Plate movements during the later stages of the MIEV bombardment had tilted the whole system, giving the tunnels a general easterly slope of five or six degrees; some terminated abruptly at fault-lines, others were waterlogged and impassable. In the rest, power failure had left natural convection as the sole medium of ventilation, and the air in them was hot, humid, and heavy. Curious white clumps of mold, fat and glutinous, clung to the walls, giving the place a musty, evil odor. And while Grishkin's team had introduced fluorescent lighting to the major bunkers and some of the corridors, most were lighted only by the wan phosphorescence of the algae that dripped from the outputs of the ventilation plant like listless hanging gardens.

Despite the faulting, it was still a considerable warren. Truck and Tiny were quickly reduced to choosing their direction at random, wading half a mile at a time through eight inches of filthy water past alcoves full of enigmatic, corroding equipment, broached refrigerator units foul with partly decayed food, and doors that wouldn't open. The water trended east, chuckling around their feet to speed with mysterious echoes into the darkness ahead: they found a stream stronger than the rest and got some idea of following the direction of the current — but it only led deeper in, to pour finally over the lip of a fault into the absolute blackness beneath.

'Christ,' whispered Truck, staring at the jagged, tumbled blocks of concrete, the great rock dome the Centaurans had never planned, the long fall. After that, they tried three of the major bunkers: found only rusting consoles and heaps of bones covered in a damp green deposit, each pelvis or femur labeled with a neat white tag — 'female,' 'pre-pubescent male,' 'female adolescent' — by Grishkin's archaeologists. By pure force of will, they rediscovered the bright fluorescent walkways, but none of them seemed to lead back to the bottom of Omega Shaft.

It was Tiny who first noticed that they weren't alone in the maze.

The transit lanes were full of pathetic alien junk abandoned by the survivors in the aftermath of the war: personal effects, robbed of place and purpose and cultural definition, hard to identify in terms of human equivalence as the belt-buckles, bookends, or athletic trophies they undoubtedly were. Tiny, with the brain of a jackdaw and all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery, had been pocketing the shinier bits as he went along, exclaiming 'Look at that, Truck!' and 'Hey, someone's kicking himself for losing this.'

When he found the Chambers gun, however, he didn't say a thing: just hurried up and stuck it under Truck's nose. Truck, sodding and blinding with frustration and expecting each new bit of loot to turn out to be a pocket nuclear weapon, tried to ignore him. He waved it urgently about 'Truck? Truck?'

'Look, what the hell are you saying at, Tiny?' — pushing-the barrel aside. 'If we don't get out of here soon, there'll be murder done — '

'I found it on the floor.' '

Truck grabbed it, in a spirit of self-defense, and had a look.

'You dropped it.'

'Did I hell drop it. Look. Look. You can't tell me that's been down this bloody hole for two hundred years.'

It hadn't.

Five yards further on, they stumbled over its owner.

He was stone-cold dead on the ground, a strand-wolf from one of ben Barka's howling personal deserts, clutching a double handful of mud and grinning savagely into the haunted water that flowed past his head.

Silence.

Truck and Tiny looked down at him, appalled.

Then footsteps, quick and muffled, like murder in an alley, skittered down a parallel tunnel: something was keeping pace with them, stalking them out of the phosphorescent dark.

'Christ, Tiny, he's still here!'

A junction loomed ahead.

'Move!'

Truck threw up his pistol, sent a bolt flaring and sizzling down the passage, shadows bickering along behind it. He couldn't see anything, but someone was out there. He dragged Tiny along after him, stumbling and swearing. 'If he gets behind us — run, Tiny, run!'

They reached the junction and hauled up gasping — just in time to see the hem of a plum-colored cloak, violently agitated, vanishing into yet a third branch of the maze -

Neither of them felt very much like following it Suddenly, the labyrinth was full of disturbing echoes. And plum is the color of Openerism.

But Openerism wasn't the end of it

Fifteen minutes later, they came upon an entire unit of General Gaw's elite police, tumbled about the corridor like burst sacks. A Chambers bolt was still fizzing in the gloom, picking out slaughterhouse expressions on upturned faces, limning an indescribable mess of blood, scorch, and tangled limbs.

'Oh Jesus.'

Tiny cocked his head. 'Truck — '

Muffled Arabic whispered all around them on the complex acoustical fronts of the maze, a new ambush being set up at their very elbows. Distant but clear came the thump of grenade exchanges conducted through rock and concrete, faint shouts and cries. Ruin was loose beneath Centauri, and the bunkers were full of lost men blundering into invisible, desperate engagements.

Suddenly, and close: 'There's a whole nest of the buggers in here! Look alive, lads! — Let's have their trousers down! Where's that napalm!'

Truck shuddered. Bitter smoke had begun to drift down the empty corridor, nuzzling the corpses at his feet. He knew that voice, that awful gusto: he stood once more at the fulcrum, with the Galaxy shaking itself to pieces in a mad struggle for balance around him. 'Come on, Tiny.' He gazed warily round the abbattoir. The dead police stared back, their polarized contact lenses grim and gray and unblinking. 'I've got to find that bloody thing before they find me.'

General Caw's voice faded in the teeth of an Arab counterattack. Truck and Tiny, hermetic and apart, waded off hopelessly, deeper into the labyrinth, their shoulders hunched, the bunkers vibrant around them with the careless enthusiasm of the dance — Opener, Arab, Israeli, celebrating the abandoned figures and extravagant rituals of violence.

Tiny Skeffern dawdled once too often, and they missed each other in the dark. Truck ran wildly up and down the transit lanes bawling 'Tiny! Tiny!' not caring who heard. Only echoes answered him. He stumbled about firing off one of his Chambers guns at shadows until the click-clack of the empty mechanism brought him to his senses. Groaning, he leaned on a wall, put his forehead to the cold damp rock. Another dependent astray in the absolute broil of Circumstance.

Thereafter, he wandered with the gradient like a thin jackal, avoiding the larger concentrations of military and trying to surprise smaller ones by leaping out at junctions with bared teeth and oaths. He came to an area of seemingly endless geological disturbance, picking his way through a great choke of rubble and collapsed ceilings to the fault-line lip, where he watched the water spill over and down into the planetary chasm, not quite sure what he was seeing.

By that time, the Device itself was exercising control over the bunker maze; Grishkin, who'd mapped the system for IWG less than a year previously, was roaming it in a mad daze; Arab and Israeli alike were hopelessly confused. Truck was being cut out and guided toward an initiation he'd feared all along. He blundered along the fault-line, not thinking about much.

Twenty minutes walking brought him to the central redoubt, Grishkin's markers and lights, and an anteroom where luminous fungi cloaked the pipes and cables, and the wind hissed up out of Centauri like a voice.

From the anteroom the bunker doors, jammed open for about a quarter of their travel, made a tall rectangle of light, peculiar and leaping, as if some sort of fire was burning inside.