Castle Dreams

Twenty-three Mine

Running in the dark, running from sounds of pursuit. Turning corners into blind alleys. Running, always running, desperately looking for another safety shaft, a way up, a way out.

Running and running some more.

Past arsenals of the tools of war, high-tech weapon in hand, racing through darkness, pounding footsteps echoed by those at your back, drawing, it seems, ever nearer. Gaining. Endless dark tunnel ahead.

Gene stopped to peer around a corner. Nothing coming, so he waved Sativa on. She ran past him, turned the comer, and sprinted ten yards before ducking behind a pile of shipping containers. He came out from cover, dashed past her position and took a firing position between two refrigerator-size plastic crates. He watched Sativa advance down the tunnel at a crouching lope.

In this manner they kept moving through the underground warren, dodging unseen pursuers whose voices sometimes rose to a shout.

But it was not long before pursued met pursuer.

Gene turned the comer and surprised a man in combat fatigues and futuristic helmet bolting out of an ambush position, apparently unaware of Gene’s approach. Gene fired wildly, two shots, and ducked for cover.

The gun made a curious sound, rather like a crossbow, perhaps louder. But it was nothing like the ear-splitting crack of a conventional weapon.

He heard a groan and looked over the edge of the crate. The man was lying supine, his weapon out of reach.

Gene rose from cover as Sativa came jogging past. She went to the man and leaned over him.

The rebel solider turned his head and scanned her through red night-sight goggles.

She raised her weapon and aimed at his chest.

“Sativa, no!”

Gene’s shout was in vain. She fired, and the man died as Gene looked helplessly on.

She met his bewildered look with a face twisted by hatred and the immense effort of self-justification.

“You don’t understand. Members of my family have died in their terrorist attacks. My half-brother was tortured to death by these scum.”

He said nothing.

“Let’s try this direction. I don’t think —”

Shouts in the direction in which she pointed drove them back, but that route also had its disadvantages. More voices and more boots thumping against the level tunnel floor.

Fairly soon, no direction seemed likely to yield an escape route. Shots came out of the darkness at them.

They took up positions on opposite sides of the tunnel and alternated fire in both directions.

Gene wondered how many rounds his weapon had, trying to remember whether she had told him seven hundred or seventeen hundred — or was it just seventy?

He sprayed on full automatic for a while, then switched to single shot in case the lowest figure was correct. He had two extra clips in his knapsack but doubted he could reload under fire. It had been difficult enough in “training.”

Slugs chunked into the wall near him, not ricocheting even when hitting at a sharp angle. They packed a lot of wallop, these weapons did. The man Sativa had shot would probably have died in any case, possibly from shock alone. With that grim consolation. Gene assuaged his feeling of half-earned guilt.

But that wasn’t really bothering him. The prospect of imminent death was. They were trapped, and this was possibly the end. As he fired, he thought of giving up.

No. There had been a death; an execution, yet. As he saw it, that pretty much blew chances for a negotiated settlement or clemency on the captors’ part. Anyway, Sativa probably had not lied about these guys. They certainly weren’t pulling any punches.

Or were they? They were returning fire very conservatively.

Of course. They were afraid of setting off all this ammo.

Sativa wasn’t. She had turned into a human Gatling gun, spitting death in both directions.

How much longer before the nuke grenades went off?

Nuclear grenades. Really, now. He couldn’t conceive of it. It seemed like a joke.…

He watched in amazement as Sativa threw something in one direction, hauled back, and heaved something in the other.

Nuke grenades in the tunnel?

“Concussion squibs! Get down!”

Gene hunkered down just in time. Twin flashes dazzled him, and two bone-shaking concussions jarred him one way, then the other. He wound up on his buttocks, wedged in tight.

She yanked him out and pushed him forward.

“Get, get!”

He got, running through thin smoke and jumping over still bodies.

“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston pie!” he yelled as he brought the butt of his rifle around to connect with an enemy face mask. He ran on into the darkness, virtually blind.

He collided with someone, rolled, and bounced to his feet again, racing on. He cracked his hip against something, almost tripped again, dimly saw a comer to turn and turned it.

A half-minute later he was still sprinting through total darkness, somehow using his magical sensors, when he heard Saliva’s hoarse shout behind him.

He sensed something up ahead, a barrier. He slowed to avoid banging up against the gigantic metal door that blocked the end of the tunnel.

She came running up, bringing her ghostly glow with her.

“You’ve found it!”

“What? Oh, the freight entrance.”

“Yes!” She dragged him backwards. “We’ve got to arm the launcher.”

