A Planet For Emily

CHAPTER TWENTY

Suzanne sawed away at another strand of wire, stopped to feel the nick she had made with her finger, then pressed hard with the knife. It did not give. She wished, again, that her plastic knife had a serrated edge. If and when she got out of the cage, she promised herself, every knife she owned would have a serrated edge. Every knife in the kitchen of the Maxwell, should Rods have anything to do with her, would have a serrated edge. She cursed the wire and the knife, as much as Suzanne could curse. She bore down on the nick in the wire with her full weight, such as it was, and it broke. She was standing on one of the cross bars in her cell, barely able to see the wire in front of her in the dim light, cutting a half circle in the top right hand corner of her cell door. She hoped to be able to cut enough of the wire to force her hand through to the door release button she knew was there. But it was a long job and, she thought, it would be quicker if she weighed more so she could bring more force to bear on the knife. The thought made her smile.

The culture that had insisted women should be slim had mostly died along with the navy’s defeat at Crossroads. The problem had become getting enough food to survive, rather than avoiding eating to keep slim. But enough of this weight consciousness had survived in cultural memory for Suzanne to find the thought that it would be useful to be heavier an amusing one. Then she remembered that she didn’t want to be a vessel and started sawing at the next wire.

Several wires later she tried forcing her hand through. Yes! She stood up on her toes and reached around to where she thought the button should be.

The lights went on. Suzanne jerked her hand in; too quickly. Her jacket sleeve caught on the edges of the wire. After a moment’s struggle trying to free it, she pushed hard on the wire to give her arm room, pushed the whole sleeve out to free it, then pulled it in again. That left a noticeable tear in the wire which she tried to fix by pulling it taunt, as she heard the sliding door open to her left. Suzanne dropped down to the concrete floor, just as she heard the first click of an approaching Oid and sat on the bare concrete on the opposite side to the damaged wire, with what she hoped was a look of abject resignation. At the last moment she dropped the knife into her pocket.

The guard loomed beside the door, looking down at her. If he looked up and to the left, Suzanne thought, he could not fail to see the mess she had been making of the wire. Suzanne heard him grunt. Then he banged on the wire to get her attention and pointed at the food bowl, which Suzanne had unhooked and taken inside her pen. With her foot she nudged it closer to the hatch at the bottom of the door, so the attendant could get at it – all without looking at the creature. He picked it up and stalked off, knees clicking.

She waited. The sliding door opened and closed, then the lights went out again. She waited until her eyes adjusted and, as before, the only illumination was what an instrument light at one end of the corridor. Now that Suzanne thought about it, she had seen no windows on her earlier trip through the building. All the light had been artificial. She must be underground. That could work in her favour, if and when she got the door open. The Oids probably could not see in the dark either. If they couldn’t see her they would not return her to her cell. But first she had to get the door open.

Suzanne groped her way back to her work place at the top of the door, forced her arm through the wire and tried slapping the concrete about where she thought the button was. She stood on tiptoe and groped around the area for several minutes. Nothing. She felt the angle in the recessed door and visualised the button she’d seen earlier. Her arm should be long enough; unless she wasn’t allowing for the doorway being recessed. How could she extend her reach? The knife! She withdrew her arm, with some difficulty, re-sheathed the knife and used it as a probe. One tap, another tap, then a third which hit a section raised above the wall. The button? She pushed as hard as she could, at the limit of her reach. The Oids had just slapped it, but it was an electrical button. It shouldn’t be hard to push down.

Click! The door swung open with Suzanne on it. Jubilant, she jerked her arm down, only for the sleeve to get caught again. She dropped the knife, which fell with a clatter, and struggled on the door as it swung out into the corridor. But this time the sleeve was caught fast. In a panic, as the door started to swing back, she shrugged her other arm out of the coat and fell with an indecorous thud on the concrete.

“Yeouch!”

The gate thumped against her then swung out again. Something hooted from a cell further down. The growling creature further down the corridor, which had been quiet for a time, started growling again.

