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adverse_camber“…well, he’s definitely not here.”
Firewire’s vessel had not landed anywhere near as gracefully as Slipstream had landed his and Celerity’s; it had come in low, if the sets of abbreviated scuffmarks on the rocks behind it were anything to go by, skipped like a pebble across smooth water, and finally nosedived enthusiastically into the mud around a narrow mountain river. The main hatch stood open, and apparently had done so for some time, as there were small, muddy animal tracks leading inside.
The pilot was conspicuous by his absence, however; how long he’d been gone was impossible to tell, but he was certainly nowhere in the vicinity, as his locator beacon was out of range. Of course, Slipstream reasoned, he could have unplugged it, but they weren’t easy to get to in the first place, let alone easy for big, surgically-unskilled hands to manipulate. So he probably was still connected, somewhere, wherever he was. Just… out of range. Way, way out of range.
“We’re never going to find him, are we?” Slipstream observed, tiredly, standing in the open hatchway, arms dangling lifelessly by his sides.
He looked beaten already, Celerity considered. All that overthinking – something else his father did, which didn’t help either of them – and he’d managed to convince himself it was a lot worse than it looked. “Yes we will,” she soothed. “We just need to find our bearings, and work out which direction he’s gone in. And it doesn’t make sense that he’d lose himself in a wilderness with no facilities, does it? So maybe we just need to look for a city…”
“ Nothing he does makes sense,” Slipstream argued, dropping back to the mud outside. “He could have gone to find a cave, to be a hermit in.” He gestured at the mountains. “He’s taken a solar collector, he can get all the energy he needs.”
“But not repairs, can he? If he takes a tumble up there and breaks something, he’s not going to be able to fix it easily, if at all. He’ll have headed for civilisation, I bet there’s more than enough places for him to hide in a city.”
“Exactly.” Slipstream took Celerity completely by surprise, approaching her and sagging against her, resting his head against her chest. “We’re never going to find him, are we?” he repeated, feebly.
To her credit, the big female recovered very quickly from the surprise. She wrapped him gently in her arms, and hummed softly to him, like she would have done when he was an infant in need of comfort. His electric field was prickly and uncomfortable with distress; she harmonised her own with his in an effort to soothe him. “Of course we will,” she soothed, cupping one large hand around the back of his head and stroking gently. “One little setback isn’t going to spoil everything, spark. We’ll find him.”
“But the place is huge.” He didn’t even try and keep the static out of his voice; at least his static envelope was beginning to soften. “You said it yourself, millions of places to hide in a squishy city. He could be anywhere.”
“True, but he’s not built for speed, is he? He can’t be that far ahead of us. And if he’s gone to a city, I bet there’s people who’ll have seen him. We can ask around.” Celerity gazed quietly out over the landscape while the youngling got his emotions under control, and spotted… something. “Hmm… I wonder…”
“What?” Slipstream lifted his head, rubbed his face with the heel of his hand.
Celerity looked up at their guide. “Mirii? What’s over there?”
The siinu had already scrambled to the roof of Firewire’s abandoned vessel so she could get a better view of the lay of the land, and as soon as the Policebot pointed, she saw what the larger femme was indicating.
Footprints. They meandered a little, and the line was interrupted by patches of ground on which footprints could not be made, but the softer, muddy ground was very clearly marked with large divots, impressed into it by large mechanical feet.
“If we extrapolate from the line he has already made,” Mirii hypothesised, out loud, “it looks like he is heading for Shahr-Pieni.”
“Shar what?” Slipstream looked up at her, guiltily stepping back away from his aunt; Celerity made no move to stop him.
“Shahr-Pieni,” Mirii repeated. “The southern capital, if you like. A city.”
Silence descended, and maintained its hold for a few long seconds.
“The capital city,” Slipstream echoed, softly. “Not just a city, the capital.”
“It is only the southern capital,” Mirii was quick to reassure. “Which means it is not quite so large as the conjoined northern capital, Stolica and Sostine.”
