1821 hours
Wayne dropped, cradling his crossbow in his arms, alert as if something very real and dangerous might be waiting for them. The tilted, twisted floor was very slick, but friction heat was still building up under his butt and shoulderblades.
He hit the water hard, and sank deep. Kicked away and leftward as Angelique dropped in behind him. The water was tepid. Not salty, but something… spent gunpowder? A taste of moondust.
His head broke the surface and he scooped water off his eyes and mouth, and looked around him quick.
The pool was a circle of Olympic size… a hemisphere, in fact, very deep in the center. A ledge ran all the way round under a tremendous volume of rock cave. The slide had dropped them near the middle of the pool.
“Get to the edge!” he cried. “If we’re standing and they’re floating, we can shoot them like sitting ducks!” He started swimming like mad.
Angelique popped up behind him. Others were following.
How much was real? This stone ledge, at least. It seemed to run all the way around, making a perfect swimming pool. Wayne heaved himself out. Water came with him, a sheath that drained slowly in lunar gravity.
The cavern was bathed in blue, a restless wave of azure light washing across the floors and ceiling. The entire room was gray unweathered rock. He was stunned by the size… until Wayne realized that it simply couldn’t be this large. It was larger than the largest caverns on Earth, with stalactites the size of Moon missiles depending from a ceiling high enough to shelter clouds. To the sides… well, there were no limits to the sides, so far as he could see. The room’s light dwindled away to shadows long before it revealed walls. Just… rock. Spars of rock like jagged teeth, broken jaws grinning and gaping at them in all directions.
How much was illusion?
“Nervous?” Angelique heaved herself clear. Her crooked little smile had never seemed so endearing to him. She had watched him with Darla. Angelique had set the rules, from the very beginning. Had she come to regret them?
He turned to her. The others were still far enough behind that they had a moment of privacy. “Angelique,” he said. “Look. Whatever happens now… whatever happens in there, I just wanted to say… thank you.”
She seemed genuinely startled by this. “For what?”
“For the best game anyone ever played,” he said.
Their eyes held each other for a long time, and then she cupped his cheek in her hand. “Let’s play this out, partner. Time for good-byes later.”
“Not always,” he said.
A narrow rock path led up into gloom. The pirates of Neutral Moresnot must have exited the pool and entered the dome from here.
“Wow,” Ali said, rising from the water, Scotty Griffin close behind.
The pool shimmered with a deep and lovely blue light radiating up from the depths. Echoes sent wavelet sounds from every direction.
“I see something,” Maud said. And made a magical gesture with her hand. Her face blossomed into a bright, wide smile such as she had not displayed for at least twenty horrific hours. “The magic is working!”
“Holy shit!” Scotty said. Then paused. “That’s good, right?”
“When the gods are awake, please refrain from blaspheming,” Margie said piously.
Mickey waved them over to the left side, where, hidden in a tumble of rocks, they found strange-looking tumbles of steel cylinders and leather straps. It looked like a cross between traditional rebreather gear and a conch shell. And it was ruined, smashed and bent.
“What is this?” Wayne said, lifting one so that he could examine it more closely.
Scotty pulled it from his hands and examined it himself. “Well, under the plastic I think we have a local version of standard Euro Union search-and-rescue gear. The pirates found it before us, and trashed it.” He looked up. “Nobody’s using this.”
“All right… but what does that mean?”
“It means,” Angelique said, frowning, “that the way out of here is down through the pool. This gear was supposed to get us out of here. That’s why they made sure we were all certified with rebreathers.” She paused, pinched face reflecting a painful thought. “And why Asako’s pod was airtight.”
“What now?”
“Now…” Angelique pushed the red button on her belt, twice. The air above them rippled, and a visual field tried to focus. They breathed a collective sigh of relief. They seemed to have come out of a long, long shadow.
Xavier’s pinched face appeared on the field in front and above them. And for the first time that Wayne remembered, the little guy actually seemed rattled and relieved. “Angelique!” he said. “I… I wasn’t at all sure this would work.”
“What exactly is going on?” she said. “What do we do?”
