Battles unfought, p.23
Battles Unfought, page 23
“We can’t just stay here,” Maggie said. “If there’s a trap ahead –”
“If?” Dave asked, incredulously.
“Okay. Since we know there’s a trap ahead, we know to be careful. But we can’t just stay here.”
“Watch me,” Dave said.
“People are going to die,” Fredericks put in.
“A good number of people,” Corano agreed.
“Yeah,” Carter said. “Us.”
“A minute ago, you didn’t want to stay. Now you do?” Frank asked. “Whose side are you on anyway?”
“No one’s. They all suck.”
“Yeah,” Maggie said. “They do. But we’ve got to do something.”
“Something other than complain,” Frank agreed.
“Doctor Fredericks is right,” Maggie said. “The longer we wait, the likelier it is that people are going to die on that station.”
“People are going to die no matter what,” Carter said. “Cook made that abundantly clear. But, if we stay here, we may at least – well look, I don’t want to be the one to say it, but someone has to.” He threw up his palms, like a man compelled to do some unpleasant task. “If we play our cards right, we may outlast Takahashi. And then – if that nutjob wasn’t lying – he’ll let us go.”
We stared at him, stunned into silence, and he scoffed. “Come on. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking it.”
“He is your employer,” Corano said.
“Yeah, well, depending on who you ask, that’s reason enough, right? I mean, who doesn’t wish to off their boss now and then?” When no one spoke, he sighed. “Look, I’m kidding. I don’t want the guy to die any more than you. He’s a pretty good boss. Pain in the – well, you know. But decent, as far as bosses go. And usually, smart.
“But this time, he got played. We all did. Cook’s holding all the cards, and he wants Takahashi dead. Us not wanting it to happen isn’t going to change a thing.”
“That’s why we have to stop him,” Frank said.
Carter laughed, a bitter laugh. “Sure. You, me, and what army? Or have you forgotten that we’re all alone here?”
“We are together,” Sydney said. “And there is strength in that.”
“Come on. When are you people going to get it? This isn’t going to have a fairytale ending, and platitudes aren’t going to cut it. We don’t all walk away happily ever after, good doesn’t triumph over evil. That’s propaganda, not real life. Real life – it’s ugly and brutal, and people die. Sometimes the good guys – and I use the term loosely – win. And sometimes they lose.
“Today, the good guys lost. Maybe, for a very long time, if this Groundbreaker thing is as big a deal as it sounds. But either way, Takahashi’s not going to win this one. Cook wants him dead. It’s that simple. And if we run blindly into whatever’s waiting for us, doing his bidding, we’re going to die too.”
“And if we sit here and do nothing,” Fredericks said, his tone icy, “those families on Station Frontera are going to suffocate.”
Carter looked a little more contrite at that, but he shrugged, and said, “And that sucks for them. But it’s Takahashi’s call. Not ours.”
Dave snorted contemptuously, throwing a disbelieving glance around our assemblage. “You hear this guy? He’s starting to sound like the nutjob.”
“This is Cook’s fault, and no one else’s,” Corano said.
“Of course it is. I’m not talking about blame, I’m talking about solutions. Right now, Takahashi’s the only one with any power to change anything.”
“We can try,” Frank said.
“Try what? Try walking into a trap?”
“Even if it is a trap,” I said, “that doesn’t mean we can’t survive it. I mean, we survived the rats, right? And the water?” I certainly didn’t want to repeat either of those experiences, but we had lived. And that seemed to signify that at least some of the traps were survivable. “If we can get through whatever’s up ahead, to – somewhere. A command center, a server room. Somewhere. Then maybe we can help, before it’s too late.”
Carter laughed, as if the idea was absurd.
Fredericks said, “You can laugh all you want. Some of us would rather do something than sit around hoping someone else dies first. These are our people, dammit. Union citizens!”
