Chapter 31
UNDER THE COVER of the masses of fighting refugees, they slipped quickly inside the water towers. Shutting and bolting the door behind him, Six signed to Diva and Testan to follow him, and left the others to defend the bolted door. They had long lost sight of the second group, slowly battling its way towards the western tower.
Six climbed into the water tank and Diva and Testan followed him. They all adjusted their mask packs, and then slowly lowered themselves beneath the water level. There was a slight slope down to the fuel station, so there was no need for complicated vents and hatches. By gravity alone the water found its way along the underground tunnel, filling the smaller tank inside the fuel deposit to the brim. Six signed to Testan to breathe slowly and without panic, and then let himself sink under the water.
It was pitch black and very inhospitable. They sank down until their feet touched the bottom of the deep tank, and then moved slowly towards the centre. Panic was taking hold of all of them now, and it was difficult to keep their breathing calm.
At last they managed to locate the hole in the centre of the tank. It was about five hands in diameter, enough for one person. Six forced himself to dive head first into the tube, and began to pull himself steadily along by laying his hands flat on the sides of the tube, which were slightly slippery with the accumulation of algae from the water. He found himself fighting a cloying feeling of claustrophobia. It was one of the worst things he had ever had to do. I can’t give up now, he thought to himself. Diva is just behind me. She will think nothing of something like this. I will not be beaten by that Coriolan aristocrat. No way! He thought of her face if he went back a failure. Not going to happen. He would rather die down here than see a look of disdain on Diva’s face. He fought back the panic, imposing a steely determination on his quivering heart.
Finally he felt an upturn in the tube, and then the circular piping around him opened out. He was through into the smaller tank situated in the fuel depot. He allowed himself to float to the surface, and pulled off the mask pack gratefully. The pent-up stress came out in a long and deep sigh.
He swam to the side of the tank, and clambered out. Then he waited for the next swimmer to come through. There was a very long pause, and he began to think that they hadn’t made it, when Diva appeared, her expression one of infinite distaste.
“If you ever ask me to do something like this again, Kwaidian,” she said as a greeting, pulling off her mask pack, “I swear I shall kill you!”
“Where’s Testan?”
Diva raised her eyebrows. “You mean the bold trainee meant to look after me? He won’t be coming.”
“What have you done to him?”
“I haven’t done anything to him,” said Diva complacently. “He put one toe inside the tube and discovered a sudden illness which impeded his taking part in your little excursion. He sends his apologies.”
Six glowered. “You should have made him come!”
Diva’s eyes flashed. “And how exactly was I supposed to do that, nomus?”
“Well I don’t know do I? You usually manage to terrify everybody!”
“On this occasion the water was the greater of the two evils. I threatened to slice his head off with my dagger, and he looked as if he would prefer that to coming down the tube.”
Six gave a grunt. “It wasn’t much fun.”
“That is the understatement of the year, untouchable! And just think, we still have the happy journey along the fuel pipe to come!” Diva fought to keep her voice calm. There was no way on Lumina she was going to let the Kwaidian see just how frightened she had been when she had forced herself into that black tube. The only thing that had kept her going was the thought of his expression if she had chickened out of it. She couldn’t blame Testan for his fear: she had felt much the same herself.
“Well. Now you have finally deigned to arrive, my lady, we can put phase two into operation.” He looked at the huge fuel tank, and signaled for her to follow him up the ladder. Outside they could hear the shouts and struggles of the Elders as they pushed into the battle. Inside everything was bathed in a surreal green colour, and the sounds were subdued by all the liquid present.
They scaled the ladder, finally reaching the top. From there, the fuel was allowed to run across the piping, which was supported by Y frames every half dozen metres or so, over the heads of the struggling Elders. The main piping was slightly translucent: they would be able to detect light, perhaps even vague shapes. It also meant that if anyone happened to look up, they might be detected too. And now they had to take separate routes.
Six identified the tube that led to the northern ship, and then stopped, turning to look at Diva.
“I will never speak to you again if you don’t make it,” he told her.
