Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (29 page)

It became quiet. Very quiet. If I faced Polly, I could hear her heartbeat thundering, her breath roaring in and out. But facing straight ahead, there was nothing . . . until I heard the faintest of sounds. I strained to make it out, and I was soon convinced of what it was. I faced Polly, and so did Patrick.

She put her hand beside her mouth, opening it and closing it while she moved her mouth, then jerked her thumb ahead of us. Translation:
I hear someone talking down there.
I nodded.

She pointed back down the tunnel, lifting her eyebrows inquisitively, then pointed ahead, again asking.
Forward or retreat?
I hesitated, then pointed ahead, and cupped my hand around my ear.
Maybe if we get closer, we can hear what they’re saying.
Patrick nodded, and so did Polly. I’ll admit I wouldn’t have minded if I’d been outvoted.

So we continued, even slower, and very gradually the sounds got louder. I couldn’t make out words, but it was definitely people talking. How many? I couldn’t tell. Someone coughed, and it was like they were standing right beside me. We all stopped, and I heard what was surely laughter.

We all looked at each other again. Go on? Go back? And if we go back, what then?

Polly turned toward the sounds again, and as she did a buckle on her belt clanked against the pistol in its holster. Anywhere else, it would have vanished in the background noise, but here there was no background, just hard steel surfaces to bounce it all the way to the next station.

The talking stopped. Once more it was silent as a tomb. Then, for the first time, we understood words.

“Is somebody down there?”

Yeah, the bogeyman, and he’s coming to get you. It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded pretty tentative to me.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I didn’t, either.”

“I did. I think we ought to go down there and take a look.”

“You see anything in the infrared?”

“Nothing we haven’t seen before. They could be down there in the vanishing point, and I don’t think we’d see them.”

“We would if we got closer.”

I picked out four voices for sure, maybe five. One of them sounded like a man on a macho kick, sounding tough, or at least trying to. Another didn’t sound happy at all.

Polly held up five fingers. Patrick nodded and did the same. I held up four, then five, with a shrug. There were at least that many up there. Polly once again shrugged, then pointed forward, and back. I pointed back. So did Patrick. Polly nodded, and we headed back the way we came.

—

The next hours were some of the most frustrating I’ve ever experienced. We didn’t have to go so slowly on the way back, as we figured they weren’t coming after us. But once back at the elevator, we had another choice to make.

“Looks like we have to do it on the surface,” Patrick said.

“What, are you nuts?” That was Polly. “The only way I can see us doing that is to just go straight ahead to the north, on foot or in a vehicle, and kill anybody who gets in our way.”

“Which we may have to do,” I pointed out.

“You think I don’t know that? And I’ll do it, and you two will, too, if it comes to that. But, one, unless they are only a handful—and I don’t believe that, if they’ve posted five people on that one underground line—I don’t even know if we have enough
ammunition
for that.”

I didn’t think we did, either, but I didn’t say anything.

“And two, is that where we want to start? I mean, shouldn’t that be our last option if everything else fails?”

“I’m on board with that,” Patrick said.

“Me, too.” But she wasn’t finished. She was really worked up, about as much as I’ve ever seen her.

“Add to that, we’ll be like bugs in a jar out there. They’ll spot us as soon as we start north. Cameras, and spies, and . . .” She tapered off. I patted her on the shoulder.

“It’s okay, sis. We’ll explore every option.”

So we agreed that meant the other tunnels.

—

And that’s where the frustration came in. According to the map Travis had unlocked for us, there were two more North–South private trains. They were spaced evenly around the poles. One of them was the one we had recently traveled on to get from our house to the bridge. It was 120 degrees away from this one, reachable through a door off to our right as we had exited the elevator.

The door opened onto another plain corridor. This one was not as wide, as no train cars would ever run through it. And whereas the train-tunnel lights only came on when a car was passing, this one was lit. Very dim, with a small light every twenty yards or so, but lit. And the floor curved upward ahead of us. If we walked a little over six miles, we would end up right back there.

We reached the next door in about twenty minutes. Patrick was breathing a little hard and looked tired. The guy wasn’t in as good shape as me and the twin.

So we repeated the whole process, down the train tunnel. We knew this time about when we might be able to hear something, so we slowed down and listened, still maintaining silence.

There wasn’t much, at first. But it turned out these people just weren’t as talkative as the first group. Eventually, we heard them, and just a little later they heard something from us, because we could hear them asking each other if they heard anything. There was some difference of opinion on that, but then we heard something distinct.

