Valor's Trial (27 page)

One minute to dark.

“We're stopping for the night, people. Pick a spot up against the right wall.”

“Gunny, the cave . . .”

“Has no back door.” Torin cut Mashona off. “And we're against the right wall,” she continued before one of them could ask, “because if anything comes out of the cave in the night, it'll orient itself along the left.”

“What's going to crawl out of the cave, Gunny?” Kichar asked, dark eyes wide.

“Who the hell knows? We do know that since the incoming Marines appear in the caves, the Others have access. So piss against the left if you're going to.” She sat back against the side of the tunnel, club cradled in her arms like her KC-7, and stretched out her legs. She had a job to do, she had no officer to interfere with her doing it; if she'd been carrying her actual weapon, she'd have been relatively happy.

Kyster settled in on one side while Mike propped himself up on the other, using the last minute of light to work on the slate.

The sudden darkness was no longer entirely absolute. The circular beams of four cuff lights danced over the opposite wall.

“Lights out, people.”

“I'm just going to work a little longer,” Mike murmured, head down, face illuminated by the screen. “I've almost accessed the index.”

“And?”

“And then I can start recovering programs.”

“We,” Ressk muttered quietly from along the tunnel.

“We,” Mike amended, his smile shifting the shadows.

Torin slid along the smooth rock until she was lying flat, club along her right side.

“Gunny?” Kyster's head was practically on her shoulder. “You know they're following us, right?”

Past Ressk, Mashona snorted.

“I know,” Torin told him. The three di'Taykan had been careful but not quite careful enough, not when they were the only other movement in the tunnels. “Now get some sleep, we have a lot of rock to move tomorrow. Technical Sergeant Gucciard, remember the dark lasts only six hours . . .” It had seemed longer until they could time it. “. . . and we move out with the light.”

He snorted. “I never sleep much without my own pillow anyway.”

“Well, maybe by tomorrow you can call home on that thing and have it delivered.” She slipped her hand inside her vest, closed her fingers around the salvage tag, and closed her eyes.

The rocks in the fall were flat, brittle, and felt just a little greasy. Rubbing her fingertips together under her nose, Torin could pick up an oily scent that reminded her of low-tech machinery. It matched the puddle's flavor. Odds were evening out that the crack had exposed a natural vein of water rather than a broken pipe.

“Shale,” Mashona offered, tossing another onto the pile behind her and rubbing her hands on her thighs. Settled on new worlds, Humans had taken the labeling of oldEarth with them and concentrated on similarities—differences carefully cataloged and then ignored by almost everyone.

“Slate,” Torin corrected. “Started as shale but went through some high heat; it'll shatter before it crumbles.” She glanced down at the stone knife in her boot. “Question is, was it changed by the volcano or by whatever the Others used to make these tunnels?”

“Does it matter?” Werst snorted.

“Everything matters in the end, Corporal.” Torin reached up and carefully began to ease one of the medium-sized slabs free. “You never know what information you'll need to win the war.”

“And I'm sure this'll be useful, Gunny, if we're ever up against a battalion of geologists.”

Torin grinned down at him. “Who's to say we haven't been? They threw rocks on Simunthitir.” She braced her legs and shifted her grip as the stone started to move. “Stand clear—when this comes out, we're going to get another spill.”

Small rocks slid into the holes left by the removal of the larger rocks. This time they kept spilling in and over the space, edges whispering against each other until Torin was standing ankle-deep in shards of rock, boots protecting her from minor injuries. She twisted, handed the larger rock she still held off to Mashona and studied the rock face as she freed herself. If anything, it extended a bit farther out into the tunnel.

“Get the feeling the whole planet's going to slide down here given half a chance, Gunny?”

“If it does,” she grunted, reaching for another rock, “it'll make it easier to get to the surface.”

“Don't even know if there's an atmosphere,” Werst pointed out.

“I'd put prisoners in a moon.” Ressk glanced up from the slate. “Make it harder to escape from.”

“Gunny, what if there's no atmosphere?” Waiting her turn at the rock face, Kichar sounded a little desperate.

“Well, that depends, Private. How long can you hold your breath?”

They started with three Marines at the rock face, either Technical Sergeant Gucciard or Ressk working on the slate, two hours on, two hours off. On her first break, Torin walked back to the cave she'd been found in and swept her sleeve light over the walls.

She'd meant everything she'd said to Pole about a way in not necessarily meaning a way out, but she was here . . .

“What're you looking for, Gunny?” Kyster hadn't quite pressed up against her leg.

“The way out. If the Others dropped me here . . .” She glanced down at the top of his head. “. . . and we both know they did, then there has to be an access hatch.” Atmosphere, air pressure, gravity; according to her sleeve, it was exactly the same in the cave as it had been in the tunnel. Rough in places, and smooth in others, the walls, ceiling, and floor were solid. Her sleeve light threw cracks into high relief, but none enclosed an area large enough to move an unconscious body through. “You found me soon after I arrived; how did you know I was in the cave?”

“I heard you moan. No noises but me,” he added at her silent suggestion. “Makes not me noises really loud.”

Being back in this cave wasn't doing Kyster any good, devolving his speech patterns to near where they'd been at Torin's arrival. Since that was all being in the cave was accomplishing, Torin waved him out and followed close behind. The Others had to have a way in—they weren't just pushing Marines in through solid rock.

Then the floor touched her chin. It felt cool. She couldn't smell anything but the smoke she'd inhaled before she got the filter on. . . .
Torin reached out and touched the tunnel wall for reassurance.