“Look,” Xavier said. “Neutral Moresnot-”
“The pirates.”
“The pirates scrambled our communications, as you know. And they knocked out most of the control mechanisms. But the aquifer’s on a different grid from the rest of the dome, and they weren’t able to kill it.”
“That might come in useful,” Wayne said. “We’ve got full effects?”
“I’ve run all the diagnostics I can from here, but you’ll need to tell me what you think.”
“There’s no time for that right now. How do we get out of here?”
“There’s only one way-down through the pool.”
“Under water? Are you mad?” Maud asked.
“Opinions differ. But you can’t even do that. According to Kendra, the door is mined.”
“Mined?” Maud again. To her credit, she wasn’t whining.
“Makes sense,” Scotty said. “They’ve thought of everything. And it gets worse, Xavier-”
Scotty’s expression reminded Wayne of something from a cheesy version of the Ten Commandments, Moses staring up into a talking cloud rather than down into a burning bush.
“They’ve destroyed the rebreather gear. Even if the door was unlocked-”
“Despite any personal antipathy, we would have come to get you,” Xavier said. “Listen. We have rescue on the other side of that door. If you can find a way to defuse a booby-trap, we can open it. Wait-”
There followed a momentary pause, while the visual field blanked out. Then another face appeared. Dark hair, strong cheekbones, Polynesian eyes. A far prettier face, far more welcome.
“Kendra!” Scotty said, and Wayne could hear the naked relief in the big man’s voice.
“Scotty.” Whatever their history might have been, the affection in her voice was clear. Dammit, he wanted that for himself. If there was nothing else this adventure had taught Wayne, it was that he wanted someone to care like that.
Darla?
She was close behind him, and her hand stole into his. He pressed it.
“Scotty,” Kendra continued. “Piering and a rescue team are down in the tunnel, on the far side of the airlock. If you can disarm the bomb, they can get in. What do you think?” Her smile looked just a little desperate and sick. “Could bomb disposal be part of that wild, wide, wonderful training of yours?”
“Ah…” Scotty looked a little scared, and Wayne saw that the answer was no.
Darla raised her hand. “Listen. If this bomb is like everything else, it was jerry-rigged. Can’t be terribly sophisticated.”
“If it was made here, then…” Kendra’s eyes closed for a moment. “Maybe I have someone who can tell us what we need. Give me ten minutes, will you?”
“If we can.”
“I’ll get right back.”
The air in Toby McCauley’s holding room was stifling, almost as if it had gelled thick with fear. When Kendra entered, he was staring at his fingers.
Very slowly, he turned to look at her. That mischievous, cocky light in his eye was dead and gone. “What do you want now? I already told you everything I have to say.”
“I’m thinking that you might want to say a little more,” Kendra said. “There seems to be an explosive device attached to the airlock leading from the aquifer into the maintenance room.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” McCauley said, his long face had taken on a greenish pallor, but managed to stay neutral at the moment.
“I know, I know,” Kendra said. “But there’s something you need to know. So far, no one outside my staff knows what you have done.”
“What I’m suspected of doing,” he corrected, without much enthusiasm.
“Not to us. But here’s the thing. My husband is down there. And he is going to try to dismantle that bomb. And if he dies…” Kendra stopped herself, surprised at the lump that had materialized in her throat. “If Scotty dies, I swear that all and any evidence needed to convict you in the court of public opinion will materialize, and be mysteriously leaked far and wide. I further promise you that you will be moved, in a low-security vehicle, to a holding cell in the mining district. And there will be no pressure suit or emergency supplies in that vehicle.” She leaned closer. “I promise you that that vehicle will never make it. It will break down… or be hijacked… or spring a mysterious leak. Look at me, Toby. Look at me.”
He forced himself to face her. Stared into her eyes, and blinked.
“We’ve played poker for years. I usually lose. You know me, Toby. I’m not a good bluffer. Am I bluffing now?”
Toby blinked again, and looked away. “What if I did have something to say?” The words came slowly, like pulling teeth. “What happens then?”
