Laldasa (44 page)

When nothing else stirred, when she had convinced herself that fear was out of place here, she dared move. Behind the padded bench seat of the two-wheeler, her hands found the closure of the stowage cowling and opened it, groping within. The little pile of equipment she had secreted earlier in the evening was still there: the coil of rope, the palm-lamp, the small leather satchel.

She slipped the palm-lamp under her robe and clipped it to the belt at the waist of her black body suit, then moved back to the front of the bike. Grasping the tongue in both hands, she rolled the little carriage out into the middle of the harnessing arena, then selected and harnessed a dark horse. She checked each buckle, quietly tugged at the traces, then paused to murmur a quick prayer.

A moment later she was driving across the yard, a blaze of pinkgold light washing over her, heading for the main gate. The guards had been instructed to keep people out. No one had said anything to them about keeping anyone in. They were not party to the whys and wherefores of their job, so when Ana called out something about visiting a friend in town they merely exchanged uneasy glances and let her go on her way unchecked. She sang on the drive into the Silk District. She'd done all her thinking; had tried on every “what if” she could think of. There was no sense in worrying it to death.

A block from the Badan-Devaki, she pulled the bike up to a public tie-down and secured the horse to one of the many empty rings. Light from a corner street lamp flooded the area with unwelcome light; she had to slip into the bike's shadow to pull off the robe. She flipped it onto the seat, then went to the rear of the vehicle to retrieve the rope and the satchel. She was dismayed to find she hadn't secured the hood to the stowage, relieved to find that it hadn't resulted in the loss of her equipment. The rope went over one shoulder; she clipped the satchel to the front of her belt and slid her fingers into the soft web of the palm-lamp.

As she melted into a pool of shadow along the tie-down wall, her memory called the maps to mind; the sketches and print-outs folded in the satchel at her waist. She found the mouth of the alley that ran behind the Badan-Devaki. There was a gate across it.

She hunkered down in the shadow of a trash bin and checked the time, cupping the palm-lamp above her timepiece. Ten minutes to wait. She chafed at the seeming endlessness of it, wishing she had cut it closer. She was building up a charge of fear. That was dangerous.

She took a deep breath and began a shallow discipline; not involving all her senses—she needed to hear the street—but just deep enough to calm her mounting pulse and massage some patience into her apprehension. It was an effort well spent; when her ears caught the sound of something shuffling along the wall to her left, she did not jump out of hiding, but only stiffened with a sudden chill, senses flung outward, straining.

Another sound intruded from the right, growing louder—the rush of an air wagon. She strained her hearing back to the left, but the shuffling was swallowed in the wash of the wagon's jets. She could feel its warm breath on her face and hands. She gave her entire attention to the wagon. It had a two seat cabin, rounded and skull-like, that gave the vehicle the look of a mythical beast. It was a tractor rig with a pleated tongue between cab and trailer.

Ana's eyes seized on the narrow hitch. There was enough room there for a slender passenger, she decided, and coiled herself, waiting for the wagon to pull abreast of her cover. The aperture appeared almost too quickly and Ana bolted into a low leap, landing, cat-like, on the synthetic fabric of the telescoping joint. She would be lucky, she realized, if she wasn't crushed by the two halves of the rig and prayed the wagon wouldn't meet with any obstacles in the alley.

It didn't. It glided on its cushion of air up the throat of the alley, the photonic gate opening and closing silently before and after. Ana watched brick and masonry flicker in its forward light bar.

The wagon soon slowed. Ana made herself as small as possible in her dark nest, her eyes on the bath of light around the Badan-Devaki service entrance.

She realized, with a freezing jolt, that the wagon would glide right by that well-lit portal and present its rear doors. When it did, her precarious perch would be flooded with light. She rolled from the hitch and was swallowed by the trailer's shadow. She walked beside it, stopping when it stopped; it blocked her from the view of the B&D security guards.

Her back against the trailer, she glanced back, down its long, smooth flank. The service entrance lights flooded the alley behind, opening a broad fan of illumination across the worn paving—a fan that lay between Ana and her access to the dalali's sub-regions.

The snick of a door catch brought her attention back toward the cabin. Less than three steps away the cabin door swung open and a shadowy pair of legs thrust out. She moved swiftly, silently, toward them—one long step and a pivot and she'd swung back into the breach between cab and trailer. Curled into a ball on the nearly collapsed tongue, Ana squeezed her eyes closed and hugged her knees fiercely, barely hearing the driver and his companion pass by the dark slot. Several deep breaths and a numb prayer of thanks later, she opened her eyes and glanced up toward the cab.

In the mirror surface of the window of the driver's open door, she could see the transparent, distorted images of the two draymen and a handful of B&D guards. They were armed.

One of the guards pulled open the building's service door. It swung outward and stopped, turning the delta of brilliance Ana must ford into a mere canal. She peered at it hopefully. That was little more than a meter in width. Dangerous, yes. But not deadly.

The draymen opened the rear doors of the trailer. It bobbed as they boarded and began unloading. Ana slipped off the hitch and moved silently down the dark side of the wagon. From beneath the ramp, she could see the guards. There were three. They were not watching the alley. They were talking and chewing pramada sticks, which meant their faculties would be cloudy at best.

Encouraged, Ana waited until both draymen had disappeared into the broad entrance, then took two long strides across the glowing river of roadway. The flash of light hit her full in the face before she plunged into darkness and stopped, stone still, listening.

The mumble of voices and the shuffle of feet continued behind her. Someone chuckled. She relaxed and moved the last few steps to the wall of the building, resisting the temptation to collapse against it in relief.

Summoning her concentration, Ana turned away from the light and put a hand against the cold brick. She'd taken three steps when something scraped the hard stone of the alley floor barely two meters in front of her. She hung between advance and retreat, imagining horrors; imagining Parva Rishi leering at her from the sooty beyond.