“Oh, can it,” Carter snapped. “Look, you people can do the knight in shining armor routine if you want, but I live in the real world, and I’m going to call it like I see it. I’m not going to die just so I can feel all warm and fuzzy and patriotic. Sacrificial lambs aren’t heroes, they’re suckers. And if you don’t believe me, why the hell hasn’t Takahashi taken care of matters himself? He could save us all, if he wanted. And yet…” He spread his hands wide. “Here we are. He’s not willing to die for us – or them. So why the hell should we walk into a trap on the imaginary chance that we can maybe do something to stop this guy, in his own home?”
What Maggie thought of this speech, she didn’t say, though the rest of the crew eyed Carter with varying degrees of disgust.
Maggie, brow knit in concentration, said, “So those are our options: stay and wait it out, or proceed, knowing it’s a trap. If we stay, we may outlast Takahashi. But he’ll be dead, and there’s a good chance a bunch of civilians will die too. If we go, there’s a good chance we’ll die. Even if we don’t, there are no guarantees we’ll be able to help.”
Carter murmured something about ‘no guarantees’ being an understatement, but Maggie ignored him.
“So, let’s put it to a vote,” she said. “All in favor of staying?”
Carter raised his hand, and his voice. “Me.”
I glanced Dave’s way. He hadn’t budged from the floor, but he hadn’t raised his hand either. Instead, he’d adopted a ferocious scowl which he fixed on the floor, as if compelled by conscience to side against his own interests, and furious about the fact.
Maggie waited for a few long seconds, and Carter swore, cursing our stupidity.
“All in favor of proceeding?” Maggie persisted.
One by one, we raised our hands. Not eagerly. For my own part, I felt every bit the fool Carter accused us of being. But, I didn’t have an alternative, not really.
Not when there were people suffocating on Frontera.
“Okay,” Maggie said. “We go on. You’re welcome to stay, or not, as you see fit, Mr. Carter.”
“Well,” Carter said, “if you people aren’t a dual testament to the failures of public education and successes of admiralty propaganda, I don’t know what is.” He waved her on. “Lead on, by all means. Lead us to our deaths. For admiralty and empire! Like the good serfs you are.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Maggie did take the lead now, as we were far from the path that Jylya knew. I fell in a step behind her, and Corano and Ria walked with us.
The tenor of our footsteps continued to change as the ceiling vaulted high above us, and the hall spilled out into a large black – what? A huge chamber, that seemed to stretch on and on, long beyond the scope of my flashlight beam.
My pulse quickened and my palms slicked.
It was a trap, no doubt about that. Not another water tank, at least. This was too big for that. Not even the Broker, I thought, could have a store of that much water at hand, ready to flood an area like this one.
Still, my mind wandered to the various types of traps I’d read about, seen in cinema, or encountered in videogames. Spiked pits to impale the unwary, moving and compacting plates to crush and kill. Fire traps and inescapable infernos. Snake pits.
A cold sweat had broken out on my forehead, and as my imaginings got worse, so did the perspiration. One step after another, we headed into the great, dark room. Our footsteps sounded very far away now, and our jagged breaths loud.
Carter took up the rear, keeping well to it as he went.
At first, despite my racing pulse and sense of impending doom, his caution seemed misplaced, for nothing happened.
No slamming doors, no floor panels falling away, no pile of rubble careening down onto us from above.
Nothing at all.
On and on we ventured, deeper and deeper into the blackness. Then, all at once, the inevitable happened. The door fell with a thunderous clang that echoed through the chamber.
I knew it was coming. It had to be coming, else there’d be no point in diverting us here. Yet the sudden noise put my heart in my throat.
For a long moment, we stood still, listening and scanning the room with our flashlights. I don’t think I even breathed for those first few seconds.
Then, slowly, I took in a trembling breath. The door had closed. That was all.
“Come on,” Maggie said, and her voice sounded hoarse, and unusually loud in the utter absence of sound.
She took a step, and another. I followed, heart thundering in my chest as I waited for the proverbial other shoe to drop.
And again, nothing happened.
Two steps.
Three.
Ten.
