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Manitius base was in direct sunlight now.
"At the halfway point," wheezed Eduardo over his shoulder.
"Halfway point to where?" Grant asked.
When Eduardo didn't answer, Grant took a long-legged step forward, reaching
for the man. Due to the diminished gravity, he ended up slamming into him.
Eduardo nearly went sprawling, but Grant grabbed him by the collar of his
coverall and kept him on his feet.
"Where are you taking us?" he demanded, his voice a growl of suspicion.
Eduardo winced, touching his chest, but he didn't try to wrest free. Earnestly
he said, "To my people.
They're waiting for us. For the love of God, let me go. I'll tell you
everything once we get there. Believe me, I'm just as curious about you as you
are about me, but this isn't the time!"
Grant glared at him for a silent, menacing second, then released him. The four
people moved on again.
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James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon
The narrow conduit opened up on a long, low tunnel stretching away before
them, iron I-beams shoring up the sides and ceiling. The ground was earthen,
muddy and damp, showing the prints of many feet. The smell of decaying
vegetable matter clogged their nostrils.
Eduardo strode swiftly to the end of the tunnel and came to a halt, looking
around cautiously. The three
Cerberus personnel joined him, gazing in astonish-ment at the vast bowl-shaped
chamber beyond. The walls and domed ceiling were composed of interlock-ing
slabs of a transparent substance all of them rec-ognized as armaglass. Outside
the dome, they saw the Manitius base looming around them.
Most of the installation was built into the regolith, the inner walls of the
crater. It was a collection of towers and radar dishes and bulldozed flat
planes bi-sected by terraced channels with concrete-paneled sides.
Eduardo pointed, saying, "One of those is our des-tination, the life-hutch
habitat modules."
They saw four smooth cylinders, each with a chute type of tunnel leading to
them from a point they couldn't see. Each one was half dug into the side of
the crater, presumably for shelter from radiation.
Atop some of the towers were small directional dishes. From others, stairs on
elevated girders climbed to pyramidal structures that were part of the
solar-cell energy array. The entire expanse was interlaced with thick power
cables and conduits stretching along forked pylons.
"Not much to look at it, is it?" Eduardo asked.
"Depends on your perspective," Brigid answered.
Eduarda gave her a jittery smile and moved out from the tunnel. The air was
still and hot, thick with veils of steamy mist. "This is a hydroponic farm,"
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Eduardo said. "It grows everything we need to keep us alive.
This was the first place Megaera claimed."
Brigid looked out at the walls of the crater looming above them and fanned
away steam from her face.
"Land of the misty mountains," she muttered. "Now I know what that meant."
They scaled a short ladder leading to a catwalk forming a narrow, elevated
bridge between square fields of mossy earth dotted with warm pools of wa-ter.
Below them were fruit trees, rows of corn, even carrot patches.
At the end of the catwalk, Eduardo turned aside and sidled through a doorway
that in turn led to a chamber from which a metal stairway spiraled down into
darkness. Eduardo, panting from exertion and pain, pointed into the throat of
blackness. ' 'That goes to an accessway below, then to the life-hutch module.
Megaera and her Furies and maybe even a carnobot or two might have gotten here
ahead of us.
But we must take the chance."
All of them quickly descended the winding stair and stepped into a corridor as
impenetrably black as the gulfs between the stars. Their dark-vision glasses
were useless, and Kane fumbled for his Nighthawk microlight in a belt pouch.
He turned it on and the amber beam cast a halo, on Eduardo's frightened face.
Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead like polished pearls.
"No!" he barked, clapping both hands around the little flashlight. "I know the
way. If an ambush has been laid ahead, we can't let them know we're com-ing."
Kane hesitated, then clicked off the Nighthawk. "All right," he said in a low
voice. "But Grant will keep his blaster on you. Play us false and you'll wish
you were dealing with carnobots."
Eduardo was too agitated to react to the threat. "Link hands."
Kane murmured in Brigid's ear, "Let me bring up the rear."
He stepped around her and clasped her right hand in his left. The four people
began a silent march into
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James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon absolute darkness. Brigid ran her
fingertips along the bulkhead as they walked, occasionally feeling a closed
doorway.
Kane suddenly heard a faint sound behind them. His flesh crawled as if an army
of ants crept along between his skin and the shadow suit. He strained his
ears, trying to catch a repetition of the stealthy move-ment in the corridor.
He tried to pierce the blackness with slitted eyes.
He saw nothing and after a moment he was almost ready to attribute the sound
to an errant echo and his wire-taut nerves. Then, in the sepia sea two points
of red fire appeared, seeming to dance and shift in a weird rhythm. He heard a
distant tap-tapping. Be-tween one heartbeat and the next, the tapping rose in
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