Had she disturbed the guard? Suzanne rubbed her head, which had hit the concrete, and listened but heard nothing beyond the low growling. She had glimpsed a spider-like creature with teeth in one of the nearby pens as she was dragged to hers and thought that must be the one growling. Well, the creature was safely inside its pen, and Suzanne was not. With that thought she felt exultation. She had escaped, just like all the movies she had seen. The escape could have been smoother, and it was only to the corridor so far, with a whole building full of Oids and other hostile creatures between her and freedom, but it was still a step away from being a vessel. Then she thought how her fall would have made Rods laugh, and that gave her new resolve. Laugh at her falling off a door would he? If and when she saw him again she would tell him off, after she hugged him because she would be immensely glad to see him again. But what was she still doing on the floor? Rods would have been practical. You’re out of the cage but not back on the ship, Suzanne thought. Get up!

She got up, still sore from her fall, groped for her knife and, after a struggle, freed her coat from the door. Now what? The guards had come through a sliding door to the left of her cell, so she would go that way, keeping her right hand on the corridor wall. The cruise director had a moment of panic when she began to grope along the wall, thinking that she might be pointing the wrong way in the near total darkness. But then she thought her right hand was on smooth concrete so she had to be pointing to the left from her cell, which was the correct direction. There were no obstacles in the corridor. Twice something hissed at her in the darkness. The growling creature kept on growling and, to judge from the sounds, started banging its head against its cage door, as Suzanne came closer. Eventually, her right hand, trailing across the wall, hit a raised barrier. The door. She pulled at it for a moment until she recollected, sheepishly, that it slid across rather than opened out. After some grouping and pushing in the dark, the door slid across and Suzanne stepped through. The corridor had smelled of fur and animal droppings, but the room smelt more like wood smoke, or at least what she thought was wood smoke – a dim memory of an aroma machine she had been given as a birthday present in happier times.

She became aware of a soft rhythmic whistling. Straining her eyes Suzanne thought she could make out a dark mass just to her right, close enough to touch. The Oid guard on his sleeping mat? Behind her, the growling creature picked up the volume and banged louder on the cage door, and now there was no closed door to muffle the sound. The rhythmic whistling stopped and the dark mass seemed to stir. Time to go. Suzanne stepped out, keeping to her left, away from the Oid, and kicked something. Suzanne never knew what she had kicked but from the noise it could have been a plate and cup left on the floor. The Oid sat up and Suzanne instinctively crouched She had the impression of the creature looking around, puzzling over what had awoken him, but was just as blind in the dark as she was. He “oompahed” plaintively then drew his breath in sharply, perhaps realising that he could hear the growling of the spider dog clearly. The dark mass of the Oid got up, off its bed – Suzanne shrank back to keep out of its way – and stumbled off to the left in the darkness. The Earth girl scuttled in the opposite direction on all fours back around the other side of the door and into the corridor, where she stood up. What to do? She had just decided to pull the door shut and look for another way out when the lights came on.

The electrical car had a single, weak headlight which Rods switched off, driving by the light amplification goggles. This time he took care to scan the bushes on either side of the road – who knew what other horrors this planet had in store for them – but apart from a shadow or two, and perhaps a flash of white fangs, he saw nothing. Back near the main road they stopped the cars. Rods pulled a small component from under his rental’s basic dashboard, as the renter Oid had shown him, to disable it, and they moved to the car the two Oids had come in. He took a robe he had brought to cover up Suzanne, if and when they found her, and spread it over one side and part of the front window. A coat he had brought for himself he spread as best he could on the other side. A weak cabin light died a brutal death. They drove off.

Stars shone through the outpost’s dome but there was, of course, no moon to supplement the lanterns hung at the gates on either side of the road – the Oid idea of street lighting. Rods had his goggles on, but it was still difficult to see the clan badges. Without Igor, who had been automatically mapping by dead reckoning as they went, Rods would have had a lot of trouble finding the right house again.

“So how are you going to get into the house?” asked Hoss from back on The Max, as Rods drove. He had realised they were heading back. “Are you going to do it tonight?”

“Got to, and we’re in the Oid car. These guys don’t have any comms on them or on the car. Guess they’re just not set up for any opposition that might shoot back. So, I’m going to turn up at the gate in their car with the clan symbol on if expecting to be let in. Might get us inside the house. If not, Igor will have to start his party trick.”

“Good luck. The ladies say good luck.”

“We’ll need it.”