“You worry about yourself, nomus! I will be up at the orbital station long before you have even made it into the space shuttle!” she told him severely.
He smiled and then gave her a quick hug. “I know,” he said. “You are worth ten of me.”
She hugged him back. “Don’t keep me waiting, no-name! I detest people who don’t keep appointments.”
“I’ll be there waiting for you,” he promised. “Just don’t go on any scenic detours.”
“Me? I’m a Valhai, remember? I can do anything.”
He watched her as she let herself slowly into the round piping on her side of the tank. “I hope so,” he muttered to himself. “I really hope so.”
He waded over to his own tube, fed himself head first into the piping, and began to propel himself along towards the spaceship.
GRACE WAS SHIVERING as she surfaced from the water tubing and found herself inside the fuel depot. She felt frozen to her very core, and had never been so scared in her whole life. She swam over to the side of the water tank and climbed out. Gerrant was already there, and they waited for a few minutes for Solian. Finally he joined them, tearing off his mask pack, which had blocked on the way up in the final tank.
They began to climb the metal steps set into the side of the fuel tank, and Grace was reminded of the steps up the skyrises on Valhai. She would have given anything to be back there again. Any place would have been better than here, in the middle of this awful war, about to thread herself through a pipe surrounded by toxic fuel, she thought. Just thinking about it made her feel dizzy.
Gerrant gave her a concerned look. “All right?” he asked.
She stifled back the impulse to scream no at the top of her voice and managed a small nod. “F-f-fine.”
He touched her on the shoulder. “You will do it,” he assured her. “You are a Sellite. You can do anything!”
I wish. But she didn’t say it out loud. Let him think what he liked. It might help, and certainly would do no harm.
They let themselves down into the fuel floating in the tank, pushing aside a soapy scum on the surface. Then they separated – the two Kwaidians to the southernmost pipe, and Grace to the northern one. She looked back just before she went in. Gerrant held one thumb up in the air, and gave her an encouraging smile. She held her own thumb up, and nodded.
DIVA COULD FEEL her hair burning. The liquid fuel had somehow managed to penetrate the mask pack; the chemicals in it felt as if they were slowly eating their way through her follicles. She didn’t think it mattered. As far as she could see there was no way she could survive this idea of Six’s. I might have known you would be the death of me, she told the absent Kwaidian silently. What took you so long?
The mask pack was struggling, and she had no hope of switching to another if it did block. With the bodywrap on there was barely room for her to pull herself along the tube. There was no way she could change a mask pack. In any case, they were made for low atmospheres, not for surviving lethal liquids. She wasn’t even certain she would be able to manage her knife when the time came. At least she had remembered to transfer it to her hand before she went into the fuel feed. She squirmed her way along the pipe, over the bumps of the Y frames, feeling a stinging in her eyes which boded no good for the future, and waiting at every moment for a popular clamour to announce that she had been spotted by the elders.
It was almost an anticlimax to reach the end of the heavy piping, and pass into the flexitubing which traversed the last few metres to the closed hatch. She thanked Lumina that she had the dagger in her hand. Otherwise she would have had no chance of getting at it. She edged the blade around, using the other hand to pull herself as close as possible to the hatch. It was closed on the inside of the ship: there was no way they could penetrate the ship from outside, but the tubing close to the hatch was made of a lighter and more flexible material, to enable easy connection. She had to cut her way out of this tubing, fall the three metres or so to the floor, fight her way around the ship to the entry hatch, get in, close the hatch, and then take off over any bodies which happened to get in her way. The Kwaidian couldn’t possibly have thought up a more impossible mission if he had dreamed about it for months, she thought. Trust him! And he had complained about being thrown to the Tattula cats!
Diva positioned the knife above the tubing, and uttered a short silent prayer to Sacras. Then she plunged it into the flexitubing, sawing and hacking at the material as fast as she could.
There was a short time when everything passed in slow motion, just as it had when she had fallen through the orthogel for the first time on Valhai, then the combination of her own weight and the fuel tore open the gash in the tubing, and she felt herself falling to the ground.
