Lifting Above
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Chapter XX: Lifting Above

It was pretty easy to find the right entrance. There’s a big sewer entrance about a hundred feet from the intersection of Greystoke and Almpasser, where Nemesis must have dragged her supplies down. We hesitated for a minute or so, standing around the uncovered hole in the ground, wondering what was down there. Lady Halflance was the first one to take the ladder down, which was probably a good thing. Without her lead, I don’t know if I would have been able to take the plunge. 

The sewer system underneath Amrinval was… surprisingly roomy. The tunnels were at least ten feet across, stone bricks lining both walls and the ceiling, with walkways on either side just wide enough for two people to pass one another if they squeezed a bit. Lady Halflance explained that it was about half a century old, designed to be large enough to handle floodwaters from the summer storms that occasionally drifted up from the south, as well as to accommodate the utility workers who would occasionally have to go down there to clear out blockages and stuff. Of course, compared to where we were going, this was a scratch mark in the ground.

Lady Halflance, as the one with the map, lead the way. I was in the rear, sword in one hand and revolver in the other, just in case we got ambushed. Rook, who had decided to be the only one of us without a melee weapon, instead hefting a hunting shotgun of some variety, was in the middle. Even with two armed women around, being ready for an attack was not good for anxiety, which is why I’m thankful that we had some light. Down in the sewers, oxygen is at enough of a premium that burning kerosene was a bad idea. Each of the three of us had an electric lantern in hand, as well as a replacement battery nearly the size of a revolver on its own. The light let off was an eerie off-white that made me sick. The only respite was that the tunnels were wide enough not to cast many shadows.

It felt like an eternity passed with just the three of us walking down those tunnels, occasionally turning when Halflance told us to. That silence was broken when I noticed something. There was a passage extending off to our left, another tunnel stretching off into the darkness. It made me uncomfortable, and I took a moment to hold out my lantern. You never know, there might be some crazy bearwolfsnakehorseman ready to jump out and murder you. Even in the dim light of the lantern, I caught a sudden flash of blue.

“Hold up, I think this is the right way.”

Halflance and Rook stopped. “What?”

“Down this passageway,” I said, gesturing emphatically with my lantern, “there’s some Nila mold growing. Amina and I found some of that right around the drop-off point. It’s rare around here, so I think there’s a connection.”

Rook leaned around the corner, peering out into the darkness. “I’m guessing you mean the blue thing?”

“Yep. That would be the one.”

“Hm. That would be an interesting path, but…” Lady Halflance squinted, “Very well, we go this way.”

The decision to follow the mold, which is usually a very poor decision if your name isn’t Alexander Fleming, paid off quickly. Shame that it paid off in the form of more things trying to kill us.

Halflance was still in the lead. We were following the passage to a sudden corner. Halflance was halfway around the corner, mid-stride even, when she suddenly leapt back. An instant later, she was followed by four loud, sharp cracks. Dust spewed from the back wall as four bullets blew holes in the brick and stone.

“Are you okay?” I said in a harsh whisper. 

“I’m fine,” she responded. She was clearly out of breath, but the lack of bleeding boded well. “They have a machine rifle, same kind as on the Archopolid.”

“Fuck, really? Mechanodrones or something else?”

“I don’t know,” hissed Halflance. “You try sticking your head out there to find out.”

I did exactly that. Staying behind Lady Halflance, I rapidly jerked my head out from behind the corner. Most of what I saw was a blur, considering I didn’t have the courage to look out for very long, but I definitely recognized the dark brown leather and black metal of a Mechanodrone. A moment after I ducked back behind the wall, I was followed by another blast, this one six or seven shots.

I took a moment to reboot, staring at the far wall. “Okay, so we have a few Mechanodrones and a mounted gun right around the corner. We blundered into them, so no element of surprise, and there’s no cover we can take that lets us see them. It’s like the Somme all over again.”

I think Rook and Halflance were too busy figuring out a solution to care about my bad jokes. Rook began loading shells into her shotgun. With a deadpan that in no way encompassed the level of danger we were in, she explained her plan. “I’ll lay down covering fire, distract them. You two can charge in once they start focusing on me, and take down the ones aiming the gun.”

“What? No! You aren’t just going to give your life for this, not at the first sign of trouble!” I said.

