Blindfold, page 25
“I'm from the Truthsayers Guild,” she answered quickly. “We know you were sentenced falsely, and we have to get you out of here.”
“But,” Troy said, unable to find words. “I can't. They won't let—”
“Yes, they will! It's all been arranged, but we have to move now. We won't get a second chance.”
Troy suddenly narrowed his eyes, suspicious in a way he would never have been before his time in the orbital prison. “How do I know you're not trying to get me killed in a prison escape attempt to cover the Guild's mistake?”
Kalliana sighed in exasperation. “You don't. But I'm your only hope for getting back to Atlas.” She fixed him with an intense, impatient gaze. “Unless you'd rather stay here for the rest of your life? Do you want to go, or don't you?”
Troy's lips trembled, but he shook his head vigorously. “No, I want to go home.”
Kalliana didn't have the heart or the time to explain that he could never go home. At least he'd get back to the surface, though. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him with her, bounding out into the corridor in the featherlight gravity.
Lights flashed. Doors sealed shut automatically, trapping people inside. Kalliana was aghast to see that the door to their inspection cubicle hissed to an airtight seal only moments after they had slipped out. If she hadn't moved immediately...
Sol-pols rushed down the corridor, their loud bootsteps thundering. “Get to shelter,” one shouted at Kalliana, then hurried on his way. Several workers without mag-boots scuttled along, like fish swimming away from predators to a safe refuge.
Kalliana tried to recall the OrbLab 2 blueprint, but the noise, the lights, and her own panic, only served to transform the diagram lines into a tangled nest in her mind. “Help me find the outer portal,” she said. “To get to the suits and the sleds!”
“Oh!” he said, as if it had suddenly become real to him that they were actually going to leave the prison. “But we're sealed in,” he said. “We can't just leave — they'll know.”
“We'll worry about that when we get there,” Kalliana said in an effort to purge her own self-doubts.
They reached the main entry station where two sol-pols supposedly sat armed and waiting to prevent any such escape attempt — but even these two had left their posts in the emergency. Kalliana doubted that was standard procedure; Sondheim had assured her they would be given explicit orders.
The big metal door sat shut, as if welded against the outer docking chamber where the slingshot sleds waited. She raced to the keypad and punched in the code phrase Sondheim had told her to memorize — but her trembling fingers stuttered, and she hit the wrong buttons. A warning flashed up, telling her she had one more chance before the entire station would be locked down. Breathing fast and hard, concentrating to keep the numbers and letters from swimming in front of her eyes, she picked out the input one key at a time, her lips pressed together.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Troy said.
“I am,” she answered and finally completed the last keystroke. The airlock door swung open. “Inside, hurry,” she said. “We'll have to cycle through.”
It took forever for the pressure equalization to allow them access to the docking chamber. “We're going to slip off of OrbLab 2 during the confusion,” Kalliana continued. “I was planted on the inspection team. Nobody knew who I was. The team members will be evacuated separately, in small groups. No one will know I'm not with some other party. And you,” she pointed at Troy, “the records will show that you got ejected from the airlock in the decontamination dump, though the lab was really empty. Clean, efficient, and simple — and you'll be a free man.”
“I...” Troy's Adam's apple bobbed again. “Whatever you say. But that lab wasn't empty—”
“Just get moving,” Kalliana said.
The second door finally unsealed. They bounded into the docking chamber where the two sleds still waited for their return journey — but the large craft were not yet cranked into the heavy-gauge spring-launchers in preparation for launch. Kalliana went to the big equipment closet mounted to the wall and opened it, sorting through the suits dangling there like empty silver skins.
“But how are we going to get back down to Atlas?” Troy said.
“One step at a time. First we have to get to the Platform.”
Exasperated, Troy said, “But how do we get to the Platform? You can't fly one of those sleds can you? They're too big for just the two of us to launch.”
“True,” Kalliana said, knowing how preposterous it would sound. But Sondheim's message had insisted this was the only way. She pulled out one of the spare suits and thrust it at Troy.