Torin reached out and touched the tunnel wall for reassurance. Definitely rock. Still, there was nothing that said there couldn't be a patch of organic plastic in the ceiling of one of those caves. It would feel like rock to the touch—Big Yellow had felt like all of the substances it had appeared to become—and without the scanners in their helmets, they'd never find it. And that could explain why no helmets had come through.

She could find it. All she had to do was run her hands over every square millimeter of every cave and every tunnel. Crucible had proved that the alien reacted to her—to her and to Craig back on Ventris—probably because of the way they'd been deep scanned.

From what she'd seen, Big Yellow—well, the component parts of Big Yellow, and that was still easier to say than polynumerous molecular sentient polyhydroxide alcoholydes with an agenda—was certainly capable of setting up this kind of a system, but it seemed like an awfully complicated load of rubbish to go through just to . . . what? Study a few hundred captive Marines?

No. Her father had never thought much of the Corps or her joining it, but the two of them—her father and the Corps—had shared a few essential beliefs, the relevant one being that the simplest answer was usually the right answer.

Why would unknown aliens bother to set up such a complex scenario when they'd proved they could observe the entire Corps with no one the wiser? And not only observe but make them dance?

It didn't make sense.

Prisoners of war did. They'd been at war for a long time.

But the Others didn't take prisoners.

Except they did.

“Gunny?”

Bottom line, it didn't matter who was holding them. They were leaving.

“Come on, Private. Let's move some rock.”

By midafternoon, they'd switched to three at the rock face, three carrying the debris back out of the way. By early evening . . .

Torin turned away from the face, wiping her sweaty forehead on her sleeve. The sides of the tunnel were closing in, and work was slowing as the three Marines carrying had to move farther and farther back. “That's enough of this shit,” she snarled and raised her voice. “Darlys! Jiyuu! Watura! Turn your maskers to maximum and haul ass! If you plan on going through after us,” she added as the three di'Taykan appeared a little better than five hundred meters away at the first bend in the tunnel, “you can damned well help haul rock! Double time, Privates! Move!”

“I thought you didn't want them with us?” Mike murmured as the three small figures began to run.

“I don't,” Torin growled. “But I'm not wasting the time to drag them back to Staff Sergeant Pole, so if we're stuck with them, they might as well make themselves useful.”

“You brought supplements for all three species.”

She turned to glare at the tech sergeant, who gave her a blandly neutral expression back. “Force of habit,” she said at last.

By dark, although the rockfall looked no different, Jiyuu swore he could smell a change in the air up near the ceiling.

“ 'Cause stink rises, you fukking ass kisser,” Werst snarled. “And only Gunny here is still smelling like
heritaig
.”

“If I didn't know that was a type of meat pie, I'd be flattered.” Immediate area around her illuminated by the light in her sleeve, Torin chewed a mouthful of biscuit. “We're not setting off the kinds of slides we were,” she said thoughtfully after she swallowed. “We work in shifts through the dark and we should get through tomorrow.”

By midday, no more rock slid down to replace rock removed. By midafternoon, they were making significant forward progress. By evening, a slide opened the fall up to the other side, both the di'Taykan and the Krai swearing they could smell a change in the air.

Standing on Mashona's shoulders, her hands gripping his ankles to hold him in place, Kyster twisted his body through the space, arms stretched out in front of him. Broken rock snagged the sleeves of his uniform, and jerking his head away from the line of pain as a protruding shard scored his scalp only drove the opposite temple into a point rather than an edge.

“You okay, kid?”

He tightened his grip with his good foot and muttered, “Not a kid.” as his fingers butted up against a barrier of loose rock. The little light that managed to seep around his body told him nothing, so he squirmed a little closer and shoved, swearing as the rock spilled through to the other side and a piece from the side of the narrow passage fell loose and smacked against his cheek.

“Kyster!”

Nothing else seemed to be falling, but he could feel . . . not a breeze but movement in the air against his face. “I'm okay, Gunny! We're through!”

“What do you see?”

He twisted to let a little more light through from behind him, but it barely pushed the gray out past the ends of his fingers. “Feels like open space, but it's dark.

“Use your light!” Mashona barked, whacking him in the calf with the side of her head.

His light. He'd spent so much time in the dark, his uniform doing nothing more than covering bruises, he'd forgotten that most of the tech was back on-line. Glad that Gunnery Sergeant Kerr couldn't see him flush, he tapped his left cuff and peered, eyes watering, along the beam. No mistaking the curved walls or the light dangling from the ceiling or the darker patch of a small cave.

“Gunny! It's more tunnels!”

AS THE ONLY HUMAN MALE, TECHNICAL
Sergeant Gucciard was the bulkiest, so they sized the break to the new tunnels for him.

“He's tech, he's not a fukking tank,” Torin sighed, stopping Watura from dragging out one of the larger rocks. “You remove that and you'll start another slide. Just make sure he can get his shoulders through; everything else is compactable.”

Another time that would have been more than a di'Taykan could resist, but here and now none of them were comfortable enough around her to make the obvious comment. That didn't bother her much although, to those used to serving with di'Taykan, the innuendo was conspicuous by its absence.

Stomachs sloshing with water—the easiest way to carry another couple of liters—they went through: Krai, di'Taykan, Human, one representative of each species at a time. Facing the unexpected, it was smartest to have the strengths of all three species available as quickly as possible. Torin went through after the first three, an extra Human, safe enough to leave her people in the tunnels behind where she knew there was no threat, needing to be with those facing the unknown. Wanting to be first but well aware that leading from that far out front wasn't smart.

The passage added new bruises to old ones turning green under her combats. The width of the rock fall was the only thing that made it even relatively stable, and, at that, the exit into the other tunnels was less a controlled descent than a function of gravity and loose rock.