I was dying.
8
A voice whispered in my head. Light, musical. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Maybe it was Dynark. Maybe all the old priests were right. When you died, Dynark personally welcomed you to His kingdom.
No.
This voice wasn’t greeting me. And it wasn’t comforting me.
It was berating me.
Don’t give in to failure, Jannigan Beck.
Yeah, easy for you to say. You’re not the one being digested by a giant worm somewhere deep underground.
And you are not the one who surrenders. That’s not why I bestowed my gift upon you.
Gift? The word burned in my mind. It was something I had heard before. Maybe in a dream.
Push.
I couldn’t push. I couldn’t cut. I couldn’t even stand up. My muscles had completely failed me. My body was drained of life. And this was the last gasp of my conscious mind.
Yes, use your mind, Jannigan. Push! Push with your mind!
And then it came back to me.
I knew where I had heard this voice before.
Back on the Mayir ship, the Baeder, I had been seconds away from having my brain fried by a psychotic doctor. He had me strapped into some kind of torture device and I could feel it draining away my life.
The voice had started speaking in my head. Telling me the same thing: to push.
So I pushed then.
And I pushed now.
And the next thing I knew, I felt myself sliding against a sandy surface, gasping for air. But this time, there was air to breathe. Real air with oxygen. And I gulped it ferociously.
Somehow I had made it outside of the worm.
Not by much, though.
I lay maybe a meter away from the gaping maw of the dead creature. By the glow of my light stick, I saw that the monster did look like a worm, but with a big sucker mouth ringed by a half dozen hairy tentacles.
I scrambled away, not sure if it was really dead. But the creature was unmoving.
My hand touched something wet, and I turned around to see a pool of water. It was big enough for me to get into, so I did, trying to wash the digestive fluids off of me.
That was when I saw Kira.
She was slumped on the ground near the far side of the pool, covered with ichor and weblike strands.
And she wasn’t moving.
“Kira!”
I rushed over to her and checked to see if she had a pulse.
“C’mon, Kira!”
I felt something at her neck, but it was very faint. She was extremely pale, and a good portion of her body was covered in slimy ichor. But she was breathing—just barely.
Quickly I tilted her head back to make sure her airway wasn’t blocked. Then I stripped off her thermal suit to get the ichor away from her skin, and checked her body for injuries.
Suddenly everything lit up.
“You found her!” TenSix said, shining his light onto Kira’s unmoving body.
“Yes, but she’s not doing well.”
“Let me run diagnostics on her.” The little bot raced over. “I’m trained in field first aid.”
I let TenSix do his thing, while I broke out the medpak and searched for the fortissa. That should at least help stabilize her a bit until we figured out what the hell to do.
According to TenSix, Kira had suffered a concussion, blood loss, and some damaged ribs. Not too bad. The troubling thing was the presence of some sort of psychoactive toxin in her bloodstream.
“I lack the equipment to determine what exactly it is, but I am guessing that the creature injected her with a type of venom to act as a sedative, perhaps so it could more easily ingest her.”
“I need to call her parents. I’m sure they have a Medascap or even a MedBed at their camp.”
“There is a functional MER-3 MedBed at my camp,” TenSix said. “It’s closer.”
“It’s a moot point. We don’t have any way to transport her back to camp. We need the Larks and a sled—or at the very least, a stretcher and one other person besides me to hold it.”
“We also need a way through those thorns,” TenSix said.
“But first of all, we need a way back up through that whirlwind.”
“I think I might have a solution to that,” TenSix said. “But it will involve a lot of messy work with your judder knife.”
The bot explained that if we were able to cut down the flow of hot air through the lava tubes—even temporarily—it would weaken the whirlwind.
“How are we supposed to do that? There are dozens of shafts and holes down here.”
“True, but not in the lava tube immediately below the shakah-nua. There’s only one shaft and it’s the one we traveled through. If we can seal that shaft—”
“Seal it? With what?”
The little bot turned his light on the corpse of the giant worm creature. “Start butchering.”
It was disgusting work, but TenSix was correct. I was able to slice off enough slabs of fatty flesh to seal the hole behind us—after I carried Kira and TenSix up to the top level of the maze of lava tubes.
Immediately after I sealed the shaft, the lava tube became quiet. TenSix, who had stationed himself right below the whirlwind, called out to me. “It worked! Not completely, but the wind speed is greatly diminished.”
I didn’t know how long the seal would hold, so I carefully hoisted Kira over my shoulder and made for the exit shaft.
It took some maneuvering, but after first hoisting TenSix through the exit, I managed to lift Kira up through the hole. Thank you, lesser gravity!
TenSix was right. Instead of 150 kilometer per hour winds, it was maybe a quarter of that. Strong, but not enough to toss us around.
Once we were free of the whirlwind, I carried Kira to a protected area near the canyon wall and put a balled jacket under her head as a pillow.
Then I got on her comm unit and called back to the Larks’ camp. It took a while for someone to answer, but eventually I got through to Kira’s mother.
When