“We're going to jump.”
II
With his head sealed inside the spacesuit helmet Troy's breath roared around him as he panted with fear and disbelief. He could hear his heart pummeling his chest and the blood rushing through his ears.
They toggled through the communication systems on their suit, finally connecting each other with a low-power line-of-sight radio link.
“Now what do we do?” he asked.
Kalliana seemed just as frightened as he was. She went over to the hull door controls and punched in a sequence that began the decompression cycle.
The waiting was tense and interminable as the docking bay drained of air, seemingly one lungful at a time. Troy felt his suit ballooning as it strained to protect the pressure of his body from the empty maw of space. At any moment he expected the OrbLab 2 guards to stop them.
He fought against a violent shiver and a distant roaring in his ears that made him suspect he was going into shock. He had no idea what he was doing here. He had hated his hazardous yet monotonous life in prison. He knew he wasn't guilty of his crime — but this escape attempt was insane. What if the sol-pols caught him? They would shoot to kill. And this emergency, the sudden depressurization in the bacterial sorting lab — had Eli Strone been a victim of the planned escape?
Troy felt like a tiny piece of flotsam in the midst of a hurricane as he looked out the opening door that led to the bottomless pit of space. “And you want us to just ... swim?”
“Swim,” Kalliana's voice crackled over the speaker, bouncing around in his ears. “There's a way we can bleed air from our tanks, use it to propel ourselves across the gulf and get to the Platform.”
“But if we jet with our air, we won't have enough to breathe,” Troy said. This “solution” seemed to get worse every moment. Standing by the equipment cabinet, he snatched two of the small compressed-gas packs, and tossed one to her. It tumbled slowly, end over end in the soup of nothingness, and she caught it, nearly overbalancing herself. “Here. Maybe these'll help us. I saw Kareem Sondheim using gas canisters to move himself about.”
“It isn't really all that far. Sondheim assured me we could do it,” she insisted, working her way to the edge. Troy gulped as he looked across the black canyon of space. The gold and blue planet hung immeasurably far below, and a sense of unreality overtook him.
Before Troy could remember his terror again, the two of them pushed off, drifting through the open doors and out into the abyss.
OrbLab 2's decompression cycle timed out and began to reverse itself. Behind them, the thick doors ground shut in silence, sealing Troy and his rescuer from the hodgepodge of canisters and sterile laboratories.
The yawning distance below and around him seemed incomprehensibly vast. Troy found himself dizzy and nauseated again, as he had on the space elevator ride, but he clamped his teeth together. The thought of vomiting inside the space helmet made him doubly queasy.
Across space Troy could see the Platform, and the space elevator with its razor-thin thread of diamond fiber just disengaging to begin its descent.
They experimented with their compressed-air canisters, sending themselves into spins and lurching with increased inertia. Troy felt a great uneasiness at being so disconnected, so disoriented, out in space.
“We're supposed to go to a particular external airlock on the Platform,” Kalliana said over the line-of-sight link. “There's a holding chamber inside. Sondheim will see that we get hidden in the space elevator on the next cargo-only run.”
Troy recalled the cramped elevator, thought of what his surly boss Cren would say if the anchor point crew opened the hatch to find two fugitives hiding inside. It might be worth it, just to see the bug-eyed expression of surprise on Cren's face.
The winking hemispherical Platform hung in orbit, precariously connected to the planet below. They drifted closer, faster — and Troy realized with alarm how much they had jetted with their canisters. They had better start decelerating now.
He sprayed the nozzle in front of him, and white vapor puffed out. It slowed him down like a fist slammed into his chest, but gradually counteracted his forward motion. Kalliana did the same.
“There!” she said pointing toward the convoluted topography of the outer dome. Troy squinted through the polarized glare of starlight and saw a circular outer hatch marked X15. Using tiny jets from her canister, Kalliana maneuvered herself closer and closer to the designated opening.
“If Sondheim was correct,” she said, “I should be able to open this from out here. Then we'll be inside and home free.”
