Generation Warriors (30 page)

Not her problem. Not now. Now all she had to do was find a way out, to the surface, call Arly and get a shuttle to pick them up. She longer cared about the legal aspects of action.

The next access port led them down, deeper into the city's underground warren of service tunnels. This one was lighted and the single rail down the middle of the floor indicated regular maintenance monorail service. Plastic housings covered the bundled cables along one wall, the pipes running along the other. Sassinak noted that the symbols seemed to be the same as those used in Fleet vessels, the colored stripes and logos she knew so well, but she didn't try to tap a water pipe to make sure. Not yet. They could walk along the catwalk beside the monorail without stooping. With the light, they could move far more quickly.

That didn't help if they didn't know where they were going, Sassinak thought grimly. The port they'd come out of had a number on the reverse: useless information without the map reference.

"We're still going the same way," Aygar said.

She stared at him, surprised again. He was taking all this much better than she would have predicted.

"It's easy to lose one's way without references," she began, but he was holding up a little button. "What's that?"

"It's a mapper," Aygar said. "One of the students I met at the Library said I should have one or I'd get lost."

"A locator transmitter?" Her heart sank. If he was carrying that, their unknown enemies could simply wait, watching the trace on a computer, until they came up again.

"No. He said there were two kinds, the kind that told people where you were so they could find you and help you, and the kind that told you where you were for yourself. Tourists carry the first kind, he said, and rich people who expect their servants to come pick them up, but students like the second. So that's what I bought."

She had not realized he'd been on his own long enough to do anything like that. Thinking back... there were hours and hours in which he'd been left at the Library entrance. She'd taken him there, or the FSP prosecutors had, between depositions or conferences. She hadn't even known he'd met anyone else.

"How does it work?"

"Like this." He flicked it with a thumbnail and a city map, distorted by the casing of the cables, appeared on the wall of the tunnel. A pulsing red dot must be their position. The map seemed to zoom closer, and letters and numbers replaced part of the criss-cross of lines. "E-84, RR-72." Aygar flicked the thing again and a network of yellow lines appeared. There they were, in what was labeled
Maintenance access tunnel
66-43-V. "Where do we want to go?"

"I'm... not sure." Until she knew who their enemies were, she didn't know where it might be safe to surface and call Arly. Or if even that would be a good idea. "Where's the nearest surface access?"

The red dot distorted into a line that crept along the yellow of their tunnel, then turned orange.

"That means go up," Aygar said. "If we have to go down to get somewhere, our line will turn purple." It made sense, in a way.

"Let's go, then."

She let him lead the way. He seemed to know how the mapper worked. She certainly did not. She wanted to ask about scale, but they'd been in one place too long already. Her neck itched with the certainty that pursuit was close behind.

"If you have any more little goodies, like the light, or the mapper, why not tell me now?" It came out a bit more waspish than she intended.

"I'm sorry," he said. He actually sounded abashed. "I didn't know... There hasn't been time."

"Never mind. I'm just very glad you opted for this kind of mapper and not the other."

"I didn't think I'd need it, really," he said. "I don't get lost easily. But Gerstan was being so friendly." He shrugged.

Sassinak felt another bubble of worry swell up beside the cluster that already filled her head. A friendly student who just happened to take an interest in the well-being of a foreigner?

"Tell me more about Gerstan," she said as calmly as she could.

Gerstan, it seemed, was "a lot like Tim." Sassinak managed not to say what she thought and hoped Aygar had made a mistake. Gerstan had been friendly, open, helpful. He had sympathized with Aygar's position. Because, of course, Aygar had explained all about Ireta. Sassinak swallowed hard and let Aygar go on talking as they walked. Gerstan had helped him use the Library computers to access the databases, and he had even said that it was possible to bypass the restriction codes.

"Really?" said Sassinak, hoping her ears weren't standing right straight out. "That's pretty hard, I'd always heard."

Aygar's explanation did not reassure her. Gerstan, it seemed, had friends. He had never explained just who they were: just friends whose specialty was intercepting data transmissions and diverting them.

"What kind of transmissions?"

