Shockball (15 page)

He helped me up. “You withstood the trial well, Cherijo. I was correct in my predictions of your nerve tolerances. I think it is safe to assume my other estimations will be as accurate.”

“Don’t be so humble. You’re not that great.” I swayed on my feet. “Could I get some sleep now? I’m really tired. And a privacy screen would be nice, too. I’m sick of all the drones watching me undress.”

The whine in my voice was artificial, but very convincing. Joseph instructed the lab drone to give me what I needed, and said his usual good night to me. He felt brave enough to touch me, and caressed my cheek with his cold hand.

“Sleep well, daughter.”

The man still thought of me as his child. He really was pond scum, minus the pond.

The drone obligingly draped the walls of my treatment room with privacy screens, then turned out the lights. Reever had been moved back to his own room, now that the plas wall had been replaced, and lay apparently asleep. A few moments after the lights went out, he groaned softly.

“Reever?” I sat up and looked through the dividing panel. “Are you okay?” All I got was another groan. “Maintenance unit?”

“No talking. Take your sleep interval now or you will be sedated.”

“Linguist Reever is ill. Service emergency medical override protocol, priority one, directive file S.O.P. four-two-seven.” I crossed my fingers, hoping Joseph hadn’t removed that directive from the unit’s database. It was part of the original factory programming package, and consequently no one ever thought about erasing it when creating new command sub-menus.

It clicked and hummed for a moment, then said, “Service emergency medical override protocol initiated. What are your instructions, Doctor?”

I went right to the door panel. “Provide me access to the patient, and assistance.” The drone let me out, then escorted me into Reever’s room. My husband had curled over in a fetal position, and was shaking violently. “Reever, what is it? What’s wrong?”

All he did was groan again.

The lab drone went to the edge of the berth. “Inquiry: Should Dr. Joseph be signaled to attend to this patient?”

“No, that’s not necessary,” I said, and pulled the power supply board out of the back of the unit. It went completely dead. “Please help me get him on his back,” I continued, for the benefit of the recording drones.

Reever allowed me to roll him over, and while I blocked the view of the maintenance drone, pulled the unit’s panel and began reprogramming it.

Everything was looking great, until all the lights went out.

“Is it the power grid?”

“We’re not going to wait to find out.” Reever grabbed my hand, pushed the unit out of the way, and hauled me to the door.

Someone bumped into us. Someone short and wearing strange garments. Too short to be Joseph. Another drone?

“You the patcher and the code talker?” a high-pitched voice whispered.

“Who wants to know?” I whispered back.

“Come to spring you two out of here.” The intruder turned on an optic emitter and swung it toward one of the corridor access panels. “This way.”

I started out the door panel, but Reever held me back. “Who are you?”

“Milass.” His voice bordered on shrill. “I hov’ with the alien underground. Caught word of your troubles, craved to help.”

The alien underground? “I’ve never heard of that,” I said.

Reever stepped in front of me. “Nor have I.”

“Not like we advertise, get it?” He spoke an odd variety of inner-city slang, one I hadn’t heard in three years.

“Can you speak stanTerran?”

Milass made an impatient sound. “You two crave strolling out of here, or not? The junkers will be on us in a blip.”

I wasn’t taking another step without my cat or the Lok-Teel. “Reever, get Jenner.”

While I retrieved the Lok-Teel from my cell, Reever managed to smash open the plas unit Joe had imprisoned Jenner in. He leaped up in my arms and stared at our rescuer. He didn’t hiss, but the fur on the back of his neck stood on end.

“He’s okay, pal.” I stroked him, not sure if I was comforting the cat or lying to myself.

A small, square hand gestured for us to follow him. “We got to stroll,
now
”

I looked at my husband, who hesitated another moment, then nodded.

We followed our diminutive rescuer into one of the corridors and down past a number of equipment storage areas. Emergency lights illuminated everything with a blood-red glow. At the very end of the corridor was a wall panel with a small, square hole.

Milass pointed to it. “That way.”

Reever crawled in first. I put Jenner in, then followed. Behind me, Milass got in, then sealed it. That plunged the narrow crawl space into total darkness.

