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IT WAS A LIVING HELL. It must have lasted all of three seconds, but it was eternity to me. Down this hole, strapped into a seat, facing down a fifty degree slope looking at the wreckage of Tyge’s truck, and not knowing, not knowing...!
“She’s here! Still strapped in. Hey, Tyge! Tyge! Wakey wakey!”
Thud!-Thud!-Thud!-Thud!...went my heart.
“She’s alive!”
Thud–thud–thud–thud ...
“Looking good!”
Thud-dah, thud-dah, thud-dah, ...
“Damn it, honey, you’re really wedged. ... Shit. ... Okay, we’re going to have to pull you out truck and all. ... Yes, I know, but we’re gonna bloody do it, all right!?”
It was about then that I realised Tipper was pausing now and again, as if Tyge was answering back. I strained to hear. Nothing. “I’m coming back up!” she announced suddenly, “She’s okay but she’s gonna need a lot of help. Doc!?”
“Yes!” I must have really shouted.
“Chill out, Doc. You’re needed down here, but wait till I’m back with the line.” A moment later I saw a little light wavering beyond those two twisted legs. It was Tipper.
“Take down the lights, will you?”
I leaned over to her side of the cabin. “How?”
“Right hand side. Big knobby thing, labelled ‘lights’. Got it?”
I stretched further, found the knob and gave it various twists. Suddenly the lights died out altogether.
“Oh lovely, thanks Doc.”
I tried again and again, but they stayed like that until Tipper with her little light heaved in over the front, causing things to sway horribly, and with one twist put the lights on again. She tugged down the lid. The scrubbers got to work on the air, and ten seconds later our breathers dropped their fields.
The air stank, like overly mature cheese.
“Here’s the plan,” she puffed, disconnecting the line, “I’m going topside to set up Stage Two. Gonna take a few hours. You’re with Tyge till I get back. Just keep her going. We’re gonna pull her out truck and all. Legs are pinned, see. Mashed. She's gotta stay put, and you're gonna keep her pecker up till we’re done. It’s all titanium in there, she’s pinned total. No room to cut. Here,” she handed me the line, “you know how to use a carabiner?”
“Yep. But, ah, remind me again.”
Tipper showed me. I got secure. She dug out a little box. “Emergency food and water.” She gaffer-taped it to my arm and gave me a firm pat. “Okay, Doc, go do your stuff!” Very brusque, but I detected a slight quaver behind it. Even the mighty Tipper was troubled by what she had seen.
I went over the side and lowered myself to the ground, skidding onto my face almost immediately. I regained my footing and started paying out line, looking down and back. Got through the tangle and slithered further down slope. There was some sort of snot oozing out of the walls, just as Tipper had described. It reminded me of the filling that oozed satisfyingly out of the centre of Instant Cheesy Stuff, and it turned my footwork to mush.
I reached the tail end of Tyge’s smashed truck and took the left-hand side. It lay in a dip in the tunnel, lying almost level. I could see why the burly Tipper had had so much trouble getting past but I got through fairly quickly, with extra thanks to the generous slathering of Instant Mucus Stuff I had acquired on my way down slope.
I peered nervously into the crushed cabin, the little light on my helmet casting around for Tyge. I noticed that another of the truck’s legs was jammed upwards in front. It must have acted like an brake, finally halting her slide.
“Tyge?” I called softly. Then I saw her, jammed into the far right hand side. Man I was glad to see her alive! I eased in through the wreckage.
“Hey, it’s me. Are you with me, mate?” I tried to sound like Tipper, confident, as if our nasty little spat that morning had never happened.
She turned. There was blood under her nose and flecked all across the dashboard. She had managed to get her breather on at some stage but her face was very pale under her tattoo and her eyes were strangely blank. Then they flickered to life. Her mouth shaped a smile. I slid in, found a bit of space beside her in the wreaked cabin, and gripped her left arm gently.
She flinched and lifted her other hand to me. “Take it easy, Doc, it’s only our second date, y'know.”
“Oh look, about that, I...”
“No, no, I should be the one apologising, Doc...”
“No I... I guess I was the one who wasn’t really noticing that... that you... I mean Sharp: she, er, anyway you’re right. I should’ve ...”
