Andromeda Day and the Black Hole (10 page)

To her surprise, however, instead of
nodding in acknowledgement as he read her thoughts, he merely looked puzzled. He
came a little closer to her, and his hand touched her softly under the chin,
bringing her head up so that she looked directly into his eyes. He couldn’t read
her, she thought suddenly. He couldn’t read her thoughts.

“You are a strange one,” he said
eventually. “You are blank as a white sheet to me. What is your secret?”

“Maybe I have nothing to hide,” she said as
boldly as she could.

His hand was still touching her skin. It
slid under her hair, bringing her even closer to him. For an absurd moment she
thought he was going to kiss her. She fascinated him, she realized. He’d never
met anyone before that he couldn’t read.

“Sir? There is rifle fire from the edge of
the woods.”

Sphere continued to stare at her for a moment.
Then his hand dropped, and he turned impatiently to the guard who stood at his
side. “Get the forces mobilized, and quickly.”

He beckoned to another guard. “Take them to
the
Praxim
,” he instructed him. “They can go to the Hole at first
light.” His eyes brushed across Clios, then lingered on Andi. “You intrigue
me,” he said to both of them. “I haven’t finished with you yet. I will come to
see you in the Hole.” And then he turned away.

The guard caught their arms and led them
out of the hall by a side door. They crossed a smaller square to the other side
where there a group of Ruvalian prisoners sat on the floor, slouched together
despondently.

The guard prompted them to join their
compatriots, and the two young women sat together, huddling close. The guard
wandered away, awaiting the arrival of the ship that would take them to the
prison.

Andi looked at Clios. The Ruvalian girl
rolled her eyes. “I thought for a moment that he was going to keep us here.”

“Me too.” Andi’s heart was still thumping. “I
suppose because of my computer brain, he can’t read my mind.”

“You certainly intrigued him.” Clios
shivered. Her green eyes were dark, like the depths of the sea.

“It must have been very difficult for you,
being so close to the man who killed your parents,” Andi said softly.

“I wanted to kill him. I would have, if the
guard hadn’t taken away my knife.” She had a determined look on her face. “One
day I will kill him. I will kill all the Hoshaens, if I get the chance.”

Andi wrapped her arms around her legs and rested
her chin on her knees. The Thoume moons were fading in the sky and the early
morning sun was rising in the north.

“Are you all right?” Clios asked, touching
her on the arm. “Are you thinking of Deneb?”

“No. Actually, I was thinking about the
Hoshaens.” Andi lifted her head to look honestly at her friend. “I… I feel a
little confused, Clios.”

“Can you explain?”

“Well, because we landed near your city, we
became affiliated with you. But we could so easily have landed on the other
side of the continent, with the Hoshaens. Would that mean that we would be
fighting you? I’m just confused because I’ve been thinking of the Hoshaen as
the enemy, but that guard who brought us here… he seemed so young and…
ordinary. And the way they treat women here, it’s so different to Earth, it
seems more… advanced, somehow. What I mean is, why are they the ‘baddies’, and
you’re the ‘goodies’? How can I tell?”

Clios listened to her thoughtfully. Andi
knew the question must be very difficult for her because she hated the Hoshaens
so, and yet the young woman thought Andi’s question through carefully. “I
suppose you can’t,” she said eventually, slowly. “This war is being fought
between two peoples—and I fight on the side of the Ruvalians, because that is
who I am. The war has gone on for a long time, mainly over land, and this means
nothing to you, because you do not come from here. Whatever I think about them,
Andi, although the Hoshaens are my enemies, I know that most of them are not
evil—they are just different. And I suppose you must make your own mind up
about who you support.” She drew in the ash on the ground with her finger. “After
saying that, it was the Hoshaens who invaded our land this time, who broke
through out city walls. It is the Hoshaens who are burning our dead when they
know our views on the afterlife. And it is the Hoshaens who created the Black
Hole, and who use the Ruvalians they capture as slaves to mine for Indigo
Quartz. We do not do that. Our miners are our people, who work on strict
rotation and who are compensated adequately for their labor.”

“I suppose so.”

Clios looked at her then. “And I am not
mistaken about Sphere. He is evil, Andi, don’t be misled by his charming
manner. He is a killer.”

Andi shivered, remembering the way his hand
had lingered on her skin, under her hair. “Yes, I know.”

