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“I, ah, I, hold on.”

Tam reached down to the seam where the metal floor of the closet met the duracrete floor of the hallway. He lifted, and the floor came up, revealing a hole in the duracrete beneath. The hole was smooth-edged but irregular, lacking the mathematically precise curve of something cut by machinery.

A noise floated up out of the hole. It seemed to come from a great distance, but it was recognizable: a wail of despair, of pain.

Tam sat down at its edge, dangling his legs into the hole. “I’m going down.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m seizing the initiative, Wolam.”

“No, you’re waiting for an officer to come on the comlink.”

Tam pushed the portion of metal flooring over until it leaned against a panel of machinery and would not fall across the hole. Then he slid down into the hole.

“Tam, blast it, don’t do what I say, do what I mean.”

NINE

The tunnel did not descend in a straight line. Tam didn’t expect it to. It was something of the Yuuzhan Vong, and they never did anything in straight lines.

But that, and the fact that it had been bored through duracrete, meant that Tam could clamber down rather than drop to a messy, bone-breaking stop at the bottom.

Another scream floated up at him, louder. A few meters down, the duracrete gave way to bedrock, then became duracrete again; it looked as though there were sub-basements below, levels that perhaps were not accessed by the public turbolifts and emergency stairwells, and the Yuuzhan Vong intruder had found them. Tam could see, even dig his fingers into smaller side holes in this tunnel; he supposed that whatever stone-eating organisms had made the tunnels had first dug around in all directions and then conveyed images or other knowledge to the Yuuzhan Vong spy who commanded them, allowing him or her to choose which path the main tunnel would follow.

He found a larger niche, two meters deep and one high. Its bottom was lined with some sort of mossy substance; he’d seen it before, one type of sleep surface. There were also gelatinlike bags he knew to contain bioengineered creatures that performed various functions when released from the jelly. He’d possessed some of them when he served the Yuuzhan Vong.

There was another scream, and the sound of voices speaking. He slowed his descent, tried to make it quieter.

A few more meters, and the hole opened up into a chamber. Lights flickered red and blue down there, suggesting a computer terminal screen rather than overhead illumination.

And finally Tam could understand one of the voices. It was a male, and he spoke Basic with the halting accent and peculiar rhythm he’d come to associate with a member of the Yuuzhan Vong trying not to reveal his true origins.

“Where is the true crystal?” he asked.

There was no immediate response. Then there was another shriek. The next speaker also sounded male, though his words were distorted by pain: “It’s gone. It’s been taken to the pipefighter already.”

“The pipefighter abominations are still in the flat building. They have not fired upon us. They leave the lambent in that building when guards are more numerous here?”

“Yes, yes—” There was another scream. This one went on and on, ending only as the second speaker ran out of wind.

Tam grimaced. He had to see what was going on in that chamber before he could act. But although he could wait here at the tunnel end, his legs braced at the side, for some time, he couldn’t turn upside down to peek outside it. He wasn’t that nimble.

Ah, but he had another set of eyes. Hurriedly, he took his light-duty holocam from around his neck. He detached its neck cord, attached it so that the unit could dangle, its lenses pointed to the side and its quick-review viewscreen oriented up toward him. He adjusted the lenses to wide-angle viewing, then lowered the unit to the very bottom of the tunnel and slightly beyond.

In the viewscreen, he could see the chamber below. It appeared that the tunnel was in the ceiling of one corner. The chamber itself was mostly lined with computer equipment, but in one corner was a doorway that