Revolution's Shore (6 page)

It proved a more potent gesture than she intended. Somehow, with pressing and touching and the smooth flow of long practice, she found herself lying on the bench next to him in an intimate embrace. Inappropriate, surely, for such a time, and yet she thought it might be better to reassure him. And he was so close, and so nice to hold.

He was the one who pulled away. His expression bore no rage, no jealous fury, just simple resignation. “It doesn't matter,” he said quietly. Deep in his voice she heard the echo of an old, wrenching sorrow. “I have to kill him. Now that you know that, you can keep me away from him.”

“
Why
?”

He broke away from her and pushed up off the bench to his feet, finding refuge in the corner opposite the bench. “
Don't ask me that
. I thought I had finally escaped.
Abai'is-ssa
.” The alien word slipped out of him too naturally. “I should have known better. You should have left me on Arcadia.” He did not look at her as he spoke.

“Yes,” she replied sardonically as she, too, stood up. “You said something like that before. But Finch is one of my oldest friends. Do you expect me to let it go at that? Who are you going to attack next? Me?”

Now he turned. His face was set, a mask of sheer impersonal threat, like a red warning light signaling the entrance to a danger zone that is off-limits to all personnel who do not have the complete envelopment of a life suit.

“
Never suggest that to me
.” He looked so revolted by the thought that she felt suddenly embarrassed, as if she had set out to deliberately offend him. “There may be people who are that sick, to kill their own lovers. I'm not one of them.”

His anger completely deflated hers. It seemed impossible, facing him now, to force the issue. She took in a single, rather shaky breath to calm herself. Once they had left Harsh, there would be time.

“I'm not suggesting,” she began slowly, leaping back to his first question, as if the ensuing conversation had not taken place, “that Heredes meant to be executed as Pero, but if he was caught, and knew that they would kill him—and infiltrating their entire defense network was clearly treason—I think he would convince them that he was Pero if only to leave a trail of confusion as his final legacy. After all, Pero is free to work openly again, for a while.”

“I still don't see,” replied Kyosti, taking up the thread of this conversation without any hesitation, “how Heredes
could
be caught.”

“‘You were caught …”

“By the League, a government far in advance of Central in such techniques, I assure you.”

“I thought the League and all its people had forsworn any contact with the kind of espionage you and Master Heredes used to be engaged in on their behalf.”

Kyosti smiled bitterly. “Forsworn, yes. But not forgotten. That would be foolish indeed. ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!' We're dangerous, unpredictable beasts.”

“Oh, what does it matter?” she cried, lifting a hand to pull at her hair in helpless anger. “How they caught him or how he came to be identified as Pero. He's dead.”

Kyosti came across to her in three swift strides. “Lily,” he murmured, soothing, and he cradled her against him.

“We don't have time for this,” she muttered into his shirt, although she did not pull away. “Do you remember someone I talked about named Paisley?”

He considered, nodded. “A Ridani girl. Indentured to—Harsh. I see. A victim of the terrible prejudice in this area.” He shook his head. “Only in such a backward pioneer culture—”

“What's ‘pioneer'?” She pulled back from him. “And you needn't use that patronizing tone of voice. I've never seen League space. I've got no proof you came from there, or that Master Heredes did, or sensei Jones. You might all be making it up.”

He laughed. “My dear Lily, haven't I ever told you that you speak Anglais with the most delightful, primitive accent?”

She knew perfectly well that he, and Heredes, and sensei Jones, were incontrovertibly not citizens of Reft space, that they had indeed come from far away across the old lost paths to the home planets from which humans and pygmies had long ago migrated to Reft space. So she only removed herself from his grasp and walked to stand beside the thin seam of the cell door. “Sometimes I forget about
your
accent,” she said. “Although,” she added thoughtfully, “Master Heredes never had one.”

“That's because he used to be an actor. Now what about Paisley?”