Rook stopped loading just long enough to give me an annoyed look. “I won’t be giving my life if I’m quick enough. They’ll be forced to hide once I send some buckshot their way. Classic military strategy.”

“You’re forgetting the armor,” added Halflance. “You’d have to aim well to get through it with those munitions. Your plan won’t work if you can’t hurt the enemy.”

“Ah. Hmm.”

“Well great, does anyone else have a plan? Possibly one that won’t end with any one of us dying.”

Total silence. Of course. I slumped back against the wall of the tunnel, being very careful not to end up within line of sight of the big death gun. I was honestly not surprised that we had met our match this early on. Running headfirst into the sewers beneath the city, what was I thinking? I leaned my head back, staring at the ceiling.

“Were those there before?” I mused.

“What?” Halflance had been about to stick her head out into the corridor again when she stopped to look at me instead. 

I pointed at the ceiling. “Those pipes.”

There were smaller pipes on the ceiling, each one about three or four inches across, with a bit less than a foot of clearance between the pipes and the ceiling. I don’t know what those pipes are for, and neither does anyone else I’ve asked. The best guess I’ve heard is that they were installed by a noblewoman with more money than sense who wanted an extra supply of hot water to her villa. Regardless, they ended up serving a much better purpose.

“What are those doing there? Why would you make pipes… inside…” Lady Halflance whispered under her breath. 

“Do you think someone could climb on those?” I asked, still staring upwards. “Could make for a good flanking maneuver.”

“I doubt those pipes were built strong enough to handle my weight, trust me.” Thanks for the honesty, Miss Rook.

“Likewise.”

There was an awkward pause, while both of their eyes slowly, obviously, turned towards me. “I mean, I’m still like… a hundred pounds. I really don’t think that they’re that sturdy.”

“Well, there’s no point in not trying,” said Rook.

“Don’t be a coward, Emma. I saw you at the ball, when the Archopolid burst in. You aren’t a coward.”

I looked at my shoes, anxious. “So what’s the plan, then? I crawl along those pipes, jump down, and kill them all?”

Halflance shook her head. “Too much risk of being seen. We’ll need a distraction.”

“Rifled slugs are an excellent distraction, are they not?” said Rook, smirking. “Send a few downrange, get them to fire back, and they won’t even notice that Emma is there. All you’ll need to do once you drop down is get them off the machine rifle.”

I nodded. “Okay, let’s do this. How am I going to get up there?”

Rook responded by grabbing me around the hips and quite literally throwing me at the ceiling. I narrowly avoided complete embarrassment and quite possibly a serious concussion by throwing out my arms, just getting them to wrap around the pipes before I started falling. To my great surprise, that worked. Probably on account of being barely five feet tall, I was able to support my entire weight on just my arms. Definitely couldn’t do that back on Earth.

“A little bit more warning next time?” I hissed, trying to hook my leg around the pipe.

Halflance crossed her arms and looked up at me in much the same way as you would a cat stuck in a tree. “If you had been given any time to worry, you would have let your worries overcome you. You would be on the floor with a cracked ribcage.”

Rook leaned up against the corner, loading one last shell into her shotgun. It was an interesting design, lever-action from what I could tell. Very Terminator 2, which was appropriate for Rook in more ways than one.

Rook gestured what I assumed was the signal. I started crawling as best as I could, hanging below the piping from my arms and legs like a tree sloth. Just as I started turning the corner (thankfully the pipes made a curve or else I would have probably pulled a muscle), Rook jumped out from behind the corner and started firing. The blasts were thunderously loud, reverberating through the narrow passage and hammering my eardrums. The Mechanodrones apparently thought the same way, and returned fire. I became rather concerned for my hearing at that point, but I didn’t stop.

Sure enough, Rook’s plan worked. She and Halflance traded off firing, popping out from behind the wall for just a moment and snapping a few bullets at the Mechanodrones. I kept moving ahead, crawling face-first towards the enemy. Now that I had a little bit of time to actually look at who I was fighting without getting my head blown off, I saw that there were three Mechanodrones present. The one in the middle was operating the machine rifle, a little box on a tripod with a tube sticking out one end… and a belt of ammunition emerging from the side. Her two friends were both carrying what was apparently the standard issue for Mechanodrones, a large fire axe. They were just… standing around. It was eerie looking at them, how they were completely still, bereft of even the tiny subtle motions that people have when they’re supposedly “standing still.” I zeroed in on the one weakness: the control box at the back of the neck, still mounted on all three Mechanodrones. Apparently Nemesis hadn’t found a way to eliminate that weakness, even after I had made use of it so many times. 

