Amber dragged herself out of the murky pool with a final gasp of exertion and slumped down against the stonework, her whole body on fire with pain. Before hitting the flood water at the bottom of the collapse her body had been smashed off jutting walls and spurs of flooring, and in the tumble the glass of the mono-rig had been shattered, raking her eyelid with needle-like shards.
She had half-fallen, half-tumbled down the collapsing cliff edge for what felt like an age, bouncing and ricochetting like a human pinball, with lumps of rock and debris accompanying her all the way. When she had finally struck the water it provided little respite, the sheer impact crushing the breath from her body. Still, it had been better than hitting solid rock.
She rolled onto her back with a sob and yanked the useless mono-rig off her head. Keeping her eye screwed shut, she gently brushed away the splinters of glass. When her hand came away it was covered in blood and panic welled in her chest at the thought of enduring the rest of the ordeal half-blind. When she opened her injured eye, however, she could still see, albeit through hazy, reddened vision. Tears swelled and spilled across her face but she wiped them away. She couldn't fall apart – not now – not if she wanted to see her companions again. She needed to take stock of her situation.
Miraculously, her carbine had survived the fall, but the gear in her backpack was a different story. On the way down it had protected her by bearing the brunt of several crushing impacts – that, coupled with the Blink body armour, was the only reason she was still alive. Shrugging the pack from her shoulders, she looked grimly at its battered structure. The prospects for the equipment within were not promising.
The mapper was a smashed, useless pile of circuits and she hurled it away in frustration. It split apart even more upon striking the nearest wall. She now had no way to determine distance or navigate within the baroque halls. Shaking those thoughts away she continued rummaging inside the backpack.
One of the climbing gauntlets had survived – the other was broken in half. One glow node remained intact out of a possible four. The others spilled their innards within the pack. The lenses of her night-sight goggles had been smashed too, so she tossed them aside. When she discovered that the breather mask had survived, though, she offered a silent prayer of thanks to whoever might be watching. Her canteen of water sported a sizeable dent but seemed mostly undamaged. She took a sip and poured a trickle down over her injured eye to wash away the blood and any remnants of glass.
Salvaging a spare bandoleer of lances for her carbine, the climbing tether, a Blink issue marker and whatever rations hadn't been pulverised by the fall, she repacked her bag and made to stand up.
A gasp escaped her lips as she put weight on her right leg and it nearly buckled. Pain lanced through her knee and she looked down to find a deep gouge in the armour where a sharp piece of rock must have bit into it. That the knee-plate was still in place paid testament to the skill of the engineers who'd designed the protective gear. Still, the impact had been passed through to her kneecap and it throbbed agonizingly with each step she took on it.
Her combat vest housed some very limited medical supplies and without Hekket she would just have to make do. Leaning against the wall, Amber swallowed two combat-grade painkillers and closed her eyes, waiting for relief. While she waited, a thought occurred to her. Her earpiece was still in place.
"Amber to all units," she croaked. "Can anyone read me?"
Nothing. With a curse she tugged the earpiece out and examined it in the dim twilit passage. It seemed to be intact from what she could tell, but the internal wiring might have been damaged. Shoving it back into place, she cleared her throat and tried again.
"This is Operative Amber Garret," she began, remembering the protocols that had been instilled in her by the Blink instructors. "Blink ID Alpha Hammer Five. If anyone is reading me please acknowledge this transmission."
Still only silence greeted her plea and her heart sank. Alone.
She had to fight to keep control when the realisation kicked in. No contact, no help, a million miles from home and with god-knows how many walls, doors, floods and cave-ins between her and her comrades. All things considered, it was a pretty dire situation. With the mono-rig smashed to pieces even the observers on the Manitta-Vanna would have no idea where she was. They probably thought she was dead, and by rights, she was lucky not to be.
"You're still alive," she whispered to herself. "Think."
With pain in her leg starting to subside, Amber limped over to the edge of the water and looked up through the chasm into which she'd fallen. Even now smaller bits of rubble and debris skittered down the walls and splashed into the pool of flood water below. She could see only so far before darkness enveloped the rift. Desperately she tried to re-run the incident in the passage above, trying to pinpoint just where she'd fallen. Thinking back to the maps of the complex, and what little data she'd gleaned from the mapper before its destruction, she could take a rough stab at where she'd dropped. What she had no way of knowing was just how far down she was.
Still, if she had an approximate direction to go in that might be enough to start. She could see the ragged face of the wall where it had been ripped open by the quake – that gave her a point of reference. If her guess was at least half right, and she'd fallen a good number of floors, she could still find her way to the Coring Well on her own. If the others had given her up for dead – and quite frankly she wouldn't have blamed them – she knew what their next course of action would be: finish the mission.
Turning, Amber shone the light from her carbine-mounted torch into the gloom of the passage she stood in. It was smaller than the huge vaulted halls above, with a lower ceiling and less ostentatious lighting nodes. Some still seemed to be functioning, casting a partial illumination through the dank, empty space, while others lay dead in their housings. Her route to the Well, she hoped, would be in that direction. Squaring her shoulders, she shoved aside the looming sensation of isolation and trudged off down the corridor.
Her footsteps echoed wetly off the walls as passed over damp patches and small rivulets of the encroaching sea. Whatever was happening to this ancient monolith, it wouldn't be too much longer before the ocean finally breached the millennia old defences and sank the whole structure for good. Amber was quite sure she didn't want to be around when it happened.
