Dusk (40 page)

“You see something? Hear an alarm?”
Milliken’s anxiety had taken full hold of him now.

“No, nothing at all. And that’s exactly what
bothers me. This is too important. If there are sensors here,
whoever is monitoring them
wants
to catch us.”

• • • • •

As they sped between the waterfalls into the
first corridor, Cyrus franticly pulled one of the envirosuits over
himself.

“What the heck are you doing?” Milliken
looked as if he was so rattled he would either fall over or
burst.

“Trying to figure out the best way out of
this. As a matter-of-fact, we should probably all put these
on.”

“We planning on going back on foot?” Uzziah
asked, trying to add some levity to his own apprehension.

“No, but we might be doing just that if we
don’t put these on. We need to stop in the first chamber up ahead.”
Cyrus zipped up the front of the suit and started looking over the
controls of the ship. “Milliken, that last tunnel out of here is
straight, right?”

“Yeah, more or less,” Milliken answered,
slipping his first leg into his own envirosuit.

“Good, because that may be the only thing
that gives us the time we need.”

The suit was stifling. The composites that
formed the mask of the suit were designed to repel water, but
breath still managed to clog Cyrus’s already muddled vision.
Running blind was a special psychological torture. The transparent
fascia of the suit not only made his beard itch, but made him feel
like he was about to collide with some unseen wall. This suit’s
support unit seemed lighter, more efficient, and better at
maintaining a consistent internal temperature than the prototype
suits they had left back on the Paracelsus. He didn’t need the
oxygenating unit, but as it absorbed and recycled his own stifling
breath, and since he had not run a half K in weeks, it made the
burning in his lungs less intense than it should have been. Also,
as he neared the mouth of the passageway, the HUD temperature
reading counted downward like a stopwatch—without this suit, he
would surely be frostbitten by now.

The sensors, which absorbed outside sounds,
magnified them, and projected them into the suit, kept him aware of
Tanner keeping pace behind him. Cyrus would have expected Tanner to
be more comfortable running in the dark, but he had been rattled
and silent since they had left the strange temple at the center of
the even stranger underground city. Cyrus tried his best not to
focus on what might be next. Most likely, if Uzziah was right,
fighters were descending to kill them this very moment—and if they
died, the significance of the strange underground metropolis would
quite possibly remain hidden for another six hundred years.

This was at least the third time in not as
many days that Cyrus had been afraid for his life. As he rushed
ahead, not sure how much farther he had to go, he thought about how
much the world around him had changed, and how different it was
from how he had expected it to be. Less than a month ago, he was
fighting grown, highly educated men off with sticks in sterile
corridors and playing war games on a jury-rigged deck network. He
and his colleagues had manufactured a sense of trepidation wherever
possible. Now, the melees, skirmishes, stratagems, and above all
else, the trepidation, were anything but manufactured. The blood,
sweat, and angst were all very real, and oddly, as his lungs burned
and he wondered how soon the danger would come, he felt completely
and inexorably alive.

Light flooded the corridor just as Cyrus
brushed his shoulder against the wall of the hallway to make sure
it was still there. The flash of light caused Cyrus’s pupils to
dilate and he strained as the surveying craft they had come in flew
overhead at an alarming rate of speed. The wash from the flyover
pushed him along, and in the brief light, Cyrus saw the end of the
tunnel was only a few meters away. The surveying craft spread light
across the two grounded assault levs outside as it swooped upward.
The envirosuit had a low-light imager, but it required the use of a
forehead mounted light that Cyrus was reluctant to risk using, so
he had to rely on his spatial memory as his pupils contracted
again, making his already blurred vision even fuzzier. He picked up
his pace as he reached the assault levs, praying that the large
levs had not been left there because they were out of
commission.

