The Mandala Maneuver (7 page)

“That would be a little too convenient, don’t you think?”

“Probably.”

They chewed their makeshift meal and drank some water. At least they’d been able to replenish their water stores before breaking camp that morning, and so wouldn’t have to worry about running out before they reached the science station.

And what then?
she thought.
What if the mercs are waiting for us there?

She really didn’t have an answer for that. All she could do was hope that they’d abandon the search once they realized they’d lost all trace of their quarry, and would leave the scene of the crime before anyone else came along.

Not very likely, but hope was about all she had right now.

A
fter lunch
they made good time, walking along the preternaturally smooth tunnels in a more or less northerly direction. Still the passageway sloped downward. Lirzhan kept his fear to himself, that it would keep going down until it abandoned them in some dead end kilometers below the surface of the planet. No, he refused to believe that. Surely they could not have survived so much already, only to be lost in the bowels of Mandala.

Alexa did not appear inclined to talk, and he allowed her that silence. Truly, he did not know what he should say to her. She had hit a little too close to the mark there with her probing questions about precisely why they had been the targets of the attack. He had told her the truth when he said those of his race could not lie, but that did not mean they wouldn’t dance around an issue when necessary. Yes, he had been carrying no sensitive papers with him when they were attacked, as those had already been delivered to the head ambassador on Eridani. Even so, he possessed knowledge that many unscrupulous souls in the galaxy might kill to get.

Right now, it did really not matter why they had been attacked, whether such a thing had been deliberate, or whether they had simply been caught in the aftermath of an experiment that had nothing to do with them, as he had postulated to Alexa. The only thing that mattered at the moment was surviving. They could decides on the whys and wherefores once they reached the station.

He looked down at her, saw how her steps had begun to slow, how her slender shoulders were drooping with weariness. Unlike her, he wore no chronometer, but he guessed a good five hours or more had passed since they had last eaten. There had been no signs of pursuit, no sounds of footsteps coming after them, and so he thought they were safe here underground. So far they had seen no creatures of any sort, and only a few clumps of oddly glowing fungus that shriveled as soon as the light from the lantern struck them. The likelihood of an attack was small.

For the last few minutes they had been walking through a largish cave where the tunnel had opened up, and it seemed as good a place to stop as any. “Time to call a halt, I think,” he said.

Alexa stopped at once and glanced around her. “Not a very defensible place, is it?”

Well, that was true enough. The cavern was wider than it was long, floor and ceiling smooth, with no signs of the stalactites and stalagmites common in such sorts of caves. “At the far wall, then,” he said, pointing to the place where it narrowed down once more into the same sort of tunnel they’d traveled through to get here.

“Sounds good.”

He watched her carefully as she made her way over to the spot they’d chosen, but he could see no signs of a limp. Apparently the bandage was holding this time, probably because she’d done nothing more strenuous than walk in a straight line for the past few hours.

“Blanket?” she asked, extending a hand toward the emergency kit. “This rock is damn cold.”

“Of course,” he replied at once, and extricated it from the kit.

She took it from him and settled it on the ground, then said, “Actually, better give me the other one, too.”

He did as she requested, and looked on as she layered the second blanket over the first. It was chilly down here — or at least it would be chilly for her, in her knee-length skirt and plain jacket. The cold could not penetrate his heavy robes, and he wished he could offer to wrap her in them, hold her close so the temperature of the rocks underneath them wouldn’t affect her, but he doubted she would accept such an offer, even if he were brave enough to make it.

Once again they shared the ritual of eating half a protein bar and drinking a careful amount of water. After they were done, he folded the wrappers and placed them back in the emergency kit, along with the water containers. He’d just begun to settle himself on the ground a few feet away from her when an odd glow at the far end of the cavern caught his eye. Pausing, he narrowed his eyes at the strange phenomenon, wondering if it were perhaps a particularly large clump of the phosphorescent fungus they’d seen earlier.

But then he realized it was moving toward them.

Alexa had obviously seen it, too, for she rose to her feet, saying, “Lirzhan — ”

“I see it,” he told her.

“What is it?”

He began to respond by saying he had no idea, but the glow — whatever it was — had picked up speed, almost as if it had sensed them in some way. It came just close enough for him to see a ghastly green-white gleam, baleful black eyes on stalks, a long slug-like body trailing away from them.

“Go!” he shouted, and Alexa scrambled toward the opening in the cavern that led to another tunnel. He hoisted the emergency kit over his shoulder and grasped the lantern, then fled after her, hearing horrible squelching noises as the beast lumbered after them, bringing with it a noisome scent of decay.

She had just entered the tunnel when he caught up with her, stumbling over the rough ground. For whatever reason, this opening was far more rugged than the ones they had traveled through previously. No time to worry about that, or anything else, as he heard a hissing noise and felt the thud as the monster careened into the opening of the passage, far too large to actually fit through it.

Chancing a quick glance over his shoulder, he saw that somehow the creature was melting the opening, as if its very touch was acidic. But it was slow going, and it soon dropped out of sight as they staggered their way through this new tunnel. After a minute or so, he heard a mournful bellow, followed by the squelching of the beast moving off. Apparently it had decided they weren’t worth the effort.

“What — was — that — thing?” gasped Alexa.

“One of Mandala’s less hospitable denizens, I presume. That would explain the smoothness and the size of those other tunnels we used, though. The creature is highly acidic, and seems to have made its own pathways through the rock.”

She stopped then and looked around the tunnel where they now stood. “But not here.”

“I don’t think so.” Lirzhan lifted the lantern and shone it all around them. The roof of the opening was only a few inches above his head, and was rough with what were clearly outcroppings of solidified metamorphic rock. “This appears to have been a lava tube. That creature has clearly never come down here.”

