Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to blink away the tears. “I think so,” she said, sniffing. “I mean, I think we ultimately want the same thing. Only they’re… sort of independent.”
I grimaced. Independent operations were always wasteful, usually counterproductive, and way too often dangerous. But in the world of intelligence and covert ops, they were unfortunately a fact of life, “Do you know what their plan is?”
She closed her eyes, squeezing out another couple of tears in the process. “No.”
I took a couple more calming breaths. I didn’t need this. I really didn’t. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find out.”
She opened her eyes, gazing nervously at me as if expecting another outburst. “Does that mean you’re staying?”
“For now,” I told her, unwilling to commit myself to anything long-term at this point. “Go ahead and switch your comm back on, and let’s head back to the toboggan tunnels.”
I started to reach for my own comm switch, but she snaked a hand up and caught my arm before I could reach it. “I told you once I wasn’t your friend,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. “But I’m not your enemy, either.”
I stared into her eyes, eyes from which all the defenses had crumbled. There was indeed a real, live person back there. “Glad to hear it,” I said. “Be ready to switch off again when I give you the signal.”
I turned on my own comm, and we headed back upslope. She was clearly still too shaken to counterfeit a casual conversation, so instead I kept up a more or less running monologue about how her first lugeboard run had been beginner’s luck. About halfway there, she was finally able to ease back into the conversation.
We reached the lugeboard tunnels; but instead of stopping, I motioned her to keep going, and we followed the pylons as they headed up the next hill. JhanKla had said there were two other toboggan tunnels in production, and it seemed logical that the Halkas would have laid out their future ski lift to serve all five.
We reached the top of the hill, and there they were: two large openings facing each other from the sides of another pair of hills. Like the first set of tunnels, a flattened staging and preparation area had been created between them, this one crowded with heavy equipment and crates of supplies. Some of the equipment was attached to conduits and cables of various colors and diameters that snaked their way down into the tunnel mouth. No one else was visible, and the tunnels themselves seemed dark.
I motioned to Bayta, and we switched off our comms. “There you go,” I said, pressing my helmet against hers again.
“There I go where?” she said, frowning.
“It’s classic diversionary technique,” I said. “You get your opponents looking one direction while you set up your operation in the other. The Bellidos get the Halkas looking down at the underwater caverns, then settle themselves into a nice little staging area up here. An unused tunnel, complete with stacks of stuff where you could probably hide pretty much anything you wanted.”
“But there are Halkan workers here,” she pointed out.
“Only during the day,” I said, checking my watch. “Then they go inside, which is where they all are now, leaving the place nice and deserted.”
I started forward, but Bayta grabbed my arm and pressed her helmet against mine again. “What if the Bellidos are in there?”
“They aren’t,” I assured her. “They can’t be back from Sistarrko yet.”
“Unless they took a later torchferry from the Tube and never went to Sistarrko at all.”
I shook my head. “I poked around the resort computer system for a while last night after you went to bed. Room registration listings are always protected, but the restaurant and room-service records are usually more accessible. There were only two sets of Belldic meals served yesterday, and one of those has to have been to Apos Mahf.”
“Do you think he’s working with them?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “For one thing, he tried too hard for information as to who had left me in that spice crate. For another, he tried to get me to touch the coral.”
I heard her inhale sharply. “You didn’t, did you?” she asked anxiously, her grip tightening on my arm.
“No, no, I didn’t even get close,” I assured her hastily. The sudden dark tension in her face was unnerving. “Maybe you should tell me why that’s such a big deal to you.”
Through her faceplate, I saw her throat work. “I can’t,” she said, letting go of my arm. “You just have to trust me.”
For a moment I was tempted to again threaten to walk. But I’d already made my decision on that, and I knew better than to bluff when there was nothing to back it up. “Sure,” I growled. “Come on.” I stalked off across the ice toward the leftmost of the two tunnels, the one on the north side of the staging area. With only a slight hesitation, Bayta followed.
The tunnel was clearly being planned as a more challenging run than the one Bayta and I had gone down earlier, with a much steeper initial plunge. Fortunately, the Halkan workers weren’t relying on the nonsmoothed ice to get back and forth, but had rigged a corrugated walkway along the tunnel’s left-hand side. Pulling out my light, I got a grip on the handrail and started down.
The first fifty meters of the tunnel floor were smooth and clean. Past that point we hit an area of work in progress, and got a hint of just how complicated these things actually were. My earlier speculation about an embedded heater system was confirmed: Wide sheets of fine mesh encircled the entire tunnel, buried a few centimeters beneath where the toboggan surface would ultimately be. Every few meters we came upon large holes that had been dug in the tunnel walls, with various bits of machinery tucked away inside. Some of the devices were easily identifiable: area minigenerators for the lights and heaters, and impact registers like those used in sports arenas for alerting the staff to possible medical emergencies. Others I didn’t have a clue about.
We followed the twists and turns for another hundred meters to where the tunnel ended at a concave wall. Several heavy-duty melting units were on the floor in front of the ice face, along with a pair of high-pressure pumping units connected to two of the thicker conduits.
Bayta touched her helmet to mine. “Nothing here,” she said “Maybe the other one.”
“Maybe,” I said, eyeing the wall on the far side of the tunnel. On the other hand, if I were hiding something, I would put it on the side farthest away from the traffic zone. “Go ahead and start back,” I told her. “I’m going to take a stroll.”
I crossed to the far side and started up, alternating my light and attention between the ice wall and the cables and hoses running alongside it. Even in the low gravity there were a couple of spots where I had to use one of the cables to pull myself up.
Midway through one of the tighter curves, where the slope made a particularly sharp drop, I found it. Catching Bayta’s eye, I waved her over.
It took her a minute to backtrack to a spot where she could cross the tunnel and join me. “Take a look,” I told her, pointing to the drain hose, our helmets again touching for private communication. “See here, where the color is just slightly off the rest of the hose?”
She peered at it. “Looks like a patch.”
“Very good,” I said. Working my fingertips under one edge, I peeled the patch back a couple of centimeters to reveal a handful of small punctures below it. “Behold: a homemade mister. Something to make liquid water mist, which will then freeze on contact with a wall.” I touched the tunnel wall beside me. “This wall, for instance.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Let’s say you want to burrow into a tunnel wall,” I said. “The digging itself is trivial; all you need is a tight-beam plasma cutter or nuke torch. Hiding the hole afterward is the tricky part. You need liquid water and a way to deliver it to the hole.”