Dark Of The Woods

his shoulder, and they walked to enjoy the warmth and the crispness of the morning. On both sides of them, there was an occasional scurry as a woodland animal rushed for a tree or burrow. He remembered having read descriptions of the Demosian city sites immediately after the Alliance troops had landed. They had described the vast numbers of dead birds and animals that had succumbed to the mustard gas, tens of thousands of them, lying so thickly that they concealed the earth itself for long stretches.
    "There's the shelter," she said. "What is left of it, at least."
    He followed the direction of her slim, tan hand and saw great slabs of concrete thrusting out of the earth, lengths of rusted and twisted steel that punched at the sky as if to rip it open and bring it down. The earth around the debris was charred black and in a few places fused into darkly gleaming glass by the heat of the explosion that had ripped through the underground structure. As they drew closer, he could see pieces of furniture, metal benches, and leather couches all broken, shattered, melted, mashed in among the cross-work of beams and concrete. In the crook of a steel beam, wedged in the tight angle, was a Demosian skull: fragile, tending toward a slight lengthiness, with the oval eye sockets that would accommodate the lovely orbs of a girl like Leah. In a pocket of rubble only a few feet away, as if giving balance to the scene, was a field mouse's nest. The thing hunched in the mass of weeds and grass and string, its two babies in its belly pouch, looking at them with more curiosity than fear. Death and life, side by side.
    "You couldn't have had traitors," he said. "I know that much about the Demosians. They never gave information—even under torture. How did the Alliance know where to drop bombs?"
    "They didn't," she said. "The explosion, you see, came from within the shelter, blasting outward, rather than down and in. The conquerors had a thing we think they called the ‘mole.' They dropped them by the hundreds, maybe thousands."
    "Yes," he said. "I remember now. The things were only as large as a man's arm, packed full of superexplosives. They hit the ground, bored down thirty feet, then leveled out and acted like subterranean submarines, seeking out heat with very sensitive receptors. Drop enough in one area, and sooner or later, one of them is going to hit paydirt. Then it bores through the wall of the shelter and detonates itself."
    The field mouse made a chittering noise at them, but didn't bother running.
    Davis clambered into the rubble, stopping here and there to look down the spaces between the fused debris. There was a soft light welling up from somewhere very far below, and it illuminated a ragged but possible sloping corridor. "It looks," he said, as Leah came to his shoulder and looked downward with him, "as if the generators have never run out."
    "It hasn't been too many years," she said.
    "The rubble looks fused the whole way down. There shouldn't be any slides. I'm going to try to pry my way in there."
    "It's packed too tightly," she said, looking over the expanse of mangled construction materials. "You won't find a way."
    "I'll make a way," he said, grinning. "Proteus!"
    The robot floated quickly to his side, main manipulator barrel unstopped, sensors flashing excitedly.
    "Gun left."
    Proteus slid a barrel from his smooth, seamless belly, turned left.
    "Ground level," Davis ordered.
    The angle of the barrel dropped until it was pointing at the melted beams and concrete hillocks.
    "Fire one!"
    Proteus shot a small, explosive rocket, large enough to blast a hole through any animal as large as a horse. It struck the ruins five yards away as Davis and Leah stopped behind a slab of concrete. There was an almost instantaneous explosion that shook the entire crust of ruin, and a section of the floor they stood on gave way and crashed down into the open spaces beneath. For a long moment, the sound of things rebounding from the walls and outcroppings of the regions below echoed up to them, a mournful noise. When the quiet returned, Davis ventured forth and carefully inspected the entrance Proteus had made, found that the crust immediately around the hole was still solid and trustworthy.
    "I'll try not to be long," he said.
    "I'm going with you," she protested, pouting her face.
    "I've got Proteus. That's one of the burdens as well as blessings of having a robot guardian. He goes with you whether you want him to or not."
    "I'm