Tory

Grey and white walls, pipes, icons marking the walls, stripes lengthwise on the floor in three colors, red, blue, green.

Where was she now?

Tory Ciarelli stopped for a moment to think, to revisualize what the maps had shown her. She held onto the metal rung of the ladder, not yet daring to put a her foot down to the floor. Yes, she’d found the hatch as expected, yes, had used her code breaking app to get through the security protocols. And was now, down three levels, seven hundred meters from the central hub, but on this level the markings had changed. This was it, the original base foundation of Cerberus Underhill, built a decade before by machines, robots, under remote supervision. Almost from another time it looked, certainly from before she was even born.

Still, Tory had studied enough of what she could find by sneaking access to her mom’s account and should be about seven hundred meters now from where she needed to be. The old lines that the second generation systems painted were still there, on one had bothered to remove them when they added the new coded guide system, that had to be it. So, all she needed to do was convert to what was above. She finally let go of the ladder and landed lightly a half meter down. Small and compact, Tory wasn’t exactly heavy, and in Martian gravity even lighter. It was a feather fall, really.

She glanced along the lines that stretched down the floor of the maintenance corridor ahead of her, then turned to look at where they came from behind her, calculating the direction she needed to go. Each had an arrow laser painted in every three meters. About ten meters ahead of her, the red turned left. Another ten and the blue turned right.

The instructions in the first gen maintenance guide came to mind.

On level two you follow the blue.

Tory shivered. It was colder down here, since this level wasn’t a place for people so much, more for robots so comfortable temperatures weren’t maintained. It smelled different as well and the odor made her scrunch her nose. The living levels of the complex were filled with people, colonists and bornhere’s, the air seemed organic, scented. The air here had a rusty metallic scent to it with a hint of mold. She hadn’t added any layers, didn’t think about the temperature down here. Well, once she got to the hub, there would be p-suit, and they had built in heaters. The best she could do was keep moving to keep warm.

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But the good thing was they’d never track her down here.

She wasn’t carrying her spreader with her, or anything else which could be traced. Tory had also memorized the route to Cerberus Underhill’s transport hub meter by meter, had always been good with the kind of maze the CU was, and had the color chart to help guide her if for any reason she felt she was getting lost. That talent had kept her from being locked down back home on Earth, no matter where her parents were posted by the Ares Combine, and with any luck, that particular talent would help get her back to where she belonged. Earth. Home.

Behind her somewhere, metal slammed on metal? Another hatch? The sound made Tory stop, glance back over her shoulder worriedly. Could that be someone who would spot her, tell on her, or was it just a robot sent to seal a crack, fix a circuit . She started back down the corridor, taking off in a lope fast enough to hopefully keep warm herself.

Tory wasn’t used to the gravity on Mars yet, not used to weighing only a third of what she was supposed to, and skidded around the next corner faster than she’d intended, light clumps of her hair slapping against her brow, her breathing starting to pick up from steady to a little ragged.

She avoided slamming into the wall, but not slowing down turned out to be a mistake Tory didn’t correct soon enough. Her breathing picked up. Before she knew it her chest was heaving.

The thin air here hated her and her lungs hated it right back. Low in pressure like on a mountain top, not the oxygen mix her body craved combined and this air carried had trace particles it down right loathed.

“You have to take it easy for the first few months,” the school medtech had warned her after rescuing her from her first attack with swift use of an oxyinjector. “Your body needs time to adjust to the atmosphere here.”

Tory slowed right down, but it was too late. She was now gasping for breath, stumbling down the passageway, trying to concentrate on slowing her desperate heaving chest and failing miserably. She was still loping, being carried by momentum as much as anything, tried turning around the next corner, hit the pipes along the wall with her shoulder, bounced back.

Three times since that warning she’d suffered an pseudo-asthma attack, each as terrifying as the one before. One of the big excuses her parent’s has used to come here was the polluted air back home, the wonderfully rich and warm atmosphere of Earth her mother had constantly complained about Tory’s body loved. This air was too thin!

She wheezed, choked, stumbled to what looked like a bench sitting near a four-way intersection and tried to calm her lungs by force of will. That wasn’t working. No! She’d finally made the decision to try to find a way back home, to her home, her real home and she might not make it anywhere, she might die right here!

Calm down! Breathe! Please Breathe!