Captain Vorpatril's alliance

It felt as if a giant’s hands had cupped Ivan and pressed inward at all points at once. He didn’t exactly hear the boom, because his hearing had gone wonky in that instant, but he felt it in his bones. Tej may have yelped; in any case, her mouth moved.

Ivan fell back on his butt. A couple of cases thudded to the floor, knocked off their stacks.

And it was over.

All the Arquas were working their jaws, trying to get their eardrums to pop back. Imola cried, in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a great distance, “What the hell was that?”

Ivan climbed back up as far as his knees. “Sergeant Abelard’s time bomb,” he managed to get out, over the ringing and hissing and rumbling, most but worryingly not all of which seemed to be coming from inside his own head. “Running thirty‑five years late.”

Chapter Twenty‑Two

Tej drew breath against the appalling concussion that had seemed for a moment to crush her lungs, and pushed herself upright from the stack of cases she’d stumbled against. She braced for an aftershock. But except for the humming in her ears, only silence came from the dark, open doorway into the tunnel.

“ Rish. Jet!” she gasped, and bolted for the aperture. She held up her cold light, making dull gleams race over the uneven black walls, and ran down the slope. Around the first, or last, bend.

Behind her, she could hear Ivan Xav’s strained shout, “Tej, no!” and the thump of heavy, slippered feet. She didn’t look back.

She dodged through the kink. Another straight, descending stretch. The next kink. She was almost back to the storm sewer pipe; the breach and the bomb hadn’t been much beyond that. What if Rish and Jet were trapped under some fall of dirt, tons of dirt, like the poor sergeant? Could they dig them out before they suffocated‑if they weren’t crushed already‑and were there any tools back in the lab for‑she skidded to a halt.

Filling the tunnel before her feet was a flat stretch of roiling, dark water. The downward slant of the tunnel, here, brought the roof to its level; the water lapped at the tunnel top. A sort of water seal‑she could not make out any dirt‑ or rock‑fall beyond it. Though the blast must have both broken open and collapsed the pipe, to dam and back its flow up into the Mycoborer maze. She put one foot into the icy water. How deep did it go? Could she swim through to the other side‑or was there no other side, the tunnel over there flattened?

Ivan Xav’s hand grabbed her arm and yanked her back. “No,” he gasped. “Don’t you dare!”

She gulped, and tossed her cold light out as far as it would go. It bobbed a moment and sank slowly; but its glow was quickly occluded in the opaque brown murk of the bubbling water. She could see nothing through it. Scum rings twisted on the moving surface.

As they stared, aghast, Grandmama jogged up‑Tej had never seen her move faster than a dignified stride, before, and finding her breathless was weirdly jarring. She stared with them, then, hesitantly, stepped back and put a hand to her belt. The pale oval force‑field sprang out around her, buzzing and sputtering.

“No, Lady ghem Estif!” said Ivan Xav. “That bloody thing is shorting out already. It won’t hold, and once the water gets in, it’ll kill you outright.”

Reluctantly, her hand fell once more, and the field died away. Her lips moved numbly in her carved face. “I’m afraid your evaluation is correct, Captain Vorpatril.” She looked…old.

“What can we do?” Tej’s whisper was not, now, for secrecy.

Ivan Xav glanced down where the waves nibbled at his toes. “Back up. Water’s still rising.” They all did so, peering uneasily downward.

“We must return to the lab, and stay inside,” said Grandmama, with a glance around. “The freshest areas of the Mycoborer tunnel have a certain amount of flex and rebound, but that concussion may have cracked the more cured sections. Very unstable, very unsafe.”

“It was pretty hardened around the, the bomb,” said Tej. “What if it collapsed on Rish and Jet? What if they’re buried?”

“Or drowning,” muttered Ivan Xav. “Or buried and drowning, oh God.”

Grandmama hesitated. “If they were close to the explosion, I don’t expect they’ll have survived to experience either. If they weren’t.” The last sentence fragment stopped rather than trailed. She didn’t finish the thought aloud.

Ivan Xav was swearing under his breath, or praying‑it was hard to tell which. But, his hand still gripping Tej’s arm too hard, he turned her around, and they all started back.

“It was a squib,” he said after a minute.

“What?” said Tej.

“Sergeant Abelard’s bomb. If it was originally intended for ImpSec, it should have turned this whole city block into a crater. The explosives were deteriorated. Just…not quite enough.”