THE TRAMP-SCRITCH-TRAMP went on and on for hours. They were plainly right underneath a big Magh' push.
Trapped.
Chip could do nothing but sit in the darkness, conserving his torch power pack. He thought of sun and light and air. He couldn't help but think of the dead. Friends. Comrades-in-arms. And . . .
Dermott. Damn!
Here he was, as far as he knew the last surviving human in this hole. If he had to be honest with himself, Chip knew that they had no chance of getting out of here. It was a thought you pushed aside or you cracked up. He'd had to push aside the memory of death and the hope of survival so many times. After all, he'd been a conscript for seven months now. It felt like seven years. In this war he was a combat veteran. A conscript's lifespan in the front lines was usually less than three weeks.
Buddies were close, and yet . . . you kept your distance. You didn't want to get too close. Still, this time . . . he'd like to see another live human face. Dermott's, especially, but any human would be better than none. If push came to shove, Chip would even settle for a goddamn officer. Even if the alien soft-cyber enhanced rats and bats, with all their goofy attitudes and ideas, were still more his kind of folk than those sons-of-Shareholders were, he'd still like to see a living human again. . . .
Hell, he might as well wish for one with an hourglass figure too. And a few beers. A steak as thick as both his thumbs . . . Huh. He was getting more like one of the damn rats by the day.
The air was hot and stale in this hole. But at least the noises from above had begun to change.
"They're building." The low bat-whisper was the first thing besides Maggot susurration and his own quiet breathing and heartbeat that Chip had heard for hours now. He recognized Bronstein's voice easily enough. Despite the generic similarity of all the voices produced by the synthesizers, each rat and bat still managed to maintain a distinctive tone.
Chip ground his teeth. Maggot tunnels above them! Maggot tunnels could be miles wide and five hundred yards high. "Look, we've got to get out of here. We're gonna run out of air and suffocate soon anyway."
"We'd be foine if it wasn't for the primate using two-thirds of the oxygen," grumbled a bat. That was Behan, surly as usual. "Still, we should be able to start diggin' out now. Those builder-digger Maggots are really stupid. When I was in that mole in Operation Zemlya, we popped out right next to them. All they did was stand around and get butchered."
"When who starts digging?" sneered Fal. "You damn flyboys can't dig." The rat heaved his corpulent form upright. "Who does all the work around here, and why do we, hey, flyboy glamour-puss?"
"Work! 'Tis ignorant of the concept you rats are!" snapped the big male bat. He called himself Eamon Jugash . . . something or other. Chip couldn't remember. Or see the point. Bats didn't really have decent jugs, after all.
But that was bats for you. Bats always chose mile-long pretentious names for themselves, to replace their official Society-issued numbers. What Chip principally remembered about this one was that Big Dermott had said that that particular bat was trouble. He would tell her—
The realization hit him like a sledgehammer. He wasn't going to be telling Dermott anything. She was dead for sure, by now.
He was a bit shocked at how hard that knowledge hit him. It wasn't as if Dermott had had a dazzling personality or been any kind of a beauty queen. Not too bright, really, with a broad Vat face on a big workhorse body. But a nice girl all the same. A very nice girl. A girl with a dream . . . One more indebted conscript the Company wouldn't be collecting from.
Still, he had to make sure. Maybe—
He got up and began digging into the rubble.
"You're not going to get out that way, Connolly," said Siobhan.
"I'm looking for someone," he replied stubbornly.
"Nobody would still be alive."
"I know. But I can't just leave her. There's a chance."
"Dermott's dead," said the bat quietly. "A scorp got her, in the middle of cave-in. I saw."
Chip swallowed. He supposed that it had been an open secret. A private life in the trenches was a wild dream. "Are you sure?"
"Sure as breath. It was quick and painless, Connolly."
That was a lie. Scorp poison wasn't. But Siobhan had seen her die. That was plain enough. Poor kid. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and swore quietly to himself.
