Steel Gauntlet (42 page)

“Goddamn!” he shouted, and punched her in the head with his balled fist. She staggered back into the wall and collapsed. As she fell hard on her side, at last she understood how someone could kill another person with a knife. The glowball rolled on the floor, eerily illuminating St. Cyr’s legs. “Try that again, and I’ll break your arm,” he shouted

“Put your filthy tongue on me again, you bastard, and I’ll bite your fucking throat out!” Wellington-Humphreys screamed back.

St. Cyr reached down with one arm and hauled her upright. “Any more biting around here, and I’ll do it,” he hissed. “When I get you to where we’re going, Madame Ambassador, I’ll have my way with you until I’m done with you.” With a nasty laugh he shoved her hard on down the tunnel.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“To my bower.” St. Cyr laughed. He felt expansive and confident now. He was still ahead of the wave. “There is an underground river about a kilometer farther down this tunnel. Its channel runs in an old shaft the miners dug two hundred years ago. It flows into the Carnelian Sea. I have a small watercraft just ahead that will take us to the river’s delta. From there it’s a short walk to where I have hidden a 36

V spacecraft. You figure out the rest of the plot.”

A brilliant flash followed immediately by a rush of hot air threw the two Marines head first along the tunnel they’d been trying to negotiate in the almost total darkness. From far ahead they could just make out the tiny speck of light that was St. Cyr’s glowball. Now they lay stunned on the rocky floor as tons of debris crashed down upon the spot where they’d been shuffling along only minutes before.

“Mac!” Dean shouted. His ears were ringing loudly from the blast. At first he was afraid he’d lost his hearing completely.

“Here,” MacIlargie answered from somewhere in front. They had both been picked up by the force of the explosion and hurled down the tunnel. Dean felt wetness on one side of his face. He wiped at it and then put his fingers to his lips. Blood. He began crawling in the direction of MacIlargie’s voice and found him by touch. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Stunned, is all. Well, Shadow, we’re really in the shit now, aren’t we?”

“Yeah—” Suddenly Dean screamed. “Something’s in here with us! It touched me!” A small, blue-green light began to glow beside Dean’s leg. Quickly it formed the outline of a Woo.

“Ee, gods,” Dean whispered, “one o’ them whatchamacallits!”

“Yeah, yeah!” MacIlargie exclaimed. “Never seen one before. But it must be a Woo. They’re harmless,” he added. “And look, it can generate light!” With that, the Woo glowed even more intensely, as if showing the Marines what it could do. “Stop it, you idiot! He’ll see us!” MacIlargie whispered, and the Woo suddenly stopped glowing. “It understands English,” he exclaimed.

Dean did not believe that, but grateful for the source of light, he decided not to chance insulting the creature, so he kept quiet.

The huge eyes mounted on either side of the Woo’s long narrow head gazed silently at the pair. Then it nodded down the tunnel in the direction St. Cyr had departed. When they did not respond, it nodded again. Then it scuttled down the tunnel a short distance, and beckoned them on with its one armlike appendage.

“It’s gonna guide us, Deano, the little bugger is going to guide us!” Cautiously, they picked their way along behind the creature, which now scurried down the tunnel in short dashes, emitting just enough light to guide them but not enough to give their presence away.

St. Cyr pushed Wellington-Humphreys into a small gallery out of which led several passages. He put an infra device to his eye and shoved her across the gallery into a branching tunnel. “Half a kilometer down this tunnel we will skirt a geothermal spring that bubbles up through a fissure. It is boiling, so don’t fall in. The path around is negotiable even with your arms tied behind you. Once on the other side, we crawl up a steep slope and we are there.” He smiled voraciously and pushed her onward.

A minute later the Woo, followed closely by the two Marines, skittered through the gallery and unerringly picked the tunnel down which St. Cyr had just disappeared. The Woo increased its pace and the Marines scrambled to keep up with it.

Suddenly, the tunnel began to broaden, and just ahead they could see the faint glow of light and hear voices, one of them clearly that of a woman. The temperature had gradually increased and the air inside the tunnel had turned humid. The Woo had stopped generating light and now squatted at the mouth of the tunnel. The three crouched in the darkness and peered out across a steaming pool of water at St. Cyr, clearly silhouetted by the glowball in his hand as he inched carefully along a rock ledge just above the steamy surface of the water. The sound of running water came to them clearly on the humid air.

