Arena (43 page)
“IF GOD IS FOR US, WHO IS AGAINST US?
FOR THIS VERY PURPOSE I RAISED YOU UP,
TO DEMONSTRATE MY POWER . . . AND THAT
MY NAME MIGHT BE PROCLAIMED . . . .”
ROMANS 8:31; 9:17
Firing in bursts at the low, crumbling wall behind which the first of the Morresian patrol had taken cover, Callie and the others retreated up the rubble-strewn street of Old Morres. They’d hoped the patrol would not follow them into this ruined city, but the number of Watchers clinging to the walls and balconies around them predicted otherwise. As two more armored giants dashed for cover behind the wall, the blue beams of Callie’s SI–42 stitched small explosions around the doorway through which they had emerged. Her companions’ fire followed suit and they stopped the advance. For now.
The four Morresians at the wall opened fire, forcing her to dive behind a fallen wrought-iron balcony, their pursuing beams sizzling off the metal. A scent of ozone mingled with the dust and the sour-dishrag stench of the ruins. Wiping the sweat from her brow, she rose and fired again, aware of Brody crouched behind a fallen pillar across the street. With the rest of the squad they covered Dell and Tuck, now rushing past them to the rear.
Callie’s last burst flickered and turned pink as she withdrew behind the metal, popping out the spent cube and slapping in a new one. Another burst sizzled along the ruined balcony, and she jumped up, firing again. An answering lance zinged off her shoulder, disrupting her aim and sending tingling numbness down her back and arms. Improved though their shielding was, the weapons of the Nine Cities matched it. Successive hits would produce temporary paralysis—and sometimes a disastrous loss of mental composure.
The bridge into Splagnos lay at their backs, not far now, but they’d been counting on the Morresians’ fear of the ruin to discourage pursuit. Old Morres had not lain abandoned sixty years without reason. When the Splagnosians had penetrated the city’s protective dome and slaughtered its inhabitants years ago, they had left it drenched with poisonous residues. To this day, nothing lived here, except mites and a vine that fed off the toxins themselves.
Pierce’s voice crackled over the receiver in her ear, “Okay, Two. Go.”
The others were in position now and firing. Callie caught Brody’s eye, and together they sprinted another leg. Something exploded behind her, black smoke roiling past her feet. Shouts followed, then the rapid
zip-zip-zip
of SIs, then another explosion, and the stench of ozone. The Morresians must have lobbed some stink bombs, in hopes the sedating gas would slow them. She skidded behind a wide stone stairway and resumed firing while the others ran by in their turns. Sweat dribbled down her sides. She wiped her brow again, drying her fingers on the leg of her khaki jumpsuit. The bandana she’d tied around her forehead was already soaked, useless until she could wring it out.
Ten Morresians now held the end of the long street, with more coming in behind them. If the bridge passpoint wasn’t there . . .
It’ll be there
, she told herself as she picked a target and fired. She hit once, then twice, but missed the third shot that would have brought the Morresian down before he dove for cover.
By then her friends were past, the whole group leapfrogging down the street, until it was again Callie and Brody’s turn.
“All the way to the bridge, Cal,” Pierce said in her ear. She gave him a thumbs-up and sprinted down the road, her pack bouncing against her back. Careening around a black hulk of building, she raced into a crater-pocked plaza. On its far side stood the stone-and-iron wall that lined the river chasm bisecting Old Morres.
Two nights ago an ASB had given them a map of the ruins and a six-inch blood crystal. The map showed a long-destroyed bridge where there would likely be a passpoint for the crystal to activate. There’d been no direct instruction, as usual, but since the main bridge was under guard by both Morresian and Splagnosian troops, the passpoint seemed the perfect solution to the problem of crossing into Splagnos.
