He took his time, nodding at the fluorescent scrawls left by regulars at stairwells and ramps as he descended into the bowels of the structure. Some of the crews had been on the site for twelve hours, and you had to accept their cryptic signs as gospel even if the ferroconcrete swayed underfoot. 'Going in, Control,' he said. 'Ramp three-ell. Somebody's been here with chemlamps. You copy?'
A moment's pause. 'Copying, Q. Mirovitch set the lamps, ah, eleven hours ago, so you should have light for another twenty-five hours.'
Quantrill came to a landing halfway down, saw an arm protruding from beneath the laminated girder which had slammed down through the walkway. He grasped the wrist, released it gently. Only one more level remained, but now he picked his way over shards of plastic rail and jagged hunks of concrete. The air below carried a pungent damp stink and the faint odor of ozone.
At the bottom stairwell door was a woman. No, only half a woman. He kept going, eased the heavy door open and jammed it with a hunk of debris. He studied the faint glow in the quiet dank hell of the lowest sub- basement for long seconds. It wasn't entirely quiet; as he stood in the scant protection of the doorframe, a desk- sized chunk of concrete slithered a few centimeters down a pile of debris in muted warning.
'Bottom level, Control, facing East. Either Mirovitch planted some chemlamps
The desexed voice was distant now. 'Mirovitch was rotated out after he reported what he found, Q.'
'Mustn't risk the prettyboys, huh?' But he knew better. The less a regular knew about weapons caches, the less he would speculate.
'Say again, Q,' the faint voice requested.
'Forget it.' He drew two chemlamps from his backpac, energized them, snapped a teat on one and squeezed carefully against its slender length. Bright gobbets of liquid light splashed near his feet, a trail he could follow later. With stealthy caution he skirted the collapsed segments, moving into deeper gloom.
He felt the faint tremor through his bootsoles, saw dust sift through another rent in the concrete above to his left. Several levels above him — endless tons of hair-trigger-balanced junk above him — something big had let go.
'Report, Q.' It must've been a beaut. Now Control was loud in his noggin.
'Proceeding East, Control. I'm still suckin' wind, if that's what — wups. Well, Mirovitch was right.' In the dim dazzle of his chemlamp was a welter of cartons. They had fallen from a stack against the East wall to reveal the top of a trapezoidal opening. It hadn't always been trapezoidal; it had been forced awry by the building's collapse. It hadn't been part of the original concrete pour, either.
The cartons weighed little, obviously just a mask for the portal beyond. Quantrill eased several of them away; stood shaking his head as he studied the skewed opening. He squirted the chemlamp fluid into the black maw before him, saw the spatter outline a stack of fiberite casings and, farther back, more military storage canisters. He wished then for an incandescent lamp but thrust that wish away. He'd seen what happened when an electric bulb cracked in an atmosphere full of dust. Usually nothing happened. But at times that dusty mixture supported combustion, and then what happened was of no further interest to the bulb user.
Some idiot had opened one of the sealed fiberite cartons, as if by leaving a live round in sight he could remind himself of its potency. Dumb… 'We've got a cache of rockets, Control — could be old Hellfire ATM's they put on attack choppers against armor. Prewar stuff; I see a 1987 stencil. Estimate two hundred rounds,' he said, easing his head into the opening to peer past the hole in the foundation wall.
Someone had run an earth-borer through that hole and hollowed out one hell of a room, without more than the flimsiest kind of wooden mine-shoring to keep the earth roof in place. The damned stuff had already fallen nearby, he saw with a grunt of fresh surprise. All of that overburden could let go at any second, right on top of two hundred rounds of stolen antitank missiles. And old munitions were touchy.
It was then that he heard the rustle of fabric.
He tossed the chemlamp onto a distant pile of soft earth; fumbled for another. After a moment he catfooted through the hole to kneel in the dirt under that half-assed mine shoring. 'Control,' he said, 'I've found a live one.'
