As the roof of the cave collapsed, Alex's left brow met the ground with a sick thud. His vision briefly went black. During that instant, he saw flashes of images, scenes of dreams he'd had and forgotten.
A giant squid.
A blue cube.
A fluffy white lemur.
His father. Dressed in the same clothes he'd had when he'd left. Sitting on his knees and his eyes glazed over. Alex shook him Dad! Please, come back to us! I need you. Arty needs you. Mum needs you. For a moment, something skirted across Artemis Sr.'s face, Alex acted on it. Just wake up! For Alex. For Artemis! For Angeline! Then suddenly his father seemed awake, muttering the last name.
And then he was awake. Shaking off double vision and blinking blood out of his eye.
Meanwhile, Holly was on her feet, racing toward her commander. But what could she do? She threw herself back underneath the ledge.
"Stay back, Captain," said Root's voice in her ear. "That's an order!"
"Commander," Holly breathed. "You're alive."
"Alex!" Artemis yelled, materializing at her side.
"He's here, he's fine." Root replied, Holly quickly relayed. "But Butler is unconscious and we're pinned down. The ledge is on the point of collapsing. The only thing holding it is the debris. If we brush that aside to get out…"
They were alive, then, at least. Trapped but alive. A plan, they needed a plan. Holly found herself strangely calm. This was one of the qualities that made her such an excellent field agent. In times of excessive stress. Captain Short had the ability to seize upon a course of action. Often the only viable course. In the combat simulation for her captain's exam, Holly had defeated insurmountable virtual enemies by blasting the projector. Technically she had defeated all her enemies, so the panel had to pass her.
Holly spoke into her helmet mike.
"Commander, undo Butler's Moonbelt and strap yourselves in. Have Alex do the same. I'm going to haul you all out of there."
"Roger, Holly. Do you need a piton?"
"If you can get one out to me."
"Standby."
A piton dart jetted through a gap in the icy bars, landing a foot from Holly's boots. The dart trailed a length of fine cord.
Holly snapped the piton into the cord receptacle on her own belt, making sure there were no kinks in the line.
"This plan is patently ridiculous," Artemis snapped. "You cannot hope to drag their combined weight with sufficient velocity to both break the icicles and avoid being crushed."
"I'm not going to drag them," Holly replied.
"Well, then, what is?"
Captain Short pointed down the track. There was a green train winding its way toward them.
"That is," she said.
There were three goblins left. Their names were D'Nall, Aymon, and Nyle. Three rookies vying for the recently vacated lieutenant's spot. Lieutenant Poll had handed in his resignation when Alex's flare had gone up and missed him by mere inches. It'd distracted him long enough to be swatted by a one-tone pane of transparent ice from the avalanche.
They hovered at a thousand feet, well out of range. Of course, they weren't out of fairy weapon range, but LEP weapons weren't operational at the moment. Koboi Laboratories upgrades had seen to that.
"That was some fire in Lieutenant Poll's pants," whistled Aymon. "An' I don't mean that like was a bad liar."
Goblins didn't get too attached to each other. Considering the amount of backstabbing, backbiting, and general vindictiveness that went on in the B'wa Kell, it didn't pay to make any special friends.
"What you think?" asked D'Nall, the handsome one, relatively speaking. "Maybe one of you guys should take a spin down there."
Aymon snorted. "Sure thing. We go down and either get sparked by the big one or set on fire by the little one. Just how dumb do you think we are?"
"The big one is out of the picture. I sparked him myself. Sweet shot."
"My shot set of the avalanche and sparked both of 'em," objected Nyle. The baby of the gang. "You're always claimin' my kills."
"What kills? The only thing you ever killed was a stink worm. And that was an accident."
"Rubbish," sulked Nyle. "I meant to kill that worm. He was buggin' me."
Aymon swooped between the two. "All right. Keep your scales on the pair of you. All we gotta do is throw a few rounds into the survivors from up here."
"Nice plan, genius," sneered D'Nall. "Except it won't work."
"And why not?"
D'Nall pointed below with a manicured nail.
"Because they're boarding that train."
Alex dug through Butler's pockets. Finding a thick white bandage and slapping it to the cut on his eyebrow while securing himself in the Moonbelt.
"What exactly is the plan?" He asked the commander, not sure if he could hear him with Butler between them.
"Holly and Artemis are going to get us out of here, my guess is that it's going to involve us going flying." Root answered.
"I mean after that," Alex elaborated. "The goblins make it pretty clear that we're not going to Murmansk anymore. So, what do we do now?"
Root was quiet for a moment. "Looks like we'll have to deal with the B'wa Kell first, but we'll rescue your father. We'll have more time to work out the specifics later."
Alex couldn't tell if Root was out of practice talking to kids or if he was never comfortable with it in the first place. Either way, he wasn't very reassuring.
That and the idea of "later" depended on Artemis and Holly working together. Which would be more unlikely than anything else that'd happened today.
AN: I was looking back on this fic a couple days ago and realized it'd been over a year since I updated, and 7 months since I updated Orion. In that time, I finished the spring semester, got my wisdom teeth out, worked a very stressful housekeeping job, and just did a bunch of other stuff that made me forget this story even existed. But I recently found a way to get inspiration for Alex & Ryn through some of my more recent interests, aka Steven Universe and Rick & Morty respectively. So I'm hoping to keep the ball rolling with these new chapters. I'm working on a new Ryn chapter so expect that up around Friday.
In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!