Parallels

Her voice cracked, 'Please don’t leave me behind! I don’t want to be…I don’t want…'

Trevor leaned in close to her. She averted her eyes.

'Go on.'

Nina admitted, 'I don’t want to be alone. Not again. I couldn’t stand that again. I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t leave me alone.'

'You did everything I wanted, even things I didn't know I'd want. Was all that so you wouldn't be alone? Is that what it took for you to keep the other Trevor? I was right from the very beginning; you're nothing like the Nina I knew.'

She leaned against the wall and sighed. A pitiful sight but he cared only out of necessity.

'Can you get us out of here? Get us away from Thebes?'

'Snowe landed his Skipper on the roof. If we can get to it we can get away fast.'

When Trevor said nothing she took his silence as acceptance but before she took the lead he warned, 'If you deceive me again, if you lie to me, if you try anything I don’t like, I’ll kill you. Do you understand? I don’t care who you look like or what we’ve done. Clear?'

Despite the fact that he was unarmed and she carried two pistols, she believed his threat.

Major Forest swallowed hard.

'Okay…um…this way,' she led him toward a descending stairwell.

'Wait. I thought you said we’d head for the roof and take his ship.'

She answered timidly, 'If we go down two levels we can cut past the holding chambers and get into one of the cargo tubes. That will take us to an elevator to the roof.'

He did not budge. He did not believe her.

She said, 'Listen, back in the old days some of the supplies had to get shipped fast to the front. We had transport tubes from the core to a freight elevator to the landing pads on the roof.'

Trevor said, 'Your supplies from another world. From your home world. Right.'

She bit her lip and nodded.

'Tell me, Nina, why is this city so empty? Where are the reinforcements from home?'

'We don’t have time for this, Trevor. We have to get going. Snowe isn’t going to let you live now, he’d never trust you and he sure doesn’t trust me. We don’t have time.'

'We’ll make time, soon enough. Okay, go.'

Trevor followed the Major down several flights of stairs. They arrived at a wide, lonely corridor. They hid among a pile of crates covered by a tarp as a squad of soldiers marched by.

When clear, he asked, 'Did I go from Emperor to wanted man that quick?'

She said, 'No, he'll try and keep it quiet. He's probably got a handful of loyal men in here searching for you and everyone else doesn't have a clue. But we don't know which guards are working for him and which aren't, so best to stay out of sight if we can.'

One room grabbed his attention, a massive but dormant assembly area. Through an observation window, he spied parts of Skippers-rotor blades, wings-lying about.

'Too big to come through on their own,' he said more to himself than her. 'So you send through the parts and assemble the bigger equipment over here.'

'Yes,' she admitted.

He said to her, 'I've seen gateways before on my world. The Hivvans had one and that one looked different from the one we destroyed in Binghamton that first year. Yours doesn't look like either of those. Same function, maybe made from different technology?'

'I guess. Look, we have to keep moving,' and she coaxed him forward.

The hall ended at a set of rusting metal doors but passages led off to either side, making a ‘T’ intersection. To the left, a corridor leading to darkness. To the right, a small hall lined with electrical cords and plumbing.

While he waited for her to decide direction, Trevor heard voices from the passage to his right where he saw an archway leading into a lit chamber of some kind. He recognized the tone of the voices: guards issuing orders, no doubt with the added emphasis of a whip.

'Trevor…wait,' her voice came in a loud whisper as he drifted toward the sounds. 'There’s an access point for the cargo tubes through here. Don’t go that way. Trevor!'

He paid her no attention as he moved to the archway that, he found, led to a balcony serving as an elevated guard post above a prisoner work area. A soldier stood there, his attention focused on the slaves below.

Quietly, Trevor dared a step inside for a better look, managing to avoid notice.

He saw a big room lined with steel girders and metal mesh catwalks that smelled of steam and sweat. Other elevated observation posts remained unmanned, no doubt a symptom of diminished manpower.

Several conveyor belts flowed into the room dropping bundles into bins. From what he could see from the distance, those bundles included clothing, shoes, personal electronic devices such as shavers and hair dryers as well as other household-type items.

Human workers examined the bundles, discarding some but distributing most to work stations where the items were repaired. At those work stations labored bipedal humanoids with big puffy cheeks, wiry hair, and whiskers of a sort.

Chaktaw slaves.

Still unseen, Trevor returned to the hall and said to Nina, 'No deals, no bull shit. You tell me right now, whose Earth is this? The Chaktaw’s?'

She did not hesitate. 'Yes. It’s their Earth. Our mission was to wipe them out.'

Trevor stepped back to the balcony again. The guard there leaned against a post in an effort to remain vertical while he drifted closer to a nap.

As he glanced over the balcony, he saw a sight he had seen too often on his home world. Sweat shops and industrial slave camps had been critical components of survival for the invading Grand Army of the Hivvan Republic on his Earth. Even the most conservative of guesses pointed to tens of thousands of his people starved or worked to death in such places since the invasion.

For the first time, Trevor Stone felt pity for a non-human creature.

He knew the Chaktaw — the Vikings- from his Earth, having fought them-no, slaughtered them-at Five Armies. While he did not regret murdering those invaders, he saw them now in a different light. This was their Earth. Their home. Nina and the men of Thebes had no more right to invade and conquer here than the Chaktaw or the Hivvans or the Duass did on his home world.

'What are you doing you ass?' one of the guards berated a slave. 'I said repair this shit, not take it apart. You dumb or something?'

The Chaktaw to whom the guard spoke actually looked familiar to Trevor, albeit with more bruises and scrapes on his face. It was the Chaktaw prisoner taken from the strip-mall-like outpost they had raided, the prisoner who could speak man's language.

'You stupid…you still here… you die I think. Fromm come for you.'

Wham! A back hand from the guard sent the prisoner to the floor.

Nina joined him on the balcony. Thanks to the constant drone of machines and the continual shouts from below, the drowsy sentry did not hear them converse.

She pointed to what resembled a massive pipe affixed to the wall with an opening cut in the side. The slaves placed boxes inside that pipe.

'That’s a cargo tube,' she said. 'There's a platform in there that could take us to the freight elevators for the roof.'

Trevor went quiet for several seconds, his eyes alternating between the tube and the prisoners and the guards. Finally he told her, 'Okay. I’m taking that prisoner with me. That one who was talking.'

She gasped, caught herself, and said, 'No, we don’t know who to trust in there. And the Chaktaw will kill you and me if given the chance.'

'Shut up. Either I’m taking the two of you with me or I’m taking just him.'

Major Forest opened her mouth to protest but he did not wait to listen. Instead, he walked over to the napping guard and shouted, 'Hey, wake up, soldier!'

The guard jerked straight and swung around.

Nina hustled to Trevor’s side, her hands primed to reach for her twin pistols.