“You all right there, buddy?”
“I don’t know! What the hell, man? Are you crazy? What just happened? Where am I?” Letho shouted.
Above and all around him the sound of groaning metal filled the air. He looked up to see a giant set of jaws above him closing. Dust rained down as two huge metal plates with toothed edges slowly ground their way to meet one another. The enormous metal teeth fit together perfectly, sealing out the night sky and plunging everything into pure blackness.
Then industrial halogens kicked on, humming their simple song in the key of fifty hertz. Their harsh yellow light illuminated the falling silt and rust from the doors above.
“It’s okay, man, you can let go. Damn, you really are a strong little bastard!”
Letho looked down to see that he had left a dent in the shape of his hand on Saul’s dashboard. “Sorry Saul,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Something to remember me by?”
“Yeah, you got it. Go ahead, get out. It’s safe, I promise. I wouldn’t put my trusty mule on any unsafe ground, you know.” Saul patted the steering wheel.
Letho did as he was told. He supposed that they were in fact safe, though to Letho the term seemed rather relative. The massive steel platform they had landed on was held in place by a giant crane attached to the stone walls of what appeared to be a cylindrical cavern leading straight down into the earth.
“What is this place?” Letho asked. “And what was with that crazy entrance?”
“Oh come on, already. It wasn’t that bad, was it? That’s Tiny over there,” Saul said, offering a curt salute to a rather large but handsome woman in the crane’s cab. “She catches us on the way down and makes sure we have a happy landing. As to the entrance, well, we don’t want our friends in Hastrom City to know about this place, so we have to go in all stealth-like. That’s what the killing the lights was all about. Sorry if it scared you. I was just having a little fun. You gotta have a little fun from time to time, Letho, otherwise you might just be tempted to put an assault rifle in your mouth, you know?”
Letho looked down at himself, surveying his tattered jumpsuit. It had once been bright Fulcrum red, but was now mostly black and covered with gibbets and flecks of bone from the many mutant creatures he had killed.
“Yeah, fun. You got it, Saul.”
The landing area was a large platform constructed of metal grating, and Letho could see the places where support beams had been welded into the very bones of the earth. He looked beneath his feet and saw that the true floor of the cylinder was at least one hundred feet below him. Tiny began to lower them toward a catwalk that led to a set of enormous steel doors.
Letho was suddenly engulfed by fur and the familiar musk-scent of his friend.
“Maka!” he shouted, or at least attempted to. His lips were crushed against the bear’s chest, and if he wasn’t so happy to see his friend alive he might have been tempted to remove himself from the rather awkward embrace with force.
“You’re alive!” Maka shouted, releasing Letho from his crushing embrace and holding him at arm’s length. Letho smiled up at Maka and then made a show of spitting and pulling fur from his lips.
“Did you expect any less?” Bayorn said, smiling a bit more than was his custom, the guise of gracious leader slipping in his joy.
“You guys made it!” Letho said.
“Yes, and no thanks to you,” said Thresha. Thrown across her shoulder was a slumped and slurring Deacon, who looked a bit disoriented but otherwise no worse for the wear. Letho felt a twinge of jealousy as he noted the way that Deacon’s body was so firmly pressed against the devastating curve of Thresha’s hip and bosom, and the way her arm clutched him at the hip.
“Whatever, Thresha. My diversion was a key component to your escape,” Letho said, forcing a half-grin.
“Yeah, right. We’ll have to sit down sometime and talk about your strategies,” Thresha replied, but even she was smiling more than he had ever before witnessed.
“You gonna introduce me to your friends?” Saul asked. He inhaled deeply, and his nose wrinkled, as though he smelled something he didn’t care for. Realization hit Letho, as he knew all too well what Saul smelled.
“Wait!” Letho said, but just a moment to late. Saul’s hands had flicked down to his sidearms, and they were in his hands faster than Letho could think shine-ola. He wasn’t anywhere near as fast as Letho, but he was quick.
His eyes went cold as they locked on Thresha’s, then darted to Letho’s, whose hand went instinctively to an empty holster. At the rapier-quick movement of Letho’s arm, Saul’s eyes widened like someone who has had his disbelief in legend summarily extinguished. Letho, remembering that he had no weapons to answer Saul’s challenge, put his hand up, palm out, taking care to move slowly, calmly.
“Letho, please tell me that you don’t think that we’re all kutas. I need to hear you say it, because by not telling me that you have a goddamn Mendraga in your company and then just assuming that I wouldn’t notice… you leave me with no recourse but to believe that you think that I am just one ignorant-ass kuta.”
Maka and Bayorn glowered at the use of one of the Tarsi’s crudest words, and Letho could feel the rumble of their growls vibrating in his own chest. A momentary cacophony of clicks and the rustle of fabric filled the air as Saul’s men brought their rifles to bear.
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” Thresha said.
“Shut up! You ain’t got nothing to say that we want to hear.” Saul’s next words were for Letho, but his eyes never left Thresha’s. “Waiting on you, pal. Tell me I’m not a kuta!”
“You’re not a kuta, Saul,” Letho stammered. “Look, don’t do anything crazy—give me a second to explain.”
Saul appeared to be frozen, as if the machinery in his mind had slipped a gear. A line had been crossed, one that demanded action—and Letho feared what that action would be. Saul’s and Letho’s Black Bears hung in the air like unanswered challenges, and there was no tremor in Saul’s hands. Letho felt time slipping away in the form of beads of sweat that rolled down his neck and down the curve of his back. He could sense that Saul’s men were getting antsy, and he could smell their fear, a fetid stink that rose up and stoked a desire in him to do something unequivocally insane, like snatch his Black Bear back and make it speak brimstone.
“Squad, hold your fire. Permission to fire only on my command,” Saul said calmly. “Letho, please explain. Please tell me why I’m not a kuta for allowing this walking sack of filth into my inner sanctum.”
“Oh, please. Why don’t you do something, tough guy?” Thresha said with a seductive smile. Then to Letho, she said, “He’s bluffing. He knows we can tear him and these fools to shreds. Let’s just kill them.”
“Shut up, Thresha!” Letho snarled through clenched teeth.
But Saul took the bait. The dry, concussive blasts of his sidearm thundered in the air, but Thresha had already begun to move. She slipped through the air, frictionless, dancing her way toward Saul as bullets sped by her on all sides. She pounced, blurring forward, catching him in the solar plexus with both hands and driving him to the ground.
Saul’s soldiers could have obliterated her in that instant, but they obeyed their commander’s last order and did not fire. Letho was amazed at their restraint, their absolute obedience to their commander, whom Thresha now sat astride, one hand pinning him down, the other raised in a clenched fist. Letho didn’t know what to do.
But the arrival of someone new defused the situation before Letho had time to make yet another decision he might’ve regretted later. All attention turned to the enormous steel double doors on the nearby catwalk as the weary machines that moved them began to groan and spit magnificent plumes of steam and the occasional jet of sparks. Letho thought for a moment to use this diversion to his advantage; in fact, Saladin was practically goading him by presenting ways to incapacitate Saul’s men. The vignettes skittered like arachnids across the augmented network of neurons in his mind, and Letho was disappointed to see that most of them ended with at least one of his comrades dead.