Troy heard the words with a sluggish sense of joy. Home. Free. Two concepts he had never thought he could apply to himself again.
Kalliana struck the hatch like an insect, landing with spread hands and booted feet. Troy gave a final blast from his gas canister, which slowed him down just enough so that he wasn't thrown off-balance by the impact.
Kalliana fumbled with the access controls. Troy wondered when this entryway had last been opened. These emergency entrance chambers had been placed by the original workers when they had disconnected the Platform from the main bulky framework of the colony ship.
The door swung silently open with a puff of crystal steam, remnants of air that hadn't quite been drained away in the cycling procedure. Inside, the chamber was full of shadows. A good place to hide.
Kalliana drifted in, groping for Troy's gloved hand to pull him after her. She had turned and looked behind herself to get a good grip and tugged Troy along, so that they both saw the threat at the same time.
Sondheim's guards were waiting for them.
Within the cramped chamber three suited figures stood around a massive cannonlike weapon that gleamed with solenoids and magnetic rings along its barrel: some sort of bizarre and powerful plasma-discharge launcher, Troy guessed, far different from the simple projectile rifles carried by sol-pols. It was obviously aimed at them.
The suited guards reacted frantically, moving about in vacuum silence — their communications link must have been tuned to a different channel — as they wrestled the plasma-discharge cannon into position.
In a snapshot of terror, Troy noticed a curiously familiar insignia emblazoned on the cannon's barrel. He had seen the same design on the outer wall of the Truthsayers Guild, partially worn away by time. This weapon had come from the SkySword, part of the military ship's stockpile of high-tech armaments that had supposedly been destroyed when the invaders’ vessel was grounded.
“We're betrayed!” Kalliana shouted over the radio link. She still clutched his wrist; Troy planted his foot on the hatch frame and shoved with all his might.
They tumbled backward just as the three figures managed to trigger the plasma discharge. A bolt of crackling, fizzing incandescence sprayed outward through the center of the opening, a screaming path of disintegration. The weapon blasted a second time.
Troy and Kalliana reeled out of control, tumbling endlessly into space.
CHAPTER 31
I
Though Maximillian was generally dour and serious, Dokken caught him smiling as the two of them galloped their horses out for another rigorous ride deep into the badlands.
Dokken was in no particular hurry, but he enjoyed the feeling of his stallion extending his muscles, snorting with effort, hooves pounding on baked clay as they thundered across the desert. Dokken's long hair swept wildly behind him. Though the rainstorm had washed away all previous trails, the stallion seemed to know where he was going.
When both horses were exhausted, Dokken slowed his mount to an easy walk. Maximillian squinted, as if his cheekbones were squeezing upward toward his craggy forehead. They carried plenty of water and supplies. Though it was dangerous to ride off into the rugged wasteland alone, Franz Dokken and his manservant had done this so many times it had become old habit to them.
Back at the villa Dokken had once again grown weary of constantly shepherding his myriad plans, each designed toward guiding the great tapestry, a plan that would leave him, Franz Dokken, fully in control of Atlas by the time the EarthDawn arrived. His work was not merely a petty power-grabbing scheme, of which the other inexperienced landholders were so fond — he was sculpting history.
Now, though, he also felt eager for the restful oblivion, to recharge his batteries in the way that had allowed him to maintain himself for nearly two and a half centuries. It also helped “dodge the bullet” of his own more extreme actions, such as the sabotaged escape attempt of the Truthsayer and that scapegoat Boren from OrbLab 2. Some things just needed time to sort themselves out.
Tharion would be utterly outraged when he heard of it, but the Guild Master simply had to believe it was an accident, a tragic mistake. In time Tharion might even be made to see the ultimate advantages of removing the scapegoat and the Truthsayer. Dokken simply hoped he had trained Tharion well enough that he would come to such a realization on his own. He had the potential for greatness, though he must never suspect any deeper scheme. The powerful Guild Master's greatest value lay in the fact that he thought he knew what was going on ... but in reality he knew very little, and therefore remained malleable.