We crawled forward, but not for long. Reever pulled himself out into a larger area, and turned to grab Jenner and help me. When the smell hit my sensitive nose, I stopped at the very edge.

“What is that stench?”

Beyond me appeared to be some kind of tunnel with smooth, perfectly rounded walls. Someone had strung a couple of optic emitters along the very top of the tunnel. A stream of sluggish mud covered the bottom of it.

“Take my hands, Cherijo.”

I held on to my husband’s hands and pushed myself out of the crawl space. And stepped into something that was definitely
not
mud. “Where are we?”

“Old sewer pipes,” Milass said as he emerged. “We got to hike through it to get to
Leyaneyaniteh
.”

That wasn’t anywhere I’d been in New Angeles. “Le-what?”

“It means, ‘The Place of the Reared Under the Ground,’ ” Reever said.

Our rescuer climbed down and walked toward us. “You got word on my tribe, code talker?”

I saw his garments had been fashioned from some sort of animal hide, and covered with primitive symmetrical symbols. He looked as though he’d stepped out of a history text.

“I understand your root language.”

Code talker. A name for linguists who’d used obscure languages as encryption devices during the old wars. How did I know? Joseph had dragged me over to the Four Mountains reservation to watch him make his annual address as the official shaman for the Native Nations of North America. Sometimes I’d slipped out of the tribal assembly hall and wandered around the adjacent museum building.

“You’re an Indian,” I said. I concentrated for a moment, rolling the word around in my head. The only Indians for miles around were the ones up in the canyons, beyond the mountain range. “Navajo?”

“No.”

When he stepped into the circle of light, I saw he wasn’t a young boy, but a very short, thin man. Milass had the typical bowed calves and dark coloring of the Navajo, so I didn’t think he was telling the truth. He wore his long brown hair loose, with some white feathers hanging from a single thin braid by his right temple. The feathers contrasted sharply with the livid burn scars marring his face and neck. He might be child-size, but he looked like a guy nobody messed with.

“You’re tasty looking,” he said, giving me a leer.

“You’re not,” I said.

“We’ll spout later.” He started down through the conduit. “Move your gear.”

I looked at Reever, saw how my cat was struggling to get out of his arms. “Give me him, he’s scared.”

Reever handed me Jenner, and I propped my frightened cat against my shoulder. He sank his claws into me, and shivered.

“It’s okay, pal.”

I continued to murmur wordless sounds of comfort as we worked our way farther into the archaic sewer system. When I saw the rats lining either side of the conduit, I realized Jenner wasn’t frightened as much as he was
hungry
.

“You can’t eat those things,” I told him. “Look where they live.”

Reever put his arm around me when we turned into a cross section and had to climb up into another, smaller pipe. This one had several inches of waste at the bottom, and I made a face.

“That has to be at least two hundred years old. So why is it still wet?”

My husband took my arm. “It’s below the water table.”

I cringed as my footgear became saturated. “Lovely.”

We slogged through a series of waste-lined conduits for some time, until we reached a man-made breach in the pipes. Milass led us through that into a much larger tunnel, filled with what appeared to be an ancient transport system.

I studied the alloy rails, huge, decaying transport vehicles that resembled glidebuses, and heard the faint hum of electricity. The little Indian went up to the first of them and wrenched open a door. A shower of rust flakes rained down around him. Hinges squealed and groaned.

“I never saw anything like this when I lived on Terra,” Reever said in a low voice.

Me neither. “Have any idea what it could be? Besides junk, I mean?”

“Apparently some type of primitive electrical conveyance system. It might be what was once called a ‘subway,’ a system of underground transport.”

I could think of half a dozen archaeologists who would have fainted at the sight of an intact subway system. “Can’t be. Subways haven’t been used in about five hundred years.”

Milass came over to us, clearly impatient to go. “It’s solid. Let’s jam.”

We entered the long, box-shaped transport and sat down on two of the cracked, stained seats. Reever was utterly fascinated and started touching everything.

“This pole is aluminum,” he said, then felt the seat. “And this feels a little like unrefined plas.”

