Scott approached through the tunnels at high but cautious speed and quickly hit a problem. The corridors were lit by recessed bulbs at infrequent intervals, which meant he had to worry about cameras; he would have to spread himself thinly enough to go unnoticed by watchers, which in turn meant leaving the flashlight behind. Oh, well. At least the tunnels were lighted.
    He chose to come from the north, into subbasement three. No alarms went off, although he had passed through some dark patches. In the dark areas were fine chain mesh fences which would have stopped just about anything that couldn't turn into a gas.
    He'd been right about the third level; it was full of equipment he didn't recognize, the ceiling lower than expected. There was probably a space squeezed in between sub three and two. There were about twenty people there, wearing lab coats and carrying clipboards, a couple of security guards hanging around. On several monitors he could see someone who certainly looked like Needle. One was visual, one infrared, one that might be a bioaura scan, and so on. Judging from the way she was all curled up, she hadn't been given any coffee lately.
    He caught a snippet of conversation as one lab coat approached another.
    "That was just damn clumsy," the first snapped. "Someone should have gotten that out of there beforehand."
    "We're lucky that you're getting to her enough that she's not curious." He flipped through a newspaper and removed a two by two inch square from one of the pages, dropped it into a dish and tossed the newspaper aside. "We'll reprogram it for tomorrow."
    "Okay."
    Well, that didn't sound good at all. Scott spread out to look around, taking the measure of their internal security emplacements—the most advanced he had ever seen, which made them a quantum leap above the supposedly cutting edge base stuff. He would have to be very, very careful. In his presentient days, he would have been caught already.
    He found the generator room. And the bomb.

    Lucky and Phoenix Talon cruised overhead on their hovercycles, the magical candle lit to shield them. A hundred and fifty feet above the building, it looked dead, sounded pretty dead even to her senses. She picked up ultrasound from the motion detectors, guessed there was some sort of infrared sensor, and there were people moving around in the complex. The whole thing was too quiet, no sound of mice running or pigeons settling; they had sound baffles in place. And judging from what she could hear through them... that was a lot of activity being silenced. She passed all of this along to Phoenix.
    "Banzai," he whispered, and rappelled down the line in silence, stopped at a second-story window. Glass cutter out, he opened the window in moments and was inside. Lucky felt his weight leave the line, reeled it back in and gained altitude, the second cycle now slaved to hers.
    He was on the second level, north side. It looked like an abandoned factory. Too abandoned. The space was oddly designed. It looked, in fact, as if a corridor ran around the entire outside of the building, leaving space for... something else in the center. The walls had been painted in such a way that if someone had walked by with a flashlight they would have seen only an empty building.
    He got lucky with the cameras and slid into a shadow before they could turn, began working his way around the hall. He could feel a slight, bone-deep hum, familiar from his time in Japan as an ultrasonic baffle. He could make as much noise as he wanted out in this hall, and no one would hear him. He couldn't tell what was on the other side of the wall, would have to guess at a good spot to make his entrance.
    A solid blow shattered bricks. Beyond was what looked like a latrine stall. No one in it. He caught a toppling brick before it could fall with a noise and enlarged the hole until he could crawl through it, then listened.
    Running water. He peeked over the top of the stall. There was a man there washing his hands, wearing a brown uniform coverall. When he looked up, Phoenix bounced a flash off the mirror, vaulted the stall and slapped his hand over the man's mouth. In a few moments he was unconscious. The guy was in good shape, he noted a bit uneasily, and knew a bit about fighting. If he hadn't caught him by surprise, the man might have been able to give an alarm. And this was their maintenance crew?
    Time to change clothes. This sneaking around in disguise stuff was great. He put the brown uniform over his costume and pulled the hat down over his face. Had to take the headset off and remove his gloves and mask, but the man was wearing a heavy tool belt which served nicely to fit various pieces of his equipment in. There was also a tool kit by the sink, filled with lots of things he didn't have the vaguest idea what they did. A few minutes of squirming served to conceal the bokken. He left the man tied up out in the silenced hallway and strolled out.
    He found himself in a corridor with what looked like office doors running along the right. On the right there was a half-wall, half three inches of Plexiglas giving him a view of everything below.
    There was a lot of stuff going on down there. What looked like bodies in tubes of colorful liquid. Scientists walking around among maintenance men and security types. There were stairs on the other side, which meant there might be stairs on this side behind one of those doors. He found the stairs and made a beeline for the tubes with people in them, looking like a man with someplace to go and a reason to be there.
    None of them was her. None of them was, in fact, a whole person. Bits of muscle, some open bone floated there. He winced. Scientists talked nearby.
    "Crimson sequence 23 just is not working out right," one complained.
    "We got it to work before."
    "I know, but it changes with every set through, how are we going to get the bone density we need for the strength...?"
    He opened a panel and pretended to fiddle with something inside as someone approached from behind.
    "Hey, Bill."
    Had that been directed at him? He closed the panel and stood up, glanced that way.
    "Bill?" the scientist repeated.
    Phoenix kept the hat low over his eyes as he spoke. "Got a report there was something wrong with one of these, but it was an error. I'm gonna go back up and talk to 'em about it."
    "Just make sure that you deal with that camera problem."
    "Yeah, I'll get it."

    Lucky waited, counting the slow minutes. The half moon was plenty of light for her; it made her think of Valerie. Lucky wondered where she was, if she had changed since they last saw each other. She saw security cameras on the roof, panning back and forth. After fifteen minutes a brick disgorged itself and floated up, zipping back and forth until it was about two feet from her face. She kept perfectly still and wasn't sure if she saw a lens open and shut before it went away again.
    Well, that sucked, whatever it was.

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