Clios nodded. Then she looked up at a black
spot that was gradually growing bigger against the lightening blue-purple sky. “Here
comes our transport,” she said, getting to her feet. She held a hand down to
Andi. “Are you coming with me?”

Andi smiled up at her. In spite of all she
had said about war and the Hoshaens, she knew that she wanted to be on Clios’s
side. She took the older girl’s hand and Clios pulled her to her feet, and then
they waited, their green hair blowing in the breeze as the craft lowered itself
into the square.

The guard came back to them and ushered all
the prisoners onto the
Praxim
. It was small inside, and they had to sit
in the floor in what looked like the cargo hold. The two girls kept together,
saying little to the other Ruvalians.

Andi wondered at one point why Clios didn’t
talk to her compatriots.

“I don’t want to get to know them,” the
girl whispered back. “It’ll only make leaving them in the Black Hole more
difficult.”

Andi nodded and leaned back against the
shuttle wall, thinking about Clios’s comment. It must be extremely difficult
for her, Andi realized, to be going into the place she’d dreaded her entire
life. There would be Ruvalians in the cells that had been prisoners for many years.
It was going to be very hard to escape from the prison with just Lydia, and
leave all the rest of her people behind in that terrible place.

Was it possible that there was any way to
free the rest of the Ruvalians? At that moment, Andi couldn’t think of a plan. But
the idea had lodged in her computer brain, and it wasn’t going to go away.

It took them about half a day to fly from
the once-Ruvalian city across country to the Hoshaen prison. Andi sat near the
window, looking down at the land as they flew, studying the fields and forests,
and the dull hollows of mines where the search for Indigo Quartz had been
carried out and then abandoned. They were given a small meal aboard the
Praxim
,
a light, yellowcorn bread and some dusty water, which the two young women ate
in spite of its lack of appeal, knowing they had to keep up their strength for
the inevitable struggle to come.

When the sun was high overhead, the
Praxim
finally began its descent and landed on a runway. Blinking in the brilliant
sunshine, the prisoners were escorted off the craft and across the runway to
the low, ugly blocks of an enormous building which the guards informed them was
the main entrance to the prison.

Andi glanced over at her friend. Clios
looked frightened at arriving at the place that she had heard about since she
was a child. Andi clutched Clios’s hand. She couldn’t believe they were finally
there.

They went through a pair of double doors
into a large hall that looked similar to photographs of Old-Time airports that
Andi had seen on the
Antiquarian
. The prisoners were directed to various
‘terminals’. Here they were questioned and their statistics recorded on the
computer: name, age, and place of birth. Clios had already primed Andi on the
answers to give, and the Hoshaen who questioned them didn’t even look up at
Andi to question what she said.

After this they were ushered back into a
group. The other Ruvalians looked scared and some were even tearful. Andi could
understand their fear—after all, she had every intention of escaping the Black
Hole, but these others did not have that hope, and would be thinking that the
rest of their life was to be spent underground.

She felt a sudden flip of worry in her
stomach, like she did on the rollercoaster ride in the VR Playroom on board the
Antiquarian
. What if Deneb was already dead, or if she couldn’t find
him? Or what if she wasn’t able to escape from the prison? That would mean all
three of them would be stuck there forever. The thought was not pleasing, and
Andi swallowed nervously as they were led through the terminals and another
pair of double doors and into a large hall.

The room bustled with activity. On one side
were large wagons full of what Andi assumed must be Indigo Quartz, fresh from
the mines, which were wheeled through weighing rooms and then out into the open
air to waiting crafts, ready to be transported to the main Hoshaen cities. Lines
of Ruvalian prisoners took up the rest of the hall, waiting despondently for
their trips down to the depths of the prison. Hoshaen guards prowled the lines
with their rifles drawn.

Andi and Clios were moved forward into one
of the lines and they grasped hands again. Andi felt Clios’s palm slick with
sweat and realized that she, too, was nervous. They waited for some time in the
lines, which led up to several pairs of huge metal doors. Andi wondered what
was through those doors. Some form of elevator, presumably, that was going to
lead them down to the bowels of Thoume.

She felt a brief moment of panic, almost
like claustrophobia, and had to physically stop herself from running away. She
was glad she did so—shortly afterwards the wait became too much for one of the
Ruvalians and he bolted from the line, racing along the hall in Andi’s
direction, heading for the terminals through which they had come. Andi could
see his eyes as he neared her, wide with fear and panic and determination to
get out of there. Then there was a crack from one of the rifles and he sprawled
to the floor, almost at her feet. Clios’s hand tightened in her own until she
thought she might feel her bones crack under the pressure.

