Where the windows might have been were red metal flags, and these, on all the doors but one, were down. Hal took five long strides to the one with the flag up and reached for its latch.
It was locked. He slagged the lock. Holstering his pistol, he tore off a section of his shirt, wadded it up to protect his hand, and, grasping the handle above the ruined lock, swung the door open.
A sewer stench struck him solidly in the face. He stepped inside, almost slipping for a second on the human waste that covered the floor. Inside, after the brilliance of the light in the corridor outside, he could see nothing. He stood still and let his senses reach out.
A scant current of moving air from some slow ventilating system touched his left cheek. His ears caught the even fainter sound of shallow breathing ahead of him. He stepped forward cautiously, with his arms outstretched and felt a hard, blank wall. Feeling down, at the foot of the wall, his hands discovered the shape of a body. He scooped it up; and it came lightly into his arms as if it weighed no more than a half-grown child. He turned and carried it put the doorway into the light.
For less than a second the thin, foul-smelling bundle of rags he held in his arms could have been someone other than Rukh. She was almost skeletal; bruises and half-healed lacerations and burns had distorted her features and her hair was matted with filth. But her dark eyelids, which had closed against the light as he stepped through the doorway, opened slowly, and the brown eyes that looked up at him were untouched and unchanged
With effort, her dry lips parted. Barely, he heard the whisper that came from her.
"I testify yet to thee, my God."
A memory of a day in which he had stood to his neck in water, looking through the screening branches of a waterside bush, returned to Hal. Through the delicate tracery of brown twigs and small green leaves, he remembered seeing in the distance - now, for the first time, clearly - three old men on a terrace, surrounded by young men in black with long barrelled pistols and a very tall, slim man; and his arms pressed the body he held close to himself, tenderly and protectively, as if it was something more precious than the universe could know. Deep within him, the breath of coldness that had woken in him momentarily in Athalia's outer office came back, coalesced to a point, and kindled into icy fire.
"Here," he said, putting Rukh gently into Jason's arms. "Take her out of here; and give me your rifle."
His hand closed about the small of the butt of Jason's power rifle, as the other man handed it to him. The feel of the polished wood against his fingers was strange - as if he had never touched such a thing before - and at the same time, unforgettably familiar and inescapable. He holstered his own power pistol and turned to one of the others who carried a rifle.
"And yours…" he said
He grasped the second rifle in his other hand and looked again at Jason.
"If I'm not outside with the rest of you when you've loaded the trucks," he said, "don't wait for me."
He turned and went off before Jason had time to question him. He heard the footsteps of the others begin and follow. But the sound of their feet died away quickly behind him, for he was moving with long strides, up the stairs, out of the cell block and through the entrance room. He passed the final observer there without answering her as she tried to question him about the still-bound Militiaman, and went on up the corridor beyond.
The chart he had studied of the Center's interior layout was burned sharply into his memory. As he approached the next to last observer she stared at him and at the two rifles he carried nakedly, one in each hand.
"Monitoring equipment from the yard just called to say they think a party's been sent from the front of Center to deal with us - " she began.
"Jason and the rest have Rukh," he interrupted, without breaking stride. "Go with them as soon as they reach you."
He continued straight down the corridor, parting company with the cable, which here made a ninety degree turn into a cross corridor, on its way back to the kitchen and its exit.
"But where are you going, Hal Mayne?" the observer called after him.
He did not answer; and the echoes of her question followed him down the corridor.
He went on, following the chart in his head now, turning at the second cross corridor he came to, heading toward the front of the building. Inside him, the point of coldness was expanding, spreading out through all his body. All his senses were tuned to an acuteness wound to the edge of pain. He saw and remembered each crack and jointure in the walls that he passed. He heard the normally silent breathing of air in the ventilating system through the gratings in the ceiling beneath which he stepped. His mind was focused on a single point that ranged ahead of him, reaching through the walls and corridors between the Center's front offices, where the majority of the black-clad Militia would be, their officers with them and Amyth Barbage, among those officers.
Now, the coldness possessed him totally. He felt nothing - only the purpose in him. He turned into a new corridor and saw, ten meters down it, three Militiamen pushing a small, wheeled, power cannon in his direction.
He walked toward them, even as they suddenly noticed him and stopped in stunned silence to stare at him, striding toward them. Then, as one of them roused at last and reached for the power cannon's firing lever, the rifles in his hands roared briefly, the one in his left hand twice - like the coughings of a lion - and the three men dropped. He walked up to them, past them, and on toward the front of the building.
"Report!" rapped a harsh voice from a speaker grille in the ceiling of the corridor. "Sergeant Abram - report!"
He walked on.
"What's happening there, Sergeant? Report!" cried the speaker grille, more faintly over the increasing distance between it and him. He walked on.
He was all of one piece, now; with the coldness in him that left no room for anything else. Turning into another corridor he faced two more Militiamen and cut them down also with his rifles; but not before one of the counter discharges from the power pistols both carried cut a smoking gash in the jacket sleeve of his upper left arm. He smelled the odor of the burned cloth and the burned flesh beneath, but felt no heat or pain.
He was getting close to the front of the building; and the corridor he was on ended a short distance ahead in another cross corridor. Already, there was a difference in what he saw around him. The doors, that were now of glass, to the dark offices he passed had become more widely separated, indicating that the rooms they opened on were larger than those he had passed earlier. Half a dozen steps from its end, the corridor he was in abruptly widened, its walls now faced with smooth stone where up to this point they had been merely of white-painted concrete. The floor had also changed, becoming covered with a pattern of inlaid gray tiles in various shapes, highly polished; and his footsteps rang more sharply upon this new surface. To the abnormal acuteness of his vision, under the now-hidden but even brighter illumination from overhead, the invisible atmosphere about him seemed to quiver like the flesh of a living creature.
He had been moving under the impetus of something neither instinct nor training, which directed him from the back, hidden recesses of his mind. Now he felt this impetus, like a hand laid on one of his shoulders, stop him, turn him and steer him into one of the dark offices. He closed the door behind him and stood to one side in the interior shadows, looking out through the transparency of the door at the empty corridor ahead.
For a few seconds he heard and saw nothing. Then, from a distance there came a growing sound that was the hasty beating of many feet, rapidly approaching; and, within a minute, fully a dozen fully-armed Militiamen burst into sight around a corner of the cross corridor and ran past him back the way he had come. He let them go. When they were out of sight, he stepped back into the passageway, and continued, turning left into the cross corridor in the direction from which they had just come.