Twenty.
A strange blend of relief and heightened tension swirled through me. Nothing had happened. Which meant – could only mean – something worse was about to happen.
On we went. Thirty paces. Forty. Fifty.
And then, with an electric clicking, light flooded the chamber. Bright, fierce light, so bright it elicited a hiss of pain from a few of us. I shielded my eyes and staggered backwards, blinking hard as I tried to adjust.
Slowly, through patches of white, the chamber came into focus. It was huge, larger than most sports venues I’d ever seen, though I could not immediately divine its purpose. There were very few distinctive features in the space.
It was longer than wide, the sides slightly rounded to make a giant oval. Four equidistant gates led into the arena, the one through which we’d entered and three others. Rows of lighting hung overhead, veiling the ceiling behind a blinding glare. There were no benches or seating, no goalposts or nets or hoops or anything else.
But no. That wasn’t entirely true. As my pulse slowed ever so slightly and I scanned the area a second, then third time, I saw one additional feature: a series of metal grates set into the floor.
Drains.
With a sinking feeling, I realized that we’d stepped into an arena alright. Not a sports arena. This was an arena in the vein of the old Earth colosseums.
As if on cue, the Broker’s voice permeated the room, smug and booming with triumph. “Ladies, gentlemen, and respected beings, let me welcome you to the games.
“The games within the games. How meta.” Somehow, he sounded even smugger. “I did warn you that things were about to get more difficult. Well, welcome to More Difficult.”
At either side of the arena opposite us, at two of the gates I’d noticed earlier, doors began to slide upward. “Allow me to introduce your opponents. The crews of the Tsar Saleski and the Razortooth.” A gaggle of men and women stepped into the first hint of light.
“Like yourselves, they – foolishly – thought they could outwit the Broker. And like yourselves, they have had to answer for their crimes. But unlike yourselves, they’ve been here for some time, entertaining me. Three months, for the Razortooth, and…oh, what’s it been? A year? For the Tsar Saleski. Consequently, these crews – what remain of them – are eager to be on their way, lessons learned.
“The rules are simple. Survive if you can. Your prize is a shot at freedom. Only one crew will walk out of the arena. But whoever does, gets to try to make their way to the surface. Whoever fails, well – dies.”
He finished on a satisfied tone, and then paused as the three groups took stock of one another. The crew on our right looked fresher, less ragged and haunted. They, I figured, must be the Razortooth’s people. There were six humans, and a single Esselian.
The other crew was larger, and leaner, and hungrier. Not in the physical sense, though the way their clothes hung loosely from their forms seemed to indicate that that might be true too. But there was a hunger in their eyes, the look of caged and hunted creatures who have finally glimpsed freedom after a long period of internment.
“Well, this is fantastic,” Carter murmured.
“Do we attempt negotiations? See if we can work together against a common foe?” Corano suggested.
“We can attempt it, but we are unlikely to meet with success,” Syd said. “The Razortooth is a pirate vessel, with several substantial bounties on its crew for serious crimes including multiple murders. And the Tsar Saleski was reported overrun by pirates two years ago. The culprits were believed to be border pirates, as the crew had been spaced – the signature move of this particular band of pirates. The ship itself disappeared. I guess we know why now: it ended up here.”
“So they’re seasoned killers,” Maggie said. “All of them.”
“Well? What are we waiting for?” Dave asked. “Start shooting.”
“They appear to be armed with blunt and melee weapons only,” Syd said.
“So? It’ll be a short fight.”
“I’m not going to fire into a crowd that may or may not pose a threat to us,” Corano said. “Not until I know they pose a threat anyway.”
“They’re murderers,” Dave reminded him. “Pirates.”
“Yes. And they should be brought to justice. But gunned down in an arena for the Broker’s entertainment is not justice.”
Before we could argue further, noise interrupted. A whole deluge of noise, seemingly from every corner of the arena – scraping, clanging, whirring. The sounds of gears and pulleys, of lifts and pistons, of engines and all manner of machinery. The floor rumbled underneath us, and the air moved around us.