Then I got dizzy from trying to look down while hanging upside-down from a pipe, and shut my eyes, focusing on the bone-rattling sound of machine rifle fire. When it was directly below me, or maybe a little bit behind me, it would be time to drop. I suddenly had a horrifying thought: what if the machine rifle could turn around? If that was the case, it would just swing around and shoot me point-blank. A worrying thought, that one. But I kept going.

Eventually, a burst fired off from what sounded like it was a bit behind me. I had reached the right position and not gotten shot. Now I just needed to get my sword into my hand and drop. Very slowly and with more care than I had given to just about anything in my life, I let go of the pipe with my right hand and reached for the sword at my belt. I slowly wrapped my hand around the hard leather of the hilt, and inched it out of the scabbard, wincing at every minuscule creak. I knew I had to be completely silent if this plan was going to work. It took approximately fifty thousand years, but I got the tip of the sword free, and breathed a sigh of relief. Then my hand slipped, and I fell to the ground.

For a second, my vision went white. When it returned, I was on my back looking up. Thankfully this sack full of spare parts had broken my fall. Wait, scratch that. I was in serious trouble, because the Mechanodrone was directly under me, and probably mildly annoyed at being landed upon. The metal under my spine started to shift, clacking and creaking. I rolled over to the side, snatching my sword from the floor. A few more seconds and the Mechanodrone was on its feet. It tore a pipe from the wall, holding it low. The other two, holding their axes in front of their chests, had turned to face me as well. I was outnumbered three to one. At least, I was until Rook entered the fray.

It started with a shrieking battle-cry in a language I didn’t understand, then the sounds of boots on stone. She was there in a second, before anyone had a chance to react. Her attack opened by grabbing one of the Mechanodrones, the one on my left, by the torso. It thrashed and flailed in an attempt to throw her off. The heavy steam backpack blocked it. Rook lifted the Mechanodrone entirely off the ground. Then slam, on the ground. If I had to guess, some kind of judo throw thing.

I charged in, throwing a cut at the central Mechanodrone. It ducked aside, clunky but effective. I followed up into another cut, down at the shoulder. It stepped back. My blade deflected off the armor plating. Damn. I had overextended, giving it time to attack back, swinging the heavy lead pipe. I tried for a parry. Didn’t work, the pipe was too heavy. The sword flew out of my hand, and the pipe hit hard, sending my arm rattling with pain.

My sword was too far away to reach, not before getting my skull bashed in. The fury of combat had completely overtaken me. So I did something stupid. I screamed and then charged. My shoulder hit it right in the chest, my momentum sending it reeling back. My shoulder felt like something had been broken, but I didn’t let up, berserk fury carrying me forward. Against a halfway-competent opponent, I would have been skewered, or deflected, or just beaten aside. But Mechanodrones were never very skilled, relying on their insane strength and bulletproof durability to win. I wasn’t thinking about that. 

The Mechanodrone stumbled backwards. With a crash and a clang, it ran into the machine rifle. Both fell over, with myself in tow. Running more on rage and adrenaline than thought, I punched it in the face. Ow. I won’t make that mistake again. Its limbs were splayed out, flailing around. I don’t think Nemesis ever programmed them with ground-fighting, which meant that we were on even footing. I lunged forward, pressing down on its right arm with both of mine, wrenching the pipe out of its hand then throwing it aside.

In the moment I looked up to throw aside the pipe, I caught a glimpse of Rook fighting. I, evidently, was the lucky one. She was fighting off two Mechanodrones at once, batting aside their axes with the butt of her shotgun, dodging expertly away from their clumsy strikes. 

The Mechanodrone tried to move. It planted its arms and legs, attempting to push itself off the ground and get back into a fighting stance. I couldn’t let that happen, lest an ass-kicking ensue. Thinking quickly, I picked up the tripod, broken off from the machine rifle in the fall, and smacked the Mechanodrone upside the head with it. It was a metal tripod, and pretty heavy at that, so very effective. Its head kicked back, slamming into the ground. I heard something crack, and the Mechanodrone started to slow down. I beat it a couple more times for good measure, praying that I wasn’t hurting the girl inside too badly. Eventually it stopped moving at all, the control box well and truly shattered. 

