by Timothy Zahn
"Just relax," the other whispered back.
And to Caine's surprise, the soldier turned and walked casually away.
"What...?" he hissed, totally confused now.
"You weren't paying attention to his stance and equipment," Skyler explained as they started forward again. "Both were more appropriate to a sentry than to someone on bush-beating duty. Bernhard, what's out here that anyone might want Security protection for?"
"No idea," the other said with a puzzled frown. "Kanai?"
The other shook his head slowly. "Nothing I know of. Possibly a major intake to the city water supply?"
"That's right—you got a map of that network a few days ago, didn't you?" Skyler commented to Caine. "Maybe they still think we're out to sabotage the system."
"Doesn't matter," Lathe put in. "From his positioning I'd guess the center of the ring is a ways south, off to our left. We'll veer north and see if we can avoid any more contacts."
"Right," Caine said. He glanced at Skyler, caught the other's signal. "Bernhard, Kanai—do either of you know what those things were around the guard's neck? I've never seen goggles quite like those before."
Bernhard snorted and launched into a rather condescending explanation of infrared-enhancement equipment. Caine kept the whispered discussion going for several minutes longer as they continued on, plying both him and Kanai with more such naive questions. It was an annoying role to play, but as a diversionary tactic it succeeded remarkably well. By the time the conversation ended, Skyler had returned to the group as quietly as he'd left it, without either of the Denver blackcollars having noticed his absence.
—
The sun rose higher in the sky, eventually passing zenith, as they continued to hike. "It sure didn't look this far on the map," Caine complained once as they broke for a ten-minute lunch.
"Uphill climbs never do," Kanai puffed, as out of breath as any of them despite his high-altitude acclimation. "For your full expedition out here, Lathe, I suggest you make the jump-off point a little closer. Reger isn't really going to learn anything useful about your destination, no matter where along the road his driver lets you off."
"You may be right," Lathe conceded. "Anyway, the worst part is over. I read the entrance as being just on the northern side of the peak over there." He pointed.
Caine looked and sighed. "What's that, another two or three hours?"
"One hour tops," Lathe promised. "Let's go. I want to find the entrance, figure out what we'll need to get it open, and be back at the pickup point before dark."
Lathe's estimate turned out to have been on the optimistic side, but not by too much. Exactly an hour and fourteen minutes later they came to a halt beside a rocky overhang and the ventilation tunnel intake.
Caine had wondered how the hell a two-meter grille could have remained unnoticed all these years, but now that he was here he realized that it wasn't nearly as unlikely as he'd imagined. Shielded from above by the rock overhang, its surface covered by strategically placed grasses and other plants, the actual intake openings scattered in an irregular pattern instead of a normal crosshatching—the more he studied it, the more he realized that even someone searching for the damn thing could walk right by without noticing it.
Lathe might have been reading his mind. "Lucky for us you knew precisely where this was located," he commented to Bernhard. "Wasn't it?"
"Yes," the other said shortly. "Hadn't you better get busy on your studies?"
"Yes, well, we're actually not in as much of a hurry—"
"Shh!" Kanai cut him off. Caine froze with the others, straining his ears....
"Behind us," Bernhard murmured, drawing a shuriken. "Someone's coming."
"A lot of someones, actually," Skyler told him stepping over to examine the grille. "It's Mordecai and the rest of the group."
"What?" Kanai frowned, peering into the distance. "But you said—"
"I guess he lied, didn't he?" Bernhard snarled, jamming his shuriken back into its pouch. "That's all.
Lathe's just making sure we all know who the boss is around here. All right, Comsquare; we're properly impressed. You going to level with us now?"
"Sure." Lathe nodded at the grille. "We're going in. Now."
"In other words, you never planned to make any preliminary studies." Kanai's face was beginning to redden with anger. "I thought we were allies now—you had no cause to lie to us."
"Maybe, maybe not," Skyler put in before Lathe could answer. "But we've been at least as truthful as your leader was. Haven't we, Bernhard?"
