"No, I say this way," Indigo countered. "That area had work done by noncompromised contractors, whereas this area was totally done by the Ontongard."
"Ru?" Atticus trusted his partner.
"Okay, with your back to the stairs you just came down, to your left, on the same wall as the stairway, is a door," Ru said. "It leads to a long hallway with lots of doors off it. Ignore them all; go to the end."
"You sure?" Atticus said.
"No," came the answer from all three federal agents on the other end.
"All the other doors lead to fairly small areas," Ru explained. "At the end of the hall, though, is another stairway into an large area isolated from everything else."
"Look at these electricals." Indigo must have produced drawings to support her theory; paper rustled loudly.
"Oh!" Ru was convinced. "Atty, there's a shitload of power lines going into that area. It has to be the right place."
Atticus hurried to the door, aware of Rennie moving to join him. The Pack leader had been shot in the left arm; a gaping hole punched through the muscle and the arm hung useless at his side. The wound, though, was already healing closed. A mouse clung to Rennie's shoulder.
They'd lost ten of the Pack fighters to the thirty-two Ontongard dead, which was surprising, since they seemed so equal in strength.
"We value our hides." Rennie tucked his shotgun under his useless arm to load, doing it with an ease that suggested it wasn't the first time he had had to work one-handed. "So we're better at protecting them. But there's only a hundred of us and they've got us outnumbered two or three times over. We have to get this done before they overpower us."
Atticus nodded and indicated the door. "We think the transmitter is this way."
Rennie's mouse took advantage of the moment of stillness to scurry down into Rennie's coat pocket. "Let's do it then. Dogs, to me! The rest, seal those doors and get the dead contained."
A four-foot-square steel plate barrier was brought forward. With speed and efficiency no human team could match, the Dogs readied around the doorway and behind the shield wall. No sooner was the last person in place than they battered down the door and opened fire. Gunsmoke formed a cloud.
It was an expensive win. Of the fifteen Pack who pushed their way down the hallway, only Atticus, Rennie, and Stein were left standing at the end. Yet Atticus couldn't sense any Ontongard beyond the last door. He cautiously opened the heavy steel door and found an empty stairwell.
"Wait!" Rennie caught Atticus's shoulder before he could step forward, pulling him back away from the door.
"What is it?"
Rennie pulled out a handful of loose coins and flung them at the open doorway. With a crack and the sudden smell of hot metal, the coins rebounded to the floor at their feet, blackened and twisted. "They've got an energy field up."
"Oh, cool," Kyle said over the radio. "But that's not on the as-built."
OSHA wasn't going to like that. "How do we get through it?"
"We don't." Rennie shot one of the slightly dead Ontongard who had stirred back to life. "Nothing on Earth can penetrate it."
"Where the hell did it come from?"
"The scout ship; Hex stripped out the armory. See if there's a way around it."
With that Rennie and Stein worked back down the hall, stomping on hapless rats and shooting the fallen Ontongard in the head and chest—anything to keep them dead. Fighting broke out in the large center room, an endless thunder of guns backed with the snarls of the Pack. Atticus noticed for the first time that neither side shouted or cursed or screamed other than short yelps of pure animal pain.
"Ru, is there any way around this?"
"Actually, there is, but you're not going to like it," Ru said.
"How?"
"Go back to the first door. There's a small odd-shaped room that doglegs around the fresh-air ventilation shaft leading down into the Ted Williams Tunnel. There's an access panel into the air shaft. On the other side of the shaft is an air duct into that area."
The room was a supply closet, stacked haphazardly with construction supplies and tools. Atticus pushed through the equipment to the far back corner and unburied the access panel. The metal panel was secured to its frame with screws; he shot them out and pried off the panel.
Night air rushed out of a pitch-black shaft.
He found a flashlight in the clutter. He turned it on and discovered that its battery was nearly dead. He tried shining it into the shaft. The darkness swallowed the feeble beam. By holding on to the edge and leaning through the opening, he could make out the opposite wall. The shaft seemed to be about ten feet square. Fans roared somewhere overhead, and the sound of traffic echoed up faintly from the darkness below.
"Are you sure, Ru? I don't see anything."
"Opposite wall. It's smaller, and maybe to the . . . to the left."
He played the light across the far wall and found it. "Oh, shit."
"What is it, Atty?"
"It's like two and half feet, maybe three feet wide."
"It's the only way, Atty," Ru said.
"I know." He fixed the spot in his mind and pitched the flashlight aside. "Here goes nothing."
Atticus leapt into the darkness. He hit the wall hard, clawed at the darkness, found the edge of the air duct, and scrambled madly to haul himself up into the tiny crawl space. "I'm in!"
The only response to his news was a relieved sigh over the radio link and the thunder of guns behind him.
***
Ru told him that the air duct went only fifty feet, but it seemed longer, crawling on his stomach through the tight, square passageway. The other end opened onto a vast room filled with a bewildering array of equipment. Pipes from an inch to a foot in diameter bisected the room into grids. Besides pressure gauges and meters, nothing was labeled. Scattered around the room, in seemingly random order, were racks of computer equipment. Nothing seemed centralized. Nothing looked like the heart of a machine. No convenient big red switches.
He dropped lightly down onto a catwalk that ringed the upper level of the room and stared around him, suddenly feeling like a caveman asked to stop an aircraft carrier. No, worse—like a flea inside a supercomputer, whose only possible act of sabotage would be throwing himself on a random circuit and hoping that his death would fry an important chip.
Unfortunately, the room wasn't empty of Ontongard, and he'd been noticed. Three Gets started up the catwalk toward him. One was the missing Iron Horse from the DVD of the Ontongard attack on the Buffalo DEA team, the big, black, sleepy-eyed David Toback. The two others looked like construction workers, and were nearly as big and muscular. They carried short lengths of pipe; apparently they were loath to fire guns in this room. They split up, heading for the two ladders up to the catwalk, planning to catch him between them.
This was going to hurt.
"Can you see this?" he asked his team.
"Yeah, we're picking it up." Ru sounded as disheartened as he felt.
"I'm open to suggestions at this point."
"I don't know what to do," Kyle admitted while the other two remained silent.
"Not a clue?"
"Atticus," Kyle whined. "It's not like I can download a user file on this in PDF format with diagrams. It's an alien machine!"
"Shit!" Atticus charged toward the first construction worker to the right as he climbed the steep ladder to the catwalk. He did a flying kick, connecting with the Get's head as it cleared the top step. He heard the crack of bone, and the Get dropped backward.
Catching the handrail, Atticus let momentum spin him around and landed back on the catwalk. On the second-floor landing below him, the Get lay in an awkward sprawl. Atticus pulled his pistol and took careful aim. Fighting alongside the Dog Warriors had taught him how to maximize his damage. Two bullets into the skull kept a Get down the longest.