Sometimes people ask me if I was scared.
I laugh and say, no, I wasn’t scared. I was hissing terrified!
Going down into the belly of the beast, hunted from above. And throwing my lot in with an Earther I’d only met a couple hours before?
It was insane.
And yet I’d do it all again. The rewards more than made up for the fear.
—From Drop Day Blues, by Rylan Ramirez
Rafe rubbed his eyes. He looked worn down, much less the society gadfly Sanya had always pictured him as. With his rolled-up shirt sleeves, hair in disarray, and the bags under his eyes, he looked human.
This had taken far longer than she’d expected. “I thought you had the best decryption stacks in town.”
“Second best. Alpha has platinum-grade stacks with loads more processing power than I can afford.” He swiped past the recording hovering above his deck and stared morosely at it. “90 percent chance it’s a woman. Maybe. But I can’t tell you much more than that. I can run it through a few more cleanup stacks to see what we can do.”
She nodded. “Great, let’s do that.” She wanted to get this thing moving. Events were passing her by. She could feel it.
She ran through her feed in her head, killing time and seeing what her friends were up to.
Cella had posted a funny photo of a mangled brown food disaster that had come out of her synthesizer. This is in no way a green salad.
Sanya had to agree.
She was outwardly calm, but inside she felt a growing sense of anxiety.
“Give me a sec.” He ran a few commands across his deck and then glared at the results.
“How long will that take?”
“About fourteen hours, more or less.”
“Cracking hell.” All. Night. Long. “Anything we can do to speed it up?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Not unless you wanna steal a little speed from Alpha.”
Now it was Sanya’s turn to stare. “That’s… really not a good idea.” Alpha’s storage and processing was walled off from the city grid. Redemption depended on the AI for life support and protection, among many other critical needs that the city mind provided. “Right?”
He grinned. “So not a good idea.” He flexed his hands, cracking his knuckles. “Still, it would make things go faster.”
She bit her lip. “Have you done it before?”
He looked away.
“Holy hissing shit. You have! When?” She leaned forward across the desk. “Rafe Wilde, what did you do?”
“Remember the blackout last month?”
“Remember it? It’s all anyone talked about for a week.” Redemption had redundancies after redundancies. That kind of thing was never supposed to happen.
“I had a client who needed to decode a crack-ton of data.”
“What kind of client?”
He shook his head. “Not for me to tell. Let’s just say it paid handsomely.”
She considered it. It was a big risk, but if she was right about the scope of what was going on... “Could you… do it again? Access Alpha’s stacks?”
He snorted. “I said we probably shouldn’t. I never said I couldn’t.” His hands danced across the deck like a virtuoso keyboard player. His eyes narrowed, and colors and symbols flared and dropped into darkness above his deck.
She watched him, impressed. Rafe Wilde, you have hidden depths.
Terry pinged her. Any news?
Sanya frowned. Must be a light news day for tomorrow’s edition. Working on it.
Rafe sat back, lifting his hands from the deck, a shit-eating grin on his face. “Done.” The status bar immediately started to shorten. “Revised estimate, two hours.”
She nodded. “Better.” She felt guilty, but she stuffed it down. It was for the greater good, right?
The ground shook and the lights flickered.
“Probably unrelated.” Rafe glanced nervously at the status bar.
“Probably.” Sanya shivered. If Alpha caught them… The crater was always darkest before sunshine spilled over the rim.
He put his hands behind his head and kicked his cowboy-booted feet up onto his desk. “So, tell me about the other ship.”
Rai scrambled down the ladder, passing faint yellow lights recessed into the plascrete wall about every three steps. Some were broken, while others gave off more of an amber glow. There’s still power. He wondered if it was solar, or geothermal, or stars forbid, carbon.
Above him, Aidan followed him into the bowels of the Earth.
Rai could still feel where Aidan’s hand had touched his and then pulled away. What the hell was that about? Not that he was stupid. He’d dated enough guys to know what the touch meant. But the pulling away part….
Then again, Ally and Aidan had grown up underground with just a handful of people, all family. That could make you all kinds of cracked up.
He tried to make conversation to lighten the mood between them. “How far down you think this goes?”
“Dunno. They built most of these facilities far underground to keep them safe from the bunker busters.” Aidan’s voice echoed off the hardened plascrete in the narrow space.
“How deep was Boundary—” Rai’s foot missed a rung and he slid down the shaft, the world blurring around him. “Cracking hell!” He grabbed frantically at the ladder and snagged a rung, stopping his free fall abruptly and pulling hard on his shoulders.
“Rai, you okay?” Aidan’s voice seemed far away above him.
“Yeah, but watch it. Think there’s a rung missing.” Damn, that hurts.
“Found it.” Aidan’s voice echoed down from above.
Rai clung to the ladder, letting his breathing and heart rate slow as the muscle pain ebbed. How much farther?
At least he was out from under the great big sky. It made him nervous as hell, all that open space. He supposed he’d get used to it eventually.
