The Trial of Tompa Lee

  23 Into the Abyss

  Although the others were starting to leave, Dante stared down at Tar-Thara’s sister for a moment longer. Her head was framed by a halo of crimson dirt. Now that he knew she was an adolescent, he could see signs of youth. Smooth skin, unfurrowed by regret, worry, or compromise. Features that were large for her head. An aura of gentle repose, as though she were so innocent of death that she’d laid down and composed herself for sleep, expecting that she would awake and laugh about today’s misadventure.

  But she was dead, and he was no Navy hero. Maybe the two weren’t connected. Maybe, though, they were.

  “Come in, Dante,” his mumbler crackled. “This is Carolyn.”

  He frowned and ignored the call. He couldn’t bear to talk right now.

  “Dante, the green light is on, and I’ve been assured that means you can hear me.”

  Being careful not to flex the muscles in his arm that would activate his transmit, he crouched so he could brush the girl’s cheek with his fingertip. Her skin was like satin, or maybe a peach. From this close, he caught a whiff of the smelly caterpillars—gloves, Tompa had called them—that the Shons found tasty. At least she’d had a good last meal.

  “Dante, I need to warn you about the Kalikinikis.”

  When he still didn’t answer, Carolyn sighed. The sound startled him. Although sighs were one of the few sounds that were close enough to subvocalization for mumblers to transmit them, they usually sounded like scratchy, deathlike groans—not authentic sighs such as Carolyn’s microphone had caught. There was a tale that a snobbish officer had accidentally triggered her mumbler during extra-marital sex, broadcasting her infidelity to an entire cruiser. Supposedly, at least. Every enlisted man in the Navy seemed to know someone who’d heard it happen, though no one had actually been present.

  “Dante, speak to me.”

  Before his accident, Dante had dismissed the tale as myth. He couldn’t remember why he’d been so certain—about this or many other things. Now, the only certainty was death. But the other Dante had believed in his heart that death was only for others, and that certainty was anything matching his carefully wrought theories.

  He stood up. “At least,” he whispered to the Shon, “you’re really dead. Not dead and still walking.”

  From his mumbler, Carolyn said something. At the same time, he heard Tompa speak. He ignored them both. Carolyn wanted to use him, and Tompa was still young enough to think she could outrun death. Their manipulative age and hostile youth exhausted him.

  “I’d have saved you if I could,” he whispered to the dead girl. “Really. I’m not just a useless, defective coward, no matter what Tompa thinks.”

  Frowning, he glanced up, looking for the amazing yet irritating young woman who saw through his skin to his soul and knew he was no hero. Tompa was nowhere to be seen. Nor were Awmit or Tar-Thara. How could they be gone? It was as though he’d accidentally turned two pages in a book and missed something important.

  “Dante,” Carolyn began.

  Behind him, he heard shouts. He turned.

  Running, clambering, swarming over the rocks, an army of Shons was approaching. For a moment, they seemed unreal, part of a dream. Then he thought, Oh, shit.

  And ran.

  He leaped over a corpse and sprinted down the path. Carolyn spoke again. “The Kalikinikis blame you personally for the latest death amongst Major Krizink’s crew. The Klick authorities want you handed over to them for trial no matter what happens to Tompa Lee.”

  Dante reached the boulder that had blocked his view of the earlier attack. The nearest Shon was no more than a hundred feet behind him.

  “I wonder,” Carolyn said, “if I may have set a bad precedent when I gave Lee to the Shons.”

  Dante scrambled up the boulder. As he started down the other side, he tweaked the muscles that made his mumbler respond. “Carolyn, you didn’t ‘set a bad precedent,’ you screwed up.” He saw the bridge a quarter mile ahead, but not Tompa. “Can’t talk now.”

  Sounds jumbled together into a surreal hash of noise: the raucous singing of the Shon hunters, seemingly coming from all directions; and Carolyn, speaking to someone on the Vance without turning off her microphone. The only words he caught were, “Turn that TV around.”

