33
Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Basin
Savi led Daeman and Harman off the roof, down the ladders and steps, and into one of the narrow alleys. The starlight and blue glow from the neutrino beam on the Temple Mount gave just enough illumination for them not to crash into walls or fall into wells as they ran, although shadows were a solid black in the doorways and empty windows. Daeman soon fell behind, gasping. He’d never run, even as a child. It was an absurd thing to do.
Closer now, less than a short block away in the maze of flat-topped buildings and labrynthine alleys, came the scrabbling of the hundreds of hurrying voynix.
Itbah al-Yahud! rasped the voice from those loudspeakers Savi had called muezzin.
Savi led them across a cobblestoned street, down another dark, narrow alley, across a small clearing strewn with glowing human bones, and into an interior courtyard that was even darker than the alley. The pad-thump and manipulator-scratch of voynix running at high speed along walls was closer now.
Itbah al-Yahud! The amplified cry seemed more urgent.
Only Savi here is a Jew, whatever that is, thought Daeman, his lungs burning, staggering to keep up. If Harman and I let her go on by herself, the voynix will leave us alone, probably even help us get home. There’s no reason we should share her fate.
Harman was running hard behind the old woman as she crossed the courtyard and ducked through a low arch into the ruins of an ancient building. Or I can take care of myself, thought Daeman. Harman can stay with her if he wants.
Daeman slid to a stop on the dusty cobblestones. Harman paused in the black rectangle of a doorway and waved him on. Daeman looked over his shoulder toward the sounds behind them—like claws or hollow bones rattling against stone—and, in the light of the blue beam, saw the first of a dozen voynix running in the street they had just crossed.
Daeman felt his heart lurch—he wasn’t used to the emotion of fear and found the thought of doing anything alone right now as the most terrifying option—and then he ran into the dark doorway behind Harman and the old woman.
Savi led the way down a series of increasingly narrow staircases, each flight of steps older and more worn than the one above. Four flights down, she tugged a flashlight from her backpack and flicked it on as the last of the reflected light disappeared from the dim blue glow above. The narrow beam illuminated a wall at the bottom of the narrowest flight of steps and Daeman’s heart lurched again. Then he saw what looked like a flap of dirty burlap hung over a hole he was sure was too small to allow him through.
“Hurry,” whispered Savi. She pulled the gunny sack material aside and slipped through the hole. Daeman heard echoes as if from a well. Harman quickly followed the old woman into the blackness.
Daeman heard scrabblings from the ruined house above, but no voynix footsteps sounded on the stairs. Not yet at least.
He leaned into the little hole, squeezed his narrow shoulders through, found that he was hanging over a bottomless black circle less than four feet across, and then his flailing hands found iron rungs in the wall opposite and he grunted as he pulled his torso and hips through the opening, scraping skin against ancient plaster until his legs were free and dangling. Then his feet found purchase on the rusty metal rungs and he began clambering down toward the muted sounds of Savi and Harman descending below him.
Cold air flowed up past his face. Daeman’s fingers and feet shifted uncertainly downward from cold rung to cold rung, he heard whispers below, and suddenly there were no rungs under his feet and he dropped four or five feet onto a brick floor.
Harman’s hands steadied him. He could see the circle of Savi’s flashlight illuminating a round tunnel made of ancient stones or bricks.
“This way,” she whispered and began running again, bent over to avoid the low ceiling. Harman and Daeman scrambled along behind, trying to avoid the irregular bricks in the curved floor by watching the circle of her flashlight rather than their own feet.
They came to a junction of tunnels. Savi checked her glowing palm function and they followed the left passage.
“I don’t hear the voynix behind us,” said Harman. He’d spoken softly, but his voice still echoed from the curved brick. The tallest of the three, Harman had to bend the most to walk.
“They’re above us,” said Savi. “Following us on the streets.”
“Are they using proxnet?” asked Daeman.
“Yes.” She paused at another junction, chose the center of three smaller passages. They all had to bend low here.
Harman looked at Daeman again, obviously curious about the proxnet comment, but not asking any questions now.
“They’re following you, you know,” said Savi, pausing to look first at Daeman and then at Harman. The harsh flashlight beam made her face look even older and more skull-like.
“Not you?” said Daeman, surprised.
She shook her head. “I don’t register on any nets. The voynix don’t even know I’m here. It’s you two who are showing up out of bounds on their farnet and proxnet scans. I think the nearest faxportal is Mantua. They know you didn’t walk this far.”
“Where are we going now?” whispered Harman. “The sonie?”
Savi shook her head again. Her gray hair was wet with sweat or condensation and plastered to her skull. “These tunnels don’t go beyond the old city. And the voynix have rendered the sonie inoperable by now. I’m headed for the crawler.”
“Crawler?” said Daeman, but rather than explain, Savi turned away and began leading them through the tunnels again.
A hundred paces further and the round brick tunnel became a narrow corridor, thirty paces beyond that and the corridor became stairs, and then a wall stopped them.
Daeman felt his heart trying to pound through his chest wall. “What do we do?” he said. “What do we do? What do we do?” He spun away from the light, listening hard in the darkness for voynix sounds.
“Climb.”
Daeman turned back to see Savi being lifted into another vertical well—this one narrower than the one they had descended—and then the light was gone as the flashlight bobbed above them.
Harman jumped up for the lowest rung, missed, cursed softly, jumped again, caught it, and pulled himself up. Daeman could barely see the outline of the older man’s arm as he reached down. “Come on, Daeman. Hurry. The voynix are probably already up there, waiting for us.”
“Then why are we climbing up there?”
“Come on.” Harman seized Daeman’s forearm in the darkness and pulled him up.
The voynix broke through the wall of the building just as the three humans were scrambling onto the crawler.
The huge machine took up much of the space in the central area of what Savi said had once been a large church. When they came up the stairs from the cellar, Savi’s flashlight flicking this way and that, Daeman had paused on the steps, not sure of what he was seeing. The crawler filled the space like some giant spider, its six wheels—each at least twelve feet tall—linked by hinged spidery struts, its passenger sphere glowing milkily in the center of the struts like a white egg at the center of a web.
The battering against the church doors and walls began even before Savi began climbing the thin, metallic access ladder hanging from the struts. “Hurry,” she said, no longer whispering.
Third in line—again—Daeman thought that the old woman was the master of the unnecessary imperative. A boarded window sixty feet up a wall exploded inward and five voynix scrabbled in, their bladed manipulators hacking into stone like ice hammers. The eyeless, rust-red domes above their carapaces turned ponderously downward and fixed on the crawler and the three people trying to get to its passenger sphere. Stones burst from the far wall and half a dozen other voynix came in on two legs.
Savi touched a faded red circle on the underside of the sphere, tapped digits into a small yellow energy diskey that appeared, and a section of the glass globe slid open with an audible rasp. She crawled up and in, Harman followed, and Daeman got his legs in just as the first of the voynix hurtled across the dusty stones toward him.