No, it could just as easily be a rodent of some sort—a citizen of the alley, itself terrified of alien intrusion. Something small. Something harmless. It was, even now, backing away in fear. Turning to give her one last, wild-eyed glance. Skittering away to safety.

The scraping repeated itself, was followed by shuffling and the clatter of pebbles against stone. Wings fluttered.

Ana expelled a silent breath of relief. A night bird, that was all. Hunting, as she was hunting. She calmed herself and moved cautiously to the access shaft.

She crouched by the small rectangle of absolute darkness and reached a hand tentatively into it. There was no covering to be pried away; it was open to the alley. Open too, said a small, annoying voice, to whatever lived in the alley.

Ana swallowed a tingle of apprehension. She'd faced worse on her own world. She thrust her legs into the opening and rolled onto her stomach, letting herself backwards into the aperture. Her toes touched gritty bottom. She lowered herself to the floor, then turned slowly, putting her back to the access. She took a deep, centering breath and a long moment to orient herself to the void. The place smelled of wet and rusty metal.

She recalled the computer rendering of the sub-structure. This should be a rough square, about four meters to a side. The opposing side funneled into a narrow passage hemmed by pipes and conduits. She tried to imagine that; tried to overlay an illuminated map on the lightless place. It was difficult and she wished for a miner's helm with the computer image in memory. But she didn't have one and so began a measured pace toward the opposite side of the imagined square, counting each footstep under her breath, her hands outstretched. Even in the soft shoes she'd chosen for the adventure, each step seemed to emit a crunchy shriek as it crushed unseen debris.

In fourteen deafening steps, her fingertips touched cold, curving metal. A large pipe. She felt to the left. The pipe took a sharp upward angle. She felt to the right. The pipe turned away and ran before her into the dark. She followed it, finding herself in the pipe-hemmed pathway that led into the bowels of the dalali. The floor plan had given the width as half a meter. She stretched out her arms. Good. The floor plan was accurate.

It was too soon for the palm-lamp, she decided, and continued her blind, fingertip progress to her immediate goal—a second pipe-bound chamber with a trap door to the regions above.

Above the rush of her own breath, above the crackle of her footfall, she heard, or rather felt, something behind her. She froze, found herself listening to nothing but the rhythm of her heart, thudding in her chest. She isolated it, closed her mind to it.

Other sounds scurried forward to take its place—the gurgle of water in the pipes, a slow drip from somewhere ahead and to the right, a sporadic creaking from over head, a pervasive hum and, on the periphery, minute noises like the whisper of tiny feet on the gritty floor. She refused to put form to it.

Ears ringing from the intensity of her listening, she took a step forward. Paused. Nothing. She took another step, her hands nearly gripping the cold, filthy pipes that ran level with her head.

A long scrape of sound shrieked at her from the blackness. She shot forward, her hands braced before her at eye level, struck a large pipe, rebounded, spun, stumbled to the right and half-fell into a corner. She hung there, barely daring to breathe, her arms lying atop the cross-piece of some bit of framework.

The blackness was absolute. Nothing existed in this place with her. Nothing but dripping, scurrying, screaming blackness.

She took hold of her panic with the firm, callused hands of a veteran miner. Whatever was sharing this alien cave with her was at least five meters away and around a corner. That is, she thought wryly, unless it was small enough to glide under the pipes.

She pushed herself upright, listening. The nerve-flaying sounds were gone. For now.

Ana struggled to reconnoiter. She had known where she was when she'd started her sprint—just below the first corner. The forced right turn was all right, but the next turn should have been a left only a meter and a half along this corridor. She must have stumbled twice that distance to the corner, which meant she'd have to work her way back down the passage.

Grit crunched softly somewhere in the darkness. Somewhere back the way she'd just come.

Her jaw clenched painfully. She willed it to relax. It was only three steps—four, at most. A quick right turn, then another quick jog to the left.

Just put one foot in front of the other, Anala, she told herself, and did that, feeling for the junction and curve that would signal the turn.

One step. Two steps. Three. Her hand met the raised collar of the junction fitting and ahead of her in the dark, something brushed the dust.

She slipped around the corner as silently as possible, sidling, listening. Her hands sought signs of progress—another curving juncture slid beneath them. Her right hand, extended at arm's length met a wall—the “T” intersection that butted against the lift shaft. She padded left; three meters later, she turned right.

She stopped. Now she had to measure carefully or turn on the lamp. She turned her head toward her back trail, listening. Nothing.

Biting her lip, she took what she hoped was a half-meter step, then another and another. She stopped, turned and fanned her fingers against the wall. The metal framework she expected to find was not there. She felt left and right. Nothing. Had she gone too far or not far enough?

Above the sudden clamor of adrenaline, her senses told her something was moving in the peaty gloom, advancing on her up the pipe work maze. Denying her fear the power of form, she thumbed on the palm-lamp and scraped its golden beam across the wall.

Not far enough! She dove at the spider-work of metal braces the light revealed—a manual cantilever stairwell. Ana gave the mechanism a swift glance, saw the oil-packed chains that supported the closest end. She shut off the palm-lamp and, before the image of the stair frame could fade from her eyes, lunged for the bottom end of the narrow steps. Under the sudden weight, the mechanism groaned, resisted, then gave, lowering in a ponderous glide. She willed it down. When it was still a meter from the floor, she flung her body onto it and crawled upward toward the seemingly unreachable trapdoor.

It was not unreachable, but it was set at an a awkward angle to the steps. She ended up lying on her back along the metal frame, pushing upward with increasing force. Thought of the unseen Something Behind nearly made her frantic, but she fought the urge to pound on the trapdoor and kept her pressure on it firm and consistent.