Dean put his ear close to MacIlargie’s. “That must be how he’s going to get away. There’s a river somewhere nearby. We’ve gotta stop him now, before it’s too late!”

“How? We don’t have any weapons!”

The Woo reached up to Dean, and between the fingerlike talons that served it as a hand, it clutched a large rock. Dean’s expression changed as he got the idea. MacIlargie caught on almost as fast and groped on the floor of the tunnel for rocks of his own. When the Woo saw that each Marine was ready with a rock in each hand, it began to generate a brilliant orange light that rapidly swelled to illuminate the entire chamber like daylight.

Dean threw his rock with all his might. It narrowly missed St. Cyr’s head and bounced off the wall and into the pool, where it disappeared with a splash and a cloud of steam. MacIlargie’s rock hit St. Cyr on the shoulder and caused him to wince. He pulled the Ambassador closer to him to use her as a shield, and stepped off the ledge onto a gradual rock-strewn slope. Holding her tightly with one arm, he drew his blaster and leveled it at the two Marines, who were now clearly visible on the other side of the bubbling pool. At the last instant, Wellington-Humphreys shoved him, and the bolt spattered harmlessly into the rock vault above the pool. St. Cyr smashed the blaster barrel across the bridge of her nose and shoved her away from him, up the slope. Then, turning back toward the Marines and using two hands to hold the blaster, he planted his legs firmly about ten centimeters apart and took careful aim.

The Woo’s light went out and everything plunged back into darkness. St. Cyr hesitated to shoot, and at that instant Wellington-Humphreys smashed into him with all her weight behind her shoulder. St. Cyr staggered forward and plunged head first into the pool. He went fully under, popped quickly to the surface, screaming. The Woo’s light came back on, and Dean stepped onto the ledge and began inching his way toward where Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys lay dazed, her head only a few inches from the bubbling pool.

St. Cyr screamed and thrashed about in the boiling water. He reached for the ledge on which Dean stood and tried to pull himself up. Dean stamped hard on his fingers. The nails and flesh shredded off under the boot, but still screaming, St. Cyr clung to the rock. Dean stamped on his head and a large patch of his hair sloughed off. Balancing himself precariously on the slippery rock, Dean ground his heel on St. Cyr’s fingers and then kicked him again in the head, and this time he slipped back into the water.

Afraid that St. Cyr would come back and get a grip on one of his legs, Dean dashed the rest of the way across.

Meanwhile, MacIlargie stood on the other side of the pool and tossed rocks at St. Cyr as he splashed about in the pool, his screams increasing in intensity as the boiling water cooked him alive. MacIlargie tried to silence him with a blow to the head, but the rocks just thudded into his swelling flesh without effect.

Dean crouched beside Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys. “Are you all right, ma’am?” He helped her to her feet. She nodded that she was, although blood still flowed freely from her broken nose. “I can’t get this damned fastening off your wrist,” Dean complained as he tried to loosen it. “I’m afraid we’ll have to go back along that ledge. Can you make it?”

“Yes. Can you shut him up?” she asked, nodding at St. Cyr, who now had drifted to the middle of the pool and floated there with only his head and shoulders above the water, trying to keep the burning liquid out of his nose and mouth.

Once on the other side, the two Marines gathered rocks and began pelting St. Cyr with all their strength, not for revenge or punishment, but in an effort to silence his terrible screaming, which gradually weakened into a high-pitched keening. The man who had fancied himself a greater conqueror than Napoleon Bonaparte, the man who had conquered a whole world, was reduced to a screaming mound of stewed flesh twisting in the boiling water. The rocks bounced off his head and face, crushing his bones and teeth, but still he kept up the keening. At last he sank beneath the water and the grotto became silent, except for the Marines’ heavy breathing and Wellington-Humphreys’s retching.

With a forearm, Dean wiped perspiration off his brow and sat down inside the mouth of the tunnel.

MacIlargie and Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys joined him.

The three sat in silence for a few moments, catching their breath. The Woo diminished his light so they would no longer have to see St. Cyr’s lifeless, obscenely swollen body floating like an overdone sausage in the steaming pool.

