Chapter 10
*** TOREN ***
The earthquake hit on day nineteen of the assessment.
Toren was in the research caverns with Marina and Melessra when the first tremor came.
A low, grinding vibration that rattled the volcanic glass instruments and sent hairline cracks racing across the cavern ceiling.
Minor tremors were normal in the Colony.
The geothermal systems produced seismic activity the way a heartbeat produced vibration.
Background noise. Nothing to worry about.
This one didn't stop.
The second tremor hit eight seconds later, harder, and the bioluminescent organisms on the walls flickered like candles in a storm.
Data tablets slid off workstations. A rack of crystallographic instruments toppled with a crash that made Melessra curse in Dobromian with a word Toren had never heard from her before and that suggested considerable stress.
"That's not a standard tremor," Melessra said, already running toward her monitoring station. Her green scales had gone pale at the edges which was the stress response that Toren recognized from a lifetime of crises. "The epicenter is shallow, directly beneath the Colony's eastern quadrant."
"What's in the eastern quadrant?" Marina asked, steadying herself against a workstation as the floor shuddered beneath them.
"Storage levels, secondary water systems, and; Melessra's voice tightened, "the guest wing."
The third tremor knocked Marina off her feet.
Toren caught her. His arms went around her waist before his brain registered the decision, pulling her against his chest as the floor lurched.
Chunks of ceiling stone crashed onto the workstation she'd been sitting at three seconds earlier.
Dust billowed through the cavern in choking clouds.
The bioluminescent light stuttered, went dark, came back at half intensity.
Marina gripped his shoulders, her face inches from his, dust in her red hair and her green eyes sharp with fear she was already converting into action. "I'm fine," she said. "Put me down. We need to move."
"Agreed."
They ran. The corridor between the research caverns and the main Colony was two hundred yards of carved stone that shook and groaned around them like a living thing in pain.
Bioluminescent panels went dark in sections, leaving stretches of blackness they sprinted through by memory.
Behind them, something massive crashed. An entire section of ceiling coming down in the cavern they'd just left.
If they'd been thirty seconds slower, they'd have been under it.
Melessra ran beside them, her data tablet clutched to her chest, her green scales flashing in the intermittent light. She was reading seismic data while running, which was either extraordinary multitasking or terrible self-preservation instincts. Toren suspected both.
They reached the main junction and found chaos.
Weredragons crowding the corridors, shouting instructions, carrying children.
Warriors in partial shift directing traffic with wings spread as barriers.
The emergency lighting cast everything in a dim amber glow that made the dust clouds look like fog.
A mother was pressed against the wall, clutching two dragonlings who were crying making high, sharp sounds that cut through the rumble of aftershocks.
An elderly Weredragon with faded scales sat on the floor, looking dazed, blood on his forehead from a falling stone.
"Where's Athena?" Marina pulled out her communication device. Static. She tried again. More static. "The comm system is down."
"The relay nodes are in the ceiling infrastructure," Toren explained. "If corridors collapsed, the nodes went with them."
"Then we go in person." Marina was already moving toward the guest wing corridor. "My people are in there, Toren."
Melessra grabbed her arm. "The seismic data; the fault line runs directly beneath the guest wing. The structural integrity of that section is compromised. Going in there right now is …"
"Not optional," Marina finished. She pulled her arm free gently but firmly. "Athena, Peter, and Patel are in there. If the structure is compromised, they need to get out, and they can't do that through a collapsed corridor."
Toren looked at Melessra. The scientist's amber eyes held the calculation of someone weighing lives against probabilities and not liking the math. "How long before the aftershocks stop?" he asked.
"I don't know. The fault line is shallow and active. Could be minutes, could be hours."
"Then we go now." He turned to Marina. "Stay behind me. I'm serious about this. My scales can take impacts that your body can't, and if the ceiling comes down, I can shield you. But only if you're behind me."
Marina looked like she wanted to argue, but she didn't. She nodded once and fell in behind him.
They ran.
* * *
The guest wing corridor was worse than Toren had feared.
