"It's good to see you - and good to have you," said Hal. Jason got to his feet. Hal looked around and raised his voice. "All right, everyone who's with me! Into the front room and we'll get ready to leave."
As the trucks that carried them got close to the Center, they heard the whistle of cone rifles from a couple of blocks away, and when they were closer yet, the tall faces of the buildings on either side of the street brought them echoes of the brief, throaty roars of power weapons, like the angry voicings of large beasts.
The trucks turned into a street along one side of the Center; and the metal gates to the service courtyard entrance, almost to the rear of the block-long buildings stood wide open. Whatever Militia Guards had kept their post here, normally, there was now no sign of them. Instead, four men and one woman in civilian clothes and holding power rifles, with two still figures in uniforms lying against the rear courtyard wall, were waiting for them. Their trucks were waved into the courtyard, and the gates closed behind them.
"Everyone out!" Hal called as the trucks stopped.
He got out himself and saw the riders in the main bodies of the trucks dismount and sort themselves into two groups. He turned to the seven men and five women he would be taking inside with him; and saw that they had already congregated about Jason, as a recognized Command officer.
"Power sidearms and rifles, only, inside," he told them. "Who's got the cable?"
"Here," said one of the men, partially lifting the small spool of what seemed only thin, gray wire, at his belt. The wire was shielded cable for a phone connection between the invaders which the communication equipment in the center would not register, let alone be able to tap.
"Stretcher?"
"Here," answered a woman. She held up what seemed to be only a pair of poles wrapped in canvas.
'Good," said Hal. He looked for the four people who had been guarding the black metal gates when the trucks arrived, and saw one of them, a man, standing a little apart from the two groups. "Anyone in the kitchen there, as far as you know?"
"We were inside," said the man, shifting his power rifle from one arm to the other. "There was just one person on duty. She's tied up in a corner of the main room."
That would mean, thought Hal, that the kitchen attendant on duty was a civilian. If she had been of the Militia, they would have killed her.
"All right," Hal turned back to his dozen people. "After me, then. If you fall out of touch with me, or something happens to me, take your orders from Jason Rowe, here. Keep together; and you observers take posts in the order we talked about earlier today. Report anything - anything at all out of the ordinary you see or hear - over the phone circuit. Come on."
They went in, with Hal in the lead. Inside, the kitchen was only partially lighted over the sinks at one end and smelled heavily of cooked vegetables and soap. Hal saw a bundle of dark blue cloth under the furthest sink that must be the bound and gagged attendant.
"First observer, here," he said. One of the two women in his group, taller and leaner than the other and in her forties, stooped and took the end of the cable from the drum slung from the shoulders of the man beside her, clipping it to a wrist phone on her right arm. The detailed map of the Center's interior, which Athalia had provided for Hal to study, was printed in his mind. He led the rest off through a doorway in the wall to his left, down a long, straight corridor where the odors, by contrast, were dominated by the sharp smell of some vinegarish disinfectant.
Dropping off observers at the points already picked out on the map he had studied, Hal led deep into the interior of the block-square building and quietly down three flights of ramps. At the base of the last of the ramps, a man in black Militia uniform snored lightly on a cot beside a bare desk and just to the left of a barred door leading to a corridor lined with metal doors that could be seen beyond. The Militiaman slept the utter sleep of exhaustion, and only woke as they began to bind his arms and legs to make him a prisoner.
"How do I open the door to the cells?" Hal asked him.
"I won't tell you," said the Militiaman, hoarsely.
Hal shrugged. There was no time to waste in persuading the man, even if he had preferred doing so. With his power pistol he slagged the lock of the barred door, which had not been designed to resist that sort of assault. Kicking the still-hot bars of the door to open it, Hal led the six who were left, including the team member with the reel of cable, into the corridor lined with cell doors. The last of the observers was left behind with the trussed and gagged Militiaman.
The doors of the cells, like the door on the cell Hal had shared with Jason, long before, in Citadel's Militia Center, were solid metal with only a small observation window which could be covered with a sliding panel. The observation windows on the cells they passed were uncovered; and as Hal glanced into each, he saw it was empty. They reached the end of the corridor where it ran into another corridor at right angles, running right and left.
"Shall we split up, Hal?" Jason asked.
"No," said Hal. "Let's try to the right, first."
The leg of the cross corridor to the right offered more empty cells - but also three inhabited ones. They slagged the locks on these and released two men and one woman who turned out to have been arrested the day before in the course of the rioting. All three had been badly treated; but only one of the men required assistance to walk; and this the other two gave him. Hal sent them back to the room where the last observer waited with the bound Militiaman, with orders to follow the cable wire from there to the kitchen and freedom.
In the same way Hal and his team proceeded through eight more corridors and cross corridors, releasing over twenty inmates, only one of which had been there before the riot; and who had to be carried out by his fellow-rescued on a makeshift stretcher. Still, they had not found Rukh; and a coldness was settling into existence, deep inside Hal, at the thought that maybe they were half a day too late - perhaps she had died and her body had been taken out to be disposed of by whatever method was used in Centers like this one.
"That's the end of it," said Jason Rowe at Hal's left shoulder.
They had come to the end of a corridor and the wall that faced them was doorless and blank.
"It can't be," said Hal. He turned about and went back to the room before the entrance into the cell block.
"There are other cells," he said to the captured Militiaman. "Where?"
The white face of the bound man in the black uniform stared up into his and did not answer. Hal felt something like a breath of coldness that blew briefly through his chest. A living pressure went out from him and he saw the man on the cot felt it. He stared down.
"You'll tell me," he said; and heard - as a stranger might hear - a difference in his voice.
The other's eyes were already wide, his face was already pale; but the skin seemed to shrink back on his bones as Hal's stare held him. Something more than fear moved between the two of them. In Hal's mind there came back a long-ago echo of a voice that had been his, telling a man like this to suffer; and now, in front of him, the Militiaman stared back as a bird might stare at a weasel.
"The second door, in the first corridor to the right - it isn't a cell door," the man answered, huskily. "It's a stair door, to the cells downstairs."
Hal went back to the cell block. He heard the footfalls of Jason and the others on the concrete floor behind him, hurrying to keep up. He came to the door the Militiaman had mentioned and saw that the window shield of it was open. The view through it showed an ordinary, empty cell. He tried the door handle.
It was unlocked.
He swung it wide; and it yawned open to his left. Stepping through, he turned and saw a picture screen box fastened over the window on the inside face of the door. Beyond were wide, gray, concrete stairs under bright illumination, leading downward. He descended them swiftly, through the door at the bottom, and stepped into a corridor less than fifteen meters in length, with cell doors lacking windows spaced along each side of it.