“Right.”

He followed her back down the tunnel to the nearest intersection. When they got there, shots drove them back.

“Give it to me!”

He took the launcher off his back and handed it over.

“Cover!”

He took up a position at the comer and began concentrating fire on the tunnel segment to the right. Answering fire was more responsive here, as the tunnel was less cluttered with munitions in this area. He switched his weapon back to automatic and hosed in both directions to keep enemy heads and weapons down.

Sativa worked furiously behind his back. But soon she was ready. Balancing the firing tube on her shoulder, she took aim at the blind end of the tunnel.

“Get down and cover your eyes!”

“We’re too close!”

“Move!”

He stretched out and tried to make himself one with the wall, burying his face in his shirt-sleeve.

“You’re right, this ought to kill us,” she said almost casually a second before he squeezed the trigger.

The missile left the tube with an ear-splitting whoosh of flame.

A split second before the world came apart he felt her weight on his back, felt her shielding him with her body.

More light than he’d ever suspected to exist turned the mine into the interior of a star.

He couldn’t get up at first. She was lying on his legs; he pushed her off and struggled to his feet. He bent to pick her up, couldn’t quite. He slapped her face a few times.

He did manage to drag her a few feet before she woke up.

“I can walk,” she yelled.

He helped her up and she could walk a bit. There was light coming from the blasted end of the tunnel, which was now a gaping hole in the side of the mountain. Together, they staggered toward blinding day.

Just as they came out into the world she lurched and fell. He lost his grip on her and she rolled down the crumbling slope of the mountain. He ran after her, fell, and rolled until he was brought up against her still form.

There was a gaping hole in her chest, blood fountaining out.

“Run,” she said. “The grenades … chain explosion …”A spasm went through her body.

She died in the interval between heartbeats.

He made his way down the mountain — running, stumbling, falling, sometimes all three at once. He slid the remainder of the way and ended up half-buried in a pile of mine tailings.

He got up and ran, amazed that he was essentially unhurt, no bones broken. His hands were scratched but that was the extent of the damage.

He began to sprint, wondering how far you’d have to run to be safe from multiple nuclear blasts — and possible chain-reaction secondary explosions. Pretty far, he guessed.

He ran across bare desert floor and jumped a narrow dry wash. When he came to another, this one wider and deeper, he dove in and took cover.

About fifteen seconds later the mountain went up. But it was a surprisingly muffled, subdued affair. Smoke issued from the ventilation shafts along the peak of the mountain, then flames reared up. A tongue of fire licked out from the tunnel mouth, then turned to black smoke. A few seconds later a series of smaller explosions began and continued for the next several minutes. The mine turned into a nuclear inferno.

By that time he had begun to walk home.

He came trudging through the portal, stepping from that too-colorful world of blue and yellow rocks into the relative drabness of the castle.

He felt a slight jar as he passed through, a signal that there was some time displacement. Every universe has its own clock, its own rate of time flow. Spend an hour in a different world and a day might go by in the universe you left. Gene had developed a sixth sense about it; he could usually guess how much time had passed in the castle since his departure.

It felt like half a week, castle time, give or take a day. He’d only been gone, at most, six hours in subjective time. He wondered what had happened, if anything, in his absence. Probably nothing.

He came into the sitting room and collapsed on the settee. He wasn’t hurt. He had defied death again. He wondered why he liked to do that.

Silly. Very silly to keep doing it. One of these times he was going to be just a tad too silly and get his ticket punched.

He thought about Sativa.

Then he decided not to think about Sativa. Sativa belonged in another world. Her world was not his. No need to think of her at all. She wasn’t part of reality.

He thought about her anyway. He thought of her face and how pretty it was. Then the face became distorted by hate.

He didn’t want to think about her. He didn’t want to do anything just now except rest. He’d go to his room, catch a shower, and go to bed. When he got up he’d eat, then maybe go to the Gaming Hall and see what was cooking there. Maybe somebody wanted to get up a few rubbers of bridge. Or cribbage. Or whist or something. Trivial Pursuit?

He saw purple eyes and white hair.

Funny, it didn’t look old white, like hair on an old person. It was just white. Like the whitest blond. A little whiter than corn silk.

But she didn’t exist any longer. Her world — her worlds — didn’t really exist. Nothing really existed but the castle.

The places on the other side of these portals weren’t real, he told himself. They were movies. Yeah. They were 3-D Technicolor movies in Cinerama and Panavision with Dolby stereo sound. You could walk through them.

She’d been nothing but celluloid, the kind of stuff that dreams are made on.…

Dreams.