“It’s still a capital, though.” Slipstream sighed, softly. “And we don’t even know for sure he went there.” He let himself simply fall forwards, reverting to his vehicular form to catch himself before he could plant his face in the dirt.
Celerity watches him vanish off across the grass before offering her hands to Mirii and helping her down from the roof of the abandoned vessel. “We’d better get after him, before he goes and falls down a hole again…”
Even at top speed, it took another two full days of travel across boring, featureless grasslands, watched by dull-eyed, uninteresting herds of bored-looking animals, before they even got close to the southern capital. It glittered like a forest of needles even when several miles distant, and as the small group approached they realised that just arriving was only the first problem.
To start with, the city was the typical sprawling metropolis, and the earlier optimism that they’d be able to find Firewire easily dwindled among the towering crystal and chrome spires. The ocean glittered away in the distance, to the south-west of their position, and the city of Shahr-Pieni itself stretched away to the north as far as the eye could see. And what completed the image of impregnability was the apparent wall of pipes and aerials that bristled out of the desalination plants and power generation facilities and refineries around the margins.
“…this is the smaller city?” Slipstream challenged, softly, feeling his hopes shrivel up once again inside him. “How are we even going to get in?!”
“We walk around the outside, and look for an opening,” Celerity reasoned. “Unless Mirii has any ideas?”
Mirii shook her head, glumly. “Unfortunately not. I have not visited before. I had anticipated…” she shook her head, and waved an arm, helplessly; “suburban areas, housing, gardens, the typical city margins!”
“Well…” Celerity studied the bristly emplacements closest to them. “They don’t look like they’re designed to keep us out, right? Just… there because they’re necessary, but no-one wants to look at them. So by that token, if we keep going around the edge, we’ll find a way in.”
“And if we go the opposite way to Firewire?” Slipstream challenged, quietly, arms folded.
“We keep pinging him for a location, if we can’t find any more footprints.” She helped Mirii to her shoulder; Fred scrambled his own way up. “If he’s here, he’ll be within range eventually.”
“Eventually? What, is that an euphemism for ‘in a solar orbit or two’?” he demanded, irritably. “We need to find him now!”
“I know,” the big femme agreed, amiably, moving away around the perimeter, towards the ocean. “Which is what I’m doing. See? Footprints,” she observed, pleased, and Slipstream promptly lost his accusatory tones.
“Where?” he pursued her. “Are they his?”
“Unless there’s any other robots your size in the locality, I’m thinking it’s a good bet. Come on…”
The footprints were as sporadic as they’d been around the downed vessel up in Felsen, scattered in a meandering path around the perimeter towards the ocean. Firewire had apparently been having the same issues with getting in as his pursuers were having; he’d walk in a straight line for a short distance, then head in close to what looked like a gap, then change his mind and carry on, then move very close to the fence, muddle around a little bit, then give up and carry on. The occasional spot of orange or yellow paint showed where he’d actually attempted to clear a fence, and failed. Fortunately, that meant he’d been cutting his own lead; while he struggled to find a way in, his pursuers simply followed his footsteps, skipping over the inappropriate areas.
The perimeter dwindled, becoming less ‘bristly’, the closer it got to the ocean; by the time they finally reached the water’s edge, and a pleasant little beach of rough sand and wiry grasses, it was just a simple chain-link fence, with triangular yellow hazard warning signs for what looked like “deep water” and “beware machinery!” dotted along it. The fence itself came to an abrupt halt a few metres out into the water.
Inside the fence was a small patch of beach, but it rapidly became more rocky; the city itself towered away skywards, but at its foot were great piled boulders, apparently acting as sea defences, punctuated with the outlets of a massive drainage system. The pipes themselves were like great mouths, opening onto the ocean. Visible just a little further down the coast, great surging jets of water spewed out of the pipes into the surf, but this end, close to the last margin of the city, the flow was slower, steadier, like a leisurely estuarine river.
