Tritium Gambit (Max and Miranda Book 1) (10 page)

“
The who-what now?”

She smoothed my hair down. “The Boyhen are genetic engineering masters. Most inter-species couples aren’t genetically compatible, but the Boyhen can help them have a child. That’s what my parents did.”

“
I never really talked to my parents about it. All I know is that they wanted me to be mostly human, and that’s why I have this weak body rather than my mother’s more durable form.”

“
My father was my genetic template, too.”

I took my eyes off my ring and looked over at her. “Well, I’d say you’re dad was kind of hot.”

She laughed. “Just because he was my template doesn’t mean they can’t alter the gender and add in characteristics from my mother. My nervous system is more similar to my mother’s, and so are my muscles. My bones are much lighter and stronger than human bones, and I also have less blood than a normal human. Overall, I’m lighter than I would be if all human.”

“
So your parents raised you then?” I asked.

“
Yes, but they recently moved back to my mother’s home planet.” She sighed. “They send gal-com video messages from time to time, but you know the cost of a two-way cross galaxy communication—the out of network fees are absolutely ridiculous.” She noticed me looking back to my ring. “Is that from your parents?”

I cleared my throat and looked away from her. “So, where’s the sheriff?”

“
He thought you made a good point about the creature. It might not be down here, and so he’s going to look around the top of the cliff.”

“
Very brave of him,” I said sarcastically.

Miranda tucked away her rebreather on her belt. “I know, right?”

I tried not to roll my eyes as I followed her example and put my rebreather away. Miranda pulled her microfiber towel out of a pocket and dried her hair. I was shivering, and so I decided it was a good idea and dried off my hair and exposed skin too. My clothes were designed to dry instantly, but I still felt cold.

I pulled the small bottle of blue pills from my pocket and popped two into my mouth. “Do you want any?” I held the bottle toward Miranda. “They give you a quick metabolism boost, which can help warm you up.”

“
No thanks,” she said. “I feel fine. Why do you have pills like that? Are you worried about your figure?”

I chuckled. “No. They can help me heal faster, too. Good for emergencies. I suppose they could help anybody heal twice as fast, but for most people twice as fast still isn’t sufficient to survive a serious injury.”

She pulled a Bar-F from her pocket and broke it in half. “Here, eat this. You’ll need the calories.” She handed me half and ate the other.

I ate it in a bite, grateful for the food. I had been starving, despite what I had said when I refused the soup earlier. That was another risk for me. A high powered metabolism is necessary for rapid healing, but it has its drawbacks. If I don’t eat often, my body will begin to cannibalize muscle, and when it runs low on muscle, it starts to consume organs.

“
It looks like we’ll go this way.” Miranda indicated a jagged opening leading into the dark. “I’ll leave the glow stick here to help us find our way back to this point, though I’m not entirely sure we can swim out of here.” She unwrapped the thin green glow stick from her wrist and placed it on the floor where it was visible from the cavern she had pointed to.

We both pulled high-powered LED flashlights from our belts. Miranda had hers pointed right into my eyes when she turned it on and nearly burned out my retinas. Two cheers for regeneration.

“
Sorry,” she whispered.

“
Not a problem.” I blinked the tears out of my eyes and then looked down the dark corridor.

“
We should explore the cave for evidence of Tyler,” she said. “We can look for a way out at the same time.”

I wasn’t about to argue. If there was any way out of here that didn’t involve swimming, I was all for it. I thought Miranda was right about swimming out, especially for me. The strong current would smash me to pieces or simply push me back into the cave.

Chapter 10. Max

The cavern was a rough triangular corridor with the ceiling somewhere high above in the darkness. It looked like the foundation of the earth had cracked and shifted, and like the slabs of stone we walked between were waiting to smash back together at any moment. The floor was uneven, covered with loose debris and large sheets of rock that the walls had shed. At one point, the cavern’s walls became very narrow and we had to shuffle sideways through. Further along, we had to crawl on our bellies. After what seemed an eternity to me in that tight passage, we eventually stood up in a large open room.

The low ceiling stretched like a dome over us, touching the rugged floor dozens of feet away in each direction. Nothing about this cavern looked artificial, and there were no obvious exits. Even the way we had crawled in was difficult to make out after taking a few steps. I realized that the different crevices in the walls all looked the same.

“
Hold up,” I said. “Shouldn’t we mark the way we came in so we can find it again if we need to?”

Miranda nodded. “You’re right. We should be placing markers every dozen feet so we know where we’ve been and how to get back. I’ve been spelunking before, and anybody in a cave needs to be careful even if they aren’t looking for a flesh-eater.”

She set about building a cairn, and I helped. When the pile of stones was sufficiently tall so that it did not look like some random pile, she pulled out a thin green glow stick, lit it, and put it on top.

“
That should be plenty visible,” she said. “Even if we don’t need to come back this way, it’s good to know where we’ve been so we don’t cover the same ground again.”

I had to agree, but I had also resolved to dig my way out of the cave before trying to swim out the way we got here. Then I had a depressing thought. “If we’re stuck down here for a while, we might need fresh water.”

Even in the dim light of the glow stick, I saw Miranda frown.

“
I really hope we aren’t down here that long,” she said.

Being stuck in a cave made me wonder who I was stuck with. I realized I really didn’t know Miranda very well. I looked at her. “Why did you become an agent?”

