Tunnels 03, Freefall

liars, with no exceptions!"
    Martha cleared her throat, and Chester slowly turned to Elliott as he remembered what she had revealed back in the cavern. He shifted awkwardly where he sat. "Er... no offense meant," he mumbled at her.
    Elliott had stopped chewing and was staring at the boy. "Topsoil scum," she said through her tight lips. Chester's eyes opened wide with surprise, until she suddenly burst into laughter. "Only kidding, Chester! My father may have been one of them, but I hate them as much as you do."
    Chester swallowed, trying to summon a smile, but still looking a little shaken.
    "My mother served in the Garrison in the Styx compound, where they met," Elliott explained. "When she found she was with child, she moved as far away as she could in the West Cavern. To say it was a difficult situation would be putting it lightly -- she would have been Banished and he executed if anyone had discovered their secret. So he didn't have an awful lot to do with me while I was growing up, but he did come and visit us whenever he could. Then, when I was nine years old, the visits suddenly stopped. Word was he went missing in action -- on some Topsoil operation."
    "But don't you feel a bit funny about it?" Chester ventured. "I mean, you speak Styx, you're half Styx, and yet you've fought and... and you've killed them, haven't you?"
    "No, look, I'm a Colonist through and through, like my mother. She brought me up as one, and I saw how the Styx treated my people. I loathe them as much as anyone else," she answered.
    "So why did you leave the Colony?" Martha asked.
    "Somehow, someone found out who my father was and tried to hold it over my mother. I don't know who -- she wouldn't say, but she was going mad with worry. So I thought if I went, it would stop."
    "Did it?" Martha said.
    "I don't know," Elliott said, her voice sad. "I haven't had any contact with her since I left."
    There was a silence which Martha ended. "We can't hang about here. We're deep in spider country."
    "But what about Will?" Chester asked, frowning. "When I saw him he was moving like the wind. Do you think he's okay?"
    Martha took a deep breath. "Even if he did get clear, he's not going to be able to follow us into here. I say we try to get to the WolfCaves," she said, staring into the tunnels behind them. "If we reach them we can wait for him there."
    "What do you mean if? " Chester said.

Part Four
The UndergroundHarbor

20

    Three days later and with the food nearly exhausted, Will and Dr. Burrows were badly in need of rest. The inclined seam had been interrupted by a number of vertical faults, which meant they had to make it across some terrifyingly deep ravines in order to continue their journey. If these ravines had been on the surface, they wouldn't have stood a chance of crossing them, but in the low gravity environment they could simply leap from one side to the other.
    They had just traversed another ravine when Dr. Burrows began to whistle random notes through his teeth. He was pottering along with his chin in the air, exactly as if he was out for a Sunday stroll. It irked Will that his father appeared to be so relaxed about their situation. But within less than a kilometer, they came to the top of the seam and found themselves squeezing through an extremely narrow passage, a rock corridor with jaggedly uneven sides.
    Dr. Burrows ceased his whistling and was instead making a series of grunts as he struggled through the claustrophobic space.
    The whistling had been bad enough, but the grunts were getting too much for Will to bear. All of a sudden he stopped, forcing his father to pull up sharply behind him in the corridor.
    "What am I doing!" he blurted, kicking out at a loose rock. "Why the hell am I here with you?"
    "Something on your mind?" Dr. Burrows asked.
    "Yeah. Other than being bloody knackered and starving, I've made a terrible mistake. I should have found a way back to Chester and the others. I didn't try hard enough. I just know they'll be waiting for me at the WolfCaves."
    "We did try," Dr. Burrows replied evenly. "There wasn't a safe way through."
    Will shook his head. "We should've just taken the first passage we came across, the one with the young spiders in it, and chanced it. I bet it would have been okay. And we didn't really explore whether there were passages off the other side of the seam. What if there was one that led straight to the WolfCaves?" He kicked at another rock which rebounded off the walls of the corridor.