Timothy Zahn - Blackcollar - The Backlash Mission

"What about the stage-one weapons Bernhard mentioned?"

Hawking pointed. "Right at the end there, where the tunnel starts going vertical. At least one reasonably heavy laser and what look like a pair of flechette repeaters. Probably got gas and acid jets hidden behind the electrical mesh, too—I think I see where the metal has been acid-protected."

Caine licked his lips. "How likely is it the stuff's running on automatic?"

"It's not," Bernhard said. "Everything but the electric mesh was manual control, and the fuel cells for the mesh probably drained themselves years ago."

Lathe cocked an eyebrow at Hawking. "True?"

"Probably." The other shrugged. "Hard to tell until we try going in, though. The mesh, at least, doesn't seem to be responding to pressure anymore."

"In other words, we've learned all we can from out here," Lathe said. "Let's suit up, then—full flexarmor, including gas filters." His eyes shifted to Bernhard. "And we'll let our guide go first."

Kanai gave the comsquare a long, hard look. "I thought we were going to be allowed to leave once we got here," he said. "Just another lie?"

"The grille's been opened," Lathe told him. "Bernhard's the only one we know of who knew how to find it. You can draw your own conclusions."

Bernhard snorted. "Oh, I see—you think I came up here five years ago and added new traps to the tunnel in case someone from Plinry forced me to let him in someday. Come on, Lathe—you're being ridiculous."

"You're right, of course," Lathe said. "Let's just say I've grown accustomed to your company." He hesitated. "Though on second thought, there's no real reason you have to come along, Kanai. If you want, you can leave now."

Kanai seemed to consider that. Then, with a glance at Bernhard, he shook his head. "Thank you, Comsquare. But as long as I'm here anyway, I might as well see it through to the end."

"All right." Lathe took a deep breath, glanced around the group. "Mordecai, you'll stay up here on guard duty. The rest of you... let's go."

Bernhard went first, unrolling the rope ladder before him as carefully as if setting out a fur-skinned runner for a visiting eminent. But nothing fired at him, blew up under him, or sprayed lethal fluids toward him, and by the time he tilted the rest of the bundle over the edge of the vertical shaft Caine was starting to breathe again.

Or he was until the uncoiling ladder hit the scud mine.

"You did say all these were set on manual, didn't you?" Skyler commented after the slender needles had buried themselves in the shaft walls and ceiling and the echoes of the blast had faded into silence.

"I also told you some of the mines were on automatic," Bernhard growled back.

"Looks like we hit one," Lathe said, glacially calm. "We'll have to watch ourselves on the way down.

Avoid contact with the shaft walls, and don't touch anything that's protruding. Got that, everyone?

Let's get moving, Bernhard."

The other took a deep breath and started down the ladder. Lathe went next, followed at twentysecond intervals by Hawking, Caine, Pittman, Braune, Colvin, and Alamzad, with Skyler bringing up the rear.

A hundred meters down, Bernhard had said, but to Caine the trip seemed much longer. Suspended in almost total darkness, the faint glow from his armband light barely showing him the section of ladder before him, he found a strange sense of disorientation gripping him, as if his directional sense had disappeared. Like the blind man combat test, he thought; only this was much worse. The ladder's swaying seemed to be increasing in amplitude....

"Everybody hold it a minute," Lathe's soft voice floated up from beneath him. "Stop where you are, lock your arms around the ladder, and take some deep breaths. Something funny is happening here—a low-level sonic, feels like, playing games with our inner-ear balance. Whatever, take a second to reorient yourselves."

"Use the other lights as reference," Hawking suggested. "Sorry, Lathe—I should have caught on to this earlier."

"Forget it," the comsquare told him. "Everyone okay? Let's keep going, but take it easy."

The effect seemed to get worse as they approached the bottom of the shaft, but Caine found that simply knowing it was an attack and not something internal made it easier to handle. Focusing on the lights above, listening to his other kinesthetic senses, he was actually startled when Lathe's goggled face suddenly appeared beside him and his feet hit solid ground.

"Oops," he said, prying his fingers from the ladder. "Sorry—concentrating on something else."

"No problem. Get into the tunnel before you get stepped on."

Caine nodded and moved away from the ladder. Ahead, the tunnel opening was visible in the sleevelight glow, a dim figure—Bernhard?—already there. On the far side of the shaft another figure was crouched over a collection of wires and components. "What's that?" he asked, stepping over.

"Our confuser," Hawking's voice answered. "Lathe was right—it's a sonic broadcast unit of some sort, aimed upward along the shaft."

Caine glanced upward. "Seems a little silly, with all the armament already up there."

"It wasn't put here by the designers," Hawking replied. "It looks very much like it was hand-made.

By an amateur."

Behind his gas filter, Caine licked his lips. "Ah-ha."

"Don't let it worry you," Lathe advised. "If this is the worst we'll have to face, we should be fine."

Somehow, that wasn't much comfort. Caine stepped into the tunnel proper, fingers taking automatic inventory of his weaponry.

—

The rest made it down without incident, and a few minutes later they were walking along the tunnel, again spread out in a loose line in case of trouble. There was little conversation; everyone seemed more interested in careful listening than in idle chatter. But aside from their own footsteps there was apparently nothing to hear.

Nothing to hear, and no impediments to their progress... and they had been walking for nearly half an hour before anyone noticed that there was something odd about that. "Bernhard," Alamzad called softly from near the back of the line. "Didn't you say this was an intake tunnel for the ventilation system?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Well... shouldn't we be running into filters of some sort along here somewhere? There ought to be at least a sensor mesh or bio-kill screen this far down the tunnel."

There was a long silence from the front of the line. "How about it, Bernhard?" Lathe prompted.

"They didn't leave all the filtration work to the innermost tunnel section, did they?"

"I doubt it," Bernhard said at last. "There should have been at least the sensors he mentioned, and probably one or more micron filtration screens, too. I've been watching along the walls, and I think I've seen a couple of places where something like that would have been mounted."

"And you didn't say anything?" Colvin growled.

"Maybe he didn't find it significant that someone went to all the trouble of taking the stuff out,"

Pittman said icily.

"What significance do you want it to have?" Bernhard shot back. "I told you once I've never been down here. Everything could have been taken out of this end before the war, for all I know."

Colvin snorted his opinion of that.

"All right, ease up," Lathe put in mildly. "Bernhard never promised to take us by the hand and point out the sights along the way. It's up to us to keep our own eyes open."

The group went on, again in silence. Now that he was watching for them, Caine noticed more of the filter mountings Bernhard had mentioned: rings of heat-bruised metal running the circumference of the tunnel. "Looks like they were taken out with a torch," he muttered to no one in particular.