Tunnels 05 - Spiral

clue to help him.
    “Hopeless,” he complained, kicking at the sodden soil in sheer frustration. Then he froze. As though the ground had been raked over, just under the surface were unusual deposits. A darker, almost black material seemed to be mixed in with the soil. And it had nothing to do with the miner birds or the cultivation of penny bun crops. He knelt down to take a pinch of the material between his fingers, then held it to his nose.
    “Ash,” he said, sniffing. “Burned timber.”
    Whoever had cleared the area, they’d razed the town to the ground. They’d done a thorough job. As only the Styx could.
    He stood up, directing his lantern around him.
    “But what happened to the people?”
    He was still half expecting to hear the crack of a rifle and feel the sharp pain in his neck as a Limiter executed him for contravening the Styx edict. But there didn’t seem to be any of the ghoulish soldiers in the cavern, either.
    He continued to comb the area, going over the ground inch by inch. He was coming across pieces of broken crockery and glass, then he found a spent rifle cartridge. It smelled of cordite. It had been fired recently. But the people in the shantytown couldn’t have been burned along with their huts. He couldn’t believe that. And if they’d been taken away by the Styx, then where had they gone?
    He saw something glint as his lantern beam flicked over it. He almost knew what the object was before he stooped to retrieve it. It was a brass button with the motif of the crossed spade and pickax cast into it. The three-hundred-year-old crest of the Founding Fathers of the Colony. And this button could have come from only one place.
    From a policeman’s tunic.
    From the Third Officer’s tunic, to be precise.
    With the button gripped tightly in his hand, he returned to the main track. He walked faster and faster as it became clear to him what he had to do. He crossed the South Cavern, returning to the incline that he’d descended only a couple of hours previously. He continued up past the Fan Stations, then came to an abrupt stop.
    Making sure he hadn’t been followed and that there was no one in the tunnel up ahead, he ducked into the dark side passage. After thirty feet the passage opened out into a small chamber. In its center was a penned enclosure with straw scattered across the floor of bare rock. Although the Second Officer could still detect the smell of pigs, it had long ago been emptied of its occupants, slaughtered to feed the army of New Germanians.
    But the Second Officer hadn’t gone there for the pigs.
    At the far side of the chamber, he found where the door blown open by Drake and Chester had once been. It had since been shored up with huge chunks of rock, and most likely the Labyrinth tunnels on the other side had also been collapsed so that no one could ever again use it to enter the Colony.
    The Second Officer counted his paces as he followed the chamber wall along to his left, then stopped to examine the ground with his lantern. He found the depression, filled with pieces of rock, and began to excavate it, trying to make as little noise as he could.
    Then he saw what he’d come for. It was a black box the size of a pack of cards, with a wire aerial trailing from it.
    Look on it as a last measure
, Drake had told him.
If you ever need help, for any reason, I’ll do my best to come.
    At the time the Second Officer hadn’t given much thought to it. After half of the Laboratories had been demolished by their explosion, it had been vital that Drake and Chester escape from the Colony with Mrs. Burrows as quickly as they could. And the Second Officer himself had also been more than a little preoccupied about quite how he was going to convince the Styx of his innocence.
    He knew that he should have reported the device and had it removed, but his knowledge of it wasn’t going to be easy to explain away. So, in the end, he chose to simply forget about its existence.
    Until now.
    He inspected the device’s shiny black casing. Its appearance was similar to the beacons that Drake had provided to Will to mark his way down to the inner world, but this one was different. It also emitted a radio signal that was detectable through the crust, but on a completely different wavelength.
    With his clumsy fingers, the Second Officer located the microswitch on the side of the casing and slid it into the on position. Then he placed the beacon carefully back into the depression and made sure