“
There aren’t too many jobs where you get to put your life on the line to save the planet or even the galaxy on a day to day basis,” she said.

“
So, you’re in it for the excitement?” I asked.

“
Aren’t you? There isn’t a more dangerous job.”

I shrugged. “People get hurt, die, or get smelly all the time. I am not sure it is worth it. I’ve heard time and again how amazing my parents were, for example, but now they are dead. I have only a vague idea of who they were. A big price to pay, it seems to me.”

“
Why did you join if you didn’t do it for the excitement?”

“
I was seventeen when my parents died. I didn’t really know what else to do. I guess I wanted to show I could do something I knew they’d be proud of. I didn’t know that I’d be this bad at it though. I probably should have been a truck driver.”

She patted me on the back. “Well, for what it’s worth, I think you’re a good partner.” Miranda took out another glow stick and handed it to me. “You might need this if you lose your flashlight. It’s always good to have an extra light source.” She scanned the debris around us. “Let’s explore.” She walked away and started digging around the room.

We searched the cave, which turned out to be rather large, for over an hour before Miranda called to me, “I found something!”

I made my way through the rubble as quickly as was safe. “What is it?”

“
There’s some sort of hole in the ground here. It’s half covered with this rock, though.”

The rock to which she referred was more like a boulder. I didn’t see any way we were going to move it, but Miranda suggested we try. I thought it a waste of effort, but what the hell. Together we pushed on the boulder and, amazingly, it moved. Miranda must have been much stronger than I thought. With the boulder out of the way, the opening was barely big enough for one person to descend at a time into what appeared to be a slide.

“
It’s called a chimney in spelunker-speak,” she told me.

I looked into the narrow hole, which twisted and bent into the dark. I thought a more appropriate name for it might have been corkscrew. “It doesn’t look like much of a chimney.”

She smiled her brilliant smile, which I had not seen since yesterday—at least not in all its amazing glory. She was beautiful when her eyes lit up. “That’s just what spelunkers call vertical tunnels like this, and they might lead to another room or cavern or might simply dead end. I’ll go first. Wait up here until I give the all clear. I don’t want us both to get stuck at once.”

I pulled a thin cord from my belt and tied one end to the large boulder we had moved. “Take this, just in case you need to climb out or be pulled back up.”

“
Good thinking.”

She put on light gloves that left her fingertips exposed. I dug around in one of my many cargo pants’ pockets and followed her example. The gloves were standard issue and, like so much of our equipment, they were light, compact, and durable. The palms were coated with Marhid rosin, which gave the gloves a sticky quality that would let you grip nearly any surface.

Miranda studied the hole a moment longer. “I’m going to go down feet first in case it’s a dead end, which will make it easier to crawl out—especially if there isn’t enough room to turn around at the bottom.”

She lowered herself into the hole and sat on the smooth, slide-like surface, then started scooting further in. First her feet disappeared around the initial bend, and then she slowly twisted and lowered her torso out of sight. In a few moments I was staring into the darkness where she disappeared. I dangled my feet into the hole and sat down. The extreme silence and stillness of the air unnerved me. At first I heard small sounds coming from the hole as she made her way down, her scooting against the rock, and then nothing. I listened for many moments without hearing so much as a whisper, and then I heard something, a ticking noise coming from the darkness around me. I shined my flashlight around the room and saw small metallic shapes emerging from cracks and dark corners.

The shapes looked like little robotic spiders with glowing red eyes and sharp pincers. They approached warily as I reached into a pocket and pulled out a small ball that looked like it was made from rubber but was really a synthetic material that retained near complete inertia after each bounce—the universe’s best super ball. This ball also emitted small EMP bursts with each impact. I pulled the thread out of it the same way you pull a pin from a grenade, activating it, and tossed the ball with all my strength at the nearest spiders. Even if they were EMP resistant, they would still have to fail-over to their redundant systems, and that would slow them down. The spiders nearest the first bounce froze and clattered to the floor. I narrowly dodged the ball as it zipped past my head, disabling the spiders threatening to pounce on me. I could tell that I had upset the robotic spiders by the high-pitched, robotic chirping they squealed at me.

I jumped into the hole to avoid the next rebound of the ball. “Miranda?” I shouted.

“
Yes?” Her voice was muffled.

“
We have trouble up here. Is it safe for me to come down?”

“
What kind of trouble?” she asked.

A spider robot leapt at me and bit me in the arm, tearing into my flesh. “Miranda, is it safe for me to come down?”

I tossed the spider across the room and it bounced off stone, squirmed, righted itself, and began its approach again. The EMP ball was still bouncing around disabling spiders, but there were hundreds of them and I didn’t have any other way to destroy them. I pulled out a metal cylinder with a nylon-like strap from my belt and pushed a button. The cylinder spiraled out into a circular shield as I held it above my head, but the opening wasn’t big enough for the shield to expand to full size and the shield’s mechanisms groaned and protested at the resistance. The cord that was tied to the rock above was sliced by the shield, and I cursed as the cord whipped past my head. I heard Miranda scream below me. Metallic feet clicked and ticked on the shield. It was made of an alloy that could stop bullets and lasers, and so I reasoned that it should stop a few spiders long enough for us to escape.