Flinx in Flux (18 page)

Clarity shook her head. “You saw everything.”

He chewed his lower lip. “I can’t imagine what’s left to blow up, unless they’ve gone completely mad and are destroying the supplies.” He climbed to his feet, picking up a tube. “I’ll go have a look. You can wait here.”

“Not a chance.” She rose nervously. “I’d rather be lying half-dead on that beach back on Alaspin than be left alone down here.”

“All right. But when we get close, we’re going to have to muffle the light from the tubes. We can use our shirts.”

“Anything you say, but I’m not staying here alone.”

They never did make it far enough to see what was happening. When they had retraced half their steps, Flinx noticed that the faint glow of distant biotubes through spray-wall was absent. Rumbles continued to reach them from progressively fainter explosions.

“We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

“No, this is right. This has to be right.” She caressed an oddly bent stalagmite. “I tried to memorize landmarks, specific features. That’s one of the first things they drill you in when you come here, in case you do stray from a lit path.”

“Then we just haven’t come far enough.”

He thought they had walked the required distance when they found themselves standing opposite a solid wall of rock. Flinx played his tube over the broken surface while Pip and Scrap fluttered curiously nearby. The echo of another explosion reached them, very distant now. That was strange, because it should have been louder.

He bent to examine a place where broken stone was layered against a sparkling brown and white stalagmite. Clarity was kneeling and pushing aside fragments of rock.

“These look like unicorn horns. There’s no fresh growth, and the stalactites are still damp where they’ve broken loose from the ceiling.” Her gaze rose to the solid wall in front of them. “They must be destroying the back passageways.”

“It’s not enough for them to ruin your work here.” Flinx rose, his expression grim. “They’re trying to entomb it by demolishing the corridors and rooms.”

A slight quaver crept into her voice. “If they’re blowing up all the tunnels on their way out, then we’re trapped back here.”

“They found a new way in, we can find a new way out.”

“But they had proper spelunking equipment, and the passage they found is somewhere in there.” She indicated the immovable wall. “We only have, a couple of light tubes, and when they run out—”

“Calm down!” Flinx ordered. It had the intended effect, which was to quickly dampen her rising hysteria. “There have to be other exits to the surface from here, otherwise there’d be no decent air for us to breathe.”

“There are probably a hundred openings that go all the way up,” she said tiredly, “and most of them less than a meter in diameter, and they twist and turn and curve on their way in. Nothing a human being could fit through—nothing a cat could fit through—but enough to allow air to circulate. Alternative entrances to the outpost were checked and rechecked before construction began. The only practical way into the complex is via the ancient river canyon which forms the shuttle landing strip.” She ran her hands along the wall. It might have been in place for a million years for all the chance they had of forcing a passage through the tons of collapsed limestone.

“We’ll have to find a way through this somehow,” he told her. “Maybe a couple of large stones fell against one another and left a clearable space between.”

They did locate one spot where an immense fallen stalactite three meters in diameter formed a low arch. A hopeful Flinx crawled through, only to find his way blocked by debris from a second wall less than half a dozen meters beyond. Unable to turn, he laboriously crawled backward until he was standing outside the archway.

“No good. They set off more than one charge in here.” He brushed dust from his clothing, noticed the small flying snake peering at him from Clarity’s shoulder, and smiled. “Pip and Scrap could probably get out through one of those air passages you spoke of, but they’re not homing animals. They couldn’t take a message through, and in any event, Pip wouldn’t leave me in my current state of mind.”

“Then we’re trapped. We’ll never get out. Even if there was another way, we’d never find it. We don’t have any equipment.”

“But we do have time. The food will last if we’re careful with it, and water’s not a concern.”

“It’s not that. It’s not that.” She held her light tube so tightly, he was afraid she’d crush it between her fingers. “What happens when these start to go out?”

“They’re not going to go out until we’ve found a way out.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because we have to find a way out first.” He looked past her. “If they’re slowly filling in the entire Coldstripe complex, then our best bet is to try to circle around to the port area. If they’ve taken over the entire outpost, then it doesn’t matter where we go, but we can only proceed on the assumption that there’s a safe haven waiting for us at the end of our search. We need to find a way into a developed section of cavern.

“They can’t have brought enough people to keep watch over every room, every chamber. Most likely they’ve rounded everyone up and are keeping them under guard in one place. By the time we’ve found our way around to another part of the outpost, they won’t be looking for strays.” He took a determined step past her.

She didn’t follow. “You think it’s that easy? You don’t know anything about caves and cave systems. Caverns big enough to shelter half a city are often connected by crawl spaces too low for an infant to pass. You tell yourself, just a little more, just a little farther and you’ll be through, crawling on your belly, pushing with your feet, clawing with your hands while dust you can’t brush aside falls in your eyes. You can get close enough to see the next cavern beyond, and then the roof dips another centimeter and you’re stuck, and you can’t back out and they can’t pull you out and so you just lie there trying to shrink your skeleton enough to pull free and—”

“That’s enough!”

