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nocturnal activity their confidence grew.
They had been allowed to keep their survival suits and the harmless equipment
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the suits contained. Using their bodies to shield their efforts from the
tireless spy eye, Blanchard and his freinds had cannibalized portions of that
equipment. The result was a tiny, ultrashort range transmitting device.
They couldn't disable the spy eye because that would bring an immediate
response from installation security. But Blanchard had devised a way to
achieve the same result. Instead of recording what it saw every half minute,
the transmitter he and his colleagues had constructed and trained on the spy
eye jammed the recording circuitry. Instead of displaying a new recording
every thirty seconds, the camera now continued to play back only what it had
observed in the half-minute interval between twelve fifteen and twelve fifteen
and a half A.M. All the spy eye had seen in that particular thirty seconds was
a room full of sleeping people. It would run back that sequence over and over
until either the deception was finally noticed or the recording began to
deteriorate from repeated replaying.
By which time they hoped to be elsewhere.
Eventually it should occur to whoever was assigned to watch the monitors that
no one in the dormitory prison had yawned, turned over, or so much as twitched
in his sleep. They were gambling on the boredom inherent in such a job. It was
much more likely that the monitor-watcher glanced only occasionally at his
screens, and therefore unlikely he'd notice anything out of the ordinary for
some time. With luck, their disappearance wouldn't be noticed until it was
time for the morning meal to be delivered.
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Compared to fooling the spy-eye system defeating the door lock was an easy
matter. A single window was set in the door. By peering through it was
possible to ascertain not only that there was no one immediately outside but
also that the plant did indeed shut down during the nighttime hours. Only a
few dim lights glowed in the corridor.
After everyone had quietly slipped outside, Blanchard removed the lock defeat
he'd improvised and listened as it sealed itself shut once more. Anyone
happening by who tried the door would find it locked tight. Should they also
happen to glance through the window they would be able to see lumpy,
motionless shapes lying on the dimly lit cots. Williams had supervised the
artistic rearrangement of blankets and pillows to simulate sleeping human
forms.
From Blanchard they shifted their reliance to Skua September, who as it turned
out had the best memory of all for places and passageways. As they crept down
corridors and stairs they remained fully alert, but no one appeared to
confront them. Machinery hummed and fussed around them, masking the noise of
their footsteps on the metal catwalks. Clearly the installation was attended
by a minimal night crew.
"Down this way, I think," Williams whispered.
September shook his head in disagreement. In the poor light, his white hair
served as a bobbing beacon for all to focus on. "Over here. After we left the
Tran they took us up one more level." He started toward a stairwell, silent as
a ghost.
In a few minutes they found themselves standing across from the oversize door
that sealed the refrigerated storage room where their Tran compatriots were
being held. Williams had to admit that he'd been wrong. September accepted the
apology as his due.
This would be the trickiest part of their escape attempt, for naturally there
was no thought of trying to flee without freeing Hunnar, Elfa, and the rest of
their Tran friends.
"Can you see anything?" Ethan and the others looked on anxiously as Blanchard
put his face to the window in the door and stared into the room beyond.
"Two dimples in the ceiling. They might be spy eyes, or they might be
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something else. Can't make out details."
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"Sprinkler heads," Semkin suggested hopefully. "Why would anyone put spy-eye
cameras in a freezer?"
"I don't know." Blanchard stepped back, rubbed at his eyes. "We'll just have
to slip inside and hope that if they are cameras I'll have a chance to jam
them before anyone wakes up." The abrupt stirring of the fifty or so Tran in
the room would be bound to draw the immediate attention of even the sleepiest
of security personnel watching the monitors.
They waited while the geophysicist used his homemade device to interrupt the
magnetic flow which kept the door sealed. In the darkness the faint clicks
sounded preterna-turally loud. September wrapped one huge fist around the
oversize handle, nodded at Blanchard, then slowly eased the door aside.
Several Tran stirred. One sat up and stared in the darkness but said nothing.
Blanchard hurriedly moved to aim the jamming unit at one of the dark spots in
the ceiling, relaxed with a sigh. Sprinkler heads. No reason, just as Semkin
had said, to put security cameras in what was essentially an enlarged
refrigerator. Ethan didn't doubt such devices would eventually be installed to
keep an eye on the Tran as well as the humans. For now it wasn't an immediate
concern of Bamaputra's or Antal's.
Besides, a primitive native couldn't defeat a magnetic lock. The cold room was
perfectly secure.
As secure as the dormitory.
They spread out and began waking the Tran, admonishing them to silence. Dark
furry shapes began to rise and gather. Faint light shone eerily through raised
dan, giving their native companions the appearance of enormous bats. Within
minutes the entire group had been awakened. Hugs and greetings were postponed
until they could be exchanged under more amenable circumstances. They still
had to get out of the installation.
The corridor was empty as a newly dug grave and they began filing out of the
room. The mere movement of so many bodies produced a certain amount of sound,
enough to rise above the soft muttering of machinery. Still, by itself the
noise wouldn't be enough to raise an alarm. Some-one had to hear it first.
Blanchard resealed the chamber door while Ethan and the others discussed their
plans with the newly liberated Tran.
"We've got to try and retake the ship."
Hunnar nodded, that odd little down and sideways movement of the head that
Ethan knew as well as any human gesture. "It will be good to fight."
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"Even if we should fail," whispered Monslawic, Ta-hoding's first mate, "better
to die fighting than rotting away in a cage."
September clapped the Tran on a furry shoulder. "We ain't going to fail. Not
after having made it this far."
They followed the giant as he struggled to retrace the path they'd taken when
they'd been marched inside the installation. There was no way to muffle the
clatter of clawlike chiv on metal, which sounded like an army of dog-sized
insects. A single night tech left his dials and gauges to find out what was
making the strange noise.
He found out. His eyes widened as half a dozen of the
Slanderscree's sailors jumped him. They would have cut his throat save for the
intervention of the humans. Ethan pointed out that the unlucky man wasn't
responsible for the installation or its raison d'etre. It required all their
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powers of persuasion to dissuade the Tran, who were eager and anxious for
someone to kill. In the end they settled for gifting the technician with a
mild concussion.
Cheela Hwang and her companions descended on the man's equipment belt and
pockets like so many scientific scavengers, appropriating everything that
might prove useful later.
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