The ceiling had partially collapsed at the main junction, blocking the entrance with ten feet of rubble made up of stone, shattered bioluminescent panels and twisted metal from the ventilation system, all piled in a jagged wall that sealed the corridor as effectively as a door.
Dust hung in the air so thick that Marina was coughing before they reached the blockage, pulling her jacket collar over her mouth to filter the worst of it.
"Athena!" Marina shouted through the gaps in the rubble. "Can you hear me?"
Nothing for three seconds, then five. Marina's hands clenched at her sides. Toren could see the fear in the rigid line of her shoulders, but not for herself, never for herself. For her people.
Then, a faint, muffled, but unmistakable, Athena's voice. "We're here! The corridor's blocked on our side too. Peter's hurt. A ceiling beam caught his shoulder. He's conscious but bleeding badly. Patel's fine. She was under a table."
"Of course she was under a table," Marina muttered. Even in a crisis, Patel's survival instinct was to protect herself and the data in equal measure.
"How bad is Peter's bleeding?" Marina called through the rubble.
"Bad enough that I'd like him in a medical bay sooner rather than later. The wound's deep, shoulder to bicep. I've got pressure on it, but he needs stitching or whatever the alien equivalent is."
Toren assessed the rubble. Collapsed stone, some pieces weighing hundreds of pounds. A human team with tools could clear it in an hour. They didn't have an hour. Peter was bleeding through whatever pressure Athena was applying, and every minute counted.
"Stand back from the wall," he told Marina. "As far as you can get."
"What are you going to do?"
"What I'm built for."
He shifted. Not fully because the corridor was too narrow for full dragon form.
But enough that his wings spread against the walls, his tail extended for balance, and the denser musculature of his partial shift gave him the raw strength needed for what came next.
His scales thickened along his forearms and shoulders which was the natural armor that Weredragons developed in combat shift.
It was harder than stone, capable of deflecting Drog mandibles and falling rubble alike.
He breathed fire at the rubble. Not a sustained blast, just targeted bursts that superheated the stone at its fracture points, making it crack along natural fault lines.
The heat was intense enough that Marina retreated further down the corridor, her arm over her face, watching him through the shimmer of superheated air.
The stone glowed orange, then red, then cracked with sharp reports that echoed through the corridor like gunshots.
Between the fire bursts, he tore chunks away with his claws.
His tail braced against the corridor wall for leverage, the spiked tip digging into the stone.
Each piece he removed revealed more rubble behind it.
The collapse was deep and layered, the ceiling having come down in stages.
But it was thinning. He could feel air moving through the gaps, carrying the scent of dust and blood from the other side.
"Toren!" Athena's voice, closer now. "I can see light through the rubble. You're almost through."
He redoubled his efforts. A slab of stone, which was easily three hundred pounds, blocked the final section.
He got his claws under the edge, set his feet, and heaved.
The muscles in his back screamed. His wing membranes strained against the corridor walls.
The slab shifted, scraped, and then toppled sideways with a crash that shook the floor.
The gap opened. Not wide, just barely enough for a person to squeeze through, but open. Bioluminescent light flickered on the other side, dim and unsteady.
Athena appeared immediately. Dust-covered, blonde hair and blood on her hands that wasn't hers.
She was pulling Peter through the gap with one arm under his good shoulder, her other hand pressing a wadded jacket against the wound on his left side.
Her face was focused, set, the expression of a woman operating at maximum capacity on nothing but adrenaline and stubbornness.
Peter looked worse. His face was gray beneath the dust, his breathing shallow and rapid. The blood had soaked through Athena's improvised bandage and was dripping onto the stone floor. His eyes found Toren and focused with the deliberate effort of someone fighting to stay conscious.
"You're on fire," Peter observed. His voice was thin but present.
Toren looked down. His left forearm was smoldering where a superheated stone fragment had lodged between two scales. He knocked it away and patted out the ember. "Minor occupational hazard."
"You literally set yourself on fire to rescue us."
"The stone needed to be heated to fracture properly. The self-immolation was a side effect."
"That's the most alien sentence anyone has ever said to me, and I was kidnapped by a Drog last week."
"You weren't kidnapped. The Drog tried to eat you. There's a difference."
"Not from my perspective."