  He kept running. Up ahead, the path narrowed until he ran out of running space. From there it was a hard climb to the level of the bridge, up a steep gravel slope dotted with knee-high weeds armed with stiletto spikes. He guessed that Shons—not the ancient ones who’d built the original road, but modern ones—must have piled the gravel to smooth out the approach to a bridge they’d built after the landslide had destroyed the original road. At the top of the bank was a footpath leading to the bridge. He hadn’t led Tompa and the others to the footpath before now because it was completely exposed. However, if any of the pursuers had followed the path, he’d be heading into a trap.

  His feet crunched on the loose gravel of the slope. Maybe Tompa had already climbed to her death. Maybe that was why he couldn’t see her. Carolyn would be happy about that.

  Dante climbed. His first steps were too fast, too vigorous, and succeeded only in starting a small avalanche of pebbles that carried him back down to the base of the slope. He tried again, more carefully. The gravel still slid downhill under his feet, but he made some progress. One step up, slide a half-step down. Repeat. The top of the bank seemed distant.

  “Dante,” Carolyn said over his mumbler, “I’m watching you on TV now. The Shon-Wod-Zee are right behind you.”

  He already knew that; their singing was awfully damned loud. Carefully avoiding one of the well-armed weeds, which looked as though it could slice right through his dress-uniform boots, he climbed faster. One step up, slide a half-step down. Sweat ran into his eyes.

  “They’re fanning out at the base of the scree slope,” Carolyn reported. “They’re climbing in a very orderly line.”

  The singing abruptly grew softer, though no less menacing. Saving their breath, Dante guessed as he climbed. He asked, “Is anyone on the path at the top of the bank?”

  “Ship’s Ward Lee and two Shons.”

  Still alive, then. “Any hostiles?”

  “The TV keeps switching views so it’s hard to be certain, but I don’t think so.”

  “We might make it, then.”

  As soon as he subvocalized the words, the gravel gave way underneath him in the most serious slide yet. He flattened himself against the slope, pressed his face to hot gravel, slid another yard, finally stopped. A few pebbles belatedly joined the party and came to rest against his face.

  Dante spit a piece of bitter-tasting gravel from his mouth and cautiously turned his head. A thorn had pierced his shirtsleeve but hadn’t broken the skin. Grimly, he resumed climbing, using his hands as well as his feet to spread out his weight.

  “Dante, the Shons aren’t having as much trouble climbing as you are. What’s that? Oh. One of the techs here suggests that’s because the Shons are lighter.”

  “Will they catch me before I get to the top?”

  “Not if you don’t slide way down again.”

  “Good.” Once he reached the top, he could outrun them and, hopefully, reach the bridge first. It was narrow enough that they’d have to cross no more than four or five abreast. If he waited at the far side, he could hold them off for a few minutes before they overwhelmed him.

  “Maybe I’ll be a hero after all.”

  “What’s that, Dante?”

  He hadn’t realized he’d subvocalized his thoughts. “Nothing.”

  His foot caught a lip of solid rock under the gravel. Behind him, the Shon’s singing had quieted to a growling hum. He could hear them climbing, a stereophonic rippling of feet on gravel below him, to his left, and to his right. Don’t slip, he told himself. Don’t slip.

  Suddenly, instead of grey pebbles filling his vision, there was flat ground with myriad old Shon footsteps baked into red clay.

  Carolyn gave another s
igh. “You made it, Dante!” In the background, his mumbler carried claps and shouts.

  He rose to his feet and sprinted down the path. The rough surface, combined with his flimsy boots, made running tricky. If he fell he’d be in trouble. Not much farther, though.

  The Shons hummed louder as they neared the path. The first of them reached the top, but to Dante’s surprise and relief, their wide hips kept them from wriggling quickly onto the path and blocking his way. They had to inch their legs up, pushing their backs and hips high like a caterpillar, to reach the clay. By then he was in the clear—but not by much.

  “Dante,” Carolyn shouted, “hurry! Tompa Lee is trying to destroy the footbridge.”

  A boulder narrowed the path and blocked his view of the bridge. Destroy the bridge? How in God’s name, Dante thought as he ran, can she destroy a bridge with her bare hands?

  But if anyone could, it was Tompa.

