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"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 fu
"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 tu
Caine nodded and moved away from the ladder. Ahead, the tu
"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 tu
—
The rest made it down without incident, and a few minutes later they were walking along the tu
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 tu
"Yes. Why?"
"Well... shouldn't we be ru
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 i
"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 ru
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 tu
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 tu
"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," Hawking 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 i
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 tu
"Pretty faulty logic," Bernhard said.
"Not really," Lathe said. "A
"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."
Bernhard gazed steadily at the big blackcollar. "I told them everything I knew about this deathtrap," he said, his voice flat. "I told them their chances weren't good, that they'd be here for months just getting in." He took a deep breath and turned back to the cavern. "What can I say? They were fanatics."