds. Kyosti just stood there as the wounded man rolled, reached for the gun dropped by his dead compatriot, and lifted it to aim at his nearest clear target: Hawk.

Lily shot him in the head, and he slumped forward over the other body. Rainbow came forward and began to search the bodies.

Lily walked to the door, paused by Kyosti long enough to shove his rifle into him so hard that he had to take three steps back.

“I hate you,” she muttered. “Rainbow! What are you doing?”

“Got it.” Rainbow rose. “Ya manual keypad for ya cells. Free ya prisoners.”

Her voice seemed so nonchalant that Lily was filled with a wrenching rage at the Ridani's seeming ability to kill so casually. She whirled and stalked out. Had to wait in the empty corridor until Kyosti and Rainbow emerged a few minutes later.

“We checked the other rooms,” Kyosti said. “They're clear.”

From some deep recess of memory that she had forgotten existed, there flashed a vivid picture of Master Heredes sitting cross-legged on the floor of his Academy's workout room, watching her as she did a particularly complicated kata. “Yes,” he said in this memory, “yes. In this move you strike directly to the temple. Done so, with proper alignment, you kill your opponent with that single blow.” His face remained impassive, as if killing was an abstract ideal that never touched reality, as if the opponent was always an idealized shadow of one's self, echoing your own movements across space. She wondered, standing there in the light of the three filtered helmet beams, how many people Heredes had killed in the course of his very long life.

The tube lighting along the walls flickered on, off, on: low wattage power, almost grey, and the hushed, strained whirring of the auxiliary venting system kicked in.

Lily forced herself to relax her grip on her rifle, finger by finger. “Come on,” she said, more to herself than to her companions.

They met the other three by the metal door that led on to the meter-square maintenance shaft that paralleled, opened out from, the central elevator shaft. The door was ajar.

“I didn't believe it.” Yehoshua said as they came up. “The 'bot really did it.”

“Who do you think cut the power?” Lily demanded.

“Maybe Main Block finally tapped through and cut it.”

“Maybe that's what the guards will think. We can hope. Did you clear all three corridors? Good.” In the distance they could hear prisoners shouting to each other across the cell tunnel. “Rainbow. Release one prisoner, and then follow us up. Lock this shaft behind you.”

Rainbow paused to look up at the ceiling. “It be ya sore long way to ya surface dome, min.”

“I know.” Lily stepped through the door and set one hand on a ladder rung. “That's why they won't be expecting us.”

T
HEY CLIMBED.

Lily's hands began to hurt first, from being curled around the metal rungs, then the arch of her foot, from pushing off all the time. Eventually her back began to ache as well, right around the shoulders and between the shoulder blades.

Rainbow started to lose ground fairly soon. Yehoshua and Alsayid kept up until they passed the door marked level 6 and then their lights, too, began to recede into the vast depths of blackness that surrounded them: the empty, seemingly bottomless central shaft.

Lily had to stop just above level 5. She laced her elbows around a rung and let her hands hang open, breathing hard. Below, Jenny stopped as well, but Kyosti continued up until he was half-overlapping Lily. Letting go with one hand, he massaged each of her palms in turn.

“Hoy,” she gasped. “You'd think it was three kilometers between levels instead of one-third.”

“It'll get worse,” replied Kyosti cheerfully.

It did. She reached a point where she could block the pain lancing through her muscles, but the halts became more frequent, and the relief they afforded less. Once she heard a curse, far below, and she trained her light down to see Alsayid dangling and pulling himself back onto the ladder with Yehoshua's help. Rainbow's light was lost in the deep black beneath. The air stirred around them.