The Clone’s Mate by Susan Trombley
Twenty
I suspected that our captors had wildly underestimated Subject 34, and they would eventually pay for it, but for the moment, even he knew we were better off escaping the squad of mechs entering the enclosure. He led me to the maze hatch, and quickly broke it open with a few hard slams of his upper fists.
Once he’d jerked the cover off the hatch, he swept me off my feet with his lower hands, then unceremoniously shoved me through the hatch. Pumped with adrenaline, I was still moving fast, though my entire body trembled as reaction began to set in. I quickly crawled through the hatch until the tunnel opened up to a point where I could stand.
Subject 34 was right behind me when I rose to my feet, his movements as he climbed up into the shaft barely making a sound compared to my noisy crawling. He picked me up in his lower arms again—to my protest—then raced down the dark tunnel. For a few moments, I felt blind in the darkness, but then I saw the lights from the lower tunnel as the sound of his steps changed when he crossed the grating. I shuddered at my recollection of being in that place now below us.
Walls were already shifting into place as 34 ran much faster than I would have been able to keep up. He seemed to anticipate them as we moved through the maze above the other maze. He had some destination in mind, but had to take a roundabout route, because our captors were trying to cut off our escape.
Mind you, I didn’t think there would be a full escape from this maze. At least, I hadn’t found one, but it turned out that I was dead wrong. Try as they might, they couldn’t completely block 34’s path, since each time a wall moved to block one opening, it exposed another.
That’s what you get when you had a budget. You couldn’t put unlimited walls in your death maze.
They did try though, and several times, I thought they would succeed in cutting us off so the noisy squad of mechs chasing us would catch up and kill us.
Well, they’d probably kill me. Maybe they’d do some damage to 34 before he destroyed them. I knew it was me they wanted dead. They probably figured once I was, they could regain control of Subject 34.
Then something more ominous occurred that left me certain we would die—or at least I would.
The maze began to fill with gas. Subject 34 chitter-growled in rage, then sped up his steps when I didn’t think he could possibly move any faster, his wings twitching so rapidly behind him that they buzzed. I kept my silence, clinging to his chitin as my heart thudded and fear-sweat soaked my shirt and pants.
I trusted 34 to keep me safe to the best of his ability, and that ability was great. I just wasn’t sure we could escape our captors when they’d had the upper hand for so long.
But they no longer had control of 34, and I don’t think they saw that one coming.
He broke through a hatch and dropped down into the lower tunnel to escape the gas. There was more of it in this tunnel, but not in such a thick cloud that it left me choking. I’d begun to grow groggy, and my breathing became difficult, so when 34 stung me, I barely felt it.
I did, however, feel the burn of some kind of stimulant rushing through my blood from the place he’d stung me, and I jerked into alertness in his arms. My head rushed with blood, my nostrils flaring as I sucked in air free from the gas while he moved further away from the vents spilling it into the lower maze.
Then we reached a dead end, with no sign of moving doors or walls. This didn’t stop 34 though. He extended his pincers and jabbed them at a panel in the ceiling. It was clear that this part of the lower maze wasn’t below 34’s portion of the maze. Instead, the panel broke away after several hard strikes from 34, to reveal an opening leading to some new chamber.
Grasping the sides of the square hole with his upper pincers, he hauled us upwards, his lower arms shifting me so that I was held against him with my legs dangling against his. Even with this shift in position, we barely fit through the hole because of the size of him and the rigidity of his chitin.
On the other side of the hole lay a staging area for his prey, with a few of the clear cages I’d become far too familiar with, several machines that looked like the one that had taken samples from me, and a variety of sealed crates and shelves. It was about the size of a large garage, and even had a garage type door, though the top of the door had a cut-out to fit around a huge track that also looked familiar.
It was the track for the giant claw that led into the warehouse where all the clear cages were kept. I had no doubt the other side of that garage door would be that warehouse, though I didn’t hear any sounds coming from that other side. Not surprising given the fact that those cages were soundproof.
“There will be guards out there,” I whispered to 34.
He nodded in a staccato motion, then set me on my feet. I stepped away from him as I glanced back at the open hatch, thinking about all the doomed prey that had been dropped through it into the maze.
Was I to be doomed as well? I turned my attention back to Subject 34, who was now pacing in front of the garage door in an inhuman fashion, his wings flicking.
I loved him—this monstrous alien creature. I wanted him to be free from this horrible life of imprisonment and enslavement. I didn’t know what kind of life awaited him beyond the confines of the warehouse, and I wasn’t certain it was even an environment I could survive, but I suspected there wasn’t much in the way of environment that he couldn’t handle.
I couldn’t give up hope of at least Subject 34 escaping these Iriduans alive.