Security cameras? Maybe he could take out a couple with his silenced pistol, assuming he did get into the building, and lose himself in the sprawling clan house but then what? He could hardly sneak around the house or pretend he was one of the guards. Sooner or later it would come down to shooting. So be it. He and Igor had an arsenal between them, and his bad mood had become worse. They and the guards would have a real party.

“In front or behind?” Igor wanted to know when told what would happen.

“To start with, in front. Anything in front with a weapon is an enemy, but make sure they have a weapon and are not Suzanne.”

“Weapon, not Suzanne, Gotit!”

He drove up to the gates as if he drove in every day, crouching low so that he could barely see over the dashboard. He could see an Oid silhouetted in a lighted window directly in front. An intercom on the gate Oompahed – crude technology, thought Rods – and the gate opened. At the same time, at the end of a short concrete drive, a gridded roller door also started opening. Except that the scale was wrong they might have been entering a secured garage on Earth.

Rods drove in fast, ignoring another squawk from an intercom by the garage door. The garage itself proved to be a dimly lit concrete box holding another of the electric cars, which he parked beside – he had been hoping the garage would be much larger. Rods muttered a “stay here and don’t fire yet” to Igor then eased out the door on the side away from the control room, pistol at the ready. A guard started Oompahing and this time the translator caught enough to make sense of it.

“Hey, Jubal, Kathar,” said the creature, “get out of the car next time and don’t make me leave the control room. You’re not off yet, there’s some problem below.”

Rods got up into a crouch, pistol held in both hands, at eye level.

“Jubal, Kathar, why the (untranslatable) don’t you respond? The Oid took two steps into the small room and opened the car door. He pulled away the cloak to see Igor pointing his machine gun at him. Rods now bobbed slightly, until his head and gun were just clear of the car. The Oid saw this movement and registered the existence of Rods before catching a bullet squarely between the eyes. He crumpled.

Rods was at the control room door in a few steps, going through the door in combat mode. No other creature was on duty in the dimly lit room, which contained an array of screens. One bank showed the outside of the house where there was no activity, because the intruders were now inside. Another bank connected to interior cameras showed shots of Oids running to and fro. From somewhere deep inside the house an alarm, an old fashioned bell that sounded as big as one on a fire house, was ringing.

Rods wondered if perhaps his lost cruise director was causing trouble.

Suzanne looked around, blinking in the sudden brightness. At one end of the passage, past her old cell, the corridor bent at right angles. The nook featured a chair and a small table with a computer screen on it. An instrument light from the screen had provided the room’s only illumination when the main lights were turned off. In the pen right in front of her was a spider dog of the type Rods had been trying to avoid in the colony’s wilderness area, ramming its head against the cage, glaring at her through multi-faceted eyes and growling. Able to see the creature close up, Suzanne did not like it, and the creature returned her dislike. Behind her Suzanne heard the clicking of the Oid returning.

Then the cruise director saw the blue button above the corner of the spider dog’s cell door and recalled that she didn’t want to be a vessel. She leapt up, put one foot on a cross bar and stepped up to slap the button as hard as she could. The lock clicked open. She dropped her foot and gave the door a tug to ensure that the spider creature got the idea, then sprinted for the table at the corner of the passage, blessing Rods insistence that she should run every day on The Max’s treadmill. Behind her, the spider-dog’s cage door smashed open, just as the Oid appeared at the sliding door. Suzanne, busy climbing onto the corner table thought she heard the Oid give a very human yelp and run, oompahing loudly. The spider dog, forgetting about the human female, took off in hot pursuit. By the time the cruise director got to the top of the table, the oomphs of alarm had grown distant but had multiplied and mingled with the sound of furniture being overturned. She stood on the table for a few moments listening to the mayhem before deciding that the only way out was still the sliding door, so she got down again.

She dashed to the still open door and peered around. No one. Just that wood smoke smell, some basic furniture and what to Suzanne seemed truly awful wall posters of Oids grappling with one another. The other creatures were making noises in their pens – grunts and yelps – and a couple were banging on their pen doors. Let them. Suzanne thought that one released dangerous creature was enough for the moment. They might start attacking cruise directors and that would never do.

There didn’t seem to be anything in the room she could use. The second door was fully open, left that way by the Oid guard fleeing for his life. On the wall beside it was a panel of switch pads that must control the lights. But just as Suzanne reached the door she heard Oids pounding along the corridor outside. They were making for the room.