Dark Of The Woods Read Free Page B

and string, its two babies in its belly pouch, looking at them with more curiosity than fear. Death and life, side by side.
    "You couldn't have had traitors," he said. "I know that much about the Demosians. They never gave information—even under torture. How did the Alliance know where to drop bombs?"
    "They didn't," she said. "The explosion, you see, came from within the shelter, blasting outward, rather than down and in. The conquerors had a thing we think they called the ‘mole.' They dropped them by the hundreds, maybe thousands."
    "Yes," he said. "I remember now. The things were only as large as a man's arm, packed full of superexplosives. They hit the ground, bored down thirty feet, then leveled out and acted like subterranean submarines, seeking out heat with very sensitive receptors. Drop enough in one area, and sooner or later, one of them is going to hit paydirt. Then it bores through the wall of the shelter and detonates itself."
    The field mouse made a chittering noise at them, but didn't bother running.
    Davis clambered into the rubble, stopping here and there to look down the spaces between the fused debris. There was a soft light welling up from somewhere very far below, and it illuminated a ragged but possible sloping corridor. "It looks," he said, as Leah came to his shoulder and looked downward with him, "as if the generators have never run out."
    "It hasn't been too many years," she said.
    "The rubble looks fused the whole way down. There shouldn't be any slides. I'm going to try to pry my way in there."
    "It's packed too tightly," she said, looking over the expanse of mangled construction materials. "You won't find a way."
    "I'll make a way," he said, grinning. "Proteus!"
    The robot floated quickly to his side, main manipulator barrel unstopped, sensors flashing excitedly.
    "Gun left."
    Proteus slid a barrel from his smooth, seamless belly, turned left.
    "Ground level," Davis ordered.
    The angle of the barrel dropped until it was pointing at the melted beams and concrete hillocks.
    "Fire one!"
    Proteus shot a small, explosive rocket, large enough to blast a hole through any animal as large as a horse. It struck the ruins five yards away as Davis and Leah stopped behind a slab of concrete. There was an almost instantaneous explosion that shook the entire crust of ruin, and a section of the floor they stood on gave way and crashed down into the open spaces beneath. For a long moment, the sound of things rebounding from the walls and outcroppings of the regions below echoed up to them, a mournful noise. When the quiet returned, Davis ventured forth and carefully inspected the entrance Proteus had made, found that the crust immediately around the hole was still solid and trustworthy.
    "I'll try not to be long," he said.
    "I'm going with you," she protested, pouting her face.
    "I've got Proteus. That's one of the burdens as well as blessings of having a robot guardian. He goes with you whether you want him to or not."
    "I'm going with you," she repeated.
    He saw the determination in her face, the tightening of the muscles along her jawline, and he knew there was no sense arguing. "The way's going to be a little tough, and there isn't room to spread your wings and fly if you should fall. But if you're still all that set on going—"
    "I am."
    The way was not as rugged as he had thought. His perspective, peering through the jumbled rubble earlier, had made the slanted corridor below look longer than it was. In ten minutes, they were in what had been the bottom floor of the shelter, a three-level affair. Here, the Demosians in hiding from the Alliance gases had not been killed by the force of the explosion itself, but by the firestorm which it had engendered. The bodies of about two hundred winged men and women and children laid about the room, mostly against the walls where they had been caught and suffocated so swiftly that they had not had a chance to move. The suction of the explosion and the intense heat