| To Saralinda: Part 3 |
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To Saralinda: Part 5 |
Keith shoulders the backpack containing a portable blowtorch and power drill. He looks over at me. “Ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be, Cap’n.” I adjust my miner’s helmet and glance down at my utility belt. Plenty of hooks, a canteen, first aid kit, bolt cutters, knife, flashlight, a pack with a couple of sandwiches and both coils of rope on my shoulders, since Keith is carrying the blowtorch. My backpack has nothing but a small folded blanket to wrap Saralinda in for a safe ride back to the surface, assuming we find her. I hope we do. There aren’t a lot of things in my life I’ve wanted this badly.
We take the elevator in the northeast tower down to sublevel ten, which is as far as it goes. The doors open into a cavernous space with dimmed overhead lights, heavy support pillars and little else. A lone canary-colored cargo skiff sits in the corner closest to us. Someone has painted the hood and sides of the cab over the front wheels to make it look like Yellow Lion’s face. We both get a chuckle out of it.
“Here goes...” Keith retrieves his scanner and turns slowly as he activates it, his gaze fixed on the tiny screen. He stops parallel to the east wall and points ahead of him into the darkness.
“Straight ahead till we reach the north wall, then count two panels to the left starting from the corner. There should be stairs leading down to the shelter level behind the second panel.”
He starts off, and I follow him. Once we reach the agreed-upon section of wall he bangs on it with his bolt cutters and we’re both happy to hear a nice, hollow ring come from behind it. Keith promptly digs the blowtorch and mask out of his pack and sets to work, cutting a doorway into the thick steel. When he’s done I put on my gloves to help him slap at it around the edges. It gives inward and falls onto the steps behind it with a loud clang that makes our ears ring, clanking its way along the stairs until it thumps to an abrupt stop in the shadows below.
Keith snaps on his helmet lantern and peers down the stairwell. The piece of paneling has been stopped by a small landing that disappears through a doorway on the right. He steps back to repack the torch and its accessories, then sets it aside. I toss off the ropes and we both go down to move the chunk of steel out of the way. Keith takes a peek through the doorway.
“Another set of stairs and a corridor,” he says to me. I nod and we head back up to get the ropes and blowtorch. Once we’re back at the landing I turn my helmet light on as well. Keith grins at me.
“Shall we embark on the quest?”
“Throw me the whip.”
“Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip.”
We laugh as he leads the way down the second flight of stairs.
We arrive at the entrance of a long corridor stretching on to infinity, it seems. Keith glances at the floor and gives me a nudge. “Look.”
I look down to see a crack in the floor tiles, zigzagging ahead of us to vanish into the gloom. Not a good thing. Keith studies his scanner and frowns.
“We’re nowhere near the part of the shelters where Allura and her family stayed, and we’re up against this already. It’s not a large crack, but it could be worse further on.”
“Guess we’ll cross that crack when we get to it.”
Keith gives me a sideways glance and resumes point again.
A hundred feet along, the split begins to widen from a pencil’s width to several inches. By the time we reach the first intersection on the map it’s grown to two feet across and has vanished beneath the corner on our right only to reappear again about twenty feet ahead and cross the floor on a north/south diagonal. We slow our steps considerably.
Keith steps on a section of tile close to the fissure and his right foot breaks through it. He starts to pitch forward but I grab him by his backpack and snatch him back toward me. He hooks his right arm under mine and braces to yank his foot free.
“Whoa, Cap’n.” I frown at the tile. “That one looked just as solid as the rest of them.”
Keith gives a curt nod. “We need something to test the floor with.”
“Well, we could get Hunk to come down and walk ahead of us, and when he disappears, then we’ll know we have trouble.”
Keith makes a face a me. “Try again.”
I cast my gaze around the area while thinking of a reply, and my helmet light falls on something of interest. “Okay, how about those?” I point at a pair of thin steel rods about five and a half feet long propped against the wall on our left.
Keith looks at them, then back at me. “Yeah, those will do.”
Keith grabs one of the rods and frowns at the hole he made in the floor for a moment before he begins to tap on the floor tile. Three-quarters of it crumbles away to reveal a hole about half a foot deep.
“Great, just great. Wonder how much of this we’ll be up against?”
“Probably a lot. Maybe we should just go back and forget about it.”
Keith shakes his head. “Nope. I’m not ready to call it quits just yet.” He steps gingerly into the hole and taps the tile ahead of him. That one is sturdy. He steps up onto it and frowns. Beyond the breach in the floor is a pile of rubble from the ceiling and the collapsed section of wall that once supported it. The debris is too high to allow for even a crawl space. Keith frowns at it.
“We have to go through that.”
“How about we check through those doorways on either side of you for another passage before we start digging?”
“Good idea, Lance.” He takes the room on the left, I enter the one on the right. I find more rubble, another crack running almost parallel to the one in the hall, but all the tiles in here are stable. There’s no other way in or out of the room, though. I’m about to leave when my helmet light runs across a faded image painted on the wall opposite. I move closer to take a look.
Someone drew a pretty decent caricature of Zarkon’s face superimposed on a horse’s rear end right at the spot where the fertilizer drops out. Nice. I chuckle a little and return to the hall. Keith is out there already, looking rather unhappy.
“What’s up, Cap’n?”
