But the group reached level three without incident, found their way along the darkened halls to the main command center and found it untouched.

"All right, then," Lathe said, turning to Bernhard. "Where's the next best place to tie into the computer?"

"Down the hall," the other said, pointing. "The computer rooms are also on this level. But without power they're as useless as this place is."

"So maybe we'd better concentrate on finding Torch instead," Skyler said quietly. "If they're still here."

Lathe nodded, looking around them. "I'll admit the place seems deserted. But they were here... so where did they go?"

"Back outside?" Colvin suggested. "Maybe they just stuck around long enough to ice their trail and then took off for parts unknown."

"This is an awful lot of work to go to just to hide out," Alamzad said. "Unless they've just taken off temporarily to avoid seeing us."

"How would they have known we were coming?" Jensen asked.

"Oh, the base's phone lines are probably still operational," Bernhard said. "Maybe your friend Anne Silcox knows more about where her comrades went than she lets on."

"There may be a simpler explanation," Lathe said slowly. "Bernhard, where did you say the medical facilities are?"

They found them there, thirty-eight of them, in various parts of the brightly lit level-five medical complex. Men and women both, ages ranging from young adult to late middle age.

All of them dead.

"Damn," Braune whispered as they walked carefully among the bodies. "Damn."

"What happened?" Lathe asked Hawking as the latter rose from a brief examination of one of the bodies.

Hawking shook his head. "Vale's the one with the real medical knowledge, but it looks to me as if they were poisoned. You'll note there's been no visible decay—that's characteristic of some types of poisons. If I had to guess, I'd say it was something low-level they ingested over a long period of time."

"Not ingested," Bernhard said from across the room. "Inhaled."

Alamzad swore under his breath. "The gas attack that knocked the base out in the first place. And the missing filters from out in the tunnel."

"They knew," Skyler murmured. "We'll probably find the filters set up in their living quarters somewhere around here. They knew they were dying and tried to fight back."

"And yet they didn't leave," Lathe mused. "I wonder what they were doing down here that they considered that important."

"Never mind them," Pittman put in. "What about us, now that we're here? Will our gas filters be enough to protect us?"

"We won't be here long enough to build up a real dosage of the stuff," Lathe assured him. "Caine, there must be a separate computer for the medical section. It's a long shot, but let's see if they might have put your information in it." His eyes found Skyler. "The rest of you, spread out, see what else is around here."

The medical computer turned out to be across an untended environmental area in a building that also housed the main labs and several more bodies. "At least it's got power," Caine said, wincing as he rolled a corpse-laden chair out from in front of the console and tried a couple of commands. "Let's see if I can get on."

"If you can't, we'll ask Bernhard if he knows any special passwords," Lathe told him. "I'm going to take a look around the rest of the building. Signal if you find anything useful."

He left. "All right," Caine muttered, snaring another chair and sitting down before the keyboard.

Computer usage had been fairly standardized throughout the TDE before the war, and his Resistance tutors had given him the most common military passwords. Keying one in, he began his search.

It took only about an hour to try all the passwords he knew and to run through the directories they accessed, and when he'd finished he leaned back in his chair and sighed. Nothing. No mention of Backlash; no files tied in with the word blackcollar except for a few medical records.

Which meant that Lathe's hoped-for long shot hadn't panned out. If the Backlash formula was indeed in Aegis, it had to be up on level three.

Caine glared at the screen. Getting in there would be a major project all its own—and a dangerous one, if Bernhard could be believed. Still, military computer systems often had overlapped files.

Perhaps he could at least find out how to reenergize the command level from here. He was just beginning a second search of the directories when his tingler came on. Caine: Come to the numbertwo lab—fourth door down the hall.

Lathe met him at the lab's door, an odd expression on his face. "Any luck?" the comsquare asked.

"None," Caine told him. "Looks like we're going to have to get into the main machine upstairs after all."

"Maybe, maybe not. Come take a look at this."

Frowning, Caine stepped past him into the room... and stopped short with surprise.

Another twenty or more bodies were inside, most of them lying in cots but a few slumped over lab tables. The lab tables themselves...

"What the hell were they doing in here, anyway?" Caine asked. "Place looks like a robotless genetics assembly line."

"It does at that," Lathe agreed. "I'd expected to find what was left of Torch on this level, because they'd have come to the med section to fight against their poisoning. But it looks now as if they were set up here from the very beginning."

"That long?" Caine frowned.

"The indications are here. But hang on to your teeth—the real kicker is over here."

Lathe led the way around one of the long tables to a cluttered desk squeezed between a pair of chemassemble machines. A man lay across the papers and disks there, looking for all the world as if he'd settled down for a short nap and never awakened. A ledger-type book sat open before him, and it was to the heading on the left-hand page that Lathe silently pointed. Caine leaned over and read it...

"PRODUCTION SCHEDULE," was written there in a bold, firm handwriting. "DOSAGES OF

WHIPLASH PER DAY FOR A WEEK ENDING..."

"Whiplash?" Caine frowned. "What the hell is—

He stopped abruptly. "Are you thinking," he asked the comsquare slowly, "the same thing I am?"

"We won't know for sure without a real test," Lathe cautioned. "But it's just barely possible we've found a shortcut to the end of the mission."

Caine snorted gently. "Only if you believe in miracles," he said. "I gave those up about the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus."

"Nothing wrong with accepting miracles that come your way," Lathe murmured.

Something in his tone made Caine look up at him. The comsquare's face was tight, his eyes focused on infinity. "What's wrong?" Caine asked.

"Oh... nothing. Nothing I can do anything about, anyway." Lathe took a deep breath, released it slowly. "You just reminded me that Project Christmas is being activated about now back on Plinry."

"Project Christmas? What's that?"

"Ask me another time," the other advised. "Come on, let's get back and find the others. And see if we can come up with a safe way to figure out just what the hell this little Christmas present of Torch's really is."