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The guard shoved the kid through the nondescript double doors in the empty white hallway beneath the Grip. She came back out clinging to his arm, terror etching her features. He hissed and shook her off, snatched the hood of her robe and tossed her back inside.
I opened my mouth to protest and sucked in a mouthful of the cold, putrid air that rolled out the door. I bent nearly double, gagging as an Endar hand caught the back of my neck and pushed me in after her.
Lirilune met me on the other side, throwing her arms around my waist and burying her head against the bare skin of my side. I put a sympathetic arm across her shoulders, but I reserved the other one to cover my own nose and mouth.
The guards pitched my shipskins in behind me and slammed the door, leaving us in the reeking cold.
"Shit," I muttered. "Shit, shit." What the hell was this place? As my watering eyes adjusted to the thin light, I looked around.
We stood on a landing perched high on a wall beneath an arched stone ceiling with a huge hole at its center. The platform extended out in a two-meter square and connected to a ramp that curved down to the floor along the circular wall.
I'd seen a similar place on this world, but from a different angle. Beyond the rail that edged the platform, the walls looked like the chamber where Duff had rescued Saura and me from the first bunch of ragpiles. Even the lighting emanating from the stone looked the same. The eerie, moaning howl was missing, however. The place was as silent as death. Which matched the smell.
This was Seok's silo. It surprised me that I remembered anything after the pain he put me through with the ndu.
The first thing I had to do was look around and assess our situation, but my internal feeds were blinking red, an insistent alert in my left eye that I could not ignore. They read an ambient temperature of fifteen centigrade from the sensors implanted in the surface of my skin. A horizontal scroll running beneath the feed warned me that, based on my current physical state, I was at risk of hypothermia and advised I should find suitable clothing or shelter as soon as possible.
Shit.
I quickly queried survival time limits for a near-naked Human body from my chips. The answer came back with four to six functional hours for a skinny spacer with low body fat, and seven hours or a core body temperature drop to twenty-eight centigrade before complete, irrecoverable shutdown. Possibly less. It advised me to seek warm clothing and shelter immediately.
Yeah.
I wondered if the High Jerak was aware of the limitations of the Human body or if he was only interested in salvaging my brain.
My dying would seriously curtail his fun.
I grasped Liri's shoulders and set her back a step away from me. Saw the blood smearing her face and robe from the slash on her cheek. The bastard! I had something to fix the wound, but right now it was not life threatening and therefore not a top priority.
"You talk Union Basic?" I asked her. For me, the mongrel patois spoken in Rim-space between star associations, was the lingo of docks and dives—not something a kid on a remote, isolated planet would learn.
She nodded.
"Stay here," I told her. I needed to recon the place and assess our prospects for escape.
She latched back onto me, small fingers digging into the skin of my sides. I patted the backs of her hands, then peeled her off me. "Stay here."
I had no idea if she understood, but she relaxed her resistance. I raised both hands in front of me, palms outward in a Human gesture. "Stay."
Her face muscles twitched silent protest, but she retreated to cringe against the wall.
"Good. Sit." I motioned downward. "Now, stay."
Despite the fear in her eyes, she settled to the floor.
I didn't have to strain over the rail of the platform to see the gaping pit centered in the circle of the floor below. The light from the walls cast its edges into shadow, but I could see white and grey shapes piled at its center. Add in the smell and it didn't require any imagination to know what lay there.
I didn't want to go down for a closer look, but my pesky training told me the Earth Alliance and the Whooex Union required every detail of what happened here and, when I got out, I had better have my facts straight. Too optimistic? No. It was the beginning of a plan. The place was cold, we were under-clothed, and I had no idea how long we would be stuck here. I doubted our captors were concerned with supplying us food or water. Our escape fell on me.
And, yeah, the last part might be a bit overly optimistic, but I needed something to keep me going.
First priority, however, was taking care of myself.
I snatched up the tattered remains of my shipskins. Technically they were ruined, but wearing them, even damaged, would extend my effective operational time by a few extra minutes. Turning my back to the kid, I pulled off my skivvies and used them to clean up as best I could, then I tugged the bottom half of my skins over my feet and wore the top as an open-back shirt. With their integrity destroyed, they sagged on my body, but they were still a damned sight warmer than bare flesh.
Should I have given them to the kid? No. She had her long-sleeved robe. I had no idea what features it possessed to protect her from the cold. And second, we had less than six hours to escape this place. Although I had a pretty good idea of the High Jerak's plan for me—or my brain—I didn't know what he intended for the kid he called his 'ruined' prototype. I sensed it wasn't good. How can you let a telepath who has seen her family murdered and overheard your secret plans live? Her survival hinged on me getting us out. If I failed, she died.
I would not let that happen again.
I glanced behind me at the kid, sitting with her back against the wall, her knees huddled against her chest to conserve body heat.