Then I thought of all the other victims, trapped in their clear cages, helpless, desperate, despairing. Always watching the claw passing overhead, fearing they would be the next to be plucked from their perches and dropped into a nightmare. Granted, some of them, like poor Ilyan, were too dangerous to roam free, but there were likely others who deserved at least a chance to find a better life.
Then I thought of Nirgal, my tormentor whom I had grown oddly fond of, and now, his own people tortured him to see if he would become like Ilyan.
“Thirty-four,” I said in a hesitant voice, unsure whether I should even voice the direction of my thoughts.
He turned from the large door to face me, his body language showing that I had his full attention, though I suspected he always remained aware of his surroundings on another level perhaps a human couldn’t understand.
“Can you read these symbols?” I asked, pointing to the various markings along the wall and on the machines and the crates.
He nodded immediately, without turning his head to scan the room. I’d already guessed that the little, black half bubbles found at several points on his head chitin were also eyes, allowing him to see with a far greater periphery than any human.
“Do you see anything in this room that might help us free the captives in the room beyond this?”
Subject 34 could probably sneak us past the mechs, but I couldn’t just leave this place without trying to help others escape.
He turned his head this time, regarding everything closely. I returned to the hole that led to the maze, my ears straining for sounds of pursuit. If they figured out where we were, they wouldn’t necessarily have to come at us from below. They could already be amassing on the other side of that door.
Then 34 chittered in a sound I took to be pleased as he strode to one of the machines. He pushed some buttons, brought up a screen, then started swiping and tapping away.
The door descended into a slit in the ground rather than upwards like a normal garage door. Then the giant claw entered the room on its overhead track, having apparently been stowed just outside the door.
As I feared, there were mechs on the other side of that garage door too, along with some floating drones. Voices shouted from the drones, demanding our immediate surrender, but Subject 34 quickly dispatched the mechs that charged at us as I ducked behind some crates.
Whatever they were using to shoot him with seemed to be ineffective. Maybe it wasn’t lethal projectiles but rather some type of stunning round, but they were outmatched. He quickly disposed of the threat, including the drones, then chittered for me to follow him as he leapt onto the claw.
He held me close with one lower arm as his upper hand moved over controls on the claw. Suddenly we were moving. I clung to one of the arms of the claw as it moved out of the storage room and then over the rows of cages. When we passed over the first stack of them, Subject 34 did something on the claw’s control panel that caused the cages below us to open.
The mechs that amassed in the walkways between the cage stacks suddenly found themselves under attack from creatures crawling out of—or flying out of—their many different cages as 34 opened one after another. There were so many creatures, and I had no idea how many were deadly to us as well as the mechs and guards below, but we didn’t really have time to take an inventory first.
Armed drones flew towards us, but before they could fire upon us, they were swarmed by a variety of winged creatures, including some of the Iriduan males who were apparently in better shape than the ones barely able to crawl out of their cages.
I wasn’t certain whether the escaped creatures were deliberately helping us, or just enraged at their captors and getting some of their own back. I supposed it didn’t matter.
We passed over Ilyan’s cage, and I had a moment of doubt, but Subject 34 freed him before I could warn him not to. On the one hand, I knew what the bad side of Ilyan was capable of, and I feared him for it. On the other hand, I’d seen how much captivity was destroying him, and I wondered if being forced to live out the rest of your life in a tiny, clear cage was the answer for curing such a horrible illness as being fractured.
He’d been watching our advance. I felt his eyes upon us, though I wasn’t close enough to see whether they were cold or simply calculating, so I had no idea which part of him was in charge now. His wings were shriveled, so he couldn’t fly out of his enclosure, but he wasted no time leaving it, leaping lithely down the stack of cages, easily dodging angry critters darting out of their own prisons.
I felt torn, wondering if we should follow him and keep an eye on him so he didn’t escape this place to go redirecting asteroids or something equally as destructive. Still, if he brought hell down upon our captors, it might be very useful for us. Given the way he moved as if he was driven by some purpose, it was clear he wasn’t leaving without taking some of them down.
The rush of captives escaping preoccupied the mechs and guards so much that they couldn’t get a bead on us, but I didn’t feel relieved yet. We still didn’t know what kind of defenses guarded the outside of this warehouse. Granted, we had a whole army of pissed off captives now working towards dismantling the very walls of the place, but I didn’t know what kind of army would meet us when we succeeded.
We reached the end of the row of cages, then passed down the other side of the warehouse to free all those creatures, only adding to the mayhem. At the end of the track, Subject 34 caught me up in both lower arms and jumped off the claw. We landed lightly on a cage on one of the bottom stacks thanks to his wings slowing our fall.
Then he immediately shoved me aside, shrieking in challenge as something struck at him.
