Bleeding Kyber Chapter 3: 03_ Struggle for freedom(2)

Read chapter 3 of Bleeding Kyber by theRonin_666 on NovelPedia.

Water exploded through the entrance tunnel, a devastating brown flood that swept controllers off their feet like dolls. The alarm cut out with a wet sizzle. Slaves scattered, screaming, scrambling for higher ground as people were thrown around. In the chaos, nobody noticed the skinny half-half and the old engineer slip through a maintenance shaft that led straight to the living quarters. Behind them, the mine began to fill. Herald fell from the shaft, landing face-first into the hard floor. Pytor soon followed him. 'Seventy-seven years,' he thought. 'Or today. I pick today.' "We should pack. Bring everything valuable, something, anything that may help us survive the coming battle." Pytor stood holding his back, trembling as pain overcame his desire for freedom. "Fuck! Can't they make these shafts easier to crawl." "Pytor, focus here." "No, kid. You listen. We split. You go your way, I go mine. If they follow you, great. If they follow me, go your way faster. Understand?" They both looked each other in the eye, Pytor firm in his standing. Before he turned away, continuing his heroic monologue. "You should know. I am old," he turned towards Herald, expecting him to be emotional, maybe a tear slowly sliding off his face. Only to find himself alone. A cold wind blew in the corridor, smell of river mud reaching his nose. "Heartless half-half." He paused at the corridor's mouth, as if he might say something else to the now empty corridor, then shook his head and vanished into the dark. His footsteps echoed in the dark hall as they both scrambled to prepare for an escape. A piece of chocolate, a bottle, a dull blade and a piece of cloth to protect himself from the desert. That was all Herald took for his escape. Along with something he'd kept, something from the pod he'd been bought in. A glittering piece of crystal, cold to the touch, and hard in texture. 'I could sell this for a few credits.' He ran out of the quarters, a cloth wrapped around his face, supplies in a bag, and moved along the corridors. He knew about another exit for the caves, the old mining caves that are connected to the new one. He just needed to walk past the now flooding mine ways, while escaping the controllers and other desperate slaves. While Herald and Pytor were still crawling through the dark, the controllers were learning a lesson in consequences. Drell was the first to notice the water, his fat belly floating on the water like a balloon. He'd been shouting himself hoarse at the slaves turning the crank, his jaw aching with every syllable, when something snagged at the edge of his mind, an unease he couldn't name as the water finally reached above his belly button. The gate was down. The crank had stopped. The alarm had been silenced by its own waterlogged circuits. Everything was, in theory, secure. Except for the sound. Water. Running water, inside the mine. Not the distant roar of the river outside, but the unmistakable rhythm of a current flowing somewhere. He turned, his photonic whip dangling uselessly under water, and saw it. A stream of brown water sliding under the gate, two feet high and rising fast. The gate wasn't sealed. The gate wasn't even close fully. "What," Drell said, his voice suddenly very small, "is that." The female controller, her name was Lasker, and she was the only one in the room with any resemblance of engineering sense, pushed past him and stared at the gap. Her face, already hard, turned to stone. "The stop-pin," she said. "It's gone. The gate didn't seat. Someone pulled the pin." Drell's brain, which had never been built for speed, took a moment to catch up. "Pulled it? Who-who would-" "It doesn't matter who. The river's still rising. If we don't seal this gate right now, we lose the entire mines." She was already moving, barking orders at the crank team. "Push harder! Force it down! We'll drop it again-maybe it'll seat this time." The slaves threw themselves at the crank wheel, their muscles straining. For a moment, the c