Without the mapper she had to rely completely on her eidetic memory to guide her and prevent her from back-tracking. The narrower hallways that she now found herself in formed an intricate, labyrinthine arrangement and more than once she marched straight into a dead end. Frustration burned inside her but she kept a lid on her emotions, forcing the higher logic functions of her brain into the foreground. She had to keep thinking clearly, despite the pain, despite the loneliness, despite the alien halls that clustered in around her, she could not panic.
Biting back a curse, she doubled back down yet another passage and took an alternate route, looping around the dead end and, hopefully, bringing her out on the far side. She passed more rooms, places that looked like they might have been living spaces, and others littered with the same kind of consoles they'd found in the science labs. Not wanting to waste time, she didn't give them more than a cursory glance under the beam of her torch.
On she limped, a forlorn, tiny figure in the dark.
After twisting through an interminable series of passages, Amber finally emerged into a longer, broader corridor that looked like it would run a good distance in the direction she wanted – providing she'd successfully navigated thus far. Before she started the arduous shuffle through it, however, something else caught her eye. It was a door on the far left hand side, sealed shut, save for the fact that the latest quake had bent it out of its frame, making a thin aperture through which a slender individual like her would fit. The door itself, however, was what really snagged her attention, because its brassy structure bore dozens of deep gouges like the claws of an animal.
Her mind flashed back to the colossal crustacean they'd encountered on their way to the control room and she instinctively glanced around, looking for cracks or crevices where one of the monsters may have been hiding. Then she remembered that the thing had been reluctant to leave water. Relaxing her grip on the carbine, she trained the torch on the warped door frame and approached it slowly. Taking a deep breath, she shone her light into the gap.
What she found was a tomb.
Half a dozen huge forms were scattered around the room, slumped at consoles or prostrate on the floor, each one easily eight or nine feet in height. She recognised them instantly – carbon copies of the alien hologram that had warned them away from this place – and her heart jolted in shock. Real alien bodies. The sealed doorway had protected them from whatever had tried to claw its way into the room, but not from the march of time. Whether they'd starved or died of asphyxiation Amber couldn't know, but whatever had happened, the alien corpses were very well preserved.
And she hoped the same could be said of the belts of equipment most of them still seemed to be wearing. She might have been looking at the most significant archaeological, anthropological and technological find in human history, but right now all she cared about was getting out of the city alive. Deciding that maybe, just maybe there would be something she could use, Amber clambered awkwardly through the thin crevice in the door frame and into the room.
Churchwood would be going crazy over this, she thought wryly as she approached the closest of the colossal bodies. Dropping into a crouch beside it, she winced as a lance of pain shot through her knee, before she cast a careful eye over the contents of the belt-sash across it's enormous chest. A vaguely fishy scent wafted from the corpse into her nostrils and she felt a twinge of nausea when she connected the smell to the body.
Shaking her head, she looked closer. Most of the gear looked utterly alien to her but there were one or two things she recognised. For one, there was something that looked very much like a weapon with a trigger mechanism designed to be handled by the creature's three-fingered hand. She steered clear of that for the moment, not wanting to accidentally trigger something that might do her even more harm. Another pouch held what appeared to be some kind of blade – a hunk of metal that Amber doubted she could grip, let alone lift.
However, there was one completely sealed, large square compartment that had the right dimensions for what she was looking for. She reached forward and pushed back the flap of the pouch.
The alien fabric was still soft and pliable despite the thousands of years it had lain in this room. With a barely audible hiss it opened under her touch and she slid free a large, rectangular console of some kind, not unlike one of the Blink issue dat-pads. It felt heavy and ungainly in her grip, and her hands barely covered half of the handles on either side of the main screen. She pressed what she hoped was the 'on' switch – a button the size of a human fist embossed with the symbol that they'd identified for activation.
The screen came to life.
It was all she could do not to whoop with joy when a perfectly readable two dimensional image of corridors delineated by green lines appeared before her. After looking for just a few seconds she could tell it was a depiction of the level she found herself stuck in. Better still, a pulsing blob of white showed her position within it all – at least she hoped it did.
She turned left and right. The map image rotated with her, circling around the white dot.
"I might just get out of this," she murmured, grinning to herself.
Her elation fled in a rush at a sudden scraping sound from behind her. She froze. Gently she slid the precious alien mapping device into her pack and stood up, flicking off the light of her gun-mounted torch. She could still see as her sharp eyes quickly adjusted to the drop in illumination, but she still wished her night-sight goggles hadn't been smashed in the fall. Rotating silently on the spot, she trained her gun on the aperture where she'd entered the room. Barely daring to breathe, she stood motionless for minutes, watching; waiting.
Nothing materialised, but Amber didn't doubt her senses. She'd heard something out in the passage. Moving with painstaking care, she crept over to the gap and looked out. Light from one of the nodes much further down the passage was trying in vain to illuminate the space, and she saw nothing amiss. Nonetheless, a tingle of unease settled in the base of her neck and she decided she definitely did not want to be here.
Sliding awkwardly out of the room, she gave the immediate area a quick scan down the sight of her carbine and when no threats revealed themselves, she started walking down the long passage. She would stop and study the alien computer properly when she found somewhere safer to do so.
Amber walked maybe a hundred yards before another, much louder scrape echoed down the hall from behind her. Ignoring the pain in her knee, she pivoted on the spot and dropped into a crouch, carbine aimed. At first she saw nothing, but then her blood went cold at the sight of a long dark limb extending out from the shadows.
Followed by another.
And another.
In the darkness she couldn't see it fully, but more and more long spindly legs came into view, protruding out from an enormous torso like those of a spider. In the gloom she could see the glittering of a dozen baleful eyes mounted on a head the size of a man-hole cover. A low, eerie hiss reverberated down the passage.
Adrenaline exploded in her veins, and with the speed of pure terror, Amber turned and ran.