“It hasn’t been too many years,” she said.
“The rubble looks fused the whole way down. There shouldn’t be any slides. I’m going to try to pry my way in there.”
“It’s packed too tightly,” she said, looking over the expanse of mangled construction materials. “You won’t find a way.”
“I’ll make a way,” he said, grinning. “Proteus!”
The robot floated quickly to his side, main manipulator barrel unstopped, sensors flashing excitedly.
“Gun left.”
Proteus slid a barrel from his smooth, seamless belly, turned left.
“Ground level,” Davis ordered.
The angle of the barrel dropped until it was pointing at the melted beams and concrete hillocks.
“Fire one!”
Proteus shot a small, explosive rocket, large enough to blast a hole through any animal as large as a horse. It struck the ruins five yards away as Davis and Leah stopped behind a slab of concrete. There was an almost instantaneous explosion that shook the entire crust of ruin, and a section of the floor they stood on gave way and crashed down into the open spaces beneath. For a long moment, the sound of things rebounding from the walls and outcroppings of the regions below echoed up to them, a mournful noise. When the quiet returned, Davis ventured forth and carefully inspected the entrance Proteus had made, found that the crust immediately around the hole was still solid and trustworthy.
“I’ll try not to be long,” he said.
“I’m going with you,” she protested, pouting her face.
“I’ve got Proteus. That’s one of the burdens as well as blessings of having a robot guardian. He goes with you whether you want him to or not.”
“I’m going with you,” she repeated.
He saw the determination in her face, the tightening of the muscles along her jawline, and he knew there was no sense arguing. “The way’s going to be a little tough, and there isn’t room to spread your wings and fly if you should fall. But if you’re still all that set on going—”
“I am.”
The way was not as rugged as he had thought. His perspective, peering through the jumbled rubble earlier, had made the slanted corridor below look longer than it was. In ten minutes, they were in what had been the bottom floor of the shelter, a three-level affair. Here, the Demosians in hiding from the Alliance gases had not been killed by the force of the explosion itself, but by the firestorm which it had engendered. The bodies of about two hundred winged men and women and children laid about the room, mostly against the walls where they had been caught and suffocated so swiftly that they had not had a chance to move. The suction of the explosion and the intense heat must have snatched the air from their lungs in one instant and replaced it with flames the next. At least, he thought, it had been a swift end. There was nothing now but bones, a few skeletal masts of cartilage that had once been the bearers of membranous wings. And four hundred eye sockets, oval eye sockets, staring accusingly . . .
Proteus soared the length of the chamber, certain that there must be an adversary in such an uncommon place. When he reached the far corners of the room, forty yards away, the rat overhead screeched its battle cry, spraying spittle down onto Davis’s head . . .
He looked up, saw red eyes as large as quarters.
The rat leaped, striking Leah’s shoulder and sinking tiny, razorlike claws through her toga.
To the modern Alliance man, the ability to commit violence, against either another man or an animal, was something distasteful, barbaric, something that only an Alliance soldier had. And since most Alliance soldiers were power soldiers, robotic devices, machines, and cybernetic systems, there were relatively few men capable of violence in the entire system of settled worlds. The Proteus robots had, after all, all but negated the necessity to know how to defend yourself.
This atrophy of the violent ability very nearly meant the winged girl’s death, for Davis found himself staring with fascination at the rat which scrabbled at her, tore her toga as it tried to sink claws into her flesh and gain a purchase from which it could bring its wicked, yellowish teeth into play as well. It was as if he were in a dream, moving through syrup or suddenly turned to stone just when it was essential that he act most swiftly. Then, fleeing across the back of his eyes like a specter across a moor was a vision of Leah with her face chewed up, an eye torn loose by the vicious fingers of the ratlike thing. In a moment, the anti-violence tendencies which had been nurtured through his entire life evaporated and were replaced by a manic and uncontrollable rage.