(No Rock, but Definitely a Hard Place) Part 2
Coauthors: Rodlox (rodlox@hotmail.com) & Gok (h_raelynn@hotmail.com)
Rating: G (no bad words worse than the show had, anyway)
Part: 2 of 2
[thoughts are shown in square brackets]
*****
G'kar, that that moment, was wondering how long he'd been in the dark. He was used to dark, and to underground, and to being held against his will, but all the occasions previous, he had never been in the dark and underground while unknown and bizzare creatures kept him there because they were 'curious'. After arriving in his current place, a single alien had come down the corridor and inside, making clicking sounds as it pressed its large footpads against him, and the occasional 'chrrr' deep in its throat. He had tried talking to it, but there had been no response, and he had not wanted to use force, in case the alien would let him go right afterwards. It had not, however, and he had been sitting there, alone, ever since it had sealed him in again upon its departure.
He hoped he was alone - there were no others in the little cell, but he could hear scratching, shuffling, clawlike noises from across and slightly down the corridor. Whatever was making the sounds, they could not reach or get past the latticework that formed the door to the cell, growing right out of the oddly-textured surface that formed the rest of the boundary. He'd already been trying for some time to pry his way out, but he simply was not strong enough. But scratching things aside, he was alone. The aliens that had made him come down here had not reappeared in the long black hours since, and he only hoped that Lyta could figure out a way to free him.
That had started him worring that the growing delay meant that she was also imprisoned. Or that she had given up and left, since she was fully capable of piloting the ship herself and continuing her search for a homeworld.
Down the blackness of the corridor, he heard the noises suddenly stop, to instead by replaced by a faint whirring sound. He found himself wondering what the baby aliens ate, when he realised the new sound was coming from the same direction that now had a faint light.
It was not the aliens, he soon saw, but a little land-probe such as the ship had several of. It was dragging several attachments with it and a narrow length of cable that disappeared from sight into the blackness behind. It had a light turned on and it's sensors out, and it was slowly picking its way through the dried slime trails that covered the floor. Within a few minutes, it had stopped just outside the doorway, and waved a single sensor to say hello.
"I'd say I'm glad to see your face, but I can't, so I won't. I don't know if you can even hear me." He paused to see if the probe gave a reaction. When it didn't, he took a slight step back and guestured at the thick bands that crisscrossed in front him. The probe whirred for a few more moments, scanning the bars with its light and some of the sensor ends. Then the little attachments it had been dragging along came to life, disconnecting from the probe. A cluster of tiny robots sprang free of a case, each firing up a tiny light of its own, and began to scurry along the corridor in every direction, quickly vanishing around the bends. The remaining three attachents, still connected to the probe by narrow power cables, walked forward to the bars. One of them fired up a little welding arc, and started to cut at the nearest bar. Another had a ragged blade and the third had a bright, narrow laser. They each took up a position at the base of one of the bars, and set to work. It took several minutes, but they had soon each made a substantial notch into the bar they were attacking. G'kar sat down to wait, noticing that the scratching sounds were gradually returning as the creatures that gave them off grew less afraid of the light and started to move again.
It might have been a hour, it might have been closer to two, but the little robots were eventually through their first bars and had started to sever another when something disasterous happened. The scratching creatures, having regained their courage, had managed to grab onto the cable that swept back along the passageway, and with a shower of sparks, the probe was suddenly yanked backwards to a squeal of gears, and the three cutters were dragged back along with it. G'kar caught a breif glimpse of the animals as the light's last dying glow showed a swarm of large snake-shaped things, each with a considerable collection of insectoid legs and six crab-pincers around each of their mouths. He was momentarily glad that they were also trapped behind a set of bars and so could not reach him, because of the shredding, grinding sound of metal being easily ripped apart with even more sparks and the crackling of pulled wires.
Then he again felt extremely frustrated, because now it was dark again, and there were a great many more bars left to cut through before he could get out into the corridor, nevermind back to the surface and to the ship. But he was now certain that Lyta had not left, that she had been trying - and might have succeeded, had there been another day or so of uninterrupted cutting - to free him.
With a deep sigh, he sat down on the floor of the cell to wait, trying to ignore the scraping, scratching noises that the crab-snake things were making as they chewed the probe and cutters into fragments.
*****
It was a long wait, several hours at least, though he was not certain of the exact time it took. The only interruptions to the silence were breif - a few minutes into the darkness, there was a sudden, loud, and extremely bright explosion - they had bitten into the fuel tank for the welder robot. After the small, hot fireball had dissapated in the passageway, there were no more sounds at all out of the cell with the crab-snakes. A short while afterwards, however, he could hear - and smell over the stench of scorched alien snake - that a few of the sentient aliens were down the passage, investigating. They did not enter his cell, however, only moved their oversized bodies along the corridor to check the blasted cell, and made a few of the same deep 'chrrr' sounds he'd heard before. Then he was again left undisturbed to wait.