She started crying, not caring if anyone overheard, wanting someone to hear because anything was preferable to being marooned forever in that awful darkness, alone in a cavern that had suddenly become a potential tomb. Better to be a prisoner, better to suffer any amount of abuse by captors than to be trapped here.

“F-Flinx, I don’t want to die down here.”

“I’m not particular about the place,” he replied coolly, “but I am about the time, and it isn’t now. Come on, we’re wasting time. We have to work our way around, whether we have to climb or crawl or glide to do it. There
has
to be another way out.”

They started following the wall, traveling north by Flinx’s illuminated compass, one of the hundred functions he could call up on his chronometer.

His hope was that they would quickly find a passage leading to the back of some other company’s research installation. But Clarity was right. He knew more of the vastnesses above worlds than he did of the hollow places beneath their surfaces.

The first problem was that the ground did not stay level. Despite their constant efforts to remain at the same depth, they found themselves unwillingly working their way deeper. Nor did the wall they wanted to keep on their left curve gently around toward the port. It wandered and split, forming new passageways and small caves and tunnels until it was impossible to tell which was part of the original wall and which was entirely new. The narrowest crawl space might lead to salvation, while spacious walkaways always seemed to end in rockfalls.

He thought they could find their way by following breezes coming from the west, but holes in the ceiling centimeters wide and hundreds of meters long all admitted fresh air from the planetary surface. The result was a constant swirl of air, directionless and unhelpful.

The bright flare from the chemtubes they carried did little to dispel their sense of disorientation. Flinx had no idea of the port’s layout and knew only the direction in which they were traveling; Clarity, still terrified by the darkness, was completely lost. To her credit, she struggled to keep mind and soul together with as much hope as she could muster.

“Maybe heading down isn’t so bad,” she said, trying find the good in a bad situation. “There are levels below Coldstripe’s. I think there’s a big storage area located beneath the port. We just need to make sure we don’t descend too far or we might walk right beneath it and out on the other side.”

“We’ll find it. Or something close to it,” he told her with an assurance he did not feel.

Chapter Eleven

They walked, ate several meals, and marched on. It dawned on Flinx that one could go quietly mad trying to find one’s way around Longtunnel. It did not help when Clarity informed him that several of the geologists believed the wondrous cavern system extended the length and breadth of the continent. The hoped-for back way into another company’s chambers did not materialize. Even while paying constant attention to a compass, it was easy to get turned around.

Wild photomorphs fled from their lights. There was also an unseen creature that spun an intensely phosphorescent, bright pink web. They carefully avoided the sticky strands as they walked past, content to admire the web from a distance without feeling compelled to summon its owner forth.

Following a straight path was impossible. The farther they went, the more difficult it became to know if they were still anywhere near the colony. For Clarity’s sake Flinx espoused a positive line, but after several days of climbing over fallen boulders and through forests of stalagmites, during which time they encountered not a single sign of humanx presence, he found he was becoming discouraged himself.

Pip’s and Scrap’s moods reflected those of their humans. They rarely flew, preferring instead to ride shoulders and arms while displaying none of their usual exuberance and curiosity. Flinx knew that Pip’s lethargy was a true reflection of his own current state of mind. It was not a good sign.

The sheer enormousness of the caverns was putting a severe dent in his self-confidence. They might already have walked past half a dozen tunnels leading straight to the port complex. Instead, they had explored dozens of blind alleys and corridors that gradually narrowed to the width of a knife. As Clarity relentlessly pointed out, climbing higher might only lose them in different caverns.

If only they could get near enough to an installation to see a light, hear a noise. But there was only the trickling of water, the high-pitched squeals of cavern dwellers, and the strange unnerving noises produced by shadows in the darkness that scuttled out of sight whenever a tube was thrust in their direction.

On the third day Clarity said, “They might really want to destroy everything. Not just Coldstripe.”

“How do you mean?” Flinx had to turn sideways to fit through a narrow passage between a row of stalagmites. She turned to follow him, carefully keeping her precious tube away from any projecting rocks.

During the past days the tubes had faded slightly. Hardly enough to be noticeable, but it did not take much to panic Clarity. She had not complained, had not pointed out the reduced level of illumination, but he knew she had noticed. It was an effort for her to stay calm from the time they began walking until they lay down to go to sleep.

“If they can wipe out the entire installation, bury every corridor and fill in every developed cavern, they might try concocting a story about some kind of natural disaster. They could claim they were headed here to carry out an experiment of their own, or to make a mild protest, only to have found that an earthquake or something had recently destroyed the colony. Make it look as if natural causes were responsible. If they can invent a plausible enough story, the Commonwealth office for this sector might not think it necessary to send out their own inspectors to check it out.

