"Nothing you want," Wendy replied quietly. "You just go your way and we'll go ours."
"Oh, I don't think so," the heavier one said, pulling a chain out from behind her back. "I really don't."
"Do we kill them?" Elgars asked with perfect clarity. She was standing quite still, her weight forward on the balls of her feet and her hands at her side. The question was asked in an absolutely toneless voice.
"Uh, no," Wendy said. "Security gets all pissy when you do that."
"Okay," Elgars said and moved. From Wendy's perspective, one moment she was totally still and the next she was practically chest to chest with the leader.
The captain blocked the swing of the bat with her forearm—she was well inside the arc—and ripped the ring out of the leader's nostril. "That's to get your attention," she said in a deep voice just before she head-butted the leader into the far wall.
Wendy's hand dipped into the bag and came up holding the Glock, which more or less stopped the other three in their tracks. "Oh, look, there was something you guys could have used. And, lookey, it's got a silencer on it. Which means that when I blow you all over the wall, security won't even hear. Now, why don't you three just take off while my companion finishes playing?" They took one look at the pistol and decided there were corridors that needed their attention. Like, now.
Wendy winced as Elgars kicked the henchman in a place that is, arguably, more sensitive in women than in men. The chain had disappeared somewhere down a corridor and a knife was already on the floor broken at the tang. The woman was waving one hand in front of her face, fighting to get a word out, when Elgars followed it up with a kick to the side of the head.
"If you didn't want to play, you shouldn't have brought the ball," the captain said, bouncing on her toes with her hands up at shoulder height, fingers folded and palms out. Again, the voice was decidedly deep and clear.
"I think you're done here, Annie," Wendy said, stepping over to the leader to check for a pulse. There was a good solid beat, which was nice considering the bang her head had taken. Wendy flipped out a penlight and checked the pupils. The right pupil was a little sluggish but Wendy figured she had a better than fifty/fifty chance of waking up. The henchman was even better off, already starting to groan into consciousness.
"Damn, you two are luckier than you have any right to be," Wendy said, straightening up. "I'd suggest you run by the infirmary, though." She kicked the leader in the shin. "You've got a pretty good concussion going there.
"Right," Wendy said, "I think we should get as far from here as possible."
" 'Ka," Elgars mouthed, lowering her hands. "N'd t' ge' ou' o' D'ge."
A few turns, a short secondary corridor and they were back in well-maintained corridors as if the encounter had never taken place. These corridors were, for the most part, not crowded. The one exception was an open area where at least four hundred people, mostly older but with a scattering of younger women and children, sat on metal chairs playing board games, talking and sipping drinks. One end of the area was an elaborate playground, like hell's own hamster trail. It was mainly around this centerpiece that the children ran screaming happily.
Wendy didn't even pause, continuing her unerring navigation towards their eventual goal.
"We're almost there," she said, taking another up escalator. "This place is laid out really logically. Once you get used to it you can find anything. All the security stuff is up and towards the main entrance which is on the inner corner of A."
Elgars pointed to a large red box on the wall of the corridor. It was the second one that they had passed. It was marked in a similar manner to the emergency packs in the rooms, but had a large sign "For ER Personnel only." And it apparently hadn't been looted.
"It's an attack pack," Wendy said. "There is one in each subsector, located at the subsector's 4/4/4 point; that's short for the middle of the subsector. It's got basic rescue and fire gear in case of an emergency. There's some class B breath packs, a trauma kit including foldable stretcher, a defib kit, firefighting gear and an entry kit. They can only be opened by qualified emergency/rescue personnel; there's a palm print scanner on them. I can get one open; I'm in the fire/rescue reserve force. I'm hoping to get on a regular crew soon, if I can pass the Physical Performance Eval."
Elgars pointed to the sprinklers on the ceiling. "F'r'?"
"Yeah, they're for fire suppression," Wendy agreed. "And some of the areas that have a lot of computer equipment are Halon fed. But even with them, there's the possibility of a large breakout. And if a big fire breaks out, we're screwed. This thing is like a ship; you have to kill the fire before it kills you. The alternative is going to the surface, and if we wanted to be up there, we wouldn't be stuck down here."
"Wur ahh . . . are we?" Elgars asked gesturing around. She apparently had decided to ignore the earlier adventure.
"You mean in the world?" Wendy responded. "They didn't tell you?"
"Nuu . . ." the captain said. "Ne'er ask . . ."
"Didn't want to ask the shrinks, huh?" Wendy said, taking another turn. This corridor was less well lit and appeared to be unused. The doors along both sides all showed the red panel of being locked. "We're in the mountains of North Carolina. Does that mean anything to you?"
"Nuuu . . ." Elgars said with a shrug then frowned. "S . . . saw a m . . . map. A . . . Ash . . ."
"Not near Asheville," Wendy said with a snort. "It's a long story."
"Tell."
Wendy shrugged. "When the Posleen dropped on . . . Fredericksburg," Wendy said with only a slight catch in her voice over the destruction of her hometown, "most of the Sub-Urbs weren't ready for people to move in. But there were nearly two million refugees from Northern Virginia. Some of them could go back but . . . well most of F'Burg was just gone. I mean, between the battleships and the fighting and the Bomb it had been smashed flat. And we were going to have to move out soon because the Posleen were just coming back. And most of the survivors were . . . well . . . not in the greatest shape. . . .
"Anyway, this was the only Urb that was almost finished on the East Coast. It was the first one started; the local congressional representative had managed to wrangle getting it placed in his district even though it's in a really stupid spot."
Elgars made another sound and Wendy grimaced.
"Well, first of all, all the other Urbs are placed near interstates, usually near existing cities. Asheville has two really huge ones and they're both full. But we're near a place called Franklin. It's just a little town in southern North Carolina, a dot on the map. The only reason we're here is because of the congressman; he'd been in Congress for just about forever and was the committee chairman for the procurement process. So this was where the first Sub-Urb went.
"Supplying us, what little supplies we get, is a real pain because the trucks have to compete with the supplies for the corps that's defending Rabun Gap. And the corps is practically on top of us; their main rear area supply point is Franklin, so at first we had all sorts of trouble. There's a Kipling poem that points out that soldiers aren't 'plaster saints.' Mix a corps of soldiers with an underground city full of women and things got . . . bad for a while. So now they stay out there and we stay in here and almost everybody's happy."
She shook her head after a moment. "We're just about the only Sub-Urb that has that problem, too. You see, we're just about the closest Urb to a defense line. I mean, there are a couple of others that are this close and then there was the Rochester Urb . . ." She paused and shuddered.