“Thank God,” she said, and pushed a few stray strands of hair back off her forehead. In the blue-white light from the LED lantern, she looked almost ghostly pale, the usual color in her cheeks gone. “So what now?”

“We push on. We certainly can’t go back, and it doesn’t seem as if any of those creatures could fit down here.”

“Unless they have babies,” she said darkly.

That thought hadn’t occurred to him, and he didn’t like it any more than she clearly did. Still, they really had no choice but to go on…and hope that the pulse pistol he carried would be good enough to protect them, if the creature actually did have any offspring.

“Let us hope it is not mating season,” he replied, and a second or two later she gave an unwilling laugh and began picking her way over the jagged ground.

Holding the lantern high, Lirzhan followed her.

I
t was better
if she didn’t think about it. If she just concentrated on keeping her footing in this new tunnel, then she couldn’t think about the horror they’d left behind them, couldn’t think about what other nightmares might be lurking down here in the dark. True, she could see well enough with the way Lirzhan kept the lantern aloft, could tell that there wasn’t anything around them except bare dark rock, glistening here and there with more of those pale blue crystals. Even so, shivers continued to run down her spine, shivers that had nothing to do with the chill air around them.

How could the Zhore be so calm, marching along a pace behind her, lantern held at a constant height to keep back the darkness? Or was it just easier to hide what he was feeling because of those damn robes obscuring every inch of his body?

She didn’t know, and she didn’t dare ask him. For herself, she knew she’d never been this scared, not when their shuttle came under attack, and not when they had plummeted through Mandala’s skies, not knowing whether the retro thrusters were really going to fire or not.

Before Mandala, she’d never really known fear. Anxiety, sure — worry that she’d be shuffled into yet another foster home when her current foster parents didn’t want to be bothered with her anymore, concern that her scores and grades wouldn’t be good enough, and she wouldn’t qualify for the full scholarship she needed to get through college, since no one else was going to pay for it. Fear that somehow someone would guess that behind the cool, placid face she presented to everyone she was a welter of doubt and unease, that someone would see through her, see that somehow they’d guess she wasn’t as qualified as everyone thought she was, that she was just some kid from the eastern projects in Chicagoland, a girl no one had wanted.

But none of that was the same as staring death in the face, seeing it looking back at you, just waiting for you to make the wrong move. This planet would kill them if they weren’t careful, and maybe even if they were. No telling if this passageway would bring them to safety, or abandon them somewhere far from this alien sun, leaving them to die and become a feast for those glowing slug-creatures…or worse.

Directly ahead the tunnel branched right and left. She stopped, and looked back at Lirzhan. “Any suggestions?”

He stepped forward so they stood abreast, and gazed down first the left, and then the right tunnel. “I believe we will stay more on course if we take the right branch.”

Did all Zhore have what one of her foster mothers had once referred to as a “bump of direction,” or was he just particularly talented? Alexa would have to go with his recommendation, since they didn’t have an old-fashioned compass, and of course GPS required actual satellites to work. Whether signals from those satellites could even reach this deep was moot, since Mandala had no such network in place. If it had been scheduled for development and terraforming, then the satellites would have been some of the first technology deployed here, but the Consortium had no such plans for this world. Not yet, anyway.

Not ever
, she thought, recalling the slug and shuddering.

“The right branch it is,” she said.

Lirzhan nodded, and they both headed in that direction. Normally she would have had some choice words about the rough going, but in this case the irregular ground beneath her feet actually reassured her. A smooth tunnel meant more of those creatures. She’d gladly suffer a whole hell of a lot of bumps and scrapes rather than face one of those things again.

The adrenaline rush subsided, though, and she realized that they had now pushed on long past when they should have stopped to rest for the night. Exactly where they were going to settle this time, she didn’t know; the terrain around them wasn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep. Well, she supposed they’d keep going until a location presented itself. And if it didn’t….

She was saved from having to face that contingency, because just as the thought crossed her mind, the tunnel opened out into a cave — a small one, though, definitely not large enough to accommodate one of those creatures, should it somehow even make its way down here. The roof was still only a few inches above Lirzhan’s head, but the cave itself seemed to be about three meters in diameter, with a relatively flat floor.

“And here we are,” he said, somewhat unnecessarily.

She caught an edge to his normally smooth voice, and guessed he must be very tired as well. How many hours straight had they been going this time? She didn’t know, because she hadn’t even bothered to look at her chronometer since they’d evaded the slug-creature.

“Thank goodness,” she replied, and then paused in consternation. Damn it — they’d left the blankets on the ground when they fled that monster, and now she had nothing to put between her and the cold, hard rock.

Somehow seeming to understand the source of her hesitation, Lirzhan said quietly, “My robes are very warm.”

Oh, she guessed they probably were. She almost retorted that she was just fine without the blankets and without his help, but stopped herself. It would be foolish to decline his offer simply because she didn’t exactly fancy spending the night snuggled up against him. Actually, now that she thought of it….

“Thank you,” she told him, then watched as he settled himself on the ground. She paused for a second or two, gathering her nerve, before she, too, sank to the rocky floor of the cavern and then scooted over next to him. He’d thoughtfully spread out a fold of his long, heavy cloak so she could sit on it, and she situated herself with care, making sure none of the rock was actually touching her.

Quietly, he lifted his arm, and she moved closer, leaning herself against him, feeling him pull his robes around both of them so they were wrapped in a cocoon of warmth. All right, this wasn’t so bad. He held her close, allowing her to rest her head on his chest. His heartbeat was slow and strong, reassuring in its regularity, drawing her down toward sleep.