And suddenly, panels began to rise out of the floor. A slew of dividers, partitioning the arena into a maze of new paths and passages.
I think I was by now desensitized to fear. The arena, the emergence of two bands of bloodthirsty captives, the games themselves – to say nothing of the situation on Station Frontera – had pushed me to the absolute limit. I couldn’t be more afraid than I already was.
But mingling with the fear came a new feeling. A strange, disembodied hint of something approaching admiration. Grudging admiration, terrified admiration. But admiration all the same.
The Broker was deeply unwell. He was cruel. Sadistic. Violent and murderous.
But he was also brilliant, with a once in a lifetime brain. Maybe, once in several lifetimes. His work on Groundbreaker, his own preservation beyond death, the successful attack on the Union…any one of those actions alone would have been remarkable.
Yet one brain, now augmented by Groundbreaker, had planned them all. Executed them all, without a hitch.
Then, there was this place, his twisted games. As depraved as it all was, it had taken an incredible amount of genius to plan this place. A modular labyrinth and arena, a prison that could be reshaped, reformed as and when he saw fit, to test and torment his captives as it amused him to do so.
A remarkable and rare brilliance, misplaced and abused. But remarkable all the same.
As we watched, a corridor took shape before us, walls sliding into place and then locking with a decisive click. It intersected with another path several yards ahead of us, and several yards after that, turned off to the right.
“A maze,” I said.
“A labyrinth inside a labyrinth,” Ginny murmured.
“Like a nesting doll of death,” Dave said.
“What did he say earlier, about the games inside games? It was ‘meta’?” Carter asked. “I’m sure, if you asked him, there’d be some lesson in there about ‘true freedom’ or whatever.”
“As if psychopathic killers aren’t bad enough,” Dave grumbled. “Ours has to be a wannabe philosopher too.”
“Our new friends are on the move,” Syd said. “They seem to be attempting to find a way toward us.”
“Right. Time to move,” Maggie said.
“Move? Where?”
“We need to scout our immediate surroundings. Know what’s where, and how many ways people have to get to us. If we find a better spot, we make it our base. Otherwise, we set up here. Then, we set up a defensive cordon around the base.
“If they want to work together, we can. I’ll work with anyone who wants to take Cook down. I don’t care how unsavory they are. But if they don’t, we use ranged weapons to our advantage. Take them out before they get near us.”
A solid plan, considering what we had to work with – limited fortifiable positions, flat ground without vantage points, very limited time, and an encroaching attack force.
The maze opened ahead of us, as I’d already seen, but it led into a series of twists and turns and junctions behind us as well. I went with Ria, down one of these side paths. We counted three more intersections, one of which turned twice only to wind up a dead end. The remaining two twisted and turned for some yards – farther than either of us felt comfortable straying from the main party.
But we got the confirmation we needed. There were no immediate ways to approach us from that direction, except the obvious: head on.
Maggie was fielding similar reports from the other reconnaissance teams when we returned. All in all, we’d scoped out four approaches to our position. One or more might, if we’d had more time to follow it, turn out to be another dead end. But with time a precious commodity, we had to assume that these approaches would be danger points.
To that end, Maggie divided the team into four groups, each assigned to one of the approaches. We spread out as much as possible, remaining within shouting distance of each other, and in most cases, in visual range as well.
The sole exception was my and her position, around a corner. We could hear everyone, but we took up our position just out of sight. This left us plenty of room to spot – and stop, if necessary – approaching baddies before they got close enough to use their weapons on us, but it meant we couldn’t see what was happening behind us. Not without abandoning our post.
Max and Dave comprised the rest of our team. Carter, Frank, Jylya, Fredericks and Ginny made up a second team, while Ria and Corano divided the rest of the crew between themselves. Syd volunteered to be both lookout – his sensors provided more intel than our eyes, thanks to the maze – and backup, ready to come to the aid of whoever needed it.
