Chapter 29
They jogged down the tunnel, Grant taking the point, holding the harp in both hands. They encountered no more of the transadapts before the passageway ended in a hatch.
“If the chart was right,” Kane said as it hissed open, “this is Dome W. On the other side is X and, if we’re lucky, the gateway.”
As they piled through the portal, Brigid said tightly, “We’d better be more than lucky. We’d better be blessed.”
“Why?” asked Grant as they loped along the hallway.
Quickly, curtly Brigid related what Sindri had revealed to her about how he planned to use the GRASER cannon. Both Grant and Kane were doubtful, if not exactly disbelieving.
“Destroy one planet and wreck another?” Grant’s voice held a highly skeptical note. “Damn big order for such a tiny pissant of a man.”
“Do you believe him?” Kane asked Brigid.
“I believe he’ll try it.”
Turning a bend in the tunnel, Kane said musingly, “If it works, it may not be such a bad idea. Sindri would be doing our jobs for us, giving the boot to the barons and the Directorate.”
She pierced him with a hard stare. “And most of humankind, too. Besides, the results he’s hoping for are speculative at best. Even if it all goes according to plan, do you think Sindri is a better candidate to rule the planet than the barons or the Directorate?”
“Hell, no,” Grant barked. “Then we’d just have to get rid of him.”
Kane said no more, but he couldn’t deny he found the image of flaming meteors crashing into the villes and toppling the Administrative Monoliths very appealing. Still, Sindri was not too far removed, behav-iorally and emotionally, from Baron Sharpe. Then again, with his high-handed assumptions that all his actions were sanctified in the name of the greater good, he wasn’t all that different from Lakesh, either.
The route through Dome W was deserted. Kane suspected Sindri may have gone to the circulation station to correct the air mixture, and he cautioned his companions that if they met more trolls, they might not be oxygen drunk.
When they reached the hatch that led to their destination, Kane’s sixth sense, his pointman’s instinct, suddenly bristled in full, suspicious alert.
“Let me go first,” he said, reaching out to take the harp from Grant.
Distrustfully Grant commented, “You don’t know how to play this thing.”
“Neither do you. You just got lucky.”
Reluctantly Grant passed over the instrument. Kane stepped before the sensor, and the iris segments of the hatch slid open. He stepped into Dome X, sweeping the bottleneck of the harp in short left-to-right arcs.
Almost immediately he felt his nape hairs prickle. Although the tunnel stretching before them looked exactly like all the others they had passed through, he felt a surge of unreasoning fear. Dark stains marred the smooth surface of the floor.
Much blood had been spilled here; many people had died brutally. The dome reeked with the same miasma of terror and despair as Redoubt Papa.
Kane hurried forward and, unconsciously lowering his voice, said over his shoulder, “We’ll have to check every room here.”
The first hatch they came to opened into a partitioned office suite filled with desks and computer terminals. Tacked on to a bulletin board near the door were dozens of memos, each one bearing the legend By Order Of The Committee Of One Hundred.
Though they knew that it was more than likely a waste of time, they fanned out across the suite, searching for another exit. They found none and returned to the tunnel.
The second hatch opened up into a big room that had apparently served as a council chamber. A raised dais supported a lectern, looking out over ten rows of chairs. They didn’t bother to count them, assuming they probably numbered exactly one hundred.
A swift search of the chamber turned up no adjacent room, so they went back into the tunnel. The third hatch they found didn’t respond to the blocking of the photoelectric sensor. All three of them made numerous attempts, but the portal stayed shut.
Kane declared, “This has got to be it.”
“How are we going to get in there?” Grant demanded.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119