I DON’T BELONG HERE
1563 4D
The power in Sobi Zone was gone. In the blanketing darkness Andrew turned around and nearly fell, seeing and sensing nothing except the wet floor underfoot, not even knowing where Ezzar, Grendel and the other man stood so near him. The floor took on a feel of super-reality, its every depression and contour and slickness now his only clues to the world. He reached with the toe of his boot, finding something firm but soft here and there. A nose, an eye socket: the dead shopowner’s face.
“Who’s got a torch?” A clear, penetrating voice: the man with Ezzar and Grendel.
Andrew found a packet of chemtorches, and lit one to release its faint green light. Ezzar and the others stood in front of him. He said to her, “This is my old home. I can get you anywhere around here.”
She said, “Then get us up to 636, where the street above this one enters the South Complex. Fast. The bastards have cut the power, and our people will start things now.”
The other man, gray eyes narrow and reading Andrew, broke in. “This is the best way, straight across and up.”
“No,” Andrew said, “because it’ll be guarded by remote. I worked on the lightwires here. I can take you straight to 636 South, and no one will see you. But it’s tight going.” Here he looked at Grendel, whose face seemed a shade more green than the light itself. “Follow me.”
“Hold on,” the man said, hefting the load of weapons he carried. “Ezzar, you really want to let this guy show us the way?”
Ezzar looked at Andrew for a long moment. “Yes. This is Andrew. He’s already bailed my ass out, twice.” Andrew nodded briefly to her in thanks. She responded, “This is Ellichik.” The other man grunted, nodded briefly.
The journey took them past a coded lock into a utility closet and up a steeply-slanting ladder beneath a bundle of cables that grazed their upturned heads. A climb about equal to ninety long strides in distance brought them, panting, to another access closet.
Voices rang in the understreet outside. Andrew crouched to peer under the door. A rumble, then some beam blasts. “We’re on 636 South,” he muttered. “The lights are out here too, but someone’s spotting with infra.”
“This is a key crossing,” Ezzar said. “We’re supposed to be holding it.”
“You’re not,” Andrew said, listening, “Because some of those voices are bug soldiers. Your people use them?”
“No.” Ezzar. To Andrew she seemed oddly passive, uncertain – probably worrying about Grendel.
“Any suggestions?” No one spoke. Grating shouts and scuffling sounds, punctuated with gunfire, shook the thin utility access door. Andrew groped in his memory. “How about this: up to 634, and down again inside the Complex? It’ll be even tighter that the last leg, but we’re pinned in place here otherwise.”
“Can I get through?” Grendel.
“We’ll get you through,” Andrew said to him. “Come on.” He led them up and off the shaftway they had taken into a circular pipe little wider than their shoulders. Small corrugations in its round wall served as foot– and hand-holds. Behind their heads ran a heavy ribbon of shielded lightlines.
Grendel got stuck. With Ezzar and Ellichik behind him, and Andrew ahead, he tried to negotiate a seventy-degree elbow in the pipe, and wedged both shoulders in a joint ring that protruded slightly inward from the pipewall. Grendel‘s voice, muffled, came from below Andrew. “I ca…" The words ended, and a rapid, hollow bumping started.
“Andrew!” Ezzar shouted ahead, “Get him out! Get him out! It’s a seizure.”
Andrew, carrying the only light, tried to see back beyond his own feet. Jerking in and out of the greenness, Grendel‘s pale head bobbed like a rock bouncing down a mountainside, his breath chuffing short and hard.
Andrew looked ahead to another slight bend. “Hang on,” he called, “I’ve got to turn around and come back in to get him. We’re almost out of this.” His elbows and knees wracked with shooting pain, he wriggled ahead, fell down and out into a closet, and climbed up and in again with the torch in his teeth. He reached Grendel. The big man’s breath had shallowed out into a flutter.
“Hurry,” Ezzar called.
“When I tell you, twist his left leg up over his right, and try to turn him,” Andrew called back.
“That’ll break his thigh! The bad one!”
Andrew paused. “It’s that or stay here. Choose.”
A quiet, with no sound at all now from Grendel. “I’ll do it,” Ezzar said.
Taking Grendel under the arms, Andrew pulled one side, then the other. A finger’s width of advance. “Do it,” he said. As he pulled, Ezzar twisted, and the large man’s frame began to rotate slightly. Then with a surge, Andrew freed him, calling back, “No more now.” Carefully, as tenderly as they could, Andrew and Ezzar moved Grendel out of the pipe and laid him on the floor of the small utility closet. Andrew wedged his torch between two conduits that splayed out from the pipe into small holes leading to the understreet. All quiet here. They waited, listening, watching Grendel; at last his eyes opened.
“I don’t belong here,” he said slowly. His voice grated. “Let me go. This is hurting too much, now.” He looked at Ezzar with longing and pleading in his eyes. “Can we get back out to the land again?”
She caressed his face. “Yes,” she said. She looked up at the waiting Ellichik and Andrew, and Grendel‘s pleading showed in her eyes. “Can we…" she began.
A distant jackhammer of sound echoed from the pipe they had used. They all stared at its opening.
Andrew knelt by Grendel. “It sounds like we’re all caught in this right now. If we’re gonna get out, we’ll have to fight for it. But I won’t drag you through the pipes again. You can stay in the open streets now. We’re inside the South Power Complex.”
Ellichik cracked the closet door open and peered out. “Yes. This is where we want to be. The post is a few steps away.”
Andrew and Ezzar helped Grendel to his feet. He stood back, then said, “I’ll be all right. But I’ll be better when the door opens.”
“Okay, come on,” Ellichik said. He led them out into another dead-gray, shuttered street, lighted at last, but poorly. On his way out, Andrew quelled the torch and stuck it back in his pocket.
At the post in a walled-off cubby, Ellichik‘s officer worked frantically, muttering into voice circuits in a headset, his fingers flying over luminescent panels of shifting light. “Yes, the 94s are there. Use them but probe for reflectors first, we lost seven down on 639. Yeah, blinded. Olmey, where are the stonehosers I sent you? Not there yet? Shit, send a guy up 638 radial and find Jared. No, Jared Sixfoot, not the other… Who? They’re in the ramp? Use the sonics, right now. Never mind, damn it, ears heal. Do it. Well?” He glared at Ellichik. “Who’re these?”
“Fighters, these two, Ezzar and Grendel,” Ellichik said, looking then at Andrew.
“Name’s Luce. Militia, and utility linesman,” Andrew added.
“That how you got here?”
“Yeah, pipe access tunnels from 641.”
The officer flashed a snarl of teeth. “All right, all of you get your butts to… What the fuck is that?” He pointed to Grendel‘s huge weapon.
“It makes big holes,” Grendel said.
“Yeah, wirebrain, I see that. You use it, or just carry it for the lady here?”
“I use it.”
“Hm. Another rep goes to war. Got rounds?”
“About fifty.”
“Go use ‘em. Follow him. Ellichik, load up and get them over to West 38. Bugs on the radial, hopping backdoors in the shops. You’ll hear ‘em coming. I’ll get stone over there as soon as I… Yes? Shit.” His face drawn and tense, he swiveled his seat back to his invisible room of voices.
Ellichik turned to go. Andrew looked back at the seated officer’s legs. His stomach contracted. A flat shining seal marking its abrupt end at mid-thigh, the man’s left leg had been newly severed. Andrew followed Grendel out into the understreet. He lost a leg. What part of me is missing?
