Chapter 13

THIRTEEN

Z ed let go of his wrist. Missing their connection, Felix reached after him only to have his fingers move through the space where Zed had been. A second later Zed appeared behind Tamara. She fired the stunner, the charge crackling uselessly through the air in front of her, then struggled against the hold of the arm around her neck.

Rather than count the seconds it would take for Zed to cut the flow of oxygen to her brain, Felix eased off the bed. His head spun and his stomach protested in a number of interesting ways, but he got his feet to the floor. There he paused, hip against the bed frame while he plucked remote monitors from his chest and neck. He probed the bandage at his shoulder and was rewarded with a dull ache. Peeling back a corner revealed a series of neatly healing incisions.

He heard Tamara slump to the floor. Another rush of air and Zed appeared at his side, stuffing the stunner into his belt. "Can you walk?"

"I got sick of answering that question four months ago." When he'd first lost his arm, nearly dying in the process. "Why does everyone think?—"

"We need to get moving."

Felix grabbed Zed's arm. "Wait, what about you? Are you okay to get us out of here?"

A smile flashed across Zed's mouth. "Won't be doing it alone."

"Reserve the good stuff for when we really need it. No more Zoning or phase-shifting unless there's no other way."

His clothes were neatly folded on a chair at the end of the bed. Felix barely shook out his dusty old utility pants—shoulder protesting the sharp movement—before pulling them over his legs. When he tipped sideways, Zed steadied him and helped him finish.

As they pulled his shirt down over his head, Felix wrinkled his nose. "Jesus, this shirt stinks." But it was his stink so he'd embrace it…after a fashion.

The empty space inside his boot where his knife should be felt weird against his ankle bone. Stinky shirt, no knife—he was ill-dressed and under prepared. But he had Zed—who was rifling through drawers and cupboards, occasionally flinging bandages and whatnot to the floor.

"Nothing in the way of useful supplies in here," he muttered.

Felix had no idea how deep into the tunnels they were, or how long they'd have to wander before finding a way out. How many of Preston's soldiers they'd bump into on the way. He might not be much help. Standing was okay, but moving? His empty stomach rolled.

"Not even a lousy protein bar?"

"Nope."

Despite the bad news, Zed tossed him a smile that said they were doing this escape thing anyway and stepped toward the door. Felix shuffled up behind as Zed leaned through the doorway and scanned the hall.

"All clear," Zed reported.

"What's the plan?"

"To get the fuck out of here."

"Good enough for me." They could add complications later.

Zed ducked into the hall at a jog. Felix willed his legs to keep up. The hatch of the operating theater was open, but there was no one in the room. Felix's co-victim must have been moved elsewhere. Had her part of the operation been a success? Had Preston actually managed to insert a shard into the back of her neck?

A feeling of vacuum in front of him drew Felix's attention forward. Zed had advanced to the next corner and stood looking back at him, clearly impatient. Felix jogged up behind him. "Did you see any other recovery rooms on your way down here? Did Preston mention the other operation?"

"Other operation?"

"There was someone else in there with me. A woman. I'm assuming she's now got my pinky stuffed into the back of her neck."

Zed paled. "No, she didn't say anything."

Felix chewed on his lips. Zed's brow creased in thought.

"We shouldn't waste time looking for her," Felix finally said, though he felt an odd kinship with the unknown soldier.

"We'll help all of them when we're better positioned to."

Fuck. Felix shook his head. "Don't make promises we can't keep." If they couldn't help these men and women, Zed would blame himself for eternity.

"Review later."

Zed always said that when questions came up during a Zone. But his eyes weren't flat and his whisper was full of inflection.

"Review later," Felix murmured in return.

Zed turned the corner and jogged down the next tunnel. Felix ran after him. They navigated two more lengths of rocky passage before running into their first obstacle: a sealed hatch.

"Is this the way you came in?" Felix asked. He had an idea he'd been brought up from the other direction.

"Yeah." Zed indicated the panel. "Can you hack it?"

Felix's shoulder protested as he lifted his left wrist to activate his bracelet. He selected a diagnostic tool from his menu. He had to identify the lock before choosing a hack. Hopefully it would be something standard. They probably didn't have time for him to write code. He wasn't even sure he could in his condition.