I dropped the tripod. Just as I looked up, a gunshot rang out. One of the other Mechanodrones fell, bits of the control box flying through the air like popcorn. Silence fell over the tunnel as Lady Halflance holstered her pistol.

“Well you took your sweet time joining the fight,” complained Rook. 

“You’re the ones who charged in head-first, I was just being prudent,” said Halflance sardonically. “I especially appreciated your strategy, Emma. I had not considered the possibility of bashing their heads in like a wild monkey.”

I tried coming up with a witty comeback, but the fight had tired out my brain just as much as it had my arms. I bent over, picking up my sword. “Yeah, that wasn’t my proudest moment. But hey, it worked.”

“It worked this time,” Rook chimed in. “It might not be as effective next time, trust me.”

“We should keep moving, maintain what surprise we can.” Lady Halflance rubbed her ears. “Assuming the fucking gunfire didn’t alert every living creature within a thousand miles.”

I nodded, gazing half-focused down the tunnel. Ignoring the bodies, this passage looked pretty much the same as all of the other storm drains. A grim silence fell over us as we moved forward into greater danger.

I began, as I usually do, to worry. Had I made the wrong call? Were we going in the wrong direction because of my stupid guess? There really wasn’t much saying this was the right way aside from some mold, and since when had mold been a halfway decent compass for finding anything? Then my thoughts started turning to darker places. While we were wandering around, who knew what Nemesis could be doing to Sir Margaret. Hell, she could have been dead from the moment Nemesis…

“Ow!” Something had slammed into my chest. More specifically, someone’s arm had slammed into my chest. 

“What the hell was that for?” I asked, looking up at Rook.

She didn’t say anything, and instead gestured at my feet. If I had taken one more step, I would have fallen at least ten feet. That would have hurt.

The hole wasn’t an original part of the sewers. The edge was ragged and cracked, with the broken edge of stone and dirt visible over the edge. If I had to make a guess, it looked like most of the floor of the tunnel, and a decent chunk of the wall, had collapsed into a cavern below. A cavern, I noticed, that was carved out of green stone. 

“I guess… this is the place?” I asked.

“Looks like it. Is that the same stone as your charm?” Lady Halflance crouched down, looking into the pit. 

I flipped the charm into my hand, holding it out in front of me. “Yep. This is it. How are we going to get down there?”

Without a word, Halflance sat down, legs dangling over the edge, then slipped to the ground. She landed hard, falling forward onto her hands, but she didn’t hurt herself. Rook did the same, knees barely even bending as her landing kicked up a cloud of dust.

“I’ll catch you if you’re scared,” said Rook, smirking. 

I wasn’t scared, of course, it was just a short drop. I was really unlikely to hurt myself in any serious way if I jumped. Which is why, just to be cautious, I crouched over the edge and looked down. And then I kept looking down. For safety, of course. Then I heard something behind me, like a scratching scrabbling on stone. My head jerked around, staring at the source of the sound. I could have sworn I saw a quick flash of black. Nothing and silence.

I glanced back down at Rook’s outstretched arms, screwed shut my eyes, and jumped. I landed pretty hard, my back stinging where her arms again slammed into me, and for a second I thought I was going to fall right through her grip and break my spine… but her strength held. I guess that’s what you get from being over six feet tall and built like Rambo. It was surprisingly comfortable, actually, being held by her strong arms, her broad chest just a few inches away…

I blushed, leaping to the floor. There’s no time to be a perv, Emma, not when Margaret’s life is on the line. The passage, flat floor with an arched ceiling, was a dead end behind us, leaving only one way to go. The stonework was pretty amazing by just about any standard, the stones being perfectly smooth and fitted together without any visible mortar. This passage, whatever its initial purpose, was even more spacious than the sewers, easily wide enough for the three of us to stand shoulder-to-shoulder as we advanced. Which is what we did, nobody wanting to take the lead going down the hallway.

It went straight ahead for about forty or fifty feet, then a blind left turn. I very carefully stuck my head around the corner, ready to duck back in case of more guns. There weren’t any. 

