The Touchstone Trilogy (54 page)

It was a longish drop back to the water, but that was good because it gave me a chance to twist into a diving position, to orient myself and take a breath, and the velocity to shoot into the nearest outlet and swim as hard and quickly as I could, and fortunately it wasn't too far and I surfaced in a tall round chamber, only about three metres across, with a clutch of underwater outlets but no other openings I could see.

All that sounds very calm and ordered and deliberate, but my head was nothing but Gah-ahhhhhhh!!!  I half died from shock when it grabbed me.  The kicking and the stabbing was total panic and my log is full of the coughing sobbing noise I'm making while I'm trying to get free.  When I reached the round chamber I was gasping and staring in every direction, looking to see if the Cruzatch was coming after me.

It took a while for me to calm down, but once it was obvious that the Cruzatch wasn't coming I started taking long, deep breaths and my heart rate gradually settled.  I noticed there was a submerged ledge around the edge of the room and swam over to float above it since it was too deep to sit on properly.  I just felt so overwhelmed.  I'd spent a month alone on Muina, and been terrified more than once, could definitely have died a few times.  But nothing had involved me being grabbed and having to fight to get away.  And I was alone.  No Setari.  I was somewhere which might or might not be Muina, with my interface telling me there was no connection.

Deep shit, meet Cassandra.

I didn't even have the normal gear the Setari go into the Ena with – and if there was one thing I could have done with it was the breather mouthpiece.  The water was very cold: not ice, but the kind of thing you wouldn't want to be in for long without a wet suit, and my breath was coming out with just the faintest hint of mist.  As soon I'd calmed down enough, I made my suit impermeable, but it was still unpleasant.  So: cold, wet, no food, with at least one Cruzatch roaming around.

I immediately knew that unless the technicians pulled a miracle of analysis out of their asses, no-one was going to be coming through the platform after me.  It was obviously one of these everything-works-different-for-Devlin things.  Nor could I simply call for help.  The Tarens currently had two satellites above Muina: one in an orbit which allows for continual communication between the two settlements, and the other scanning, but my interface, powered just by my body's electricity, only has a range of a few miles.  And obviously I was out of range.  Or behind a seal like in Arenrhon.

Having decided that I could absolutely not sit in the round chamber and hope someone came and rescued me, I lifted my right foot out of the water and made the suit draw back from it.  There was an impressive set of fingerprints around my ankle – bruised, burned and with a couple of deep, seared scratches.  My suit hadn't been able to hold up to the heat, though it had reformed once the Cruzatch dropped me.

Since I hadn't prepared for an Ena mission, I didn't have a medical kit, but the injury wasn't that bad and the cold was at least numbing the pain.  Having settled that, I regrew my boot, then made them both extend out into a reasonable facsimile of flippers.  And also grew webbing between my fingers.  I love my nanosuit.

As ready as I could be for moving on, I replayed my log, trying to work out which of the four identical inlets was the one I'd come in through.  I was on both mission log and my second level monitoring log, so everything I did was thoroughly recorded at least.

The walls were scummy with a green algae, and eventually I matched up the blotches on the first wall I'd seen in my log with one of the walls, which made that wall immediately opposite the one with the inlet I'd come through.  I created a nanoliquid sword and scored a one in a circle in the algae above that inlet.  Then I opened a drawing application in my interface and started making a map.  I couldn't go back through that inlet, not when I knew that Cruzatch was there.  I wouldn't survive another encounter and wasn't even sure if I could get out of the water through the broken floor to the platform.  So I had to find a second way out.

Picking the wall to the right, I drew a circle with a two in the algae, then began taking deep breaths – both to calm myself and to get a lot of oxygen in my lungs – and set out.

Looking back, I can hardly bear to think about what the next few hours were like.  The cistern system was huge: an endless series of inlets and enormous tanks and nothing better to stop and rest on than the too-low ledges around the endless circular junction rooms.  There were two saving graces.  There didn't seem to be any animals except for some fish and little turtles.  And it glowed, very much like the walls in Arenrhon.  Though that worried me immensely, because I suspected it meant I was behind a seal.

