into my helmet mic.
“This is bullshit,” Amity said, and I agreed with her.
“We get in; we get out,” Pattee said. “Do not pass Go; do not collect 200 credits.”
The hunters insisted on going down the shaft first. Esra had followed, then Joan. Each of us had our helmet lights pointed down, but none of us could see past two meters.
Amity started down, shaking her head the whole time and staring at me before she focused on her hands on the climbing ladder we’d installed, one of the items I’d pulled from Amity’s EEP supply piles.
“On ExTerra, I had my own personal lab, did I tell you that Pattee?” she said.
“A few times,” Pattee said.
“My own personal lab, complete with a rolling chair. Air conditioning. Windows that looked out over cerulean water and a white sandy beach,” Amity continued. “Lab techs did all the dirty work. I had an intern, Pattee. An intern. He brought me coffee.”
“That sounds like a sweet set-up,” I offered from topside. Pattee was going down now, and I could just make out Amity’s black glove on one of the rungs.
“It was a beautiful lab,” she said. “All white and shiny. So clean.”
“You should tell CeCe about the rats,” Pattee said.
“I don’t want to tell CeCe about the rats. Shit! Okay, slipped a little, but it’s fine. I’m fine.”
“The rats?” I said.
“Dammit, Pattee,” Amity said. “Fine. ExTerra rats. They’re about the size of housecats. Very intelligent.” Amity’s heavy breathing filled my helmet, and while my nerves were fraying next to nothing, I found this mundane conversation was just what I needed.
Pattee gave me a thumbs up, and I knew it was my turn to climb into the shaft. I gave a final look up into the Narrows, half-expecting to see the spiny legs of an agothe-fax, but there was nothing.
“Well, I loved those dumb rats,” Amity said. “I could just tell they had their own little personalities.”
“Mhm,” Pattee said, and I smiled. Pattee’s stoicism was the perfect foil to Amity’s ebullience.
“The first day.” Amity said. “I loved them the first day, to be clear.”
“What happened?” I asked, drawn into her story enough that I’d almost forgotten we hadn’t heard from the guys in thirty minutes. We kept climbing.
“I found out they ate mice,” Amity said. “You can’t see me shuddering, but I’m shuddering. It was revolting.”
“I’d like to point out that you always save the tree thief eyeballs for Diablo,” Esra’s voice entered the conversation, and if I’d been drinking white bark tea, white bark tea would have spewed out my nose at her comment.
“That’s different, Esra, and you know it,” Amity said. “Rats and mice are cousins. We don’t eat our cousins.”
Joan’s laugh erupted from somewhere below.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I can just imagine Amity saying that to her kids,” Joan said. “It made me giggle.”
“Oh my God,” Esra said. “Can you imagine how beautiful our kids are going to be?”
“Um, I refuse to do that yet,” Pattee said. “I’m not having kids until Hivelt and I have perfected a secure perimeter around a nice plot of land.”
“The glade is pretty nice,” Joan said.
“Other than all the rocks,” Pattee answered. “But yeah, we might settle there. When the dust clears from everything else.”
By now, the black mist had enveloped me, and my girls’ conversation sounded muffled. But the steady descent kept my hands and feet busy, and every once in a while, I caught a word. My helmet light dimmed to next to nothing, and the sound of my own heartbeat and deep breaths were as loud as jackhammers in my skull.
“VELMA?” I tested my AI.
“Greetings, ADVISOR. I have limited functionality at the moment due to a network error.”
Well, that answered that question.
I descended.
And descended.
Silence entombed me. As did the dark.
“Girls’ channel?” I said.
Static.
Nothing.
“Shit.”
A flush of body chemicals spilled into my bloodstream, and I descended faster, hoping Pattee had already cleared the ladder when she touched bottom.
While comms were down, my helmet’s distance gauge worked, or appeared to. It read two meters to the ground below.
My boot met ground a few seconds later, and switching to my external mic, I called out.
“Pattee?”
“Yep, we’re right here,” she said.
“Whew, thought I’d lost you for a second,” I said. “Where are the guys?”
“We’ve been calling them but there’s no answer,” Esra said. “We decided to stick around here until you arrived so we could make a plan.”
“The air sampler is still going haywire,” I said. “Safe to assume the air is toxic.”
“When I was in the Agothe-Fatheza, the comms seldom worked,” Joan said. “VELMA and I thought it had to do with the airborne algae.”
“If we had light, we’d be able to see what kind of “mist” was in here,” Amity said. “I mean, presumably it’s black, but still.”
“You’re right. Maybe we just use Occam’s razor,” Esra said. “We already know the cyanobacteria is found globally and that there’s a higher concentration of it in the Agothe-Fatheza, for example. Affecting communications, as Joan mentioned.”
“So maybe that’s all this is,” Joan said.
“I thought algae needed sunlight?” Pattee asked.
“Organic matter in water can replace what algae would need for photosynthesis,” Joan said.
“It’s probably good we can’t smell then,” Pattee said, and everyone groaned or agreed, as suited their personalities.
“Okay, we don’t need to know why the comms don’t work,” I said. “We need to figure out how to hack this cave, find our guys, and get out. Thoughts?”
“Let’s rehearse the problems they listed when they talked about it,” Esra said. “I distinctly remember one of them saying fey winds.”
“It’s not drafty where I’m standing,” I said. “But there could be other vertical shafts or tunnels that could create those conditions.”
“It’s quiet, too,” Joan said. “Raxthezana mentioned voices of the past.”
“And being jostled,” I said. “Any of that happening in the pitch dark can take on nightmare proportions.”
“Agreed,” Pattee said. “We’re all anxious to be finished. Is it logical to assume they stuck together but struck out to find the exit as soon as possible?”
“I don’t know,” Amity said. “They should have waited for us so we could figure this out together.”
“Together,” I murmured. “Raxthezana promised we would do everything together, and I trust him to keep his word. That means he should be somewhere nearby. He would have waited. I know it.”
“This whole time, the entire time, these hunters have treated us with respect,” Esra said. “Well, maybe other than that little misunderstanding at the beginning. But what I’m trying to say is I do think they would have waited. What would keep them from waiting?”
“Protecting us from something,” Joan said without missing a beat.
“Okay,” Pattee said. “Something drew them away. How close are we to the ikadaxl nesting grounds?”
“Raxthezana said they were basically on the other side of this chamber,” I said.
“And here I was worried about keeping my baby safe from ghosts,” Amity said. “Esra, don’t you have experience visiting nesting grounds?”
“They were rokhural nesting grounds, but yeah?” she said.
“Any hints, tips or tricks?” Amity asked.
“Uh, don’t make a sound and move slowly,” Esra said. “And avoid if possible.”
Everyone was quiet for a second, and then we burst out laughing. As if avoiding anything on Predator Planet was a choice.
“Let’s go get our boys,” I said.