“I thought I recognized you when St. Cyr dragged me out of my cell, but it was just too good to believe you’d gotten free,” Wellington-Humphreys told the Marines. In turn, MacIlargie explained what had happened to them. “I’ve heard of daring rescues before,” she replied, “but what you did beats everything.”

“Hell, ma’am, it was you who saved our asses—er, saved us when you knocked that bastard off into the pool,” MacIlargie said. “We were just following orders the skipper gave us the night of the reception, to stick, uh, close by your side.”

“Do you know what happened to Professor Benjamin and your ensign?” she asked. Then she told them what St. Cyr had done.

Both men were silent for a moment. “Woo,” MacIlargie said his voice choked with anger, “please turn the lights back on!” and for several minutes he and Dean pelted St. Cyr’s floating corpse with more rocks.

“Now what do we do? The tunnel behind us is blocked.” Dean said as the trio sat disconsolately by the pool.

“He had a boat of some kind stored at the river over there,” the Ambassador said. “We could find it and escape to the sea.”

“How far is that?” MacIlargie asked

Wellington-Humphreys shrugged her shoulders. “I wish you could untie these bonds, I’m beginning to lose feeling in my hands.” While the Woo gave them light to see by, they examined the cords that bound her hands behind her, but there was no way they could break them or cut them without tools.

“Let’s see if we can manage to get your arms in front of you,” Dean suggested. She sat down, and with Dean pushing her legs onto her chest while MacIlargie pulled her arms out over her butt, they managed to push and shove until her arms came around in front. They worked the bonds as best they could to relieve the pressure on her wrists, and gradually some feeling came back into her fingers. “At least this way you’ll be able to keep your balance better,” Dean said.

“Shall we take the boat?” MacIlargie asked. Before he could answer, the Woo scrambled back up the tunnel a meter from where they were sitting and beckoned for them to follow.

“Well, Mac, looks like he has another plan. What do you say?”

“The little shit’s done okay by us so far; let’s go. Besides, I don’t much like boats.” They helped Wellington-Humphreys to her feet and followed the Woo back up the tunnel.

“Still afraid of Woos?” MacIlargie asked, draping an arm around Dean’s shoulders as they trudged through the tunnel. “Hell no!” Dean answered, and added, without thinking, “Why, if he had tits on his back I’d marry him!” Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys smiled in the dark behind him.

A crew of miners had been flown in from New Kimberly and set to work clearing the debris out of the tunnel. “This’ll take us about an hour,” the foreman told Captain Conorado.

Conorado had set up a command post in the gallery, and from there he coordinated the search parties he’d dispatched throughout the complex, to find a way around the collapsed tunnel. General Aguinaldo had mobilized his entire division and, with help from the army, a thorough search and surveillance operation encompassing all the territory within a hundred-kilometer radius of Mount Amethyst was mounted. St. Cyr had to come out somewhere, and when he did, the Confederation forces would be there—they hoped.

Captain Conorado was pouring over the chart of the tunnel complex with Hard Rocks Viola when a distinctly feminine voice behind him said, “Captain, would you do me a slight favor, sir?” He turned around and his mouth fell open. There stood Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys in a thoroughly bedraggled battle-dress uniform, her face covered in blood. Behind her stood Dean and MacIlargie, grinning like fools. The Woo, glowing a satisfied pink, sat on Dean’s shoulder.

“Madame Ambassador, how? Well, where the hell did you come from?” was all Conorado could think to say.

“The Woo knew a way out. Now, sir, could you get these fucking goddamned cords off my wrists?” As the FIST surgeon attended to Wellington-Humphreys’s broken nose, Dean and MacIlargie told their story.

“Mighty smart of you boys to take that Woo along with you,” Hard Rocks commented when they’d finished. “Little buggers have an unerring sense of direction and they generate their own light source.

Never come down here myself without one or two of ‘em along.”

“We didn’t bring him along, he brought us along,” MacIlargie said. They stared at the Woo for a moment.

“And Captain,” Dean said, “I want to take him back to Camp Ellis with me. Can I do that, sir?” Captain Conorado laughed. “Well, okay, Marine, but have Mr. Viola here show you how to take care of the thing. And Lance Corporal, you take him back, you will be responsible for him.” Dean grinned and the Woo glowed a dull pink. The Captain turned back to the others. “Men, you can thank Mr. Viola here for getting us into this place. And what’s more, he stuck right by me during the worst of the fighting.”