“No, Doc, no, I shouldn’t have...” She fell back as if the effort of talking was already too much. Quickly I fumbled out the mini-scan I knew would be in my left lower pocket and ran a quick diagnostic. Blood loss. Shock. Dehydration. Bones broken somewhere. I’d find them in a minute. First though the blood issue. I fished out the biggest gadget in my repertoire, pealed off the inner lining and pressed it to her bare arm.
“Ow!”
“Sorry, but this is emergency medicine. You’re getting new blood.” The device had welded on and was already composing and delivering her type of blood, plus nanobots to stop any further bleeding, plus drugs to reverse the effects of shock.
Tipper’s voice suddenly exploded in my ears.
“Doc!”
“What?”
“I’m still waiting for your okay.”
“Sorry. Ah, yeah, everything’s fine here. She’s going to be okay ... Stable. Condition.”
“Right. Let go the line. I don’t want it snagging on anything.”
“Oh, sorry.” I lifted the carabiner and unlooped the line. “It’s clear.” I watched the thin rope flick out of sight. My last connection with the surface was gone.
“I’m going up now,” called Tipper, “Good luck, guys!”
Moments later we heard a few rocks bang into the back of the truck. I wasn’t worried. The sides of the pore were so narrow that there was no way we could slip any deeper.
I was more concerned about drowning in snot.
The faint light from Tipper’s strider gradually disappeared. A few more rocks hit us. Then came a deep and scary silence.
“Doc?” Tyge’s crusty voice broke in, “You know what you said about Hickster?”
“Eh? No. What?”
“About him looking into his soul.”
“I said that?”
“Yeah, you did. And I blew it off at the time. Didn’t even think the guy even had a soul!”
The conversation had dived off into a place I had not expected. “So...?”
“I’ve been down here in the dark, Doc. I didn’t know how deep I was. I didn’t know whether it had all caved in behind me. A lot of people, you know, they just disappear out here. We never find their bodies...”
“We’ll get you out!” I damn-near shouted it, fully interrupting her.
“No, no, listen, if I don’t make it then I want you to know something: that one comment of yours, it sort-of saved me down here. I had time to think, and I realised I’ve been on the run half my life. Taking risks, always on the run. What from? From my soul.”
“I...”
“I’m not finished! And what I realised is I’ve still got a lot to do, Doc. I’ve been kind of talking to someone, feeling like something's been holding me here. You’ve inspired me, Doc. The way you do with those Kirrikibats. The way you gave your house to Stevo and your business to Komodo of all people! I mean, you really are a miracle worker!”
I had nothing to say, absolutely nothing. Me? An inspiration? If only people knew! But I also sensed right then that I was on the run from something too. Or at least if I wasn’t running away from anything; by the same token I wasn’t exactly walking with it either. I’d been missing the boat all the way, and I didn’t even know what sort of boat it was.
“Doc?” said Tyge anxiously.
“Sorry, just thinking.”
“I need you to talk to me,” she said, “I’m scared I’m not going to get out. Right when it all finally makes sense...”
“They’re going to pull us out – alive!” I told her firmly.
“It ain’t that easy, Doc, it’s like Wheetabix up there. You run a cable over the rim and start pulling with any kind of load on it and it’ll cut right in, trigger a collapse. Five tonne of rock’ll be down here before you can say ‘Oh, fuck’!”
Worst of it was, she said it like she already knew about this. Seen it happen.
I tried to protest. “I’m sure...”
“No, I’m sure! I’ve seen it happen, Doc. I was there. Three scientists and the nice young fella driving their winch. Never got their bodies out. Score another four to The Big Lady.”
“It ain’t gonna happen!” I snapped, “Now, let’s have a look at those legs.”
I untapped the lunch box and wedged it into a split in the dashboard. Now I was free enough to bend down and get some light onto her legs. They were crushed, no two ways about it. Moving my head around I could see a lot of dried blood down there. I sat up, got out the scanner again and ordered a 3-D visual. I had to hold it right in her lap so it could get any kind of view past all the crushed metal. “How’s the pain?” I asked, trying not to remember the last time I'd had such a close encounter with that same spot.
“Okay if I don’t move.”
“Stay with that thought. Like a drink?”
“Yeah, a cold beer would be nice.”
“Sorry, it’s just Water-Max.” I held the bottle and she sucked through the straw with her breather field off.
“Hey, the air’s not too bad,” she commented.
