Authors: Ben Bequer
She jogged back, breathing heavily, but looked so good and I got caught staring at her. She made it look so effortless, like fighting a bunch of blaster-firing aliens on some alien planet was just par for the course. To watch her was to see a pro in action, amazing and at the same time casual and cool. Apogee smiled, as if she knew what was going through my mind, and slapped my shoulder to snap me out of it.
“What about that?” she asked, pointing to the distance at a circular structure, where a few alien creatures tended to floating manta rays in what was obviously their pen. The way there was through the main spire of the citadel, probably through the heart of the guard.
I looked ahead at the bridge guards approaching gingerly, wary of us, but determined in their duty.
“Be a hell of a fight to get down there,” I said.
“I’ve got nothing else planned this afternoon,” she coaxed, and we faced off with the bridge guards. “What about you boys?” Apogee taunted them, and we went to work.
* * *
After beating on the bridge guards, we ran into the citadel and tried to find a way down to the manta ray pen.
There was no alarm to signal our escape, nor warn others, but I did have a distinct feeling that we were being monitored. We passed a herd of the enormous creatures that made the walls of the place, and while they stopped from their tasks to watch us run by, the beasties didn’t do anything to stop us.
Several small aliens with the appearance of miniature purple glowing cornstalks with eyes scattered from us screeching in fear.
Ahead was a large open courtyard, with a large entrance to each of the four cardinal points, but nothing that obviously lead downwards.
“Now what?” I asked.
Apogee shrugged, as much at a loss as I was.
A pair of armored guards, the tall stilt-walkers types I had fought in the arena, came around a corner, and walked towards us, for the moment oblivious.
“Just a sec,” she said, speeding at them and bringing them down before each could unsling their lances from their shoulders to do battle. Apogee rushed back to me.
“So?”
I shook my head in frustration, looking down, and watched where she had stepped at high speed. Each of her steps had left a pronounced smoking footprint, the speed and heat of her movement having melted a few inches into the floor.
She saw what I was looking at and followed my train of thought, taking a few steps back. Once there was a nice area for her to run, she started running in a circle, then popped her super speed. Almost immediately, she melted the ground, falling under in a circular tube, which eventually led to the lower levels.
Apogee fell the last few feet to the ground, looked for enemies, and motioned me down to follow. I’m not the most graceful guy in the world, so my drop down was more of an uncontrolled fall into a crumpled heap.
When I got to my feet, I found myself alone, in a dark circular tunnel, about thirty feet in diameter. This place was barely lit by faint radiating bioluminescence, and some glowing insects, much like fireflies. The walls and roof were all covered and dripping with a gelatinous goop.
I saw Apogee fighting a large creature in the distance. It had the upper body of a weightlifter, but was four-armed, with a deadly looking pistol in each hand. Its head was like that of a hooded cobra, and below its abdomen it had the long, thick body of a snake.
It rapid-fired at Apogee with all four weapons and it was closing in on her, despite her speed advantage.
I ran towards the monster at full speed, but there was no chance I would reach in time, as it leading her with its barrage, lining up for a kill shot. Instead, I roared, the sound amplified by the enclosed space, trying to draw its attention to me. The creature noticed me, even in the dimly lit distance, and fired a few shots in my direction. But that was enough for Apogee. She jumped on its upper body, and accelerated her arms, firing off a hundred punches into its head, dropping the snake-man to the ground unconscious.
“Nice,” I said as I finally came closer.
“I make friends wherever I go,” she quipped.
I looked around the hall wondering what we’d run into next.
“I think it’s this way,” she said, leading with a charged first that helped light the way. We continued through the tunnel, which curved to the right slightly so we couldn’t see too far ahead.
“I know what we’re gonna find down here,” I said, trying to break the tension. “There’s going to be this chamber, more beautiful than anything the Greeks could have built, with all the alien Lightbringer dudes in these sleeping pods. We’ll catch them sleeping and kill them all, and save Earth and the whole universe.”
She looked at me like I was insane.
“You watch,” I affirmed.
“If you had to guess,” she said, ignoring my comment altogether. “Which way would you say that platform is?”
I tried to judge it by feel, based on our brief glimpse of the manta ray pen was. We had crossed the bridge and travelled a few hundred feet further. Then we bore down through the floor and now travelled another few hundred feet in near-darkness. We had to be really close to it, if not right there.
“There,” I pointed, laterally from where we were.
She nodded, “Yeah. Just about, right?”
“The only problem is that these walls self-heal. I can’t break through them with my bare hands.”
Apogee looked back and smiled. “One sec,” she said, and was gone in one second and back again the next, holding the two huge guns from the lizard creature we’d just fought.
“Here,” she tossed one of the guns at me, and when we opened fire, tearing a huge hole in the wall.
Outside was a sheer drop to the abyss, as it was clear we were in a network of tunnels that wound around the bottom base of the citadel. Several bridges led away from the main superstructure, jutting in every which way, even up and down, to enclosed platforms of various functions. It took me a second to discern which one housed the mantas. It was below us, farther down than I had figured, maybe two hundred feet down, and about fifty feet behind.
“There,” she said.
“That’s a long way down,” I said, wondering how we were going to make it to the platform. The bridge to it came from below, its actual location too far beneath for us to discern its origin.
“I could throw you again,” she joked, knowing her last toss was far from accurate.
“Wish we had Mr. Haha here about now,” I shouted, sticking my head out to get a better vantage point. Winding beneath the citadel wound a hundred tubes, much like the one we were in, were all twisted amongst each other, like a bowl of upside-down spaghetti.