"Huh."

"What?" Zed asked.

"The power signature in the panel keeps fluctuating." Had Zed done something more than activate all comms? The lights hadn't flickered once. Different system? Would make sense to compartmentalize the power solutions…"If it doesn't stabilize, I won't be able to hack the lock."

Zed lifted his wrist with the Guardian cuff. Tiny lights flashed along its surface, but after a moment, he shook his head. "Not working for me, either."

Felix deactivated the diagnostic. "Let's try the other direction. I don't recognize any of this, so they brought me in here another way."

"Most of these tunnels look natural."

"Yeah, I noticed that."

"We could wander a system like this for days."

"I really, really don't need any more nightmares, Zed."

With a smirk, Zed pushed off the door and jogged back the way they'd come. Felix followed. Zed paused at the corner just beyond, peeked around and lunged back. He held up two fingers. Two hostiles in the next tunnel. Nodding, Felix moved up behind Zed. Something nudged his fingers. Looking down, he saw the stunner. Zed had vanished before Felix's fingers finished closing around the warm handle.

A muffled thump, a startled cry…

Felix looked around the corner. One guard lay on the floor. The other was locked in a struggle with Zed. Felix ran up behind them and pressed the stunner to the man's back. The man jerked and fell still. Zed eased him to the floor.

Felix looked at the bodies. Were they super soldiers? "Are they Preston's?"

Zed wouldn't meet his gaze. "Yeah."

"So, stunning them still works."

"They won't be out for long." Crouching down, Zed pulled more stunners from holsters, tucking both into his pockets. "Let's go."

Twenty minutes and two scuffles later, they ran out of civilized tunnel. There had been no hatches set into the wall for the past five minutes and the two tunnels ahead weren't lit.

"We must have missed a turn somewhere." Felix turned around. "I tried to keep track last night, but…" It had been dark and he'd been too worried about being buried under the ground somewhere.

"Going back is going to mean more opposition. Preston has got to have realized we're gone by now."

Zed sounded tired. He'd Zoned and phase-shifted countless times today already and he wouldn't be fully recovered from the shuttle crash yet. Felix felt as if he'd been laid out flat on the ground and run over by a team of raw recruits. But going forward meant heading into an unlit tunnel. He'd almost rather…no. If they went back, Preston would take more of his arm. Worse, she might figure out how he'd grown it.

Felix nodded toward the unlit tunnel. "Okay, into the dark it is."

The holos from their wallets didn't give off enough light to do much more than mess up their night vision, but without the dim illumination, they'd be left in the pitch black. They'd already come to a half-dozen forks in the tunnel and each choice looked as disused as the last. At one such fork, they'd found what looked like a storage closet—or it used to be, the ration boxes inside empty and broken down for other use. The lack of amenities and supplies worried Zed. He really hoped that these tunnels were simply a secondary route, used infrequently, rather than abandoned for being inaccessible.

Guess they'd find out.

So far, he hadn't heard or seen any sounds of pursuit—which was good, because the only thing that would be worse than working their way through these tunnels would be working their way through them at a run.

Zed tried to hold his wallet as steady as possible, but the jolting light still made his stomach queasy. He could barely make out Flick's features with each frequent glance in his lover's direction. Flick looked pale, the lines in his forehead etched deep, the scar snaking down his cheek and under his jaw that much more stark than usual.

With an effort, he bit back another "you okay?" query. He'd asked it five minutes ago, so it was off the table for at least another ten. Unless he wanted to goad Flick into a fight. The silence was oppressive, though.

"I ever tell you about the time I was assigned to explore the caves on Outrock?" Outrock had been his first posting—a dinky little colony way the hell out on the edge of human space, but he'd loved it. It had been destroyed in the war.

Flick grunted. "If this story ends with a cave-in, I don't want to hear it."

"No." Zed snorted out a laugh, then ducked around something that looked like a broken-off stalactite. He hadn't seen any evidence of water in the tunnels so far, though, so stalactite was probably the wrong term. "Watch your head."

"Got it."

"So yeah, caves on Outrock. We'd gotten reports from some of the farms near them that they were losing animals to a beardog."