“I swear to you that if you can help us, you will be allowed to leave Luna. Health reasons. You’ll have your career, and your reputation. I will have no reason to want you prosecuted… so long as you leave.”
Toby said, “They brought their own detonator. It looked like an old wristwatch.”
“Which door is mined?” Scotty asked, when Kendra was back on the line.
“Big Figjam said just the inner door. Our side. You should be able to enter the chamber, from your side.” She ran down the rest of what she had learned from McCauley, while Scotty listened intently.
“What’s the length of the tunnel?” he asked.
“Fifty meters. Why…” Then sudden comprehension. “Oh, right. Your breathing equipment is broken.”
“We’ll manage it, Kendra. I’ll make contact when we’re in.”
“You be safe,” she said.
He nodded, giving her a cocky smile. Then when she clicked off he turned to Darla. “Can you hold your breath that long?” Scotty was already peeling off his pants.
“Hey, cowboy. I’m a mermaid, remember?”
Together, the two of them stripped until Darla was pink plumpness in panties and bra, and Scotty buff in briefs. “Fifty meters,” Scotty said. “That’s Special Forces stuff.”
Darla poked a finger at his gut. “Ow. Smuggling drywall there? Good swimmer?”
“Yeah.” He could hear the voice in his head clearly: But are you that good?
She nodded. “All right. Hyperventilate to get your lungs full. The trick will be to stay relaxed. Don’t panic, and we might just get through this. We have to swim it, get into the chamber, and trigger the cycle. Can you do that?”
“Easy,” he lied.
“Not to be a wet blanket,” Mickey said. “But what if they’ve sealed the door? Or you can’t open it?”
“Then we’ll have to swim back,” Darla said.
Her smile didn’t mask the fear in her eyes. And suddenly, Wayne’s heart broke.
Standing there in her underwear, shivering in the cold, Darla seemed so brave, so strong, so very beautiful to him. He went to her and held her. “When this is over. If we’re still-”
“When this is over,” she said. “I’m coming back.”
“Right,” he said. “Right.” Wayne scratched his head, sighing. “Look. I don’t know if it would make more sense for me to invite you down, or you to invite me to stay up here for a while. But I think… I think I’d like to find out what there is between us.”
She laid the softness of her palm along his cheek, a fond gesture. “Sex,” she said. “And right now, I could use a lot more of that. We’ll work out the details later.”
He sighed, deeply. “You’ve got it,” he said.
And kissed her. And no kiss of his life had ever been sweeter, or more sincere.
For three minutes Scotty had been breathing deep and exhaling shallow. He gulped air, exhaled half of it, took another and then another until he felt full almost to bursting, and light-headed. Let it out. Then inhaled deeply again.
He and Darla nodded to each other, waved to their companions, and then dove.
The water was chilly but not freezing. If the power had been off here, the cold might have given him muscle-lock. The aquifer was intended for recreation. They must have sealed off part, and warmed it with induction coils.
He followed Darla’s lead, diving deep into the pool, strong smooth strokes taking them down. His ears didn’t hurt. Lunar gravity made for less pressure. The blue lights were mounted at the bottom, down through a forest of what simply had to be fake coral.
A startling sight: Seahorse-type creatures as big as real horses, anchored deep, motionless, waiting to play.
Ali’s horses. Briefly he wondered: What was supposed to have happened here? How would the game have gone, barring pirates?
No time. He swam on: Darla was an eel, thank God, and seemed to know just where she was going, down into a tunnel halfway to the bottom. Fifty meters. All right…
He clamped his mind down on doubt and swam on.
Angelique clapped her hands together. “All right, everyone! We can’t just wait for help. We need to prepare, in case the pirates arrive before the marines.”
She looked up into the Game Master’s cloud. “Xavier-what do we have in terms of control?”
“Just about everything,” he said. “Including a few things that you would have picked up along the way.”
“Good,” she said. “I need all the help you can give us. We want to make the next few minutes absolute hell for the pirates, and hope that that’s enough. It should be easy. When they drop into the water they’ll be dead meat.”
“Hold up a minute, love. I can’t see them in the ‘Little Wars’ scenario. They may have used the other mirror.”