“Plastic,” I said as I watched our rescuer. He’d gone to the front compartment and was sitting at some kind of console.

“If this is a subway transport, it is too old to be functional.”

“I wouldn’t put credits on that.” I watched as Milass activated the power system, and the entire car shook. “Grab something, Reever.”

Metal whined, electricity crackled, and the transport shuddered and groaned as it began to slowly move on the rails.

Reever got that rapt look on his face, the one he had whenever he was updating a linguistic database or crossbreeding some kind of rare flower. “Incredible.”

“Uh-huh.” It might be incredible, but it was also five hundred years old, or worse. I held on and prayed the thing wouldn’t collapse on us.

It didn’t. It gathered velocity until we were doing about half the normal speed of a glidecar, and rattled along the tunnel railway. Someone must have spent considerable time and effort maintaining this ancient system. Still, every couple of seconds there was a new whine, hiss, or bump. I started to sweat when I saw the rivets in one of the old aluminum panels beginning to give way.

After an hour of this joyride, I called to Milass, “How much farther?”

“Almost there,” he yelled back.

I closed my eyes as we finally decelerated. “There is a God and He listens to me.”

When the transport came to a full stop, I got to the door and out of there. In the pitch-black tunnel outside, I opened my mouth to give the little man a piece of my mind, when he took out a small black device and pointed it at the wall.

The wall slid to one side, revealing yet another tunnel—this one much smaller and hacked out of solid stone. Tiny optic emitters sparkled, casting a faint glow.

Milass glanced back at us, then waved his arm and stepped down into the tunnel.

Things weren’t adding up. Indians involved with an alien underground. Transport systems that shouldn’t exist but still worked. Stone walls moving like door panels by remote control.

“Reever, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“We have no choice but to go on. Unless you prefer to return to the estate and try to find an alternative escape route.”

“So what’s a bad feeling or two?” I stepped down into the tunnel. The air at once became cleaner and cooler, and I took a deep breath. Jenner perked up and struggled to get down again. “Not yet, pal. Pardon me, but how much farther is it?”

“We’re near getting. Wait.” He held up a hand as he pointed his device at a red optic light set in one side of the tunnel. Something beeped, and the light turned from red to green.

“What’s that?” I asked, looking back as we passed it.

“Watch.” He used his remote again, switching the light back to red, then picked up a pebble and tossed it. A bioelectrical field snapped and crackled, bouncing the pebble back at us. At the same time, half a dozen thin, sharp-tipped silver rods shot out of the top of the tunnel and buried themselves in the floor.

“A containment field. And… spears. Very nice.”

“The buzz keeps meddlers out. The chuks clinch they don’t get another go.” He was already walking away. “Grip your animal and stay near.”

“Absolutely.” Seeing as I didn’t have a handy-dandy remote device myself.

We passed at least a dozen more traps that Milass had to disarm, emphasizing that wherever we were going needed lots of security. From the slope of the tunnel and the temperature drop I judged we were descending even farther beneath the ground. The deeper we went, the more optic emitters I saw. Then other tunnel openings began to appear.

“This place reminds me of Catopsa,” I said to Reever. “All it needs is some hostile lizards and killer
tul
crystals.”

Strange pictographs also started appearing on the walls of the tunnels. They ranged from abstract circular designs to more elaborate primitive symbols. Some strongly resembled the patterns in the Navajo wool rugs my creator collected. We also heard sounds of other footsteps, faint, clanging noises, and from one tunnel opening, drumming and low-pitched chanting.

The little man took a final turn and lead us out into a huge, natural cavern. It was so enormous and unexpected that I yelped. Dozens of dark eyes turned to look at us for a moment, then paid no more attention.

It was exactly as if a small Indian village had been dropped into the center of the earth. There was a big fire burning in the center of the cave. Men crouched near it in small groups, talking and drinking from small pottery servers. Women sat near them, some of them weaving on huge looms. Children ran around, some of them naked, and played games with sticks and balls. Some thirty small, rounded huts built of mud and wood lined the walls of the cavern.