Silence in his mastoid, but ragged breathing from beneath a splintered plank. Half buried, left wrist flopping, hell of a bruise spanning cheek and forehead — but a steady pulse despite shallow breathing.
Poor sonofabitch was just a kid. 'Control? Verify, Control.' Now he spoke louder, but into his cupped hand to minimize the echo. No answer.
From the sub-basement came another, louder slither of debris. Quantrill eased through the hole again to hear, ' — Again, Q. Say again, Q. Say again, Q.'
'Say what again?' The goddam building was completing its collapse in bits and pieces, he decided. And doing it directly above him.
'Two hundred rounds of ATM's and what else?'
Ah. Once through that hole he was shielded from Control. Quantrill had been warned that his critic might not function far underground. Of course they hadn't ever hinted that a Faraday cage might be a better shield against RF energy. 'I couldn't be sure but there could be some binary nerve gas rounds there,' he said, starting to grin as an idea blossomed. 'I can't risk blowing the antitank rounds if there's much of that stuff down here. Concur?'
Pause as Quantrill's grin widened. 'Concur, Q. How long do you need?' Another way of asking how long he'd be out of contact, without actually telling him he was beyond range of their signal.
'Five minutes, but this place is settling around my ears. Can you send a regular down with a doughnut?'
'Might be quicker if you called up for one, Q.'
'Shout? In this house of cards? You have a lovely sense of humor, Control.' But he began retracing his path up the stairwell.
Minnetta Adams met him at the fallen girder with a bundle the size of a cheap bedroll. 'Laker said you needed a doughnut. How'd he know?' She ignored his shrug as she spied the deader sandwiched on the stair. 'Any more like that?' Adams was trying to keep it impersonal but any victim beyond her help affected her like a personal reproof.
Quantrill said nothing, only shook his head and waved her back up the stairwell before descending with his thirty-kilo burden. A doughnut inflated to virtually fill a narrow hallway; a fat sausage three meters long, two in diameter, with a long central passage like its namesake. A stopgap measure, but it had saved more than one life. Doughnuts could be inflated in place to raise timbers, but their primary use lay in keeping that small central passage free of sand, water, silo grain — whatever might otherwise block you off during a rescue attempt.
Quantrill snapped the webbing seal, rolled the flaccid sausage out, dragged it after him through the hole in the foundation, cursed as he remembered his backpac. It could hang up in the traction ribs of the annulus.
He duckwalked back, tugged on the doughnut's D-ring, then worked furiously to get his pack off as he watched the orange ripstop fabric inflate. It would be jammed in the hole in twenty seconds. If any adjusting were to be done he'd have to do it now.
He oriented the mouth of the doughnut so that it protruded into the basement, thrust his backpac into the annulus, clipped a chemlamp at his wrist, listened to sinister pops and rustles as the doughnut fleshed itself out. Finally, thrusting the pack ahead of him, he hustled through the annulus. It was like crawling through the guts of some great animal.
He clambered onto packed earth and splintered shoring, then placed his pack near the cache of rockets.
There was no sign of nerve gas; never had been. But judging from the stenciled hides of other crates there were enough CBW protection suits to bring half a battalion through a gas attack. The rebels, thought Quantrill, must expect some very nasty treatment from Streamlined America.
Or maybe the rebs intended to wear those suits while dealing with the Confederacy. It was only a hundred klicks to the Ohio River, the boundary and quarantine line separating Streamlined America from the region that had once been the southeastern United States. Paranthrax had fixed that.
While Quantrill reflected, he worked. It was one hot sonofabitch in this hole, and damp as well. He eased a plank from the semiconscious youngster, roughly palpated arms and legs probing for major fractures beyond the wrist. Satisfied, he reached under the lad's jawline, pressed hard, held his thumb down. The faint moaning ceased. He did not want that kid coming around while in a rover's care. There was no proof that the kid was a reb; he
