"What the fuck just happened?" Y.T.'s voice demands in Hiro's ear as he and Jack beat it out of the room and hang a right. He doesn't know where they're going; he just hopes it's not straight into a bunch of guards.
"I think you can guess," Hiro responds over the microphone. Three guards come round the corner right in front of them. Before they know what's hit them the first one has lost his head and the second has been impaled through the stomach. As the mortal remains of the first two guards collapse to the floor the third one raises his rifle to fire, but doesn't have time to pull the trigger before Jack is barreling into him at full speed. The guard's weapon spits a round of ammunition into the ceiling as he is knocked into the wall. Before he can recover Jack hits him over the head with the pommel of his sword. Hiro and Jack have taken off again before the guard finishes his unconscious slump to the floor.
"We cannot stay in the halls," Jack warns in a relatively calm voice. He's right. If they just keep running around like this they're sure to find themselves trapped between two groups of gun-toting thugs and it doesn't take much imagination to figure out what'll happen next.
Hiro doesn't have any kind of plan at this point, so he just picks a random door and slams the button beside it, then ducks through with Jack right behind. He hits the button on the inside of the door to shut it again, then starts looking to see if there's a second door out of here or at least something to hide behind.
It's a small office, currently unoccupied. There's a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet and a potted plant – nothing to provide good cover. But there's also a fairly large vent in the ceiling, right above the desk. By the time Hiro has noticed it Jack is already standing on the desk. There's no time for finesse, so he just hacks the vent cover off with his sword. Once it has clattered to the desktop he sheathes his sword, reaches up, pulls himself into the vent and disappears. Hiro sheathes his own sword and climbs onto the desk as Jack reappears and reaches out an arm to help him up.
As soon as they're both in Jack gets himself turned around again – no easy feat, but he manages it fairly quickly – and starts belly-crawling down the pipe. Hiro follows suit, feeling very glad that he isn't claustrophobic.
There isn't much light here, except for the dim illumination that comes through the occasional vent. This continues for several minutes until Hiro is in the process of crawling over a particular vent and he hears a door open in the room below it. Jack hears it too, and they both freeze. Hiro looks down through the slits in the vent and sees two guards right below him. He tries to breathe as quietly as possible, but he can't do anything about his pounding heartbeat and he's certain that the sound will give him away…
"Any idea what this is about?" one of the guards says to the other.
His companion shrugs. "Dunno."
"I hope it's over soon," the first one remarks, "Our shift is supposed to be over soon. I don't want to spend the whole night waiting in here." That last statement just makes it a perfect oh shit moment. The edges of the vent slits are starting to dig into his arms. Maybe he should just try and crawl anyway, just be really quiet about it and get off the vent and hope they don't hear it. He doesn't want to stay here all night either.
But he's not going to. The vent cover, not designed to support the weight of an adult human for any length of time, creaks and shifts a bit under his weight.
The two guards in the room below look upward.
Jack and Hiro exchange a horrified glance.
And then the vent cover gives way completely.
~***~
After the initial crash and thump there is a moment of silence. Then, as Jack is struggling to turn around in the confined space of the duct, he hears scuffling noises followed by the unmistakable sound of steel sliding out of a scabbard. In his haste to change direction he gets stuck and can only struggle as he hears a cry of pain (it does not sound like Hiro's voice, though) followed by another cry that ends in a sick gurgle. He finally manages to get himself facing in the right direction, scampers to the vent and peers down.
His heart tries to leap out his throat when he sees that Hiro's clothes are covered in blood, but it quickly becomes obvious that the blood is not his. He simply got sprayed with it when he sliced one of the guards' throats with his wakizashi. Jack breathes a sigh of relief. "Are you hurt?" he asks his comrade below.
"I'm all right," Hiro assures him, though his voice sounds a little too calm. Over the headset, Jack hears someone say "Whew!" Most likely Y.T.
Hiro wipes the blade of his wakizashi clean on one of the dead bodies, then uses it to cut the jacket off the other (this one he stabbed, so it's cleaner) before sheathing it again. He uses the jacket in an attempt to get the worst of the blood off himself. Jack finds this somewhat funny, though in a grisly kind of way. When Hiro has gotten himself as clean as he can, he drops the improvised rag and looks up at Jack. "Can you help me get back up there?" he asks. Jack nods and moves back a little, sticking his arms out of the vent. Hiro crouches, then leaps and catches Jack's arms so he can be pulled back into the duct.
They continue to crawl as before, not really knowing where they are headed. Jack's arms and shoulders are starting to hurt, and he is starting to see strange things flickering in the shadows. The whole experience has a nightmarish feeling to it now, one of those nightmares in which you are lost and know that you will be lost forever. Although he knows it to be foolish, Jack finds himself wondering if they will die here for lack of food or water, if their ghosts will haunt these ducts for all time…
He is almost overjoyed when they come upon a break in the monotony – the duct ends in a square chamber with a large fan, slowly spinning, set in the middle of the floor. There are lights set in the walls of this chamber, and as he climbs out of the duct and looks up he sees that it extends far above his head, to a lattice of metal set in the ceiling. The breeze from the fan is somewhat refreshing, though it is coming from an odd direction. Some loose strands of his hair dance like seaweed in the artificial wind.
Jack moves aside so that Hiro will have room to get out of the duct. Once he does he takes full advantage of the available space, stretching his arms above his head to relieve the strain on his muscles. "Let's take a breather," he says. "Maybe we can get our bearings." Since they are unlikely to be found here for some time, Jack agrees with his suggestion and sits down with his back to the wall. Hiro does the same as he gets the scanning device off his belt.