Fred elected to cling firmly to Slipstream’s head as the little party waded around the end of the fence; thankfully, it wasn’t deep, coming only up to Mirii’s chest.
“This looks like a good enough place to start,” Celerity observed, snagging a piece of detritus from the rocks – it looked like a piece of old, fallen scaffolding – and wading closer to the pipe. “Big enough to get in through, too.”
“You don’t even know what that is,” Slipstream challenged; he’d scrambled up onto the rocks, trying to keep out of the water, remaining perched precariously on the rocks. “That could lead to anywhere.”
“Probably.” Celerity nodded, carefully checking the depth of the water in front of her with her impromptu measuring-stick. “It looks like some sort of drain outlet, though, so I doubt it’s dangerous.”
“Drain? You mean sewer, don’t you?” Slipstream groaned, looking strangely green. “Uugh. I don’t even want to start to think about what’s probably floating along in that water. Can’t we check a bit further along?”
“No. Look.” Celerity dabbed a large blue digit at a scraped patch of yellow-orange and silver, on the mouth of the pipe. “That’s Firewire’s colour. He certainly came by here.” She gently kicked a foot closer, investigatively, and found a ridge. “Tripped up, I’d say.”
“Unless it’s all a coincidence. Or he decided – quite sensibly! – to continue down the coast and find somewhere better to get in.”
“Like one of those pipes further down, you mean?” Celerity suggested, dryly, and gave him a reassuring smile. “It’s all right, Seem. It’s not that deep, we’re not going to get sick from ‘paddling’, and so long as you close off your lower vents, you’ll be fine.” She held out a hand, which he studied with a semi-hostility, and didn’t make any effort to take the offer.
“If it is any consolation,” Mirii suggested, scrambling over the top curve of the drainpipe and sliding gracelessly down the other side on her stomach, aiming for the narrow ledge that led inwards, “there is a popular beach resort just up the coast from here. I do not imagine they would intentionally foul the water they plan to swim in with their own, ah, faecal matter.”
“It’s not like this’d be the first time I’ve encountered a species that does stupid things like that,” Slipstream argued, picking his way down off the rocks, as if trying to get into the water without actually getting his feet wet. He winced visibly when he finally lowered himself into the stream. The water came up to his chest, submerging all but his uppermost vents. “Oh god, uuuugh. I’m getting the surges just thinking about what I’m walking in…”
Up above, Mirii hesitated on the walkway, just into the mouth of the tunnel. There was another of those big yellow triangular hazard signs, which made her anxious. “What do you suppose these are intending to warn us of?”
Slipstream quirked his head to one side, stopping with his feet just inside the moulded concrete of the pipe. “Looks like there was more on there, but it’s rubbed off,” he observed, gazing up at the sign. “See that black curve? Perhaps it was part of the design, but the waves have worn it off, what do you think?”
“Possibly.” Mirii nodded, using a finger to outline what remained of the dark lines. “It appears to form a… rounded sawblade, perhaps?”
…they swapped looks, anxiously.
“Lara?” Slipstream called, uneasily, making no effort to advance any further down the tunnel.
Celerity had got a good few metres ahead, using her headlamps to light her way and her pole to check for submerged, invisible holes. At his call, she dimmed her lights and glanced back at him. “Hmm?”
“Warning signs.” He pointed it out. “Maybe we should find another route.”
“What sort of warning signs are they?” she wondered, making no effort to come back down the tunnel to look. “Like we saw before? Deep water, or…?”
“I don’t know,” Slipstream admitted. “The waves have washed most of it off.”
“Hm.” The big femme hesitated, considered for a moment. “Well, we can move inwards a little. If we see any undamaged versions, we can turn back if it looks bad. All right?”
Mirii nodded, happy to continue on; Slipstream made a huffy noise, but nodded, a tiny bit resentful that the little female was able to travel above the water. Fred scuttled along in the pipes above their heads, running a silken line behind himself for security.