"He didn't say, exactly." Aygar sounded slightly grumpy about that, as if in retrospect Gerstan didn't seem quite as helpful. "He just said that if I ever needed to get into the databases, or... or slip a loop, whatever that is, he could help. Said it was easy, if you had the knack. All the way up to the Parchandri, he said."

An icy spike went straight down Sassinak's back at that. "Are you sure?" she said, before she could stop it.

"Sure of what?" Aygar was lolloping ahead, apparently quite relaxed.

"That he said 'all the way up to Parchandri'?"

"The
Parchandri
. Yes, that's what he said. Why?"

He glanced back over his shoulder and Sassinak hoped her face revealed nothing but calm interest. Parchandri. Inspector General Parchandri? Who should not be here anyway, but at Fleet Headquarters. As if they were printed in the fiery letters in the air before her, she could see that initiation code, supposedly coming from the Inspector General's office...

"I'm just trying to figure things out," she said to Aygar who had glanced back again.

Should she explain any of this to Aygar? His own problems were complicated enough, and besides he had no real right to Fleet's darker secrets. But if something happened... She shook her head fiercely. What was going to happen was that she would be laughing at the Parchandri's funeral. If, in fact, the Parchandri was guilty of Abe's murder.

At intervals they passed access ports on either side, above, below. Each had a number stenciled on it. Each looked much the same as the others. Had it not been for Aygar's mapper, Sassinak would have had no idea which way to go.

She had been hearing the faint whine for some moments before it registered, and then she jumped forward and tapped Aygar's shoulder. "Listen."

He shrugged. "This whole planet makes noise," he said. "No one can hear anything in a city. Nothing that means anything, that is."

"How far to where we go up?" asked Sassinak. The whine was marginally louder.

"Half a kilometer, perhaps, if I'm reading this right."

"Too far." She looked around and saw an access hatch less than twenty meters ahead, on their side of the monorail, below the cable housing. "We'll take that one."

"But why?"

The whine had sharpened and a soft brush of air touched his face. He whirled at once and raced for the hatch. Sassinak caught up with him, helped wrestle it open. At once, an alarm rang out, and a flashing orange light. Sassinak bit back a curse. If she ever got off this planet, she would never, under any circumstances, go downside again! Aygar was dropping his legs through the hatch, but Sassinak spotted another, only five meters farther on.

"I'll open that one, too. Then they won't know which."

She could not hear the whine of the approaching monorail car over the clamoring alarm, but the air pressure shifts were clear enough. She ran as she had not had to run for years, scrabbled at the hatch cover, threw it back, and winced as another alarm siren and light came on. Then back to the first, and in. Aygar had wisely retreated down the ladder, giving her room. A quick yank and the hatch closed over them. They were in darkness again. She could still hear the siren whooping. From this one? From the other? Both?

All the way down that ladder, much longer than any they'd taken before, she scolded herself. She didn't even know the monorail car was manned. It might have no windows, no sensors. They might have been able to stand quietly, watch it go by, and then walk out following Aygar's mapper. Then again maybe not. Second-guessing didn't help deal with consequences. She took a long, calming breath, and reminded herself not to tighten up. Although one thing after another had gone wrong, they
were
alive, unwounded, and uncaught That had to be worth something. Her foot touched Aygar's head. He had reached the bottom of the ladder.

"I can't find a hatch," he said. His voice rang softly in the echoing dark chamber. "I'll try light."

Sassinak closed her eyes, and opened them when she saw pink against her lids. They were at the bottom of a slightly curving, near-vertical shaft, and nothing marked the sides at the bottom. Not so much as a roughly welded seam. Aygar's breath was loud and ragged.

"We... have to find a way out. There has to be a way out!"

"We will."

She felt almost comfortable in shafts and tunnels, but Aygar had had a wilderness to run in until he boarded the
Zaid-Dayan.
He'd done remarkably well for someone with no ship training, but this dead end in a narrow shaft was too much. She could smell his sudden nervous sweat; his hand on her leg trembled.

"It's all right," she said, the voice she might have used on a nervous youngster on his first cruise. "We passed it, that's all. Follow me up but
quietly
."