It was not forever, though, just long enough for a light sleep and time to get rather thirsty, before the dim glow of another light again was seen through the lattice that kept him caged. This light, however, was coming from the opposite direction than the first, and he did not know what it meant until he heard the most-welcome sound of a red-headed telepath calling out for him.
"Like a choir of angels arrayed upon a heavenly staircase, the song is both most wonderous and most welcome!" He said, grinning like a fool as he saw her come around a curve. Then, "Why are you wet?"
"Nice to see you, too. I found a way out. It's rather far though, and it gets rather tricky at the end." Besides the few lights she had - one of which she handed through the spaces in the lattice to him along with a long, slightly serrated knife - she was carrying a largish case with her, as well as a small bag slung around her neck and one shoulder. The case she set down and opened, it had a fairly large peice of welding equipment, which she quickly hooked up. "Don't talk, just listen for the Chur. My head hurts too much to even try to scan down here." She looked at and felt the edges of the bars that had been cut. "I don't know if they'll grow back in if they're cut right out, but I sure as hell hope not. Stand back and cover your eyes."
She fired up the torch, adjusted the flame so that it was white-hot and several inches long, then started on the bars, taking only a few minutes to sever each one, letting them drop down as she cut both ends. G'kar took the knife and started to work on a bar in the middle. She worked from the ground up, and got almost a third of the bars completely severed before the flame began to flicker. Swearing in more languages than G'kar could recognise or even count, Lyta adjusted the fuel a little bit and tried to work even faster. She had less than half the space cut open before the torch died off completely, and Lyta flung it to the side in anger. G'kar, working with his knife, had only gotten halfway through the bar he had been trying to sever, but the torch had put a similar groove into the other end of the same bar. The narn got down on his knees and tried to fit through, but he was simply too big to fit. "Either I need a very fast diet, or we still need to get this last bar out of the way."
"No shit, Sherlock. But I can't use my telekinesis to pull at it, I can't do much of anything while we're down here," she said, and took hold of the weakened bar. "But I'll pull if you push." They each took hold of it, and after a few tries and re-adjusting of hands to get a better leverage, the bar cracked and then broke off, the force of it landing Lyta on her ass against the far wall. She swore again - with even more unfamiliar phrases - as she got to her feet. "If you don't fit now, you're offically screwed. Try again."
G'kar could get his torso into the gap, but he was quickly stuck again. He wriggled back and tried again, with his arms going first and Lyta pulling, but he still got wedged in. His patience had worn very thin by that point, and he used a few choice words of his own as he pulled back into the cell.
Lyta sat there, staring miserably for a few minutes, while G'kar contemplated the fact that she might have to leave without him. Then, she suddenly said "take your shirt off."
"What?"
"Your jacket and vest are heavy and thick - it might give you the extra inch or so of clearance you need. Try it."
He stripped down, and passed the garments out the hole. Then he tried again, getting further, so he sucked in his breath and scraped through, earning several deep and long bleeding gashes where the rough ends of the cut bars had dug into his skin. But he was out, and they both felt better for it.
"Come on, this way - take the lights - wait," she suddenly stopped to pick up the pieces of lattice, and tossed them through the gap into the cell. "Maybe they won't come check on you for a while, if they don't know you've been sprung. The Chur were very keen on you staying. We cannot afford to be caught." She threw the torch into the case and slammed it closed while he pulled his clothing back on, hiding how badly the cuts hurt. "This way, hurry." She picked up the case and headed back the way she came.
"Why this way - I came in the other direction - didn't I?"
"Yeah, but - watch your feet here - that passage is too narrow to fit through, and I can't cut through it since it wasn't the bars. The whole surface of the planet is littered with - well, the Chur, but not the ones you saw on the top. Those are just the girls - the males aren't mobile, but the females can sense them, even control them. That's how the trellis and passages work."
"Males? Where? Acting as guards?"
Lyta stopped breifly to check a tiny portable screen with a rough map on it, and placed her hand on the wall. "Right here - they're huge, buried, and a hell of a migraine inducer. We're in one right now, but there's normal rock a few hundred feet further down, near the water."
G'kar didn't know what to say to that.
Many more long minutes passed as they half-ran and half-climbed along the twists and drops of the passages - stopping at every intersection to look for the aliens - then suddenly they were jumping from the large, oval passages to a crack in the rock, much more difficult to move through since there wasn't anything even resembling a floor. But the deep crevase only lasted a few feet before the roof of it dropped down, forcing them to carefully descend down and along to where the lights reflected off a dark surface. It was there that Lyta finally slowed down, carefully looking behind and above to where the aliens might have been pursuing them, but she saw nothing.
"Did we take a wrong turn?" G'kar asked, carefully perched between two near-vertial slabs of rock, and feeling rather cramped in the little pool of light, with the darkness pressing around and the water looking very mysterious mere inches from his braced feet.
