The Backlash Mission

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," 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 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."

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."

"So you brought them here and just turned them loose?" Braune asked.

"That's what they wanted."

"You could have come down with them," Braune shot back. "Shown them the way, pointed out some of the traps."

"It doesn't look like they needed me, does it?" Bernhard retorted, waving a hand around him. "They got as far without me along as they would have with me here to hold their hands."

"And stage three?" Alamzad asked.

There was a long silence. Caine looked off into the darkness, wondering what they'd find down there. Bodies, most likely. An involuntary shiver ran up his back, and he turned to find Lathe's eyes on him. "We can quit now if you'd like," the comsquare said quietly.

Caine bit his lip. All this way... through the frustrations with Karen Lindsay and the Dupres... the humiliation of being plucked bodily from a Security trap... the loss of his command, willingly or not, to Lathe, and the price that had exacted from his ego... all of it for nothing? "Let's go on," he told the other. "See if they found a way through. If they didn't..."

Lathe nodded understanding. "We'll find out soon enough."

Within half a kilometer they'd come to the two other bulkheads Bernhard had mentioned, both of them cut through as the first had been. The tunnel narrowed down after the last one, though not to the point where they had to walk in single file again. The floor became inexplicably crunchy underfoot, suggesting to Caine that there were probably sonic detectors nearby using the sound of crackling gravel to track the intruders. But there was nothing he could think of to do about it except to stay alert and hope like hell that the first trap the tunnel threw at them would be something their flexarmor could handle.

But the tunnel didn't seem to be in any hurry, and they got another uneventful kilometer or so before Bernhard called a halt. "Stage three starts a little way ahead," he warned, gesturing to the curve just ahead. "From here on the tunnel will do a lot of twisting."

"Probably so you won't see the lasers until you're right on top of them," Lathe said grimly. "Back to single-file order. Bernhard and I'll go first."

"Until we reach the pile of corpses, anyway," Bernhard amended. "After that you're on your own."

"Move," Lathe nudged him.

They disappeared cautiously around the curve... and as the next in line, Hawking, started to follow there was a sudden exclamation from ahead.

"Lathe?" Hawking snapped.

"It's okay," Lathe's voice came, his tone a combination of relief, awe, and amusement. "Come ahead, everyone, and see how Torch beat the stage-three defenses."

A walking tank suit? was Caine's first thought—surely nothing larger could have been brought down the narrow entrance tunnel. He hurried to catch up with Hawking, and came to a confused halt beside Bernhard and Lathe, standing beside a man-sized hole in the wall.

"A secondary intake?" He frowned, leaning in to peer down it. It headed out at right angles from the ventilation tunnel for perhaps fifty meters and then seemed to turn toward the base ahead.

"It is indeed," Lathe said. "But not one the original designers had in mind."

"Torch?" Alamzad asked.

"Who else would have had the patience to dig a tunnel through a hundred and fifty meters of rock?"

Bernhard said. But even he seemed a little awed. "Damn crazy fanatics, all of them."

A sudden revelation hit Caine. "So that's what we've been walking on—they just spread the rock chips from their digging on the tunnel floor back there."

Jensen cleared his throat. "Yeah. Fanatics. You realize, Lathe, that this means they're almost certainly still in there. And they may not like being interrupted."

"That's the main reason I wanted Bernhard along," Lathe said. "Let's hope they still remember you fondly, Bernhard." The comsquare glanced around the group. "Caine, you and I'll go with him; the rest of you stay here for now. No sense risking everyone until we've got some idea of what's ahead—that tunnel's too cramped to maneuver in if there's trouble."

The tunnel was narrower than it had looked from the entrance, frequently forcing them to sidle along crab-style. "What kind of wall would they have had to break through to get in?" Lathe asked as they sidled along.

"Four or five meters of reinforced concrete," Bernhard said, "with probably a few centimeters each of lead and soft iron for pulse protection. After cutting through the stage-two bulkheads and all this rock, I doubt it would have slowed them down significantly."

The three men continued on in silence. A few minutes later Bernhard's prediction was borne out, as they passed through an archway of torch-blackened concrete and half-melted metal at the tunnel's end and exited into a large, dark chamber.

They were in Aegis Mountain.