The fall knocked the breath out of her, but she was on her feet, knife at the ready, before any of the sycophants had even realized what had happened. They were shouting as the fuel splattered them with corrosive liquid, screaming as it bit into their unprotected flesh. Diva didn’t stop to look, in one fluid movement she flung herself towards the front of the spacecraft, towards the entry hatch, pulling the mask pack off her face as she did so. The fresh air of Kwaide for once felt absolutely marvelous, and great gulps of it were hardly enough to compensate for the claustrophobic poisonous atmosphere she had just left.
There were shouts, though, as she made her move. Not all of the sycophants were concentrating on getting out of the way of the spurting fuel. She had been spotted. Diva cursed her bad leg. It was holding her back, and she lifted her arm to strike at the first person to stand in her way. She was nearly there; she could see the hatch in front of her.
A hazy figure loomed out of the background, and then disappeared as she slashed at it with a backhanded blow. A satisfying thump told her that the hilt of her knife had connected with an enemy chin. A sycophant knife buried itself in the bodywrap, pinning her left arm momentarily to its side, and missing her flesh by a hair’s breadth. She managed to tear the weapon out and then fling it aside as she kept moving. She was there now – the hatch was in front of her.
Shouts of alarm told her that they had realized what she was planning. Too late! She grinned inanely to herself. You are all too late, because I am there. She catapulted herself through the open hatch, and banged her right arm against the locking device as she fell through.
The hatch was already half-closed as she leapt to her feet and threw herself on the dim figure she had spotted inside the spacecraft. It gave a scream, and Diva held the downward blow at the last minute.
“Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!” The figure cowered away from her. Diva peered a bit closer, and then gave an exasperated sigh. “Of all the spaceships on all the planets, I would have to find you in mine!” she muttered.
“You are a horrible girl. Let me out!”
“No way, Jalana. You are here to stay.” Diva had no more time for pleasantries, so she simply dragged the girl over to two of the containment rings set into the hull and locked her securely to them. “Going up!”
Jalana’s eyes showed white. “No!” she shouted. “I don’t want to go up!”
“Should have thought of that before you clambered into a spaceship,” said Diva grimly.
“They put me here so that Six wouldn’t fire on the ship!” snapped Jalana.
“Nice friends you have.” Diva had decided to obviate the preflight checks, and had simply pressed the ignition button on the console, after making sure the fuel hatch was secure. The thumping on the fuselage stopped abruptly as the sycophants determined that being fried by rocket engines was not a good way to die. Diva’s fingers raced over the console, enabled the automatic take-off facility, pressed the engage button, and then took a few seconds to grab a full water bottle. from one of the storage lockers and empty it over her head and face.
She emerged gasping a second later, her hair newly streaked with a nasty shade of bluish green and eaten away in places. She looked terrifying and Jalana cringed back against the ring around her wrist.“Don’t touch me!”
Diva curled her lip. “Touch you?” she murmured. “You have got to be kidding! You are lucky I didn’t throw you in the nearest fuel tank and burn you to a crisp!”
“You are a friend of my brother’s!”
“And you … aren’t.”
“He is still my brother.”
“Well, maybe you will get lucky and be able to try that number on him. In the meantime, you had better shut up, because I have things to do, and if you bother me too much, I might still decide to throw you out of the hatch without a parachute.”
The Kwaidian girl glared, but kept silent. She wasn’t sure whether the Coriolan was serious or not.
Diva turned her attention to the console. What she needed to know now was if the others had successfully managed to get their spaceships off the ground. She totally forgot the existence of the other girl, losing herself in the fight beneath. Where had Six got to?
SIX HEARD THE jet engine start up nearby as he reached the flexitube at the end of the fixed fuel pipe and his heart leapt in exultation. Diva must have made it! The vibrations carried clearly into his pipe, and he knew that he would never have a better moment to cut through the tube. He hacked away, and then clutched his dagger close to him as he fell to the ground.