Now Callie sprinted across the plaza, dodging car-sized blocks and leaping runners of the oily-leaved toxvine. Impressive in its time, the bridge gateway had been reduced to a jungle of toppled stones and twisted, thigh-thick rails. Brody’s rapid footsteps slapped the pavement behind her as she climbed the pile to peer over the top. Blue-black walls plunged a hundred feet to the frothy, emerald-hued Black River. Debris cluttered its narrow banks: stone blocks, wood beams, hunks of iron tangled with the detritus of vegetation carried through on high water. On the far wall all that remained of the opposing gatehouse was a gaping hole framed by dangling tendrils of iron. On the near side just to her right, a pair of supports arched thirty feet over the river before shearing off into nothing. There was maybe fifty feet between them and the other side.
And more of the obnoxious Watchers.
Brody climbed up beside her, panting. Behind him, the rear guard was firing from the point where the road curved.
“You look for a port up here,” Callie told him. “Try the gate pillars. I’ll check the rail tunnel under us.”
Brody dropped back to do as she suggested while she slipped off her pack and slung her SI across her back, then eased down the far side of the wall. A breeze that was almost cool rushed up around her. About ten feet above the level where the bridge supports extended from the cliff wall, she was forced to stop. She could see the gap between the sheered-off bridge and far bank clearly now. If they couldn’t find the activation port, maybe they could use their grappling hooks to swing over and rig a cable crossing. Their armor could withstand a good number of hits before the paralysis set in, and the Morresians hadn’t proved to be especially good marksmen. It might work.
Tuck peered down at her from the top of the wall. “Brody’s come up empty.”
She glanced over the edge of her rocky perch. The ledge lay just below. “I’m almost there,” she called as she turned onto her belly and wriggled over the meeting of two stones.
“Need a rope?” Tuck asked.
“No.” Her toes reached the bottom of the block, then nothing. She risked another glance down. Cliffs and river spun up at her, dark rock, white foam, green ribbon. She shut her eyes and swallowed hard, willing the dizziness away. At least she had confirmed that the ledge extended out from her present position. An easy jump.
Touching the link for reassurance, she slipped off the rock, landed lightly, and immediately dropped forward onto knees and hands. For a moment she held the position, struggling to regain her breath and bring her heart rate back down, as new zips of SI fire above reminded her that time was short. The tunnel cut back into the rock before her, its single rail twisted and raised from its bed, the end standing about a yard above the ground. Shifting, hissing movement and frequent glimmers of light reflecting off undulating carapaces—along with a sharp acidic smell— told her the tunnel was crawling with mites.
Grimacing, she stood and began inspecting the walls.
The Tohvani’s pale figure appeared even as its words formed in her mind.
You actually
like
this, don’t you?
It stood five yards into the tunnel, swallowed in shadow, its scaly “skin” softly luminescent.
It’s exciting,
challenging, and you’re good at it. Even if you won’t admit it
.
She ignored the thing, studying the walls around it.
It won’t be like this at home, you know. Your overbearing mother, your
matchmaking sister, your dead-end job
.
Annoyance rose in her. She cut it off.
You’re not going to have
him
there, either. We’ll see to that
.
Callie’s earpiece crackled, and Pierce’s voice came through, calm and clear. “Find anything?”
She pressed the patch at her throat and spoke. “An old tunnel, dust, a zillion mites, and—yes! There it is.”
High on the wall to the Tohvani’s left, three blue circles glowed in the shadow. She’d seen red, gold, and silver ports before, but this was the first blue one.
“Great. I’ll send Gerry down with the crystal.” As the group’s best marksman, Pierce would stay topside to cover their escape.
You don’t have to go home
, the Tohvani persisted.
We treat our own
very well
.
“I can see that.” She glanced sourly at the rubble around her. “Wonderful city you’ve provided here.”
Witnesses like you caused the destruction of this city. We tried to stop
it
.
“Right.”
Why are you talking to this thing, Callie?