“They could then convince the authorities that Longtunnel is unsuitable for further exploration. It wouldn’t take much. All you’d have to do is show a layman’s jury tridees of the surface. They could shut down the whole world, bar it to further research. But that would mean,” she finished in a small voice, “that they’d have to kill everybody. Not just the scientists and administrators. Everybody.”

They walked in silence for a while. “Sometimes,” Flinx finally said softly as he raised his tube for a better look ahead, “those who speak of preserving life aren’t above taking it to further what they perceive to be their ultimate aims. Often the only life they’re not interested in preserving is that of their fellow man.” As he lowered the tube, he studied it thoughtfully. “It’s a shame we can’t switch one of these off and preserve it.”

She shook her head. “It’s a steady-state chemical reaction. Once it’s activated, you can’t turn it off unless you break the tube and release the mixture. It’s fading.”

“Only slightly.”

“They don’t last forever. When one becomes too dim to be useful, it’s just replaced. Most of them are reliable, predictable, but a few last much longer than the rest, and a few . . . a few go out rapidly. You never know which is going to do what. That’s a consequence of the chemical imbalance inherent in every batch of luminescent liquid. No matter how much attention is paid to the mixing, there are always a few that are slightly off one way or the other. I’ve seen some tubes wink out hours after they were installed and others that have been glowing steadily since the first corridors were cut on Longtunnel.”

“I hope these are two of the long burners. Look, is there anything in particular we should be watching out for down here? I keep hearing noises.”

“I told you there were carnivores. So far we haven’t run into anything except some photomorphs and that web spinner. One thing I’ve been trying to keep an eye out for is straw worms. They look a lot like those soda straws we passed yesterday.”

“Soda straws?”

“The long, thin, almost pure calcite stalactites we passed yesterday. The ones that look like needles hanging from the ceiling. Straw worms hide themselves among the formations. They hang from a sucker at the tail end. If something edible passes underneath, they let go and drop straight down on it. None of the four species that have been studied thus far are toxic, but they all have three concentric rings of teeth in their jaws. They’re like leeches, only much harder to get off. They lock on, dig in, and secrete a fluid which liquefies flesh and bone.

“Fortunately they aren’t very strong biters. As long as they don’t land on exposed flesh and get a grip on you, it’s simple to grab them behind the head and throw them aside. The critical thing is not to give them enough time to chew through your clothes. There’ve never been any fatalities from straw worm bites, but then, nobody’s ever been lost down here without light, either. You said you’ve heard noises. Was a lot of that like a ringing in your ears?”

He nodded. “Yesterday particularly.”

“There are small mammals that have huge ears and cone-shaped mouths. They’re kind of cute, actually, once you forget that they have no eyes. We call them coners. All ears and mouth on oversized feet. They range their prey with ultrasound. The biggest is maybe a third of a meter tall. All they eat are blind insects.

“After they home in on a bug, they turn up the frequency and knock it off its perch, or out of the air, or stun it on the ground. Sometimes we can feel the vibrations. Nothing dangerous. They’d eat us, too, if they could, but they have no teeth. Only that funnel-like mouth. So they just scramble out of our way.

“The coners aren’t the only animals that hunt with sound. We’ve one specimen only of something that looks like a cross between a tiger and a hippo. If it can generate sound in proportion to its size and on the wrong frequencies, it could conceivably be dangerous to us, but with only a dead specimen to study, we can’t tell. It has teeth big enough to do the job.”

“Earplugs probably wouldn’t help.”

“No, they wouldn’t. But we shouldn’t be worried about sound generators. The poison carriers are the ones that concern me. There’s one that lives only on top of certain stalagmites. You can’t tell by looking at the stalagmite. The differences are apparent only to the darters, except for the absence of water.

“They have a dozen legs that help them cling to the drier limestone. The proboscis is ten centimeters long and uses air pressure to fire a little dart, an organic hypodermic if you will, that’s attached to the inner nostril by a thread-sized length of tendon. The dart contains a particularly powerful hementin-based toxin that attacks fibrinogen. If it’s not countered, you bleed to death through the wound the dart makes because the hementin prevents the blood from clotting. Then the little bastards climb down off their safe, high perches and suck up the remains. But if we don’t blunder into any, we won’t have any trouble.

“That’s why I’m glad this is a live cave system. The darters only perch on dead stalagmites. So try to stay close to the growing ones. They don’t like the water that drips from the ceiling.”

“And I was thinking how peaceful and calm it was down here.”

“Don’t let the darkness fool you. We’re walking through a treeless jungle. In its own way, this subterranean ecosystem is as vibrant and competitive as Alaspin’s. It’s just that we’re bigger than the majority of inhabitants. And if they have any photorecepting capability at all, they instinctively shy away from our lights.

