Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [146]
Miles reached around and pulled the rappeling harness off Quinn. "Go up," he said to Galeni, "and see if you can find another entrance on the other side. We've got to catch that little sucker!"
Galeni nodded and hooked up the rappeling harness.
Miles held out stunner and boot knife. "Want a weapon?" Mark had taken off with all the spare stunners still stuck in his belt.
"Stunner's useless," Galeni noted. "You'd better keep the knife. If I catch up with him I'll use my bare hands."
With pleasure, Miles added for him silently. He nodded. They had both been through Barrayaran basic unarmed combat school. Three fourths of the moves were barred to Miles in a real fight at full force due to the secret weakness of his bones; the same was not true of Galeni. Galeni ascended into the night air, bounding up the wall on the almost invisible thread as readily as a spider.
"Got it!" cried Quinn. The thick hatch swung wide on a deep, dark hole.
Miles yanked his handlight out of his belt and hopped through. He glanced back at Galen's gray-faced body, lapped by foam, released from obsession and pain. There was no mistaking the stillness of death for the stillness of sleep or anything else; it was the absolute. The nerve-disruptor beam must have hit his head square on. Quinn dragged the hatch shut again behind them, pausing to stuff equipment back into her pockets as the door's mechanism twinkled and beeped, slid and clanked, rendering the lower Thames watershed safe again.
They both scrambled up the corridor. A mere five meters farther on they came to their first check, a T-intersection. This main corridor was lighted, and curved away out of sight in both directions.
"You go left, I'll go right," said Miles.
"You shouldn't be alone," Quinn objected.
"Maybe I should be twins, eh? Go, dammit!"
Quinn threw up her hands in exasperation and ran.
Miles sprinted in the other direction. His footsteps echoed eerily in the corridor, deep in the synthacrete mountain. He paused a moment, listened; heard only Quinn's light fading scuff. He ran on, past hundreds of meters of blank synthacrete, past dark and silent pumping stations, past pumping stations lit up and humming quietly. He was just wondering whether he could have missed an exit—an overhead access port?—when he spotted an object on the corridor floor. One of the stunners, fallen from Mark's belt as he ran in panic. Miles swooped it up with a quick ah-ha! of bared teeth, and holstered it as he ran on.
He keyed open his wrist comm. "Quinn?" The corridor curved suddenly into a sort of stark foyer with lift tube. He must be under one of the watchtowers. Beware Authorized Personnel about. "Quinn?"
He stepped into the lift tube and rose. Oh, God, which level had Mark got off at? The third floor he passed opened out onto a glass-walled, lobby-looking area, with doors and the night beyond. Clearly an exit. Miles swung out of the lift tube.
A total stranger, wearing civilian jacket and pants, whirled at the sound of his footstep and dropped to one knee. The silver flash of a parabolic mirror twinkled in his raised hands, a nerve-disruptor muzzle. "There he is!" the man cried, and fired.
Miles recoiled back into the lift tube so fast he rebounded off the far wall. He grabbed for the safety ladder at the side of the tube and began slapping up the rungs faster than the anti-grav field could lift him. He wriggled his facial muscles, shot with pins and needles from the nimbus of the disruptor beam. The man's shoes, Miles realized, gleaming out from the bottom of his trousers, had been Barrayaran regulation Service boots. "Quinn!" he yelped into his wrist comm again.
The next level up opened onto a corridor without gunmen in it. The first three doors Miles tried were locked. The fourth swished open onto a brightly lit office, apparently deserted. On a quick jog around it Miles's eye was caught by a slight movement in the shadows under a console. He bent down to face two women in blue Tidal Authority tech coveralls cowering beneath. One squeaked and covered her eyes; the second hugged her