Come the Revolution (27 page)

“Bullshit! You work in neurotoxins for AZ Kagataan. AZ Kagataan is one of the biggest jump patent-holders and drive manufacturers in the
Cottohazz
, second only to AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar. You mean to tell me you don’t know
anything
about the universal neurotoxin they use to guard the jump drive?”

“No, I—”

“You’re lying. Kagataan and Simki-Traak hate each other, have fought surrogate
wars
against each other, but about a week ago I sat in a meeting with the second governor from Simki-Traak and a third or fourth governor from Kagataan, and I listened to them as much as admit they shared a secret. How big a secret does it have to be for neither of them to spill it, even to screw over their biggest enemy?

“I think you know. I think that’s why they want you dead. And I think it’s so hot a potato that even CSJ was willing to do the wet work necessary to bury it and you.

“CSJ only cares about one thing: the
Cottohazz
. They guard its future, sometimes with a creepy single-minded devotion. They wouldn’t care about this unless revealing it would damage the future of the Commonwealth. So what secret do the jump drive patent holders share, which is big enough to rupture the
Cottohazz
, and which involves you, and so presumably neurotoxins?

“You can tell me or not. If you don’t, I’ll leave you, just like you left me when I was eight years old. I’ll leave you strapped to this post, and you’ll die, probably very badly. If you tell me, I’ll take you with us.

“Please,
please
, don’t tell me.”

He sat quietly for a while, maybe a minute, staring out into the dancing light and shadows of burning Sookagrad. When he turned to me his face was twisted in contempt, but right away I knew it was not for me. I’m not sure if he even saw me.

“They think they’re
sooo
smart,” he said, his voice low and bitter. “They think they’re so very smart, but they aren’t smart enough to unravel this mystery, and they knew it. Science is sometimes as much art as it is rigor, as much inspiration as procedure, and they are uninspired, worthless artists.

“So they
used
me—me and some other Human researchers, but in the end mostly me. They broke the problem up into little pieces, embedded them in different projects, spaced them out over the course of years—over
two decades!
They didn’t think I’d ever see the common thread, ever see the pattern these pieces formed. After all,
they
never would have.

“Yes, I will tell you. I wonder, are you intelligent enough to grasp its significance? I somehow doubt it. You were always a disappointment to me.”

And then he told me the secret.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Sasha, can you help me please?” Aurora’s voice rose from the maintenance shaft and sounded weak. I got to the edge and looked down and could see her sitting in the glow of the work light, her arm and upper legs red with blood.

“Shit!” I scrambled down the ladder and knelt beside her. “What happened? Why didn’t you keep the pressure on your arm?”

“I’m sorry. I thought I did. But I got so involved with the story, with sending it…I must have been pressing the wrong place. I didn’t notice until I finished. I’m sorry. Does this mean I’m not going on?”

“Shut up,” I said, and started to work. She winced as I unplugged the data feed, sprayed it with the antiseptic prep spray for the bandage, and pushed it back into the open wound. I put her thumb on the upper arm pressure point and had her push. She still had enough strength to do that. As I worked, she began to talk.

“There’s something else. I don’t know if I’ll have another chance to say this to you.”

I sprayed the wound with the last of the liquid bandage solution in the dispenser and made sure it set before I ripped a sleeve off my shirt.

“Back on Peezgtaan, when Father and Mother left you, they told me only the three of us were going. Before we left.”

I folded my shirt sleeve into a square pad, and taped it over the bandage as a cushion and protection.

“I knew we were leaving you behind. They told me not to say anything, and I didn’t. I didn’t.”

I unbuttoned one button of her blouse and pushed her hand into it, so it would act as a sling. That was the best I could do. I couldn’t scoop up all that blood and put it back in.

“Can you climb the ladder?” I said as I put my jacket and ammo harness back on.

“Did you hear me?” she said. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes. Can you climb the ladder?”

She looked up without moving her head, as if she lacked the strength to do even that, and then looked back at me with apologetic eyes.

“If I get you up there, can you hang onto the ladder?”

“I think so.”

It was hard and awkward work in the narrow shaft, but I managed to get her most of the way up, with her good arm through a rung of the ladder. I worked my way around and past her and out the narrow access hatch, then turned around and leaned in, grabbed her collar with my right hand, and supported her weight while she moved her arm to the next rung up. Then I pulled her up a rung, and we did that four more times until I had her to the lip of the hatch and out, both of us panting and sweating.

“I think someone is moving around out there,” our father said. I sat up and did a thermal sweep, and there was some movement to the south, broken up by intervening structures, but it looked like three or four figures moving in formation, not toward us but heading west.

“Aurora, can you walk?”

“Maybe you should leave me here.”

“Can you fucking walk?”

She looked at me and nodded. “I don’t know how long.”