“There is at least one big something, though. It’s never been observed, but we have measured tracks. Eight legs and pad prints a meter wide. It keeps to the largest caverns. It’s been named vexfoot.

“Then there are the creatures that inhabit the underground lakes and streams. I won’t go into them since I don’t expect we’ll have to do any swimming.” Her tube suddenly faded sharply. She shook it vigorously, stirring the contents like a luminescent cocktail, and was rewarded when the light returned to normal. He could sense her relief.

“So these tubes are a defense as well as our guides. If they went out, I don’t know what would happen, except that you’d quickly meet a lot more of the local fauna than you have thus far.”

“There’s no reason for them to go out.” He tried to reassure her. “No reason according to all you’ve told me why they shouldn’t last for weeks or months.”

“No. No reason at all.”

“Even if we were to be attacked by something, Pip and Scrap would act to stop it.”

“I know, but flying snakes need light as much as we do. Unless they have some kind of echolocation mechanism.”

“None that I know of. But by nature they’re nocturnal. They can see quite well in very low light.”

“That doesn’t do any good down here. When these tubes go out, there’ll be no light at all. No moonlight, no stars. It’s the blackest black imaginable, much worse than empty space.”

“Except for the bioluminescents,” he reminded her. “I guess we could always capture a couple of wild photomorphs and put leashes on them. A pet that lights its own way at night.”

His attempt at humor failed. She was clearly worrying about how she would react when the tubes started to fade permanently. No matter, he told himself firmly. By that time they would have found a way out. He wished they had a way of knowing how the battle against the ecofanatics was going. They could have sealed themselves up in Coldstripe’s station or taken over the entire port. Or port Security might be driving them out, back the way they had come, while he and Clarity wandered needlessly through Longtunnel’s unmapped depths. That thought was harder to deal with than the others. Not knowing what was happening was as frustrating as not knowing where they were.

She halted abruptly, almost stumbling, and looked back sharply. “There’s something over there.” Scrap’s head rose from behind her sidetail, the adolescent minidrag looking more like a bejeweled shoulder ornament than a living creature. His stance was alert, the pleated wings half-unfolded. He had definitely taken a liking to Clarity, Flinx thought.

“I heard it, too.”

He unlimbered the needler he had taken from the man who had tried to kill them and checked the setting. Half power remaining. That should be sufficient to deal with anything they ran into. A needler was not his weapon of choice. You had to be careful with them. Sometimes they leaked and could give the wielder a nasty, unexpected jolt. But he was glad to have the firepower.

“We could backtrack a little,” she suggested.

“Backtrack to where? Let’s just stand here a minute. Maybe it’ll go away.”

The rustling noise was moving around. They followed its progress through another part of the cavern as it came parallel to their position, then moved on ahead. Intervening formations played tricks with echoes as sounds bounced off soda straws and draperies and flowstone. Something moving far away could sound quite near, while a cautious stalker could use stone and water to muffle the noise of its approach.

It was ahead of them now and closer, a rough mewing. Flinx whispered to his companion.

“Recognize it?” She shook her head tensely “Well, I’m not standing around until our light goes out.” Taking a determined step forward, he passed beyond a sheet of rippling travertine and came face-to-face with a mouth.

It was a round, impressive mouth. Apparently, round jaws were common on Longtunnel. This one was lined with three concentric rings of inward-pointing, serrated teeth. As he gaped at it, the rubbery lip ring flexed and his nostrils were filled with the smell of decaying matter. The jaw did not so much close as iris-shut. If someone’s head happened to be inside during the process, he thought wildly, it would be snipped off at the neck as cleanly as if by a surgical cutter.

The mouth was the face, and the face was the mouth. Any vestigial eyes were hidden beneath the pure white, long, silken fur against which the black lip lining the mouth stood out starkly. Atop the massive skull, a fan-shaped single ear flexed freely. Flinx wondered if it had evolved that way or if two ears had eventually grown together to form one.

He did not wonder about it long as he threw himself sharply to one side. The irising mouth opened with astonishing speed and snapped at him, the short neck extending slightly. Teeth clashed as the snout-jaw was sucked shut.

Clarity screamed as the monster lunged in her direction, advancing on four heavy legs. Flinx glimpsed the nostrils set just behind the top of the mouth. Jaws, nose, and ear were all set in line, like a multiple sight on a gun, all positioned for maximum hunting ability.

Then he could not see Clarity anymore because her tube went out. Frantically, he tried to set his own safely aside and aim the needler.

Pip and Scrap had both flown into action, but the flying snakes were confused by the sight of a creature with no eyes. While they puzzled over what to attack in the absence of their natural target, the monster was trying to decide which of two potential prey to strike at next. Clarity was moaning and trying to keep a large stalagmite between herself and that singular mouth.