Chapter TWELVE
Mixing with the street people, Drummer in sight up ahead, they moved swiftly. Adari trailed Drummer; Brad next followed by Myra and Kumiko. Zolan and Hodak brought up the rear. Drummer successfully resisted the temptation to look back.
Zolan tensed, activating the mind-mike in his armpit. Brad acknowledged by stepping up his pace. He passed Adari and drew alongside Drummer.
"Your buddy, Scarf, must have had a friend in the bar," he said. "We're being tailed."
"Another hundred meters. Cut into the alley on the left."
Drummer responded. "It'll take us through a maze that still confounds the street people. We'll have a better chance in there to lose whoever is following."
A corner loomed. They squeezed into a narrow, rubble-strewn passageway between high, rough walls. Stumbling along the barely lighted shaft they entered an alley, equally shabby, crowded with street people, refuse, and abandoned machinery.
They sped along the alley, noting its darkened, fuser-formed doorways, some empty, others clogged with trash. Inside, they saw the shadowy outlines of men, huddled women and children.
Drummer twisted from one alley into the next, and then another.
He ducked through a gap in one wall, squeezed along a narrow hallway and exited into an open space. They packed up close, running and stumbling.
Drummer slowed next to a wall of composite blocks. Several were missing, leaving a space through which they squirmed. It was tighter than they had experienced. In near darkness, they had reached a dead end.
Ahead was loose rubble forming a heap about two meters high. Drummer clawed his way around the side. He motioned the others forward and slipped out of sight.
Following one behind the other, they saw an opening in the surface. Responding to Drummer's beckoning, they dropped into its darkness. The fall was less than a couple of meters. A light glowed from a wall to just enough to illuminate Drummer.
They were in a small, roughly rounded chamber.
The walls were fused rubble, irregular and jagged.
The floor was a mixture of Plutonian detritus.
Drummer knelt beside a rock that protruded from the wall. He twisted the rock, pulled, and pushed it sideways. Reaching into the vacated space, he placed his palm on a flat, smooth disk.
A low hum from the wall. A fissure formed where the wall met the trash-laden floor. The breach lengthened and curved, its ends meeting the wall. The section dropped away into darkness.
"Move, move," Drummer snarled his impatience. "Scarf has this entire sector blocked out by now. He'll throw his gangs into the alleys and cover every square meter. These subsurface crawl spaces and links are our only way. Feel for the ladder."
He lowered himself through the opening and vanished.
Brad was committed. His glance ordered the others to follow Drummer. Hodak passed his light to Brad and dropped through first, then Zolan followed Myra, Adari and Kumiko. Brad dropped through and pushed the cover up until it snapped. Closed. He felt vibrations above him, then, after several seconds, silence.
"Must be spreading the dust of our tracks and the outline of the cover," Zolan murmured, looking up from immediately below.
The ladder was rickety, and the shaft narrow and long. When Brad reached bottom, he was in a low gallery, about two meters square, hacked out of the rock. They were in the hub of a dozen passageways that led off in as many directions from low entries.
Drummer bent and disappeared through one of the entries. One after the other, they followed.
The entry led into a utility service tunnel, the walls lined with scores of braided cables and banks of wall switches and junctions. Neutro-lighted sconces glowed at intervals, providing dim direction to their flight.
Scuttling in single file and dodging cables slung between supporting columns, they covered distance swiftly. Brad moved up behind Drummer, replacing Hodak who dropped back to rear guard immediately behind Zolan.
"Scarf knows about these utility passages, and that we would head for them," Drummer gasped over his shoulder. "What he doesn't know is which access and branches we took and where we'll surface. A slight advantage, if we act quickly."
They scampered and slithered for more than half an hour. "Looks like we're the only ones down here," said Brad.
Drummer halted to recover breath. The line closed up.
"Normal," Drummer gasped. "These passages were abandoned years ago, after we switched to local transmission from control modules suspended beneath the dome. Too much trouble to collapse the subsurface tunnels, I suppose. Also, we had to consider the surface effects of a collapse. Couldn't afford the chance. As you see, the network is still useful."
He shot a quick glance at Brad, then ahead along their route.
"Don't get the impression I've got to run from Scarf," Drummer said, heaving another deep breath, "or even to avoid him under ordinary circumstances. Obviously, he was drunk. My presence in the bar-room gave him an opportunity to enhance his image. Your companion's intervention, I admit, relieved the pressure, but the method he chose may prove unfortunate."
"Why this melodramatic escape?"
"To avoid a confrontation in which Scarf, backed up by his troops, would be in complete control; a confrontation in which you couldn't possibly hold your own. The encounter has already caused me embarrassment. I don't relish a repetition." Drummer paused. "And there's another reason."
"Oh?"
"I know who you are, and the circumstances that brought you and your associates to Planet Pluto. I want to know more."
"Why?"
"My answer to that depends on what I learn about you and your companions."
Drummer slowed to a fast walk, searching spaces between the bundles of the thick cables.
"So that you know," he said, "we're heading for my villa-dome about five kay from the city."
Drummer grunted that he'd found what he had searched for. Clawing under a flap, he uncovered a depression in the wall alongside a cable junction. He pressed himself in behind the junction and into a cranny, motioning to Brad. One by one, they squeezed through, and found themselves at the foot of a flex-ladder. Drummer climbed; they followed.
They emerged through a manhole into a kiosk next to a transit strip. Darting from the kiosk Drummer boarded the strip and nodded back to Brad to join him. Within moments they were all gliding toward an air lock leading to the outside.
Entering the air lock, they hurried into space suits from the public service rack, checked each other's seals and oxygen reserves, tested the communications and pressurization systems and crowded into the pressure-equalization chamber. Air lock and suit pressures up, balanced and checked, Drummer jerked a lever and, a moment later, they ducked under the rising panel to the outside.
Running along the ramp Drummer flashed his suit lamps at a parked robo-taxi. The signal activated the craft and it was in ready status when they reached it. Boarding first, Drummer keyed in coordinates. As the last Sentinel scrambled through the hatch he hit the lift button. The taxi rose and curved away.