I pulled the gauss pistol from my belt. “Can you use one of these?”

She took it in her right hand and felt its weight. “I’ve fired one before, but never at a person. I don’t know if I could shoot someone.”

“Can you shoot the old man if he tries something?”

She looked over at him and her eyes narrowed. “Yes.”

I got her to her feet and then cut the tape holding the old man’s hands. I’d wanted to recover the tape in case we needed it later but couldn’t afford the time. I arranged us in a V formation, the old man in front, Aurora back and left, me back and right, and started us walking slowly north. I figured if we showed up on thermal sensors, we’d look like uBakai soldiers conducting a cautious sweep, not fugitives trying to escape.

North was the wrong direction, but first I wanted to get some distance between us and that patrol to the south. As we approached the open ground and shelters I saw more thermal activity off to our left, the west, including a ground vehicle moving slowly along a side road. That was probably an APC. Too much activity to the west. I wasn’t sure how we were going to follow Chernagorov through all of that. I hadn’t heard a lot of shooting so he must have slipped through just in time.

The ground ahead still glowed with cooling corpses and some still alive, but I also saw a flicker of shadowy movement in the uneven light of spreading fires.

“Stop.” I called out to the others. “Kneel or sit where you are.”

Aurora sank gratefully to the ground, the old man somewhat more cautiously.

“Movement up ahead. I’m going to check it out. Aurora, if he decides to run for it, shoot him.”

“Avrochka!”
he said, pathetic appeal in his voice.

“I will,” she answered. “Go.”

Time was running out so I covered the ground to the first of the shelters quickly, in a crouching trot. Something about the nature of the movement I’d seen didn’t look like a soldier to me. I slipped down into the sandbagged entrance to the shelter for cover and used the RAG’s bore-sight picture on my visor to give me a magnified view. The movement had stopped but I still saw a couple bright spots on the thermal.

“Who’s up there? Show yourself or I’ll throw a grenade over.”

“Mr. Naradnyo?” I heard a young voice answer. “Please don’t shoot!”

Then I saw movement, half a dozen figures rising up, and leading them I recognized the slight form of Divya Jayaraman, the young design student, the girl who knew every street and alley in Sookagrad by heart.

* * *

“That is Plovdiv Alley, very narrow, but it empties into Grand Vision Way perhaps fifty meters to the south,” Divya said, pointing at a darker part of the hodgepodge of structures and ruins. The two of us crouched next to the sandbagged entrance to one of the shelters which was not full of burned corpses.

“No good,” I said. “I can see a bright heat source at the southern end of it, but there’s no fire burning there. It’s a vehicle with its power plant running, and there’s no reason to do that unless it’s carrying armament.”

“Well, we can go due west for a while but we still have to cross Grand Vision Way if you want to move south. It runs all the way to Bannaz Arcology.”

I’d already seen even more activity to the west, and getting closer all the time. We had to move and move now. Our party had grown to about a dozen as some stragglers wandered south, trying to escape the fighting. There was only one alternative really. Little as I liked it, I couldn’t put if off any longer.

“Okay, everyone out of the shelter. Come on, form a column of twos, try to make it look military.”

The rest of our party emerged from the blackness of the shelter and walked up the packed earthen ramp, singly or in twos. The old man and Aurora led them, father supporting daughter. About half of them were hurt, one way or another. Five of them were kids, not infants but ranging from about eight to twelve. One guy, a fighter named Wilson, had a RAG-14—empty until I gave him one of my two extra magazines.

They formed a ragged column of twos which would not look the least bit military except from a distance on thermals. Then it might. I stood to the side, like a sergeant addressing his squad.

“Okay, here’s the deal: we can’t go north, south, east, or west, and we can’t fly, so we’re going down that hole over there into the storm sewer. I’m going first because I have the thermal visor and will be able to see down there. We have two electric torches, but one goes with Wilson and one with Aurora,” I said, giving them the lights. “Aurora, I want you and the old man in about the center of the group and Wilson, you bring up the rear. Shine the torches on the ceiling ahead of you, so we’ll have reflected overhead light.

“It’s a bit of a drop so I’m going first, then you,” I said, pointing to a fairly strong-looking guy. “We’ll catch, or at least break the fall, of the rest of you as you jump down. You’ll move south, which is the direction the water’s flowing, ten paces, then stop and wait for me to come up and lead. Any questions?

“Okay. Once we get set, everyone will grab the belt or shirt of the person in front of them. If there’s a little one next to you, grab them with your free hand. Those of you helping wounded folks, do the best you can as a team. I won’t set a fast pace, but it will be steady and you have to keep up. We’ll rest five minutes every half hour.”

