“Ella,” he whispered, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him. “Deceptor battery.”
He pointed at the small red dot on the black case. Ella looked, then checked her own. It was also blinking red. A few seconds later, Drum’s started as well, then Ninde’s.
“Might use more power closer to the Projectors…” muttered Ella, looking up to where the Projector roosted unseen on the roof of the tower.
“How are we going to get up?” asked Ninde quietly as Ella tied their four pieces of rope together. “I can’t see anything to throw a noose over.”
“I don’t think we can,” replied Ella. “So we’ll go down, take a quick look around, and then get the hell out of here before the Deceptor batteries run out. I’ll go first.”
Quickly she tied the rope to a rusting steel staple embedded in the stone wall, tested it, and then threw the loose end into the shaft.
Strangely, it didn’t fall for a moment, but lay suspended in midair. Then the half on the far side of the shaft began to rise, while the half closest to them began to slowly fall, till there was one loop rising and one loop descending. Slowly, quite against the normal behavior of gravity.
Ella shot a look at Drum, but he shook his head and tapped the crown on his head.
“I guess it is an elevator,” Ella said to Ninde, pulling the rope back as she spoke. This time, she coiled the loose end together and threw it to the far side. It ascended almost at once, till the rope was taut and the coil was well above the next floor up.
“One half up, one half down?” whispered Gold-Eye. It was clear to him that half the shaft moved things invisibly upward and the other half moved them down.
“Obviously,” said Ninde, well above a whisper. “I said it was an elevator.”
Ella frowned and held her finger to her lips, cautioning silence.
“We can’t be sure it’ll hold our weight—or that it will always be on. So we’ll get the rope down and stick with that. Me first, then Gold-Eye, Ninde, Drum.”
It was the easiest rope climbing she had ever done, Ella thought as she climbed down. Her boots stepped through the rope in approved style—without taking any weight. She was sure that if she let go, she’d just gently drift down at a safe and steady rate.
She didn’t let go but took it slowly, pausing to scan the floor below with her witchlight. It looked just like the one above—a featureless round room with rough stone walls and a white marble floor. The only thing that was different was the temperature—it was noticeably warmer. But this floor wasn’t interesting enough to examine, so Ella continued down.
The second level down was quite different. This room looked almost like a grand hotel’s lobby, on a smaller scale. The floor was carpeted in rich red, and the stone walls had given way to paneled walls of black and scarlet. There were four doors leading off the room, one at each point of the compass—tall, wide doors with the gleam of beaten bronze.
Ella could see that the next floor below looked similar, and the next—and still the shaft went on. Clearly she was now under the level of the seabed, and Ella felt a tinge of fear as she realized that Red Diamond must have a whole underground complex here, a catacomb of tunnels and rooms. These bronze doors could lead to anything. Ferrets could have been brought in underground, so Shade’s assurance that he’d never seen any creatures flown in was worthless.
She felt an urge to abort the mission there and then. After all, they couldn’t go up to get a Projector without abandoning the safety of the rope. The Deceptor batteries were draining far too quickly, and the existence of this underground complex changed everything….
But every second of her days involved risk. And here there could be great gain.
Swinging a little on the rope, she jumped onto the carpet, boots sinking into the soft plush, and crossed to the western door. A muffled thud, and a glance behind confirmed Gold-Eye’s arrival. Ella pointed at him, cupped a hand to her ear and then pointed at the eastern door. Gold-Eye nodded his understanding and went to listen at that door, unsheathing his sword.
All the doors looked identical. Each was about ten feet high and six feet wide, with two panels so they parted in the middle. The bronze was highly polished, catching the witchlight and flashlight beams and multiplying them into butterflylike flashes that whisked around the room.
Ella heard nothing behind her door, nor did Gold-Eye. Ninde and Drum listened at the northern and southern doors. Silence.
It looked as if the two leaves of each door just pushed in at the middle. Ella clicked her fingers, summoning her troops to the western door and positioning them for a concerted rush if anything came out.
