Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [51]
Now she was alone, weaponless and friendless, surrounded by kilometers of crumbling duracrete and metal in all directions.
Not to mention thirsty, hungry, and blind.
She forced herself to become calm and went through a ritual checklist that helped her regain control of whatever situation troubled her. Checklist, she began. One extravagantly capable political strategist whose skills are of no use here. One Yuuzhan Vong robeskin, a living garment whose sole virtue is that it’s better than running around naked, and matching footwraps.
That’s about it.
That wasn’t quite it. She’d been given something a million years ago, shortly before starting her run. She dug around under the robeskin neckline and held the object that pretty, doomed boy had handed her. It fit her palm so that a button fell under her thumb; there were two others on the reverse side. She pressed the first button.
A tiny red screen lit up on the remote, illuminating her surroundings—a sheet-metal duct, layered with dust, a meter wide by half a meter high. The screen showed a wireframe sphere with one bright red dot at its center and another at one point on its circumference. She slowly rotated her hand and saw the second dot move around, always staying at the circumference, always pointed in the same cardinal direction.
It was a location finder of some sort. A distant object transmitted a regular signal, and this device always pointed in the direction of that object.
She pressed one of the buttons on the reverse side. The wire-frame image disappeared, replaced by the words OUT OF RANGE.
She pressed the last button. The device spoke with the voice of a woman: “Remember, pick up a new charge for the speeder, and we’re having dinner with the Tussins tonight.”
Viqi supposed that the recording would have depressed someone of less personal strength. She didn’t even bother to wonder how dinner had gone. The woman who’d recorded the message was gone, either crushed or vaporized or in some slavering idiot’s stew-pot, and her sole virtue was that one of her possessions was now going to benefit Viqi Shesh. Whatever it might lead to, it was, for now, a light source.
She rolled over onto her stomach, shining the light in front of her, and began crawling.
Viqi stood at the center of what had once been a large living chamber, centerpiece of the apartment of some wealthy business family. There were numerous doors and hallways off this chamber, all leading to bedchambers, refreshers, recreation areas—all now wrecked by looters and invasive plant life.
To Viqi’s right, a few meters away, was a huge hole in the wall that had once been a viewport half again the height of a man, and twice as broad as it was high. Now creepers growing on the building’s face hung over the gap, and pieces of shattered transparisteel littered what had once been heated flex-carpet.
Fungus was everywhere, grayish mushroomlike growths that were larger toward the hole. She’d stepped on one of the tiny ones and it had detonated beneath her foot, making her instep very sore and damaging the living footwrap she wore. She was careful not to touch any more, and it was clear that much of the damage to the chamber had come about because of the fungi—obviously, many of them had exploded over the last several weeks. Perhaps vibrations in the crumbling buildings set them off, perhaps they simply detonated when they reached a certain size.
The wall in front of Viqi was ferrocrete that had once been decorated, its utilitarian strength disguised, by a thick layer of flexible sheeting decorated in a starfield pattern. Attached to building power, the sheet’s stars and nebula would glow. Now the sheeting hung in strips. She’d torn most of it away and could find nothing beyond but ferrocrete.
On the other side of it was another crumbling skyscraper. In her explorations, she’d managed to get onto the corresponding floor of that building, but on its far side; collapsed hallways and walls had prevented her from getting closer.
The tracking device had led her here, and this was the point that