Curious, I shut off my breather too. The brimstone smell was absent. Even the eau-de-flyspray qualities were diminished. I breathed for about three minutes until I became aware of my instinct to pant. The CO2 levels were still way too high. But the most noticeable feature of the air in the bottom of this hole was the overwhelming stench of cheese.
I scooped some of the snot off my knees and sniffed closely. Yep, it was cheese, mixed with a subtle undercurrent of chitin rot.
“The earthquakes!” I suddenly yelled, “This is the answer!”
“Sorry, new thought here. Catch me up, Doc.”
“This is Instant Cheesy Stuff; it’s gone feral! Somehow it’s mutated into some kind of life-form that’s compatible with The Crush. Must have been spreading like crazy.”
“I hate cheese that spreads,” said Tyge dryly. That caught me by surprise, then I got it. We laughed together, Tyge whimpering in pain as well.
“You shouldn’t laugh.” I told her.
“Doc,” she gasped, “you’ve gotta laugh. Take life too seriously and you’ll never get out of it alive.” That would have been funny too, but I didn’t laugh. Getting out alive was the one thing on my mind. I had a career to follow, a destiny to fulfil. And I’d just had a whole new idea about how to speed everything up.
“I could market this! We could control earthquakes anywhere we wanted!”
“Quite a small market,” she commented, “or does it work for anyone with itchy skin?”
Yeah, it was a bit far-fetched. I turned my mind back to more immediate problems; like trying to avoid drowning in the ghastly stuff. There seemed to be more and more of it oozing out of the walls. In fact the walls even looked different. Were those cells looking a bit bulgy?
“Doc?”
“Sorry. Thinking. Ah, I think we’ve got a bit of a wait on our hands.”
She raised a weak smile. “Why don’t we get down and get dirty then?”
I smiled thinly, briefly feeling the same sense of hurt I’d copped that morning, then decided to get over it. I took her hand. “So, we ... friends again?”
“Yeah,” she rasped, “Life’s too short.”
I was getting tied of this particular vein of humour. “What shall we talk about instead?”
“I want to talk about the zoo.”
“Eh?”
“I went to the zoo with my sister once...”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Shut up, Doc, this is important! We went to the zoo and saw the tiger. Gracie admired that tiger so much she decided that she was a tiger too. Hey, she was four at the time. Anyway I started spinning all this crap about how the tiger was an evil animal; that it had the power of a god, but it always did evil. I mean I was only six myself and trying to sound all knowledgeable and important. And that one idea got stuck in her head from then on. She was fascinated with tigers. Drew them. Made stories about then. It was all Princesses and Tigers and Good and Evil. She was obsessed.” I tried to say something. She growled weakly, “Shut it, Doc; my story. Anyway, I was the one who turned out bad. At the age of twelve I became a real little shit. Made my parent’s life hell. One day I managed to get my hands on their credit security codes and talked Grace into running away with me. We went straight to the spaceport and took the first ship out. By chance there was this guy on board did tattoos. Grace insisted on tiger patterns for us both; reckoned we’d be kind of psychically joined after that; that we’d always be ‘blood-sisters’. But weird thing – this guy was a bit of demented genius himself: I got angels, Gracie got devils. She totally loved it! Anyway we swore that day never to get them healed off. She was a bit nuts, as I said, naïve; really trusted me. I was such a turd. Such a turd...” Suddenly weeping, she paused to fumble in her pockets with her only working hand, brought up something like a pocket mirror or compact and held in front of her eyes. There was a 'pop' and a flash of pink light. She put it down. Her eyes were normal. Totally human standard. Brown. She popped it again. Tiger was back. Butterfly Effect; had to be.
“Where’d you get the money for that?”
She shrugged, “Aw, we just defrauded some rich guy. He was old and pathetic.”
“You’ve had an interesting life.”
“I’ve had a disgraceful life! Anyway where was I? Yeah; Mum and Dad were shattered by our disappearance and hired some people to find us. When they finally caught up with me two years later I copped all the blame.” Tyge shrugged, “Hey, I deserved it. I’d destroyed Gracie and she’d been the smart one in the family. Mum and Dad were pretty ruined by then. I... I felt so bad about it, and about Gracie’s disappearance, that I hit the road again soon as I could.”
“So...” I asked, dreading the answer, “where’s Gracie now?”
Tyge’s eyes dropped and I’m sure I glimpsed a single tear fall like a tiny string of pearls in the light from my helmet.
“Angelique?” I prompted.
