She had brought a duffel from Supply, and loaded all that, along with the flight recorder from the shuttle, into it, then carried it down to the hangar. Here Kurin was already ticking off incoming supplies, while Kamat, Betange, and Barash were arranging them in vehicles by weight and bulk, and Hazarika was stacking ammunition.
“We’ve got all the weapons down here; I found more ammunition in Stores, heavy locked crates. Do you want it?”
“Yes,” Ky said. “If they make it into the tunnels, I want them to think we will shoot back. It should slow them down a little, anticipating ambushes.”
“Right,” Hazarika said.
Packing proceeded well as the hours rolled by. All the control rods they’d found, all the food—surely more than they would need—medical supplies, water, the most useful sizes of pots and pans, tools, firearms and ammunition, clothes including extra protective suits, powerpaks to recharge batteries, all the outdoor survival gear they’d found in Stores (two tents, four small portable stoves, four water purifiers, ten sleeping bags, folding seats and one folding table, two fishing rods and a tackle box of lures, extra line, and hooks).
“Clearly somebody was out wandering the countryside,” Sergeant McLenard said.
“Probably the officers,” muttered Lakhani. “Hunting and fishing.”
“Very good,” Ky said. “We’re almost ready to leave; do a final check of the rooms and see if you find anything left behind, and be ready to guide the others back down.”
“We could eat here tonight, couldn’t we? Even sleep here? They can’t get here before late tomorrow at the earliest—” Gurton said.
“If we’re right about their plans and the weather where they’re starting from. We can’t be sure of that. It’s too close. We need to be farther away when they arrive.”
The little caravan moved almost silently through the hangar door into the tunnel. When the last had passed, they all stopped on signal, and Ky walked back to shut the door using the control rod and the dimple on the tunnel side. She hoped that meant it would stay closed even if the enemy found the hangar and figured out which wall might be a door.
The first few kilometers of their journey counted, to Ky, as known territory; Sergeant Cosper had walked ten kilometers out and back, noting every marking he saw, every light fixture, even (using a level they’d found with the tools) the slope of the passage floor. The tunnel tended downward so gently that the view behind was obscured only when they went around turns. The first two of those were at right angles, but the next was a gentle arc. Ahead of them, lights in the overhead came on—not the familiar lights of any Slotter Key office building, but sections of the overhead that had looked the same plain gray as everything else flicking on to a greenish-white glow. Behind them, the lights went off again.
Droshinski had discovered that the vehicles would not move faster than fifteen kilometers an hour in the tunnel. So it wasn’t long before they saw the pack Cosper had left to mark his most distant point. Ahead the tunnel seemed straight and level, vanishing in darkness. Another hour passed, and another. Ky, in the lead vehicle, heard a loud shout from behind. She signaled a halt and when all had halted, walked back to see that a wall had cut off the tunnel behind them, ten meters from the back of the rearmost vehicle.
“It just slid out—no warning, nothing!” Sergeant Chok, tasked with being rear guard, looked as upset as he sounded.
“Have you tried opening it with a control rod?” Ky asked.
“No, Admiral. I didn’t know if you wanted—what it might mean—”
“Try it.”
Chok walked over to the new wall and felt around the margins for a dimple. “It’s not here.”
“Try the middle of the space,” Ky said.
“Aha. Here—” He touched the rod to it and fingered the sequence that had opened other doors. Nothing happened.
“Are we trapped?” That was Droshinski, who should have stayed with the vehicle she was controlling. “What if there’s another—?”
“Put this one in reverse, Droshinski. See if the door opens when traffic approaches.” It would make sense, Ky thought, to have safety doors at intervals that protected others from… whatever those who’d built this place feared.
With the usual dramatic toss of her head, Droshinski climbed into the back of that vehicle while Chok and Ky moved to the side of the tunnel. As it reversed, the door slid aside.
“Forward now,” Ky said.
And as the vehicle once more cleared ten meters between itself and the door, the door slid shut again.
“Whoever they were, we share some ways of thinking,” Ky said as Droshinski climbed out of the vehicle. She looked forward to see clusters of her team outside their vehicles. As she walked back to the front of the line, she said the same thing to each cluster: “Not a problem; the door reacts to vehicles just like the one in the hangar. We’re going on.”
In another hour, the tunnel opened out into another room, not quite as large as the hangar but large enough to park the vehicles side by side and walk around outside them. Six doors on one side and two on the other. “Try them all,” Ky said. Inside one was a room with obvious water fixtures, though they did not look like standard Slotter Key versions.
“Rest stop,” said Ennisay. “Like it’s an ordinary road trip.”
The fixtures worked; water came out of faucets, flushed through toilets, and even (Ennisay got wet trying this out) rained down in abundance in what was afterward obvious as a shower. “I thought it was just part of the floor,” he said, dripping. “And I found the dimple and wondered what it did so I pushed—”
“You didn’t see the grille in the overhead?” Cosper asked.
“I didn’t look up.”
“Bet you will next time,” Cosper said. Ennisay just grinned.
Ky looked into the space behind the next door—four tables, each with six stools around it, all the same gray as the walls and overhead. What might be a serving line of some sort along one side. Or something else entirely. Gurton said, “Since we’re experimenting—” and sat down on one of the stools, only to jump up when the table opened a seam at her place and extruded a bowl with some dry gray-green substance in it. “That can’t be food…” She picked up the bowl and sniffed at it. “Somebody didn’t wash the dishes?”
“Or freeze-dried food that only needs water?” Betange said.
“I’m hungry,” Ennisay said. “It’s been four hours—couldn’t we have a meal?”
“A snack,” Ky said. “And not food that we find down here. Food we know is safe for us.”
“I could just try wetting it,” Gurton said. “Just to see what happens.”
“Food from our own stores,” Ky said. “A snack. We’re not going to stay here long.”
Others came and sat down; when all the stools at one table were full, the table extruded a central cluster of… something that might be containers. One looked like salt. The rest were unfamiliar.
“Condiments,” Betange said. “The aliens have condiments and they sit around during meals. More and more like us.”
“They might be us,” Yamini said. “Ancestors.”
“Or not,” Ky said. She bit into one of the chewy snack bars Gurton had packed, feeling the day’s strain weighing on her. The others looked tired, too, but they hadn’t gone far enough to risk stopping here for the rest of the night. She finished eating, drank some water, and used the facility while the others finished their snacks. Then she looked into the other spaces. Two had shelves jutting from the walls that looked rather like spaceship bunks, twelve in each of the rooms. She felt the surface of the lowest. Though it looked all of a piece with the walls and floor, it felt soft, like a thin mattress.