Kanai spun on him. "And I've also had about enough of that—"
"This supposedly hard-welded grille's already been cut free," Skyler interrupted him coldly.
"What?" Kanai frowned, his anger cooling into confusion. "That's impossible... isn't it?"
"Done fairly recently, too, I'd say—certainly since the war," Skyler continued. "It's being held on by twisted wires at a dozen or so places."
"Twisted from...?" Caine asked.
"The outside."
"Well, well." Lathe turned back to Bernhard. "This remarkably well-hidden door, and someone managed to find it. Any ideas on how they might have done that, Bernhard?"
Bernhard's face had become a mask. "As you said, someone else must have stumbled on the place."
"Someone else who?"
"How should I know?" the other countered.
Lathe snorted. "Right." Turning his back on Bernhard, he joined Skyler and Kanai by the grille.
Fifty meters back, Hawking came around a clump of scraggly evergreen trees, the other blackcollars and Caine's teammates following in his wake. "Any trouble?" Caine asked as they approached.
Hawking shook his head. "Saw another of those Security guards after Skyler came back to warn us about them."
"Did you have to take him out?" Lathe asked.
"No, he was way to the south of us, sitting on a flat rock jutting out from the hillside. They're definitely guarding something, though."
Lathe grunted. "Well, whatever it is, it shouldn't be our problem. Braune, Colvin, Pittman—get busy assembling those rope ladders. We're going to need them right away. Hawking, Alamzad—come up here and check this thing out for booby traps and alarms."
But whoever had jury-rigged the entrance apparently hadn't thought to leave any hidden deterrents behind. By the time Caine's teammates had the rope ladders ready, Hawking and Alamzad had removed the grille and made a visual examination of the first part of the tunnel beyond.
"You see that mesh lining the inside?" Hawking pointed it out. "Looks like a multistage electric barrier, with potentials starting at the slight-jolt stage out here and going up to lethal on the last ring."
"Sensors?" Lathe asked.
"Between the rings—there and there. Probably mostly passive types: sound and motion detectors and maybe photobeam or laser bounce reflectors. You don't want sensors this close to the surface that use lots of current or throw off detectable electromagnetic fields. That stuff will be deeper down."
"What about the stage-one weapons Bernhard mentioned?"
Hawking pointed. "Right at the end there, where the tunnel starts going vertical. At least one reasonably heavy laser and what look like a pair of flechette repeaters. Probably got gas and acid jets hidden behind the electrical mesh, too—I think I see where the metal has been acid-protected."
Caine licked his lips. "How likely is it the stuff's running on automatic?"
"It's not," Bernhard said. "Everything but the electric mesh was manual control, and the fuel cells for the mesh probably drained themselves years ago."
Lathe cocked an eyebrow at Hawking. "True?"
"Probably." The other shrugged. "Hard to tell until we try going in, though. The mesh, at least, doesn't seem to be responding to pressure anymore."
"In other words, we've learned all we can from out here," Lathe said. "Let's suit up, then—full flexarmor, including gas filters." His eyes shifted to Bernhard. "And we'll let our guide
go first."
Kanai gave the comsquare a long, hard look. "I thought we were going to be allowed to leave once we got here," he said. "Just another lie?"
"The grille's been opened," Lathe told him. "Bernhard's the only one we know of who knew how to find it. You can draw your own conclusions."
Bernhard snorted. "Oh, I see—you think I came up here five years ago and added new traps to the tunnel in case someone from Plinry forced me to let him in someday. Come on, Lathe—you're being ridiculous."
"You're right, of course," Lathe said. "Let's just say I've grown accustomed to your company." He hesitated. "Though on second thought, there's no real reason you have to come along, Kanai. If you want, you can leave now."
Kanai seemed to consider that. Then, with a glance at Bernhard, he shook his head. "Thank you, Comsquare. But as long as I'm here anyway, I might as well see it through to the end."
"All right." Lathe took a deep breath, glanced around the group. "Mordecai, you'll stay up here on guard duty. The rest of you... let's go."
