Matthew S. Cox's Blog

Cover Reveal | Thrall Daughter of Mars #76 | A Plea in Dark...

Daughter of Mars #75 | (A Plea In Darkness part 1)

Divergent_Fate_revision_2

Consciousness invaded the abyss of Risa’s dreamless sleep. She curled on her side, half buried in a mass of trash sucked up into the ventilation system over many decades. The plastic box she used for a pillow had likely been in the duct longer than she’d been alive. Her eyelids peeled apart, breaking the perfect dark with swaths of violet reflection on the dull plastisteel walls. Risa didn’t bother with night vision; fourteen stories below the surface of Mars, there wasn’t anything she wanted to see.

Boop. A soft tone pulsed from the NetMini on her belt, alerting her to unanswered messages.

What am I doing? She sighed, still not bothering to move. Hiding in the vents again like a kid.

Boop.

“Persistent thing.” Trash crinkled and compressed as she pushed herself up to sit. A crinkled plastic cup bounced off her shoulder and landed in her lap. “I wonder what Garrison wants me to blow up this time.”

A quick mental urge triggered a wireless connection between her headware and NetMini. Aqua letters appeared in a holo-panel dimmed to compensate for the lack of ambient light, indicating eleven messages from Tamashī, two from Aurelia, and one from Garrison. Her stomach protested its current empty state with a snarl. She leaned forward and crossed her arms over her knees, forehead to forearms.

“Wow. Three whole people wondering where I went.”

She reached out and poked the air where Tamashī’s name appeared to be. All eleven messages were variations of “Plz call me”, with ‘me’ growing by several ‘e’s per each successive email. Maybe she can help.

An attempt to send a short “okay” failed with a ‘no signal’ error.

“So that’s how I managed to sleep.”

Aurelia’s first Vidmail appeared to come from inside an MDF facility, judging from the crimson-clad figures moving around behind her. Probably her desk. The woman looked exhausted, and a thick layer of dust coated her armored shoulders. Aurelia closed her eyes to let out a long sigh before leaning close to the camera.

“No leads yet. Whoever we’re looking for knows how to cover their tracks. How’d it go with the big S?” Aurelia glanced to her side. “Damn, gotta go. Stupid psych eval. There ain’t enough coffee on Mars.”

Aurelia’s second contact took the form of a text-only message: “No contact too long. Worried. Are you okay?”

She skipped Garrison’s message, dispelling the virtual holo-panel with an arm wave. The ‘screen’ shattered into ‘glass’ fragments, reminding her she had not yet set up interface preferences for her new NIU. Feeling a mixture of foolish and hungry, she crawled free of the gathered junk. Her Wraith implant rendered the walls of the junction chamber in the ducts as planes of grey whenever she moved. All three passages out rested near the roof, five feet off the floor. Risa pulled herself up into the one she’d entered from, identifiable by the open grating.

As a child, she had never gone much deeper than Tier 6, being afraid of stories of mutants, monsters, and homicidal robots lurking in the dark. Now, the deep tunnels offered a place where she could effectively vanish from the world. Nine hours ago, she had ducked into the first open chamber she could find, barely conscious. Risa climbed up through the nearest vertical connector, which spanned five stories and emerged from a floor grating in an inter-sector air handler as large as a standard apartment dwelling. Within the two-story structure, a henge of six fifteen-foot fans drew air from a cavernous opening in the ceiling and forced it down the various offshoots around the walls. Unending wind whipped her hair about; the swirling vortex made any effort to contain it futile.

For a moment, she stared straight up through the blur of fan blades. Disabling the roof fan long enough to climb through was possible, but she couldn’t climb the inner wall of a hollow pyramid without climbing gear, not to mention the shaft beyond it was too wide to brace her body against the sides. She backtracked along the maintenance catwalk, followed a set of metal grating stairs to the second floor, and hit the emergency stop on a five-foot air mover at the head end of a northerly tunnel. When the blades scraped to a halt, she ducked through and walked. Seconds later, the fan started up, creating a gale strong enough to force her up to a trot. She jogged to the end of the shaft, fifty meters later, and jumped down three feet into another junction chamber.

When she crouched at the opening of a smaller branch-off, her growling stomach echoed through the duct. The noise seemed to startle a metal spider-bot the size of a housecat, distracting it from its tireless search for vermin. It swiveled to face her, raising its front four legs, which sprouted small retractable blades. Once it determined her human, it went back to its task. Risa chuckled under her breath, remembering the scream she let off the first time she’d seen one of those.

“I gotta get out of these shafts. I’m done hiding.”

It is good to hear you say that.

The voice of Raziel shocked through her nerves with a charge that left her paralyzed and unable to scream. Four seconds after he spoke, she collapsed on her chest in the pose of a murder victim.

“R-Raziel,” she wheezed.

Forgive my long silence. I have not forgotten you.

