Page 178 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

This creepy corridor was not very long, with another thick door at the end.

Thorin spun the round handle with a grunt, rust staining the edges of the portal.

When the door opened to a room with stacks upon stacks of cages inside it, I froze and stared.

It was hard to tell if there were any animals inside any of them.

Fierce used his hand to guide me over the threshold, leading us to the center of the space.

Luka was already holding out his scanner and searching the cages, his gaze glued to a spot in one of the corners.

“This room seems to only have empty cages, but there’s more in the next one that we should search,” Thorin said, indicating a door.

It was as rusted and derelict-looking as the first one; this place looked absolutely trashed.

I was starting to feel like the small station could fall apart at any second.

This wasn’t some new kind of build—it looked really old and very abandoned.

“The smugglers retrofitted this place, didn’t they?

” Camila demanded of her male, indicating a panel on one wall with some writing I couldn’t understand.

“Hey, Doc, isn’t that Aderian script?” Luka barely glanced up from his handheld scanner, nodding with a grim look in confirmation.

It had Camila nodding in satisfaction. “See, I think this might be an old drilling facility. Look at the mounts on the ceiling over there.”

I had no clue what she saw. I couldn’t figure out what the bolts and hooks on the ceiling were meant for. Camila seemed pretty sure of her case, and I did think it made sense. The smugglers must have discovered it and used it for their own purposes after it had been abandoned by the Aderians.

Fierce looked as grim as the Doc did when we headed for the second door.

He leaned in close to talk more privately to me.

“The next room is pretty shocking. There are several animals still in cages there. They’re pretty miserable.

” I was glad he’d prepared me, because when I stepped through into the next room, which was bigger and still held some kind of crane, I was hit with the sight of a dozen cages stacked against a wall.

In each, an animal had been locked up, but most of them were dead.

Fluffy made a sad keening noise next to my ear, her body shivering and her tail curling around my neck. I hated the helmet covering me at that moment because I couldn’t reach out and pet her; I had to settle for tilting my head and rubbing my cheek against her.

Thorin and Camila went over to one of the other doors and looked inside.

I could hear their voices as they talked with Jakar and Da’vi.

I followed Fierce to one of the cages where an animal was still moving.

Not all of these were Riho; in fact, I saw only two dead ones of Fluffy’s species.

Other animals of various sizes littered the others, sometimes four in one cage, crowding the small spaces.

“Best we can figure, they stacked empties in that first room and the ones they wanted to take with them in here. Only, they never came back to pick up this last batch,” Fierce explained.

His hands were patiently working to open one of the cages, which had rusted shut.

A thick layer of animal droppings covered the bottom.

Inside was a Riho, maybe the only one still alive.

This one was bigger than Fluffy, with dark blue and bright blue spots.

It was lying on its side, its fur matted and gone in spots, its breathing labored.

The animal was so out of it that Fluffy’s presence wasn’t even required.

When Fierce pulled the poor animal out of the cage, it didn’t move or respond.

“Doc, come here. I’ve got one that needs your help,” Fierce called out, cradling the animal against his chest as he stood and looked around.

I did too, noticing that Thorin and Camila were sifting through the cages looking for a survivor, but Luka was nowhere to be seen.

“Where did he go?” I demanded, unclasping the water flask from my belt as I spoke so I could carefully dribble a little of it into the poor animal’s mouth.

There was no doubt that it was severely dehydrated.

The Doc had prepped us a little on what to expect, so I knew to only give a little and that this one needed an IV for more fluids quickly. But where was he?

“I’ll go look,” Camila said, abandoning the empty cage she’d lifted from the stack to hurry back to the first room.

Thorin gave a nod to Fierce before hurrying after her, clearly not about to let her go anywhere alone on this base.

Probably a smart choice, we already knew that the gravity generator was a little faulty and could fluctuate at any moment.

I took the sickly animal from Fierce so he could search the rest of the cages while we waited.

It didn’t take too long, though, before Camila and Thorin returned.

“He’s missing. The stack of empties toppled, but he’s not beneath them.

