“Crastus!” Alexandar shouts. He’s about to jump down to try to rescue his friend. If he dies, this is all for nothing. I grab him and shoot at the ceiling.
A million bats explode in a fury. Let their thermal optics deal with that.
I drag Alexandar and we make our way along the narrow shelf and out the cathedral, harried by bats the entire way. One’s attached itself to Drusilla. Alexandar cuts its head off with his razor and peels out its bristles. Drusilla sicks up on the floor, but stumbles after us, eyes dazed. Ignacius has to take the Fear Knight’s body. After a series of turns, we find ourselves near the end of the Fear Knight’s map. It is a limestone chamber filled with pools of dark water and stalactites dripping from the ceiling. I stop, searching the bioluminescent-lit walls, and feel panic rising in m
e. “What is it?” Drusilla asks Alexandar. “Are we lost?”
“This isn’t on the map,” he says.
“What do you mean it isn’t on the map?” she asks. Instead of two tunnels, there are seven.
Ignacius hurls the Fear Knight to the ground. “I knew this was a fool’s errand. Looks like it’s a fight after all.”
Drusilla slumps on a knee, breathing heavily from the milkbat venom. “We’re almost out of ammunition. Which way is it?”
“I don’t know,” Alexandar says. He pockets the map and slaps the Fear Knight’s face. “Wake up. Wake up, damn you!” He doesn’t. “Shit. We make our stand here. Hit them as they come in. Make this a melee affair.”
“They have Golds too,” I say.
“Not like us.”
“A lovely sentiment, but untrue,” Drusilla says. “There’s at least fifteen Scars. But it’ll be Berserks they send in first.”
“Then we die with glory,” Ignacius mutters.
Alexandar searches the tunnels. The wrong one will lead us off the map and we might starve to death before we find a way out. He’d rather fight than trust his chances with that.
The Arcosian Knights follow Alexandar’s commands and take up positions around the room to ambush our pursuers, as if you can ambush anyone with thermal optics in a cold cave. If we wanted to fight, it should have been in the guano grotto. Positively criminal how quickly razors reduce genius IQs to simple grunt logic.
I face the tunnels.
There is no reason the Fear Knight would have a fake map in his private quarters. Therefore, the map must be real and cannot be wrong. If it is not wrong, then it is shorthand. Two tunnels were supposed to be here, yet there are seven. I search for a pattern of two. Ah, the pools.
“I found the way,” I whisper.
“Shut up. I hear something,” Ignacius says. Alexandar hides behind a stalactite, waiting for the Gorgons to come from the darkness of the bat cathedral.
“The pools!” I hiss at the fools. Alexandar turns to me. “The pools lead to a tunnel.” I shine the glowlamp down. Sure enough, a tunnel large enough for three men to swim abreast is faintly visible beneath the surface.
“You clever bastard!” Alexandar slaps me on the back.
We dive into the pool. The water is hot and bubbles from cracks in the stone. The glowlamp splashes pale light on the slick tunnels beneath the surface. Alexandar covers the Fear Knight’s nose and mouth to stop him from inhaling water.
When we emerge in a small grotto, I gasp for air and pull myself onto the slick stone. Alexandar and the others breach the water and I help them lever the Fear Knight out of the pool.
We find the escape gravBikes underneath a camouflage tarp on the far side of the grotto. Concussion and gas traps deactivate from the passive signal in the Fear Knight’s datapad. We take a bike each, slash the fuel cells of the rest with our razors, and tie the Fear Knight onto the hauling rack of Drusilla’s under a portion of the camo tarp. Alexandar cuts the camo tarp into several more pieces and secures one on the hauling racks of each bike. Clever thinking.
I nod when he asks me if I know how to drive one of the bikes. “Not much to do in Erebos except daylight fancies.”
“Do not stop for anyone,” Alexandar tells us. He inserts the bike’s wired com into his ear and motions me to do the same. “Coms in. We’re playing clamshells, Goblin style. Head straight south for Heliopolis. Drusilla will have the Fear Knight. Everyone else, we’re only here to buy her time. They can’t use orbit support while we have Fear. So don’t shy off. Let’s get this bastard back to the boss.” He gives them a firm smile, forgetting me completely. “Hail libertas.”
“Hail Reaper,” they echo.
The engines scream like crying babies as we tear off down the tunnel toward daylight. The sunlight blinds, even this late in the afternoon. We take a thin track down the mountain. The gravBike sighs up and down on its gravity cushion, very similar to the bikes Cassius and I used in Darentan Station when running from Syndicate clone traders.
The controls are touchy, especially to motor reflexes under the influence of stims, but they’re far simpler machines than starShells. A powerful engine provides thrust from behind, as low-powered gravity thrusters beneath create half a meter of floating clearance from the ground. The seat is curved to angle the rider forward, with a rear seat for the gunner. Soon I’ve the hang of it, though I’m by far the worst pilot.
“Pup One to Howler One…” Alexandar announces over the com, using our transponders to boost his signal in a desperate bid to reach Heliopolis. It just might. The Society won’t be jamming its own frequencies. But if Heliopolis hears it, every Gold in a thousand kilometers will.