Celerity forged on ahead, like a big, gentle icebreaker, probing the murky depths and checking for dangers, while Slipstream tailed along some way behind, grumbling quietly to himself. Being left behind had put him in a sour mood; he was supposed to be the one out there in front, leading the search, but no, here he was, pretty much up to his neckplates and drowning in sewer water while Lara, the source of all these frigging problems, was plodding on ahead like she always did, leaving him trailing back here, feeling like he was slogging his way through treacle-
Somewhere behind was an abbreviated little shhff-noise and a splosh – like something sliding across stone and dropping into the water.
“What was that?” Slipstream startled, span to face the sound; frustratingly, his headlights were submerged, so he couldn’t get a good look down the tunnel.
Celerity turned also, her high-beams illuminating the dark and making it seem obscurely darker. “I don’t see anything.”
Slipstream stared into the gloom, disappointed. “Me either,” he admitted, reluctantly. “Sure as frag heard something.”
Celerity offered a reassuring smile. “Perhaps just something falling off a ledge into the water. I doubt the place is uninhabited, down here. Could be vermin, or something.”
Slipstream visibly shuddered and hurried to catch up. “Effluent and vermin, what lucky people we are,” he groaned. “I swear, for this alone I might not be able to restrain myself when we finally catch up with that bastard…”
Over the course of the next few hours, the small mech grew increasingly paranoid. The deeper they pushed into the network of tunnels, chasing paint transfers and abbreviated, hard-to-trace positional requests, the more frequently he heard splashes, and the more unnerved he grew. Could even be Firewire, setting traps for them, closing in on them. Ugh. So, so horrible down here.
Finally there was a splash from very close by, and Celerity managed to turn fast enough to catch it in her headlights. There was a swish of sound as the light startled the whateveritwas, and the jagged back of some aquatic creature curved briefly above the surface before vanishing in the opposite direction.
“There, see it?” Slipstream waved an arm, urgently.
“Yes, I see it,” Celerity agreed. “There were feral animals living in human sewers, weren’t there?” she observed, quietly. “Pets that got too big for their owners?”
“You think it’s just a pet?” Slipstream didn’t look especially satisfied by the idea. “Pets are meant to be pretty, companion animals, right?”
“Not always,” she demurred, waiting while he finally caught up. “Sometimes people like creatures that make them appear more powerful, too.”
He huffed softly under his breath. “Well I still don’t like it. Sneaking about in the dark, we don’t even know for sure it’s just an animal! It could be a, a guard or something.”
“What, checking for giant robots sneaking about in the drains?” Celerity smiled, gently.
Slipstream glared, but still huddled a little closer, looking unnerved. “It’s cold, it’s dark-skinned, and it’s silent,” he argued, softly. “We can only see it when we catch it in your headlights – I can’t even see it in infra-red, and it’s sneaking.”
“Well, whatever it is, it likes water,” Celerity reasoned. “And it’s getting shallower, you noticed? So maybe it’ll stop following us.”
Her words gave him cause to stop and think. He’d been preoccupied enough with the splashes that he hadn’t noticed, apart from in some automatic part of his mind. The water level was lapping at his own headlights, when before they’d been completely submerged.
“Come on,” Celerity soothed. “We’ll find somewhere to rest up. We can review our progress, decide where to go next, and maybe poach a little off the grid if we can find some accessible cables…”
It was not, Slipstream mused, the most comfortable place he’d ever had to recharge, but it was mostly out of the water, so that made it marginally more acceptable. The “ledge” they’d found was only a concrete block, sticking out like a jetty into the underground river, and there was only enough room for him and Celerity to sit side by side – Mirii sat sideways on Slipstream’s lap, allowing herself to go dormant – but cables ran along behind them and he’d secured a good hookup into the city net. Getting his batteries nicely topped up improved his mood a fraction; he even forgot about the layer of grey dirt (whose origin he didn’t want to think about) that had accumulated on his plating.