Then she pushed open the door.
It creaked at first, then eased, and Ella relaxed a little as the noise faded and nothing stirred in the darkness within. She stopped pushing and stepped back, to be ready if a creature tried to squeeze through the gap. But both leaves kept opening, and suddenly they were accompanied by the deep tolling of a bell, somewhere far below.
At the same time, witchlight flared all around them. Witchlight from the stones of the walls, witchlight flooding the shaft, witchlight bright in the corridor beyond the opening door.
A long corridor, stretching out as far as they could see. A long corridor lined on both sides with Myrmidons, sleeping at attention. Hundreds, thousands of Myrmidons, all clad in ruby-red breastplates and finely linked scarlet armor. Their helmeted heads were bent forward in sleep, so that their visors rested on the segmented plates of their gorgets.
The closest one wore the plumed helmet of a Myrmidon Master. Where all the others carried great swords or multibladed pole-arms, it cradled in its arms something that looked like a cat-sized conch shell.
The bell tolled again, perhaps only a second later, and the Master’s head snapped back. It was impossible to see behind its visor, but clearly it was awake.
It turned its head toward the shaft, put down the conch shell, and slowly, deliberately, took a tribladed axe from the unresisting arms of the nearest Myrmidon. It swung it twice, as if testing the weight, then stepped forward lightly. The ease of its movement was strange and frightening, out of place for something so big and heavily armored.
Ella stepped back, urgently signaling the others to do likewise. It didn’t seem to perceive them, so if they managed to get up the shaft…
Gold-Eye backed away, watching the Myrmidon Master the way a mouse might watch a rising cobra slowly inflating its hood. Then a faint vibration at his waist jolted his heart with even more adrenaline. He looked down at the Deceptor battery. The red light was flashing furiously, the battery buzzing its failure alert. Then the vibration stopped…and the light went out.
When Gold-Eye looked back up, the Myrmidon Master was just there, shouting so loudly, it was like the crash of a wave, with the awful axe whistling through the air—
Instinctively he raised his sword to parry, and in that same instant the Master wasn’t there anymore and his hand was numb and he was stumbling backward, screaming into the shaft.
Only Drum’s battery going flat saved him. The Master, reaching out to strike as Gold-Eye rose upward, suddenly became aware of another threat. Spinning in place, it caught Drum’s downward blow between the first and second blades of the axe, locked it, and slammed back with the butt.
Drum lessened that blow by jumping backward, meeting the paneled wall with a thud. Two swift blows from the axe butt doubled him over, and the axe was free of his sword and ready to fall. Then Ella’s sword struck from behind and came out at the front where a human’s heart would be.
Without lowering the axe, the Master turned, ripping the sword out of Ella’s hand and opening a wound halfway around its chest. The axe fell a few inches, then stopped, as if the Master couldn’t see what had driven the sword into it.
Then Drum smashed into the back of its knees, driving it down to stain the red carpet with blue ichor. Before it could rise, Drum’s sword hammered into the base of its skull. It screeched something violently i
n Battlespeech, then lay still, fingers twitching and feet drumming like a broken wind-up toy.
Below them the bell tolled again, and a hideously loud and high-pitched scream echoed up the shaft, going on and on long after human lungs would have been exhausted. If it had been closer, the scream would have deafened and dazed them—this far away, it was simply terrifying.
In answer to the scream, the serried ranks of Myrmidons began to grumble and twitch, wakened forcefully before their time—and the other bronze doors began to groan in sympathy as they opened.
“Forget the rope! Let’s go!” shouted Ella, helping Drum to his feet. “Gold-Eye! Gold-Eye! Go for the boat, don’t wait. Ninde—where the hell is Ninde?”
“Here!” shouted Ninde, running back from where the Myrmidon Master had stood. She was carrying the conch-shell apparatus and chewing on her knuckle.
“Leave that!” shouted Ella, practically throwing Ninde into the rising part of the shaft, with herself and Drum close behind.