He jerks his thumb in the direction of the room he was in. “The east wall of that room is pretty much gone. The only thing left to the floor are some broken support struts. The fissure goes through the rock to a section that I’m pretty sure has the hall we have to cross to reach Allura’s room.” He produces the scanner and studies it again. “Yeah, just our luck.”
“Guess we have to find an alternate route then.” I take my scanner out, access the floor plan and hold it out in front of him. “Where’s the break at?”
Keith draws his finger over the area in question. “Right here. The fissure looks like it’ll break across the floor just before the first bend in the hallway.”
“What’s this room right next to the turn?”
“Storage room or rest room. Dunno which.”
“Maybe we can bust through the walls and take a shortcut.”
“Maybe. We’ll know when we get there. First we have to clear a path.”
We drop the excess gear and begin clearing away the pile of rubble blocking our way to the next intersection. Keith hefts a large stone in his arms and as he carries it over to the destroyed room to drop it into the fissure I notice he’s favoring his right foot, limping ever so slightly. He must have twisted it a little when he almost fell. I cuss quietly under my breath.
Telling him about Allura’s outburst must have really gotten to him. He’s determined to find that doll or die trying, and all to prove a point. I shouldn’t have told him about it. I should have just tried to con him into kissing her in a different way. I would have had plenty of time to dream up a plan.
He notices my helmet light shining on his foot, gives me a tight little smile and goes back to working. I turn my attention to the job at hand as well. We finally reduce the blockage to a height we can walk over and I cut ahead of Keith with my testing pole in hand. He tilts his head at me. I look down at his foot, back up at him, return his reserved little grin and resume my walk. He doesn’t respond.
The first section just beyond the debris is stable. The second one isn’t, and has two splits in it for good measure. The fissures could easily be jumped over, but there’s no telling whether the ground beneath the unstable tile is strong enough to support a landing, much less the section beyond it. I look over my left shoulder and explain the situation to Keith.
“Permission to test the stability of the floor, Sir.” I give a snappy salute.
“Sure you don’t want to call Hunk down here to do it?”
“Ha, ha. Gimme your backpack.”
Keith quirks a eyebrow at me as he hands it over. I take a moment to study its weight, then select a stone that weighs about as much plus a little extra. I tuck the stone under one arm, take the rod in my free hand, back up a couple of steps, run and jump. The tile doesn’t crumble, but it does buckle slightly. My second hop lands me on solid stone. I ditch the rock and reach out with the rod to tap the tile at the center of the intersection. Nice and firm. I give Keith a grin and hop back
“All clear, Sir.” I salute him again. “Another job well done by Lance the Magnificent.”
“You should have secured yourself with one of the ropes before you did that.”
“The fissures aren’t that deep. I wouldn’t have gone too far down.”
“You could have been hurt if that floor collapsed from beneath you. You have to be more careful than that, Lance.”
“Really, now. Think I might have twisted my ankle or something?”
Keith looks quite annoyed. “Drop the ankle bit, will you?” He shoulders his backpack and makes the jump across, using his left foot first. I retrieve the rest of my stuff and follow.
“So how bad did you twist it?”
He avoids my gaze by breaking out the scanner and studying it again. “Not too badly, I think.”
“That eliminates you from doing anything complicated.”
“I think I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Judge, schmudge. If the travel gets any worse, you won’t be able to maneuver well on a bum foot. And I’m not about to go topside and tell everyone that you took a plunge without a chute because you ignored an injury you got during the excursion and that same injury tripped you up later on.”
He glares at me. “My foot is not that bad, Lance. And we have ropes for when the going gets tough, remember?”
I grin at him. “Just checking, Cap’n.”
“We have to go left to reach the Princess’s living quarters,” he says.
We both shine our lights in that direction, and immediately we spot the big opening in the floor. This one is a good ten feet wide, and is right where Keith predicted it would be. Closer examination reveals that it isn’t deep - three to four feet - which makes it more of an annoyance than anything else. The tiles on the opposite side still have some support beneath them, but the stone is full of tiny cracks and we haul ourselves up with care.
Rounding the bend to the right brings us to a second break, but this one is even more shallow than the first and we cross it easily. The left turn reveals a third break and this one is so deep that the floor across the way is a good two meters above our heads. The embankment leading up to it seems to be made entirely of pulverized rock. I cuss each and every time I lose my footing. It’s like trying to crawl up a hill made of sand.
Several shirtfuls of dirt later we’re back up in the hallway, standing at an entrance with its sliding door stuck halfway open. Beyond the door is a short hallway with some scattered crates on the right and a big pile of loose stones further in. I lead the way this time, tapping my way along as Keith studies his scanner.
We pause at the crates to go through them and find nothing but some trash and a few abandoned cans of gule beans, Arus’s answer to the lima bean from Earth. Can’t blame people for leaving those behind, really.
Keith takes a turn at blazing the trail and we bypass the stones on the left, take a right turn at a T-shaped intersection and cross a section of floor with a small crack running through it. It feels like walking on a piece of cardboard placed over sand.
Another right turn brings us to a small pile of rubble and debris and a section of broken wall. The opening is large enough to walk through without trouble. We poke our heads through and find a room with a small pink and white canopied bed on our left. Keith’s lantern reflects off of a shattered dresser mirror on the wall directly opposite us.
“Allura’s room,” Keith says quietly. “The map was right on the money. Bless you, Pidge.” He pockets the scanner and enters through the breach, with me right behind him.
| To Saralinda: Part 3 |
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To Saralinda: Part 5 |