I turned around, and looked back at the carnage behind me, half-expecting to be confronted with the scene of a massacre.
There were great gouting clouds of gas, smoke and vapour, and great glowing patches where the ledge along which we had come had suddenly been raised in temperature from a few degrees Kelvin to a few thousand. One of the sleds had been completely devastated—it had been turned into a pile of slag every bit as useless as those million-year-old cars we had passed on the highway. The other one had been too close to me—the bolts had gone clean over the top of it, without the radiation doing too much damage.
If the star-captain and her men had been close enough to me to have entered the tunnel-mouth, they would have been cooked, but natural caution had held them back. When the firing started they’d done exactly the right thing, making full use of their hair-trigger reflexes. They’d moved into the shadow of the solid wall, hurling themselves forward and sideways so that the bolts had passed harmlessly by, crouching well away from the explosive impacts which the expanding bolts had made on the body of the second sled, and hiding their eyes. They were lucky that they were wearing heavy-duty suits, not the light sterile suits Serne had described to me as their normal combat gear. Even so, I ordered an immediate set of tests, to make sure that the radiation hadn’t done any fatal damage.
“Rousseau,” said the star-captain icily, “you’re a moron.”
“Maybe so,” I said. I actually felt like a moron, for not expecting the tripwire, and not being properly alert to its presence. “But you ought to thank whatever god you have that he put the wire so close to the doorway. If we’d been thirty metres into a narrow corridor, you wouldn’t have had a cat in hell’s chance of avoiding those fireballs. You think he’s a moron too, or was that just a warning shot?”
“Can it, Rousseau,” she said, with all her customary charm. “Just tell us how much we lost, and how much it’s going to hurt our chances.”
I sighed.
“Well,” I said, “it’s certainly not going to help. It’s cost us most of our cutting equipment, and all of our bubbling gear. That means we’re going to have difficulties when we sleep. We’ll have to pitch hammocks in the open, and make damn sure that we don’t take a fall. The suits are sound, as far as the tests can tell, but the material’s not really intended to cope with a deluge of infrared and microwaves. It saved us from being cooked, but its future tolerance might be affected. We can go on, but all risks are doubled now. Next time… well, next time, whoever goes first had better not trigger the trap. That’s all there is to it.”
There wasn’t much more to add to that, and she didn’t bother. There was no point in threatening to do all kinds of horrible things to me if I was so stupid as to get myself killed. She just had to trust me to be careful. No one else could take over—it was my territory, and her boys were way out of their depth.
The going got tougher after that. We eased our way into the corridor, past the point where Myrlin had fastened the flame-gun to the ceiling, and started picking our way through the maze following Saul’s torchmarks with the aid of my tape. We moved slowly, always scanning the ground ahead of us. Nobody commented on the obvious fact that our chances of catching up with Myrlin before he got to the dropshaft were looking distinctly thin—and nobody suggested that we do anything in response to that awareness but press on as rapidly as we could.
Before we stopped to sleep, we found two more tripwires, each one connected to a string that disappeared into the darkness. Neither of them was attached to anything at all—they were just mock-ups, set to delay us and to play upon our anxieties. For an android, Myrlin had one hell of a sense of humour—and he succeeded in slowing us up.
We slung our hammocks from plastic frames that touched the ground at the tips of their four feet. Without our bubbling gear we had no other protection from the cold. The cold floor couldn’t hurt us, of course, while we were insulated from it by a metre of near-vacuum, and I’d slept that way a dozen times before, but it wasn’t pleasant.
When we started off again, we followed Saul’s directions to a wider corridor, which had two thick rails raised above its floor—tracks that once had guided monorail trains in either direction. I was pleased to see them. Tunnels through which trains once ran tend to be virtually endless, with no closed doors to impede progress. They also tend to take you to interesting places, like stations. Stations are good places to hunt around for elevator shafts.
“How much further?” asked the star-captain, when we had trudged along in the space between the rails for half a day.
I consulted my recording of Saul’s notes.
“We should be going down to three within a couple of hours,” I told her. “Then we’re really in the cold. But we’ll only be one more day in the icehouse. Twelve or fourteen hours after we start again, we’ll get to the big dropshaft.
Saul spent a lot of time down there finding it for us, but we can go straight to it. We’ll be tired, but we can make it without stopping again.”
“Damn right,” she said.
It wasn’t quite as easy as I’d suggested it would be, partly because we found the wreckage of a train blocking the tunnel. It hadn’t posed any real obstruction to Saul, but that was before the ever-ingenious Myrlin had put an explosive charge in it, and spread it all over the place. Luckily, he’d blown it into small enough pieces to make a less-than-efficient barricade. The walls, the ceiling and the tracks were made of something far too solid to be broken up by the kind of petard which scavengers carry, so there was no way that Myrlin could engineer a major cave-in to block our path.
The troopers worked like Trojans to clear the way, and we were on the trail again with all due speed. Our tempers were only slightly frayed by this extra inconvenience, but my comrades-in-arms were already brimful of bile toward their hapless quarry, and I knew that if and when they caught up with him they were really going to make him suffer.
I resolved not to be there, if there was anywhere else I could possibly be.
Getting down to three was no picnic, but we still had the ropes and enough equipment to rig up a winch and harness, so the empty shaft posed no real problems. We stopped soon after that to rig up the hammocks again. The troopers seemed tired but otherwise undisturbed. We’d been moving through narrowly-confined spaces all day, and I’d known men who’d never before shown signs of claustrophobia begin to develop the heebie-jeebies under circumstances like these; despite their inbuilt paranoia, though, the troopers were tough and disciplined. Perhaps they were revelling in the luxury of having only one enemy trying to kill them, instead of being surrounded by malevolent aliens and dangerous biotech-bugs. Despite what he’d done to Amara Guur’s hatchet men, and despite the little incident of the flame-pistol booby-trap, they weren’t really frightened of the android. They were confident that once they caught up with him, they could fry him.
Serne said to me before we went to sleep that he didn’t see how a lone man could wander around the underworld for twenty days at a time without going a little bit crazy. I assured him that, with practice, the burden of solitude was easy enough to bear. The monochrome surroundings, I told him, were quite comforting in their way. I didn’t mention that I usually packed my microtapes with hundreds of hours of music to relieve the tedium, and that I was sometimes wont to talk to myself incessantly, making up with loquacious fervour anything which I lacked in narrative skill. That would have sounded too much like a confession of weakness, unbefitting even the most reluctant hero of the Star Force.