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Vivien, whose spite had spilled it all—looked taken aback, as if she had run out of venom, as if she found a kind of dismay in what she was made to be. Maybe she grew a little then. At least she had nothing more to say.
And then a new sound, a groaning of machinery, that clanked and rattled and of a sudden a horrid rending of metal.
“O my God,” Dela breathed.
“Steady. All of you.”
“They’ve got the lock,” Ly
“Helmets,” he said, reaching for his.
I dropped the spears and picked up my lady’s, to help her, small skill that I had. But Percy took it from my hands, quick and sure, and helped her, as Ly
“... your com,” she said. “Keep it on.”
I heard other voices, Lance’s and Griffin’s as they got their helmets on and got to their feet. Griffin helped Dela stand and Percy got me on my feet so that I could lean on my spears and stay there. Everything was very distant: the helmet which had seemed for a moment to cut off all the familiar world from me now seemed instead to contain it, the cooling air, the voices of my comrades. It was insulation from the horrid sounds of them advancing against our last fortification, so that we went surrounded in peace.
“Get back,” Griffin said; and Dela reached out her hand for his and leaned against him only the moment—two white-suited ungainly figures, one very tall and the other more suit and lifepack than woman. “Take care of her,” Griffin wished us, all calm in the stillness that went about us.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “We will.” We meaning Viv and I. And Dela came with us, a slow retreat down the corridor, so as not to tire ourselves, the three of us armed with spears. Dela kept delaying to turn and look back again, but I didn’t look, not until we had reached the place where we should stand, and then I maneuvered my thickly booted feet about and saw Lance and Griffin and the crew who had determined where theywould stand, not far behind the bulkhead. Their backs were to us. They had their swords and a few weighted pipes that Gawain and Ly
“It won’t be long,” Griffin said. “We go forward if we can. We push them out the lock and get it sealed.”
“They may have prevented that,” Gawain said, “if they jammed something into the track.”
“We do what we can,” Griffin said.
Myself, I thought how those creatures had gotten up against us, and wrenched the second door apart with the sound of metal rending, a lock that was meant to withstand fearful stress. Modred’s had been a small betrayal; it lost us little. They could easily have torn us open—when they wished, when they were absolutely ready.
“Feel it?” Dela asked.
“Yes,” I said, knowing she meant the shuddering through the floor.
“They can’t stop them,” Viv said.
“Then it’s our job,” I said, “isn’t it?”
The whole floor quivered, and we feltthe sound, as suddenly there was a squeal of tearing metal that got even through the insulating helmets. Light glared round the edges of the bulkhead where it met the overhead, and widened, irregularly, all with this wrenching protest of bending metal, until all at once the bulkhead gave way on other sides, and drew back, showing a glare of white light beyond. The bulkhead was being dragged back and back with a terrible rumbling, a jolting and uncertainty until it dropped and fell flat with a jarring boom. A head on a long neck loomed in its place. For a moment I thought it alive; and so I think did Griffin and the rest, who stood there in what was now an open access—but it was machinery silhouetted against the glare of floods, our longnecked dragon nothing but a thing like a piston pulling backward, contracting into itself, so that now we saw the ruined lock, and the flare of lights in smoke or fog beyond that.
“Machinery,” I heard Lance say.
But what came then was not—a sinuous plunge of bodies through the haze of light and fog, like a cresting wave of serpent-shadows hurling themselves forward into the space the machinery had left.
My comrades shouted, a din in my ears: “ Come on!” That was Griffin: he took what ground there was to gain, he and Lance—and Gawain and Ly
“Come on,” my lady said, and meant to keep our interval: I came, hearing the others’ sounds of breath and fighting—heard Griffin’s voice and Lance’s, and Ly
And oh, my comrades bought us ground. Shadows in the mist, they cut and hewed their way with sobs for breath that we could hear, and no creature got by them, but none died either. We crossed the threshold of the rained bulkhead, and now Griffin pushed the fight into the lock itself, still driving them back. “Wait,” I heard, Viv’s voice. “Wait for me.” But Dela and I kept on, picking our way over the wreckage of the fallen bulkhead, then past the jagged edges of the torn i
And then they carried the fight beyond the lock, in a battle we could not see ... driving the serpent-shapes outside.
But when we had come into the lock, my lady and I, and Vivien panting behind us—it was all changed, everything. I knew what we shouldsee—an access tube, a walkway, something the like of which we had known at stations; but we stared into lights, and steam or some milky stuff roiled about, making shadows of our folk and the serpents, and taller, upright shapes behind, like a war against giants, all within a ribbed and translucent tube that stretched on and on in violet haze. “Look out!” I heard Lance cry, and then. “Percy!”
And from Lynette: “He’s down—”
“Dela—” Griffin’s voice. “Dela—”
“I’m here,” she said, wanting to go forward, but I held her arm. They had all they could handle, Griffin and the rest.
“Fall back,” I heard him say. “We can’t go this—Get Percy up; get back.”
They were retreating of a sudden as the other, taller shapes pressed on them like an advancing wall. I heard Gawain urging Percy up; saw the retreat of two figures, and the slower retreat of three. “Back up,” Griffin ordered, out of breath, and then: “Watch it!”
Suddenly I lost sight of them in a press of bodies. I heard confused shouting, not least of it Dela’s voice crying out after Griffin; and Gawain and Percy were yelling after Lance and Griffin both.
But still Griffin’s voice, swearing and panting at once, and then: “You can’t—Lance, get back, get back.— Dela!—Dela, I’m in trouble. I can’t get loose—Modred—Get Modred—”
“Modred,” Dela said. She turned on me and seized my arm and shook at me so that I swung round and looked into her eyes through the double transparency of the helmets. “Let him loose—let Modred loose, hear?”
I understood. I gave her my spear and I plunged back past Viv, back through the lock again and over the debris—no questioning; and still in my suit com I could hear my comrades’ anguished breaths and sometimes what I thought was Lance, a kind of a sobbing that was like a man swinging a weight, a sword, and again and fainter still ... Griffin’s voice, and louder—Dela’s.