It looks to me like a struggle,” Thorin explained.

“Keep your eyes open, we’re going to do another sweep of this shithole. ”

They ducked into the control room to update Da’vi and Jakar, then jogged out with Jakar in tow.

The three fanned out—Camila with her rifle at the ready—as they headed back to the previous room.

I’d seen a few more doors leading off that space, so they were likely going to search them one by one and, hopefully, locate the Doc.

I shared a worried look with Fierce. If the Doc was gone, did that mean we weren’t alone here?

What had gotten to him? Was he hurt? Regardless, we needed to let the others do their job while Fierce and I tried to do ours.

I wasn’t going to be of any help searching this base with a gun in hand; I’d shoot myself in the foot.

I could probably attempt that IV, Luka had shown us how to do it in case there were a lot of animals to help.

I figured I was the only one actually willing to try; Fierce had been far too squeamish about sticking a needle into Snarl’s paw for practice.

I knelt on the floor, placed the animal on his side, and took out the kit Luka had prepared for this.

I got the IV ready, and then, with some trepidation, hooked it up to the sick Riho.

All the while, Fluffy was purring encouragingly in my ear.

I was grateful that Luka’s IV kit was meant to be dummy-proof, locating a vein automatically and smoothly sliding into that thin paw.

I taped plas film around the site and then carefully tucked the animal into the new, clean travel cage.

Once he was secured, I hooked up the IV container to the outside of the door and looked up to see how Fierce was doing.

The cages made a rattling sound, my body jolting as everything suddenly became ten times lighter than it should have been.

We weren’t quite without gravity yet—things hadn’t started floating—but when I moved, I tumbled over and spun through the air before hitting the cages with a thud.

“Hina!” Fierce called out. I wasn’t hurt, just disoriented and a little disgusted over hitting cages covered in shit.

He was pushing cages out of his way that had tumbled down into a messy pile, scrambling to get to me, right as gravity suddenly shifted again.

Everything felt heavy, my body thunking to the metal floor in an ungraceful heap.

When I lifted my head, I was just in time to see him slide across the suddenly shifted floor panels.

It was as if a hole had opened up, and he went down it in a flash.

One moment, our eyes had locked, his yellow to my brown.

Then his eyes went wide in shock as his footing disappeared.

He was gone so fast that I struggled to comprehend what had happened.

I frantically scrambled across the floor to the hole, noting that a whole section of panels had slipped to the side, revealing a borehole.

“Fierce!” I yelled, struggling to properly see when Fluffy was getting in the way of my face inside the helmet.

My HUD was still signaling that the air was breathable, so I clicked the helmet out of its lock around my throat and shoved it aside.

“Fierce!” I yelled again, my voice echoing in the huge metal room.

My eyes were instantly assaulted with a stinging pain, my nose burning from the stench that filled the place.

At least Fluffy got out of my way, jumping from my shoulder to rush to the edge of the hole. For a moment, I feared she’d leap down it, but she made an anxious mewling sound and looked back at me with her green eyes, as if telling me to fix this.

With my heart pounding in absolute terror, I got on my belly to slide to the edge and look down.

“Fierce!” I yelled again. The hole was deep, and it was really dark.

I couldn’t see a thing, so I yanked the emergency light from my belt and turned it on.

The beam wasn’t strong enough to light the bottom, so, with my fingers crossed, I threw it down the hole.

Snarl was whining, making anxious noises as he belly-crawled to the edge on my other side.

Together we watched the shimmering, smooth rock walls go down, and down, and down even farther.

The shaft was hundreds of feet deep. When the light finally seemed to hit the bottom with a metallic thud, I couldn’t make out any details.

I thought I saw a shape crumpled just inside the beam of light—was that Fierce? He wasn’t moving.

I looked up to see what I could do. I had to get down there somehow; I had to get him out.

I tried not to think about the possibility that he was dead, that fall was so deep.

How could he have survived? I tried to tell myself that the fluctuating gravity might have broken his fall. There had to be hope.