Finally, however, the waiting was over. The
dead Ruvalian was hauled away, and then there was a squeaking, grinding noise,
and the metal doors at the end opened. The lines were led forward, and Andi and
Clios found themselves walking into a large, windowless, empty metal room. They
turned to face the doors, and Andi bit her lip as the metal barriers began to
slide closed. Outside, through the tempting, taunting glass of the hall, she
could see the red Thoume sun still high in the sky, and for a moment she was
blinded as she looked at it, hoping it wasn’t her last sight of daylight. Then
the doors closed, and the only light was from the sickly yellow glow of the
bulbs in the corner of the room.

The prisoners clung together, silent in
fear, as one of the guards flipped a switch on the panel on the door and the
gears clunked deep beneath them. There was a sickening lurch, and then slowly
the elevator began to descend.

Andi grasped Clios’s hand tightly as they
sank deep into the ground. They had elevators on board the
Antiquarian
,
of course, and all the townships in Earth cities had huge glass elevators on
the outside that slid up and down the towers like giant zips. She had even been
in one that had two-hundred-and-fifty floors, and it had taken over five
minutes to get from the top to the bottom.

This elevator, however, seemed to go on
forever. She had no idea of its speed, but the gradual descent was smooth and
unfaltering, a slow, steady sinking into Thoume’s heart. The lights in the
corner flickered rhythmically, and the prisoners murmured, as if with every meter
they went down, their spirits dropped even further. There was a small flutter
of panic too, and Andi guessed that they were all thinking, as was she, that it
might never end, and this might just be a nightmare from which she could not
wake.

She couldn’t tell how long they were in the
elevator, but supposed it must have been about fifteen minutes before it
finally began to slow, and the heavy clunking of the gears sounded as the metal
box came to a halt. The prisoners muttered darkly as the guard pressed the
button on the door, and then the metal barriers slid open, and Andi was greeted
to her first sign of the Black Hole.

They were led out of the elevator and found
themselves in an enormous cavern, which Andi assumed was the central hub of the
prison system. The walls were a dark-gray rock, lined intermittently with the
same lamps in the elevator, so that the whole of the cavern glowed with a
sickly yellow light.

A huge computer station sat in the center
of the cavern. On one side were a series of other elevators, some wide ones for
carrying the wagons of crystal up to the surface, others, presumably, for
transportation of prisoners to the deeper levels of the jail.

The prisoners were led to a small roped-off
area. Piles of dull brown clothing sat on the floor. “Change,” instructed the
guard. “You may keep your underwear but leave all your own clothing behind. It
is no longer yours. You own nothing in the Black Hole.”

Andi stared as the Ruvalians around her
began to strip off their own clothing without question, too despondent to worry
about being seen naked in front of everyone. “Clios,” she whispered hastily. “If
I undress everyone will see that I’m only green up to my elbows!”

“Get behind me,” the Ruvalian girl
whispered back. “I’ll help you, but we’ll have to be quick.” Andi hastily
unbuttoned her jacket and top. She looked around, but the Hoshaen guard was
watching the wagons of Quartz being loaded onto the cargo elevators, and the
other prisoners were too busy getting changed to pay any attention to her.

She pulled off her jacket and the top of
her green coveralls, leaving on her underwear, and Clios slid the large cloth
shirt down over her head rapidly, hiding her white skin. Just as quickly, she
slid off the bottom half of the coveralls and stepped into the trousers that
Clios held out for her. The whole process took less than ten seconds, and to
her relief no one seemed to have noticed.

The dull brown outfit was scratchy and
ill-fitting. As Andi watched Clios getting dressed, she realized that the
uniform was chosen to take away your individuality. She was no longer Andromeda
Day—she was a prisoner of the Black Hole, and her name didn’t matter to these
people anymore. The thought gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

The prisoners were then taken to form
queues up to the computer station to find out where they were to be held. Clios
took her hand. “We must make sure we are in the same cell,” she whispered. “Or
we might never find each other.”

They approached the station together, and
the Hoshaen behind the desk asked for their names and pressed buttons on the
screen.  He then withdrew a small metal card from the computer and gave it to
one of the guards.

The guard motioned to the small group of
Ruvalians that were in his charge. “Follow me,” he said in his growly voice. He
walked across the cavern to one of the elevators on the far side of the room,
and the Ruvalians followed.