She turned from the Watcher as a pair of legs dangled past the overhang in a shower of dirt and pebbles. Gerry dropped onto the ledge, his pack, a rope with a grappling hook, and his SI strapped to his back. Immediately the earth began to shake, releasing a cloud of dust. Together they backed warily toward the precipice, eyeing the ten-ton blocks jittering above their heads. Earthquakes were common in the Inner Realm, and those rocks had been up there a long time. No reason to think they’d come down now, right?
Before a minute had passed, the trembling faded. Sneezing on the dust, Gerry handed her a rectangular prism of clear crimson flecked with gold, the finest blood crystal she’d ever seen; it would’ve brought a fortune in the Outer Realm. She took it to the insignia, then hesitated, made uneasy by the Watcher’s brief appearance and struck again by the device’s blue color. A false box would destroy the crystal and the person inserting it. Still, the configuration was right. . . .
She aligned the crystal with the central dot, feeling inexplicably tense, as if she might be shocked on contact. Yet, there was no reason—
“Hold up, there, Cal!”
She recoiled from the wall.
“Here’s another one.”
Gerry stood at the tunnel’s mouth. A second circle-and-dot device glowed on the wall outside. Her nape hairs crawled. Distracted by the Tohvani, she hadn’t seen it. Like the first, it, too, was blue.
She told Gerry about the Watcher. “I thought it was trying to distract me from that one,” she said, gesturing to the first device, “but it must have been yours it didn’t want me to see.”
His brown eyes narrowed. “Or else that’s what it
wants
us to think.”
Callie inspected the second insignia. “You mean draw our attention to the right one in hopes we’ll think it’s wrong?”
Blue beams shot overhead in quick succession, startling them both. Then Callie heard shouting and falling rock, the zip of the SIs. The ground trembled again in aftershock, and Pierce’s voice rattled in her earpiece. “We can’t hold them off much longer, love. You got something or not?”
She could almost hear the Tohvani’s laughter.
Think!
She told herself. And immediately sought the link. Though she could feel Elhanu’s comforting presence, he never spoke to her directly through it, at least not in words. But that aversion she’d felt toward inserting the crystal into the first insignia—surely that was from him. Which meant the outer one was the real one.
Without hesitation, she stepped to the wall and pressed the crystal’s end to the device. It stuck with a click and she jerked her hand back as a current zinged through it. The crystal vanished into the rock with a high-pitched whine, and the ground trembled a third time. Then a shaft of red light shot out from the ledge, arcing over the gorge to the rock on the far side.
“Outstanding!” Gerry cried, slapping her back. Grinning with relief, Callie pressed her transmission patch. “We’ve got activation. Come on down.”
The last word had barely left her mouth before three packs dropped onto the ledge—one was her own—and Tuck and Dell slithered over the rocks after them. As they turned to the bridge, Tuck exclaimed in horror, “It has no side rails.”
He was right. It was not a bridge so much as a walkway of light, with nothing to hang on to.
“But it’s a good yard across,” Dell pointed out. “If it were on flat ground we wouldn’t think twice.”
LaTeisha landed beside them, saw the bridge, and made the same observation as Tuck.
“Well,” Gerry said finally, “the longer we stand here, the worse it’ll git.”
He stepped onto the red span and started rapidly across it. As he topped the central rise, Callie took a deep breath and followed, fixing her gaze on the point where the bridge met the rock on the far side.
The Morresians spread out along the cliff behind them, yelling and firing wildly. They hit few of their targets, and everyone reached the far bank. Then Pierce shot out the activation port and the bridge dissolved— just as a couple of Morresians were climbing down to it.
Leaving their enraged howls behind, Pierce led the way into the Splagnosian side of the city. Tall, soot-stained buildings sagged around them, walls pocked by the acid rains which daily leaked through the crumbling dome overhead. Dark green toxvine snaked across the rubble in a glistening carpet pierced by six-inch thorns. Foot-long mites the same color as the vine scuttled beneath it, providing a hissing, rustling accompaniment to their passage. The sour-dishrag stench, carried on air that was hotter and steamier than ever, became nauseating.