The nanosuit saved me from freezing to death, but the longer I went on the colder and slower and heavier I felt.  I soon felt like I'd been swimming my entire life, through an endless maze of dimly glowing rooms, and that I would never be able to stop.  Once I started to get really tired, I became convinced that I'd made a mistake in my mapping, or that I'd turned myself around swimming across the larger cisterns, but the numbers I was scratching on the walls, no matter how faintly, reassured me whenever I found one which matched my map.  The inlet tunnels were hell – long, low passages that I had to swim down into and get through as quickly as possible and once or twice they were extra long and I'd barely make it, especially when my swimming slowed.  I would never have made it through some of them without my nano-flippers.  One near the end, my lungs were burning and my vision started to fill with wriggling white squiggles and even when I reached the surface and could finally
breathe
I felt so tired that the idea of going on seemed impossible and I floated on my back until finally I had to go on or just go under.

And then there was a current of water.  Warm water.

I stopped in the middle of the cistern I was swimming across, brought alive by the sheer difference of it.  A current of warm water.  I swam toward it, of course, and followed another inlet and found myself in a small square room with very warm water pouring down from above and – joy – a way up.

I was stupid, too tired and soaked to think of more than standing in that stream of glorious warmth and then climbing straight up.  It was almost like a spiral stair made of blocks, with warm water flowing down it, and way too slick for my first effort.  I was only halfway up when I slipped, and was rewarded with a bad smack on the side of my head and a bruised side in return for my haste.  The second time, I made ridges for traction on the surface of my suit and inched my way up until I found a round metal grate which miraculously could be lifted out of the way so I could oh-so-carefully ease myself through.

It was a bath house, vaguely Roman-style, about twice the size of my bedroom back home.  The water was coming from a sunken pool in the middle of the room, which was being made to overflow by a constantly pouring flood coming through an ornately carved hole in the wall.  There were big double doors – closed – leading out.

I was so tired I couldn't stand without shaking, and when I finally managed to do that I went and as quietly as I could moved a green corroded metal thing (maybe a brazier) and wedged it under the handles of the doors.  I'm not sure if it would have stopped anything determined to get in, but it would certainly have made a lot of noise and at least given me a chance to try and throw myself back into the cisterns.

Standing in the pool for a few minutes drove away the chill, but after that all I could do was tuck myself into the driest corner of the room, close my eyes and shake.  I'd been swimming for over five hours, and was starved and weary beyond imagining.  I was too tired to even cry properly, just sat there quivering until I passed out for ten hours straight.  No-one came and rescued me, but no Cruzatch showed up either.  I had endless nightmares about swimming in the cold and felt battered and starved when I woke up, but at least I could move about without wobbling.

Then I had to decide what to do.  Obviously the Cruzatch hadn't been able to follow me through the water, but exploring would take me away from liquid safety.  After all that hellish swimming, I could get halfway down the corridor, run into a horde of Ionoth, and game over.

Sitting in a bathroom starving to death wasn't that attractive an alternative.

I had a hot bath while I thought, withdrawing my uniform partially and studying my skin, which had wrinkled amazingly where water had been trapped beneath the nanoliquid.  Mara had show me how to block my mission log for privacy – it doesn't stop recording, just means you have to have super-high security clearance to watch the blocked bit – but I don't trust whoever it is with that clearance to not look simply because I've flagged some tiny part of my life as private.  And I'd been told not to turn off my mission log while I was technically on mission.  Being constantly recorded makes bathroom breaks tremendously embarrassing, but at least my nanosuit helps me be discreet.

As ready as I could be, I nerved myself to go through those doors.

The balcony walkway outside was deserted.  And cracked, dropping half a foot to my left.  There were no Cruzatch in sight, but there was a clear view outside, and I crossed carefully over, hid behind a Pillar, and stared out.