Ghost would have handled it better. For just a second, he imagined Ghost’s strong arms around him, comforting him.
Aidan’s foot descending into his field of vision broke his concentration. “Hey, slow down!”
“Sorry… thought you’d gone on.”
Rai snorted. “Just needed a moment to recover from almost falling to my death.”
Aidan laughed. “Fair enough.” His shoes were machine made, scuffed but otherwise symmetrically identical, as far as Rai could tell.
“Where’d you get the shoes?”
“The base was full of them. Stocked with pretty much all the basic necessities. I was so happy when we found the sky fruit—”
“Zongi fruit.”
Aidan sighed. “Whatever. You get really sick of canned pears after a few years.”
Rai had no response for that. “Let’s go. The bottom can’t be too much farther.”
He took Aidan’s silence for agreement.
Another fifty rungs and they finally reached it. The drop shaft ended in a long service tunnel made of gray plascrete, with an embedded rail line that ran off in both directions. About ten meters each way, the lights in the ceiling faded to nothing. They must be far below the water level of the bay by now. Rai wondered if the tunnel extended to the other side.
He cursed the loss of the Zhenyi, and his own pack. His stomach rumbled—he should have been happily climbing zongi trees by now, eating their fruit with his teammates, and exploring whatever botany had survived the seventy-year winter planetside.
Instead, he was down here in a dank, dark hole with a stranger. Rai grinned. When you put it that way…
He shook his head to clear out the nonsense. He pulled out the slim flashlight all the dropnauts carried at their sides and turned it on.
Nothing. It was dead as the moon.
“Hissing hell.” He’d been sure everything was charged when they left the Launchpad. He dug out an extra battery and switched it out.
This time, the flashlight worked. The powerful light about doubled the visible distance, showing more of the same long boring service tunnel.
Then it too went dark. Rai growled. “Something’s wrong.”
Aidan nodded. “I have one.” He opened his pack and pulled out a black flashlight. “Military issue. Solar charge. Lasts just about forever.” He turned it on. “Ha!” He took a few steps toward the darkness, peering ahead, and then it faded to nothing. “That’s weird.”
“The lights down here must be motion activated. Either that, or this one’s been on for a hundred years.” Rai reached up to touch it—it was cool. “Lucky for us, mine has a kinetic power crank.” Rai popped out a hand-crank on the side of the flashlight and turned it a few times. The flashlight lit up again, and it lasted for a good fifteen seconds before fading.
Aidan grinned. “Smart.”
Rai nodded. “In Redemption, supplies are limited. We always have a backup for everything. If it’s human, steam, or solar powered, all the better.”
Aidan nodded. “Guess that makes sense. At Boundary Peak, we’re still running the old gasoline generators.”
Rai stared at him. Gas? Burning gas, coal, and oil had gotten Earth into its mess. He almost said something, but changed his mind. Not worth the fight. Not right now. “So… which way do you want to go?”
“Good question.” Aidan frowned, looking one way and then the other. “That direction’s toward the heart of the base, I think?”
Rai looked at the ladder. “Yeah, probably so.” He cranked the flashlight again. Tien, Ghost, and Hera would all be heading for the same place. With a little luck…
He tried to em the others. Nothing. Ghost, please be okay.
With one last glance at the drop shaft, they set off into the darkness, side by side.
The lights along the tunnel came on as they approached and blinked off behind them. About half of them were out—Rai cranked his flashlight at regular intervals as they followed the never-ending tunnel.
Aidan stole glances at his new friend. It was strange, having someone close to his own age to speak to who wasn’t his sister. As they walked, they shared childhood stories.
“What was life in a creche like?” Aidan was having a hard time picturing it. The only other kids he had known were his brothers and sister.
“There were twenty of us in mine, from little kids to teenagers. We did everything together—it was like a big family, I guess.” Rai sounded wistful—whether it was for his creche “family,” or for the real one he’d never had, Aidan couldn’t tell.
“Did you ever see your parents again?”
“No. Some kids did. But mine dropped me off and never came back.”
Aidan absorbed that. What would it have been like to never know your own parents? “What did you eat?”
“Synth food. Fresh vegetables from the Ag Annex. And a whole lot of junlei. Junlei juice. Junlei bread. Junlei cookies.”
“Junlei?”
“A fungus that grows in all the inhabited caverns.”
Fungus. Aidan made a face. “We always had plenty to eat too, but it was mostly old canned supplies. I guess they irradiated them so they’d last next to forever. Mom had a garden—one of the old hangars she’d converted with these bright grow lights she found in a storage room. She’d grow us some fresh fruits and vegetables. The bell peppers were really good, but the tomatoes never did very well underground. I liked the basil best—you could rub the leaves on your hands and smell it on your fingers for hours.”
Rai grinned, cranking the flashlight again. “We have hydroponics farms—the Agricultural Annex is a lava tube not far from Redemption that grows a lot of the fresh produce we rely on.”