Chapter 34
Bernhard went first, unrolling the rope ladder before him as carefully as if setting out a fur-skinned runner for a visiting eminent. But nothing fired at him, blew up under him, or sprayed lethal fluids toward him, and by the time he tilted the rest of the bundle over the edge of the vertical shaft Caine was starting to breathe again.
Or he was until the uncoiling ladder hit the scud mine.
"You did say all these were set on manual, didn't you?" Skyler commented after the slender needles had buried themselves in the shaft walls and ceiling and the echoes of the blast had faded into silence.
"I also told you some of the mines were on automatic," Bernhard growled back.
"Looks like we hit one," Lathe said, glacially calm. "We'll have to watch ourselves on the way down.
Avoid contact with the shaft walls, and don't touch anything that's protruding. Got that, everyone?
Let's get moving, Bernhard."
The other took a deep breath and started down the ladder. Lathe went next, followed at twentysecond intervals by Hawking, Caine, Pittman, Braune, Colvin, and Alamzad, with Skyler bringing up the rear.
A hundred meters down, Bernhard had said, but to Caine the trip seemed much longer. Suspended in almost total darkness, the faint glow from his armband light barely showing him the section of ladder before him, he found a strange sense of disorientation gripping him, as if his directional sense had disappeared. Like the blind man combat test, he thought; only this was much worse. The ladder's swaying seemed to be increasing in amplitude....
"Everybody hold it a minute," Lathe's soft voice floated up from beneath him. "Stop where you are, lock your arms around the ladder, and take some deep breaths. Something funny is happening here—a low-level sonic, feels like, playing games with our inner-ear balance. Whatever, take a second to reorient yourselves."
"Use the other lights as reference," Hawking suggested. "Sorry, Lathe—I should have caught on to this earlier."
"Forget it," the comsquare told him. "Everyone okay? Let's keep going, but take it easy."
The effect seemed to get worse as they approached the bottom of the shaft, but Caine found that simply knowing it was an attack and not something internal made it easier to handle. Focusing on the lights above, listening to his other kinesthetic senses, he was actually startled when Lathe's goggled face suddenly appeared beside him and his feet hit solid ground.
"Oops," he said, prying his fingers from the ladder. "Sorry—concentrating on something else."
"No problem. Get into the tunnel before you get stepped on."
Caine nodded and moved away from the ladder. Ahead, the tunnel opening was visible in the sleevelight glow, a dim figure—Bernhard?—already there. On the far side of the shaft another figure was crouched over a collection of wires and components. "What's that?" he asked, stepping over.
"Our confuser," Hawking's voice answered. "Lathe was right—it's a sonic broadcast unit of some sort, aimed upward along the shaft."
Caine glanced upward. "Seems a little silly, with all the armament already up there."
"It wasn't put here by the designers," Hawking replied. "It looks very much like it was hand-made.
By an amateur."
Behind his gas filter, Caine licked his lips. "Ah-ha."
"Don't let it worry you," Lathe advised. "If this is the worst we'll have to face, we should be fine."
Somehow, that wasn't much comfort. Caine stepped into the tunnel proper, fingers taking automatic inventory of his weaponry.
—
The rest made it down without incident, and a few minutes later they were walking along the tunnel, again spread out in a loose line in case of trouble. There was little conversation; everyone seemed more interested in careful listening than in idle chatter. But aside from their own footsteps there was apparently nothing to hear.
Nothing to hear, and no impediments to their progress... and they had been walking for nearly half an hour before anyone noticed that there was something odd about that. "Bernhard," Alamzad called softly from near the back of the line. "Didn't you say this was an intake tunnel for the ventilation system?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Well... shouldn't we be running into filters of some sort along here somewhere? There ought to be at least a sensor mesh or bio-kill screen this far down the tunnel."
There was a long silence from the front of the line. "How about it, Bernhard?" Lathe prompted.
