She nodded, hefted her bag of Bishop, and started back. As she passed the men on the ground Gregor glanced up at her. She punched him squarely in the mouth. Feeling better, she resumed her course.

100 VII

There is night, which is dark. There is the obdurate emptiness of dreams, whose lights are only imaginary. Beyond all is the void, illuminated however faintly by a million trillion nuclear furnaces.

True darkness, the utter absence of light, the place where a stray photon is as impotent as an atomic anomaly, lies only deep within the earth. ?In caverns measureless to man? as the old stanza rhythmically declaims. Or in those cracks and crevices man creates in order to extract the wealth of planets.

A tiny but in and of itself impressive portion of one corner of Fiorina was honeycombed with such excavations, intersecting and crisscrossing like the components of a vast unseen puzzle, their overall pattern discernible only in the records the miners had left behind.

Boggs held his wax-impregnated torch high, waved it around as Rains lit a candle. To such men the darkness was

101

101

nothing to be feared. It was merely an absence of light. It was also warm within the tunnels, almost oppressively warm.

Rains placed the long-burning taper on the floor, next to the wall. Behind them a line of identical flames stretched off into the distance, delineating the trail they’d taken and the route back to the occupied portion of the complex.

Golic sat down, resting his back against a door set in the solid rock. There was a sign on the door, battered and worn by machinery and time.

TOXIC WASTE DISPOSAL

THIS SPACE HERMETICALLY SEALED

ACCESS TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL PROHIBITED

That was just fine with the explorers. They had no wish to be suitably authorized.

Rains had unfolded the chart at his feet and crouched, studying the lines and shafts by the light of his torch. The map was no simple matter of vertical and horizontal lines. There were old shafts and comparatively recent ones, fillins and reopenings, angle cuts and reduced diameter accessways to accommodate specialized machinery only. Not to mention the thousands of intersecting air ducts. Different colors signified different things.

Numerous earlier expeditions had given the prisoners some idea of what to expect, but there was always the chance that each new team would run into something unexpected. A scrambled byte in the storage units could shift an abyssal shaft ten meters out of line, or into a different tunnel. The chart was a tentative guide at best. So they advanced carefully, putting their faith in their own senses and not in dated printouts.

Boggs leaned close. ?How many??Though he spoke softly, his voice still echoed down the smooth-walled passage.

102

Rains checked the chart against his portable datapack. ?This makes a hundred and eighty-six.?

His companion grunted. ?I say we call it a vacation and start back.?