I looked at the inky opaqueness of the hole, heard the running water down below, and wished I could recall that map of the tunnels Moshe had shown me, but all I could remember were lots of different-colored lines. Which were data, sanitary, and storm tunnels I couldn’t tell you. But water flows to the sea, or in this case the Wanu River. I figured if we followed the flow of the water, and bore right whenever we could to avoid Katammu-Arc, we’d hit the river eventually. I wished I had more to go on than gut instinct, though.

“Okay, let’s go.”

* * *

We got down without breaking any bones, got sorted out, and started pretty much as planned. I figured navigation would be the main technical challenge, endurance the main physical one, and panic the big psychological hazard. Mostly that was right, but we’d all figured on being alone down there. Panic loomed much larger as a threat when we started hearing the voices.

They were almost certainly Human voices, but ghostly and distorted by echoing and re-echoing down the foamstone tunnels, mixed in with the omnipresent sounds of running water and our own splashing footsteps. We stopped to listen the first time but couldn’t understand what they were saying, couldn’t tell the language, couldn’t even pick out words, just a general Human babble noise. We couldn’t tell if they were close or far, approaching or receding. You could hear the emotions in them, though: panic, rage, protest—things intense and dire.

We listened, then we talked in whispers, but what was there to decide? We could go on, go back, or stand still. We went on. I unslung the RAG I’d picked up from the dead uBakai soldier and checked the magazine: twenty-three smart-head flechettes still in the system and a hundred more in the single magazine in my belt. I made sure the selector switch was on single fire instead of automatic but left the safety on.

We made slow progress, interrupted by fairly frequent slips and falls into the water. The bottom of the tunnel was slimy with mud and algae, and the current made balance tougher, especially for the kids. The tunnels being circular cross-section tubes didn’t help. The only place you had much chance to keep your footing was right down the middle, which made it really difficult for those helping wounded. The healthy one had to walk in front, the injured person holding onto their shoulders, sometimes riding piggyback.

We slithered and stumbled and splashed along by fits and starts, nothing like the orderly procession I had imagined. I planned on five minutes of rest every half hour, but after about an hour of walking we needed longer breaks. Not only was trudging through the water exhausting, the air was stale and so humid it seemed thick and heavy, as if it took more effort to force it into your lungs than normal air. The tunnel wasn’t sealed, but there was no regular ventilation either, just whatever air happened to drift in the storm drains.

Probably in our second or third hour we encountered the first of the sewer people. I heard the suddenly louder voices up ahead, then the frantic splashing run.

I held my fist up to stop the column, then whispered, “Torches out!” Instantly the tunnel was pitch black.

They came around a bend ten or twenty meters ahead of us and I saw them in green negative images on my visor before anyone else could make them out. There were three of them, Humans, filthy and in rags. I think one of them was a woman. They ran with their arms thrust out ahead of them, used to moving in the dark.

“Halt!” I yelled and Aurora turned on her torch, shining it ahead and over my shoulder. It played across them and they instantly covered their eyes with their hands and screamed in panic, then turned and ran back the way they’d come.

“Wait!” I called out. “We won’t hurt you! Who are you?”

They didn’t hear me, or didn’t believe me, or were beyond understanding.

The encounter left us unsettled, but we kept going.

An hour or two later—it was getting hard to remember how long we’d been walking down there—five of them ran toward us down a long straight stretch, so I saw them on thermals from quite a distance and they saw our light. For whatever reason, maybe because it was not such a surprise, it didn’t frighten them, or at least not as much as what they were fleeing. They ran toward us shouting, all at the same time, the different voices and echoes rendering each other mutually unintelligible. But one word jumped out, over and over again.

“Gas!”
they screamed. “Run! Gas! The Varoki are gassing the sewers!”

I took a step back in panic but made myself stop. I grabbed the first man as he tried to push past.

“Where? Did you see it?”

He wouldn’t make eye contact, struggled to get free, and kept gesturing down the tunnel behind them.
“Gas!”

He pushed against me and I lost my footing, fell against the tunnel wall and slid into the water, and he was gone past me followed by the others. They pushed Aurora and our father down and the torch fell into the water, making the surface glow and sparkle.

I sat there for a moment, short of breath as much from the excitement as the exertion. I got the RAG out of the water and shook it, then got the electric torch. Both were solid state and designed to take at least this much punishment, but it was stupid to tempt fate.

“Is everyone all right?” I asked, shining the torch back on the others. The gauss pistol I’d given to Aurora had found its way into our father’s hand and although it wasn’t aimed at me, it was angled in my general direction.

“You better either shoot me or give that back to your daughter,” I said, “and do it now.”

Something flickered in his eyes, a moment’s pause before deciding. Then he made a production of shaking the water from the pistol as I had done and handed it grip-first to Aurora.

I held the torch higher and shined it farther back. I could see a light bouncing up and down, receding up the tunnel. “Wilson, where’s your light?”