Fortune's Light - Michael Jan Friedman [40]
“You come back,” said Lyneea. “I’ve had it with this burrowing. Somewhere in Besidia, there’s a real lead, and we’re not getting any closer to it by playing with rocks.”
Riker felt a gobbet of anger rise into his throat. “All right,” he said, surprising himself with the calm in his voice. “I’ll pursue this by myself.” And he walked on ahead.
“You’ve been duped,” called his partner, standing her ground. “We’ve been duped. The robed one deceived us, Riker—can’t you see that? She sent us up here to throw us off. Who knows? Maybe Conlon hired her.”
He kept walking. The passage turned abruptly to the left, and he followed it. Lyneea’s voice followed him.
“Damn it, Riker! What makes you so sure that beggar knew anything? Just tell me that, will you?”
He couldn’t—he’d already said so. Up ahead there was some debris. Evidence of another collapse—a small one?
The sound of Lyneea’s boots scraping on the floor. “Don’t walk away while I’m talking to you, Riker. Who in the name of ten thousand credits do you think you are?”
Arriving at the brink of the cave-in, he knelt and peered into the blackness, then took out his beamlight and activated it.
“I thought we were partners,” rasped Lyneea. She was coming up behind him—and fast. “That implies some kind of trust, don’t you think? Some duty to let the other partner know what in blazes is going on?”
The beam sliced open the hole’s black belly. At first glance, there was nothing—the same nothing they’d found in all the other holes they’d slithered through. He moved the light around.
“Chits and whispers, Riker. At least have the decency to look at me. I mean, I—”
He must have gasped then. Or shouted. That’s what he told himself later. At the time, however, he wasn’t aware of having done either. The blood was pounding too hard in his ears, like a heavy surf thundering on a rocky beach.
Ice blue eyes, staring unflinchingly at the light. High cheekbones, a cleft chin. The reddish blond hair that had become its owner’s trademark.
Teller. No …
He played the beam over his friend’s features again and again. Hoping that what he saw was only an illusion, a trick of the way the rocks had come to rest on one another, and if he looked at them long enough, he’d find a way out of the nightmare… .
Finally it was Lyneea’s voice, coming from over his shoulder, that made the reality of it congeal and hold fast: “Damn it, Riker, it’s him.”
Even then his impulse was to deny it—if not Teller’s presence here, then the fact that he was dead. Clamping the beamlight between his teeth, he began to descend into the pit.
“Careful, Riker. Careful, I said. Blazes, there’s no need to hurry like that. He’s beyond your help.”
But Riker wasn’t buying it. He lowered himself by hanging on to a flat rock that had fallen across the opening until he was suspended directly above a short slope of gravel and detritus. Then he dropped, landed on all fours, and slid and crab-walked his way down to the bottom to where Teller lay—open-mouthed as if in surprise, eyes like jewels in the flickering, unsteady light. Unsteady, Riker realized, because he was trembling, and the beamlight was trembling along with him.
Teller was pale, terribly pale. There should have been at least a wisp of breath twisting up from between his lips; there wasn’t. Riker took off a glove and felt his friend’s neck: there was no pulse.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, where he could still think clearly, where the thing he confronted had not spread its pollution, Riker heard the stones grind on the debris-covered escarpment. Lyneea had followed him into the pit.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
“Fine,” he told her. The word came out of him, anyway. He wasn’t sure how or from where, but it came out.
He touched the pallid brow, cold as the stones. Shut the obscenely gawking eyes.
Teller, Teller, Teller.
He had to accept it now; the evidence was only inches from his face. He had to embrace the truth.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
He forced