At 5.2 hours, the moving track stopped. Sharp sounds of metal adjusting to a new normal echoed off the walls, as did voices when they spoke. Ahead a dark opening led into darkness.
“That door didn’t close behind us,” Gossin said. She’d been in the last vehicle that time.
“And this one didn’t open for us—it’s just open.”
Ky turned on her helmet light and walked toward the opening. Another passage like the ones they’d driven through before and shadows that might be doors not too far ahead. The air smelled stale.
“Lights,” she said. She didn’t expect lights to come on, and they did not. She tipped her head back. Her helmet light revealed the same kind of light fixtures. “Bring the vehicles forward,” she said to the others. “Slowly. We need to take a rest anyway, if this place has water.”
The others had their headlamps on by then, a small constellation in the darkness, and one by one the vehicles moved into the space where Ky stood, avoiding her and parking to one side as usual. The rooms were in the same relative position as before, but no lights came on when they entered the mess and the washroom, and no water came from the faucets. Nothing worked in the kitchen—no burners heated.
“Electricity’s out,” Corporal Lakhani said. He had found an outlet and inserted a tester. “Completely.”
“If the emergency signal was from the bad guys breaching the facility… if they figured out we had to be somewhere below and started blowing walls… they might have damaged the whole system.”
“Then why lights along the moving plate things?”
“I don’t know. Different source? And if that, then why not here? I don’t know that, either.”
“Are we safe from them?” Gossin asked. “Will that track move for them?”
“Again—I don’t know. Get your packs; we’ll have to go on foot. As much food and water as you can carry, your weapons, ammunition.” As she talked, Ky found the duffel in which she’d stowed all the evidence left from the shuttle, and shoved its contents into various pockets. “Let’s get going.”
She felt a sudden change in air pressure, then stillness again. “They are blowing the doors,” Betange said. A dull deep sound vibrated underfoot.
“Keep going,” Ky said. But shortly after that, they found the entire tunnel blocked by a mass of dark rock, and nothing that responded to the control rods on the floor, overhead, or on the side walls.
“We missed a turn,” Ky said. “Backtrack.” Straight into the enemy, but maybe the enemy had other problems. Surely Mackensee had landed by now; the hunters would have hunters on their tails. Would they realize it, turn and fight? Or try harder to overrun their prey?
Kurin found a panel a hundred meters back; it opened into a side passage, too narrow for the vehicles. “And we wouldn’t have found this if we’d been riding,” Kurin said. They shut the panel behind them, hoping a turn of the wheel on the far side meant it was locked, and walked up a smooth ramp until it turned sharply, steepened, then turned again. Just beyond that turn they found another door, closed but not locked, thick as a spaceship pressure door. Gossin spun the wheel on its far side.
“Two doors between us,” Ky said, looking around the group with her headlamp. Even Sergeant Cosper was tired. “We can risk one hour rest,” she said. “Set your implant alarms for noise, as well.” They all slumped down, falling asleep almost at once. Ky closed her eyes, heard nothing but their breathing, and woke when her implant woke her. The others were already stirring.
Now she could hear a vague, disturbing sound through the door. Were the enemy troops already into the side passage? Or just banging on the walls? “Hurry!” Ky said. They moved as fast as they could up the ramp, arriving at another identical pressure door that operated the same way. Beyond was an even narrower passage of raw rock hacked into a semblance of a stairway. Ky hoped that meant it was near the surface.
Ky led the way. The stair turned, turned again; uneven steps and the bright patches and black shadows cast by their helmet lights made it hard to see their footing clearly. Ky’s breath burned in her chest; her legs hurt. Soon they were all panting; Ky knew the others must feel as bad.
“Five minutes,” she said. She leaned on the rough wall, catching her breath. Then started again. Up, up, turn and twist, duck beneath a rock that hung down. How close were their pursuers? Would they go to the end and then backtrack or just find the panel right away?
“We’ll hear if they blow the panel,” someone said, just as a muffled whoomp reached them. Ky tried to speed up.
Finally the stair ended on a cramped rock landing not big enough for all of them at once. They could see daylight beyond, at the end of a widening passage. They had traveled through another night. Ky squinted against the brightness. This passage smelled—stank, in fact—of something alive. Some animal. She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them, looking down and away from the entrance. It might be wolves, or that tall heavy-legged hairy thing with tusks and a nose like a fire hose—but that wouldn’t fit in here. She saw an uneven lumpy heap. Wolves? Giant wolves?
“Quietly,” she said to Lakhani. “Hand me a stronger light. There’s something in here.”
It looked like a pile of fur. Even with the light she couldn’t be sure of the shape, except that it was big, much bigger than any of them. She tried to move the light along the margins of the pile, looking for clues to its identity. Something moved—squeaked—wiggled—a small subdivision of the pile or rather two such, with bright eyes, black noses, very red mouths with very white sharp teeth.
Not wolves; they had rounded ears, a round head like a cartoon animal. Paws with long claws. Some memory stirred in Ky’s mind; her implant finally offered a picture of a smaller but similar shape: the bear cubs she’d seen in the Port Major zoo. Black, with white chevrons on their chests. The adult bear in the zoo hadn’t been as tall as a human when it stood on its hind legs. This adult bear was huge. The cubs squeaked again and wriggled back into the fur pile. She could hear them suckling, slurping.
So it was a mother bear, a huge mother bear, with her cubs. Ky backed up cautiously, trying not to make a sound. The bear’s nose quivered, its lips lifted over fangs as long as Ky’s hand, and then it yawned. Deep in folds of fur tiny eyes opened, then closed again. It lifted one massive paw and scratched at its chest; the claws were as long as her fingers, stout enough to shred a human torso. She turned the light off and backed up again.
“What is it?” the others asked, when she’d retreated to the narrow passage. “Can we go out now?”
“There’s a huge bear,” Ky said very softly. “With cubs. The cubs are awake; the bear was asleep but is waking up, I think. If it wakes while we’re trying to get past it, we’re dead.”
“We could stun it.”
“If we knew we had enough charge. We might be able to kill it, with the rifles, but I’d rather use ammunition on our enemies.” The enemies who had certainly found the passage entrance and were following.
“We have to do something—”
“For now, we’ll wait. Maybe it’ll go back to sleep and we can sneak past.” Did bears snore? Some dogs snored. As they sat quietly waiting, she heard other, smaller sounds in the cave. Little high-pitched squeaks, the skittering of small paws. So the bear wasn’t alone in the cave… mice, that would be, or something similar. No sound from the bear. She crept forward, dared another look at the bear. Eyes closed, mouth closed. From here she could hear the cubs still suckling. She aimed the light around the cave floor, side-to-side, and surprised several smaller animals: they looked like mice, but with furry tails. One of them scurried across to the bear and burrowed into the fur under that massive paw. The bear didn’t move.