A mountainside, three mountainsides, with a valley between them covered in white buildings, palatial and grand, with swooping, impossible-looking arches criss-crossing in the air.  I could see the sky, but it looked unreal, pearly.  Bright enough for daytime, though.  I slowly turned my head side to side, keeping behind the Pillar as much as possible in case there was anything out there looking back.  My aim was to get a good solid survey into my log and then to look at it in detail somewhere less exposed.  I was at the very bottom of the valley, and decided that was a good sign.  The cisterns had obviously all been of a level, and I'd climbed up about as much as I'd jumped down from the platform, so I was probably on the right level for that platform.  I concentrated on studying the buildings on this lowest level, which were still a large number since the valley had a broad, flat bottom.

There was plenty of damage.  Cracks, and rocks and rubble from higher up which had smashed into buildings.  Try as I might, I couldn't decide which direction I'd come from.  I'd swum for so long, but had had to keep retracing my steps, and my mapping had gone very skewiff.  There were no visible platforms, but I did see that there was a circle of small buildings in the centre of the valley.  Pandora's platform had taken me here, and I knew there were other towns with platforms.  Since it seemed to be a transport system more than a communication device (got THAT one wrong, Sight talents) then a central circle of them would make a lot of sense, just as Rana Junction is central in Unara.  But to check that out, I had to get to the nearest one without anything seeing me.

It all looked horribly exposed and open.  And Cruzatch could fly.  As if to underscore that thought, I saw one, drifting slowly up the far mountainside.

Sliding down out of sight, I reviewed my log of the buildings near me and plotted out a route which took advantage of fallen rubble, shadows, and anything that had overhangs and avoided open patches of ground as much as possible, but really it was all going to come down to luck.  Anything that happened to be looking in the right direction would see me easily, even when crawling on my hands and knees as I did getting out of that balcony walkway.  Black is not a good fashion choice for sneaking among whitestone buildings.

I can review my logs and feel silly for the way I peered around every corner and in every direction each time I moved, but it didn't seem remotely foolish at the time.  I did see Cruzatch twice, and lay still in whatever spot I was in, ready to run madly if spotted.  The closer I got, the more I believed I'd make it, and then I started worrying about what if I got to the buildings and there were no platforms, or if I got to a platform and it didn't take me anywhere.

But when I reached that central circle of buildings, I hit a bigger snag.  Other than some fallen rubble and parched bushes, most of the central space was quite clear and flat.  There were fifteen buildings, all facing inwards, some with big double doors opened outwards, some with them sealed.  Each set of doors sat at the top of a short flight of stairs behind a few not very concealing Pillars holding up porticos, continuing the vaguely Roman theme.  And drifting about the steps of the fifth building to the right were a little clutch of Cruzatch.

In some ways that was encouraging.  There had been a Cruzatch at the platform I'd come through, and a cluster of them suggested they were guarding the area.  After a brief peek and an extensive review of my log, I crept around behind the buildings in the opposite direction, aiming for the building which was six buildings away from the Cruzatch cluster.  It had open doors, and its angle was good for concealment as I hauled my way up onto the landing at the top of the steps directly from the ground so that I was sheltered by the open door.  Then I peered around the door, hoping they would all conveniently face away from me, but it wasn't to be, so I bit my lip, chose a moment, and slipped not too quickly and not too slowly out and then inside.

Once through the door I ran.  I knew that the platform, if it was there, couldn't be too far in, since the buildings weren't that large.  And when I had a choice of ramp up or ramp down I took down, since that matched the platforms I'd encountered before.

I don't think I've ever run faster.  I'd seen from the corner of my eye the reaction of the Cruzatch.  They'd seen me.  If I'd chosen the wrong direction I'd...not be writing this now, I guess.  As it was, there was a platform, and I ran up on to it, and I wanted to be anywhere but there, and all the lights went out.

I sat down hard, panting.  The place I was in was hot, and closed in, and too dark for me to make out any shapes at all immediately.  The platform was gritty.  After a few gulping breaths, I slid to one side, worried about the Cruzatch being able to come after me, but then the Ddura arrived: a new one making the question noise.  Not ecstatic, because I wasn't Muinan, but pleased and asking for orders.  Head pounding instantly, I laughed, and slid over the side of the platform so I couldn't accidentally teleport anywhere else, and then sat there in the stifling dark and bawled.