Riding across the desert, lost in thought, Dokken was taken by surprise when they encountered a deep, fresh ravine across their path. When he pulled his stallion to a halt at the edge, Maximillian rode up beside him, and they looked down the long shadowy ribbon of sliced earth.
They rode along the edge for some time until they finally found a spot narrow enough for the two horses to leap across. Some of the crumbly clay broke away and slid in a small avalanche down to the thin damp line of mud on the gully bottom.
Dokken looked back to see the white ivory of exposed bones in the fresh-cut strata, ancient fossils of large misshapen animals. He did a double take, surprised to see evidence of extinct life here on this supposedly dead world. Atlas, too, had secrets that it kept carefully hidden.
Finally, as the sun reached noon, Maximillian asked the question he always asked. “Please tell me the specific items you wish me to oversee while you are ... away, Master Dokken. How long will you be this time?”
Dokken had already been assessing the same issues, but hadn't yet come to a clear answer. “I have so many things going on,” he said, “but I'm torn between resting for our big events in the near future and needing to stay on top of things now, making sure that all the plans are nudged when necessary. Two weeks, I think.”
“Two weeks?” Maximillian sat up in the saddle, his eyes flashing sudden surprise — but he covered it well. “Yes, sir.”
“The big Pilgrim rally won't happen before then, will it?”
Maximillian shook his head. “No. I went from village to village and riled them up. They are going to meet in three and a half weeks. I don't believe Sardili suspects a thing.”
Dokken snorted. “He never does. You're sure no one will recognize you as the Pilgrim Adamant?”
Maximillian shrugged, as if it wasn't a concern. “How could they? We met in the dark. I wore one of their hooded robes, and the Pilgrims themselves are not ... cosmopolitan enough to keep tabs on the assistants of distant landholders.”
“You're right, Maximillian,” he said, “again. What would I do without you?”
The tall manservant sidestepped the rhetorical question. “One thing you will miss though, sir,” he said, “is the final dismantling of the Carsus-Bondalar marriage alliance. Next week is the culmination of our efforts, after which their alliance will no longer be a problem.”
Dokken made a sour face. “I'm sorry I won't be present to enjoy the fun.”
They rode on in silence as the land around them grew more rugged. Black rock like rotted teeth thrust up from the clays, and tall cliffs of shale tilted above the surface as if some powerful force deep below the crust had elbowed them up.
Back in the flatlands, a dust devil stretched to the sky, gray-brown as it thrashed from side to side, plowing up clouds of debris as it moved. It was a short-lived phenomenon, though, and dissipated, leaving only settling dust.
“One concern does seem to be growing, sir,” Maximillian said. “I believe Emilio Toth and Victoria Koman have indeed joined forces to oppose you. From all indications they have a vendetta against you.”
Dokken raised his eyebrows. “Well, they have ample cause — I just didn't know they realized it. Too bad we don't have Cialben to slip inside and bring back a report.”
“They're keeping their plans secret, but most likely they have set their own plots in motion to back you into a corner.”
Dokken made a rude noise. “Amateurs! They're out of their league.” He shook his head then snorted in derision. “If only Koman knew how she's been set up, she'd crawl down one of her own mine shafts to hide.”
They rode into a narrow canyon in the gray and red cliffs. Sheltered by a broad flat overhang, the cave lay before them. Dokken grew more and more excited as they approached the hideaway.
It had been so much more difficult to disappear when Schandra kept nagging him about his whereabouts, insistent upon knowing his every movement. Maximillian, on the other hand, knew all of his plans, and Dokken didn't need to keep up the tiresome charade. They dismounted, tied the horses outside the cave, and went inside, powering up the lights from the antique generator.
Dokken felt bone-weary, and he stretched his arms, looking around with a heavy sigh. Inside the cave, hooked up to its well-maintained diagnostics systems and its recirculating routines, lay one of the stainless-steel-and-Plexiglas deepsleep chambers he had long ago taken from the original colony ship.