T
HROUGH HER BREATHING HELMET
, Lily could hear the slow hiss of liquid burning through plastine. A forgotten toy, perhaps, left to fall on the tunnel floor in the panic after the first explosions. They had seen the results of that panic: on leaving the central shaft at the deepest tunnel in the 20s dig, level 9, they had found on the other side of the lock a cluster of at least one hundred bodies. Most had decayed badly, eaten through by the poisoned atmosphere, though some were still recognizable as Ridanis.

At the very front of the grisly remains lay the body of a woman clutching a small child, as if she had been more desperate than the rest, with such a burden, or the others had thrust her forward in the hope that the child at least could be saved. Now, watching the drip of some acidic fluid, released by the jostle of a passing boot out of a half-broken pipe, Lily wondered if the little doughnut-shaped object that was slowly disintegrating under the touch of that liquid had been dropped by the same child.

They had paused to consult the map. Yehoshua knelt beside a Ridani man who had worked in these diggings. Behind, his subordinate Inonu stood with her ten troopers, flanked by Yehoshua's cousin Alsayid and the Ridani trooper Rainbow.

Silence hung over them, heavy and enclosing. The microphones on the helmets accentuated the low voices of Yehoshua and the miner as they discussed their route, and the light scraping of boot on rock, hands tapping guns, as Inonu's soldiers shifted, restless underneath so much earth. The floors and walls and ceiling of the tunnel, although broad and high, showed rough-hewn and incomplete in the filtered beams lancing out from their helmets.

Jenny stood in an open door, a gap in the tunnel wall, turning her head back and forth slowly as she used her light to sweep the room beyond. Her hand, encased in the same slick material that made up their standard government guard issue coveralls and much of their helmets, tightened on an outthrust knob of rock as she counted bodies. Ahead, Kyosti knelt alone in semidarkness. He had shut his helmet light off.

After a moment Jenny pushed away from the doorway and returned to crouch by Lily. She leaned forward until her head touched Lily's. “It's enough to make you join Jehane.” Her voice sounded muffled and tinny through the mike and the thin remains of the poisoned atmosphere. “It just occurred to me that if what we're wearing is standard issue, then none of the prisoners had any protective gear at all.”

“Stops them from escaping.”

“Right. I wouldn't attempt the surface even in
this
, and neither would you. But why would the guards wear this gear in the mines if they thought it was completely safe? It was a precaution against this kind of disaster.” She made a gesture of disgust; her gloved hand, brushing the wall, caused the dripping pipe to stop leaking, leaving the discarded toy lying pathetically in two melted halves. “Although what else I could expect from Central I can't imagine. The sort of people they would indenture to Harsh certainly weren't worth the price of one of these suits.”

“How many bodies did you count?” Lily asked.

“I stopped at fifty. Say, we didn't lose the 'bot, did we?”

“No, he went ahead to sound out the thickness and stability of the rock separating the two digs. I just input the map and sent him off.” Lily used the butt of her rifle to jostle the pipe so that it leaked again, dissolving the toy into a lump of unrecognizable slag.

Jenny turned her head to watch Lily's movement and then rose abruptly. “Hey!” Her shout carried at least as far as Yehoshua, despite the dampening hush of the tunnel. “Hawk! Are you crazy? There're chemicals in this air that'll eat right through your skin.”

In the darkness of the tunnel ahead, Lily could scarcely see Kyosti's figure, enveloped in the murky fabric of the guard suit, until a flash of pale, bare hand alerted her to his position.

“Hawk!” Jenny repeated.

Lily felt a person push past her, grabbed, and found Yehoshua in her grasp.

“I'll take care of this,” she said, sweeping past him. “Are you crazy?” she asked as she came up beside Kyosti.

He turned, his tall figure outlined against blackness by her helmet light. “Probably. Why do you ask?”

“Do you want to lose that hand? You heard what they said about the atmosphere down here. You saw the bodies. Or do you think you're immune?”

He did not reply immediately, but she could suddenly tell from his posture and his eyes behind the helmet that he was smiling. “Did you know,” he said at last as he slowly slipped the long glove back on his hand, “that this tunnel is almost one hundred and seventy-five years old? It's no wonder they had trouble. They doubtless did not maintain it properly.”