They sat quietly together for a while, headlamps extinguished, for once sharing a sort of familial closeness; the only light was provided by the dim blue and lilac glow of their optics, and the eerie phosphorescent algae that limned the walls.
“When we get back,” Celerity wondered, softly, at last, running her fingers absently through Fred’s thin fur and listening as he purred. “And Lucy’s fixed up-”
“ If she’s fixed up,” Slipstream corrected.
“ When she’s fixed up…” she repeated, patiently, with a little smile. “What are you going to do with your life?”
“What’s it to you?” He gave her a brief, hostile glare, avoiding actually answering the question. “I can do without your sort of advice.”
Celerity shrugged, one-shouldered, and tried to brush off the younger machine’s accusatory tone. “You worry me a little, is all,” she explained, gently. “You’ve spent most of your life this far trying to live for other people, every spare moment going on society, and trying to single-handedly ‘beat the bad guys’, and never giving yourself a chance to unwind.”
“Isn’t that a good thing, being selfless?” he challenged. “Making other people happy by working towards the good of society?”
“It is, except when it means you push yourself towards burnout, because if you crash and burn then you can’t do anything. What you need,” she said, gently, “is to find someone to devote a little of that excess energy to. Someone who isn’t a police officer, who’ll help you relax.”
He studied the glitter of his own optics on the pipes opposite, and didn’t reply.
“Is there anyone in your life who you don’t see at the station every day?” she coaxed, gently. “Anyone you’ve met in a café, a shop, just out for a stroll?”
He gave his head a single curt shake.
“Don’t you like meeting new people? People who can broaden your horizons by being different?”
Slipstream looked away with a sullen little pout, scrambling for an excuse. Truth be told, he was scared of losing himself; his devotion was one of the few things he valued about himself, and to him, ‘other people’ were lazy, and might mean he too got lazy, sloppy, half-hearted… which scared him. That and he had no idea how to talk to a femme – would far rather pretend they didn’t exist, outside of family and work colleagues. He wasn’t “significant other”-material, he was… too workaholic and secretive about his feelings to ever be a good partner.
He finally came up with an excuse that sounded passable. “I just don’t want to turn into another loose little bike like Whitesides,” he lied, poisonously, folding his arms. “I want to be sure it’s the right thing to do, not go… jump on someone because they look at me the right way and I’m drunk enough to think it’s an expression of undying love that I’ll regret and run away from in the morning.”
“Slipstream,” Celerity scolded, sharply, but it didn’t have quite the desired effect.
“He doesn’t care what he’s doing to everyone else’s reputation, with all his… all his whoring, and drinking, and spreading himself around to whoever looks like they’re a good lay. You know what they say about him.” He hugged his arms around himself, awkwardly, trying not to dislodge his sleeping passenger.
“No.” She had that look in her optic that said she knew exactly what they said. “Enlighten me. What do they say?”
“He’s the station bike. Everyone’s had a ride-!”
“And you know this from personal experience, do you?” She fixed him on one of those looks, that reminded him a little of his mother, and made him cringe in spite of his bad temper.
The little mech’s gaze flushed brighter. “Well, no,” he admitted, dropping his gaze to his lap and finding something fascinating to study on the backs of his interlaced fingers.
“So you thought you’d go ahead and compound his problems by just repeating them, like everyone else does?” She looked genuinely upset by his behaviour, and now it wasn’t anything to do with her own mistakes, she was happy to scold him. “I’d have thought better of you, Slipstream, especially given how you know first-hand what rumours do to a machine.”
“Well what about Ama? Doesn’t he care about her reputation?”
“What about her reputation?” Celerity quirked a carefully ironic brow. “I thought most people knew her as a sensible, dedicated little femme who has manages to successfully juggle both her career and looking after you, you little ingrate. I’d not heard that she was suffering because of Whites’ choices, and you can be sure she – or particularly Longbeam! – would have said something if they were unhappy.”
