The Decimator had the power to carry my full weight, a feat which we had tested the last time we were in the Zone, when he carried Harper and myself down an elevator shaft. The issue was the same as before: battery life. Hauling my full weight and the weight of my gear would drain his very advanced batteries at a hellish rate.
“Can you determine how far the water extends?”
The blue beam of his powerful range-finding laser shot out into the distance. It was just a one-second pulse, a straight blue line into the darkness. Then he tilted his nose down slightly and sent out another pulse. Another few degrees of nose declination and he blasted blue light one more time.
“Most accurate estimate is eight hundred, seventy-nine meters, plus or minus five meters.”
Most of a kilometer.
“Current power reserves?”
“Seventy-seven percent. Sufficient to cross the water with AJ as payload.”
“How much will you have left?”
“I estimate fourteen percent power at completion of travel.”
The two recharge packs I had with me could each give him something like a ten to fifteen percent boost. So at the very best, we might finish the water, recharge maybe twenty to thirty percent, and then have to complete a bit more than one kilometer just to get out of the subway. It was tighter than I wanted, but there was nothing to be done about it.
“Okay, cut any extraneous power bleeds and let’s do this.”
“Affirmative.”
He floated down till he was about a meter off the ground while I slung my rifle on my back and tightened down all my gear. Then I climbed on top of him, lying on my stomach, my feet hanging off the back of his airframe. I had to splay out my boots a bit to avoid disturbing his rear thruster fans, and the relatively sharp edge of his forward wing surfaces were my only handholds.
“Ready,” I finally said after shifting all around and not finding any position that was going to be any better.
“Affirmative,” he said, and suddenly we were flying.
My face was down and turned to the left, my headlamp lighting the wall of the tunnel, at first about a meter and half of space above us to the ceiling. But that distance got smaller and smaller as we travelled over the splashing, squealing rats below, the ceiling getting uncomfortably close to my head. Rikki dropped closer to the surface of the water and for a time, the horde of floating rodents was loud and very near. They got louder as we passed over them and then I realized that the downdraft from his fans was pressing on the ones right below us.
I held tight to his wings but he kept his flight stable and there was no air movement in the tunnel to rock his airframe. I closed my eyes and counted seconds in my head. Rikki had estimated about ten kilometers per hour carrying my lanky ass as the best (and by that I mean the most energy-efficient) speed he could make. I kept myself busy doing the math in my head while still trying to count the time. Over five minutes to clear the water, that’s what I came up with. At a mental count of five minutes and forty-six seconds, he came to a stop and I opened my eyes. We were now over wet concrete and steel rails, but none of it was submerged. The edge of the underground lake was just behind us.
I slid off his airframe, noticing he was now wobbly when before he was rock solid.
The rifle came off my back, weapon light on, and I did a quick sweep of the area. A few sets of beady red eyes met my lights but otherwise the bulk of the rats seemed to be still on the water. Still, our time was short. We had to get a move on, as they would catch up eventually.
“Status?”
“Power reserves at eleven percent.”
I pulled the first power pack from a pocket and plugged it into his recharge port. Then, while he was still hovering, I pulled a pair of nylon straps from yet another pocket and attached these to four tie-down points on his airframe. My own small pack I slipped on backwards so that it was on my chest.
“Change to vertical.”
He obliged, lifting his nose to the ceiling so I could slip an arm through each of the straps.
“Power off all fans and non-essential systems.”
“Affirmative,” he said just as his full dead weight hit my shoulders.
Rikki is made of ultra-light components, mostly titanium and carbon fiber, but between his missile loadout and his batteries, he still tips the scales at just over thirty-five kilos. That makes him a pretty heavy backpack, but the tunnel was straight and smooth and most of the rats were behind us. He had carried me; now it was my turn to carry him.
It was easier to say than do. I’ve carried packs with more weight, but they were all ergonomically fitted to balance on my body in the most efficient way. Rikki was a big slab of triangular composite material whose rear thrusters banged on the back of my legs while the barrel of his e-mag gun occasionally banged into the back of my head.
I tried to remember that I had ancestors, hell, probably living relations, who had hauled stranger and more awkward items high into the Himalayas without complaint. Aama had told me many stories of almost superhuman feats of strength and endurance in air so thin that outsiders could barely walk in it unburdened.
So it was head down and one foot in front of the other. Just a kilometer. The slope upward was very moderate and the footing was pretty good. I saw other rats but only had to shoot twice. Both times, the noise and muzzle flash drove them away. I had figured it would take about fifteen minutes of slogging to get to the East Broadway station. Turned out it only took thirteen. It’s entirely possible that Rikki announcing the arrival of the rat pack at the edge of the water behind us motivated me to pick up speed near the end of my trek.
Regardless, the seven-meter-wide tunnel suddenly opened up to a much wider space with raised platforms on either side of us and the back end of an abandoned subway car blocking the last part of the station.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that a subway car might be left in the tunnel. Had we run into that in the flooded section, it would have been a major issue. I thanked my ancestors as I unstrapped Rikki and put his second charger in place. I tossed the dead battery pack to the floor of the tunnel.
“Status?”
“Twenty-three percent power and charging. Sensor sweep indicates no presence of rats or other mammals in this area. Electromagnetic detection indicates no drones in immediate area; however, caution is warranted as we exit the station. Stairwells block signals.”
Yeah, caution… no shit. But I couldn’t wait to get topside and away from the dank tunnels and their ratty inhabitants.