But he saw no bodies. While it was true that any one of the huge stones could conceal several crushed warriors, he felt uneasy. He raised his pistol again, holding its wavering muzzle before him as he stepped into the maze of fallen slabs. He struggled from rock to rock, clambering up on top of a massive stone, scrabbling across it, and dropping down to the debris-strewn floor before starting the process over again.
After letting himself down from a crazily canted slab, he was sizing up the next climb when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Forgetting about his ripped leg as he reached for his holstered blaster, he turned toward the movement and dropped into a crouch. At least, it would have been a crouch had his leg not collapsed under him. Cursing in pain, anger, and fear, he fell into a heap among the sharp shards of stone, cutting himself in a dozen different places. His pistol fell from his grip, clattering to the ground in a puff of dust.
Sitting motionless, helpless, he stared uncomprehendingly at what had startled him: a hand. A huge Kreelan hand, with the biggest set of talons he had ever seen, protruded from the gap formed by the huge slab as it rested on another, smaller chunk of rock. The hand moved, clawing at the rock, as the owner sought to escape from her prison.
“Holy shit,” Eustus breathed, able now to hear his own curses beyond the slowly fading ring in his ears. Ignoring the pain in his leg, where blood again seeped from the partially stripped bandage, he moved closer to the hand and the dark aperture leading to the tiny prison of stone. He saw a pair of eyes glowering malevolently at him from a face that was shadowy, indistinct in the dim light. With an angry grunt the Kreelan assaulted the slab, pushing against it with all the leverage she could muster in her cramped position. He watched in awe as the enormous slab lifted as the warrior strained within, rising a few centimeters, then a few centimeters more.
But it was not enough. With a cry of anguish, the warrior gave up and the stone slammed home again, dust shaking from it like tiny flakes of snow. He could hear her harsh and ragged breathing through the persistent buzz in his ears.
He was tempted to just turn and leave her there, to die of thirst and starvation, or perhaps bleed to death if she was injured. But he knew Reza would not have approved. The Kreelan had done no more than her duty, he supposed, whatever that might have been. No, he told himself, it would not cost anything to put her out of her misery quickly. The Kreelans had killed many of his people, for whatever reason, but they had never sought simply to inflict pain on humans, as through torture; that seemed to be reserved for humans to do to themselves.
Turning away from her, he looked for his blaster in the rubble, cursing the fact that all of it appeared black and angularly shaped. He shuffled through the mess, kicking and prodding for his weapon. At last, he saw the stubby pistol, resting next to a smaller slab that had fallen from the wall. As he reached down into the odd bits of chipped stone to retrieve it, his thigh screaming at the effort, his fingers brushed against something soft, something definitely not stone. Curious, he took up the pistol with his other hand and began to brush away at whatever lay beneath the black gravel.
It was the face of a Kreelan child.
“This can’t be,” he murmured, shaking his head. In all the years that humans had fought the Empire, no one had ever encountered a Kreelan child. They were as mysterious as were the males of the species, of which Eustus had also been one of two humans to ever see, at least in mummified form. He wondered if the light might be playing tricks on him, but as he continued to brush away the dust and chunks of rock, it was clear that it was a child. But the face and shoulders were all he could uncover, for the rest of her body was covered by a fallen slab. It was smaller than the one entombing the adult behind him, but it had been large enough to crush the life from the child. Or had it?
Knowing that he was just wasting his own very limited time and strength, he carefully let himself down beside the child, leaning over her to see if he could see her breathing. He saw a bit of fine dust on her upper lip stir. Again. And again. She was still alive. He put a hand on her forehead and peeled back one of her eyelids. He was not sure what he might see, but he thought it might give him some clue as to how badly she was injured; there was a lot of blood on her face and head. Aside from the irises looking oddly dark and round in this light, he noted nothing that he could make heads or tails of.
“Kar’e nach Shera-Khan?”
He was startled by the plaintive voice that issued from the hole beneath the slab where the warrior was trapped. He had never heard the Kreelan language spoken, even by Reza, and certainly never by an enemy. “What did you say?” he asked, not knowing what else to do.
“Shera-Khan,” the warrior said, her hand pointing in the girl’s direction. “Kar’e nach ii’la?”
“She’s alive,” Eustus said quietly. My God, he thought, what the hell is going on here? Eustus had learned during his time in the service that you sometimes had to act on instinct. But there were other times when, regardless of how quickly you had to act, even one moment of concentrated thought was crucial. And this was one of those times.
Eustus sat for a moment, pondering this new situation. It did not take him long to come to a conclusion and decide upon a course of action. Commodore Marchand’s hunch had been right: there had been something important on that ship – this girl. Eustus did not know why she was important, but the Kreelans, especially the warrior whom he now took to be her protector, had gone to the greatest lengths to keep her alive, despite their present condition of general confusion, which itself remained a mystery.
He had to take her back with him. The only question was how.
“Well,” he said, struggling to his feet, “there’s only one way to find out.” Shuffling to the side of the slab that pinned the girl to the floor, he leaned over and grasped the exposed edge with his battered hands, doing his best not to rip open the wound on his leg.
He pulled. Nothing.
Grimacing, he pulled harder, feeling his muscles and tendons pop and crack with the strain, until the stone just barely moved under his grip.
But that was all. He tried one final time, but it was just too heavy, and he let it settle back into place with a sandy grinding noise. The girl did not cry out, and he thought that perhaps the stone merely pinned her, and had not crushed any of her limbs. But until the stone was removed, there was no way to know for sure.
Panting like a dog, he sat on the slab that had just thumbed its nose at him. “I’m sorry,” he apologized to no one in particular, “but that’s just a bit… too heavy.”
The trapped warrior pointed at him. “Sh’iamar tan lehtukh,” she said, hammering her hand against the stone that pinned her. She pointed at him again, then gestured with her hand for him to come, then pounded against the rock.
Then she pointed at the girl. “Shera-Khan.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. If I helped you get out of there, even if we both could move that rock, the first thing you’d do is gut me like a pig.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
The warrior was adamant. “Shera-Khan!” she cried. While Eustus knew nothing of their ways and language, he had no doubt that a deep and frightful anguish lay behind the warrior’s voice. He knew that her job must have been to protect the girl, to see her safely to wherever they were going, and that she was failing. Had failed. And if he let her out of her confinement, he had no doubt that she would kill him without a second thought and carry on with the girl.
On the other hand, he had come to realize that she might be his only hope of making it home. By his own admittedly unreliable estimate, it had taken over half an hour just for him to hobble down to this part of the tunnel, a distance of less than fifty or so meters, and clamber over a few slabs of rock. At that rate, how long might it be before he finally found his way out of here? Hours? Days? And how long had he been unconscious? Most likely, it would take him more time than the hours the boat would wait for him to return. And the warm stickiness he felt down his right leg told him he was still bleeding, a process that was already exhausting him and, if not stopped, could leave him dead. The bandage helped, but it was just that, a bandage, and not designed to hold up to what he was trying to do. Unfortunately, the more sophisticated medical tools in his first aid kit that could have sealed the wound permanently had been destroyed.