As Cyrus reached the assault lev, his prayer was
answered. The lev door wasn’t coded, passkey-triggered, or even
locked, but he had to fumble around in the darkness to find the
handle. He looked up to see the lights of their original craft
disappear over the rim of the crater, and he could hear Tanner
opening the other lev. As the door to his lev opened, Cyrus saw
four shooting stars in the sky moving downward together and then
outward. Two of the points of light shrank in size, but two grew.
As Cyrus stepped inside the lev, he hoped that Milliken and Uzziah
had had the same luck.

When they had stopped inside the large
chamber, Uzziah had spun the craft to face the entrance and had
opened the door for Milliken. Uzziah had his doubts about the whole
plan, but he went along with it because he could not think of a
better one. He had dropped Milliken in the chamber to look for
another unit that would start, and then he had flown to drop Tanner
and Cyrus off a half K from the end of the tunnel. Uzziah had
quickly scanned the crater outside to make sure their unknown
attackers were not already upon them, and then he had flown
backward at a dangerous speed while trying to set the autopilot at
the same time. By the time Uzziah had returned to the chamber,
Milliken had started and readied a small mining craft about the
same size as the ship they had come in. Milliken had opened one of
the side doors, and after setting the computer on a timer, he had
leapt from Paeryl’s lev to the mining lev without waiting for it to
set down.

Whether it had been luck or by design, the
ship Milliken had chosen was perfect. The on-board systems included
surveying equipment as well as an articulate holographic imager. As
articulate as it was, it could not make out individual humans if
the ship was moving faster than cruising speed, which meant, if
this were the most advanced their imaging technology had become
since this vessel was created, Cyrus’s plan might actually
work.

Uzziah piloted the craft without lights,
using the imager at its lowest setting so as not to give away their
presence too soon. Milliken powered up the mining lasers mounted on
the four corners of the front of the craft. Uzziah was too focused
on flying with limited resources to pay much attention to
Milliken’s treatise on how the lasers worked. He did gather two
things from Milliken’s rambling though; these were not as strong as
extraplanetary lasers, nor were they military grade, which meant
they had to be fired within three hundred meters to be of use. That
was too close to be up against trained pilots in gunships, but that
was the hand he had been dealt, and folding would not do at this
table.

To his dismay, this craft was not as fast as
Paeryl’s, and as their original lev disappeared at the end of the
tunnel, Uzziah had a sinking feeling that this Fringe-fuck was not
going to go as pleasantly as the last.

The washed out colors on the visor imager
were disorienting, and it took Cyrus longer than he would have
liked to find the power switch. As he turned on the power, the
computers powered up, but he kept the internal lights off. As soon
as the holomonitor appeared, he was presented with a prompt,
preceded by a record of previous logins. It was apparent that
someone had powered up this vehicle at least once every ten gyres.
Most likely someone had been refurbishing the vehicles during that
time because the holograms still worked, and a standard hologram
unit had an average lifespan of about ten years. Also, he couldn’t
tell if it was a function of the visor imaging, but the resolution
of the holomonitor seemed too high for the now antiquated controls,
which, since he was in actuality now antiquated himself, he was
rather familiar with. He was sure he could hear the assault vehicle
next to him power up, so he cancelled the prompt and powered up the
jury-rigged mining lasers.

His holographic imager came into view, zoomed
out to its fullest range, and to his dismay, showed two fighters
spreading away from each other as they descended on them. The
controls of the lasers were somewhat odd, and as they were set up
to cut through rock that could not maneuver evasively, included a
rudimentary, and unfortunately completely manual, targeting system.
Luckily for Cyrus, even in his own time, computer technology had
progressed to a point where the line between hologames and reality
was hazy. The Uni would not even allow holodecks to be taken to the
Fringe for that very reason, and after years of watching Darius
immolate alien spacecraft and blast enemy fighters from the
sky—even blasting a few himself—Cyrus was not intimidated by the
controls in front of him. He was intimidated, however, by the ships
now careening toward them that were probably intent on imbedding
Cyrus and Tanner in the quartz and granite beneath them.

As Cyrus moved the sticks that controlled the
turret, the hologram twisted in the air in front of him, he pressed
the button to open the door, and then another that sent the assault
lev rising into the air. The hologram shifted with his movement,
and he pressed the buttons over the control sticks as he moved
them.

