The Wonderland Gambit 2 - The March Hare Network by Jack L. Chalker

Author:Jack L. Chalker [Chalker, Jack L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-16T19:42:03+00:00

of the place by heart. Even so, I needed to feel, to bump into things, to

orient and guide myself. Just so, the chair, the small table, yes, now across should be the door...

I can't tell you how long it took me to get up the nerve to look out or where that came from, but I finally did and saw, well, not much. The corridor was almost as black as the room except for a fading set of reflective tapes along the floor. Dif-ferent colors—red, green, yellow, blue—probably guiding somebody who knew which was which to different places. I turned not left but right, toward the Brand Boxes and the life-support modules. If anybody was around, it would be down there, and escape really wasn't on my mind, just company.

I did feel a twinge of self-humiliation at that realization, though. I never was the brave one, not really—not even in that business two lifetimes ago in this very complex. Rick was the guts, essentially, or at least the force; I was usually along for the ride. Still, with Angel upstairs and no place to run anyway, what choice did I have?

At least the glowing tape was still easy to see, and after I got to the corner, there were little lights shining down every twenty feet or so, making little pools of light along the corri-dors. Unfortunately, they also washed out the tape and made it easy for somebody to see me. I was torn, I had to admit. On the one hand, I wanted to find people, but on the other, after all this time, I wasn't sure I wanted people to find me. The left looked more promising; it seemed to have more emergency lights and also had the green and red stripes which I took to be primary. I just started to move down there, trying to keep out of the little light circles as much as possible, when there was a whine and the whole place seemed to vibrate for a minute or so, like it was an airplane warming up for takeoff or something. When it did that, I felt a sudden surge of, well, power, well-being, you name it, flow through me, wash over me like a series of waves. At the same time, less excitingly, several of the emergency lights went pop and burned out.

I continued on, remembering where I'd felt that same eerie sense of tingling power before, in the final times when I'd approached the complex in Yakima so long ago. It gave me a sense of near invulnerability, although it sure shouldn't have, and reinforced my confidence and will, at least in the short term.

I was going down still; that I could tell. Not via stairs but rather by a sloping floor that seemed to carry me down a little bit at a time. Suddenly I heard voices ahead and stopped for a moment, filled with fear, until I realized that whoever it was certainly wasn't talking to or about me.

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