Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (27 page)

On Thud and Blunder

We hadn’t gone far before someone shot at us. Simon shot back and a young man dropped from a sort of overhanging walk.

We were in a vast space, rounded and about twenty feet above. I didn’t know the plan of this base, of course, but it felt like a sort of central room, with corridors like spokes branching out in every direction.

It struck me as a very dangerous place. It must have struck Brisbois the same way. He looked up at the walk—there were two of them, crisscrossing above, just bridges of planks, with no guardrails. They looked like they’d been put in after the fact, possibly to access newly excavated tunnels in the base of the seacity. This place had a feeling of a warren multiplied by afterthought and necessity.

Brisbois was fumbling in his pants. Don’t ask me how, but before throwing out the jacket in the meeting room, he must have found the time to stash his ultra-light rope ladder in his pants and somehow have kept it from being found when we were searched. You’d think I’d have noticed that, but apparently, I was dumber than I thought. He threw it now, with precision, and did something. It anchored above, on one of the walkways.

“Up,” he told me. “I’ll guard you while you’re climbing, and then both of us can guard Simon while he climbs.”

So much for chivalry
, I thought, half-amused, as I perfectly understood that Simon was more important than I was.

I scrambled up the rope ladder as fast as I could.

Not fast enough, as a burner ray just missed the top of my head, missed because I’d hesitated for a couple of seconds. Perhaps I hesitated because I’d heard the burner fired. I don’t know. The problem with very enhanced senses is that unless you’re making a particular effort to use them, you make an effort to turn them off. You have to or you can’t live, as you monitor how everyone smells, breathes and moves around you, including those people you can’t see.

The thing is, if you’re keyed up, you still react to what you heard. You just don’t consciously register it.

The burner ray blazed just above my head. I could smell hot hair. And Brisbois fired. I thought I heard the distant sound of a body falling. I didn’t turn to look. Before he even said, “Up,” in a tone of command, I was running up the rest of the rungs as fast as I could, to lie flat on my belly on the walkway, surveying down below. I saw a glint of movement at the end of a doorway, and aimed for the foremost portion of movement, since I couldn’t be sure that it was hostile, but I knew that portion that glinted might be a burner.

I let a burner ray off, and hit the glinting thing, which exploded like a burner will when hit, and at the same time Simon must have shot, because there was a sigh, and the sound of someone falling, and Brisbois said, with a tone of impatience in his voice. “Leave off, Simon. Up.
Fast
.”

Simon must have interpreted the “fast” as I would have. So fast that no one could get a shot off while he was on the ladder, because there was a sense of scramble, two burner rays that singed the air just after him, and which were responded to by Brisbois, and then Simon was lying by my side on the plank, smelling of sweat and aftershave, and saying, in his best devil-may-care voice, “Hello,
petite
, you take the right, I take the left.”

I looked the way indicated, in time to drop someone with a burner, as I heard the scramble of Brisbois upon the rope ladder.

He landed with a thud somewhere north of me, and started shooting immediately, while saying, between gulps for breath. “Crawl forward, to the cross, move.”

“He sure gives orders,” Simon said, but I’d already started moving. Stood to reason the part where the two beams crossed was the safest, and besides, if they were going to chop us down, we’d make it as expensive for them as possible. One thing was to chop the walkway half of which would remain suspended, supported by the crossing place, and the other was to cut right through the middle of the cross and cause the entire structure to fall. They might be willing to do that to get to us, but I doubted they’d have the time.

As I crawled forward, I burned someone to my left, without even thinking. I heard Simon follow me, and Brisbois’s heavier movement.

Lying flat, shooting whoever poked a head out, Simon said, “Now what?”

Brisbois, instead of answering, bellowed to the surrounding area, “Basil! Basil!”

“What is that going to accomplish?” I asked as I burned someone at our own level, coming out of one of four openings on the second floor.

“Basil is my second in command here,” Brisbois said. “And I very much doubt he’s been corrupted. Damn it,” he said, as he burned someone below and someone above. “Basil!”

I could hear fights everywhere, on all levels, and realized that Brisbois was right. Not everyone had been corrupted. But at the same time, a lot of people had been, if there was fighting all over this place.

“Basil!”

“He might have been corrupted after all,” Simon said.

“More likely he’s dead,” Brisbois said.

But at that moment there was a bellow from somewhere, “I am coming, Brisbois.”

The shout distracted us long enough for a bright girl, fast on her feet, to make it running onto the walkway, a burner pointed at us. “Stay where you are. If you—”

So we were valuable as hostages, I thought, and even as I thought it, without moving in a perceptible way, with my hand pressed down and making the slightest gesture, I burned the bright girl at the thighs. She fell, and I’d swear that she was dead before she hit the floor twenty feet below in a shower of blood. The scream from downstairs allowed me to burn a bright boy who’d been advancing close to the wall in the shadows, doubtless till he could get a good aim on us.

“Don’t shoot,” a voice shouted, and then a word I couldn’t understand.

I focused on the corridor below, that the shout had come from. There were a lot of people there. I trained my burner on them, and realized Simon was doing the same.

“Don’t shoot,” Brisbois yelled.

“What now?” I asked, while Simon said, “Can they be trusted?”

Brisbois said something that sounded like a swear word, followed by “It’s Basil. If he’s been taken over, we’re dead, because everyone will be against us, here.”

“You have our word, unless you do something funny,” Simon yelled.

A group of people emerged into the open space below. Like the men before, they wore the white uniforms of Simon’s house guard. Well, at least they had been white once upon a time, and were now varying shades of dirt, with liberal application of reddish-black blood.

The man in the lead was built like Brisbois, and had blood-matted gray hair. He shouted, “Put your hands up,” and I thought he meant us, but the people below, the people with him, protested, and he said again, “Put your hands up or they burn us from above, and I will not blame them. Drop weapons and put your hands up.”

There were the thuds of several burners dropped, disregarded, and then hands went up.

“You have us at your mercy, Brisbois,” he said. “I am most heartily sorry for this mess.”

“Unless, of course,” Simon said, “you have comrades in all those hallways, ready to erupt the moment we come down.”

The man that Brisbois said was Basil looked surprised as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him.

I’d been straining my senses again, trying to hear more than normal people could. “There are no people in those tunnels,” I said.

The decision of course was ultimately Brisbois’s, because this was a man he knew. How much confidence he had in him made all the difference. Brisbois still sounded a little winded. I guess what we’d been doing was a lot for someone older and heavier than Simon and I were.

He said, “He knows we’d still burn him if he pulled something funny.”

“Nothing funny,” Basil said. “I’m not laughing.”

“Well, in that,” Brisbois said, and looking backward I saw him attach his little rope ladder and drop it. “You have my full concurrence.”

And then there was a sound of running feet from one of the hallways.

“Not ours,” Basil shouted, and I reached for the burner.

When about twenty people erupted into the space below from one of the tunnels, I had a bead center mass on the lead man, and just barely stopped myself from shooting Jonathan LaForce.

“Don’t shoot,” I shouted, but it was probably superfluous, since both Brisbois and Simon knew him.

The newcomers were soaked, dripping water from what looked like the same sort of amphibian suit I was wearing. In Jonathan LaForce’s case it also dripped from his hair and beard. Between them his eyes blazed furiously. “What in hell,” he said. “Has been going on here?”