They were ushered into the elevator, which
was very similar to the first, and the Hoshaen swiped the metal card he had
been given through the box on the inside. The doors closed, and they began to
descend again. The metal card, Andi realized, must hold some kind of chip that
carried information about where in the prison they were to be taken.

When the doors finally opened, they were
faced with a junction of three tunnels that led deep into the gloom. At the
head of the junction was a slim metal box attached to the wall similar to the
one on the elevator. The guard slipped his card into the box and a light
appeared above the top of the central tunnel. He removed his card, and they continued
to walk down the indicated tunnel in the yellowish light.

There were several more junctions after
this, and each time the guard used his card to establish which tunnel they
should take.

“This is crazy,” Clios murmured. Her eyes
were wide with barely held in panic. “We will never find our way out of this
place.”

“Don’t worry.” Andi squeezed her hand,
although she felt frightened herself at the maze of corridors and tunnels
through which they were passing.

Finally they exited one tunnel to find themselves
in a small room with another computer station. The guard walked up to the
Hoshaen behind the station and gave them his card. She put it into her computer
and then nodded to him. Leaving the station, she led the line of prisoners down
to the cells at the bottom.

Gradually, the prisoners were separated and
led into cells, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups. Andi and Clios
were last, and were relieved when they were shown into a room together. They
turned and watched as the door clanged shut behind them, and the guard slid a
card through the box on the wall. A red light appeared on the lock inside the
cell.

The prison had finally swallowed them
whole.

For a moment the two girls just stood and
stared at the door, and then they looked at each other, wordless. Finally they
glanced around the room. There were four bunks, two on one wall and two on the
other. There was also a small metal table, under which was a bucket.

There was nothing else in the room.

“Nice,” said Andi. “Three stars, I guess?”

Clios’s lips were pressed tightly together.
“Don’t joke, Andi,” she said, and to Andi’s surprise she could see that the
older girl was near to tears. “This is an awful place. We might never get out
of here.” She sank onto one of the bunks and put her face in her hands.

“Of course we will.” Andi spoke more
determinedly than she felt as she sat beside Clios, putting her arm around the
other girl’s shoulders. “We are going to make it out of here, and we are going
to rescue Deneb and the Golden Star, and we will make it back to Jarl, and you
two will get married and have lots of babies.”

Clios couldn’t help but laugh. “At least
no-one could call you a pessimist.”

They sat side-by-side on the lower bunks,
silent for a moment. It was warmer down in the cells, and sweat broke out
between Andi’s shoulder blades. “We made it in here,” she said eventually. “We’re
halfway there.”

“Unfortunately the second half of the
adventure is going to be harder,” Clios said.

Andi sighed. She got up and lay on the
other lower bunk and stared up at the metal slats of the bed above her. In
spite of her positive words to Clios, her plan suddenly seemed very daunting
and quite hopeless. Was it really possible to rescue Deneb and Lydia, recover
the Golden Star and end this futile war? “Clios, do you really think retrieving
the Golden Star is going to help the Ruvalians?”

Clios nodded. Her mouth was determined. “I
know it would.”

“Do you think Lydia will have hidden it?”

“I am sure that is the case.”

“We would have heard if the Hoshaens had
captured it, wouldn’t we?”

“That is very true, yes.”

At that moment, there was a rattle at the
door and a hatch to the side opened. A tray with two bowls of food appeared on
the small shelf, along with two mugs.

“Wait!” Andi ran over to the hatch and bent
to look through it. A pair of Hoshaen eyes appeared on the other side, bright
green in the dim yellow glow of the lamp above him. “What’s going to happen to
us?” she asked.

“Now, you eat,” came his low, dull tones. “Then
sleep. Tomorrow you will go down to work in the mines.” The hatch slammed shut.

Andi pulled a face at Clios. “Conversation’s
obviously not his strong point.” She got the tray and carried it back to their
small table. The two young women helped themselves to the yellowcorn bread and
a thick porridge, and the funny-tasting, dusty water.

“They want to keep us strong,” Clios said. “For
the mines.” She chewed thoughtfully on the bread. “I wonder what will happen to
the Black Hole once they take over the Ruvalian mines? I expect they will keep
it going—it will be somewhere to send the Ruvalian prisoners.”

“One day you will fight back, Clios,” Andi
said firmly. “And everyone in this terrible place will be free.” She nodded
towards the door. “Beginning with us. It looks like we have a few hours before
they come to get us for the mines. We’ll wait until our tray has been
collected, and then we’ll make our break.”