"Where are you now?" Juanita asks over the headset.
"In one of the exhaust chambers for the ventilation system. I'm trying to find a way for us to get out," Hiro tells her. After a few moments of working with the scanner he nods. "Okay. I've found a route for us. It'll require some more crawling but at least we'll know where to go." He heaves a sigh. "Which is an improvement."
"Are you going to leave through the basement or…*crr*…the r*fzzzzt*…" Juanita's voice is erased by static. It's not just Jack's own headset – Hiro is tapping his own frantically and looking very nervous. Then he gives up, switches it off and removes it. Jack does the same with his, since it is obvious that they are no longer functioning.
"They must have put up a dampening field or something," Hiro mutters. He closes his eyes, draws his knees up to his chin and rests his forehead in his left hand. "Fuck," he growls despairingly as he smacks his right fist against the wall, then utters a wordless exclamation as the headset snaps apart at the impact and cuts his hand. He glares at it for a moment with narrowed eyes, then tosses the broken device across the room, where it bounces to a stop on the floor on the other side of the fan. Then he puts both hands over his face and sighs.
Jack does not know what to do, or if he should indeed do anything. All he can do is watch Hiro sit there in silence. This behavior has him very worried – without his comrade, he will not be able to find his way around here, much less get out. And even if he could, he would not want to see the other man break down.
Hiro drops his hands, closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall with a frustrated sigh. "Tell me," he says in a very tired-sounding voice, "Are most of your days like this?"
The question is, as far as Jack is concerned, completely irrelevant to their situation, but it does not seem to be a rhetorical one and he thinks that it would be best to give an honest answer. "More or less," he responds. Hiro emits a short, bitter chuckle.
"How the hell do you deal with it?" he asks.
Jack takes a moment to frame his answer. "I don't have any other choice."
Hiro lifts his head and looks at Jack with a somewhat irritated expression. "There's got to be more to it than that." Jack shakes his head. Hiro looks up at the ceiling again. "I could never deal with it," he sighs.
There are a few moments of silence, during which Jack tries desperately to think of something, anything, he can say in response. He finally comes up with "I think you are underestimating yourself." Hiro jerks in surprise and blinks at him a few times. Then he smiles – a friendly smile that tells Jack he has said the right thing.
"Listen," Hiro says, "We might not get out of this alive. So…" He pauses, searching for words. "I always wanted to fight at your side, and I'm glad I got to – even if a lot of things went wrong and we both end up dead or worse." He shrugs, and then says in a quieter voice, "And thank you for thinking better of me than I do of myself." Hiro breaks eye contact and looks down at the floor.
Jack is honored to receive the compliment, but he has no idea what to say to all this. It seems that Hiro was not expecting an answer anyway, for he stands up suddenly and says "C'mon. It's time to go." Jack stands as well and follows Hiro into one of the other ducts that leads into the chamber.
This time they do not simply take random turns as they did before. Instead they head consistently downward, when there is a duct that slopes that way. At a certain level they stop seeing vents below them – they are now appearing on the left side of the duct. Eventually Hiro stops at one of them. "This leads into the robot assembly plant," he says. "There's nobody working in there at this time of night, and most of the guards are probably looking for us on the upper levels. So we shouldn't have too much trouble getting out through the loading bays." Hiro then draws his wakizashi and uses it to cut through the vent cover, around the edges. Once he has that done, the two of them crawl out of it and into a cavernous room. It is big enough to contain a small village, filled with huge machines, all eerily silent, and half-assembled robots and robot parts. Jack would actually feel better if it was working instead of dormant. For some reason, it puts him on edge.
Hiro draws his katana as he turns right and moves in a running crouch. Jack does the same. He can see a huge door, covered by a steel shutter, at one end of the room – the way to the loading bay, probably. It will be a relief to get out of here at last.
But then something else goes wrong. That something is a man in a long black coat who steps casually out from behind one of the machines and right into Hiro's path. He is carrying a segmented metal staff about as long as he is tall, which is well over six feet. Jack expects Hiro to just charge him and cut him down, but instead he screeches to a halt and drops into a defensive crouch. Jack comes to a stop so as not to collide with his partner. The big man drops into a defensive position himself, with his staff at the ready.
Then he smiles, showing all his teeth in a brilliant, death's-head grin. "Well, this is a bit of a dilemma. Which one of you should I kill first?" He says it casually, maybe even cheerfully, and because of that his words send chills down Jack's spine. In two sentences he has made it clear that he is a cold, cruel psychopath – which is how Jack recognizes him, though he has never met the man before. Now he understands why Y.T. and Hiro are so afraid of him.
"Jack, get out of here," Hiro says flatly through gritted teeth, not taking his eyes off Raven. The latter looks Jack in the eye as if to say Yes, run while you can. But of course Jack is not going to do that. He narrows his eyes and matches Raven stare for stare, making clear his refusal to run. Now he finds the man's smile more infuriating than it is chilling. What makes him so arrogant, when there are two opponents to match him?
Jack does not really like having such questions answered, but tonight is one of those nights, so of course he gets an answer. The bay doors at both ends of the factory roll open to admit a horde of beetle drones. They spread into the room like a black-and-red plague, their legs clicking across the floor. But they do not attack just yet.
Raven has made his decision about who to kill first. "Get the samurai. Leave the rebel to me," he orders the robots. Then he lunges at Hiro with his staff as the closest beetle bots stand up on their hind legs and rush at Jack with swinging scythes…