"A what?"

"Native fauna, predator, looked like a cross between a grizzly bear and a wolf."

"So why not call it a ‘bearwolf'?"

"I have no idea."

"Colonists are stupid."

"Yeah, well, they'd say the same thing about station rats. Scared of wind," Zed said in a mocking voice. It was a longstanding joke from their childhood, how a breeze always made Flick nervous. Something to do with air currents on a station never changing. He supposed when you grew up in a closed environment like that, randomness would be very unsettling.

"Fine, point made."

"Are you o?—"

"I want to get the fuck out of here, Zed, but since that's not a possibility at the moment because we're stuck in unknown tunnels under a fucking mountain in the fucking dark—" Flick's rising voice cut off sharply and he sucked in a ragged breath. "Go on with your story. The distraction is good."

Zed touched the back of Flick's right hand. Barely a trickle of anything came over their connection—a sure sign that Flick was functioning only because he had everything in his head on lockdown. Zed picked up the pace. Going faster would be tough on them both, but it had to be done.

"Right. Beardog. My captain sent out me and three other guys to investigate."

"Was this before or after you started sleeping with the married guy?"

Heat flashed through Zed's cheeks. That particular affair had ended poorly—his lover's wife had found them midact in the barn and beaned Zed in the back of the head with a shovel—and Zed's indiscretion had always been a bit of a joke to Flick. There was the part where he was literally caught with his pants down, but beyond that, his decisions had proven he was anything but perfect. Zed figured Flick could appreciate that. He definitely liked to poke him about it.

"After," he admitted.

"Did he give you a kiss for luck?"

"Shut up."

Flick chuckled. "Okay, okay, go on."

Zed ducked beneath another maybe-stalactite, then paused as he eyed what he could see of the tunnel in front of them. The walls had been getting steadily closer on either side, and now they'd narrowed significantly. Fuck, this was not going to be pleasant for him. For Flick, it was going to be a living nightmare.

"It's getting narrower."

"N-narrower?" Flick stiffened as his voice wavered.

"Yeah." He guided Flick's hand to his waistband and tucked his fingers between it and the skin of Zed's lower back. Looking back over his shoulder, he instructed, "Hold on tight, okay? You can wrap your other arm around my waist if you want, tuck yourself close. Put your forehead between my shoulder blades and close your eyes. I'll guide us through. You don't have to worry, just keep your legs moving. Can you do that?"

Flick wasn't looking at him. His eyes were on the darkness in front of them, but they were wide, dull, and Zed knew he wasn't really seeing their surroundings but something that existed only in memories. Horrible memories.

"Felix." He kept his voice low, but firm, and said Flick's name again until Flick looked at him. "Tuck yourself against my back. I've got you."

"Fucking hate this," Flick said, his voice shaky, but he moved to do what Zed had asked. Thank God.

With Flick securely behind him, his crystalline arm wrapped tightly around Zed's waist and fingers tugging at Zed's waistband, they moved forward. The rock pressed in on all sides, close, closer, and Zed found himself getting short of breath. He forced himself not to think of the tons of rock stacked over them and instead returned to telling his story. Flick was right—it was a good distraction.

"We tracked the beardog to caves a klick or two from one farmer's fields. I don't think any of us were thrilled with the idea of going inside, but we had our orders, right?" Zed winced as the rock wall scraped his upper arm, but he kept moving. "We're armed, we've got proper lights?—"

"So basically the opposite of this."

Relief wound through Zed that not only was Flick listening, he was in control enough to respond. "Yeah. So we head in, and after about fifty feet, we get to a bend. One of my guys, a private, starts hyperventilating, so I sent him back to guard the entrance."

"Bet he didn't make it to corporal, did he?"

"He transferred out within the month." Zed couldn't even remember the private's name now, but he did remember not being surprised when the guy was no longer on the duty roster one day. He really hoped the kid had gotten out of the AEF before the war—he wasn't suited to being a soldier. "Anyway, so the three of us continued. There were a lot of twists and turns. A lot more than in this tunnel," he said, as they followed a gentle curve in the rock. "And we kept going down and going down. The caves were fairly large, too, more like the tunnels we were in back there. Wide enough for two guys to walk side by side."