I grabbed at the walls and noticed sticky and goopy like on the inside. The outer shell was harder, as if the substance had formally set. Yet it was fibrous and had some give. Perhaps it was my strength, but I could grab into the wall, and squeeze my fingers to get a good handhold.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She shook her head, looking down.
“If we shimmy back a bit,” I continued, “we can get right on top of it and drop down.”
“It’s two-hundred feet, easily,” she protested.
“Maybe, maybe more. But you can slow your descent with your power, right?”
Apogee shrugged, “doesn’t help you, though.”
“I’ll have to take my chances,” I said.
“Ok,” she started. “You have to stop being such a damned guy. Use your head, for once!”
“I am.”
“No you’re not!” Apogee snapped. “I mean, have you noticed the hurricane-force crosswinds. And say you do manage to fall on the mark, you might break through. I can’t fly, Blackjack, if you fall through you’re dead.”
“So what do you suggest? I don’t have any arrows. I don’t even have a bow.”
“I don’t know,” she said defensively. “You replicated that machine after seeing it for, like, one minute.”
“I had Haha for that,” I said.
“Haha made it faster, right? He made it so it took a few hours instead of weeks. But you could have made it regardless, right?”
I didn’t bother answering. She was seeing only the danger of the jump down, when I could see the escape so close to us. It was a risk worth taking.
“Right?” she continued. “I heard you talking about a forge and an anvil and all that stuff.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Maybe.”
“So think of something now, Dale. You’re the super smart engineer. Figure it out.”
I knelt on the floor, “What could we use?” I asked. She wore that dress, now covered in dirt and blood, but perhaps it was of some material we could use.
“Let me see,” I said, standing by her and tearing some of the material off. It was some soft silk, totally useless to bear weight.
“Hey,” she protested, as I tore off far more than I had intended.
“Don’t worry, I’ve seen it before,” I said dismissively, looking around for something else to use.
I looked at the edges of the hole on the wall. There were some sort of fibrous filaments that had burned when we fired the guns. I gripped one of the charred ends of the filaments and pulled, finding it almost impossible to even tear them off the wall using all my strength. That was it, except instead of pulling against them, where their tensile strength was at its greatest, maybe I could find a way to tear along the fiber.
I couldn’t find any filament against the smooth floor or walls, so I punched into the inside wall, breaking through until my fist was well embedded. I grabbed some of the fibers and tore back, along the wall. It made a sound like tearing apart a coconut, as I kept pulling the handful more and more along the wall.
“Mind giving me a hand here?”
Apogee saw the goopy wet fibers in my hand and shook her head.
“That’s too slippery,” she protested. “It’s got too much of that gel stuff on it.”
“Yeah, but you can burn it off with your power. And maybe you can rip off some more from the wall, since you’re faster than me. We’re going to need a few hundred feet of it.”
She grabbed a loose end of the fibers and ran her charged right hand over them, the heat of her power melting off the gel. Madelyne smiled, as she tested the strength of the fibers.
“See?” she said. “I knew you’d figure it out.”
* * *
While I continued tearing at the wall she followed, searing the separate fibers into one. We moved backwards along the tunnel the way we had come, both silently working. I would rip a few feet off, then shift a few steps over and get another good grip and rip some more out. She was behind me, picking up the fibers as I ripped them off, waving her charged hand along the rope we were making, melting the gel, and then twisting it a few times until it congealed together.
After about ten minutes, we figured we had a rope long enough to reach down there.
I took one of the captured guns and burst another hole in the wall, peeking out to look for the bridge and platform. We were much closer, almost perfectly atop the span leading out.
“Better?” I said, moving out of the way so she could look down.
“Much,” she retorted. “But what are we going to secure the rope to?”
I smiled. “Ye of little faith,” I said and fired the gun, making another hole, about the size of the first one, beside it.
“Give me the end,” I said, digging through the pile of rope, now several hundred feet long.
“Wait, wait!” she protested. “I have it organized.” She moved a pile aside and handed me an end. “There.”
I took the end of the rope and threaded it outside one hole and back in the other, then tied it with a figure-8 follow-through knot, with the leftover rope tail tied in a fisherman’s backup knot.
“That should hold us, if anything can.”
She’d been quiet the whole time we were making the rope, probably awash with strange memories buzzing in her head, not knowing how to feel about them, now that they were fresh. One thing was for certain, Zundergrub’s power over her was fading faster and faster.
“Now,” I said, seemingly talking to myself. “The safest way to do this is for me to lower you. Then you can anchor the rope for me to come down. Sounds good?”
She nodded.
I took the last ten feet or so of the rope on the other end, and shot it off, making it into a waist harness much like the one we had used to traverse across the shards. I handed it to her and she put it on, then I tied the new, burned end of the rope to the harness using a figure-8-on-a-bight knot which was better to tie a haul line onto a harness.
“You sure this is going to hold?”
I nodded. “The rope should hold fine. And the knots are good.”
She looked into my eyes, trusting me with her life now.
“It’ll hold,” I said, trying to sound as confident as possible.
The truth was I hadn’t told her everything. The rope was strong, sure, and it would hold her weight, which was meager. The problem wasn’t even getting her down, despite the terrible cross-winds and the small target to hit. No, that part was easy compared to getting me down. I’d have to rappel or zip line all the way down without the proper gear or equipment, and one slip would be fatal.