When we finally approached the power plant end of the conduit, I could see ahead of us where the conduit curved and branched out, I assumed to where the plasma was generated. Wherever that was, I didn’t want to go there. I called a halt, and ordered lights to be turned off, while Amaro and I looked at the schematic on her phone. I tried to mentally picture where the reactor was in relation to Fort Arrow; to the east, further up the mountain, and closer to the Launcher track. If we were near where the plasma conduit branched to connect with the reactor, we'd gone too far. Asking everyone to turn around in the narrow confines of the tunnel and march backwards a long way wasn't something I wanted to do. "Amaro, this conduit ends at the reactor, or near it?"

"No, the reactor feeds power to the plasma generator, the generator is the big round structure up the mountain, it looks like a water tower, or a petroleum storage tank? There's a tall white building right next to it. We must be close to that."

"Oh, yeah, all right," we were close to where I wanted to be, although I'd forgotten how high up the mountain we must be then. "I thought that was a water tank." The conduit had been climbing so gradually as we marched that I hadn't thought about it. The Launcher was many kilometers long and climbed up and through the mountain, from its base west of Fort Arrow to the open end of the launch tube to the east, far up the mountain and on the other side of the ridge. The mountain's bulk protected Fort Arrow, and the Launcher complex, from the sonic shock wave generated when cargo pods left the launch tube and hit the atmosphere. On our convoys, if we were going to be in the sonic footprint of a launch, we had to halt a hour ahead of time, secure our vehicles, and wear hearing protection under our helmets. It had only happened twice for me so far on convoy duty, and we'd been far enough away that the launch was merely a faint streak of light in the sky, still, I'd felt the ground rumbling from the hypersonic shock waves. All the buildings in and around the Launcher complex, including Fort Arrow, had noise-canceling systems installed in the walls and windows, and the base went on lockdown during a launch. A launch is something I'd been wanting to see, now I may have missed my chance.

Amaro and I squeezed past the column, and led the way back maybe a hundred yards to where we'd passed an access hatch. The hatches had wheels on the inside also, and this hatch had a small, thick window in the center. Sticking my eye to the window was useless, all I could see was the reflection of my eyeball, it was completely dark on the other side. If there were hamsters on the other side of the hatch, we were screwed. "Amaro, get a grenade ready."