Chapter 56

"Zo, halt!" he called ahead. "We are all in." He could hear continued scuffling ahead of him that slowly faded as the group's movement stopped.

A quick scan of his light revealed why it had taken so long for the dozen humans to enter. There was a sharp slope of perhaps two meters at the entrance, leading to a passage that snaked off to one side at a much shallower angle. The passage acted as a bottleneck, less than a meter wide at its opening but quickly broadening out to more than twice that. So far as he could see ahead it remained fairly shallow, though; it was impossible for even an average-height human to stand erect. Designed for them, not us, he thought. They can stand here, and pass abreast in two ranks with ample clearance. The passage appeared to be lined with the concrete-like substance he had seen before, and was roughly rectangular in cross-section.

He moved past the bottleneck opening to relieve Montieri of Toshimura and set the injured sociologist down as gently as possible. Behind him he could hear the planking again being shifted. "Watch our backs, Montieri," he grunted. "You should be able to manage with just the suit; stun a couple of them and it will make a blockade. But if you need to fire do it; we cannot afford for any to pass."

"Yes, sir!"

The colonel looked ahead; the next in line was Eisenstadt. "Are you in condition to help Dr. Toshimura?" he asked brusquely. "His leg is broken."

"Bruises, but nothing broken, I think, Colonel," came the response. "I'll stay with him."

"Good," said Igwanda. "I will send Zo back to relieve you as soon as possible. Help him if you can." Crouched down, Igwanda began to move forward past the queued-up scientists.

"Thank you for my life, Carlos," Toshimura murmured through evident pain. "Again."

"You are welcome, John," he replied.

No sounds of alarm came from his rear, and he took time as he passed to ask each of the scientists about their condition. The responses were more encouraging than he might have feared; all were bruised with varying degrees of rib-cage pain that might signal breaks, and Mantegna and Komosaki reported probable broken arms, but there were no life-threatening injuries and only two or three cuts to the exposed faces and necks. He mentally offered thanks for the humans' superior height; most of the alien blows had been at their own eye-level or below. When he reached Meiersdottir she simply said she was "fine"; he squeezed her hand tenderly.

"Are you all right to come forward with me, Amanda?" he asked. "We may need you." She nodded, and moved to the side to follow him.

Zo, when he reached the head of the tightly packed queue, was clearly himself in worse condition than most. Leading the human escape, he had taken the brunt of the assault from the aliens who had massed out of the building ahead of them; his right wrist was evidently paining him, he was favoring his left leg, and his breathing was painfully shallow in response to evident rib damage. In passing Igwanda took note of the restraint he must have exercised in following orders not to use his laser to cut his way through the alien mob.

"Zo, I will take the lead now," the colonel said gently. "I commend you. But we are not quite clear yet, and I must ask one more thing. We have a man with a broken leg in the rear who needs help, and we will be moving forward soon. Dr. Eisenstadt has him now, but he will need assistance. Can you manage?"

"Yes, sir," said Zo unhesitatingly. "I'm hurting, but I'll give in to it later."

"And there will be a 'later' now, thanks in large part to you," said Igwanda as the trooper began moving back along the passage. He drew a deep breath.

"We're in their nest," said Meiersdottir as she came up beside him.

"One of them, yes," Igwanda answered. "The oldest, I think. It seemed the most likely place of safety."

"What happened out there?"

"The storm," he replied. "Their signal is low-frequency. Strong electrical activity will interrupt it, in much the same way as did our interference. Do you remember what Gustav told us about using the interference another time?"

"That they might be individually programmed to attack if we did," she recalled. "Is that what happened?"

"I think so. Akakha came up to me at the last minute to tell us to run and hide, and he also said something about it was too late and there was no time. I think they left the program in place and forgot about it, or at least got distracted from it, until the storm was right on top of us and they were too late to disable it. Did you see how uncoordinated they were?"

"I suppose," she said vaguely. "I was pretty busy."

"You would have been a lot busier, and soon a lot deader, if they had attacked with the same precision as before. But this time they were coming on as individuals, no thinking together, just a headlong assault."

"How many did we—" she cut herself off with a gulp.

"Kill?" he finished for her. "None, I think. Unless the electrical shocks they got from us did it. I ordered no laser fire unless it was necessary to save life, and I saw none."

"You ordered... ?" she said in disbelief.

He shrugged. "They were not responsible."

She reached out to run her hand tenderly across his check. "I love you more than I can possibly say," she said softly. "It would have been awful to have killed more of them, we've already killed so many. I..." Her voice trailed off.

"Yes. Well," he said gruffly.

She cleared her throat. "Where do we go from here?"

"Forward, I think," he said. "Unless you disagree? I suppose we can wait out the storm as we are, but it is uncomfortable."