"You wait. Me come back." I tried to give her a reassuring smile as I started down the ramp. I'm sure it came off more like a grimace.
A thick layer of fine white dust lay over everything, but long, thin Endar footprints had packed a path into the surface. I walked inside their impressions to avoid stirring the powder as I descended. I wanted to avoid breathing it as much as possible, though the hazy quality of the air told me I was already taking in lungfuls of the stuff, along with any dangerous organisms it carried.
I was shivering before I got to the floor.
It appeared the Frairy and Cheel were not the only people carving out pieces of Rohm's old infrastructure for their own private use. Like the previous chamber, this one had six arched entryways. Unlike the first one, however, white mortar blocked these openings. From what I'd seen from the platform, something blocked the bottom of the pit in the center, too.
At floor level, the dust over the pit looked denser than the air around me, giving it the effect of a pale, glowing column. That meant fans in the opening above were quietly pulling up the air and scrubbing away the odor and any poisonous gases from decay before venting it, while the dust from the rot fell back into the chamber.
The opening offered a possible way out. Unfortunately, the height put it beyond our reach.
There had to be vents somewhere else in this place to feed that airflow, however.
I followed the worn trail across the floor and stared down into the pit. After the High Jerak's torture I didn't think I could feel a stronger reaction, but my stomach twisted in horror at the sight. So many bodies! Hundreds of skeletal remains lay in the shadows below the lip. Dried skin stretched over skulls agape with gleaming white teeth. Withered, dry, pale hair snagged in tangled white rags filthy with death stains. The most recent body still had gray flesh desiccating beneath its white robes. It was the size of an adult Human.
Makima, I corrected.
Some peoples did not make a big deal of burying their dead. I got that. Environment, circumstance, and belief varied from world to world as much as the planets in our galaxy varied, but most sentient beings had some ritual for the parting of life from their own kind. Considering the positions of the bodies on the top of this pile, their limbs splayed where they landed, I did not believe this was a respectful observation of life or death.
Did the elegant creature the High Jerak called the Threadmaster know the end destination of his people?
My mind churned with horror and outrage. From the looks of things, the Endar Primacy had gotten by with this crime for what—a hundred years? More? They took Lirilune's people from their world, used them illegally, then dumped their bodies in this 'death silo' to hide the crime.
I wondered what the people back on her homeworld thought: that a little golden colony existed, where their people retired in luxury? That little palaces dotted the back of their Endar masters' properties? After more than a hundred years, when none of their people returned home, did they wonder?
An image flashed in my mind and I choked back a sob. Were there pits full of baby skeletons from failed Endar cloning experiments back on their world?
Makima leaders couldn't be that stupid. They had to suspect something.
Perhaps they couldn't, or wouldn't stop it. Maybe they didn't care. Then again, all their leaders might be tall, chitinous creatures. A single world, on the outer edge of the Orion Arm, probably not technically sophisticated, up against the Endar Primacy. Their sole source of information and tech might be the Endar. It was a chilling thought.
And, yeah, maybe I was being a little too kind to them.
If it was true, however, the High Jerak had a huge problem. After ninety days wandering the Moneyworld, seeing things, seeing people, having experiences a sheltered telepath inside Endar control did not have, Liri knew things. He couldn't allow her to spread that knowledge.
He thought I should die, too, eventually, after he was done with me. He probably thought the same for her. So, if we wanted to live, we had to go to war.
It would get dirty. I asked myself if it was better to drag Liri through the nastiness, subjecting her to what must be done, or, keeping in mind she was a child, try to protect her sensitivities. There had never been anyone to protect mine, and, despite the terrible things I had experienced, I survived and turned out okay—mostly. I had to give her the same chance.
The fire in the thought fizzled when it met reality. The clock was ticking fast on our survival in this cold air and the return of the guards.
Duff may have created a distraction to pull Endar attention away from us. Saura and the others might be diligently searching. Inside the Grip, no one could get us out except us, and, even if I got back out the door above and overcame the guard, at least two more Endar wore circlets to protect against Liri's hoodoo. And I wouldn't be able to find a way out through the maze. The place was far too alien.
That left us two other possible exits...
Fighting revulsion, I stared into the pit and wondered how far down the bodies went. Duff said the holes were very deep, making me believe something blocked this one. The Endar would want to keep their filthy graveyard hidden from the tunnel-wandering populace.
I took a step back, away from the pit and bumped something.
Images of feral, carnivorous creatures flashed in my brain. "Shit!" I exclaimed, leaping sideways.
I spun around.
Liri was standing there. Tears coursed down her face, streaking through dried blood.
"I told you to stay up there!" I shouted. "I told you..." Hell, why was I yelling at her? None of this was her fault. "I didn't want you to see this," I finished sadly.
I extended a hand and she took it.
This was a mess. A Whooex Union shattering mess. There was one thing I could do: get us out of here and stop the Endar.