“Do you truly think we can do it?” Clios
stopped eating for a moment. Her young face showed eagerness and hope. “Do you
really think we can escape, and find Deneb, and Lydia?”

“I am certain of it. I will not die in this
place, Clios, and I will not let Deneb die either.” Andi reached over to grasp
her friend’s hand. “And if it’s the last thing I do, I am going to rescue the
Golden Star and help your people to regain their lands, so that, one day in the
future, they will return to destroy the Black Hole.”

*

About an hour later, someone rapped on the
food hatch and Andi passed the empty trays out. She returned to her bunk,
exchanging an excited glance with Clios. She felt her heart thumping in her
chest, the metal organ pumping the blood through the rubber tubes and into her
veins. For once, she didn’t feel disappointment and shame at the thought of her
enhanced abilities. Instead she hoped that she would be able to stay true to
her word, and use her improvements to help them escape.

They waited about fifteen minutes to make
sure that the guards had stopped passing by, collecting trays. Then, finally,
Clios nodded to Andi. “It’s time.”

Andi got up and went over to the lock. There
was a small metal panel on the inside, with the red light that indicated that
the door was secure. There was a slot for one of the metal cards to be swiped,
but no figures or buttons.

“It must be some sort of combination,” she
said finally. “The card that they slide through randomizes it every time so
that it can’t be learned.”

“Does that mean we’re stuck here?” Clios
said in dismay.

“Not at all. Now we just have to apply a
little ingenuity.”

To Clios’s surprise, Andi began to take off
the top half of her prison uniform. She looked up to see the Ruvalian girl
watching her and grinned. “There is a method to my madness, Clios, I promise.”

She slid the jacket off and revealed the
item that she had taken from the museum on board the
Antiquarian
. It was
an Old-Time brazier, commonly known, she had read, as a bra. Awkwardly, unused
to the constricting elastic, she flipped the catch at the back and slid off the
underwear, quickly replacing the scratchy jacket.

“An interesting piece of clothing,” Clios
remarked, examining the cups and straps. “We wear tunics made of a thin, silky
material beneath our military uniforms. They have no support like this item.”

“So do we. Women used to wear these
hundreds of years ago, and they are really uncomfortable. I took it from our
museum because I thought it could be useful.”

“How?”

Andi grinned, took the bra from Clios and
turned it over. With her teeth, she carefully made a small hole in the top of
the seam under the cup.

“What are you doing?”

“Look.” Andi wiggled the seam and out slid
the thick piece of wire that served as the support for the cup.

“Oh.”

“Exactly.” Andi took the wire and went over
to the lock on the door. She knelt down, examined the slot where the card
should go, and then inserted the wire.

“Don’t you worry about electrocuting
yourself?” Clios remarked.

“If my hair stands on end, you know I’ve
hit the wrong spot.” Andi smiled over her shoulder. “I’ve done this before,
don’t worry.” She wiggled the wire until she short-circuited the mechanism
behind the wall. There was a snap, a click, and then the light went from red to
green as the catch was released.

Slowly, the door swung open.

Clios gasped. “You’ve done it!” She hugged
the younger girl in a hard grip.

“Thanks Clios, but I want to keep some of
my ribs intact.” Andi laughed, freeing herself. She pulled open the door and
peered out. “The corridor’s empty. Let’s go.”

“Do you want this?” Clios was holding up
the rest of the bra.

Andi grinned. “Let’s leave that here for Sphere
to wonder about.”

Laughing softly, they exited the cell. They
had already discussed what they were going to do, providing Andi could get them
out. Shutting the door behind them, they made their way quietly along the main
tunnel, back towards the computer station at the head of the cells.

When they neared the lip of the tunnel,
Andi let Clios go in front. Light from the computer illuminated the Hoshaen
guard sitting at the station. From where they were, they could see he was
asleep.

Clios nodded to Andi and they exited the
tunnel. Softly they went up to the guard and stood behind him. Andi looked down
and saw his metal card sticking out of the top pocket of his coveralls. She
pointed and mouthed, “There it is,” and then slid her hand under his body to retrieve
the card. As quietly as possible, she then fed it into the slot on the
computer.

A menu came up, but of course, it was in
Hoshaen. Their spoken language, she had found, was almost the same as Ruvalian,
which is why she and Clios had been able to communicate with them, but would
the written word be the same too?