"Wait," said Qanya tensely. "They'll sight us in the open, and then what chance will we have?"
Dworn tried to make out her expression, but in the darkness her face was only a white blur. "We've got to try. There's no other way."
"Perhaps there is. What about the tunnel?"
Dworn was brought up short; that idea hadn't occurred to him at all. He said slowly, "I see what you mean, It's only big enough for one-way traffic—and the drones evidently have some system of remote control, so that outbound expeditions aren't using it at the same time as returning ones...."
"So, if we wait till some of the wingless ones enter from this end, and hurry through the tunnel close behind them—" Qanya left the sentence uncompleted. Dworn knew she could imagine as well as he what would happen if they failed to time it right, and met a drone column coming from the opposite direction. Still, the sound sense of the girl's ideas was obvious.
"All right," he said. "We'll try it that way."
It was another nerve-fraying wait until a file of ground machines came winding near and vanished one after another into the tunnel.
The two watchers gave them a little time—not too much—to get clear of the entrance. Then Dworn clasped Qanya's hand tightly in his own, and together they plunged down the sliding slope of the sandhill. The tunnel mouth yawned in its side, the bore on which it opened slanting steeply down into the earth, inwardly lit with eery blue light.
Hearts pounding, they raced into the tunnel.
It was an unreal, nightmare flight. The blue shaft curved and descended endlessly. Endlessly ahead of them echoed the snarling of drone engines.