Lois Bujold - Captain Vorpatril's alliance

“And how do we get out, if they’re laying for us at the only exit?” asked Amiri a bit plaintively.

“Oh,” said Shiv sadly, “I imagine all we have to do is sit down and wait a bit. Ivan Xav’s stepda will be along. To collect on his bet.” He added after a tight-jawed moment, “ Dammit . We were so close .”

“Who the hell is Ivan Xav?” said Imola, clearly bewildered by these additions to the play-list. “Or his stepda?”

Ivan hunkered down in front of the man. “I am,” he told Imola, with false geniality. “My stepda used to run that big building”—not being quite sure how the lab was turned in relation to ImpSec HQ, or which side the erratic Mycoborer had put them in on, Ivan made his wave vague but generally upward—“full of humorless men whom everybody but you has gone to great pains to not attract. But that’s all right. I’m sure you’ll be getting to know them really well, really soon. And vice versa.”

Ivan thought Imola had processed the ImpSec is coming for you part of this, which really wasn’t much of a stretch at this point, but not the rest. He stared at Ivan in personal bewilderment, then back at Shiv.

“In that case,” he croaked, “maybe we should team up again, huh?”

Shiv just snorted.

“I don’t know, Dada,” said Pidge, tapping the captured stunner thoughtfully in her palm. “Perhaps we should reexamine our op—”

It felt as if a giant’s hands had cupped Ivan and pressed inward at all points at once. He didn’t exactly hear the boom, because his hearing had gone wonky in that instant, but he felt it in his bones. Tej may have yelped; in any case, her mouth moved.

Ivan fell back on his butt. A couple of cases thudded to the floor, knocked off their stacks.

And it was over.

All the Arquas were working their jaws, trying to get their eardrums to pop back. Imola cried, in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a great distance, “What the hell was that ?”

Ivan climbed back up as far as his knees. “Sergeant Abelard’s time bomb,” he managed to get out, over the ringing and hissing and rumbling, most but worryingly not all of which seemed to be coming from inside his own head. “Running thirty-five years late.”

Tej drew breath against the appalling concussion that had seemed for a moment to crush her lungs, and pushed herself upright from the stack of cases she’d stumbled against. She braced for an aftershock. But except for the humming in her ears, only silence came from the dark, open doorway into the tunnel.

“ Rish . Jet!” she gasped, and bolted for the aperture. She held up her cold light, making dull gleams race over the uneven black walls, and ran down the slope. Around the first, or last, bend.

Behind her, she could hear Ivan Xav’s strained shout, “Tej, no!” and the thump of heavy, slippered feet. She didn’t look back.

She dodged through the kink. Another straight, descending stretch. The next kink. She was almost back to the storm sewer pipe; the breach and the bomb hadn’t been much beyond that. What if Rish and Jet were trapped under some fall of dirt, tons of dirt, like the poor sergeant? Could they dig them out before they suffocated—if they weren’t crushed already—and were there any tools back in the lab for—she skidded to a halt.

Filling the tunnel before her feet was a flat stretch of roiling, dark water. The downward slant of the tunnel, here, brought the roof to its level; the water lapped at the tunnel top. A sort of water seal—she could not make out any dirt- or rock-fall beyond it. Though the blast must have both broken open and collapsed the pipe, to dam and back its flow up into the Mycoborer maze. She put one foot into the icy water. How deep did it go? Could she swim through to the other side—or was there no other side, the tunnel over there flattened?

Ivan Xav’s hand grabbed her arm and yanked her back. “No,” he gasped. “Don’t you dare!”

She gulped, and tossed her cold light out as far as it would go. It bobbed a moment and sank slowly; but its glow was quickly occluded in the opaque brown murk of the bubbling water. She could see nothing through it. Scum rings twisted on the moving surface.

As they stared, aghast, Grandmama jogged up—Tej had never seen her move faster than a dignified stride, before, and finding her breathless was weirdly jarring. She stared with them, then, hesitantly, stepped back and put a hand to her belt. The pale oval force-field sprang out around her, buzzing and sputtering.

“No, Lady ghem Estif!” said Ivan Xav. “That bloody thing is shorting out already. It won’t hold, and once the water gets in, it’ll kill you outright.”

Reluctantly, her hand fell once more, and the field died away. Her lips moved numbly in her carved face. “I’m afraid your evaluation is correct, Captain Vorpatril.” She looked…old.

“What can we do?” Tej’s whisper was not, now, for secrecy.

Ivan Xav glanced down where the waves nibbled at his toes. “Back up. Water’s still rising.” They all did so, peering uneasily downward.

“We must return to the lab, and stay inside,” said Grandmama, with a glance around. “The freshest areas of the Mycoborer tunnel have a certain amount of flex and rebound, but that concussion may have cracked the more cured sections. Very unstable, very unsafe.”

“It was pretty hardened around the, the bomb,” said Tej. “What if it collapsed on Rish and Jet? What if they’re buried?”

“Or drowning,” muttered Ivan Xav. “Or buried and drowning, oh God.”

Grandmama hesitated. “If they were close to the explosion, I don’t expect they’ll have survived to experience either. If they weren’t.” The last sentence fragment stopped rather than trailed. She didn’t finish the thought aloud.

Ivan Xav was swearing under his breath, or praying—it was hard to tell which. But, his hand still gripping Tej’s arm too hard, he turned her around, and they all started back.

“It was a squib,” he said after a minute.

“What?” said Tej.

“Sergeant Abelard’s bomb. If it was originally intended for ImpSec, it should have turned this whole city block into a crater. The explosives were deteriorated. Just…not quite enough.”

“But I saw those eye-pins on his collar,” said Tej. Because otherwise she would start talking about Rish and Jet, and saying stupid, hopeful, unlikely things, and the spinning words would hurt like razors. “Would an ImpSec man have been trying to blow up ImpSec?” Maybe he’d been a bomb-disposal man, instead…?

“I looked him up,” said Ivan Xav. “Yesterday. Maybe it’s day before yesterday, by now.” His stricken gaze darted around the tunnel, permanently night but for the jerking cold-light beams poking between his and Grandmama’s tight grips. “He was one of Negri’s boys, but all his records say is that he disappeared during the Pretendership. He could have been on the Lord Regent’s side, trying to take out the building when Vordarian’s troops held it. Or he could have been one of Vordarian’s—they had men inside all the corps, the whole military was divided—either before or after. Once…” He swallowed. “Once Simon might have known. Which. Offhand.”

They stepped back inside the lab, where, apparently, some argument between Dada and Ser Imola had just ended; at any rate, Imola was sitting on the floor clutching his jaw and moaning, and Dada was rubbing his knuckles and being very narrow-eyed. He looked up at them, gaze widening. “Did you find—” he began, then, seeing their faces, cut himself off. “What did you find?”

“We can’t tell how much of the tunnel is collapsed, if any, because evidently the blast cracked that storm sewer,” said Grandmama. “Water was pouring in. It had filled the portion of the tunnel nearest the pipe already.”