The Mandala Maneuver (6 page)

“This way,” he said, after analyzing the rock formations ahead. There did seem to be a narrow natural path that zigzagged up the hill.

She nodded grimly and followed him, this time seemingly content to let him take the lead and determine the best route over the treacherous ground. Once or twice her slick-soled boots slipped on the rock, and again she hung on to his hand for dear life, cursing under her breath. He tightened his fingers around hers and more or less dragged her up the last few feet before they slipped into the cool darkness of the cave, leaving the sunlight behind.

Immediately she let go of his hand and cast a baleful glance over her shoulder at the now-empty skies above the canyon. “Just what the
hell
was that?”

S
he should have known
they’d be tracked. She’d let the relative ease of their journey so far lull her into thinking that all they had to do was sidestep a few alien birds and suffer a few uncomfortable bivouacs, and then they’d be at the science station and calling in the cavalry.

Too bad the galaxy really didn’t work that way.

Lirzhan stood silently watching her, as if he were afraid that if he said the wrong thing, she’d explode even worse than she already had. She took a deep breath, calming herself. He’d probably saved her life back there; his reflexes were a lot better than hers.

Even that realization irritated her. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this, so logically she knew it really wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have the skills to wrest the pulse pistol from the Zhore and magically shoot their assailants out of the sky. She wasn’t a warrior. She was a diplomat. But she knew she’d better start thinking like a warrior if she wanted to survive this.

On top of everything, her heel had begun to throb again. Probably the bandage had worked itself loose during their headlong flight down the gully. She couldn’t worry about that right now, though.

Lirzhan had pulled out one of the lanterns from the emergency kit and had turned it down the passageway beyond them. That is, it looked like a corridor of some sort, although she knew it had to be a natural formation. It was very quiet. She could hear the angry beating of her own heart, and the slow drip of moisture somewhere down the passage.

“Does it go through?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I am no Stacian, bred to know the underground ways. But the air smells fresh enough, and I can see no end to the opening. I am willing to risk it if you are — but there is always the chance that it does not go through, and we will end up trapped somewhere far under the surface.”

“Well, the surface wasn’t too friendly, either,” she said, and let out a shaky laugh. “Maybe it goes through, and maybe it doesn’t, but if we disappear long enough, maybe our friends in the skimmer will give up and go home.”

“Perhaps,” Lirzhan replied, although he did not sound particularly hopeful. He flashed the lantern down the passageway once more and added, “Stay close.”

Like I need to be reminded
. If someone had asked a few minutes ago, she would have said walking so close to the Zhore that she could practically feel his body heat was not high on her list of preferred activities, but now his presence was more than a little reassuring. That was twice he’d saved her life in the last forty-eight hours. Damn straight she was going to stick to him like iron filings to a magnet.

“No worries,” she told him, and hoped he wouldn’t hear the edge of a tremor in her voice. “Just let me know if I step on your robes.”

He actually chuckled. “I will.”

Then he held the lantern at about shoulder level, and began walking forward, Alexa not half a step behind. She could even feel the brush of the heavy fabric of his garments against her sleeve or leg from time to time, but she found she didn’t mind so much. It meant he was there with her in the darkness, and she wasn’t alone.

The passageway sloped slightly downward, and she wondered how deep they would have to go before it began to climb again. Thank God for the LED lanterns and their practically unlimited battery life. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about the light going out and leaving them here in the utter black of these caves, hundreds of feet underground. She sniffed the damp air, vaguely recalling horror stories of pockets of bad air or poisonous gas in the mines on Gaia back in the bad old days, but all she smelled was damp rock, and a faint woodsy scent she guessed must be coming from Lirzhan’s robes.

Probably smells better than I do
, she thought wryly, although the antiperspirant treatment she used was supposed to last up to a week. Then again, its manufacturers probably hadn’t counted on having to prevent the sort of flop sweat pure fear could produce.

“It must have been when we came out into the open,” the Zhore said in quiet, musing tones. “For the first leg of our journey, we were in thick woods with abundant life, and perhaps our assailants did not have good enough trackers to locate our biological signatures. But once we camped, and then headed farther up the stream — well, then they had a chance to do more sweeps and find us.”

This sounded plausible enough, and Alexa nodded. “That sounds about right. I recognized the ship — it’s a modded version of the skimmers the GEC uses for planetfall on its big exploration ships, since those stay in orbit. Good little craft, which is why a lot of mercs and other free agents buy up decommissioned versions and modify them for their own uses.”

“Mercenaries,” Lirzhan repeated. “What would mercenaries want with us?”

“I have no idea.” And truthfully, she didn’t. Her posting to the Council’s station in the Targus system was a big deal for her — and her career — but she wasn’t self-centered enough to think that she couldn’t be replaced easily enough if she were taken out of commission. Maybe some individuals in the diplomatic service’s chain of command had been less than thrilled by her relationship with Trin, but shooting her out of the sky while on her way to a new post wasn’t the way they would have handled it. No, she would’ve been shuffled off to some backwater armpit like Iradia, and that would’ve been the end of her career. Message sent.

Lirzhan was silent as they continued to walk through the corridor, ducking once or twice when the roof of the tunnel dipped low enough to interfere with his passage. His lack of further response unnerved Alexa, and she began to wonder if she wasn’t seeing the whole picture here, if he were concealing something he didn’t want her to know.

“Or maybe,” she said, an edge to her words, “maybe they really didn’t care about Ambassador Alexa Craig, but I just happened to be in the way of their real target. You.”