  A Shon-sized guardrail, too low to keep someone her size from tumbling over the side, gave Tompa dizzying views of the bottom of a twenty-story gulch. The metal strips on the bridge rang under her footsteps. The strips were spaced crosswise atop three beams spanning the chasm like ties on upside-down railroad tracks. The bridge sagged noticeably in the middle and the support beams merely rested on bedrock at the far side of the bridge without being sunk in concrete. She hoped the flimsy contraption would hold.

  As she reached the step at the far side, footsteps drummed the metal behind her. She turned. Awmit and Tar-Thara. “Hurry up!” Breathing heavily, she jumped as her bare calf touched the hot metal of some I-beams stacked beside the path.

  I-beams? Someone was planning to repair this bridge. The servants of Bez-Tattin came to mind, but it didn’t matter who. The metal had the dull, pebbly look of hexagonal-cell foamsteel, like the Vance was made of. If the Klicks had indeed sold the foamsteel process to the Shons, then the beams might be light enough to be handled.

  Tompa tried to keep hope from soaring. She glanced at the bridge, then squatted at the end of a twenty-foot beam. It was hot and rough to the touch. She pushed; it moved several inches. Foamsteel, all right—heavy, really heavy, but manageable. Maybe she could jam it under one of the three bridge supports and use that finger of rock beside the path as a fulcrum. Then, pushing sideways like an oar, she could pry the support sideways off the bedrock and bring down the bridge.

  It just might work. She’d only have to pry the support six inches, because of the way the lip of bedrock curved inward. If she failed, of course, she’d have wasted her scant lead. But if she succeeded . . .

  A shiver of anticipation made her grin. If she succeeded, it would take the Shons hours to climb down the gully and back up—and she only had to avoid them until sundown.

  By the time Awmit and Tar-Thara crossed the bridge, Tompa had shoved a beam to the ground. She ran to the other end and pushed it toward the support. Once she got it going, a small erosion channel slanting downhill made the pushing easier. In fact, she had to be careful not to push the beam clear under the bridge and into the gully.

  The end of the beam clanged against the support. Perfect.

  “Graceful human wastes perplexingly time,” Awmit complained.

  Instead of answering, Tompa gave a grunt as she started to lift her end of the beam toward the fulcrum rock. She’d have to raise it about three feet to get it over the stone finger so she could push the lever horizontally against the fulcrum.

  “Flee precipitously, graceful human!”

  Tompa grunted again and raised the beam another six inches. Her muscles started to quiver. She couldn’t get it high enough.

  Suddenly Tar-Thara clapped her hands together. “Help pulsatingly, ancient one. Graceful human possesses divinely genius!”

  The beam felt lighter. Tar-Thara had crawled under the beam and was pushing up with her back. Tompa panted. If she dropped the beam it would crush the girl.

  Awmit joined Tar-Thara. Even with their help, the beam was heavy. Sweat ran down Tompa’s face as she struggled to lift it the last few inches. Her arms throbbed and hurt, protesting her efforts. In the distance, the song of the hunters burst into full voice again. She wondered if they’d caught Dante, but stifled the thought. No time.

  And then, finally, the beam reached the top of the outcrop. Awmit collapsed to the ground, panting. Now the beam had to be pushed off the outcrop so they could use it as a fulcrum and push sideways to dislodge the bridge. Tompa rested for a second or two, letting the pain in her overtaxed, spasming muscles ebb just a bit, then ran from the end of the beam to the outcrop. She put her back against the beam and, by herself, pushed it to the far side.

  It fell with a hideous clang that made her jump even though she was expecting it. Afraid that it might have fallen too far away from the outcrop, she spun around. It was right where she wanted it.

  “Come here,” she said, but the two Shons were already trudging to the end of the lever.

  Panting, with the smell of her own sweat strong in her nostrils, Tompa put her hands on the beam. The Shons joined her. The three of them pushed the beam.

  Gravel slipped underfoot. The beam didn’t budge.

  “Again,” Tompa panted. She braced her feet against another outcrop and pushed. Awmit gave a high-pitched grunt.

  The lever budged. Tar-Thara lost her grip and slipped to the ground. The beam halted. The singing grew louder.