It was not that far up, a circular hatch in the shaft across from the ladder, easily reached. Sassinak just had her hand firmly on the locking ring, ready to turn it, when it was yanked away from her, and she found herself pinned in a beam of brilliant light.

"Well." The voice was gruff, and only slightly surprised. "And what have we here? Not the Pollys, this time."

Squinting against the brilliance, Sassinak could just see a dark form outlined by more light beyond, and the gleam of light down a narrow tube; a weapon, no doubt.

"How many?" demanded the voice.

Sassinak wondered if Aygar could hide below, but realized he couldn't, not in the grip of claustrophobia.

"Two," she said crisply.

"Y'all come on outa there, then," said the voice.

The light withdrew just enough to give them room. Sassinak slid through feet-first, and found herself coming out of a waist-high hatch in a horizontal tunnel. Aygar followed her, his tanned face pale around mouth and eyes, and dripping with sweat. Carefully, as if she were doing this on her own ship, Sassinak closed the hatch and pushed the locking mechanism.

Facing them were five rough-looking figures in much-patched jumpsuits. Two held obvious weapons that looked like infantry assault rifles: one had a long knife spliced to a section of metal conduit and one held the light that still blinded them. The last lounged against the tunnel wall, eyeing them with something between greed and disgust.

"Y'all rang the doorbell, up there?" that one asked. The same husky voice, from a stocky frame that might be man or woman—impossible to tell, with layers of ragged clothes concealing its real shape.

"Didn't mean to," said Sassinak. "Got a little lost."

"More'n a little. Douse the light, Jemi."

The spotlight blinked off, and Sassinak closed her eyes a moment to let them adjust. When she opened them again, the woman who had held the spotlight was stuffing it in a backpack. The two rifles had not moved. Neither had Sassinak. Aygar made an indeterminate sound behind her, not quite a growl. She suspected that he liked the look of the homemade spear. The person who had spoken pushed off the wall and stood watching them.

"Can you give me one good reason why we shouldn't slit and strip you right now?"

Sassinak grinned; that had been bravado, not decision.

"It'd make a big mess next to the shaft we came out of," she said. "If someone does follow down here..."

"They will," growled one of the rifle-bearers. The muzzle shifted a hair to one side. "Should be goin', Cor..."

"Wait. You're not the usual trash we get down here, and there's plenty of trouble up top. Who are you?"

"Who are the Pollys?" Sassinak countered.

"You got the Insystem Federation Security Police after you, and you don't know who they are?"

A twin of the jolt she'd felt hearing Parchandri's name went down her spine. Insystem Security's active arm was supposed to confine itself to ensuring the safety of governmental functions. She'd assumed their pursuers were planet pirate hired guns, or (at worst) a section of city police.

"I didn't know that's who we had after us. Orange uniforms?"

"Riot squads. Special action teams. Sheee! All right. You tell us who you are or you're dead right here, mess and all."

The rifles were steady again, and Sassinak thought the one with the spear probably knew how to use it.

"Commander Sassinak," she said. "Fleet, captain of the heavy cruiser
Zaid-Dayan,
docked in orbit..."

"And I'm Luisa Paraden's hairdresser! You'll do better than that or..."

"She really is," Aygar broke in. The other's eyes narrowed as she heard his unfamiliar accent. "She brought me..."

Sassinak had a hand on the hatch rim; a distant vibration thrummed in her fingers.

"Silence," she said, not loudly but with command.

All movement ceased. The silence seemed to quiver.

"They're coming. I can feel a vibration." The one who'd spoken growled out a low curse, then said, "Come on, then! Hurry! We'll straighten you later."

They followed along the tunnel, a bare chill tube of gray-green metal floored with something resilient. Under that, Sassinak thought, must be whatever the tunnel was actually for. She was aware of the man behind her with a rifle, of Aygar's growing confusion and panic, of the ache in her own legs.

She quickly lost track of their backtrail. They moved too fast, through too many shafts and tunnels, with no time to stop and fix references. She wondered if Aygar was doing any better. His hunting experience might help. Her ears popped once, then again, by which she judged they were now deep beneath the planet's surface. Not where she wanted to be, at all. But alive. She reminded herself of that; they might easily have been dead.