At that he stopped and stared down at her. “That is not the case.”

“It isn’t? How can I know that for sure?”

“Because I just told you it wasn’t.”

“Oh, and the Zhore never lie.”

“As a matter of fact, we don’t.”

Since she couldn’t think of any real way to answer that, she began walking again. This time it was Lirzhan who made sure to come closer to her, to make certain too large a gap didn’t open up between the two of them.

“Well, they had to be after something,” she said, after an uncomfortable interval of silence.

“Obviously, but I do not know what it could be. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless we were merely expendable pawns in a larger game.”

She knew they needed to keep walking, so she didn’t stop, but rather slowed her steps so she could look up into the blackness of the Zhore’s hood. “I don’t follow.”

“Neither of us had ever heard of a device that could pull a ship from subspace, and yet we both experienced it. So perhaps someone was testing such a device, thinking they would be tampering with a slow ore freighter or a small personal transport, and when they realized their catch was a diplomatic shuttle, they took the necessary steps to ensure there were no witnesses to their crime.”

That actually did make some sense. How someone as apparently guileless as a Zhore could come up with such a theory, she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t have a better explanation. She let out a bitter laugh and asked, “Have you been watching imported Gaian detective vids or something?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Because it sounds like the sort of thing the scriptwriters might come up with.”

“Ah,” he replied, which could have meant anything.

Yes, Lirzhan’s explanation seemed plausible enough…on the surface. However, just because it was plausible didn’t mean it was true. The Zhore could still be hiding something, even if he did claim that his people were unable to lie.

She wondered what that something might be. Maybe he was carrying information that someone really, really didn’t want to get to Targus. Unlike her, he’d left the shuttle empty-handed, although she’d seen him carrying a satchel similar to hers when he boarded the ship. Which meant if he’d been transporting any sensitive information, it would have been blown up along with the shuttle…unless he was carrying it on his person.

And what are you going to do, tackle him and frisk him?

The image of her jumping Lirzhan and attempting to pat him down was so ludicrous that she almost laughed out loud. Somehow she held it in, though; the last thing she wanted at the moment was to have to explain a burst of hysterical laughter.

She pushed back her left sleeve slightly to check the chronometer on her wrist. True, it was still set to Gaian mean time, the standard for onboard chronological calculations throughout the Consortium, but at least it could help her calculate how long they’d been walking. As far as she could tell, they’d been underground for almost two hours now, which meant it was way past time to stop and take a meal break. Besides, her foot was starting to kill her.

“Lunch?” she suggested. “And I think I’m going to need a new bandage.”

“Your foot is paining you?” he asked quickly.

“Starting to,” she lied. No point in telling him that it had been hurting for quite a while now. “And it couldn’t hurt to take a breather, although I have to say it’s actually easier to walk in here without worrying about tripping over tree roots or getting sunburned.”

She wondered about that, actually; the passage was so very smooth and regular, one would have thought it had been excavated by the Consortium’s Engineering Corps. But she’d read of lava flows creating tunnels like this, so she thought that might have been the case here. If it were, she hoped that whatever volcano had created these formations had been dormant for a long, long time.

He raised the lantern higher, as if surveying the tunnel ahead of them. “It looks as if there is a wider area a few hundred feet ahead. Let us rest there.”

So she followed him to the spot he’d indicated, then sank down on the floor of cold rock, feeling it radiate upward through the fabric of her skirt. Damn. She should have thought to put down one of the blankets first.

Lirzhan set the lantern on a low rock before pulling the second lamp out of the emergency kit so he could more fully illuminate the area. Just as he flipped the switch, Alexa let out a little “ahh!” and stared around her in amazement.

Embedded in the dark rock were tiny sparkling crystals that glittered in shades of pale blue, making it seem as if they were in some sort of fairy cave rather than a bleak underground hole.

“What is it?” she breathed.

The Zhore put a gloved hand up against the rock, as if he were somehow sensing its vibrations through the thin leather-like fabric. “Some kind of quartz, I think, although I’ve never seen a specimen quite like this.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, turning his hooded head to gaze at her for a few seconds.

She had the feeling he wasn’t talking about the rock formations. Not sure what to say, she instead turned her attention to removing her boot and pulling off the stocking underneath. Sure enough, the bandage had shifted from its original position, and most of the wound was now uncovered and had been rubbing against the inside of her boot. No wonder it hurt like a bitch.

Lirzhan let out a breath. “That is not good. I shall have to clean it again.”

And so they went through the whole process a second time, Alexa once again trying to keep herself from muttering a curse as the Zhore dabbed at the affected area with one of the disinfectant wipes. He pressed down firmly on the bandage once he had it in place, as if hoping that the extra pressure would discourage it from shifting any further.

“That should hold,” he said at length, and sat back on his heels.

“Well, unless I have to run away from a skimmer again,” she replied.

She’d almost thought he would chuckle at that remark, but he didn’t, instead going in silence to the emergency pack and once more extracting two of the survival bars that she’d already begun to loathe. He handed one to her, and she took it.

“How far do you think these tunnels go?” she asked, unwrapping the bar in distaste. She tried not to think of her last dinner with Trin, of the elegantly sauced waterfowl and the twenty-year-old bottle of wine they’d drunk with it.

He glanced past their glittering resting place, down the darkening passageway. “Difficult to say. This range of hills seemed to extend some miles northward, but I cannot hazard a guess as to how far. However, I would like to hope that they go almost all the way to the science station.”