“It’s important,” said Ninde distantly, still chewing her knuckle as they rose. “That Master just kept thinking, ‘Intruders must not take the…Thinker…’ or something like that. That shout before it died was the order for all-out attack. ‘Wake and kill!’ it said. Oh, it’s so clear. I can hear everything.”
“Stop listening and start running!” shouted Ella, pulling Ninde’s knuckle out of her mouth as they reached the landing-ground level and dived out of the shaft, pushing against the opposite rim to get across. Gold-Eye was still inside the tower, despite her orders, sitting on the floor cradling his right hand, obviously in shock.
Down below, Myrmidon battle sound was erupting, a sign that the creatures were fully awake and moving. They would be up within seconds, Ella knew, at the same time that she realized her hands were empty. Her sword—and Gold-Eye’s—were still down below.
“Calm! Calm!” she told herself, her breath and heartbeat so much faster than the words. But her hands, almost without thought, were already fumbling in one of her belt pouches, pulling out the grenade she’d conjured from the University Armory—and then it was plucked from her hands by Drum.
“Run!” he wheezed, the words lost in the roar from below, so she only saw what he said from his moving lips. “Winded. Can’t run. Go! Go!”
And she didn’t even think, or say good-bye, but was out and running, one hand half dragging Gold-Eye, the other grabbing at air as if this could help pull them faster to the boat.
Behind them Drum retreated out into the fog. Then he turned to the door, which cast a bright corridor of witchlight out into the white-wreathed darkness. Crouching, he laid his sword on the ground and pulled the pin from the grenade, holding the lever tight.
When the room was full of Myrmidons, he would throw it in. After that, he would have his sword…and the Myrmidons’ anger…to keep him from the Meat Factory.
VIDEO ARCHIVE—INTERVIEW 24118 • NINDE
I suppose I’ll have to study after the Change is turned back. To become a doctor, I mean. I think that would be a good career. It is a bit revolting what they have to do, but I still think it would be good. Just like in Emergency Hospital or MediVac…
Well, everyone will just come back from wherever they went, won’t they? Or if they don’t, we’ll just have to…I don’t know…put everything back together again. It might take a while, I suppose, but it’s not like everything was destroyed or anything. Most things still work. I mean, you could just plug yourself in, couldn’t you, and make all sorts of things work….
Oh. Why won’t you be around when the Change is reversed? Well, you can’t know that, Shade. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.
As for reading minds, I don’t care if that does go away. I can only hear what creatures think anyway. People are too difficult.
No…no…I haven’t ever tried to read your thoughts, Shade. No, I promised I wouldn’t, even if I could….
I suppose it might be better to be an actor instead of a doctor. Then I wouldn’t have to study and it would be great to get an Academy Award and wear an amazing dress….
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They heard the grenade explode when the boat was just heading away from the island, the outboard straining at full throttle to push them through the swell.
Ella looked back over her shoulder after the boom of the explosion, but fog had already cloaked the island and its fateful towers. She couldn’t see or hear anything, save the crash of the surf on rocks and, below that, the muffled battle sound of enraged Myrmidons.
Like many others before him, Drum was gone.
He had been a good teammate, and Ella had even let him become a friend. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been both fiercely shy and chemically emasculated, they might have been lovers. But that possibility had never been discussed; thoughts of it had been buried deep beneath their respective tough exteriors. The friendship was what leaked out between the chinks of self-protective armor. Now that friendship was gone.
It didn’t pay to have friends in your team, Ella thought, or friends anywhere. Taking your friends was another way the Overlords beat you. If you had no friends, you had no vulnerabilities, no openings for sorrow.
Part of her mind was thinking this, but the rest was continuing on autopilot. Ella watched her hands checking the compass, hands on the tiller changing course. She felt as if they were moving without her consent, as if most of her was still back on the island. Back with Drum.
With an effort she forced her mind to the task at hand. Escape and survival. The eternal duo that ruled her life.
