Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Whatever the chemical was that they sprayed on these mostly natural caverns to illuminate them was effective. It wasn’t exactly daylight, but it was pretty easy to see and to navigate through the area.

Mostly, that meant seeing where Cromwell’s people had been. At various hollows, where “rooms” had been cut out or enlarged from natural expansion, there were signs of skirmishes and even a couple of bodies. Villagers from their looks, which meant Sapenza’s crew in this case.

There was no fooling around at this point, either. People with any sort of weapon in their possession or near them were stone cold dead; those without weapons were mostly out in heavy stun, to be collected by a mop-up team that was even now being deployed from Olivet and going into each of the openings.

The first time, Robey stared at the open, lifeless eyes and death expressions and tried to get a grip on himself. Stun, even heavy stun, he’d seen and done, but people deliberately killed was new to him. The fact that they appeared to have been almost surgically selected and almost certainly dispatched with incredible speed was a tribute to Cromwell’s skill, and a scary look inside the old soldier’s soul. There were all sorts of legends as to who and what Cromwell had been before joining The Mountain, but only here was Robey faced with the probability that some of them were true.

Robey snapped out of it and turned and started running down the cave as the noises of various light weapons could be heard echoing in the distance. No more looking in at each room or musing about life and death; what was happening was happening ahead, and if he didn’t get there soon he might wind up with the mop-up team.

“Archangel, how far ahead is the security team?” he called, then suddenly realized that the same coating and mineral structure that had protected Sapenza’s empire from being detected also had him cut off from anybody else. All of a sudden he was aware of how alone he really was.

This was brought home to him when he suddenly came out into a larger cave only to see a half dozen smaller tubular caves leading away in different directions. There were no signs, no “You Are Here” plaques, nothing. Like the cave where these people had hidden their arsenal, he and possibly the rest were in a Minoan maze without benefit of string to find their way out.

He was about to pick one at random and trust to Providence when the distinctive electronic sound of rifle fire reached him from the second cave entrance to his right. He quickly moved towards it and saw that somebody had chalked an “X” just at its entrance. He hadn’t noticed it because it was rather light and from any distance just mixed with the mineral’s glimmerings but now he realized how the mop-up team was supposed to follow. Entering, he ran down the cave at full speed.

Some of the cave segments were much larger or wider than others, but the longest was no more than a few hundred meters before it opened into one or another chamber. In this one, the chamber it opened into was impressive indeed; it was, in fact, almost an entire small town in and of itself, complete with a couple of echoing barking dogs.

These looked to be offices or apartments of some kind, and they looked prefabricated, not something that anyone would expect or even be able to make on this rural backwater of a world.

Cubes stacked atop cubes… How did they get them in here? he wondered. Was there another lift like the one used at the arsenal? Or did these construct themselves from programmed modules once you got them down through a cave opening?

He didn’t have much time to ruminate or explore. An armored head suddenly shot out from a second-story window of the complex and Cromwell’s unmistakable voice, icy to the point of freezing anything it touched, yelled, “Robey, what the devil do you think you’re doing here? Go! Get out of here! Get back to the ship! It’s important, unless you want to stay on this miserable rock with the surviving ones who did this to us!”

Robey suddenly had the awful feeling that he’d slept through the meeting or something. “But where do I go?” he called back. “How do I find the way out?”

“Use the chalk marks! Keep to the right and look for up arrows! The rest will be obvious! Now move! ”

He wasn’t quite sure what all the fuss was about, since so long as they didn’t have the location and control of those defensive naval guns everybody was stuck here anyway, but you didn’t argue with Cromwell. Next to the Doctor, he was the most formidable power anybody who grew up in the mission ever knew or could conceive of.

“Keep to the right…” Sounded simple enough. An “X” on the far right cave confirmed things. Now he was on the trail of Cromwell’s heavily armed squad, although he wasn’t sure what the security man was doing hanging back. Looking for anything useful in that previously hidden headquarters, most likely.

Still, he was so concerned with getting out at this point that he almost ran straight into a firefight.

They were shooting back and forth from cave openings across a small chamber just ahead. He could see two of the security team firing what they called rifles but which were, if at full power, more like portable laser canons of the sort Cromwell had used to initially blast the opening pack in the pasture. Return fire seemed to be smaller hand weapons, pulse blasters and laser pistols. They were no match for the security team’s firepower, but so long as they could shoot across the open space there was no way anybody else was going to cross.

One of the black-clad squad glanced back and noticed him and seemed about as thrilled by his presence as Cromwell had been. Still, he was one more gun if need be.

He crouched low and tried to see what he could. “Where are they?”

“Just stick your head out there and you’ll find out!” the nearest team member responded. He was surprised to hear a woman’s voice, particularly one with that kind of toughness. The Doctor really was kind of sexist, but somehow he’d never let that get in the way of pragmatism, and Cromwell only wanted to see you in action.

“They’re blocking that one tunnel on both sides,” the woman continued. “We don’t know why. If they don’t have an escape hatch in between they’re virtually committing suicide and they have to know that.”

Robey could see the problem. You couldn’t use gas down here for obvious reasons, particularly not with hostages and idiots like him wandering about, and you couldn’t just turn limestone into marble using the laser canons because you didn’t want to block access.

“Cover your ears and open your mouth!” the woman told him sharply. “It might not save your ears, but you deserve that much for being where you shouldn’t!”

He barely had time to do as instructed when the two of them used the targeting computer modules on their rifles to calibrate and time two shots, including ricochets. This was a new one on him, but he noted that before they started their computations both members of the squad had put on ear mufflers.

The light was almost blinding as it was, the initial sounds the twangs of laser weapons, but when the shots, one after the other, struck the cave where resistance was mounted there was a noise louder and more prolonged and more intense than John Robey had ever heard. His ears literally hurt as if somebody had stuck sharp objects into them, and for a moment he seemed to lose consciousness and then come back with a horrible and persistent ringing all he could hear.

The squad members, having no such problems thanks to their mufflers, now moved, removing the head gear as they did so, and advanced, military style, across the cavern to the targeted cave opening.