Ruiz stepped into the corridor. The initial section was empty, as it had appeared from the Terratonic’s cockpit. The walls were featureless gray meltstone, finished smooth as glass, with lume strips installed at knee height and head height. The greenish light revealed that the corridor ran straight for about a hundred meters, then angled abruptly to the left. Whatever reception had been prepared, it waited around that turn.
Ruiz moved forward swiftly, making little sound. He covered the distance in seconds, conscious of the destruction that might fill the tunnel at any instant. At the turn, he eased carefully up and listened, straining for some clue to what lay beyond.
He heard nothing. Making up his mind, he took out the nerve lash, and rolled around the corner. As he did, a shock wave arrived at the end of the tunnel. It buffeted him as he tried to regain his feet in the still-empty corridor, and then the sound of the explosion reached him. Ruiz rolled helplessly, until he fetched up at another bend, jolting into the wall with enough force to knock the breath from him.
He didn’t notice the tiny fitful buzz of the disabled spy bead that lay a short distance down the corridor.
Marmo stabbed at the touchplate of his spyscreens, but the screens stayed blank.
Corean looked at him. “When will we see him again, Marmo?”
“When he enters the bunker, so I would suppose.”
Corean gave Marmo another look, lambent with appraisal, and Marmo was suddenly reminded of his place. “Yes, certainly,” Marmo said hurriedly. “I have an additional spy bead there.”
“Can we move it to the foyer?”
“Not until he opens the door.” Marmo was carefully diffident. “But after all, what can he do in the foyer, except go into the bunker?”
Ruiz got to his feet, wincing. Apparently no enemies would attack him from the tunnel. He looked along the featureless corridor and saw that it ended in a broad foyer. At the far side of the foyer Ruiz saw a series of side-by-side closed doors. A strip sign over the doors flashed: launch control bunker. He approached gingerly. Anything might be lurking in the ends of the foyer to either side, out of sight.
When he reached the foyer, he cautiously extended the lash past the edge, wiggling it enticingly. When nothing pounced, he followed. To one side the foyer ended in blank meltstone. But on the other side, a steep ramp rose to a surface door. Ruiz moved silently past the closed foyer doors and up the ramp, but when he got to the surface door, his heart sank. The thick metal door had been spot-welded to the frame. A warm draft of air slid in under the door, air filled with the green scent of freedom. He leaned against the door for a long moment, thinking pointless wishful thoughts.
Evidently he was being herded into the bunker. Ruiz wondered what sort of surprise he could contrive for whoever waited within. He returned to the linked doors of the bunker, this time giving each a careful examination. When they were all open, the foyer wall would become a broad portico. Each was operated by a separate touchbar. To the left of the first door, a control cluster opened and closed all the doors simultaneously.
Ruiz examined the cluster carefully. He fished out one of the daggers, now warm enough to touch without loss of skin. With great care, he inserted the tip of the dagger into the almost invisible top seam of the cluster. He chipped delicately at the seam, until the cover separated. He managed to catch the cover before it hit the floor.
He assumed that the bunker could be locked from within, but obviously someone wanted him inside. Else why all this? So the doors would open. The only tactical edge he could dredge up at this point would be to surprise them by opening some of the doors prematurely. If nothing else, it might confuse their field-of-fire assignments for an instant and give him a chance to get among them. He thought for a moment, then took the dagger in the insulating fold of his cap again, and traced the contacts for the two rightmost doors. He hesitated for a moment, thinking that his options had been narrowed with disturbing skill. But then he dismissed the notion. Why would Preall, whoever he was, be interested in Ruiz, who had no interest in Preall? And who else could have arranged this?
Then he put the dagger across the contacts.
Sparks flew, and Ruiz jerked the dagger away. At the other end of the foyer the two doors slammed up, shaking the wall as they hit their stops. Ruiz instantly jammed the dagger into the contact that operated the first door, pounding it in with the heel of his hand. He launched himself at the bottom of the door, and it responded just as he reached it. He rolled under the rising edge.
He saw a sight that should have frozen him with amazement, long enough for the Moc to freeze him with the ice gun it carried strapped to its exoskeleton. The Moc was braced against the thrust of the gun, firing a blinding burst through the first two doors Ruiz had opened. Motes of frozen gas glittered in the path of the ice gun, and then the air rushed in to fill the void with a thunderous crack.
But Ruiz’s momentum and expensive reflexes carried him behind a massive bank of launch monitors. He registered the impression that he was alone in the bunker with the Moc, just as the Moc’s second volley crashed into the monitor bank, causing an ear-splitting shattering of delicate components. Ruiz scurried for cover, but what hope was there? The Moc was so much faster and stronger, and Ruiz was armed with a ludicrously inadequate dagger. And he heard the rumble of the doors closing, locking him in with the Moc. Any physical contest between unamplified human and Moc was a ridiculous mismatch.
The Moc was a flicker of movement among the monitors, and the next volley missed Ruiz by inches, shattering an expanse of crystal that looked out at Preall’s launch ring. Ruiz had no time for reflection; all his capabilities were devoted to the task of avoiding the Moc. At some deeper level, however, Ruiz realized that this was the same Moc that had accompanied Corean, and Ruiz felt an ashamed amazement, that he had been so easily duped, so easily led to this hopeless confrontation by the beautiful slaver. And to what purpose?
The insectoid warrior was slightly hampered by the bulk of the ice gun, or it already would have been over.
But it soon would be over, no matter what Ruiz might do. He flipped, dodged the next blast, rolled frantically under a desk, only to confront the Moc in the next aisle. He whipped the nerve lash into the Moc’s mandibles, but though Corean’s bondwarrior vibrated and roared, the lash diverted the Moc only for the instant that Ruiz needed to roll back under the desk. Behind him, Ruiz heard a snap as the Moc bore down on the lash with its terrible jaws — and then the earsplitting crack of the ice gun again.
Corean stood, gripping the edges of the screen, as if it were a grave she was being pulled into. “Oh no, oh no,” she said, “what went wrong?”
Only instants had elapsed since Ruiz had entered the bunker and the Moc had fired in the wrong direction. Corean’s face was livid with rage and panic. “What happened?”
She was further enraged when she noticed that, despite the destruction of her safe world by this bizarre bad luck, Marmo was laughing loudly. She turned to him, murder in her eyes. He saw, and stopped abruptly. “Corean,” he said. “He’s not dead. If he carried the death net, he’d be dead.”
And so it seemed.
The ice gun had touched him lightly on the last shot, and now Ruiz wriggled desperately through a portion of the bunker where the consoles were so crowded that the Moc could not follow him directly, but could only bound over, firing down from the top of the arc. The warrior was remarkably accurate in that awkward moment, but Ruiz was devious, faking one way and rolling the other.