“Elton, Roger, you come with me. The rest of you, stay here.”

That was enough for us.

—

The last tunnel was more of the same, the only difference being that shortly after we heard them, one of them fired a stun gun at us. The rifles fired small projectiles that would sting like the devil if they hit you. They trailed two fine wires that uncoiled out of the gun, and when they hit something, they discharged the stunning electricity. The wires had a range of about a hundred yards.

We heard the bang, and at the same time saw a flash of light from the propellant charge, but the stinger fell well short of us.

We fell back and regrouped.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Do we fight our way through one of these tunnels? Or go back and try the surface route?”

“They must know we’re trying to get through,” Patrick pointed out. “They would be talking to each other and know that each group heard something about half an hour apart. What would you do if you knew that?”

“Bring in reinforcements,” I said, glumly.

“No question,” Polly agreed.

“So maybe our best chance is a lightning run along the interior,” I said. “I don’t fancy fighting down here, trapped in these damn tubes. There’s nowhere to go but forward or back. It’s gotta be easier to defend than attack, right? Hell, they could just barricade the tunnel.”

“You’re right,” Polly said. “That’s hopeless. I guess we’ve wasted our time. I think it’s because we don’t want to face the alternatives.”

“The surface,” Patrick, said.

“No,” she said. She looked at us, and she wasn’t happy. “There’s another way. I’ve had an idea.”

It was a hell of an idea. I would soon be wishing she had kept her goddam ideas to herself.

Polly:

I never said it was a great plan. I just said it was the one I thought had the best chance of success, which was looking like slim or zero.

We were a pretty bedraggled and exhausted bunch by the time we got back to the hotel. Papa was happy to see us, but pretty soon he was back in his “thinkin’” zone. We all immediately scrambled for something cold to drink and ordered food from room service.

Cassie had her back up, and she hadn’t even heard the worst part of my plan. I wondered if it was going to be hard to sell her on it. Heck, I wasn’t even sure I was sold on it myself.

“Fly?” she said for what seemed like the twentieth time. “You talk about being bugs in a jar if we try to fight our way through on the surface. How easy do you think we would be to spot with heat scopes at night, being the only thing in the air?”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “Infrared sensors. Like you say, flying at night we would be ridiculously easy to spot.” I paused. “That’s why we’ll do it during the day.”

Her jaw dropped open, then closed again. I don’t know if I’d ever seen her speechless, but she was then. But not forever.

“You must be out of your f—. . . your cockamamie mind! In the daytime? If we fly low, we’ll still be sitting ducks, and I don’t think we could make six miles in that kind of gravity. And if we fly high, we’ll burn up. Remember Icarus?”

“Icarus disregarded his father, remember? What was his name . . . ?”

“Daedalus,” Patrick supplied.

“Right. But he flew too high. The other part of the story is that Daedalus made it. He took his own advice and kept to the right altitude.”

Cassie was mulling it over. I glanced at Papa, off in his own world, but I was about to say things it was best he didn’t hear if he happened to come up for air. I gestured toward the door, and the three of us went into the other room.

“So what we’d be looking for is the Goldilocks zone,” Cassie said, thoughtfully. “Too low, and we’d be spotted. Too high, and we fry. We have to find a distance that’s just right. And where would that be?”

“It’s wherever it is,” I said. Not helpful, I guess, but true. We would have to find the right spot by experimenting.

“I don’t get it,” Patrick said. “Why wouldn’t they spot you?”

“The sun would dazzle any device they used to look for us,” Cassie said, absently. “We’d be invisible in the glare, in visible light or infrared.”

“That’s part of it,” I agreed. “There’s also the fact that no one would think we would be stupid enough to fly close enough to the sun to hide.”

“What I’m wondering about,” Cassie said, “is if anyone
is
stupid enough to do it.”

“Well, there’s one of us who’s stupid enough to try.”

She glared at me. Putting it in the form of a dare was my best chance of getting her with me. Cassie has seldom turned down a dare, short of certain death.

“Let’s see those flycycles,” she finally said.

—

We got them out and unfolded them. I had wondered if Cassie’s sour face could get any sourer. It could.

“So, we’re going to undertake the most dangerous flycycle trip ever attempted, and we’re going to do it on junk?”

“C’mon, twin, where’s your team spirit?”

“I think I left it in that hog pen after I saved your worthless butt.”

I’d never seen her so negative. That’s usually my role in our mirror-image relationship. Truth be told, I was probably even more dubious about the whole thing than she was, but since fate or whatever had granted me the idea, it fell to me to be the optimist. Like my name. Switched at birth, we were, if that means anything with twins.