The nearby spaceship was beginning to move now, and most of the sycophants around Six were looking at that. Some though, were ducking and looking up, trying uselessly to brush off the liquid fuel which had fallen on them. His shuttle was in horizontal take-off position, Diva’s had been in vertical. Six fell to his knees and scrambled around to the back of the ship. He forgot all about the mask pack, having to tear it off when it blocked. Thank Sacras it hadn’t chosen to block inside the fuel pipe! He felt lucky. He hauled himself up onto the fuselage of the shuttle, and then pulled himself over the tapered exhaust cone, stepping on one of the smaller directional exhaust pipes. From there he was able to reach up to the entry ladder, now horizontal because of the shuttle’s orientation. He was about to swing himself up when he became aware of a rocking movement on the exhaust casing, and ducked instinctively.
The attacking soldier in the sycophant army lurched as the expected contact with his target did not materialize. Six took immediate advantage of that, and flung his arms around the other man’s knees, knocking him down to the casing. Six cursed. He could not allow himself even a few seconds more in open sight of an enemy army. Every second that passed meant that his chances were exponentially slimmer.
He pushed at the man’s face, and that turned out to be the right thing to do. Six’s bodywrap was still coated with propellant, and as he struggled to force the man’s head back, all of the remaining toxicity in the sodden finger wraps reached the man’s eyes. He cried out, and put a hand up to his face.
That was all Six needed. With a huge effort, he tumbled the man off the casing, hung momentarily from the horizontal rungs, then pulled himself up and into the open hatch, punching at the locking mechanism as he fell through the hatch and down onto the interior cabin floor.
Ouch! The landing was far worse than he expected, and he had damaged one hand, which had been trapped under the rest of his body. He stared at it angrily, but the thing dangled quite uselessly. He would have to make do with only one. He did the best he could with the one working hand, racing to get the engine started with monopropellant for a non-vertical takeoff. He could feel the sycophants clambering onto the fuselage, and hear their furious shouts, but he didn’t care. They wouldn’t be able to get at him now, and they would make themselves scarce as soon as the shuttle began to get up speed. As the lights came on inside the cabin he took a moment to check around, but there was nothing and nobody inside the craft. He breathed a sigh of relief, engaged the automatic take-off, and fumbled to strap himself in. The engines began to pick up, the men on the casing could be seen flinging themselves to safety, and the shuttle was turning onto the main runway to the north, ready for take-off. Six braced himself, and took a deep breath. The small shuttle began to hum, as the power stepped-up, then shriek, and then scream until the sound became almost unbearable. At that moment it precipitated itself along the runway, then tilted at an absurd angle up to the clouds. Six struggled to breathe through the hefty gravitational force, and then counted up to thirty as the shuttle reached a suborbital cruising altitude. He turned his attention to the console. He had to find out what had happened to the rest. Where on Sacras was Diva?
GRACE SWALLOWED AS she fed herself gingerly into the fuel tube. She put her knife in her right hand, but facing inwards, and then agonizingly began what seemed to her to be an interminable journey. She had to put all her concentration on breathing slowly, knowing that a blocked mask pack at this stage would be fatal. The only escape from the place she was in now was by cutting open the piping, and even if she could get her knife through the thicker walls of the main pipeline, she would be killed by the sycophants underneath. Her heart was pounding as she inched along the piping, terrified that at any moment she would be seen. Behind her, she heard the scream of a space engine starting up, and knew that either Six or Diva had made it to their designated target. She was so scared that it hardly penetrated in her brain, which was a hundred and twenty percent pumping useless adrenaline around her slight body.
Magestra! She sent her mother a silent call. Help me, please. I … I … am too scared to do this. Her legs felt like jelly, and something was screaming inside her to get out, get out, GET OUT!