Aidan frowned. “If Redemption is so nice, why did you come down here?”
Rai didn’t see what it could hurt to tell him. “Luna’s unstable. There’s an old power core that’s slowly sinking into the guts of the moon, and it’s causing a lot of problems.”
Aiden’s eyes went wide. “Is it going to explode?” He trailed his hand along the gray plascrete wall, then pulled it away, remembering the nasty nano dust infection he’d contracted before.
Rai laughed. “No. But there are a lot of quakes, and it’s getting worse. That’s why we have to come back here.”
Aidan tried to imagine hundreds—no, thousands—of Rais and Tiens flooding the Earth. “What’s it like—”
“On Luna?”
“—with so many people?”
Rai grinned. “Ah. Sometimes I just want to get away from the crowds. Coming here—to be honest, I was scared airless about the mission. But it’s nice being out of the city. Being someplace new. There aren’t many new places that don’t require a suit and a trip through an airlock on Luna.”
Aidan nodded. “It was like that at Boundary Peak, too.” Going outside—into the wide world under a blue sky—had been an act of bravery. But it had been a relief to see something besides the gray walls of the base. “When I was little, Mamma painted a meadow on my bedroom wall. She found this green paint somewhere, and a little art set that had enough other colors to make me little flowers.” And a golden cross. Why he didn’t add that, he wasn’t sure.
“She sounds nice.”
“She is. If we can’t find the medicine she needs—” He didn’t want to think about it. For all the other supplies at Boundary Peak, antibiotics had been one of the first to run out.
Rai looked over at him, sympathy plain on his face in the variable light. “Maybe Tien will be able to help.”
Hope filled his chest. “That would be amazing! If things don’t work out here—”
Rai stopped, looking around wildly. “What’s that noise?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
Rai turned, cocking his head. “It’s behind us. Sounds like water.”
Aidan stopped and cocked his head. Then he heard it too.
They were well below water level. What if the bay had somehow leaked into the tunnel? Awfully convenient for it to happen just now. Maybe something had opened a valve…. “The bay!”
Rai stared at him. Then it registered. “Go!”
As the sound grew louder behind them, they bolted into the darkness, hoping to find an escape from the narrow tunnel.
They ran through the ever-shifting light, the flashlight beam bouncing across the tunnel ahead, augmented by the automatic lights that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.
The pack on Aidan’s back weighed him down, but he was loath to lose it. It had food, supplies, and other things that he might need.
Aidan’s heart raced. “Jesus Christ, will this tunnel never end?” His mother didn’t like him taking the Lord’s name in vain. At the moment, he didn’t care. He didn’t think the Good Lord would mind all that much, given the circumstances.
“I don’t know. It should—” With a yelp, Rai tripped and fell, his flashlight clattering along the tracks ahead of them.
Aidan ran back and grabbed his arm, helping him up in the flickering light of one of the automatic lamps. He shrugged his pack off, giving it a regretful look.
“Leave it. We have to go faster! What good will it do you if you’re dead?”
Aidan growled with frustration, but dropped it and grabbed the flashlight.
The water was a roar in their ears now. Aidan didn’t dare look back.
Lights came on ahead. “Rai… look….” His breath came in ragged gasps.
They reached a wide dock, probably intended for loading or unloading cargo from whatever used to ride the rails.
They scrambled up a metal ladder, one after the other, onto the plascrete dock just as the water surged past them. It slammed into Aidan, sending him across the floor of the dock, but the wider space slowed the tide’s advance.
Rai helped him up, returning the favor.
“Thanks.”
Aidan cranked the flashlight, shining the light around as the water pushed up past his ankles.
Great rusting hulks of equipment filled half the space. One looked like a crane. The other was too degraded to tell. “There’s a stairway. Come on!”
“Wait! Give me the flashlight!”
He handed it over to Rai. The water was climbing his calves.
“There!”
Aidan followed the beam’s light. His pack was floating at one end of the dock. He splashed across the dock and grabbed it. It was soaked, but seemed otherwise intact.
He pulled it on, muttering at the extra weight.
The water was up to their knees now and rising fast.
He sloshed back to Rai, holding the soaked pack up triumphantly. “Got it. Let’s go.”
They made for the stairway together, slogging through the water and reaching the entrance just as it touched their waists.
Aidan climbed out of the dark underground sea gratefully, up to the first landing, his pants dripping wet. Rai was right behind him. That’s when they hit a snag.
“Keep going!” Rai shouted from behind him.
Aidan grabbed the metal bars and shook them. “Can’t. There’s a locked gate.” He set down his pack, opened it, and rummaged through. “On it.” He pulled out the crowbar he’d insisted on packing, even though Ally had thought he was crazy to carry the extra weight. “Tool and weapon,” he whispered and stuck it into the gate. Three hard heaves and it clattered open. Thank God for rusty bars.
“Take this!” He handed the crowbar to Rai and pulled his pack back on. He cranked the flashlight for a few more seconds of light, and they were off again, heading toward the surface.