“It appears we’re alone,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”
Gripping the handle, he heaved up on it. With a click, the door of dense, semitranslucent material swung outward on counterbalanced hinges. Manufactured in the last decade of the twentieth century, arma-glass was a special compound combining the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.
Kane cautiously shouldered the door aside, fairly certain in advance of what he would see. All of the Totality Concept-connected installations followed standardized specsthe jump chambers led to small anterooms, which in turn led to the control rooms.
When the door swung wide, he wasn’t surprised by what he saw, but he was more than a little dismayed by its condition. The anteroom was a shambles of bro-ken plaster and heaps of masonry dust that had fallen from the ruptured ceiling. The surface of a long table bore a thick film of gray white powder. Feeble light spilled from the control center, where a third of the overhead light strips offered no illumination whatsoever.
Brigid and Lakesh moved to either side of him. She murmured, “This place was hit very hard.”
“Washington was ground zero,” Lakesh reminded her, his reedy voice strangely hushed. “Frankly I’m amazed the gateway still functions.”
They stepped carefully and quietly toward the control room, Kane taking the point as always, toeing aside ceiling tiles and slabs of dry wall. He studied the floor as he walked, noting signs of recent disturbance in the patina of dirt and dust.
“Somebody has been here,” he commented. “Not too long ago, either.”
The control room showed extensive damage, but it appeared to be primarily cosmetic. Long black cracks spread out in jagged patterns from the corners, and a considerable amount of the ceiling had fallen in. Looking up through the ruptures, he saw vanadium-alloy sheathing gleam dully.
Still the consoles flickered with power, lights on panels and boards blinking and shining. Kane saw places where dust had been brushed away from readout screens. Wadded up on the floor glinted several small aluminum bags.
“Self-heat rations,” he said. “Whoever visited here had a picnic.”
Lakesh grunted in disinterest, picking his way swiftly through the rubble to the main console. Puffing out his cheeks, he blew a cloud of dust away from the keyboard.
“Here is the memory matrix for the imaging scanner,” he announced. “Tools, please.”
Kane handed him the kit. Undoing the latches, Lakesh raised the lid and removed first a flashlight, then an array of small, shiny metal instruments. Kane watched him for a moment, then asked, “You need any help?”
Lakesh shook his head impatiently, fitting the blade of a tiny screwdriver into the slot of an equally tiny screw on the underpart of the panel. “A one-tech task. This has to be done just so, in a certain order, or the microprocessors could be damaged.”
“I think I’ll do a little exploring.” He glanced toward Brigid. “Care to join me in a little recce, Bap-tiste?”
She looked uncertainly at Lakesh. “You sure you don’t need any help?”
“I’m sure. Just stay aware of the time. Ideally the removal shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.”
She reached out, removed his trans-comm from his belt and placed it near the toolkit. ‘ ‘Keep your channel open.”
He grunted in acknowledgment. Kane walked deeper into the control room. Before following him, Brigid unleathered the stub-barreled Mauser from her slide-draw holster at the small of her back and cycled a .32-caliber round into the chamber from its extended magazine.
The double sec doors that separated the mat-trans section from the rest of the redoubt were open. Kane pointed out tracks cutting through the detritus on the floor. Several sets of parallel grooves stretched this way and that.
“Something on wheels,” he said. “Something fairly heavy, like a dolly. It was rolled out of here, then rolled back.”
Brigid turned on the Nighthawk microlight strapped around her left wrist. She shone the brilliant amber beam ahead of them, then along the ceiling.
“The sec cameras are dead,” she observed, playing the light on the small vid boxes clamped in the high corners of the room. “There won’t be a record of who was here before us.”