"Did you get ambushed?"

"Who's telling this story?"

"You got ambushed."

"I don't think it's called ‘ambushed' when it's an animal." Zed grimaced at both the memory and the choice facing him—they'd come to a fork. Their wallets weren't good for anything but light at the moment, so he picked a direction on instinct. "But yeah. It pounced at us from a side chamber."

Flick's breath hitched. "Fun."

"We had guns, we were fine."

"Did you get hurt?"

"No."

"Zed…"

"You've memorized my scars. Does it look like I got chewed on anywhere?" He patted Flick's crystalline arm, then looked up. The tunnel didn't feel as close, and when he lifted his wallet, he saw that the walls had receded. God, he hoped that meant he'd picked the right fork. "The tunnel's opening up again." He paused, waiting to see if Flick wanted to pull away.

"I'm…"

"We can walk like this, if it's easier."

The slight sagging of Flick's form against Zed's back was all the answer he needed, so he started forward again.

"We shot it. One of the guys had a pretty good gouge in his arm, so we took some time to treat it. Once that was done, we noticed that we were in a pretty big chamber—think the size of Cargo One on the Chaos ."

"Huh."

"But the weirdest thing is that the walls were covered in paintings."

Flick jerked against his back. "I thought Outrock had no sentient indigenous life."

"That's what everyone thought. When we reported the discovery, there was all this uncertainty about whether they'd shut the colony down or whatever. Lots of scientists came through over the next few months looking for more evidence, but I don't think they found much. Another cave with paintings, maybe some tools. I think eventually they determined that whatever creatures made the paintings had gone extinct."

"Why?"

Zed shrugged. "Maybe the beardogs did it."

Flick snorted. It wasn't much of a laugh, but Zed would take it.

It took him a few minutes to realize that there was more light in the tunnel than he could attribute to his wallet. They seemed to be angling upward slightly too. "I think we're coming out."

Flick's grip tightened, as though he didn't quite want to believe Zed's words. Zed patted his arm again. "Hey, hey. Have a peek."

There was some shifting and then Flick's chin pressed into Zed's shoulder. "Daylight," Flick breathed, leaning hard into Zed. "Thank the fucking stars."

Another five minutes or so saw them emerging into the late afternoon light cast by Paradise's double suns. The egress from the cave was small, an opening they had to squeeze through one at a time, a last bit of torture from the mountain before they were free. They stumbled onto a hillside covered in rock and, crouching low, jogged over behind a large boulder. Zed took a few minutes to scan for tentacles. One encounter was more than enough.

Satisfied there were no tentacles around—yet—Zed turned his attention to the rest of the landscape. Something wasn't quite right about it. He looked around, judging angles, and realized what was bugging him. Unlike the ravine the colony was tucked into, this valley was less…natural. Too round.

"It's a crater," Flick said, his voice low. "I think this might have been another mountain or a hill once, and then smack! An asteroid destroyed it."

"Would explain all the rocks around, wouldn't it."

"Huh. Maybe." Flick squinted through the trees farther downslope. "I think there's a landing pad down there. See the lights?"

Zed angled himself to look over Flick's head and spotted the same thing he'd seen. The shadows were long at the base of the crater, which made the regular flashing lights more noticeable. "Yeah." His gaze roamed outward, looking for signs of life. He didn't see any, but he did spot another cave entrance leading out onto the crater floor, this one with a light above it. He jerked his chin toward it. "I think that's the usual exit from the colony to here." A straighter shot, most likely. Not the mess of twisted tunnels that led them higher up, near the lip of the crater.

There were also two large, bulky shapes tucked into the longest shadow. Shuttlecraft. Their way off the planet?

Movement at the lower entrance caught his attention. Three figures moving purposefully toward the opposite side of the crater where they began climbing a well-concealed path.

"A search party," Zed murmured.

Flick turned to look up at Zed. "What do you want to do?"

Zed sighed. "Head in the opposite direction to that search party and regroup while we figure out how to steal one of Preston's shuttles and get the hell out of Paradise." He smiled at Flick's low chuckle. "Come on. Let's get some distance between us and them before it gets dark."