  The three of them got back in position. This time they didn’t need a spoken command from Tompa; somehow they started pushing at exactly the same time. The beam edged forward. Awmit was using his legs against the outcrop so fiercely that his feet were off the ground, his body parallel to the path. Sweat stung Tompa’s eyes. Her arms shook. The bridge groaned a protest at its attempted murder. Just a little bit more . . .

  Suddenly, the noise of the bridge turned into a banging. Tompa didn’t stop pushing, but she glanced up. Roussel was pounding across the bridge, the pursuers not far behind. If they kept pushing, they’d send him tumbling and screaming to his death. No more worries about his flap-happiness or his bloody orders.

  This trial had already turned her into a killer. Shon, human; if you could kill the one, you could kill the other.

  Tempting. Goddamned tempting.

  The bridge shuddered under Dante’s feet. Halfway across, he saw how Tompa hoped to destroy it. The way the bridge sounded, she and her two Shon friends were going to succeed. With him on it.

  “Dante, get off the bridge,” Carolyn warned.

  Did she really think he was stupid enough to need that advice?

  He sprinted. Before he reached the end, he saw Tompa stop pushing a beam, positioned like a giant lever, and stand to watch him. As soon as he reached solid ground, she bent to her task again.

  She’d waited for him to cross. Good girl.

  Dante looked back. On the other side of the gully, the support that Tompa was trying to loosen was jammed between boulders from the landslide, but knocking this end free would probably bring down the bridge—unless, of course, the other two supports were strong enough to hold it up. Probably not. The bridge looked too slapdash and temporary to survive.

  It was a good plan, conceived and decided upon at jump speed. God, he envied her.

  “Dante,” Carolyn whispered, “the Inspector just walked into the Communications Room. She must have been drawn by the shouting from the sailors watching the television. You have to appear to be an innocent bystander if I’m to have a chance of keeping you from being turned over to the Kalikinikis.”

  The pursuing Shons were approaching the bridge. The metal made no more protests, as though Tompa wasn’t having any more success. He looked at the support. It was almost off its rocky footing. Almost, but not quite.

  “Dante, get out of there,” Carolyn said.

  He walked toward the trio who grunted and strained against the lever. Awmit looked up as he pushed. “Help lifesavingly,” he wheezed.

  Tompa’s face was red. Veins on her temples bulged. She said
nothing and didn’t even look at Dante. He suspected she’d rather die than ask him for help, no matter how much she needed it.

  “Don’t stop,” Carolyn said. “The Inspector is watching you. Run away!”

  But Dante’s steps slowed.

  “Keep going, Dante. That’s an order.”

  “Please,” Tar-Thara breathed.

  The bridge echoed as a Shon, braver or more ambitious than the rest, charged across it alone.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Dante. Get out of there. That’s a Code Red order!”

  Idiot. Yeah, that was what she thought of him.

  “Magenta, Carolyn,” he subvocalized. “Magenta.”

  He ran to Tompa’s side, pressing close to her body. Placing his feet against the rocks behind him, he pushed with both arms and legs. The metal was hot on his hands. He was aware of Tompa’s sweat and the serious, bone-grinding heaviness of this task. How had she and the tiny Shons managed to move the support at all?

  Push harder.

  The bridge support budged, then resisted. On the other side of Tompa, one of the Shons—Tar-Thara, from the sound of her voice—gave a sob and fell to the ground. Dante grunted and redoubled his efforts.

  And suddenly the lever fell forward as it shoved the support totally off the lip of rock. Dante fell with it and found himself lying on top of Tompa, face to face. The lever clanged against the ground with the thundering, harmonic resonance peculiar to foamsteel, then bounced up half a foot. He put his hands over Tompa’s head in case it hit them. It clanged again, but didn’t bounce. The metal droned like the dying chord of a Bach organ piece, then finally lay quiet.

  They’d done it.

  “Will you,” Tompa said, struggling to breathe under his weight, “get . . . off.”

  He rolled off her. She ignored him and turned on her side toward the canyon. Beside her, Awmit and Tar-Thara struggled to their knees. All of them stared toward the bridge.

  It was still there.