“It looks like there’s something up ahead,” I said, looking back. “Be careful.”

We crept around the corner down the hall. The passageway rapidly widened up into a large triangular chamber with a high arched roof. The green stone was starting to get interrupted by metallic wiring, like sickly black veins on green flesh. Nemesis’s machines had been built into the very walls and ceiling of this chamber. I was about to point them out when Nemesis herself made them obvious. 

“Fascinating that you think that you have a chance against me,” the distorted voice said, in a way not entirely unlike the tone you would use while speaking to an insect you were observing. 

“You can cut the bullshit, Esther, we all know who you are.” I rolled my eyes at nobody in particular.

There was a long silence from the speakers. Then the unmodified, somewhat screechy voice of Esther Nettle came through, though tinged with hot malice. “Very well then. You’ve discovered my identity. Considering you won’t have a chance to leave my domain with your brains intact, I don’t particularly care.”

“We already defeated your border guards,” scowled Halflance. “You can’t stop us.”

I could almost feel Nemesis rolling her eyes through the speaker. “Congratulations, you murdered three of my faceless and incompetent minions. Those were just sentries, designed to keep out passing riff-raff. Now you’ve entered my lair, where things are going to be much less accommodating.”

Lady Halflance grimaced, grabbing me by the arm. “I’ve had enough of this. Give me my wife back or I’ll hunt you down like the dog you are!”

“Hmmm… no. In fact, you aren’t going anywhere.”

There was a series of clunking sounds from either side of the room, before two heavy steel doors came crashing down, one at the passage we had entered from and one over the way forward. 

Rook, who had started charging the moment she heard the sound, slammed shoulder-first into the door. With a reverberating clang, she bounced off, landing on the ground. “You bitch!” she screamed at the ceiling.

“You can just sit tight, and my friends will be with you shortly. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have preparations to make.” With a click, the speakers went offline.

I sighed. Rook clambered to her feet. Lady Halflance looked around like she was about to strangle the first person she saw.

“Well what the hell do we do now?” I asked. 

Halflance glared at me. “We escape.”

“Yeah, I gathered that. I mean how? Those doors must weigh a ton.”

Rook’s eyes scanned up and down the door. “Trust me, this thing weighs quite a bit more than a ton.”

“Okay, I have an idea,” I said. “Do either of you have anything heavy, like a prybar or something we can use to lever apart the stones?” Rook gave Halflance a look over her shoulder, a look which Halflance returned. It was a knowing smirk, the kind you make when you’re in on a joke but nobody else is. “Is something going on that I don’t know about?”

“You’ll have to go on without me, I’m afraid,” Rook mused, crouching down. “Once it’s open, I doubt I’ll be able to pass under it without dropping it again.”

“You’ve done well, Miss Rook. We’ll get you on the way back out, that’s a promise.”

I looked at Halflance like she was crazy. “Woah woah woah, we’re not just going to leave her behind! You heard Nemesis, she’s sending Mechanodrones right now!”

“I can handle myself.” Rook grunted, hooking her fingers on the bottom of the door. “This is far from the worst that I’ve had to face.”

“Okay, but how are you going to open the door? It weighs—“

With a groan of bending metal and a rattle of gears, the door lifted half a foot. Rook’s face was set in a mask of exertion, both hands fixed under the door. She was lifting it, arms and legs tensed to the point that veins stood out against her skin. There was a creaking sound, like clockwork straining, gears grinding, and the enormous gate lifted another foot or so. Bit by bit, against whatever force had caused it to slam shut in the first place, with the sounds of metal grinding and straining intermingling with her grunts of exertion, the door opened. After about a minute of this, Rook was able to get the lower edge of the gate onto her shoulder. With a final surge, she straightened her legs and back, leaving about five feet of space.

“Go…quickly…can’t hold…very long,” Rook gasped.

For a moment I couldn’t move out of sheer shock. I shook my head, then dashed through, lowering my head so as not to hit the door. Halflance took a bit longer, having to bend over to fit through, but before long we were on the far side of the door. 

I gave Rook a slight smile. “Stay safe?”

“Go!” she shouted in response. She leapt back, sending the gate crashing to the floor. Halflance and I nodded at one another, then dashed off into the unknown.

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