“Other mirror?”
Something alive and frantic kicked in Scotty’s chest, struggling to win freedom. Not pain. Not yet. But pain was on its way. And soon after pain, panic. Then blackness, and death.
Hewn from bedrock, the underwater tunnel seemed to go on forever, little rows of blinking yellow lights lining the sides like reflective speedbumps on an endless desert road. Fifty meters? Seemed more like five hundred. The more they swam, the farther away that door seemed. Had to be an oxygen-debt hallucination, but still he wondered: Could Kendra have been wrong? Was it possible she had misread the specs, sending him and Darla to their deaths?
Then he saw the end of the tunnel, blessedly close at hand.
Darla scanned it briefly, then punched in a code.
Every disastrous scenario imaginable flashed through his mind in those seconds. She had the wrong code. The pirates had sabotaged the door, McCauley had lied about their intentions. He would drown here in this tunnel, his lungs exploding as he The door slid open. They entered, and the door slid shut behind them. The world spun, darkness and blood pounding at his vision. When the water began to drain from the chamber he braced his arms and legs against the walls, lifted his head up above the level of the water, sucked, spat, and gulped air.
Damn, that tasted good. If he’d been the first man to drown on the Moon, Saint Peter might have laughed him out of heaven.
As the water was pumped out through the floor grill, Darla was already crouched at the inner door, studying a package composed of a bundle of red clay-like bricks bound with wire and anchored to the door with some kind of clear, hard resinous substance. A dial the size and appearance of a wristwatch was set into it, anchored with wires and covered with more of that clear resin. Darla’s expression was glum indeed.
“Well?” Scotty asked.
“With the right tools… maybe. But I’m not sure at all. This isn’t makeshift, like I’d hoped. McCauley said they’d smuggled up some kind of fancy timer, and he’d spliced it into a bundle of mining explosive.” Darla had spoken with McCauley for almost a minute, and one tense, terse conversation it had been. “Someone knew exactly what they were planning to do, and smuggled a piece of equipment up from Earth. This”-she pointed at the watch-“started life as a wristwatch. The display is wonky. It’s been seriously reprogrammed. They turned it into a movement sensor. I’m guessing that it’s also sensitive to a range of other stimuli. Pure pro.”
“Can you beat it?”
“Maybe,” she said. She felt around her belt pod, extracted her multitool. “I’m not sure. Judging from this readout… I’d say it’s not very forgiving.”
“What can I do?” Scotty asked. “Is there anything I can do?” He was feeling useless, and there was no worse feeling in a crisis.
“Yes. Get the hell out of here,” she said.
Scotty pressed his face against the fist-sized viewport. Through inches of composition plastic, he waved at the room on the other side.
A flurry of movement, and Max Piering appeared on the window’s far side. Despite the tension, Scotty smiled, recognizing Professor Cavor’s face shorn of facial hair. Piering motioned down to the communications link on the inner door.
Scotty felt nervous about triggering it. “Darla?”
“Go for it. I think McCauley told the truth about this whole setup.”
He turned it on.
“How are you doing in there?” Piering asked. Scotty hadn’t seen the man in years, not since shortly after the accident that had stolen his Moon legs.
“Not bad. Could be a lot better.”
“Can you see the device?”
Darla nodded. “Looks like it’s synched into the door. Mechanics, electronics-try anything, and it will go off. Boom.”
“Can you deactivate it?”
“Same question, same answer. Maybe. With the right tools. All I have is my multi. I’m really not sure. But I’ll try.”
“What can we do out here?”
“Get back. Way back,” she said. “In case I’m wrong.” She turned and looked at Scotty. “You, too, cowboy. I think they have more use for you up top.”
Scotty nodded. He would have backed away from her, but the chamber was too small for any effective backing. “If you’re sure.”
“I don’t think I’m sending you to a picnic, mister. Go on.”
Scotty extended his hand, and Darla shook it, hard. Was she saying good-bye? “Good gaming with you,” he said.
“Good gaming with you, too,” she replied. “Take a deep breath.”