"Clot Talamein," the shopkeeper growled, and slammed the last steel shutter in their faces.
And the Companions turned as Alex thundered into them. A few of them had the brains to collapse and fake death. But most of them died as Alex's meathooks thrashed through the platoon.
There, finally, was only one left. Alex lifted him in one hand, started to practice the javelin throw, and then considered. He lowered the man and turned to Ffillips.
"M'pologies, Major," he said. "Ah thinkit's y'r honor."
"Thank you, Sergeant," Ffillips said. "The man is someone I remember. You"—turning to the Companion—"were the person who thought it humorous to fill our water supply with drakh, were you not?"
Without waiting for a reply, Ffillips fired. The highpower slugs cartwheeled the Companion into a blood-red spray of death, then Alex and Ffillips were headed back down the street, toward the Temple and the fleeing Companions.
Mathias breathed deeply. Find the Peace of Talamein, he told himself. Find the Truth of the Flame, he reminded, watching as his Companions retreated through the gates of the Temple, far below him.
This is but a challenge. Talamein will not fail you, he thought as the gates crashed closed and he saw the ragged, limping mercenaries take positions around the walls of the Temple.
Talamein will prove my truth, he told himself, and turned from the window to soothe his panicked advisors.
Situation:
One temple. A walled, reinforced fortress, built on a ridge. Defended by motivated, fairly skilled soldiers. Provisioned for centuries and equipped with built-in wells.
A civilian populace outside was desperately trying to stay neutral.
A small band of soldiers, besieging that fortress, armed only with personal weapons and light armor.
Prog? A classic siege that could go on for decades.
Without the nukes the Eternal Emperor forbade, it should have been.
Sten was determined to break the siege and end the war— and Mathias—within a week.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
A GIVEN FOR any port city, and most especially for one on an island continent, is that the watertable will be quite close to the surface. This makes building anything over three or four stories an interesting engineering problem, particularly if there's any seismic activity, as there was on Sanctus.
Not only was the water level barely fifty meters below ground level (which meant about 350 meters for the Temple itself), but the ground composition was mostly sand. Which, in the event of an earthquake and in the presence of water, goes into suspension and becomes instant quicksand, a flowing, unstable, gluelike substance.
But tall buildings must still be anchored, which means columns must still be buried deep in the earth. This is, however, not an easy solution since, during an earthquake, these columns will react to the shifting, slurry like sand and water mix, tilting or collapsing.
The solution, then, is to use hollow columns. During a quake, the sand/water mix will flow up the interior of the columns and give increased stability. This very basic element of structural engineering was known as far back as the nineteenth century.
Hollow columns work very well, except that they duct cold air—air that is chilled to the temperature of the water table or outside ocean—straight up the inside of the column to the building above. The hollow columns under the Temple had chilled Sten's buttocks as he shifted before that first, memorable interview with Parral, Theodomir, and Mathias.
And those hollow columns, coupled with Mahoney's geo-survey, gave Sten the way into the Temple.
A few feet away from where he and Alex stood, sewage gushed from an open pipe, down a gully, and into Sanctus' ocean. The gully widened past the sewage pipe (fortunately, Sten thought) and then narrowed, to disappear into a cleft in the sandy cliff.
From his position in Alex's small backpack, Doc peered down into that cleft. In addition to the Altairian, the pack contained a small light matching the one already on Alex's shock-helmet, some comporations, and a spare set of gloves. Clipped to his belt
Alex also had a minitransponder and a spraycan of climbing thread.
Sten was similarly equipped. But he also had a vuprojector reproduction of the cave system below the Temple. The system had been mapped by the Imperial geoship, and Sten was fairly sure that it would lead him to one of the hollow columns— and from there straight up into the Temple itself.
The minitransponder was one of those wonderful chunks of high-tech that most soldiers were never able to find a usable situation for. In theory, it worked fine. Plant two or more senders in given locations at least one kilometer and thirty degrees apart. Those senders would transmit and tell the wearer of the transponder exactly when he was going in the wrong direction. It was sort of a compass with a built-in-not-that-way-idiot factor.
The reason that most soldiers were never able to use this wonderful gadget is its designers had never been able to figure a way to plant those senders deep in enemy territory, and therefore the system couldn't work. It was a fortieth-century Who'll Bell the Cat.
Sten flipped on the transponder and touched the SYSTEM CHECK button. They had already planted four transponders around the Temple and should know exactly where they were at any time. However, Sten, having a deep and abiding lack "of faith in technology, carried a conventional compass on his belt, as did Alex.
"Ah dinna ken wha w' be't hangin' 'boot, watchin' drakh," Alex grumbled. "Ah'm ready t' test m' claustrophobia."
And he eased forward, down into the cleft. It was a tight fit, and Doc squealed as they went out of sight. Sten lowered himself into the blackness after him.
Doc's comfortable ride in Alex's pack didn't last much beyond the narrow entrance. The first chest-squeeze in the passage brought a gurgle out of him and a breathless insistence that he was quite capable of walking.
And so Doc scuttled out of the pack and took the lead. Alex went second and Sten behind. Doc could ferret out the passageways, and, with Kilgour second, the team wouldn't enter any passageways they couldn't get out of.
The cave went exactly as the geosurvey map said and was easily negotiable by bear-walking—bent over, moving on hands and feet. Only two sections required descent to hands and knees. They quickly penetrated about one-thousand meters into the cave. It was far too easy to last.
It didn't.
Doc eeped in alarm as the crawlway came to a sudden end a few centimeters in front of him. He dropped to all four paws and shone his minilight down into the blackness.
Far, far below, water gleamed.
Sten and Alex crawled up beside him. Sten moved his head, and his helmet-mounted light flashed across the vertical walls below. "Another passageway. There." He pointed with the light. The passageway started about four meters above the dark pool that marked the water level.
Alex unclipped the can of climbing thread from his belt, checked the hardener at the can's tip, then sprayed a blot of the adhesive on the rock ledge. Then he slid his hands into the built-in grips on the can and wriggled over the edge, letting himself down with short blasts. He dropped until nothing could be seen of him but the bobble of light from his helmet. Doc took two custom-built jumars from his pack, fitted his hands into them, and went down the same thread. Sten, using more conventional jumars, did the same.
Alex kept going down until he was below the passageway, then clipped and glued the climbing thread to the rock ringing the passage before hoisting himself up into it. The other two were close behind.
The crawlway became rapidly worse, the roof slowly flattening down on them, until they were forced to hands and knees, elbows and knees, and then to a basic slither.