In the crowded room where Rigo sat, Brother Mainoa was being wearily firm, drawing on the last of his strength to insist upon action. “The tunnel has to be closed,” he said. “At once. It’s available as a way for the Hippae to invade Commons. We heard them behind us when we came in, no great numbers because the tunnel is too small for them to come through except one at a time, but still a few of them are enough to do great damage.”
“Some of them came in behind you,” said Alverd Bee, the mayor. “The minute you arrived and told us there was a way through, I sent two men to keep watch, and they report a handful of the beasts at the tunnel entrance.”
“A dozen now could be a hundred by nightfall,” Rigo said. “Brother Mainoa is right. That tunnel has to be destroyed.”
“I wish I had some idea how to go about that,” the mayor said, turning to his father-in-law. “Roald? Do you have any ideas?”
Roald fidgeted. “Alive, what the hell can you try? Blow it up with something. Flood it somehow. Get some kind of gate across it.” He rubbed his head. “Hime Pollut is good at this kind of thing. Ask him.”
Alverd went to find Hime Pollut. In a few moments he returned “Hime thinks we ought to blow it up. He just doesn’t know what we’ve got that’ll do the job.”
Rigo said, “Don’t you have construction explosives, things you use to loosen up the rock when you have to expand the winter quarters? Or in mines? You have mines. Use that!”
“We’ve thought of that, Ambassador, but there are Hippae massed at this end of the tunnel. There’s no way we can get in there close to blow it up without getting eaten first.” Alverd chewed his lips, thinking.
“The other end—“
“The same, Ambassador. Hippae. at both ends. As soon as I heard about the ones at this end, I sent an aircar to see what was happening at the other end. The driver counted about a hundred of the beasts out in the grasses, with about a score or so guarding the tunnel entrance. Assuming they stay that way, still we’ve no way to get to the tunnel.”
grass – 348
“Drop something from above?”
“What? We have a few explosives but no bombs. No—what do you call them—detonators. There are people here who couldbuildbombs, if we had the materials, or make the materials, possibly, if we had the time. You and your friend here say there may not be time. If we could get into the swamp forest far enough, if we could locate the tunnel from above, and if we had days or weeks to work, we could drill into it and flood it. We don’t have days or weeks. We have hours. Maybe. They’ve laid their plans. Your wife found their declaration of war trampled into that cavern. We’ve seen it. Brother Mainoa here has told us what it means. That word says they plan to come in here and slaughter us all, just as the Arbai were slaughtered. Fun and games for the Hippae, they say.”
“Where does the tunnel come to the surface?” Rigo asked.
Brother Mainoa said, “On a little island among the trees at the bottom of this slope. The forest is narrowest here, on the east side of the port. Two or three Terran miles through, perhaps. Elsewhere it’s wider, but on this side the land slopes up on either side of the swamp and narrows it to a neck. There’s where the damned migerers dug. That’s where they must have been digging for years. The tunnel has to go deep enough to have a good rock layer above or it’d be full of water. Who knows how long it’s taken them!”
“Can you reach the entrance to the tunnel? Can you physically get to it?” Rigo asked Alverd Bee.
“We could if the Hippae weren’t there, yes. But not with them there. Not with them rampaging around, coming after us,” Alverd ran his fingers through his hair, pulled his lips back to reveal his teeth, furrowed his brow. “We don’t have any armor, any kind of combat vehicle. The little runners we use around town, they’re like pea pods. We could use aircars to drive them back inside the tunnel, just inside, but then they’d come out again when any one of us tried to lay explosives.”