“They’re sturdy,” I pointed out.

“So is a steam locomotive. You want to fly one? You got these from Mike and Marlee? And Patrick?”

Patrick was standing off to the side a bit. Now he cleared his throat.

“I hope you know I won’t be going with you.”

Cassie looked at him.

“Acrophobia,” he said, with a shrug.

“It’s true, Cass. He barely made it here.”

“If we’re voting here, if I have a vote, I want to fight in the tunnels.”

“You have a vote,” I told him. “Cassie, that doesn’t really matter. He couldn’t fly a cycle that far, anyway. He’s a novice.”

“With acrophobia.” Cassie sighed. “I didn’t feel good about leaving Papa behind, alone, no matter what we decided. I guess he could take care of Papa.”

“So what’s your vote, Cassie?”

Another deep, deep sigh.

“I guess we do our Icarus thing,” she said.

“Daedalus.”

“Whatever.”

—

Preparations didn’t take long. Most of it was being sure we would bring everything we needed, and the rest was finding ways to keep as cool as possible.

We had never needed suntan lotion, but we had never been that close to the sun. We sent Patrick to the Timberline gift shop to get some to put on our faces, the only parts of us that would be exposed.

Water would be essential. I expected to sweat off five pounds or more. I usually lost two or three pounds just in a regular skypool game. We couldn’t risk dehydration. But water is heavy, and we couldn’t take too much of it along with all the other stuff we had to carry.

Then we turned our attention to the tandem cycle itself. Cassie was far from convinced the ultrathin membranes of the wings wouldn’t melt from the heat. I wasn’t, either, but I pretended I was. There was nothing we could do about it, anyway.

And, finally, there was nothing to do but wait.

When we were done with our preparations, the sun was just about to go out, according to my watch. We intended to start off as soon as it had reached its full intensity in the morning, to be sure it was bright enough to conceal us in the dazzle.

Papa was already asleep at the table. He had simply drifted off and toppled over, as he often did when he was working on something. Cassie and I carried him to the bedroom and took off his shoes, put a blanket over him, and listened for a moment to his soft snoring.

Patrick bunked on the couch in the living room, and Cassie and I went to the bedroom. I was so tired I thought I’d be asleep instantly, but that was not the case.

“Cassie, you asleep?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“I thought so. Are we crazy to do this?”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re right.”

Somehow, at some point, I drifted off.

—

We made our way up the increasingly steep slope from the Timberline access door, getting lighter with every step. Toward the end, we were in skypool air, almost weightless. Games are never played near either of the poles, I don’t really know why, so we were seeing something we had never seen up close before: the junction of the sun with the rock of the ship.

There wasn’t really much to see. I had always imagined some sort of huge socket, like a fluorescent light tube. Guide the ends into the socket and twist it.

I suddenly wondered what would happen if this monster bulb ever burned out. I was sure the engineers had planned for that, would have some way to repair it, but I had no idea what it was.

There was no socket, though. The tube just entered a big hole in the rock, with a gap just about wide enough to put your fist in. It needed that space because when it got hot, it expanded a little in girth. It expanded a
lot
in length, over its six-mile length, so that was allowed for somewhere beneath the rock where it was plugged in. Right then, cold, it was as short as it would ever get.

I couldn’t resist touching it. At the same time, I was a little spooked by it. It felt a little like a clay pot. Some sort of ceramic.

We had tried to calculate where we were going to fly. It wasn’t easy. The specs mentioned a distance of a hundred yards as the point where it would surely kill you from heat prostration. Any closer than that, and you would eventually get hot enough to ignite, burn to a crisp. But what was the inner limit of being able to function and make a six-mile trip?

We found a figure for how much heat an unprotected human could stand over a period of an hour or so. We found another figure for how much heat the sun put out, per square yard, at various distances. It was enough that, on the surface, you could feel uncomfortable after an hour, but sunstroke would never be a problem.

“We’ve spent half an hour in a sauna,” Cassie pointed out. “We were probably hotter in there than we’ll be here.”

“But we weren’t working in the sauna.”

“There you go again, spoilsport.” We seemed to have shifted roles again, back to my normal negativity and her sunny disposition.

Papa could have done the calculation in his head in about a second, but we couldn’t ask him to without revealing our plan, which he would forbid. So we struggled with it. Or rather, Cassie did, as I really suck at math. Patrick helped out, and we finally settled on a figure and put it into our positioning apps. It seemed way too close, to me.

