"… know you have a basement, Sera Vanlis, and you'd better cooperate. This is nothing to play games about."
"I still don't see a warrant." Not quite defiance, but not quite calm confidence, either. "I've nothing to hide, but I'm not setting precedent by letting you search without one."
"I'll call for one."
A pause, then the sound of speech Sassinak could not distinguish. Did the sound go both ways? She had to trust not, had to hope the woman had hit some hidden switch to give them both warning and a way out. But nothing looked like a way out. No doors, in the long opposite wall, or the far end. No door at either end. A fat column of cables and pipes came out of the ceiling, entered and exited a massive meter box covered with dials, and disappeared into a grated opening in the floor.
Aygar nodded toward it. Sassinak looked closer. Not big enough for Aygar and she wasn't sure she could slither alongside the bundled utilities, but it gave her an idea. If this were a ship, there'd be some kind of repair access to the utility conduits. She couldn't find it, and the conversation overhead could have only one ending.
Then Aygar picked up a filing cabinet, one of a row along the far wall, but in line with the path of the cables, and there it was. A flat circle of metal, with a pop-up handle, and under it a vertical shaft with a ladder fixed to one side. She would have had trouble getting the cover free, and up, but Aygar's powerful fingers lifted it as easily as a piece of toast on a tray.
Sassinak eeled into the hole, slipped easily down tile ladder to give Aygar room, and murmured "How're you going to cover it after us?"
"Don't worry."
Nonetheless, she did worry as he slipped the access cover behind the next file cabinet over, and backed down into the hole, dragging the file cabinet with him.
Surely he couldn't possibly move it all the way into place, just with his hands? He could.
They were in the dark again, the top of the shaft walled with the file cabinet, but she could hear the proud grin in his voice when he said, "Unless they heard mat, they won't know. And I think it's been used that way before. That cabinet's not as heavy as a full one would be."
She patted his leg and backed on down the ladder. They ought to come to a cross-shaft… and her foot found nothing below, then something uneven. She ran foot over it in the dark, momentarily wondering why she'd been stupid enough not to bring along a handlight. Lumpy, long, slick… probably the bundled utilities. She couldn't quite reach them with her foot while clinging to the ladder. She'd have to drop. Aygar's foot tapped her head, and she touched his, a slight sideways shove that she hoped he would understand as "Wait!"
Chapter Fourteen
"What about a light?" asked Aygar softly.
Sassinak counted to ten, reminding herself that he was not, despite his talents, a trained soldier. He would not have thought to tell her before that he had a light.
"Fine."
Above her, a dim light came on, bright enough to dark-adapted eyes. Shadows danced crazily as he passed it down. Below, the cross tunnel was twice the diameter of theirs, its center full of pipes, with a narrow catwalk along one side Sassinak eased down, swung her legs onto the catwalk, and guided Aygar's feet. She had to crouch a little; he was bent uncomfortably. She touched his arm and jerked her head to one side. They would move some distance before they dared talk much.
Twenty meters down the tunnel, Sassinak paused and doused the handlight. No sound or sight of pursuit. She closed her eyes, letting them adapt to darkness again, and wishing she had even the helmet to her armor. Even without the link to the cruiser's big computers, the helmet onboard with sensors could have told her exactly what lay ahead, line-of-sight.
She opened her eyes to darkness. Complete… no. Not complete. Ahead, so dim she could hardly make it out, a distant red-orange point. She squinted, then remembered to shift her gaze off-center and back across. Two red-orange points. She leaned out to peer back past Aygar. Another, and another beyond that.
Marker lights for maintenance workers. That would be the most harmless. Alternatives included automatic cameras that could send their images straight to some police station without ever giving them enough light to see. Or automatic lasers, linked to heat and motion sensors, designed to rid the tunnels of vermin.
She hated planets. There might even be vermin in these tunnels. But when there were no choices, only fools refused chances… so Abe had said. She edged sideways along the catwalk, moving with ship-trained neatness in that unhandy space. Aygar had more trouble. She could hear him thumping and stumbling, and had to hope that there were no sound sensors down here. She used the handlight as seldom as she could.
Moving past the first dim light in the tunnel's roof set off no alarms she could sense, but then a good system wouldn't tell her. She was sweating now in the tunnel's unmoving air, and wondering just how good that air was. Between the first and second lights, she felt a sodden draft along her side, and turned the light on the tunnel wall. Waist high, another grill, this one rectangular. A silent, slightly cooler breath came from it. She could hear no fan, not even the hiss of air movement. Then for an instant it changed, sucking against the back of her hand, then stilled, then returned as before.
Nothing but a pressure-equalizing connector, probably from the subway system, she thought. Nice to know they were connected to something else with air, though she'd rather have found a route to the surface. She tapped Aygar's arm, and they crouched beneath the vent to rest briefly.
"I'm not sure who's after us," she said. "That wasn't the man I was supposed to meet, back there, just someone the right age and size, but not the same."
Aygar ignored this. "Do you know where we are? Can we get back?"
"Not the right questions. To get back, we have to figure out who's trying to kill us. At this point we don't know if they're after you, me, or both. And why."
She could think of reasons both ways. All three ways, and even a few more. Why send her to meet a fake Coromell and then kill him? It could hardly have been a mistake; the difference between a white-haired old man and a dark-haired woman was clear to the stupidest assassin. It couldn't have been bad marksmanship, not with the cluster that had destroyed the man's face. Had there been two different sets of conspirators whose plots intersected in wild confusion?
"You said that wasn't Coromell." Aygar's voice was quiet, his tone alert but not anxious. "Did the one who killed him know that?"
"I'm not sure." She was not sure of a lot, except that she wished she'd stayed on her ship. So much for confronting old fears. "If that had been Coromell, and if I'd also been killed, perhaps the next round of fire, you'd have been the ranking witness for Tanegli's trial. And, as you've said often enough, you don't know anything about the dealings Tanegli had with the other conspirators. All you could do is testify that he lied to you, led you to believe that Ireta was yours. If there were some way Coromell's death could be blamed on me…"
"And why were all those other people waiting for us outside?" Aygar asked.
Clearly his mind ran on a different track. Natural, with his background. But it was still a good question.
"Hmm. Suppose they plan to kill Coromell in the bar. They expect me to run, with you, just as I did. The only smart thing to do in something like that is get out. So they've got others outside, to kill us. Or me. Then they could pin Coromell's death on me, discredit Fleet, and any testimony I bring to the trial."
"What would happen to the Zaid-Dayan? Who is your heir?"