“Doubtless,” she replied brusquely, not interested in humoring him. “I didn't have time for any research except what Callioux summed up for us before we left. Come on.” She waved to Yehoshua, and he and the Ridani miner came forward to lead them on. It took her some minutes of careful walking over the uneven rock floor to realize that Kyosti hadn't had time, or opportunity, for research either.

The transition from the main level 9 tunnel to a side, working shaft, came as a shock to one accustomed to the smooth-bored shafts of the Ransome House mines, built to accommodate machines and free miners who could easily choose to move on to more agreeable working conditions.

They had to crawl single file on their hands and knees over sharp, uneven rock. Now and then, the shaft opened into a pocket where seven or eight might assemble, packed tightly together, for a break or to facilitate entrance into a new series of shafts, but in these pockets the sense of claustrophobic heaviness heightened, if anything. In Ransome House, there was not a shaft but you had height enough to stand, and width enough to walk three abreast; the Sar had always believed that a well-treated worker produced the best work—a philosophy he had drilled into his children. Lily could appreciate it now.

In at least half of the pockets they had to maneuver past corpses, and once Yehoshua, at the fore, had to push a decaying corpse bodily ahead of him until there was room to shove it to one side. Two of Inonu's ten disintegrated under this confinement, and were sent back to wait at the central elevator shaft. One man was sobbing softly to himself, but could not bring himself to backtrack that ground alone.

After several stalls, and one very long wait where—the ceiling pressing into her back, her elbows scraping against the walls—she had to recite kata in her head to keep calm, Lily emerged at last into what seemed an enormous room. As rough-hewn as the others, it could contain the entire party: Inonu and her eight remaining soldiers, Yehoshua, Alsayid, Rainbow, the Ridani miner, and herself, Jenny, and Kyosti. Close, but nevertheless all of them.

Crouched beside Yehoshua, Lily trained her light on the oversize com-screen the officer held and watched as the Ridani shifted the pointer until it showed their current location and the shaft they had chosen to lead them to the 30s.

“Here it be,” he said, showing a shaft that trailed into a similar grid of shafts branching out from tunnel 39. “Close enough I reckon that ya easer should sure be put together here. Won't be another such broad'ning before ya drill shall come tae use.”

Yehoshua nodded, and spoke into his wrist-com to Inonu, who crouched across the pocket from him. She immediately signaled to those of her people who had packed the components in, and within a reasonable space of time the drill was assembled. It was about the length of Lily's arm and as thick as her torso.

“Hold on,” said Yehoshua. “What happened to the power pack? We can't use it like this.”

“Don't worry,” said Lily. “Come on. We're running short of time.”

“Right.” Even distorted by the mike, Yehoshua's reply was sarcastic. “Inonu, follow us at the specified distance, and remain
only
until oh-four-fifteen. Then return to the surface and leave. Understood?”

Inonu hesitated, but replied in the affirmative.

“I'll take it,” said Lily to the Ridani miner, but he shook his head.

“So much,” he explained, gesturing with the drill, “I can do for ya people trapped in ya thirties.”

She shrugged and let him precede her into the shaft. They crawled in silence. She felt more and more keenly not the incalculable weight of kilometers of rock a hand's breadth above her back, because she had known that on Unruli; here it was the tiny space through which they moved that unsettled her. Fantasies of collapse, of bodies pinned by stone—all she could hear of the others behind her was their smothered breathing and, once, a curse of pain. A conviction that she was about to crawl into a corpse in the last stages of disintegration seized her with such terrifying force that she stopped moving.

A hand touched her ankle. A helmet brushed her hip. “‘For thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for thy name's sake lead me, and guide me,'” Kyosti said. His voice seemed peculiarly clear in their confinement.

Her breath shuddered out of her. Like an echo, ahead, three small lights blinked: blue, green, and orange. A moment later the miner blocked her view, but now she started forward again.

“Bach,” she whispered. “Thank you.” As she neared the end of the tunnel she could hear the robot singing:

Mond und Licht

Ist vor Schmerzen untergangen

Moon and light

are quenched for sorrow