«Forward! To the future of Kaldak!»
He'd hit the proper note. Kareena also laughed and stepped away from him. Side by side they walked into the darkness.
Directly ahead of them lay a single long corridor, with a metal floor and stone walls sprayed with some sort of plastic. The plastic was cream-colored and the floor a tarnished green. A translucent strip ran down the middle of the ceiling, probably the lighting system. At irregular intervals plain steel doors were set in the walls. The first three Blade tried were solidly locked.
«Why can't you burn a way through them?» asked Kareena, when they'd left the third door behind.
«Because they're too thick,» said Blade. «I would use up too much of our power. Also, we don't know what's inside those doors. It might catch fire or explode.» To emphasize his words he thumped the fourth door with his fist. It resounded as dully as the others, but then swung open several inches. Kareena giggled. Blade put his shoulder to the door and pushed with unnecessary vigor. It flew open so violently it crashed against the stone wall inside.
The lantern showed rack after rack of crates, cans, boxes, and man-high cylinders all around the room. In the middle was a table, piled on one end with small cylindrical cans with spray buttons on the tops. An overturned chair lay on the far side. Blade started walking around the room, holding the lantern up to each rack. Either the language of the Tower Builders was very different from that of their descendants, or the containers were marked in some sort of code. Blade couldn't understand more than one word or sign in ten on any of the labels. Finding out what was inside the containers was going to be a matter of trial and error. Not the best way, when one error could be fatal.
A clatter and an exclamation from Kareena made Blade turn around. She'd brushed against the table, knocking several of the metal cans off onto the floor. Blade sniffed. There was a faint smell in the air which hadn't been there before, rather like a cheap perfume.
«There's still something in the cans, Blade,» said Kareena. Before he could stop her she picked up one and pressed the button down on one end. There was a faint hissing and the perfume smell grew stronger. «It smells like a kind of soap,» she said merrily.
«Kareena-!»
She stretched out one bare arm, aimed the can at it, and pressed the spray button again. A patch of skin turned wet and glistening. Then Blade grabbed the can and snatched it out of her hand. «Kareena, you don't know what that is! It could be a poison, even if it smells like perfume!»
But Kareena was too busy rubbing the sprayed patch of skin to listen. «Blade it is a kind of soap,» she said finally. «Look.» Blade had to admit that the patch of skin she'd sprayed was much cleaner than it had been, and showed no sign of damage. «A liquid soap in a can! We've never found anything like that! What else do you suppose we're going to find?» She sounded like a child anticipating a visit to the toy store.
Blade didn't want to quarrel with Kareena. He also didn't want her kittenish curiosity to kill them both. «I do not know,» he said. «The Oltec the Sky Masters left here in the Land is different from what they left in England. I do know that we must be very careful. So never, never play with anything you find the way you did now. You were very foolish and very lucky.»
Kareena's eyes went hard and for a moment Blade was sure a quarrel was about to start. Then she sighed. «Blade, I suppose you are right. I did not think. I am not used to living so far beyond the Law that one must think about this sort of thing.»
«True, and so must everyone else in Kaldak. You're all going to have to learn.»
«Yes, but if we don't play with what we find, how are we going to learn anything about it?» She gestured around the room. «There must be enough new Oltec here to keep fifty people busy learning about it.»
«Then we'll come back with fifty people, and they can go to work. That way if one man makes a mistake and gets killed, the other forty-nine can see what happened and learn from it. If we get killed, all we've learned dies with us. It may never get back to Kaldak at all and certainly won't get back in time to help against the Doimari.»
«You think there is really going to be a war?»
«You saw that machine, Kareena. If Kaldak had a hundred of them, wouldn't your father be tempted to try destroying Doimar. And he is a man who prefers peace and the Law. I have not heard that Feragga of Doimar is fond of either.» That was a considerable understatement. From what he'd heard of the woman who ruled Doimar, she was something to frighten naughty children with at bedtime!
Kareena nodded reluctantly. «Very well, Blade. I will follow where you lead.» Blade noticed that this promise didn't keep her from scooping three cans of the spray soap into her pack.
Blade led on, trying to look more sure of where he was going than he actually was. His confidence grew as he found that about half the rooms were unlocked. After the third open room he was no longer leading quite so much in the dark. One rack there held several dozen portable lamps as powerful as miniature searchlights. They lit up the whole main corridor and showed a number of side ones as well. Blade refused to worry now about triggering alarms or defenses. He and Kareena were already far enough inside the complex to be helpless if any defenses did go into action. They were also far enough inside to have triggered them off a dozen times if they still worked.
Blade counted about forty rooms in the complex. Some of the open ones were empty or used only for what had to be junk. In many of the filled ones everything was so tightly packaged or sealed that Blade was reluctant to disturb it. He still found enough on display to impress him.
There were hundreds of sets of infantry equipment, including uniforms, boots, gas masks, body armor, and weapons. There were other garments which looked like radiation or chemical protection for rescue workers. There were portable radios and miniature computers. There was enough medical equipment for a small army, including what seemed to be a complete portable operating room. There were tons of rations, some still edible after all the years lying in the darkness. There were no waldoes or any vehicles except a few small freight trucks, but there was everything else needed to help the people of a bombed city defend its ruins.
Kareena was too amazed at the richness of the Oltec to say anything more for quite a while. When she could finally speak, the first thing she asked was, «Do you suppose there's something like this under Kaldak?»
Blade nodded. «It would make sense to have supplies stored under each city. It might be hard to carry them from one city to another in the middle of a war.»
«Then-all we had to do, to be as strong as Doimar-was to go a little farther down in Kaldak than the Law said we could? Then-it is because we have obeyed the Law that Kaldak has been put in danger?»
She looked and sounded so confused that Blade wished he could soften his answer, but knew he could not. «Yes. That is so. And the first thing we do when we return to Kaldak is explore every basement and every hole, in every basement in the city.»
They moved on, collecting samples of the smaller items as they went. Although they tried to restrain themselves, by the time they reached the center of the complex their packs were bulging and so heavy they were glad to unsling them for a while.
The center of the complex was unmistakably a command center of some sort. There was a central room with consoles, displays, and screens on all four sides. There were six reclining couches, and four unidentifiable contraptions with seats, helmets, gloves, and boots all wired to massive metal frames. Blade wondered if they were communications devices, or perhaps equipment for interrogating (and torturing) prisoners.