He hunched his shoulders and mumbled something like an apology. “Figures that you’d like him,” he groused, sourly. “Bad ideas are obviously attracted to bad ideas. Not that you’d get anywhere, cause it’s not like he likes femmes or anything.”
She gave him a gentle swat around the back of the head. “Whitesides likes femmes just fine,” Celerity demurred. “He’s just… got confused about what he wants in life.”
Slipstream gave her a glare, and lifted his chin, aggressively. “You telling me he’s had you, too?” he challenged, staring into her sedate blue gaze and trying to embarrass her into backing down.
Celerity didn’t flinch; she met his gaze without the slightest flicker of shame. “Yes, actually,” she confirmed, unexpectedly. “Although we were a little more genteel about how we defined it. It was thousands of years ago, long before we met your father and his brothers, and before I got this horrible, bulky old refit.” She shrugged a shoulder. “Whitesides was – still is – a very good friend of mine, and we spent almost ten solar rotations together. It was difficult, because we were still in dorms, and there was zero privacy, but we were happy enough together. We only parted because there was no… spice, to the relationship. No excitement. No fire. We were good friends, but that was it. We only interfaced a few times.”
Slipstream was practically glowing with embarrassment, his delicate lilac optics flushed a vibrant white-pink. “I didn’t really want to hear your bedroom habits, Lara,” he protested, hoarsely.
“ You were the one that asked,” she reminded, with a cheeky smile. “So you got told. Perhaps you shouldn’t have been trying to catch me out.”
Slipstream muttered embarrassedly under his breath and stared back down into the water.
“Whitesides just needs help climbing out of the downward spiral he’s got himself stuck on,” she said, gently. “I’m not saying you have to like him, I’m not saying you have to be sympathetic, but the least you could do is be understanding, and not help spread the rumours. And just finding someone to share a little of your life with? Is not going to turn you into some sex-crazed little maniac who can’t concentrate on his work. Besides.” She gave him a gently knowing smile. “Femmes aren’t so difficult to talk to. And they won’t mind quite so much as you think about you being good at your job.”
Slipstream glanced guiltily at his aunt’s feet, unwilling to lift his gaze enough to meet her gaze; busted. “Sorry.”
She patted his shoulder, and was reassured to feel him lean in to the touch, just a fraction. “I know I’m not the smartest of femmes, but I’ve known you for long enough to know all your little triggers. I know you’ll never be happy unless you’re slaving over your beat. I just want to see you happy, too.”
“So do I want to see me happy,” the smaller policebot agreed, softly. “But I want to catch Firewire first.”
Celerity nodded, sombrely. Straight back to the task in hand, eh? “We probably need to push off soon,” she agreed. “Don’t want him getting too far ahead of us. Just need to be careful about our footing.”
“Or whatever it is that’s chasing us.”
“Speaking of which. Those signs you saw on the way in,” Celerity mused, quietly. “Could they be referring to those creatures you saw?”
“What do you mean?” Slipstream glanced up.
“You and Mirii described the outline as a sort of a saw-shape, right?” When he nodded, she elaborated; “that creature we caught a little glimpse of, it had a jagged back, didn’t it. Almost like a sawblade.”
“You’re not reassuring me, here, Lara.” He made sure his feet were tucked up on the ledge; Mirii stirred, blinked, but rapidly went dormant again.
“I know.” Celerity tried to smile. “I suppose we have to remember they’re animals, which might have sharp teeth but they’re unlikely to be sharp enough to punch through carbon-alloy armour. Right?”
“…right.”
“So we just need to make sure we’re out of the water as soon as possible, because then they won’t folleeep!” Her words ran into a startled yelp of alarm and she jerked her feet up out of the water, almost startling her nephew into falling off the ledge.
“What was that what was that?” He stared down into the gloomy depths, struggling to catch so much as just a glimpse of a ripple, leaning automatically closer to her, but there was nothing. The waters were smooth.
