"But I'm not sure that others can't."
The woman's voice was at such close range that McCray's suit radio made a useful RDF set. He located her direction easily enough, shielding the tiny built-in antenna with the tungsten-steel blade of the ax, while she begged him to hurry. Her voice was heavily accented, with some words in a language he did not recognize. She seemed to be in shock.
McCray was hardly surprised at that; he had been close enough to shock himself. He tried to reassure her as he searched for a way out of the hall, but in the middle of a word her voice stopped.
He hesitated, hefting the ax, glancing back at the way he had come. There had to be a way out, even if it meant chopping through a wall.
When he turned around again there was a door. It was oddly shaped and unlike the door he had hewn through, but clearly a door all the same, and it was open.
McCray regarded it grimly. He went back in his memory with meticulous care. Had he not looked at, this very spot a matter of moments before? He had. And had there been an open door then? There had not. There hadn't been even a shadowy outline of the three-sided, uneven opening that stood there now.
Still, it led in the proper direction. McCray added one more inexplicable fact to his file and walked through. He was in another hall—or tunnel—rising quite steeply to the right. By his reckoning it was the proper direction. He labored up it, sweating under the weight of the suit, and found another open door, this one round, and behind it—
Yes, there was the woman whose voice he had heard.
It was a woman, all right. The voice had been so strained that he hadn't been positive. Even now, short black hair might not have proved it, and she was lying face down but the waist and hips were a woman's, even though she wore a bulky, quilted suit of coveralls.