  Carolyn groaned. “Dante, Dante. What have you done?”

  The lone Shon who’d charged onto the bridge had frozen in place, most of the way across. The mob of pursuers, suddenly quiet, stopped at the edge of the bridge. Half a dozen cameras hovered motionless, pointing at the scene from different angles. The entire world seemed to hold its breath.

  Watching.

  The bridge had listed to the right. The support hung down, bouncing slightly, yet remaining lodged between the boulders on the far side. About a quarter of the metal slats on the deck of the bridge remained attached to the loose support and had popped askew, forming a set of low hurdles for anyone crossing. The bridge groaned. The Shon on the bridge grabbed the handrail with both hands and waited.

  But while the world held its breath, nothing happened.

  “Ratshit,” Tompa spat, breaking the spell. “Goddamned, flea-infested, maggoty, cockroach-eating ratshit.”

  Tar-Thara began crying.

  “Stupid fool,” Carolyn muttered in his mumbler. “You’ve sacrificed yourself for nothing.”

  The Shon on the bridge turned his head a hundred eighty degrees to look at his companions. Then he stomped a foot. The bridge held.

  The Shon jumped straight up and came down with both feet. The bridge groaned, but held.

  For a second longer, the odd moment of stasis endured. Then everything exploded into motion. The lone Shon charged toward them, hopping over the raised slats with that surprising agility of his race. The other pursuers broke into their loudest, most bloodthirsty song yet. Without jostling or confusion, they streamed onto the bridge with herd-like efficiency.

  Tompa scrambled to her feet. She grabbed Awmit’s hand and pulled him up. Dante was torn between following them and watching the fragile bridge.

  The bridge shrieked, overpowering the Shons’ chant. As though in slow motion, the loose support sagged under the weight of the Shons piling onto it, pulling the slats with it and causing the other two supports to bend in the middle where their component I-beams were bolted together. The lone Shon jumped to the safety of the near bank, but most of the twenty or so others on the bridge fell off. A few clung desperately to the swaying ruin, their bodies dangling in the air. The groan of metal scraping rock drowned out the screams of the fallen, as the bridge gave a jerk that dislodged another Shon.

  Then it utterly collapsed into the gorge, slamming into the far wall with a sound that shook the very ground. Sparks flew as metal scraped rock. Within seconds, it had disappeared from Dante’s sight. The bridge boomed and echoed as it plunged toward the canyon’s bottom, landing with an anticlimactic crunch.

  Dante started to glance at Tompa, but a shuddering thud snapped his attention back to the gorge. The supports that had been jammed between boulders on the far side pried a boulder loose. It started to roll reluctantly, moving so slowly that a Shon standing on top was able to roll with it like a lumberjack in a log-rolling competition. The Shon’s feet moved faster as the boulder gained speed, then still faster, until finally he was tossed aside and instantly disappeared. The small rocks surrounding the boulder slid with it. A dozen Shons fell, screaming and flailing about for something solid in a landscape turned fluid.

  The landslide was inherently unstable, and the boulder had supported other rocks upslope. After a moment’s hesitation, these rocks came sliding down. The attackers tried to scatter. More rocks fell, then more and more. With an earth-shattering tremble and a roar like the world crying in agony, the unstable slope erupted into a mass of dust and chaos that poured downhill. Caught in the turbulence and flying debris, Dante could see few details. A pair of Shons, arms linked, plummeting off the edge of the gorge. An empty tunic blown skyward on a violent updraft. A camera’s balloon ripped to shreds by flying rock and careening into the cascade of stones and bodies.

  The ground shook. Tompa stumbled against Dante, tossed off her feet by the angry quaking. Though pebbles clattered and Awmit fell, bleating, to the ground, their side of the canyon held. She pulled herself upright, clutching his shoulder so hard that it hurt. The pain was nothing, though, against the backdrop of the landslide.

  A dust cloud billowed toward them, forming a dark backdrop that highlighted the lone hostile Shon who’d made it across. He stood where the bridge had been, bracing himself against the quaking as he watched the doom of his companions. Just before the cloud engulfed him, he leaned his rigid body forward, arms at his side, and calmly dropped into the abyss.