Tunnels 02, Deeper

the Great Plain and its environs. By the time we are finished" -- his dark pupils swept toward the items at the very end of the table -- "you will be fully versed in our equipment and our weapons, and trained to operate within our strictures. Understood?"
    "Yes, sir," she answered, addressing him now as befitted his military manner. He seemed pleased by this.
    "We know you are capable -- you must be, to have evaded us for as long as you did."
    She nodded.
    "Your sole objective will be to track down and disable -- by any means necessary -- the rebel."
    The air hung heavy as she stared into his terribly disfigured face. "You mean Will Burrows?"
    "Yes, Seth Jerome," he said succinctly. He mopped his weeping eye with the back of his hand, and then snapped his fingers awkwardly, using what remained of his thumb and index finger.
    "What...?" She heard a clicking on the stone floor behind her and whipped her head around. A shadow flitted through the doorway.
    It was the Hunter, the giant cat that had come to her aid on the surface. Pausing to look around, it briefly sampled the air, and in the blink of an eye it had capered over to Sarah's side and was rubbing itself affectionately against her leg, with such vigor that her chair was pushed sideways.
    "You! she exclaimed. She was both astonished and delighted to see the creature again. She'd assumed that the Styx had had it killed back up in the excavation. Indeed, quite the opposite was apparent: It was a very different animal beside her now, compared to the sorry specimen she'd seen Topsoil.
    She could tell from the way it carried itself as it scampered off to sniff at something in the corner of the room that they'd been making sure it was well fed. Its appearance was considerably improved, and the festering would on its shoulder had been tended to. A lint pad was bound to its shoulder by a copious amount of gray bandaging trussed around its chest. As it was also sporting a brand new leather collar -- not something generally found on these animals -- Sarah instantly assumed it had been in the care of the Styx rather than Colonists.
    "His name is Bartleby. We thought he might be put to good use," the Styx said.
    "Bartleby," Sarah repeated, then glanced across the table at the battle-scarred soldier for an explanation.
    "Naturally the animal will be eager to find his old master -- your son -- employing his keen sense of smell," the man told her.
    "Ah yes." She nodded. "How very true." It would be invaluable to have a Hunter when she was tracking in the Deeps, and the fact that it was Cal's scent trail would be incentive indeed.
    She smiled back at the man, and then called out, "Bartleby, here!" He obediently returned to her side and sat down, watching her as he waited for another command. She kneaded the scabrous expanse of the cat's wide, flat head. "So that's your name, is it... Bartleby? " He blinked his saucer-sized eyes at her, a loud purr rumbling from his throat as he shifted from forepaw to forepaw. "You and me together, we'll get Cal back, won't we, Bartleby?"
    The smile vanished from her face. "And we'll flush out a big rat in the bargain."

    * * * * *

    Outside in the rose garden of Humphrey House, several pigeons alighted by the bird table, where the cook regularly left slices of stale bread and other scraps from the kitchen. Distracted from the magazine spread before her, Mrs. Burrows looked up and tried her best to focus on the birds with her red, swollen eyes.
    "Blast it! I can't see a bloomin' thing, let alone read!" she grumbled, squinting first through one eye and then the other. "This filthy, filthy virus!"
    Television news bulletins had begun to pop up a week ago, reporting a mysterious viral outbreak that seemed, as far as anyone could tell, to have originated in London and was now sweeping like wildfire through the rest of the British Isles. It had even reached as far afield as the United States and the Far East. Experts said that although the disease, a sort of mega-conjunctivitis, was short-lived, lasting four or five days at most in the average person, the rate at which it had spread was a serious cause for alarm. The media constantly referred to it as an "Ultra Bug," because it had the unique attribute that its transmission appeared to be both air- and water-borne. A world-beating combination, apparently, for the virus that wants to go places.
    According to some experts, even if the government made up its mind to manufacture a vaccine, the process