HE GATHERED HIMSELF IN INNERSPACE
1563 4D
“This moment is all you have. Go to sleep.” The words of Allashani returned as Grendel awoke. The understreet ceiling of the makeshift rebel hospital arched overhead, the place where he’d brought Ezzar, so badly burned. The couch still hugged him softly in his sprawl. Ezzar. Where was she?
Doors opened and closed with metallic thuds. He turned his head to the left. The liftway door slid aside, and three men, helmless, staggered out toward him. The middle one’s feet dangled, and his head hung low between his shoulders held upraised in a shrug by the other mens’ gripping hands. A chill trickled down Grendel‘s spine. The two carriers let the dangling man down onto a stretcher as if they laid a wet sheet on a mattress. He didn’t move. Clear liquid ran onto the stone floor from his hand hanging from the stretcher edge. His face looked rough, shapeless.
“Who’s that?” Grendel asked them. Apprehension made the words come hard. His helm lay next to him.
The nearest man spoke, panting. “You the andro he talked about? That’s Ellichik. Or it was.” The other man went to the doors to the corridor where Ezzar had been taken, and called muffled words.
“I’m Grendel.” The man nodded as Grendel struggled to his feet, his carapiece weighting him. He moved with short steps to where Ellichik lay, and crouched very slowly to get close to the man’s face. It resembled Ezzar‘s now, the features abraded and charred and bent into burned tree bark, the eyes only pits. No breath came from the mouth now incapable of closing, its lips eaten back to show pale, almost glowing, teeth streaked with brown and black.
A pattern of nearly-intact skin across one cheek resolved itself into the end-on silhouette of a beam gun; the weapon must have shielded part of Ellichik‘s face from the blast. Grendel reached out a finger, touched the crackling skin on the neck. Maybe Allashani could save this one, call him back. Maybe he could hope for this. Maybe, just once, he could make an opening in the walls he kept building in his mind, like the opening he kept only and always for Ezzar.
Beyond the doors, the other man’s voice repeated its tired calls for help.
“Bugs,” the man by Grendel said. “They pushed us back to the shaft area, and they may be down here in no time. He managed to knock off a whole load of them, but they’re still coming, like there’s no end to them. They’re so fast.” The man swayed, put out a hand.
His own strength returning, Grendel caught the hand in his own, and put his other arm around the man’s shoulder. The shaft, that’s where they’d come. And soon. “You sit here.” He let the man down on the couch where he himself had been, then drew the weapon parts from his carapiece and coverall. His hands flew as he puzzled his own and Ezzar‘s guns together again, and loaded them. All still in order. Mixed with the distant clatter and thrum from behind the doors nearby, Grendel heard a faint echo from the lift shaft.
He stepped to the lift door and listened. A distant scraping grew louder. “Ah, shit. They’re coming.” Grendel grabbed his big gun, tossed Ezzar‘s weapon to the man returning from the doorway, and jammed his helm on his head. Time to try Andrew‘s trick. “Cover me. Lift, open!” He leaped inside, set his gun butt on the floor, chambered, squeezed his eyes shut, and fired through the liftcar ceiling.
Pain stabbed Grendel‘s leg as he leaped up and out of the sagging, smoking car, just clearing the lift doorway before the car fell out of sight. He rolled across the floor toward a chair at the far wall shouting, “Take cover!” Three closely-spaced thumps rose from the liftwell. A screech of metal built to a crescendo.
The fight exploded in beams and bullets. The first surviving bug soldier down the shaft braked perfectly, hanging by his knees from a pair of crossed steel spears, and fired a burst of slugs that blew chunks of stone from the wall beyond Grendel. Grendel‘s beam took his head and shoulders off; the spears clanked down the shaft. Next down were two more; one heaved a grenade into the understreet, and followed up with a spatter of slugs that chewed the stone wall just above Ellichik‘s inert body. The other slewed a beam blast at the doorway opposite the lift.
The grenade spewed gas; the man covering Grendel backed frantically away, then hurdled a heavy chair and disappeared down the street.
“Tardikon,” Angie said in his helm. Grendel sniffed. Oh, yeah. Humans couldn’t take this stuff. His skin flushed as his own defensive enzymes went to work. He fired twice, from behind the couch, taking out both soldiers as they descended from the cover of the shaft a second time. They fell, smoking, and silence arrived. “There’s a bunch more in the shaft,” Angie reported.
Grendel waited, testing his bad leg. It was gone — the last jump had ripped the muscle and the tendons in his hamstring. He’d have to stay here. Not a sound, except faint shouts behind the charred doors. The gas woke memories for him of the vats, when the master teacher had calibrated his olfactories.
He closed his eyes, still listening, and gathered himself in innerspace.
Towering walls of rock leaned over him on either side, a deep blue sky showing in a crevice above. A distance away along a defile between the walls, a gaggle of men, andros, he supposed, stood huddled together staring at him. He stared back. “Who are you?”
The nearest, a pale man squat and strong like Jirinai, answered. “We’re fighting you. What are you doing in here? You’re not human. But you’re not one of us.”
“I’m just an andro.”
“We’ve never seen regular andros fight.”
“Are you andros? Or are you aliens, or what?” Grendel studied them. They had to be waiting in the liftway shaft. Innerspace changed things; the bug soldiers had self-grown body armor, but these figures looked almost normal.
“We’re soldiers for the Engharhnhas.” From further down the narrow space between the mountain walls, more men joined the group. A tall woman came up behind them. Her face shone like the sun; the rock blared with light. Like Allashani. The nearest man showed Grendel a wide mouthful of long sharp teeth. “We’re going to kill you now.”
