[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.” A thermal sensor would have to be aimed straight in, to pick them up, from a point twenty meters in the air out over the ravine.The place was riddled with hundreds of similar crannies.“Even better.” Bothari pulled a pair of antique field glasses, looted from Kly’s cabin, from their bedroll.“We can see them.”The glasses were nothing but binocular tubes with sliding glass lenses, purely passive light--collectors.They must have dated from the Time of Isolation.The magnification was poor by modern standards, no UV or infrared boost, no rangefinder pulse.no power cell to leak detectable energy traces.Flat on her belly, chin in the rubble, Cordelia could glimpse the distant cavern entrance on the slope rising beyond the ravine and a knife-backed ridge.When she said, “Now we must be very quiet,” pale Gregor practically went fetal.The black-clad scanner men found the horses at last, though it seemed to take them forever.Then they found the cave mouth.The tiny figures gesticulated excitedly to each other, ran in and out, and called the flyer, which landed outside the entrance with much crackling of shrubbery.Four men entered; eventually, one came back out.In time, another flyer landed.Then a lift van arrived, and disgorged a whole patrol.The mountain mouth ate them all.Another lift van came, and men set up lights, a field generator, comm links.Cordelia made a nest of the bedroll for Gregor, and fed him little snacks and sips from their water bottle.Bothari stretched out in the back of the niche with the thinnest blanket folded under his head, otherwise seeming impervious to the stone.While Bothari dozed, Cordelia kept careful count of the net flow of hunters.By mid-afternoon, she calculated that some forty men had gone below and not come up again.Two men were brought out strapped to float pallets, loaded into a medical-- evacuation lifter, and flown away.A lightflyer made a bad landing in the crowded area, toppled downslope, and crunched into a tree.Yet more men became involved in extracting, righting, and repairing it.By dusk over sixty men had been sucked down the drain.A whole company drawn away from the capital, not pursuing refugees, not available to root out the secrets of ImpMil.it wasn’t enough to make a real difference, surely.It’s a start.Cordelia and Bothari and Gregor slipped from the niche in the gloaming, cleared the ravines, and made their way silently through the woods.It was nearly full dark when they came to the edge of the trees and struck Kly’s trail.As they crossed over the ridge edging the vale, Cordelia looked back.The area by the cave mouth was marked by searchlights, stabbing up through the mists.Lightflyers whined in and out of the site.They dropped over the ridge and slithered down the slope that had so nearly killed her to climb, hanging on to Rose’s stirrup two days ago.Fully five kilometers down the trail, in a rocky region of treeless scrub, Bothari came to an abrupt halt.“Sh.Milady, listen.”Voices.Men’s voices, not far off, but strangely hollow.Cordelia stared into the darkness, but no lights moved.Nothing moved.They crouched beside the trail, senses straining.Bothari crept off, head tilted, following his ears.After a few moments Cordelia and Gregor cautiously followed.She found Bothari kneeling by a striated outcrop.He motioned her closer.“It’s a vent,” he announced in a whisper.“Listen.”The voices were much clearer now, sharp cadences, angry gutturals punctuated by swearing in two or three languages.“Goddammit, I know we went left back at that third turn.”“That wasn’t the third turn, that was the fourth.”“We re-crossed the stream.”“It wasn’t the same friggin’ stream, sabaki!”“Merde.Perdu!”“Lieutenant, you’re an idiot!”“Corporal, you’re out of line!”“This cold light’s not going to last the hour.See, it’s fading.”“Well, don’t shake it up, you moron, when it glows brighter it goes faster.”“Give me that--!”Bothari’s teeth gleamed in the darkness.It was the first smile Cordelia had seen crack his face in months.Silently, he saluted her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]