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eyeballs begin to swell and protrude as whatever had him increased the torque
of its grip. He heard and felt the snap that broke his neck, the rush of death
in his ears...
"...and I want you to sound off the minute you see anything suspicious,"
Angelo finished up. He had armed his weapon and was lowering his face shield
when Kuri made a puzzled sound over the tac net.
"Hey Sarge, Road's gone."
Dante leveled his weapon and swung toward where he had last seen the
private. Xavez and Marino exchanged wary looks, then followed the sergeant's
lead.
"Road!" Dante called softly. He dropped his mask and called him again
through the net. When there was no response, he gestured briefly to the team.
"All right, don't just stand there: find him!" To Kuri he said: "See if you
can raise the lieutenant."
Dante double-checked his weapon, thinking: If this is Road's idea of a
joke, they'll be calling him dead-end from now on!
Suddenly, without warning, the room was sectioned by laser fire.
"Stand clear!" Dana warned Bowie and Louie.
The two of them returned to their Hovertanks as Dana primed the laser
and aimed it at the armored gate.
Dana's mecha had managed to stop just short of the thing, hind end
almost fully around, two meters from collision. She had repositioned it in the
center of the corridor now, thirty meters from the gate. The barrier was some
sort of high-density metal, unlike the durceramic of the corridor walls, and
Louie had every confidence that the laser would do the trick.
"Any luck raising Sergeant Dante or Jordon?" Dana asked Louie once more
before targeting.
Louie shook his head and flashed her a thumbs-down.
"Even my optic sensor is out," he told her over the net.
That didn't surprise her, given the apparent thickness of the corridor
walls and the fact that they were at least one-and-a-half miles into the
fortress by now. Nor did the barriers come as any great shock; all along she
had sensed that their progress was being monitored.
"Do you think they caught the others?" Bowie said worriedly.
"Your guess is as good as mine," she responded casually, and turned her
attention to the laser. "All right then: here goes."
She depressed the laser's trigger; there was enough residual smoke in
the corridor to give her a glimpse of the light-ray itself, but by and large
her eyes were glued to the barrier. Louie had cautioned her that it would
prove to be a tedious operation-a slow burn they would probably need to help
along with an armor-piercing round but Louie was not infallible: instead of
that expected slow burn, the laser blew a massive hole in the gate on impact.
"Well that wasn't so bad," Dana said when the shrapnel-storm passed.
She reached for her rifle, dismounted the tank, and approached the gate
cautiously. Beyond it was a short stretch of corridor that opened into what
she guessed was the fortress's water-recycling and ventilation hold. What with
the numerous shafts and ducts here, she reasoned she couldn't be far off the
mark.
"What do you see, Lieutenant?" Louie asked from behind her.
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Dana lifted her face shield. "Not much of anything, but at least we're
out of that trap." As Bowie and Louie caught up with her, she cautioned them
to stay together.
There were enough dripping sounds, sibilant rushes, and roars to make
them feel as though they had entered a giant's basement. But there was
something else as well: almost a wind-chime's voice, soft and atonal, all but
lost to their ears but registering nonetheless as if through some sixth sense.
It seemed to fill the air, and yet have no single source, ambient as full-moon
light. At times it reminded Dana of bells or gongs, but no sooner would she
fix on that, than the sound would reconfigure and appear harplike or string
percussive.
"It's like music," Bowie said to a transfixed Dana.
The sound was working on her, infiltrating her, playing her, as though
she were the instrument: her music was memory's song, but dreamlike, preverbal
and impossible to hold...
"Are you all right, Lieutenant?" Louie was asking her, breaking the
spell.
She encouraged the tone to leave her, and suggested they try to locate
the source of the sound. Louie, his face shield raised, ever-present goggles
in place, had his ear pressed to one of the hold's air ducts. He motioned Dana
and Bowie over, and the three of them crouched around the duct, listening
intently for a moment.
"Maybe it's just faulty plumbing," Bowie suggested.
Louie ignored the jest. "This is the first sign of life we've
encountered. We have to figure out where it's coming from and how to get to
it."
Dana stood up, wondering just how they could accomplish that. Excited by
the discovery Louie was firing questions at her faster than she could field
them. She silenced him and returned her attention to the sound; when she
looked up again, Louie was falling through the wall.
Sean and company-Woodruff and Cranston-were in what appeared to be some
sort of "hot house," scarcely 200 yards from the water-recycling chamber
(though they had no way of knowing this), but in any case separated from the
lieutenant's contingent by three high-density ceramic bulkheads. "Hot house"
was Sean's conjecture, just as recycling chamber had been Dana's, but it had
taken the private several minutes to come up with even this description.
There was no soil, no hydroponic cultivation bins or artificial
sunlight, no water vapor or elevated oxygen or carbon dioxide levels; only row
after row of alien plants that seemed to be growing upside down. Central to
each was an almost incandescent globe, some ten meters in circumference,
tendriled and supported by, or perhaps suspended from, groupings of rigid,
bristly lianalike vines. (Cranston was reminded of the macrame plant hangers
popular in the last century, although he didn't mention this to the others.)
The globes themselves were positioned anywhere from five to fifteen meters
from the floor of the chamber, and below them, both still affixed to the
stalks themselves or spread about the floor, were individual fruits, the size
of apples but the red of strawberries.
The three men had left their idling Hovertanks to have a closer look.
Sean had the face shield of his helmet raised, and was casually flipping one
of the fruits in his hand, using elbow snaps to propel the thing in the air.
Talk had switched from the plants themselves to the fact that the team had yet
to encounter any resistance. No one had taken the dare to taste the fruit, but
Sean had thought to stow a few ripe specimens in his tank for later analysis.
"It's crazy," the one-hand juggler was saying now. "They were awful
anxious to keep us out of here in the first place, so why are they so quiet
now?"
"Maybe we frightened them?" Cranston suggested. "Up close, I mean," he
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