“I don’t know,” Celerity admitted. “Something brushed against my feet.”
“Is that all?” Slipstream scolded, trying to get his motors – primed to make a run for it – to offline again.
She resisted the urge to clout him. “It was big, it was rough, and it discharged electricity where it bumped against me,” she elaborated, irritably. “So don’t you take that tone with me!”
Slipstream pouted, lips pursed, and muttered under his breath, but didn’t apologise.
The little party was glad to find that the water level rapidly began to get lower, the further they pushed on. The ledge around the walls had vanished again, forcing Mirii to resort to riding on shoulder again, but soon the water had dropped enough that she could wade, as well; the water came only to her waist, and smelt only like drain water – runoff from the streets, not sewage.
Celerity had changed her mind about forging on in front, and was instead now bringing up the rear, leaving Slipstream to forge ahead with the pole to check for invisible obstacles. There was the impolite insinuation that the big femme was hanging back because she’d got spooked, but everyone knew the real reason – if those creatures were stalking them, they’d get to her first.
The round mouth of the sewer opened out onto a wider, taller chasm. Although clearly part of the network of sewers, it was less of a pipe and more of a gully, striking down like a sheer-sided wound in the city, three times as wide as the pipe they’d emerged from and the roof towering way above even Celerity’s head. Dirty sunlight filtered down through the sporadic gratings in the top, and the endless sides of tower blocks were just visible outside. The floor was just as flooded as everywhere else, but only to a depth that came barely to Mirii’s waist.
“ Now where do we go?” Slipstream half-despaired, splashing down to the flat floor and surveying the forest of pipe-mouths leading into the ravine. Some pipes were small enough that even Fred would have been able to get into them, but at least half were big enough for Firewire to have escaped down, and a few were big enough that even Celerity could have walked down them with space to wave her arms above her head and not reach the top.
Celerity shook her head, tiredly. “I don’t know,” she sighed. “Ping for a location; failing that, check each one in turn to see if there’s any footprints in the silt, or paint transfers, or any other traces-”
“…-and failing that, check every single pipe that’s big enough for him to get into.” Slipstream’s shoulders sagged, dramatically. “We’ll be hunting for him forever.”
“Well, then let’s get started, shall we?”
They’d surveyed the first few tunnels when there came an abbreviated splash from behind them.
“Creatures,” Slipstream commented, anxiously, and pointed at another clutch of the yellow triangle warning signs; some clearly suggested ‘deep water’, but one showed the ‘sawblade’ shape, and now it was clearly a creature, with an arched back and an open, beaky mouth, from which a bolt of lightning emerged.
Celerity nodded, warily. “I’ll stand watch,” she said, unexpectedly. “You keep looking.”
Fred scrambled on ahead, scaling the walls with aid of the pipes that covered them like leafless old vines. Slipstream went back to searching, trying not to pay too much attention to his aunt standing protectively behind them, like some ancient armoured knight, with her scaffolding grasped in both hands like a rusty quarterstaff.
Another splash, closer at hand; he winced, tried not to think of a hundred creatures swimming unseen around his legs. Then another splash, and a noise of alarm from Celerity and a crack and a hiss. He turned, startled, to find her standing over the upturned, scaled belly of some reptilian creature – she’d clearly hit it with her scaffolding.
She picked it up, warily; a long-bodied, slender creature, with six short, paired legs and a jagged toothless beak. Its scaly hide was a blackish-green, covered in bony plates and with a jagged triple crest down its back. It reminded Slipstream a little of a small crocodile, like he’d seen in Egypt, way waaay back when he’d been an infant.
“At least we know what’s chasing us now,” Celerity deadpanned, looking far from happy. “Some sort of displaced wildlife, or something gone feral, one of the two.”
“The latter seems more likely,” Mirii commented, uneasily. “Native creatures are all quadrupeds. Hexapod creatures have been reported as coming from one of the biotech industries at the surface.”