"No. The little explorer drones I set out in the tunnel back there? Only one of them found a way back to the surface that we could fit through. This is how." She handed him the case to hold while she dug through the bag around her shoulders. Then she handed him a little mouthpeice, with a strange filter attached to it. "Put this in, and hold your nose closed, you won't be able to hold your breath long enough to reach the main part of the lake, nevermind the shore."
"Lake? I can't swim! I'm a Narn! We're too heavy!"
"Then drop down behind me, and then walk along the bottom until you can reach air. It's not a big lake. I moved the ship to the shore, as long as we come up near enough to it, the Chur shouldn't be able to stop us. I hope. They didn't want you to leave, but maybe they won't have noticed yet. I'll probably lose sight of you, being faster. They've just ignored me so far - I'll watch the shorelines - don't climb out of water, just poke your top half out. I'll look for you and move the ship to wherever you are, save you from walking around."
"This is a breather for underwater, an artificial gill."
"I know that. Pop it in and let's go before I pass out. Your surgical ones won't work in a liquid environment, remember?"
"Lyta - I assumed I would never have to enter the water, short of a full environmental suit - I only had one on the ship. What are you going to use?"
She didn't answer.
"Lyta! Are you planning on holding your breath for however long it takes? How far is it?"
"Too far to hold my breath, but trust me - I'll make it. If you can take the welder, do so, but drop it if you must - it was the only large one we had, and it can be refuelled if it gets back to the ship. But if you need to drop it, do so. Just follow my lights until you can see the daylight." With that, she folded her legs under her and dropped in.
A few seconds of horrified silence followed as the Narn stared at the dark water, a pale glow in one small location to mark where she waited. Then, clamping his mouth tight on the breather, he lowered himself down, the icy cold water covering his feet then his legs then his head, and he tried not to panic as he felt the great weight suddenly pressed around him. He had only the one light, and it did very little to illuminate his surroundings. He let himself drop, braking against the rock walls for as long as they lasted, but following the lights that Lyta carried. She seemed to be waiting for him every few meters, but never waited long enough for him to actually see her.
It seemed to take a very long time to reach the bottom, but the pressure increase seemed to show they had not gone much below the surface, even if the pressure was much, much greater than what was comfortable.
Once at the bottom; a mix of thick mud and rocky outcroppings, he had to let go of the case to half-pull along with his hands while continuing to push with his legs, or else he was too slow to move forward before sinking into the ensnaring mud. Lyta was apparently above him some distance, but she still moved slow enough to be followed. It was again an intermitably long struggle, dark and beyond cold, but eventually he could see light from above him, though he did not reach water shallow enough to stand up in for even longer. When he finally could put his head above the water, he took the deepest, most welcome breath of air he'd ever had.
Then he looked around, taking a few more steps through the mud, feeling more tired than he could imagine. He could see the ship, just settling down, a few feet inland on the gravel of the shoreline, and he started for it, promising himself a long, hot steam treatment as soon as they left the system. He was just bringing his knees out of the water when he saw them: more Chur, a group of more than a dozen of them walking calmly from several directions, and not more than a few hundred feet from the ship.
He ran the last few paces, and scrambled in through the hatch, spraying water and gravel everywhere as he threw the breather into a corner and slammed the controls to close the hatch behind him, shouting, "Take off! Take off!" up the ladder towards the cockpit. As it closed, he could see more of the dreaded bars extruding from the ground, pushing up small piles of gravel as they rose, reaching out for the ship as it sat there. She must have seen the restraints growing too, because he hadn't finished yelling before he was knocked to the floor from the sudden lurch of a rather inelegant liftoff, before the growths could reach over and hold the ship down. He staggered up to the cockpit, not reaching it before the surface was many miles behind them as they sped away, obscured by clouds.
Lyta was there, just as dripping wet, and coughing miserably as she tried to manage the controls. He collapsed into the other chair, infinitely glad to be off of that place. "Next time," he wheezed, "We CHECK before we try and rescue anything."
"Amen," Lyta coughed.
They sat there are dripped in silence for a few more minutes, as the view changed to show stars and they headed for the jumpgate. It was Lyta who finally broke the silence, to laugh slightly as she coughed, wiping away filmy green-brown lakewater scum from her mouth.
"What's so funny?"
"I was just thinking. I finally got you out of trouble, instead of always the reverse. Let's not do either again, though. Too much work."
G'kar smiled back, then leaned forward to check to controls. "Unless the chronometer is wrong, we've been there more than three days."
"Too much work," Lyta repeated, and got up to leave. "You fly this thing for a while. I need a shower and a triple shot of whiskey."
"I didn't think it was that long. One tends to lose all track of time in a place that."
Lyta, halfway out the door, stopped dead in her tracks, then turned around very slowly. "Don't - ever - say - that - again!"
Then she left, suddenly more pissed of than tired.
G'kar took the ship through the gate and set a course into the autopilot, wondering what he'd said now.
****
(end)