But we paced it out with ten minutes left until sun-on. It still seemed far too close, but that was the whole idea. We opened the cycle and did one last check. I found a loose connection and tightened it up to specs. Cassie watched me until I straightened out, and I gave her a thumbs-up.

“No parachutes,” she pointed out.

“Then we just have to do it right all the way.”

“I’d kick the tires,” she said, “but I’m afraid it would fall apart. I wonder where that expression came from? Kick the tires?”

“I have no idea and couldn’t care less. You want to match for the front seat?”

“Two out of three.”

She covered my rock with paper, I smashed her scissors with my rock. Then she cut my paper. Damn the bitch. How does she always do that?

MILE ONE

It started out well enough. The sun warmed up for about a minute, flickering a little, and then blasted us with heat. I hastily lowered my dark glasses, slipped my feet into the stirrups. I assumed the position, almost prone, and started pedaling. Behind me the prop began to whirl and chatter as it cut through the air. We pulled away from the solid rock of the pole and were airborne. Cassie had the altitude control, being in the front.

“Going up a little,” she said. “About twenty feet gets us where we planned to be. Feeling hot?”

“Actually, not too bad at the moment.”

“It’ll get hotter.”

It did, but not a lot. I began to feel a little better. Maybe our main problem would be having enough strength to power our way through, and not the heat itself. I felt refreshed from a night’s sleep and a good breakfast. I felt strong. Six miles? Do it standing on my head.

MILE TWO

I was getting tired already of staring at Cassie’s ass. Other than my recent trip with Patrick back in steerage, it had been a long time since I’d been on a tandem cycle, all the way back to my learning days, when I was in front, and my teaching and student-coaching days, when I was in back. The joy of cycling is in the freedom, the flexibility, of swooping through the air like a bird . . . well, not quite, but a lot more agile than any aircraft. Of course, that was the least of my worries. It’s just that it was better to think about what was annoying me than about what was torturing me. Which was the heat.

It was pounding right through the back of my helmet. It was sitting on my back like a ton of hot bricks. It was raking along the backs of my legs, on my shoulders, my arms. And we weren’t even a third of the way there.

“How are you doing?” Cassie called back.

“Just fine,” I said.

“Me, too. Piece of cake.”

MILE THREE

You think it can’t get any worse, and then it gets worse. And worse again.

I was pretty sure the heat wouldn’t kill me, but I had begun to wish it would. This wasn’t an all-enveloping heat, like in a sauna. It was all coming from one side, the back, and maybe the contrast had something to do with the pain I was feeling. Being on a rotisserie would have been better. At least one side would have a little time to cool off from the air flowing over us. I felt like I was on a barbecue grill, and it was about time to turn me over because I was sure done on the one side.

We were over Grand Fenwick, crossing the border with Lake Wobegon. Something was wrong down there. I saw three places where thin columns of smoke were rising, all of them from the middle of villages. From almost a mile up, people were antlike, but I could still make them out, and I didn’t like what I saw there, either. I could see groups hurrying around or assembled in one place.

“Looks like the rebellion has finally reached the level of the common people,” Cassie said.

“I wonder what they know.”

“I’m not getting anything now. Are you?”

I tried a few phone calls and got nothing. Ditto connecting to any information source. For a moment, I got a staticky picture of a newsreader sitting at her desk and mouthing something, with no sound, but that soon broke up, too. The only things I was getting on my visual display were internal programs like time and orientation. Which was depressing, as we weren’t even halfway there yet. I wished I had had the temperature sensor installed when I got my most recent phone . . . and then I was glad I hadn’t. I didn’t want to know.

MILE FOUR

I turned to the side and threw up. That breakfast had been a mistake.

“That’s going to be a nice surprise for someone on the ground,” Cassie said.

“Shut the heck up.”

“You’d better take on some water.”

We had both been drinking. My primary water bottle was about two-thirds empty now. I only had one spare.

I got the bottle and put my lips around it and sucked in a mouthful. It had had ice in it when we started, but now it was tepid. I had another mouthful, and then squeezed a little into my hand. My face was covered in sweat already, but it was hot sweat. And in the near-weightless zone we were in, it didn’t drip. Water didn’t flow here, it beaded in the air. I splashed my handful of water on my face and rubbed it around. It cooled me slightly.

My whole body was bathed in sweat. My thirst was almost overpowering, but I forced myself to clip the water bottle back to the cycle frame.

“We’re over halfway there, Poll,” Cassie said. “How are your legs holding out?”