“Drum?” croaked Gold-Eye from his position on the floor of the boat. Color was returning to his face, and he seemed to be regaining the use of his hand—which was fortunate, since the other one had two fingers splinted together and a purpling bruise halfway up to his wrist.
“He stayed behind,” Ella said after a few seconds, when she realized Gold-Eye had asked a question. Saying it made it suddenly seem more real, so she didn’t say any more. Instead she looked over Gold-Eye’s head at the dark of the sea, telling herself she was searching for buoys or a sign of lights.
“Someone had to slow them down,” explained Ninde slowly, after Ella didn’t answer. The younger girl was uncharacteristically subdued, the conch-shell device sitting on her lap like some self-satisfied entity. Ninde couldn’t help feeling that, whatever it was, it should be back in Fort Robertson and Drum should be sitting here with them.
Gold-Eye lapsed into silence for the rest of what seemed like a very long journey back to the Submarine. Ella and Ninde were quiet too, wrapped up in their own thoughts, bodies curled up almost fetally, as much for some shred of comfort as protection against the wet cold of the fog.
None of them noticed the red eyes in the water following them back, the rat robot using the last of its power to keep up with the boat.
It, in turn, didn’t notice the dark shape flying twenty feet above the waves, keeping just enough foggy airspace between it and the boat to remain well hidden.
Not that it would have been seen even if it had gotten closer. After all, Wingers never flew at night. At least, they didn’t normally. In any case, no one bothered to look up.
Back at the Submarine, Ella had to still her shaking hands with an effort of will as she flicked the outboard into neutral and lifted the mooring rope onto a rusty stanchion at the same time. The boat drifted on for a bit, then swung back against the Submarine, till Ella could pull it against the bow. Gold-Eye made no move to help and Ninde just sat there, cradling the Overlord device and humming something to herself.
“Come on,” said Ella, her voice flat. She rapped on the torpedo-tube hatch and waited, without having to stand up, for the Eye to come out. The tide was rising, and in an hour or so they would have had to spend the night outside. Knowing that made it easier to climb into the tube. She pushed Gold-Eye ahead of her, and Ninde brought up the rear.
They all got cha
nged together, Gold-Eye mechanically removing his wet suit, not even bothering to look at Ella and Ninde’s momentary nakedness, nor hide his own. Both his hands ached, his ears hurt from the cold, and there was a sort of numbness in his head, a sense of dislocation he hadn’t felt since Petar and Jemmie were taken away. In a way Drum had already become a replacement for Petar, and now he was gone too….
But there was a pressure on his head he could do something about, and he took off the useless Deceptor and threw it on the floor, followed by the power cord and battery. If they’d lasted for another five minutes, Drum might have survived, he thought, looking down at the steel-and-gold circlet.
Five minutes. He felt nauseous at the thought of Drum standing there alone, and then suddenly dizzy, as the familiar rush of the soon-to-be-now seized him. The Submarine’s metal walls faded, and he saw a strange, red-walled room—a vast red room, filled with row after row of shelves. They were people-sized shelves stretching up a hundred feet from floor to ceiling, farther than he could see. Full shelves, piled with motionless people, stacked up like some perverted library.
As Gold-Eye watched, two creatures he’d never seen before came into the room, wheeling a trolley. They were more humanlike than most creatures, though their faces were flat and noseless and they had no ears. They were as white as the room, like pallid grubs that lived all their life underground.
He recognized them from one of the training sessions. Drones. Harmless, save that they were never without guardians, and never seen far from a barracks, an aerie, or a lair.
They lifted a body off the trolley, and Gold-Eye realized it was Drum, unconscious but not dead. His massive chest was rising and falling with the slow regularity of sleep. The two Drones lifted him easily, displaying unexpected strength, and pushed him onto a vacant shelf at waist level. One then touched a button or control, and the shelf rose twenty feet. There were twenty full shelves above him, and room for eight more below. As Drum’s shelf rose, an empty one came up out of the floor and stopped at waist height. The Drones stepped back and pushed their trolley on, down the corridor of shelves and unconscious people.