“Great. So we’ve got feral, genetically-modified monsters chasing us, now-”
“- ow!” Celerity’s exclamation made them all jump.
The first creature had come alive in her grasp, and discharged electricity into her hand, prompting her to drop it; it swam hastily away with a lash of its flat tail.
“I think we out to make getting out of here and to higher, drier ground our priority,” the big femme commented. “We can resume the search when we’re out of rea-ow! Ow, damnit!” She kicked out, alarmed; the curving backs of another three of the creatures rippled through the water around her. “Get away!” She slapped her pole down on the water’s surface; the noise startled them away a little way, but they rapidly swirled back.
“More of them.” Mirii was already fidgeting on the dry rim around the top of one of the larger pipes, and now pointed at the pipe they’d originally emerged from. The arching back of one of the animals swept over the rill of running water and into the gully.
“Slipstream, stop looking like a half-sparked scrapheap and get going,” Celerity instructed, irritably. “That pipe’s as good as any, I’ll- ow! I’ll ping you for a location and catch you up later.”
“But those creatures-”
“-are aggressive and can generate an electric charge, and I don’t know what’ll happen if enough of them offload their charge into the water.” She stabbed her pole into the head of one, which was attempting to climb her thigh; it hissed and fell back into the murk. “They’ve probably been following our electrical signature, we look like big delicious things to eat. They’ll get – ow – get bored and go away as soon as they work out I’m not edible.”
“But I can’t leave you here alone!” he bleated, alarmed. “You can’t get down here, you’re too big!”
“This is no time for you to suddenly get noble,” Celerity snapped, pointing into the tunnel, finally losing her rag; another of the creatures latched onto her leg and bit at her hip, scraping off traces of blue enamel. “I want you out of here.”
“But what if you’re hurt?!”
“If I’m hurt then it’s my fault for being careless! Augh, dammit-” She stamped dramatically at one of the curling creatures; a curl of blue static sizzled up her leg. “If they can hurt me they’ll sure as frag hurt you, and if we’re both out of the picture, who’s going to chase Firewire?”
“But-”
“So help me Slipstream, if you don’t go right now…!” she thundered. “This is no time for you to be a martyr!”
As if to back up his aunt’s roar, one of the creatures broke away from the rest and bit out at Slipstream’s feet. He needed no further bidding; snatched up his two friends, and bolted. He’d seen Celerity angry before, sure, on rare occasions, but never so thunderously furious.
The pipe angled very slightly upwards, and water rapidly ran out to nothing but a dribble in the centre, leaving the few creatures that had bothered pursuing them flopping and hissing angrily in their wake.
Slipstream finally came to a halt when the tunnel widened back out into a junction, linking five separate pipes; he let Mirii drop safely to the ground before flopping to his aft, sucking for cold air after the unanticipated exertion. Stressed heat shimmered up off his vents.
“Is everything all right?” Mirii came closer, anxious, resting a hand on his shoulder.
He nodded, awkwardly. “Just hot. Give-… give me a minute.” Distortions crackled in his voice, softly, but it wasn’t all because of his unanticipated exertion.
Celerity’s words had hurt, but they hurt more because they were true. And they hurt because they made him look at himself, at what he’d been doing to her. Ungrateful little wretch indeed. She was scared he only wanted to help because he wanted something else to needle at her with, not that he was scared she’d be hurt. She thought he wanted to help to so he could say ‘here’s something else you did wrong, here’s something else you couldn’t fix without my help. It’s your fault we’re both hurt because it’s your fault we’re here in the first place.’ He felt like a bastard, and resolved to make it up to her.
-Lara?- he pinged, miserably. -Safe now. Where meet?-
…Silence.
He gave it a moment, anxiously. Maybe she just needed to decide what she was going to say. -Celerity?-
Still silence.
He pinged her for a positional reference, and… no reply.