He sighed, and started to haul clods away behind the digging rats. Every single time you said, "Don't get involved, or, if you're gonna get involved, just keep it physical." But you always ended up exchanging dreams. Dermott had wanted a farm. Huh. A Vat-born indentured girl who wanted a farm! Fat chance. Farm laborer was the closest vatbrats could get. Well. The kid had bought one. And the Company wouldn't be screwing her any more, either. Yep, the only way out of the Shareholders' clutches . . . die. And then, rumor had it, they'd bill your clone for the burial charges.
"Responsible socialism," the New Fabian Society Shareholders called the system they'd set up on the colony planet of Harmony And Reason. HAR—or, as vatbrats called it, Har-de-har-har. When they weren't just calling it the Company Town.
Chip had been born here—grown here, rather—in one of the New Fabian Society's genetic production plants. Grown in a Company Vat, raised in a Company Nursery, and educated in a Company School. His "parents" were shreds of cryo-preserved tissue some long-dead dreamers had sent off on a slowship to this new "Utopia" among the stars.
Utopia—ha! Even the Shareholders, so far as Chip could tell, didn't believe that crap. At least, he'd heard them whine enough about Harmony And Reason in the haute cuisine restaurant where he'd worked before the war. Not that he'd had much opportunity to listen. He'd been an apprentice sous-chef after finishing Company school, and he hadn't had a lot to do with the clientele.
Still, he'd noticed that the Shareholders seemed to be especially grumpy about the sunlight. To Chip, the sunlight was not too blue, nor too hot. But the older Shareholders weren't local Vat-born clone kids like him. No, they'd been wealthy adults back on Old Earth—philanthropists, they called themselves—and had come along in cryo-suspension. The windows of Chez Henri-Pierre had been specially tinted to yellow the sunlight for them. According to them Earth light had been sweeter and better . . .
A rude voice interrupted his musing.
"Pull your finger out and move the damn stuff out of the way, Connolly."
Chip shook himself. He'd been falling asleep, he realized. Air . . .
"Dig us an air hole, Pistol."
"So that we can breath Maggot pong? And they can smell us?"
"We need oxygen, you . . ."
"Better make us some human oxygen out of your own air hole, you muddy rascal! I feel tired and I've got a headache. I don't feel like digging."
"Intercranial pressure because of vasodilation in the brain from oxygen deprivation," said Doc. "The lethargy is caused by raised CO2 levels."
For a moment, Chip was startled by the assurance in the bespectacled rat's voice. But then he reminded himself that Doc had proven, more than once, that he was an excellent medic. At least, when he wasn't droning on about epistemology and ontology and the whichness-of-what.
Chip unlimbered the Solingen. It seemed an effort. Like bothering with perfectly scalloping that last potato of the hundreds . . . Like that, this had to be done. "Dig straight up, Pistol, or I'll shove this up your ass and ruin your sex life." He noticed that his outstretched arm was trembling.
It wasn't a long dig. Moments later the rat broke through. The Maggot-tunnel air was cool, sweet and fresh by comparison to the stuff in their hole. The one eyed rat took long whiffling-nosed sniffs of it. "So okay, Connolly, you damned dunghill cur. My head already feels better. Maybe I won't piss in your next beer. Even Maggot-air smells good compared to the stuff in here. But don't ever threaten me with that poniard of yours again."
That was one villainous old rat. There were times to back off, and this was one of them. "You can empty your bladder into the next beer I buy, if you like. It'll be yours. I owe it to you, I reckon. Lack of air was making me silly."
The one-eyed rat was mollified. In a manner of speaking. "I'm a whiskey drinker, you skinny blue-bottle rogue. And I like triples. And I never pee in my own drinks."
"Give a rat an inch . . ." Chip smiled.
"And he'll think you're shafting him," concluded Pistol, with a suitable gesture.
"Will you two be getting out of the way so that we can all have a breath of air?" Eamon grumbled.