The lasers streamed out from the top of the
tank, much farther than guns normally fitted on a tank would have
ever reached with any effectiveness. The ship shuddered from the
power drain, and a chill shot through Cyrus’s body, causing his
right hand to shift slightly. The two white beams stretched into
the sky like fiery lines drawn by some celestial being. They
stretched on either side of one of the fighters, which dipped to
its right into a spin, but a combination of Cyrus’s adjustments and
twitches crossed the beams in an awkward pattern, slicing in an
angle through the middle of the ship as if it were a hot sweetbar.
The hologram showed detail that would never have been visible in
the night sky. The rear end separated from the ship and continued
on its normal path, but the front end dipped forward slightly,
hanging as if it was about to drip from the sky. It wobbled
strangely, and then, as it must have slipped outside the grip of
the gravity drive, flipped beneath and behind the rear end, which
seemed to stay on its original course, continuing to spin as it
descended. Cyrus was sure these systems could not image individual
humans at this distance, but he swore he saw a body fall from the
front piece of the fighter as it plummeted out of range. Evidently,
the lock-on warning systems of this craft were also still intact
and operational, because even as he leaned forward to get a better
look at the hologram through his visor, a shrill beeping and a
pulsating red light alerted him to what was coming next. Cyrus dove
out of the door of the tank, falling farther than he had expected
too, but the padding in the suit and the lower gravity made the
collision with the ground less traumatic than his mind had
expected. His shoulder burned from the shock of the impact, but he
was beginning to get used to the pain. Before he knew it, he was on
his feet. Tanner had left the door open on his lev, and he began
lifting it from the ground as soon as Cyrus reached the door. Just
as Cyrus jumped in, an explosion rocked the ground beneath them,
temporarily lighting the immediate area. Either Tanner jinked the
lev to the side, or the blast of the explosion moved the lev Cyrus
had left, or both, but the first lev moved toward Cyrus as he
pulled himself inside. As Tanner moved away, Cyrus saw the outside
light up again as the tank he had just jumped out of on fire and
smoking as it settled slowly to the ground, and then was hit again
by another missile.

And then, before he knew it, he was in the
laser control seat, aiming in the hologram again. This time, he
activated the left laser first, hoping to catch the fighter that
had obliterated the other tank with the first shot. He missed, and
the ship evaded. As it spun, he moved his left hand, carving a
fiery swath in the sky as the fighter dipped and spun. This pilot
could only have been used to dodging weaker planetary lasers. The
war had been half a millennium before, but in simulators he must
have trained on being fired upon by an extraplanetary laser. The
warships Cyrus had seen in the holocasts were usually equipped with
several laser batteries with autolocking systems as well as trained
gunners. No, using this type of weapon against fighters would be
like using an assault rifle to kill a mouse; but the mouse, no
matter how many times he practiced, would have difficulty adjusting
once the bullets grazed his hide—especially when his friend was
just obliterated. So as the ship dipped to the right of the
hologram, Cyrus fired the right laser and pulled it toward the left
stream as if he were bringing his hands together to swat a fly.

But the ship dipped downward and dropped
beneath the two streams as they crossed, firing a missile as it
fell. Tanner moved the lev into the air, but the motion of the
modified assault craft was jittery. It was clear he was not used to
moving such a large vehicle, and the lag in its movement, although
slight, was enough to stop them from being able to move out of the
path of the missile. The missile exploded against the side of the
lev and forced it to dip left, throwing Cyrus from his seat.

Tanner was strapped in but the blast dimmed the
controls for a moment and his command inputs would not register.
When the hologram faded back into clear view, Cyrus saw the fighter
leveling off as Milliken and Uzziah’s craft sped above the
lumbering assault lev. Cyrus dove back into his chair to fire the
right laser, but he missed again, sending a bright colored stream
through the sky wide left. Cyrus knew his next shot would be his
last chance because he was sure this assault lev could not take
another blast like the first one.