Her mask pack blocked, and for one moment she knew absolute, incapacitating panic. A blackness took over her whole brain, and stopped all rational thought. She was within an inch of trying to cut her way out of the main tube, even though she was still in the middle of the enemy army. Grace frantically tried to hold on to some coherent remnants of decision. Slowly she fought her way back up to logic, to making her body functions obey her brain, to overcoming the black negation. She began to breathe again, at first so shallowly that it was almost imperceptible. The mask pack behaved, allowing the precious oxygen through to her starved cells. She breathed a little deeper, and then a little more, until finally the level of oxygen in her bloodstream normalized, and she was able to continue. She had no idea how much time she had lost. Seconds or minutes? As some cognitive function came back she felt angry at herself. Could she never do anything quite right? It felt hard to be the one who was going to fail on the mission, even though her determination was rock solid.
At last she was at the closed hatch, where she would be able to cut her way out of the thinner flexitube. For a moment she thought she would not have enough strength in her hands to make the first cut. Panic erupted again. Then she set her jaw. No! She was not going to give up! She was going to go through this whole thing; going to show them all that she could be just as heroic as Diva, or Six, or whoever. She renewed her attack on the resistant material, and at last began to make an opening. It all depended on the sycophants, now. Would they have spotted her, would they be there, waiting to catch her?
GERRANT WAS LEADING the way, with Solian following. They had decided to leave a gap between the two of them, in order not to weigh the pipeline down too much, so Gerrant had a full segment’s lead on Solian. They edged their way along the piping, making good time.
They were about half way across the expanse between the fuel depot and the space shuttle. Solian saw Gerrant reach the next Y support and slide over it to the other side, and breathed a sigh of relief. He saw Gerrant’s feet disappear as the other Kwaidian pulled himself over the support and into the following segment, and began to drag himself forward, towards the Y support, entering the segment Gerrant had just abandoned.
There was a sudden wobble in the pipe, and Solian felt disoriented. The pipe seemed to be moving to one side. Solian paused for a moment, and then hurled himself along the rest of the segment, trying desperately to reach the Y support. Something was wrong, the piping was not holding. He tore pieces off the bodywrap as he skimmed the sides in his hurry.
But it was not the pipe. The closer he got the Y support, the more the piping moved. It was not until he was almost on top of the support that he realized why. The Y support itself was breaking. There was a slight angle from one segment to the next, and the combined weight of two bodies, pulling slightly to one side, must have destabilized it. The whole structure was coming down! His heart gave an enormous leap of fear, and then the coupling joining both segments broke at the support, fuel sprayed out over the unsuspecting enemy below, and then the two loose ends separated completely and plummeted to the ground, discharging all their contents into the surrounding sycophants.
Solian pulled off the mask pack, and leapt to his feet. He had been at the top of the piping, and so had been deposited head first, and very quickly. He had time to pull out his sword before they were on him. He tried to find the space shuttle, and his spirits sank. It was another fifteen metres ahead. There were too many sycophants between him and the ship. He knew he would never make it. He raised his sword high above his head, and gave a battle cry.
“NEW KWAIIIIIIIDE!” He shouted, and launched himself into the last battle of his life. He would be dead in seconds, he knew, but he was determined to make those seconds count. He was going to take as many of the enemy with him as he could. He was going to keep their attention away from Grace for as many long moments as he could.
Gerrant felt the piping drop, but was helpless to do very much. He slipped inexorably backwards, feet first, down to the ground. He felt the bitterness of failure, and spared one last thought for Grace. Then he slid out of the piping and they were on him. He was dead before his head emerged from the tubing.
GRACE FELT THE tube suddenly give way as she hacked at it, and dropped in a soggy lump to the ground. She could hear shouting all around her, and for one moment thought she heard the battle cry of New Kwaide from behind her. She didn’t have time to look, though. Hers was one of the upright shuttles – ready for vertical take-off, so she had to find her way around to the ladder and climb up to the hatch. She felt for the first rung, surprised and hugely relieved not to have to fight any sychophants. They all seemed to be surging in a different direction, and a small clearing had opened around her. She didn’t stop to wonder why she had been so lucky, but grasped the first rung with relief. It was only a moment’s work to slip inside and slam one hand against the locking mechanism.
Behind her Solian finally succumbed to the press of eager sycophants. He fell to the ground, and his open eyes began to glaze over, unable to see the nearby shuttle as it rose into the air.