The run was a broad, slanting tunnel cut into the ice. Crude steps had been etched into its lower surface, four, five, six parallel staircases. There was no light but the stars, and the spots of their skinsuits.

Eight of the ten teams would enter the run, leaving two on watch on the surface. Dower waved two units forward to take the lead. Abil’s red team was one of them.

Abil led the way into the hole. He clambered easily down the stairs, wary, descending into deeper darkness. His hands were empty; though the weapons of his team bristled behind him, he felt naked.

Abil had descended maybe two hundred yards into the hole when suddenly the ice under his feet shook again. The lid was closing over the hole, like a great eyelid, shutting out the stars. He heard hurried, gasping breaths, the sounds of panic rising in his troopers. He tried to control his own breathing. “Red team, take it easy,” he said. “Remember your briefing. We expected this.”

“The corporal’s right,” growled Dower, somewhere above him. “This is just an air lock. Just wait, now.”

For a few heartbeats they were suspended in darkness, their puddles of suit light overwhelmed by the greater dark.

There was a hiss of inrushing air. Then a coarse gray light flickered into life from fat fluorescent tubes buried in the walls. Abil looked up at the lines of troopers, weapons ready, standing on the floor of the cylindrical hall.

Dower held up her gloved hand. “You hear that?”

They listened in silence. Sound carried through the new air: muffled footsteps from beyond the walls, pattering away into the void beyond. And then more footsteps—many more, like an approaching crowd.

“They have runners,” Dower whispered. “Throughout the warren. Patrolling everywhere. If one of them spots trouble, she runs off to find somebody else, and they both run back to the trouble spot, and then they split up, and run off again . . . It’s a pretty efficient alarm system.”

There was a noise from behind Abil, carried through the new, thick air. Only a few steps beneath him, there was another lid door, like the one they had come through from the surface. It, too, had a wheel set on an upright axle.

The wheel was turning with a scrape.

“They’re coming,” Dower said, hefting her weapon. “Let’s have some fun.”

The door slid back.

Chapter 50

Chapter 50

I like to escape from the crowds. Even in the winter, the center of Amalfi and its harbor area swarm with locals and tourists, mainly elderly British and Americans here for the winter sun.

So I climb the hills. The natural vegetation on this rich volcanic soil is woodland, but higher up the land has been terraced to make room for olive groves, vineyards, and orchards—especially lemons, the specialty of the area, though I swear I will never get used to limoncello; I can never get it off my teeth.