“I don’t deserve that name.” She answered bitterly, “Last time I saw Gracie she was thirteen, sneaking onto an Actorial freighter with 5,000 cigarettes.”
Silence. A silence I knew I had to fill. “I ... I wish I could help.”
Tyge spoke fiercely with her failing strength, “Just get me out of here, Doc! Give me the chance to live again! I promise you, I’ll go out there and find her, I’ll do whatever it takes, and I’ll take her home with me even if it kills me.”
“I’ll get you out,” I said, “Or at least Tipper will.”
“Tipper,” drawled Tyge, starting to get a little light-headed on the complex dose of drugs I’d given her, “Dear old Tipper, everyone’s big sister. Y’all watch out for Tipper, now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed? A new girl in town, and pow! Tipper’s in there!”
“You too, huh?”
Tyge laughed, almost hysterical, “I really let her have it, man. Slapped her right across the kisser.” Her arm swung drunkenly, then flopped down again.
“What did she do?”
“Stopped pulling off my clothes and said ‘Welcome to Edgetown, mate.’ I couldn’t help but like her after that.”
“You know, she’s pretty worried about you right now.”
“Yeah, that’s Tipper. On top she’s so tough, but deep down inside ...”
Silence.
“We’re only human,” I said.
Tyge turned and smiled at me, “That’s what I like about you, Doc. You’re not afraid to be who you are. You’re not afraid to be vulnerable.”
We looked at each other as if it were for the first time. I no longer saw a tiger. I saw a complex, hurting human being; someone I could respect despite her dismal past. I saw someone I could even love.
“Doc,” she whispered, the delirium suddenly over, “I’m cold.”
That was a bad sign but I tried not to reveal my reaction. “I’ll see what I’ve got.” I started poking through my pockets, and that’s when two things happened.
1) I found Sharp’s card. I’d stuffed it into the same pocket as my standard-issue can of ‘Kill&Chill’, and –
2) the walls had just split open.
“Doc! Get your light up!” yelled Tyge suddenly, “The sides are coming in!”
My head snapped up. “Don’t be daft...” then I saw it, a huge bulging ugly Crush-cell pushing its way towards us through a cheesy rupture in the side wall. A new kind of cell I’d never seen before. It glowed a sickly green, and oozed.
“Oh God!”
Her good arm started grabbing for me, panicked. “I didn’t want to tell you, Doc; it was just one of those stories; but they always said the Crush engulfed everything that fell into it. Just... digested it.”
The whole truck shuddered under us. I flicked up the light, looked overhead and behind us. It was happening. The hole was closing off. We were about to be engulfed.
“It’s only been three hours.”
Tyge’s eyes flicked up as if trying to penetrate to the surface, “They’ll never do it.”
“They’ve got to do it!”
Tyges voice was like ice. It was like the voice of doom. “No,” she whispered hoarsely, “We’re stuffed, mate. Just another pimple on the face of the mighty Crush. Goodbye, Doc. Wish I’d had more time to love ya.”
I ignored that as I desperately rummaged through my pockets trying to find anything that could reverse the situation, but of course nothing was even remotely feasible.
“Stay here,” I said decisively, “I’ll see if Tipper’s getting close.”
“Don’t go,” she gasped desperately, “I don’t want to die alone.”
I didn’t go. It was partly to due to the fact that a huge ugly blob of siliconic protoplasm was shoving in at me just behind my left shoulder, and partly because she’d just grabbed onto my breather ring with a grip of death. Instead I tried to twist around, to look up and over the wreckage through the tiny gap that still remained there. Had the light changed? Had I just seen a new kind of flicker?
“Tipper!” I shouted, “Can you read me? Over!”
My implant ghosted up the words NETWORK CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. At the same moment something went bang behind me. I spun around, slithering in the goo that was now merrily spilling in. No idea. Something had gone bang, that was all.
I looked at Tyge. Her face was white under her tattoo.
“I think they’re coming,’ I lied, “I saw some lights.”
Tyge just nodded. I was losing her. Quickly I leaned closer, merged our breather fields, and kissed her; a long lingering tender kiss; then sat back. We had maybe two minutes left, three at most. I was going to absolutely maximise the last moments of my life. Nothing else mattered but letting her know I cared. Tenderly I took her limp hand. “Would it help you to know that I think I love you?” I said. Her head just lolled. She'd just passed out!