Tears welled up at the corners of her eyes. “I thought you were angry at me for failing.” She struggled to pull herself upright, but her muscles refused to move. “Ngh; what’s wrong with me?”

You did not fail. You saved many lives in Arden.

She moaned through clenched teeth, drawing her knees to her chest and curling into a ball. “Pavo… Is it true?”

I am sorry, Risa. He has been taken to a place I cannot see.

“No…” How could an angel not be able to―Hell… that’s not fair! All fight left her body; she sobbed. “It’s not right.” Hollowness spread through her gut, consuming her.

Do not let sorrow take root in your heart.

“It’s not sorrow.” Risa grunted and pushed herself up onto all fours, and crawled into the duct. “They all think I’m a tí-zhèn, an assassin. I’m going to prove them right.”

The people of Mars need you.

She shuddered under the weight of his voice, and collapsed flat with a resounding boom that repeated into the distance. Despite the burning in her arms, she kept dragging herself forward. “They n-needed Pavo too.” She grunted. “Did you hear them in Concourse 3? Not one of them cares. They think the UCF protects them from us. They think we’re trying to hurt them.”

The pig adores the farmer until it becomes a ham.

“I don’t have any idea what that means.” She forced herself back up to a crawl. “Why should I care what happens to these people? When I was with him was the only time in my life I’ve ever felt happy. Someone took it away from me. If I was nobody I’d―”

Have watched it happen and been helpless to stop it. What happened to Pavo was not about you, Risa. He was with the Pueri Verum Martis before you knew he existed.

“Maybe whoever attacked him wouldn’t have found him if…” She stopped; her breathless gasps for air echoed in the tight confines.

It is not your fault.

“If you didn’t send―”

Then everyone in Arden would be dead now. Do you believe Pavo would think his life worth a hundred?

She cried, lowering her forehead to the cold metal as she wailed. “It is to me.”

Raziel waited until her grief fell silent. I know you don’t mean that.

“Why didn’t you warn us?” She sniffled, wiped her face, and moved into the bottom of another vertical shaft.

I do not foresee all things. The architect of that plan acted on a whim, without preparation.

“So I’m supposed to go on like he never existed? Like everything’s fine?”

It is your destiny.

“My destiny?” After two stories, she hauled her body over the edge of a square hole, and slid into a horizontal passage. “Right now, my destiny is to find everyone responsible for what happened to Pavo.”

You’re not a killer, Risa.

She took a few breaths, resting from her climb. “I’m not? Tell that to the people in the nano-weapons lab.” Pavo went to Hell for it. I guess we’ll be together someday. “Before you say ‘they were going to kill thousands’, maybe it’s still wrong to kill them first.”

The most direct way to prevent a threat is to remove it. Destroying the facility was critical.

“I don’t understand anymore. None of this makes sense.” We’re damning ourselves for people who couldn’t care less. “I don’t know why you chose me or why things happened the way they did. When this is over, when the people responsible―”

The people need you.

“The people need a lot of things. I’m not the only tí-zhèn on the planet.” Risa cringed inside, debating the wisdom of hurling sarcasm at an angel.

Kree needs you.

Risa halted at another ladder that would take her to a street-level intake on Tier 2. Air laced with the flavor of metal and the scent of street food awoke the monster in her belly. Guilt at the expression on Kree’s face when she had begged her not to go to Arden put it back to sleep.

“Raziel?”

I am here.

“I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked of me for almost five years.”

That is true.

“I haven’t asked you for much in return.”

Almost nothing, except to free those women.

She crept to the end of the shaft, crouching behind the grate and peering through the slats at a secluded courtyard beyond. Four street punks wearing the neon green logo of the SecSpiders lounged around on old plastisteel shipping crates as big as caskets. One tended pale slabs of meat sizzling upon a rebuilt e-grill. A long, shallow box lay on the ground at his feet, filled with clear plastic film. Judging by the “Ernesto’s” logo on the side, the gangers had scored an entire plank of vat-grown chicken. Risa wasn’t sure what a chicken looked like, but she doubted they were big enough to carve off a five-foot long slab. The idea of a tank of green slime filled with hundreds of rectangular ingots of meat struck her as neither appetizing nor off-putting.

Whispering in the dark drew her gaze to the far side of the courtyard. A tiny grating opened, allowing pair of preteen boys in tattered clothes to creep out of the shadows, drawn by the scent of food. Her breath stalled in her throat as the children approached the notoriously violent gang. She knew full well how such a fragrance could overpower fear. A lifetime ago, she had been the rat crawling from the tunnel.

The boys approached slow and wide-eyed, young enough to hope their odds at begging outweighed their chances at escaping alive with thievery.

“Would ya lookit that then,” said the man cooking. “What’cha fink we should do?”

“Sorry.” The boy on the left stopped; the hope in his eyes gave way to fear.

The SecSpiders laughed.