"They didn't leave all the filtration work to the innermost tunnel section, did they?"
"I doubt it," Bernhard said at last. "There should have been at least the sensors he mentioned, and probably one or more micron filtration screens, too. I've been watching along the walls, and I think I've seen a couple of places where something like that would have been mounted."
"And you didn't say anything?" Colvin growled.
"Maybe he didn't find it significant that someone went to all the trouble of taking the stuff out,"
Pittman said icily.
"What significance do you want it to have?" Bernhard shot back. "I told you once I've never been down here. Everything could have been taken out of this end before the war, for all I know."
Colvin snorted his opinion of that.
"All right, ease up," Lathe put in mildly. "Bernhard never promised to take us by the hand and point out the sights along the way. It's up to us to keep our own eyes open."
The group went on, again in silence. Now that he was watching for them, Caine noticed more of the filter mountings Bernhard had mentioned: rings of heat-bruised metal running the circumference of the tunnel. "Looks like they were taken out with a torch," he muttered to no one in particular.
Hawking, ahead of him, half turned around. "And notice that they took the entire filter—they didn't just cut a hole so they could get through it. Might indicate it was done by scavengers, bringing stuff out of here back to Denver."
But then why didn't they also take the laser and flechette guns from the entrance? Caine grimaced, but kept quiet. The others were sure to have thought of that themselves anyway.
And finally, after walking for nearly an hour, they reached a thirty-meter cavern were a dozen tunnels like theirs met and combined. Ten meters inside it was the first of the stage-two passive defenses.
Or, rather, what was left of it.
"Class-four hullmetal," Hawking muttered, examining the edges of the man-sized hole that had been cut through the half-meter-thick bulkhead blocking the passage. Beyond the hole, off to one side, the missing piece lay warped and blackened on the tunnel floor. "Harder than hell. They were sure deadly serious about getting in."
"Serious and a little crazy, too," Alamzad said, leaning into the hole to peer at its edge. "There's gaspocket honeycombing every five centimeters or so."
"What would that have been for?" Pittman asked. "Poison gas under pressure?"
"Or else something flammable to incinerate the cutter operator with," Hawkin
g said grimly. "The fact that they got through anyway implies they knew what they were doing."
"Or had a lot of cutter operators," Lathe said. "Bernhard, what other defenses are there in this section?"
"Two more bulkheads," Bernhard said mechanically, peering beyond the barrier into the darkness swallowing up the rest of the vast chamber. "From the evidence, I'd guess they're gone, too."
"Um." Lathe seemed to consider, turned to Hawking. "At a guess, how long would it have taken to do three bulkheads like this one?"
"With the proper equipment..." Hawking pursed his lips. "Maybe a month or two. Without it, most of a year. At least."
"Hence the little sonic gadget back at the shaft?" Skyler suggested. "Something to guard their backs while they worked?"
Hawking shrugged. "Reasonable enough. Still... you did say stage three was totally unpassable, didn't you, Bernhard?"
"It was supposed to be," Bernhard said. "But I wouldn't have thought... whoever it was would have had the patience for this stage, either."
Jensen snorted. "Oh, come on, Bernhard, let's quit the wide-eyed innocent act, okay? You know who did this, we know who did this, so let's drop the bush-waltz."
For a moment Caine thought Bernhard was going to keep up the facade to the very end. But after a moment of silence, the other sighed behind his gas filter. "How long have you known?"
"We've known since we got to the intake tunnel," Lathe told him. "Suspected for a lot longer. After all, everyone we've talked to agrees that Torch disappeared without a trace—where else could they have gone but into Aegis Mountain? And who else might have known a way in that the Ryqril weren't blocking?"
"Pretty faulty logic," Bernhard said.
"Not really," Lathe said. "Anne Silcox remembers you as being held in much more esteem than your actions lately would warrant, which implies you were more help to Torch than you've let on."
"The real question," Skyler added quietly, "is whether or not you really were helping them on this one. In other words, whether you told them about all the defenses or made them find out the hard way."